Camosun College

Insight Speaker Series

2010 Series tickets on sale now!

Each year Camosun College presents the dynamic and inspirational Insight Speaker Series giving Victoria audiences the opportunity to interact with world renowned experts who offer insights to a wide variety of global and community topics.

2010 Insight Speaker Series

Showtimes: 7:30pm with Q&A and reception to follow.

Tickets on sale now

For tickets: McPherson box office or phone 250-386-6121.

Program

Doors open at 7pm and speakers present from 7:30 to 8:30pm with a half hour question and answer period at the end. Following the formal part of the program, Camosun College invites guests to meet the speaker and enjoy refreshments in the McPherson foyer.

Speaker bios

Freelance journalist, columnist, military historian Gwynne Dyer

Climate Wars

Gwynne DyerGwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. He served in three navies and held academic appointments at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University before launching his twice-weekly column on international affairs, which is published by over 175 papers in some 45 countries.

His first television series, the 7-part documentary 'War', was aired in 45 countries in the mid-80s. One episode, 'The Profession of Arms', was nominated for an Academy Award. His more recent works include the 1994 series 'The Human Race', and 'Protection Force', a three-part series on peacekeepers in Bosnia, both of which won Gemini awards. His award-winning radio documentaries include 'The Gorbachev Revolution', a seven-part series based on Dyer's experiences in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1987-90, and 'Millenium', a six-hour series on the emerging global culture.

In Canada, Dyer's column appears regularly in the Telegram in St. John's, the Halifax Daily News, the Fredericton Daily Gleaner, Le Soleil in Quebec City, La Presse in Montreal, Le Droit in Ottawa, the Kingston Whig-Standard, NOW in Toronto, the Hamilton Spectator, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the Guelph Mercury, the Sudbury Star, the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, the Winnipeg Free Press, Prairie Dog/Planet S in Saskatchewan, Vue in Edmonton, Fast Forward in Calgary, Georgia Straight in Vancouver, Monday Magazine in Victoria, and about forty other newspapers.

In the United States, his column appears in the Cincinnati Post, Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, Hartford Courant, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Raleigh News & Observer, Sacramento Bee, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Salt Lake Tribune, San Diego Union-Tribune, Toledo Blade, Winston-Salem Journal and about twenty other papers.

Outside North America, papers that use Dyer's column regularly include the Japan Times, the Straits Times (Singapore), the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), the Bangkok Post, the Canberra Times, the New Zealand Herald, The Pioneer (New Delhi), DNA (Bombay), Dawn (Karachi), 7Days (Dubai), the Bahrain Tribune, Arab News (Saudi Arabia), the Jordan Times, Egypt Today, the Jerusalem Post, the Turkish Daily News, the Moscow Times, Telegraf (Kiev), Lidove Noviny (Prague), Monitor (Sofia), Helsingin Sanomat (Finland), Information (Copenhagen), NRC Handelsblad (Rotterdam), De Standaard (Brussels), Zeitpunkt (Switzerland) Internazionale (Rome), Daily Vision (Uganda), The Star (Nairobi), Zimbabwe Independent, The Citizen (Johannesburg), the Cape Times, the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, the Trinidad Express, the Barbados Advocate and the Buenos Aires Herald.

Dyer's recent books include Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq (2003), Future: Tense (2005) and The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq (2007), all of which were number one or number two on the Globe & Mail's non-fiction best-seller list. A completely updated edition of Dyer's book, The Mess They Made, originally published in 2007, was released in March of this year.

His new book Climate Wars, based on his recent CBC "Ideas" series of the same name, deals with the frightening geopolitical implications of large-scale climate change, and was published in Canada by Random House.

Jessica Jackley Co-founder of Kiva

Harnessing the Power of Perspective

Jessica JackleyJessica Jackley is the co-founder of Kiva, the world's first peer-to-peer micro-loan website. At Kiva.org, users can make micro-loans directly to specific developing world entrepreneurs, who then use the money to start or grow a small business, and lift themselves out of poverty. Loans start at $25. Named one of the top ideas of 2006 by The New York Times Magazine, and praised by Oprah, Bill Clinton and countless others, Kiva is one of the fastest-growing social benefit websites in history. Since its founding, in 2005, it has loaned over $100 million from lenders to entrepreneurs across 182 countries (By 2012, it expects to have loaned over $1 billion to the world's working poor). For all its success, Kiva remains animated by a simple message ("to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty") and by the idea that relationships are a powerful force for positive change.

Jackley, a finalist for Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2009, first saw the power and dignity of microfinance while working in East Africa with a micro-enterprise non-profit. Sector-agnostic about social change, Jackley has worked for public, nonprofit, and private organizations including the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Amazon, and others. In 2009, she began work on ProFounder, which provides new ways for small businesses in the U.S. to access start-up funding through community involvement. She also teaches Global Entrepreneurship at the Marshall School of Business at USC. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Discussing a wide-range of timely issues, from economic development to women's empowerment to Web 2.0, she reminds us that, at the heart of social entrepreneurism, there will always remain the connection between two human beings.

Pico Iyer - Travel writer and cultural reporter

Defining Culture and the Place We Call Home

Pico IyerPico Iyer was born in 1957 in Oxford, England, to parents from India. He grew up in California and currently lives in Japan. He won a King's Scholarship to Eton and then a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where, graduating with a Congratulatory Double First in English, he received the highest marks of any student in the university. He went on to acquire a second Master's degree in literature at Harvard, where he taught literature and writing for two years.

He is the author of eight books: his first, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), appeared on many lists of the top travel-books of the 20th century, and his second, The Lady and the Monk (1991), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in the category of Current Interest. His first novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), was optioned six times and then bought by Hollywood, and his book The Global Soul (2000) inspired multi-media shows, musical works and websites around the world. In addition, he has written a film-script for Miramax, initiated the Hart House Lecture series at the University of Toronto, helped name an internationally known soft drink and been a Fellow (twice) of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Since 1980 he has also written voluminously for magazines in America, Europe and Asia, publishing regular pieces on literature in The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper's and on films and music for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. A contributing editor to Salon, Conde Nast Traveler and Time, he has written essays, book and TV reviews and cover-stories on every continent for Time.

In 1995 Iyer was named by the Utne Reader, along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, as one of 100 visionaries worldwide who could change your life. His collection of travel writing, Sun After Dark, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2005.

Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s) for the last three decades—a continuing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in The Open Road, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the most remote, least developed places on Earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity. Moving from Dharamsala, India—the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile—to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West where the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, rigour, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.

Presenting sponsor

Presenting Sponsor: Coast Capital Savings

Media sponsors

Jack FM 103.1Times ColonistThe Ocean 98.5A Channel

Reception sponsor

RBC Dominion Securities

We continue to look for compelling speakers and invite your suggestions to speakerseries@camosun.bc.ca.

Previous speakers

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

Last updated: 18-Mar-2010 1:19 pm