UW Hosts North American Online Conference on Leadership, Culture and Inequalities

“Global Leadership Crisis, Rising Inequalities and Culture Wars: Contestations of the Liberal Script in North America” is the focus of a virtual conference this week at the University of Wyoming.

UW and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Berlin, Germany, are jointly sponsoring the online conference, with UW political science Professors Stephanie Anderson and Jean Garrison serving as the on-campus hosts. The conference features UW faculty members and educators representing four continents.

UW’s Center for Global Studies is the North American workshop host, and more conferences are planned during the multiyear project, Garrison says.

“Given the COVID circumstances, this demonstrates how we can keep moving forward on scholarly pursuits and international interactions despite COVID-19,” she adds. “An in-person, follow-up conference is scheduled next year where we will bring in a similar slate of folks here to campus.”

Thanks to past UW Professor Thomas Risse and his wife, Tanja Börzel, UW was selected, along with Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley and Princeton University, to be a strategic partner on a multimillion-euro “Cluster of Excellence” grant funded by the German Research Foundation with FUB (and other global partners) to research challenges to democracy. The “Contestations of the Liberal Script” grant funds the conference.

Risse taught in UW’s Department of Political Science in the early 1990s. After leaving UW, he became one of the leading educators in the field of international relations. Börzel is a leading expert on the European Union, and her teaching focuses on European Union integration.

The couple teach at FUB, among Germany’s premier universities, and both are UW School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies (SPPAIS) adjunct professors and longtime supporters of internationalization at UW -- including serving as past advisory board members of the UW Center for Global Studies.

Anderson is head of SPPAIS, and Garrison is a professor in the school.

UW has twice hosted FUB Vice President Klaus Mühlhahn, once when he met with former UW President Laurie Nichols about collaborations between the two schools, and last fall when he gave a public talk on his new book on Chinese history.

In summer 2018, Nichols, Anderson and Garrison traveled to Berlin to sign a memorandum of understanding for exchanges and collaboration between UW and FUB.

About the Grant

In the Excellence Strategy research competition run by the German federal and state governments, FUB successfully applied for a Clusters of Excellence grant.

The cluster “Contestations of the Liberal Script” combines a research center, a graduate school and a center of advanced studies. The funding, for seven years, is to address the challenge that “contemporary liberal societies face a loss of confidence in the ability of their core institutions to provide solutions to the most pressing issues of the 21st century, such as rising inequality and the crisis of democracy.”

To learn more, visit the website at www.scripts-berlin.eu/.

For more information about the virtual conference, email Anderson at redhead@uwyo.edu or Garrison at garrison@uwyo.edu.