Armin Hübner

Congratulations to Armin Hübner, winner of the annual International Relations Thesis Prize for his thesis Ghana and the Resource Curse. Hübner is a recent graduate from the Webster Vienna campus and earned his M.A. in International Relations. He completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna.

Currently, Hübner resides in Vienna and is working for the mission of the United Arab Emirate to the UN Office of Vienna where he assists the Ambassador in a variety of work focusing on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. In addition to his full-time work, Hübner is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the Vienna University and spending time with his two children.

Le Blanc, who holds both an MA in Management (’89) and an MA in International Relations (’03) from Webster, has previously served in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy and held international management positions in several countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kuwait. Most recently he held the title of Group Chaiman for the Bin Hatem Holding Corporation located in  Bangkok, Thailand before retiring and devoting himself to writing full-time. Le Blanc is a married father of two and proud Webster alum.

“I have always been very proud to tell anyone I am a graduate of Webster University,” said Le Blanc.  “My degrees have repaid me many times over.”

Read Le Blanc’s excerpt.

Paula Hanssen, Assoc. Prof. International Languages and Cultures, presents Kiss with her scholarship

Congratulations to Edina Kiss!

Kiss is the most recent recipient of the German American Heritage Society Scholarship. The scholarship provides financial assistance to students interested in studying aboard in German.

Kiss studies Music and German because much of music history revolves around the language and culture of Germanic countries like Germany and Austria. She is also of Hungarian descent, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and wanted to study abroad to explore that area as well as become more proficient in German.

Webster University offers music courses and German courses in Vienna, so it was her number one choice. Her peers who just returned from Vienna were really enthusiastic about the museums, composers’ houses and the concerts they attended.

“I was all the more excited because I love music history. The great composers all spoke German,” said Kiss.

In Vienna she’ll take music classes, and  ’Vienna-Live’ guided tours through the city, combining art and music history, with sight seeing. She’ll explore nearby countries to get an overall taste of the bigger picture that is Europe and make connections, both business and informal.

Her future career plans are of the entrepreneur nature, so the more people she knows, the better. She loves making friends with people who live a completely different life style than I. Culture rubs off on a person best hearing and sharing stories.

Webster student John Davis reads a children’s book — in French — to students of St. Louis Immersion Schools. John, along with fellow students Nora Benedict, center, and Fatou Thiam, were volunteers in an after-school program.

One of the directives of the Jane and Bruce Robert Endowed Professorship in French and Francophone Studies is that the holder of the professorship should promote French and Francophone culture at Webster University and in St. Louis.

It’s a mission that Lionel Cuillé, the inaugural Robert Professor, embraced wholeheartedly on his arrival at Webster University and the Department of International Languages & Cultures in fall 2012. In cooperation with French Professor Emily Thompson, Cuillé started making plans for the Centre Francophone. He engaged graphic design students to create a logo; he used professorship funds to schedule speakers and to co-sponsor French films; he arranged to take his knowledge—and that of Webster’s French students—into the community.

The Centre Francophone logo was designed by Webster University graphic design students.

Logo designed by Webster students

The Centre Francophone logo is the work of Webster students Kelly Goode and Katelin Hull. Members of Associate Professor of Art Noriko Yuasa’s fall 2012 “Advanced Graphic Design” class, the pair took part in a competition to design a logo for the new center.

Cuillé said the winning logo captured the vibrancy that he hopes will become a hallmark of the Centre Francophone. The logo’s colorful, convex lines represent Air France flight patterns coming out of Paris, he explained, and also suggest the St. Louis Arch.

“The students even created their own typeface,” Cuillé said. “Everything they did was thought through.”

Cuillé said the purpose of the logo is to help create a sense of community among Webster University French students and St. Louis area residents who want to learn more about French and Francophone culture. The same is true of the center’s Facebook page.

Highlights from the center’s first semester

Highlights from the center’s first semester include French anthropologist Michel Agier’s Oct. 29 talk, “Humanitarian Government as the Postcolonial and Compassionate Side of Globalization,” and a Nov. 1 presentation by memory expert Pascale Michelon on increasing brain health and boosting memory. The center also co-sponsored two French films during November’s St. Louis International Film Festival: The Other Josephine and Rust and Bone (De rouille et d’os).

Lionel Cuillé

The Centre Francophone also provided the means for French students to be guests at a French restaurant and to see a French movie as well as a French play, “We try to spoil our French students at Webster,” Cuillé laughed.

