The Bellarmine Forum

Trans orbal map a global press map

Internationalization and the Liberal Arts

This year’s Bellarmine Forum invites students, faculty, and the entire LMU community to think about how we understand “internationalization” and how to break it down into what that actually means to us. Who benefits from this framework? How is it something more complex than an educational alibi for global structures of power under contemporary capital, the legacy of empire and colonization? At a basic level, we can understand internationalization as a response to globalization; one that attempts to distinguish first and most clearly by its name—stressing relationality within its prefix, “inter”—suggesting a space between nations rather than subsuming them within a globe. If thinking globally and acting locally is no longer enough to address global challenges wrought by the world’s elite, how might internationalization bring about new relations that exceed already existing structures of the transnational and of the global? Given that we maintain that a liberal arts education exceeds the needs of the marketplace, that it is something richer and more valuable than job training, we ask: how might the magis of a Jesuit and Marymount education illuminate the affordances of internationalization at LMU?

Events

Students gathered for a lecture in the Life Sciences Building
Event Lineup

About

The Bellarmine Forum is an annual celebration of the life of the mind in relation to LMU’s mission and heritage. Each year, the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts offers programming that engages an important question or theme. These conversations and events impact the education of our students, provide space and time for critical reflection for our faculty and staff, and build capacity toward future programs. Events are open to the community.