Vishakha N. Desai uses her life experiences to explore the significance of living globally and its urgency for our current moment. She weaves her narrative arc from growing up in a Gandhian household in Ahmedabad to arriving in the United States as a seventeen-year-old exchange student and her subsequent career as a dancer, curator, institutional leader, and teacher against the broad sweep of political and social changes in the two countries she calls home. 

The Committee on Global Thought was established by Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger in 2006 with the mission of enhancing the university’s engagement with issues of global importance. To understand the changing conditions of our contemporary world, we require new concepts and categories that pertain to and are derived from global phenomena as they are rapidly evolving. 

OneShared.World began during the early days of the pandemic, when hundreds of people from around the world came together to draft the Declaration of Interdependence. Since launch, OneShared.World has grown into a broad and inclusive movement of people from 112 countries across the planet, built an incredible youth-driven organizing team, with much more to come.

TheNewCity.Live conference is a gathering of leading innovators presenting aspirational models and  solutions to city challenges. In collaboration with Union Theological Seminary, The New City conference presents keynote speeches by inspirational civic leaders and energizing examples of models large and small that spark the imagination and provide solutions.

The Hudson Eye is an artist-driven 10-day public program and urban showcase, with a focus on dance, music, performance, film and visual art. The Hudson Eye partners with local venues and also features daily “Hot Topics” talks that are free and open to the public, hosted by guest speakers whose professional affiliations represent the diversity of Hudson, NY. 

The Center for Justice at Columbia University serves as the incubator of the Roma Peoples Project (RPP), which addresses how Roma have represented themselves and how they have been represented by others.  It aims to identify, centralize, examine, and curate images and information about the Roma people in order to bring them to the forefront of academic and public consciousness.