To celebrate life in person, the Mershon Center is instituting weekly lunch conversations, Monday 12-1:30 in the Mershon conference room, Derby 1039. No preregistration is required and no specific expertise is expected: come and bring your good will with you. We'll have overviews of Mershon projects, discussions of current events, work in progress presentations, and whatever else comes up. We'll be reaching out to current grantees for possible contributions, and please also feel free to share topic ideas with Dorry.  

A light lunch will be served to attendees. The room has doors opening onto the courtyard, and whenever weather permits we'll keep these open to facilitate the flow of air. This is an experiment: we don't know how many people will come or how often, so space and food orders will be in flux and we ask for your forbearance as we adjust our formula. The conference room is also being refitted this autumn, on an uncertain schedule owing to the usual staffing and supply chain issues, so watch the newsletters for possible relocation and please bear with the mess in the meantime. This series will be in person only. 

Here are our initial topics: 

• September 12
  Dorry Noyes (Mershon director) discusses Mershon convivencia, drawing lessons for interdisciplinarity from folk tradition and comparative politics. 
   
• September 19
  Mat Coleman and Kendra McSweeney (both Geography) present their new Mershon series, The Legal Geopolitics of the Ocean.  
   
• September 26
  Nancy Rogers and Carl Smallwood (both Law) and Teri Murphy (Mershon associate director) of the co-sponsored Divided Communities Project discuss the process of revising the Practical Guide to Planning Initiatives for Working Together to Advance Racial Equity in the light of user feedback and ongoing events. 
   
• October 3
  Morgan Liu (Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures) talks about Eurasia’s superrich as a political-economic and cultural problem.
   
• October 10
  Theodora Dragostinova (History) and Eric Schoon (Sociology) present their Mershon series, Centering the Global Periphery. 
   
• October 17
  Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, Associate Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu (and OSU/Mershon alumna), considers majority-minority dynamics in Estonia in the light of the Ukraine war.