However, students also gave back to the community by reading children’s books — in French — to young students of the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools. The project continues in 2013.

Cuillé, too, is taking his talents into the community. Last semester, he conducted a workshop on Jacques Prévert’s poetry for area high school teachers (Sept. 26). This semester, he will participate in a panel about French painter Georges Braques at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (March 7) and again will present a workshop for local teachers. In addition, he contributed to a pending dual-credit partnership in French with a local high school.

Cuillé and Thompson will also continue noontime French conversation hours for staff and faculty. The discussion groups are held each Wednesday in the Emerson Library. (Check at the reference desk for location.)

Leila Mana, French teaching assistant, models the new Centre Francophone tee-shirt.

Upcoming schedule includes talk by Pascal Quignard

The Centre Francophone schedule for the first part of 2013 includes the March 1 launch of the Literalité website, which will review contemporary French poetry, and talks by French writers. Novelist Arno Bertina will speak on March 5; Pascal Quignard, considered the greatest living French writer, will speak on March 23 in Moore Auditorium. (Details will be available soon in Webster Today.)

Still in the planning stages are a short-term study abroad course for summer 2014 and Cuillé’s fall 2013 course on human rights from a French perspective. Cuillé said the course will help fulfill the human rights component of the Robert Professorship — as did the October 2012 talk by Doctors Without Borders member Michel Agier.

Cuillé noted that Webster University has given him freedom to be innovative in his new role. Along with the Robert Professorship’s financial assistance, that latitude has allowed the center to accomplish much in a short time.

“Our hope is that the Centre Francophone will continue to enhance the intellectual lives of our students and to enable us to reach out to the surrounding community,” said Cuillé. “In fact, we hope the best is yet come.”

For more information about the Centre Francophone: cuilleli@webster.edu

Speakers include Winona LaDuke, an American Indian activist; Caleen Sisk-Franco, chief of the Winnemem Wintu tribe; Dr. Maureen Lynch, International Observatory on Statelessness; and Justin Semahoro, Banymulenge stateless refugee advocate. The conference will include a photo exhibit by photojournalis Greg Constantine, titled “Nowhere People: The World’s Stateless.”

More conference information will be a available soon on the Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies website.

The Centre Francophone logo

Help celebrate the opening of the Centre Francophone from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, in Sunnen Lounge. Enjoy live music (in French) as well as a slice of king cake, and enter your name in a drawing for a Centre Francophone tee-shirt.

Susan Margolis Balk discusses the HateBrakers organization and those who have put the brakes on hate. “These courageous people have been victims of hate violence, from bullying to genocide,” she said, “but they still find courage to become leaders instead of haters themselves.”

The name says it all. HateBrakers aims to bring hate to a screeching halt.

That task may seem next to impossible in today’s world, but Susan Margolis Balk, an Arts & Sciences Advisory Board member who founded HateBrakers two years ago, believes wholeheartedly in her program and its mission. That mission states: HateBrakers, an innovation of NEW CONSCIENCE,INC, provides tools that spotlight and celebrate those who interrupt the predictable cycle of hate-breeds-hate.  We promote the paradigm of hitting the brakes on hate when perpetrators, victims, and bystander/witnesses of acts of hate transform themselves into healers, heroes, and leaders.

The HateBrakers website provides an important means for carrying out the program’s mission. The site pays tribute to individuals and organizations that have stood up to hate; it also has a wealth of resources for those who want to help spread the message that together we have the power to stop hate’s ruinous path.

Other vehicles for spreading the HateBrakers message include the program’s HateBrakers Heroes Awards (thus far awarded to the Delancey Street Foundation and two members of classical piano quintet the 5 Browns, who started the Foundation for Survivors of Abuse); a traveling museum exhibit; and educational presentations.

Interviews with HateBrakers are “jewels in our crown.”

The HateBrakers website features poignant video interviews with some of the people who have had the courage to break the cycle of hate. Balk called these interviews the “jewels in our crown.”

Two HateBrakers of note: Olive Mukabalisa, left, and Annie Kopp. Olive is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who plans to return to her country to help with the healing process; Annie is a high school student who who was bullied badly her freshman year, attended the Second City comedy school, and performed “Stand Up to Bullying” for the school faculty when she was a senior.

Several of the site’s interviews are with Webster students, including a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, a young woman condemned by her church because of her sexual orientation, and a social justice leader whose childhood was defined by gang violence and racism.

