Night of Ideas: Common Ground

Program Schedule

5–8 PM
Doors open at 4:30

• Remarks and Keynote Presentation
  Keynote: Confronting Climate Change: Lessons from the Past That Can Help Us Protect This Blue Planet
  5 PM | Film/Video Theater
  Recently, environmental historian Bart Elmore has taken Ohio State students to the front lines of the climate battle: the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At this year’s Night of Ideas event, Elmore offers some of the key lessons he has learned from both the journey to the COP and his historical studies that can help us solve one of the biggest challenges we face as a global community.
• Being a language broker
  4:30–8 PM | Lower Lobby
  In this short film, three Ohio State students share some lived experiences of being language brokers—individuals who facilitate communications between their relatives and third parties when there is a language barrier. Their knowledge of the locally spoken language and their relatives’ native language makes them essential translators, interpreters, or cultural mediators in a variety of contexts. Nonprofessionals, they act out of kindness and are the invisible bridge that ensures that important information is conveyed both ways when direct communication is not easy.
• On Board(hers)— A Performance
  6 PM | Lobby and gallery ramp
  Started in 2018 in Ohio by Lucille Toth, who teaches French and Francophone studies and is affiliated with the dance department, On Board(hers) is a dance project that explores the experiences and testimonies of women from diverse countries of origin. For the Night of Ideas, they perform a new iteration of the project.
• Flash Talk Presentations
  6:30 PM | Performance Space
  Introduced by Fabienne Münch, chair of Ohio State’s Department of Design. Featuring Ohio State faculty Joyce Chen, Ryan Joyce, Jonathan Mullins, Dorothy Noyes, and Maurice Stevens.
• Audience Conversation and Q&A 
  7:30 PM | Performance Space
  Facilitated by Fabienne Münch, chair of Ohio State’s Department of Design

Flash Talk Descriptions

Navigating the Possibilities and Constraints in Creating Mutually Beneficial Community Collaborations
Maurice Stevens discusses the productive relationship between their work in critical trauma theory and as associate dean for engagement in the College of Arts and Sciences supporting regenerative engagement with collaborators to cocreate large-scale partnerships that center community-determined priorities.

Why Haiti Matters: Freedom, Action, and the Limits of Universalism 
What lessons can we learn from the Haitian Revolution about the possibility of action? Ryan Joyce, who teaches in the Department of French and Italian, uses Haiti’s revolutionary history to show that symbolic freedoms alone are insufficient. He argues that historical and contemporary systems of inequality shape the relationship between action and the conditions necessary for true revolutionary change. By reflecting on Haiti’s legacy, he explores the limitations of universal ideals and challenges us to rethink how freedom can be transformed from a theoretical right into a material, achievable reality.

The Limits of Performance: How the Attention Economy is Reshaping Political Agency
Dorothy Noyes, who teaches folklore, discusses the rise and fall of performance as a mode of political agency from the mid-20th century to the present. While the effectiveness of political performance has arguably diminished with the transition from mass media to social media, the contemporary attention economy has opened up space for quieter types of cooperation.

The Speed of Thought, The Time of Action: Or, What I Have Learned from French and Italian Theory
Jonathan Mullins, who teaches in the Department of French and Italian, presents and discusses the question: How do we understand and respond to the calamities of our time, and how might we rethink our notion of time in order to do so? 

Reimagining Labor Mobility
Globalization has facilitated the free—and increasingly fast—flow of goods, services, and capital across national borders. Yet workers have remained largely immobile, with respect to both geography and socioeconomic status. Joyce Chen, a development economist, asks, how can we reimagine immigration policy to encourage equitable growth both within and across countries?

Learn More

Villa Albertine: Night of Ideas 2025