The 24th annual Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) symposium begins tonight and will focus on the theme of global cities and the future of urbanization. The five-day annual event, entitled "Cities: Forging an Urban Future," will open with a presentation by sociologist Saskia Sassen and will include about a dozen panels and events involving leading international experts.
The symposium marks the culmination of more than a semester of preparation by the EPIIC colloquium, an intensive, yearlong course offered through the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL). Each year, EPIIC explores a multidisciplinary topic of international concern; this year the course focused on global cities.
The symposium will incorporate the panels and events with other features, according to Adam White, a senior in EPIIC. The panels generally include presentations by several speakers, followed by questions from other panelists and audience members, and some keynote lectures will be given.
The five days will also include more intimate breakout discussions, as well as a kickoff video, slam poetry and a cappella performances.
Panels will examine a variety of issues relating to global cities and urbanization, including the current financial crisis, informal settlements and slums, terrorism, cities threatened by natural disasters, and equity and rights within the city.
Sassen, who coined the term "global city," will give a presentation entitled "Global Cities/Global Slums." IGL Director Sherman Teichman called her "the leading intellectual analyst on cities."
Another panel called "Governing the City: Leadership and Innovation," to be held Saturday, will feature current and former mayors from from Haifa, Israel and Medellin, Colombia, respectively, discussing urban innovations.
A third panel will address the current financial crisis. The panelists range from a Tufts associate professor of economics and a World Bank representative to the the CEO of Boston Community Capital.
"It has a really wide perspective," White said.
The students in EPIIC are almost entirely responsible for planning and producing the symposium, according to White. "The format of the event is fairly formal because it is a traditional conference," he said. "But it is all student-run, and that is something that really makes this conference special."
Teichman praised the collaboration of the students in EPIIC.
"The thing I am most excited about is to see the fruition of the work of my students," he said. "They have labored for months." The students, he added, have participated in over 100 hours of preparatory meetings.
The symposium, officially titled "The 2009 Norris and Margery Bendetson 24th Annual EPIIC International Symposium," will be open to the general public but will require tickets. Tufts faculty and staff will get in for free.
Tufts students, whom White expects to make up the majority of the audience, will have to pay $5 for a pass to the entire symposium. All events will take place in Cabot Auditorium.
Eileen Guo, a freshman in EPIIC, emphasized her goal of bringing the broader Tufts community to the symposium, especially students with no connection to the IGL.
Guo helped raise publicity for the event through op-eds, posters in Boston and Cambridge and letters to The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
International guests will also comprise a portion of the symposium audience. In addition to international panelists, EPIIC is bringing over 40 students from other countries to the symposium.
This is the second year that EPIIC has brought international students to the symposium from locations such as South Africa, Guatemala, Haiti, South Korea, China, Singapore and Israel.
International students attend the symposium as part of the Clinton Global Initiative's EMPOWER project, which launched in September 2007. White said that the IGL pledged to make the symposium international.
These international students will "add another perspective" to the symposium by leading and attending breakout sessions and staying with host students in EPIIC for about a week.
As a member of EPIIC's international student planning committee, Guo was involved in coordinating the students' visit to the symposium.
"We've been planning events for them to do in Boston and to get them acquainted with Tufts," she added.
Every student in EPIIC participates in committees within the program that meet weekly throughout the year.
The programming committee spearheads the organization of the symposium and chooses the event's title. The group chose the title "Cities: Forging an Urban Future" to emphasize the evolution of cities during the next generation, according to White.
While EPIIC focuses on global cities, the programming committee went beyond the course syllabus when choosing the symposium's panelists and creating the agenda, according to Teichman.
"I think it is a derivative from what the students have studied, but parts of it are completely novel," Teichman said of the symposium.
The students in EPIIC have studied global cities intensively since the beginning of the academic year, drawing on biweekly guest lectures, class discussion and readings.
"We've read books and articles by famous authors and experts in the field, and it's really exciting to be able to meet them," Guo said.
"That's what helps us make the program really relevant," White said. "The students who are creating the program have such a thorough background."
Teichman expounded on the pertinence of the global cities theme, saying the world is now at a "tipping point."
"2007 saw the moment when the plurality of the world's population was urbanized," Teichman said.
This year's EPIIC colloquium differs from previous years because of its class composition, according to Teichman.
"This colloquium more than any others is overwhelmingly of the sophomore class," Teichman said, adding that of the four class years, the class includes the smallest number of seniors.
Teichman said that "tremendous intellectual curiosity and diligence" characterized this year's group, adding that the students "matured quickly."