“There’s just a continuous parade of people I see who manage to become HateBrakers,” Balk said. “They have this great moral courage and strength. What we’re trying to do is honor and promote and celebrate these HateBraker heroes.”

HateBrakers came into being because of a 2007 book, Vienna’s Conscience. Balk explained the connection: While listening to a 2005 talk by Professor Gregory Weeks, she said she was reminded of a project by her late husband, Richard Winter. That unfinished project comprised photographs and interviews with Viennese people about the Nazi era and in particular about the exile and execution of the city’s Jewish population.

Balk talked with Weeks about Winter’s work, and before long, she and Weeks were collaborating to bring the photos and interviews into book form. Vienna’s Conscience includes Balk’s commentary about Winter’s project and his feelings about a city that forced him into exile when he was 17. It also includes Weeks’s explanation of the collapse of Austro-Hungary, anti-Semitism, and events leading up to Vienna’s German occupation.

Interviews with students planted the seed for HateBrakers.

A year after the book’s publication, Balk interviewed student volunteers selected by Andrea Miller, adjunct human rights professor. Not only did those interviews with students who had been hate victims became part of a Vienna’s Conscience museum exhibit, but they also helped plant the seed for the HateBrakers project.

Balk said she became aware of the need to expand her anti-hate message when she overheard a couple talking at a Vienna’s Conscience exhibit at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum & Learning Center. “One said to the other, ‘Oh, those Viennese, they’re hopeless.’” Balk said. “I thought, ‘Well then, this exhibit has not succeeded, because it’s not just the Viennese. It’s all of us.’”

Thus HateBrakers was born.

“My main hope for this project is to put the model, the paradigm, out there,” Balk said. “I want people to realize they don’t have to become revenge seekers to keep their honor. They don’t have to become self-destructive when they internalize this hate, and they don’t have to go into toxic self-denial.”

With the support of the HateBrakers board, Balk hopes to keep extending the program’s reach. Plans include a partnership with Webster University’s Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies; a program for veterans, to be called “After You Killed”; and an international guide to hate-braking. Another ambition is to install plaques at key hate-braking sites, for example, in front of the home of someone who hid a Jewish family during World War II.

“This is the year that we’re really trying to get grounded here in St. Louis.”

HateBrakers chapters in other cities are also on Balk’s wish list, but expansion will occur only after 2013. “This is the year that we’re really trying to get grounded here in St. Louis,” she said. The organization’s program for 2013 focuses on HateBraker heroes in the St Louis area. There’s an award ceremony slated for May.

Balk said that after assessing the program’s impact in one city, she will be better prepared to introduce it in others.

Balk invited everyone to spend time on the HateBrakers website and to take the HateBrakers pledge. Another step against hate is to nominate a HateBraker—either a perpetrator or victim who has had the courage to stop the cycle of hate. The website makes it easy.

Balk said she will not be satisfied until HateBrakers causes anti-hate ripples in every segment of society.

“The more frequently and publicly we observe, understand, and celebrate hate-braking,” she said, “the sooner interrupting the cycle can become a common gesture in our everyday lives.”

Learn more about the sessions.

Sign up online.

Maxine Burkett

Maxine Burkett, associate professor of law, University of Hawaii, will present a lecture titled “The Nation Ex-Situ: On Climate Change, Deterritorialized Nationhood, and the Post-Climate Era” at noon Tuesday, Feb. 19, in Room 253, EAB.

Rising ocean levels due to climate change threaten the very existence of island nation-states like Antigua, the Maldives, and Tuvalu. What will happen to these countries and their citizens when their physical territories become uninhabitable? Professor Burkett argues that statehood and international law should evolve to accommodate a new category of international actors: the Nation Ex-Situ.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies, Sustainability Studies Committee, Center for Ethics, and Philosophy Department.

For more information, contact Professor Karla Armbruster, armbruka@webster.edu.

Carrie Shoultz plants a kiss on Jokia,  a blind resident of Thailand’s Elephant Nature Park sanctuary.

Global Thinking periodically spotlights a current Global MA in International Relations student.  This time we present Carrie Shoultz. (See the November profile of Betsmara Nye Cruz Lebrón.)

