October Update

I am happy to announce that the official date of the 17^th Annual International Studies Symposium: Prospects and Challenges for Contemporary Germany, is set for March 17^th, 2012! I’d also like to introduce this year’s symposium committee!

From left: Sunny Gladish - Communications Coordinator, Professor Dagmar Soennecken, Nancy Tran - Logistics Coordinator, Sandra Song - Panelist Coordinator, Professor Ulrich Best, Nicole Thwaites - Finance Coordinator, Malvina Jozwik - Project Coordinator, Suharmys Vivanco - Funding Coordinator, Vanita Thind - Panelist Coordinator

My apologies for the late update! We’ve all been busy, busy, busy working on the organizational aspects of the conference, consolidating our decisions for our panel topics and panelists, networking with the German community, approaching potential sponsors, setting up our website, planning our field trip, and preparing for our official launch scheduled for January 2012.  (Excuse me a moment while I catch my breath…phew, an exhaustive list, I know!) More information on our launch, events and news will be posted on our facebook page as it becomes available!

Earlier during the month, our group attended an open house at the Goethe-Institute Toronto, a German cultural centre located in the heart of downtown Toronto.  Jutta Brendemühl, the centre’s Cultural Program Coordinator was kind enough to give us a tour of their facilities and provided us with a good list of German film recommendations ( I will post the list within the next few days for those interested in checking it out). After our tour we headed to WVURST, a sausage/beer hall at King West and Spadina, to try some authentic German sausage. Unfortunately, the sausages were not so authentically German, but the food was delicious and we all had a great time! 

Mmm...fries and sausage.

Just before Halloween, a few of our members volunteered at Glendon’s Halloween pub night. We were able to raise a substantial amount of funds due to a great turn out! Thank you to all those who have helped to support Germany Symposium 2012 by attending the event!

In other news, the organizing of our trip is well underway! Although we have much work to do before April, we’ve been able to organize our field trip with the guidance of Professor Best! The focus of our trip will be on Germany’s role in the European Union. Since we’ll be applying for funding from the DAAD, we need to increase the number of people on our trip in order to meet their eligibility requirements. As a result, a few students from Professor Best’s German Studies course have agreed to join us on our trip. We look forward to meeting you all!

The field trip will include a few days each in Frankfurt, Berlin and Leipzig. So far we have confirmed meetings with the Municipality of Leipzig’s Urban Renewal department and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig; the Human Rights Institute, the EU Parliament Office, the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundestag), and the Institute for European Integration at Freie University in Berlin; and the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. We still have yet to contact a few other institutions and organizations, but so far our trip is looking pretty solid!

Summer is almost over :(

Much time has passed since our last update! Although we have all been enjoying our summer break, we’ve been hard at work brainstorming theme and fundraising ideas and figuring out the perfect date to hold our main event.

Earlier this summer, three of us met with a few faculty and affiliates of the Canadian Center for German and European Studies at York. Our meeting was a success and we managed to capture the interest of those we met with. The meeting ended with the best possible outcome, as we received notice shortly afterward that Professor Dagmar Soennecken (School of Public Policy & Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies) and Professor Ulrich Best, (Visiting DAAD Professor of Geography) have taken an interest in co-supervising our symposium. We are all looking forward to meeting and working with them over the coming school year.

We may have put a lot of work into our project over the summer, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have time for fun! In the meantime we’ve been trying to meet up under more casual settings to get to know one another a little better in hopes of becoming a strong team!

Let the Research Begin!

When our group first came together, we had (or at least we thought we had) a clear idea as to where we want to go with this year’s symposium. We were set to pursue Uruguay and picked up Argentina along the way as our initial region of choice. Could Symposium life really be this easy? Could we simply choose a region that we knew so little about and simply decide, “Hey let’s make this our focus!” OF COURSE NOT! What do these two countries have in common? Is there a strong community in the GTA? Who will we approach to supervise our endeavors? Things weren’t going so smooth after all.  

Back to square one! From Uruguay and Argentina, to Chile, to South Korea, and a number of countries located in Eastern Europe, nothing seemed to click. Things just weren’t happening for us.

Then came Germany, the light at the end of the tunnel. Why hadn’t we thought of Germany in the first place? I can’t really say. Germany quickly took hold of our interest. As the world’s fourth largest economy and a major player in a number of international global institutions, not to mention its recent ambitions to reduce its nuclear energy production and increase its renewable energy supply, Germany has become a hot topic of international debate, and now the focus of the coming 2012 Symposium!

Our project, “Germany: The Rise After the Fall” has emerged from many long weeks of brainstorming and research (and already one meeting that reached nearly midnight!).  Our research will focus on contemporary German politics and culture since reunification in 1990 to the present and beyond.

Join us as we work toward planning and organizing the Germany Symposium!

We are all looking forward to a challenging, yet exciting year ahead of us!