It would be fair to say that Honors Signature Conversations began with the SMBHC World Cup initiative in 2012, which culminated in our sending six honors students, “Team Barksdale,” to Brazil in summer 2014 when the world came together around one sport. More recently, our collective attention has been caught by global crises that are beginning, or sometimes beginning again, to assume a prominence and severity that demand the attention of citizen scholars. Water security is one of these concerns; increasingly and frighteningly, so is immigration, including its embodiment as migration and displacement.
As our students and faculty explore all manner of questions that intrigue or trouble them, the SMBHC itself—a home for citizen scholars—will claim specific concerns as focus for on-going deep conversations, the Honors Signature Conversations. These concerns are as current as today’s headlines, but they are also evolving, mutating, and driving a host of other concerns before them as they do so. The SMBHC will serve as home to a variety of efforts that we hope will engage our students and Honors community, including alums. We will continue to support fully and fervently all the challenges our students identify as important to their community and to themselves, whether hugely significant or preciously personal and finite. But some topics we will claim for our deeply shared conversation, even as we expect that list of topics to evolve also. Talk with us. Your participation will shape the insights, songs, stories, laws, machines and technologies, chemicals and protocols of perhaps the most important questions of this century. We are fired by the life of the mind, committed to the public good, driven to find solutions.
Series: From the Edge of Inside
Immigration (coming soon)