Students consider the global impact of local actions
First-time colloquium brings students and faculty from Concordia and New York's Siena College together
The presence of 36 students and several professors from New York state’s Siena College gave the Loyola International College’s (LIC) inaugural Conference on Globalization an international perspective.
The aim of the conference was to promote “an understanding of one another and to think of ourselves not as Americans or Canadians, but as global citizens of the world,” said Rosemarie Schade, Principal of the LIC.
Also attended by nearly 40 Concordia faculty and students, the April 7 colloquium marked the first major event the LIC has hosted since its inception four years ago.
It began last year when Siena professor Richard Shirey was hunting for a Canadian school that would be a good match with his Albany-based school’s Globalization Studies Program.
When he started his search on the web, the LIC was the first school he found. “We liked the idea right away, and started to collaborate immediately. I feel it will be a very fruitful and promising partnership,” Schade said.
Students took in three interactive lectures that encouraged them to think about how seemingly innocuous actions – such as purchasing a taco, or taking an all-inclusive holiday – might adversely impact someone living thousands of miles away.
Lillian Robinson, Principal of Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, discussed the origins and consequences of sex tourism in “Sex in the Global City." Siena professor Dmitri Burshteyn spoke about “Globalization and Health Care,” while Shirey finished with a lecture about community-supported agriculture.
Robinson recalled the roots of mass tourism. In the mid-1970s, it was touted as the balm to soothe the economic woes of third-world countries. This idea received the stamp of approval of the World Bank, headed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the time.
Robinson noted that the American military was the sex industry’s biggest customer, in many Asian nations in particular. After it left – about the same time mass-tourism started to gain traction – the tourists had access to the “infrastructure” the soldiers had started.
Burshteyn engaged students in a debate about the prospect of universal health care in the United States. “The public wants it, it’s the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that don’t,” he said.
One student said he opposed paying taxes for health care because as a college graduate, he anticipated getting a job with benefits anyway. Burshteyn cautioned that for many of the 46 million Americans without health insurance, the picture might not be as rosy.
Shirey also stressed the importance of solidarity. For example, he said that if consumers stood together to demand fair wages and dignified labour conditions for workers, companies would be obliged to supply them.
He cited the case of a group of students in Florida who successfully pressured Taco Bell to force its tomato suppliers to pay their pickers one cent more for every pound of tomatoes they harvest.
“It increased the daily pay of these workers from $50 per day to harvest two tons of tomatoes, to $90 per day.”
After the lectures, the students broke into panels to discuss the issues with, Rosemarie Schade hoped, new perspective.
She said she hopes this is only the beginning of the relationship between the two schools, and that they plan to hold a similar event in Albany next year.