About

Mission

The Avery Point Global Café is an interdisciplinary learning community aimed at bringing the campus community together to examine real-world issues that span across the disciplines and affect us all.

Our mission is to provide students opportunities to make connections across courses and enrich our campus’s learning community through discussions and events.

We host dialogues designed to help our students, faculty and staff talk and listen to one another more effectively—to encourage participants to understand one another’s points of view, find common ground, collaborate, and respectfully address issues important to us all.

We also sponsor a variety of other events—all focused on our theme “local environments, global citizens.”

 

Coordinators

The backbone of Global Café is its faculty learning community (FLC), a group of part-time and full-time faculty who meet to discuss thematic content and interdisciplinary connections to course material, as well as important perspectives from staff. The staff and FLC create a “think tank” for Global Café programming, faculty/staff collaboration, pedagogical strategies, and community building both on and off campus.

This year, the Global Café dedicated coordinators are three faculty and three staff members:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kate Richards

The importance of storytelling and community are themes in Kate’s research and are central to her work with Global Café. She began teaching anthropology classes at the Avery Point in 2013 that center stories as a way to bind us together and expand our ideas about what is possible in our world. The following year Kate added an introductory course that examines human rights from an interdisciplinary perspective to the campus. This class emphasizes the ways students can make an impact locally, in addition to its focus on first-person experiences and global interconnections. A common thread among these pursuits is the work to cross boundaries of all types, and this drew Kate to start organizing and facilitating events as a Global Café coordinator in 2018. She is dedicated to creating space for thoughtful dialogue and connection in our community.

For more info, contact Katharine.Richards@uconn.edu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Muireann O’Callaghan

Muireann O’Callaghan was born and grew up in southern Ireland where storytelling was part of the culture’s way of allowing for diverse narratives. She continues to engage in community conversations, whether serving as board member and volunteer at a local arts and cultural center, or tutoring at the US Coast Guard Academy, or while teaching First Year Writing at Avery Point.

For more info, contact Muireann.O’Callaghan@uconn.edu