International Week 2010 Overview
International Week 2010’s theme is To Boldly Go: Charting Our Common Future. Decades after the World Commission on Environment and Development called for a development path that “sustained human progress not just in a few pieces for a few years, but for the entire planet into the distant future”, the global community struggles to envision and protect a shared future. This year’s theme conveys the need for brave and collaborative solutions in the face of global challenges, inviting discussion on innovation as well as on the reflection necessary to "boldly go" responsibly forward. We hope that programming will balance out the sometimes grim lessons learnt (or not yet learnt), with exciting developments in technology, opportunities for action and prospects and alternatives for the future. Some of the intersecting subthemes emerging from our topic are:
1) Charting our Common Future: Ethics and Innovation (developments in science/technology that will change the world or impact global challenges, ethics in science, etc.)
2) The Future of Global Governance (including grassroots and new social movements, developments in international law and global institutions)
3) The Future of the Global Economy (global economic trends, economic alternatives, impacts of global capitalism on human security)
4) The Future of Canada (Arctic security and sovereignty, Canada's role in the world, social justice issues in Canada etc.)
5) The Future of the Global Commons (global environmental issues and trends, solutions, predictions)
International Week is our largest annual extracurricular educational event and is the largest event of its kind on a Canadian campus—7200 people attended over 60 events last year, and we expect this year's program to be just as stimulating!