Carrie Shoultz was born in Long Beach, Calif., grew up in Albuquerque, spent six years in Minneapolis, where her family originated, and has spent the last five years living in Augusta, Ga. She graduated from Augusta State University with degrees in political science with a concentration in international studies and Spanish. Carrie was a participant in the inaugural year of the Augusta State University National Model United Nations team and served as president of the Political Science Club. She loves to travel. Fortunately, her mother works for an airline, which afforded her the opportunity to travel often while she was growing up. During her undergraduate days, Carrie studied abroad in India, El Salvador, and Spain. She loves photography, which combines well with her love of traveling. She worked for Ritz/Wolf Camera for seven years, through high school and college.

Our questions for Carrie:

What is your current city?

Geneva

What is your next stop?

London

What has been your best experience thus far in the GMAIR program?

It’s hard to decide between seeing Le nozze di Figaro at the State Opera House in Vienna, a wine tasting and tour outside Vienna, touring real Middle Age castles in Mödling, the floating markets of damnoen saduak, or the Loi Krathong festival in Bangkok! I guess my most moving experience, though, was while I was in Thailand and I got to have some incredible interactions with elephants, which have been my favorite animal since forever (I am even traveling with my stuffed elephant, “Beanie,” that I’ve had since second grade — as a comfort from home!).

Carrie Shoultz helps bathe elephants at the government conservation center in northern Thailand.

Kurt and I took a weekend trip to the government conservation center in Lampang (northern Thailand) and took the two-day mahout training program where we got certified as “amateur mahouts” (possibly the most unique résumé line I have from this program). During the first week of winter break I volunteered with the Elephant Nature Park, a non-profit elephant rescue organization outside of Chiang Mai, on their Journey to Freedom Project. I spent a week in a small Karen village in the northern Thai mountains working with the villagers and the elephants that live in the jungle around them. It was so removed from society that we had to switch vehicles to get there as the van that picked us up couldn’t drive on the dirt roads. We hiked up and down the mountains to see the herd, swam under a waterfall (the freshest water I have ever tasted!), and at night the villagers and kids would come and sit by the fire with us. At the end of the week, we went to the ENP’s sanctuary where we learned about the problems that international tourism has created for the Thai elephant and met the herd that the organization has rescued and now live at the park.

The elephants had some of the most heartbreaking stories. I fell in love with Jokia, an elephant who had her eyes gouged out after she refused to work in illegal logging due to emotional trauma suffered by a miscarriage. I had a moment that week, sitting on the mountaintop looking at the stars after the generators had been switched off for the night, when I could not believe where I was and what I was getting to do. If you had told me last year that I would be sitting there that night, I would have thought you were crazy. It was one of the most moving moments for me to be able to do that program. Additionally, it changed my perspective academically about how the rapidly developing world can and is affecting traditional village life and the environment and native animals.

What has been the most enlightening part of the program thus far, academically speaking?

One of the unique parts of the global program is the opportunity to “compare notes” with what you read and what you experience. I opted to take Southeast Asia studies while in Bangkok in order to try to maximize that aspect of the program. I vaguely wanted to go to Singapore before getting to Thailand, but after studying the political system in Singapore my mind was blown and I had to go see the small city-state for myself!

Sometimes political culture is a hard to see overtly, but it has a way of making its way into everyday life in a profound way. I was able to make a few observations and compare them to what the academics were writing about. I noticed how structured everything seemed to be in Singapore, how clean everything was, and the high regard for rules and order the Singaporeans had. What was most unique about Singaporeans, though, was how excited to talk about their politics they were, and many of the anecdotes they offered seemed to be echoed in the articles I had just read. Actually being there makes what you study more “real” but more than that, I feel like I understand it far better than I ever would have if I had just read it in my room back in the United States.

What has been your biggest struggle adapting to other cultures?

Food in Thailand was tough. I knew it would be spicy, but I did not expect it to be “surprise spicy.” You would be eating something that you think is not spicy and then bite into a whole chili pepper and want to cut your tongue off. I have never been afraid of food before (it is a bit disconcerting to be bitten back)!

The concept of saving-face and keeping a cool head in Thai culture was difficult for me as well. I found that taxi drivers, rather than admit they do not know where something is, would just drive around in circles. The first time this happened I went for a half hour before I realized it and asked him just to take me back. You can’t ask not to pay because that would cause him to lose face, and you can’t get angry about it either, so that became frustrating. I started bringing maps in the cabs with where I wanted to go circled, and if I could get the desk clerk to write the address in Thai I would do that as well. But, until I figured that system out, I had a lot of unexpected cab tours of Bangkok.

Singapore at night (photo by Carrie Shoultz)