Before Spring Break, AU students gathered to watch and participate in a videoconference with students from Wellesley College, Marquette University and the Turkish University in Izmir. The AU Foreign Policy Association partnered with Americans for Informed Democracy to host the discussion.
AUFPA co-founder and president Kristy Mordhorst, a grad student and Masters candidate in international peace and conflict resolution at AU, is an Americans for Informed Democracy campus coordinator and helped plan the event.
AID is a non-partisan organization that works with future leaders through leadership summits, educational seminars, town hall meetings, opinion pieces and global videoconferences. It was the third event at AU done in partnership between AID and AUFPA.
The audience for the videoconference was "very diverse," Mordhorst noted. "An Iraqi Kurd, a Bangladeshi who grew up in Saudi Arabia, African Americans, a woman from Latin America and others from different parts of the US. It would have been interesting to hold a talk with just those there on their perceptions."
The videoconference focused partly on redefining the Western and Muslim
worlds.
"The videoconference linked us up with students from Turkey. In our discussions we expected them to speak for the Islamic world, but they can only speak for themselves and their Turkish experience," Mordhorst said in an e-mail. "Before we can work on improving Western-Islamic relations we need to work on being able to separate and really define those terms."
During the videoconference, Rob Paarlberg, a political science professor at Wellesley, said, "Relations between the West and Islamic worlds are not as harmonious as we would like them to be. A suggestion for restoring cooperation equals not a common political enemy, but a common political principle."
"When scholars hear 'Islam' and 'democracy,' it sounds like it's something very new and compatible," said a male student from Marquette University. "Islam is truly democracy itself. The Islamic world has the same values and shares the thoughts as we
do."
Many suggest opening many channels of dialogue to help facilitate a better understanding between the worlds.
"Engaging young people to talk to each other is a good step. Engage with both an open heart and an open mind," Mordhorst said. "This conference gave us a unique opportunity to talk with others we might not have the opportunity to talk to. And to realize that despite growing up thousands of miles apart we are not so different from each other."
The Marquette student said the videoconference represented a good start.
"This is beautiful," he said. "We're having a cross-cultural discussion."
AID and AUFPA will host Stephen Rand from Jubilee Debt Campaign in the United Kingdom to speak about debt in the developing world on April 20, according to Mordhorst.
