Events

 On Tuesday, Nov. 1, the Young Initiative welcomed co-founder of the Center for Open Data Partnership Laura Manley to campus. Manley’s presentation focused mainly on targeted group work, where students were asked to create teams to analyze some of the challenges facing the use of data to measure progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Carmen Chu graduated from Occidental in 2000 and returned to campus Tuesday to share the story of her path to public service. She is the first speaker in a series hosted by the Young Initiative and Politics Department titled, Distinguished Alumni Speaker Series.

On October 14th, Derek Chollet came to Occidental College to discuss President Obama's foreign policy legacy. Derek Chollet is counselor and senior advisor for security and defense policy at The German Marshall Fund, was the U.S.

The recent speaker in the 2016 Sustainable Development Speaker Series, Philip Thigo, focused on the role of data in Kenya’s implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Thigo is a senior advisor for the Deputy President’s office in Kenya, as well as the founder of INFONET, and he approached the topic with a sense of optimism.

The former Prime Minister of Haiti, Laurent Lamothe, visited Occidental to discuss new methods of economic development for the future of multilateral international relations. Mr. Lamothe shared his experiences using technology as a resource to help the country recover from the 2010 earthquake that produced a humanitarian crisis.

Faisal Devji is a world-renowned scholar on jihadism and serves as a University Reader at St. Antony’s College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. On September 20, Dr. Devji spoke at the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs, for which he is an advisory board member.

          On September 6th, 2016, Occidental was visited by Jenna Slotin, the Director of Sustainable Development Policy at the United Nations Foundation.

Michael Mahdesian served for seven years (1993-2000) as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Response.  His main duties included overseeing the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).  During this period, he was integrally involved in shaping USAID’s response to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Indonesia, and ot

Ambassador Burns began by providing context and stating that today is not the most dangerous time, but that "we" sit in the most complex political environment since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency (1933-1945). For the future administration the three most-prominent issues are (1) "Putin & Europe," (2) the "burning Middle East," and (3) "China and Asia."

Dr Wiseman’s lecture in Johnson Hall’s Atrium began by explaining that short of war, governments have two behavioral choices with adversarial states, to either isolate or engage. Generally, in the United States this partisan decision is divided among conservatives who favor isolation and liberals who prefer to engage.