The Pandemic:
Self, Other, and the World Beyond Us
Wednesday, July 15
10:00 AM New York | 3:00 PM London
5:00 PM Amman | 7:30 PM Mumbai | 10:00 PM Beijing
Register Here
Join us for an exceptional conversation with some of the world’s leading thinkers offering rare insights into how human interactions have had to adapt in the wake of the pandemic.
Roger Cohen, journalist, author
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Return and A Month in Siena
Carol Becker, Professor of the Arts, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts
Safwan Masri, Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University
Joining us as discussant:
Natalia Herbst, Obama Scholar,
Former Director for Community
Organizations, National Youth
Institute (Argentina)
Opening remarks:
Shannon Marquez, Dean of
Undergraduate Global Engagement,
Columbia University
From social isolation due to quarantine, to changes in work environments, to the closing of public spaces, the COVID-19 outbreak has profoundly impacted individual and societal behaviors. We have had to reshape the many ways we interact with one another and to our environs, striving, as Roger Cohen wrote in the NYT, “for national and personal reinvention and rebalancing.”
- How do we interact, within and across societies, both now and in the future?
- What meaningful connections have we (re)discovered during the pandemic–with ourselves, with art, with nature, and with others?
- How far has technology taken us? And at what point has its use gone too far?
“(COVID’s) effects are mental as well as physical, in the sense that it threatens to attack that most essential of human rights, breathing, and compel our culture to think that the pandemic is the only thing worth thinking about.” Hashim Matar, Visiting the Museum in My Mind, The New York Times Magazine, 5/15/2020.
“Some have already recognized that being separated from what we love most—each other, our work, art, culture and travel—has provided time for us to reflect on what brings joy, regenerates us and makes us useful citizens.” Carol Becker, Lessons Learned: The Giant Pause and the New Now, Columbia News, 6/24/2020.
Join the Columbia Global Collaboratory, Columbia Global Centers and our esteemed panelists for the second of this three-part series as we discuss the emotional impact and social changes brought about by COVID.
For a recording of our first seminar, The Future of Globalization: Consequences of the Pandemic on Supply Chains, featuring Ian Bremmer (President and Founder of Eurasia Group), Martin Wolf (Financial Times’ chief economics commentator), and Ruth DeFries (University Professor and Denning Family Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University), and moderated by Merit Janow (Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs), go here.
This seminar is brought to you by Columbia Global Centers as part of the Global Columbia Collaboratory, a new initiative developed in partnership with the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement designed to give students the skills, understanding, and networks to grow into the leaders our world needs to thoughtfully address our increasingly complex challenges.
