Shanghai. The Fourth Annual Global Studies Consortium Meeting (Ivan Aleshkovski)

The 4^th annual Global Studies Consortium meeting was hosted by Shanghai University (Shanghai, China) on June 17–18, 2011.

The Global Studies Consortium was founded in 2007 to promote and facilitate graduate teaching programs in global studies and to foster cooperation among them.

The first annual meeting was held in 2008 in the University Sofia (Tokio, Japan), the second – in 2009 in the University of Leipzig (Germany), the third one – in 2010 in the University of California (Santa-Barbara, USA).

The Consortium's primary goals are as follows:

• share curricula and ideas about teaching programs;
• exchange teaching materials, including lectures and reading lists;
• facilitate cooperative teaching projects, such as distance learning, on both bilateral and multilateral levels;
• survey student career paths;
• share information about employment and internships for students;
• encourage student and faculty exchange agreements;

The Consortium membership is ordinarily open to those programs (or departments, schools, consortia, or other entities) that offer or participate in a graduate degree program in global studies, or are in the planning stages to create such a program.

At present moment the Consortium includes 21 academic institutions which represent (in brackets there is given a respective number of participants): Australia (1), Germany (2), Denemark (1), India (2), China (4), Poland (1), Republic of Korea (1), Russia (1), the USA (4), Japan (3). The single representative of the Russian Federation in the Consortium is the Faculty of Global Processes of Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Within the 4^th annual Global Studies Consortium meeting there were held the following panels:

· Defining Global Studies as a teaching and research field;

· Standards for MA programs; the feasibility of PhD programs;

· Institutionalizing Global Studies: Schools, Departments, Programs and Consortia;

· Global Studies in the Global East;

· New Programs ‘show and tell’;

· Placement and internships, and inter-university collaboration.

Summarizing the meeting the following decisions were made:

· to hold the 5^th annual meeting in University of Melbourne (Australia) in June 2012;

· to consider the possibility of holding the 6^th annual meeting in Lomonosov Moscow State University;

· to establish a working group for developing common educational standards in the field of Global Studies;

· to create a working group for the development of distant education and methodological interaction of the Consortium members;

· to create a working group for the development of academic exchange programs among the Consortium members.

One can find the more detailed information concerning the Consortium Activity at http://globalstudiesconsortium.org/