In coming decades, we are likely to see rising numbers of refugees worldwide — reaching potentially 200 million people in motion by 2030. This presentation will offer ideas and information useful to teaching K-12 students about this subject in the context of past and impending global transformations. It will focus on the social processes and uses of language that dehumanize refugees and then discuss ways to help re-humanize them and counter dangerous trends that can lead to fear or indifference. The presentation will draw on findings from a community college teacher workshop hosted in 2020 by UW-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies (LACIS) program, and Center for European Studies (CES) on teaching on refugees and statelessness.
Click HERE for more information about the 2020 Workshop for Community College Teachers, “The Growing Crisis of Statelessness and Refugees.”
Speakers:
Dr. Mary E. McCoy is the Outreach Director for UW-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and author of Scandal and Democracy: Media Politics in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019). She also serves as Teaching Faculty in the Department of Communication Arts and teaches courses on rhetoric, politics, media, and culture. Her primary research has been on media and democratization, with particular emphasis on Indonesia and worldwide democratic revolutions, social movements, religious intolerance, legacies of authoritarianism, rhetorical genres, and freedom of speech. Her more recent work focuses on demagoguery, dictatorship and extremism.
Eleanor Conrad is Outreach Specialist and Assistant Director of European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in French and German. She studied at the Universität Freiburg in Germany as a 2009 DAAD Scholarship Recipient. In addition, Eleanor holds a certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language and has taught ESL domestically as well as in Aix-en-Provence, France through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).