Dr. Younus Y. Mirza

Invited Speech: Virtual Exchange and Climate Action (UN SDG 13)

Biography:

Dr. Younus Y. Mirza is the Founding Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University.  He has a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies and has taught at Millsaps and Allegheny College. He is a co-author of the book The Bible and the Qur’an: Biblical Figures in the Islamic Tradition and has published in various journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), the Journal of Qur’anic Studies (JQS) and Islam Christian-Muslim Relations (ICMR).  In his teaching, he has been profiled by Interfaith America and has won a teaching award for his First Year Seminar course. In his virtual exchange projects, he has worked with American, Southeast Asian, European and Arab students, faculty and staff and organized a variety of virtual programs from forums, to conferences, to Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). He has been recognized by Shenandoah University’s Board of Trustees for being “a strong advocate for global education and international academic partnerships.”

Abstract:

This session will cover various virtual exchange initiatives around UN SDG 13 or Climate Action. The first will highlight how an American professor (Staci Strobl) and British Professor (Sammie Buzzard) created podcasts to highlight climate change in various countries around the world such as India, the Canadian arctic, Greenland, the south Pacific, the Arabian Gulf and western Australia. Structured around the insight from the students’ different disciplines, the podcasts explored topics such as the rising ferocity of heat waves, droughts, extreme rainfall, glacier melt, and sea level rise, and the subsequent impacts of each on the associated locations. The podcasts students created were designed to be informative, evidence-driven and solutions-focused while being accessible to listeners of all kinds. Students from Cardiff University in the UK were able to provide details around the physical geography and environmental aspects of climate change, detailing past, current and predicted changes to the region of interest. Shenandoah University students in the USA provided a human focus, with investigations into legal and criminal justice aspects of climate change. Moreover, American Professor Allyson Degrassi will speak about her experiences with Climate Fresk which is a card game started in France that allows people to help students make connections among the cascading impacts of climate change and how humans contribute. The game facilitates a virtual exchange among students globally and allows them to think through how their actions impact the environment and how they can work together to preserve the climate. The various presentations will therefore highlight how virtual exchange can be a tool to connect students globally and work towards the UN SDGs, especially climate action.