Four Burning Questions

Science is often inconvenient for journalists. Scientists insist on talking about background literature, replication and the caveats and nuances of their findings in language peppered with ugly terms and impossible acronyms. Journalists then work black magic to turn years of research into bite-sized stories, sprinkled with puns and a dollop of mind-blowing principle. In the balancing act between scientists and their audience, journalists have to take care neither to overstate results, nor leave their consumers feeling nothing.

By McGill Reporter Staff

Sahar Khamis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an expert on Arab and Muslim media and the former Head of the Mass Communication and Information Science Department at Qatar University. She co-authored the 2009 book Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace with Mohammed El-Nawawy, and has published numerous articles on media in the Middle East, in both English and Arabic.

By McGill Reporter Staff

By Theodora Tsentas

On Nov. 8, Prof. Janet Giltrow, Senior Associate Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia and internationally renowned expert on academic writing, will deliver a keynote presentation and two workshops about writing as a way for students to participate in the research-intensive culture of the university.

Louie Palu is an award-winning Canadian photojournalist. His work has appeared in numerous international publications and exhibitions – among them, The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek and The Atlantic. In 2010 he was awarded an Alexia Grant to complete his study of Kandahar Afghanistan, an Hearst Photography Biennial Award, the Canadian Photojournalist of the Year and a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting Grant. He is currently a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow with the New America Foundation.

Can libertarians care about social justice? In his book Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Theory Project at Brown University, argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor.

Mary Gordon is an award-winning social entrepreneur, educator, best-selling author, child advocate and parenting expert. In 1996, Gordon founded Roots of Empathy, a pioneering, evidence-based classroom program that helps to reduce levels of aggression among schoolchildren, while raising social/emotional competence and increasing empathy. To date, the program has reached 450,000 children worldwide.

Rémi Brague is a renowned French philosopher, and Professor emeritus at La Sorbonne University in Paris. His writing and teaching concern ancient Roman and Greek philosophy, medieval Jewish and Arab philosophy, contemporary questions of meaning, and the history of cultural thought (Christianity, Judaism and Islam). On Oct. 20, he is scheduled to receive the prestigious Ratzinger Prize for his works on the history of Christianity.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and human rights in cross-cultural perspectives and teaches courses in human rights, religion and human rights, Islamic law, and criminal law at Emory University. His research interests also include constitutionalism in Islamic and African countries, and Islam and politics which focus on advocacy strategies for reform through internal cultural transformation.