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Peter Chilson
Associate Professor of English
Washington State University, Pullman WA
Peter Chilson went to West Africa in 1985 as a Peace Corps English teacher where he taught junior high school in Bouza, a village in southern central Niger, near the border with Nigeria. After the Peace Corps, Chilson worked as a freelance journalist based in Ivory Coast. He later worked for the Associated Press in Connecticut and as associate editor at High Country News, the magazine that covers public lands issues in the American West.
To research his first book, Riding the Demon, Chilson went back to West Africa in 1992. Based in eastern Niger, he spent a year on the road through Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast, living and traveling with bush taxi and truck drivers to write about modern Africa and the African genius for survival. His work has appeared in The American Scholar, Audubon, Ascent, Best American Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, The Long Story, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Riding the Demon won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Chilson has won the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize and most recently the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in fiction for his new book, Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories. The stories in this book are about Americans in Africa, struggling to cope with political and social conflict, and Africans trying to adjust to life in the United States.
He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington State University. He lives in Moscow, Idaho and Portland, Oregon.
“In the Bright Country: Travels Through an African Borderland”
In 1904, France organized 1.8 million square miles of coastal forest, inland savanna, desert, and millions of people from countless tribes into the eight colonies of French West Africa. They re-cut the region dozens of times, dividing land by stability, wealth and suitability for cotton, coffee, and cocoa. They never planned for independence. Where the borders lie now is mostly guesswork. Chilson will read from new nonfiction about traveling the border between Ivory Coast, a country divided by war, and Mali, which is at peace. He will explore the legacy of Africa’s colonial borders and what they mean for Africa’s future.
Mike Reddin
Retired, London School of Economics
Mike Reddin is a real person, some 67 years of age currently enjoying 'retirement' in London, England. Having enrolled as a student - of social policy - at the LSE in 1963 - he proved unable to salve his curiosity and stayed on, as researcher and then Lecturer in Social Policy at the School. He had taken on the (unpaid) additional role of Senior Tutor to the General Course (the School's full-year programme for visiting undergraduates) from 1987 but eventually found the dual responsibilities of two full-time jobs a bit much even for his level of adrenalin. Asking, in 1994, to be permitted to get back to full-time teaching and research the School floored him by suggesting that instead he run the General Course full-time, an honour he innocently accepted and pursued with energy and real pleasure. Alas, in early 2001 the School decided that the success of the programme (which had been in existence since 1910) demanded that fees should be raised on a grand scale. Mike resigned in sad protest and jumped ship, immediately after admitting some 400 students in the Fall of 2001. He now writes, researches, occasionally teaches, travels, sing in choirs - and runs, increasingly slowly. See http://www.publicgoods.co.uk for course outlines, lectures, publications, databases of student fees inter alia.
Messages of support or hostility should be sent direct to mike.reddin@virgin.net
"Existential Reflections on Education Abroad: Some things to do before you get fired, resign, retire or die"
This breakfast plenary will stir the audience to consider a range of fundamental questions that point to the heart of our work in education abroad. Is what I'm doing, or trying to do, important? How much does it matter? How do I know what is best for my students and what programs are of greatest value to them? How can we comfortably use the words “foreigners,” “fear” and “culture” in describing our work? What is likely to be “foreign” in another place/language/space? What is there to be afraid of? Do we spread the message that without our care and support students will fail? Should we feel obliged to foster anxiety among students and teach them to experience the foreign as truly foreign? Drawing on his experience in education abroad as well as in other fields, the speaker will provoke the audience to reexamine its assumptions about education abroad.
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