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18 Sep 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, Education News, High school

Camden Conference hires Erin Towns as first Education Outreach Liason

The Camden Conference is pleased to announce the hiring of Erin Towns as its Outreach Liaison to Maine high schools. Erin is a high school educator at Edward Little High School in Auburn with over 15 years of experience teaching geography, world history and contemporary global issues. She became interested in making education relevant for students and began a quest to bring the world directly into her classroom and has been involved with Camden Conference in the Classroom (CCC) program since its inception in 2015. The CCC promotes courses being offered on current foreign affairs in Maine high schools and seeks to increase the attendance of high school students at the Camden Conference. The teachers are given support in the form of resources about the topic of the Conference and a workshop in September featuring presentations by experts on the topic.  Erin quickly became a leader of the group of…

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18 Sep 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events

Camden Conference presents distinguished panel discussing “Violence, Victims and Healing”

When bad things traumatize good communities will be the topic for a distinguished prize-winning panel of journalists at Hannaford Hall on the campus of the University of Southern Maine Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. The event, “Violence, Victims, and Healing” is sponsored by the Camden Conference and is free and open to the public. Presenting will be: Julie Anderson, editor in chief of two major news outlets in Florida, one of which, the Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the mass shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In 2018 David Shribman, recently retired editor of the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh who led coverage of the fatal shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 and whose staff also won a Pulitzer for that work. Brian McGrory, editor of The Boston Globe, who directed coverage of the Marathon Bombing in 2013 and whose…

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03 Sep 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, News

Keynote speaker at 2020 Camden Conference announced 

Nicco Mele is one of America’s leading forecasters of business, politics, and culture in our fast-moving digital age. He is on the faculty at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. From 2016 to 2019, Nicco was the Director of the Center, where he started new programs focused on understanding misinformation on social networks; sustainable models for local journalism; institutional anti-racism in media and algorithms; and platform accountability. He continues to teach classes on technology’s impact on media, politics, and public policy. Since his early days as one of Esquire Magazine’s “Best and Brightest” in America, Nicco has been a sought-after innovator, media commentator, and speaker. His prior experience includes founding technology companies, working on political campaigns, and a stint as a media executive at the Los Angeles Times. He advises several startups, including Blueprint Robotics (on-demand manufacturing), Optimus Ride (autonomous vehicles), Plympton (publishing), and Cignify (data analytics). Nicco’s book, The End of Big: How…

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03 Sep 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, Colleges and Universities, Education News, High school, News

Education Chair-Peter Imber

Peter Imber moved to Maine in 2010 with his Rockland born wife, Jo Dondis, after a 28-year career in network television news. For most of that time he was a producer for ABC News and worked for its broadcasts, including World News Tonight, Nightline and Good Morning America. His work was nominated for National News Emmys four times, winning once. He has also received a DuPont-Columbia Award and a National Press Club Award. Peter grew up in Pennsylvania, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and lived in Israel during the 1970s where he was a member of a kibbutz and served in the Israel Defense Forces. After returning to the U.S. he received an M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. in Motion Picture/Television Production. He has taught several classes at Belfast Senior College and is teaching another at the Camden Library this spring. He has been a volunteer with the Camden Conference and served…

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03 Sep 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, CC In the World, News

CAMDEN CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD-SEPTEMBER 2019

Want to hear some good news on the state of the global media for a change? The keynote speaker for our 2020 Camden Conference on The Media Revolution: Changing the World, Nicco Mele, provides just that in a report he co-authored for the Shorenstein Center on Media, where he teaches. His report, Digital Pay-Meter: Playbook, finds that the paid digital subscriber business model is catching on among publishers, in preference to sole reliance on advertising revenue. That may not sound like good news at first, but what it means, Mele and his colleagues find, is that publishers are not only more likely to stay in business. They are also coming to prioritize “high-quality, meaningful, trustworthy content” over the sensationalist headlines that put a premium on grabbing the “clicks” advertisers want over quality news coverage and analysis. The news is anything but good on another scheduled 2020 CC speaker, famed Mexican…

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31 Jul 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, CC In the World, News

CAMDEN CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD-AUGUST 2019

Susan Thornton, a 2019 Camden Conference speaker and former senior diplomat, joined two other distinguished China experts last month in penning an open letter to President Donald Trump and members of Congress expressing deep concern “about the growing deterioration in U.S. relations with China, which we believe does not serve American or global interests.” The letter was later signed by an impressive list of diplomats and others including at least three Camden Conference alumni: Director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States Robert Daly, Career Ambassador and former Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, and academic and senior Central Intelligence Agency veteran Paul Pillar. These and other past Camden Conference speakers have of late been actively debating the pros and cons of a threatened and extended “cold war” between the US and China in numerous forums. Martin Jacques, 2019 keynoter and bestselling author on China, told the…

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01 Jul 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events

Osher@Dartmouth Summer Lecture Series will be available to Camden Conference members through the Member Portal

The Summer Lecture Series “Critical Thinking for the Preservation of Our Democracy” presented by Osher@Dartmouth will be streamed on our website through the member portal beginning on July 18. The programs will be available one week after the live events. Members will be able to watch through the portal at their convenience. Recently there has been a sharp decline in critical thinking – listening thoughtfully and evaluating different points of view objectively on an issue. Rather, partisan and often uncivil tribal loyalty is dominating the discourse, and Americans are more and more getting their information and opinions from media vehicles that already agree and reinforce their going-in opinions. Other points of view are ignored. Each session will be a debate where both sides of each issue are covered, thus demonstrating critical thinking in action. For each debate there will be a moderator and two speakers representing different points of view…

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30 May 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, News

UNA Maine summer events

Maine Model UN Conference (MeMUNC)(May 2019)The keynote speaker at the Opening Ceremony of MeMUNC, Professor Rebecca Davis Gibbons, an authority on international relations and nuclear issues, challenged approximately 600 high school and middle school students in attendance to identify and understand the meaning of the above stark symbol (the “Doomsday Clock”) during her address on Wednesday evening, May 15.  Although this started as a somber message, she commended the students for preparing themselves through Model UN to take on leadership roles in the world and to work toward moving the clock back.  Professor Gibbons is currently a post doctoral research fellow at the Belfour Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She will join the USM faculty and work with Professor Tim Ruback and MeMUNC students next September.  Thanks to Chapter members and friends who contribute to the Chapter’s Education Fund, we were again able to provide scholarship support to many of the students attending. UNA-USA…

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30 May 2019
Posted by Lauren Lewis
Category All Events, Education News, High school, News

Students from Portland High School present their Capstone projects

Two Portland High School students, Mariam Douale and Elisa Membreno, presented their Capstone projects to the Portland Board of Public Education on May 21. Their projects were based on this year’s Conference topic “Is This China’s Century?”, which they attended in February 2019 with their teacher, Troy Crabtree, as participants in the Camden Conference in the Classroom program.

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