Featured Speakers
Global Fusion 2025 | OCT 16–19, 2025 | Carbondale, IL
The Critical Path In Disorienting Times: Explorations, Practices, and Solidarities
Academic immigrants in pursuit of a home and solidarity
Dafna Lemish
Distinguished Professor, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University
In this plenary presentation, Dafna Lemish will discuss her new book Always an Academic Immigrant: A Collective Memoire (Rutgers University Press, 2025). This collective memoir gives voice to eighty-one academics who immigrated from thirty-seven countries for careers in institutions of higher education in eleven different countries. Lemish will discuss the in-depth interviews as well as observations from her own experiences as an immigrant scholar and reflect on the highs and the lows that academic immigrants feel as they search for both a country and an institution they can call home. Formative events led these scholars to pursue careers outside their native lands, and Lemish details the challenges they faced adapting to unspoken expectations in their new countries and workplaces. Ultimately, Lemish’s research reveals the strategies that immigrant professors use to bridge their native and adoptive cultures while highlighting the vital contributions they have made to academia as scholars, teachers, and leaders. Her analysis aligns with Buckminister Fuller’s vision for global unity and shared humanity in the pursuit of a critical path for our future.
Dafna Lemish is a Distinguished Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, the founding editor of the Journal of Children and Media, and a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA). She is the author of numerous books and articles on children, media and gender representations. She is proud to have served as Dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at SIU Carbondale (now the College of Arts and Media) and is looking forward to returning here for Global Fusion 2025 to present the research from her new book, Always an Academic Immigrant: A Collective Memoire (Rutgers University Press, 2025)
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/always-an-academic-immigrant/9781978843615.
Medicine on the breath, Magic in the making: Drawing from de-colonial processes for storytelling as path-making.
Allen Turner
Assistant Professor, Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University
Bio: Allen Turner has been involved in storytelling, game and play design, and education most of his life. Most recently he published "Ehdrigohr: The Roleplaying Game," a dark fantasy horror game that draws inspiration from the folklore indigenous peoples around the world to explore identity in culture and the processes of struggling against depression.
Allen's involvement with the video games industry began at Bungie Software where he started as Tech Support and grew to help out with the production polish of Myth II. He went on to Day 1 Studios where he worked as a level designer for MechAssault on the X-Box. Most recently Allen was employed at Wideload Games/Disney Interactive Studios where he acted as a Lead Designer and Game Director. At Wideload he has worked on Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse, and Hail to the Chimp, Guilty Party, and Avengers Initiative and Marvel XP.
The Dymaxion Boat: River travel as a Critical Path to Connection in a Hyper-mediated World
Human Rights Foundation, Augsburg University, Environmental Studies Director, Associate Professor
At a time when many forms of media are fragmenting community and disconnecting us from the world, there is a need for new avenues for reconnection and rebuilding. Taking inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s highly imaginative experimentation and design work, this talk explores ways of radically rethinking forms of higher education that use wooden sailboats, embodied experience, and river travel to connect students and community partners in the troubled world of the Anthropocene. Rivers and river journeys provide powerful ways to build community, resist, thrive, and live otherwise.
Bio: Joseph Underhill received degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University and a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Michigan. He has been working at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN since 1998 and from 2010-12 served as Batalden Faculty Scholar in Applied Ethics. In 2016-18 he was Program Director of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum. He is a founding member of Augsburg’s Environmental Stewardship Committee, and helped create and currently directs the Environmental Studies Program. Underhill also created and now directs the River Semester program, the nation’s only full semester program offered on the Mississippi River. He has been teaching and researching the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions of environmental and security issues for the last twenty years and has written and presented on the intersection of political psychology, security, and the environment, and is the author of Death and the Statesman (Palgrave, 2001). Dr. Underhill teaches courses in environmental and river politics, research methodology, political movements, and a range of topics in environmental politics. In his courses he emphasizes experiential and critical, democratic, place-based pedagogy, regularly engaging students in fieldwork and service projects, including courses in New Zealand, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Egypt (2012), Tanzania (2013), and now regularly on the Mississippi River.
If you have any questions, email us at: global.fusion.2025@siu.edu