Understanding the World Today: A Perry World House Faculty Discussion

As the world continues to grapple with deep and interconnected challenges, working toward collective peace, security, and prosperity has never been more urgent.

Armed conflicts persist in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa. Despite approximately half the world having the opportunity to vote in 2024, much of the world’s population still lives under some form of autocracy. Human rights remain under pressure, particularly for the millions of people crossing borders in search of safety and opportunity. As the world marks the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, climate-driven disasters are taking a rising toll on lives and livelihoods. Across all of these arena, technological advances are outpacing governance systems.

The challenges are vast, but they also present enormous opportunity. Surging civic participation shows global demand for accountable governance. Migration is reshaping societies, spurring cultural and economic growth. The climate crisis is accelerating cooperation and technological breakthroughs. While disruptive technologies raise complex risks, they also hold tremendous potential to improve lives.

To make sense of this moment and what lies ahead, Perry World House will convene a panel of distinguished experts. Drawing on expertise in democracy, climate change, global security, and human rights—the four thematic pillars that guide PWH’s work—this discussion will offer insights into the many global policy issues defining the start of this new academic year.

Speakers:

Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is also its Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3).

Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, as is her scholarly editorial work. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Banet-Weiser has been the recipient of international fellowships and visiting professorships at, among others, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, France; the Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Portugal in Lisbon, Portugal; Microsoft Research New England (the social media collective); and McGill University in Montreal (Media@McGill Scholar). She is also a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Banet-Weiser is the recipient of scholarly and mentoring awards, including the Constance Rourke Prize for Best Article in American Quarterly, and the Mellon Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California. She was formerly a Professor and Head of Department at the London School of Economics after 19 years in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where she was Professor, Vice Dean, and the Director of the School of Communication.

Michael C. Horowitz is Director of Perry World House and Richard Perry Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Senior Fellow in Innovation and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2022 to 2024, Professor Horowitz served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities. He is the author of The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics, and the co-author of Why Leaders Fight. He won the Karl Deutsch Award given by the International Studies Association for early career contributions to the fields of international relations and peace research. He has published in a wide array of peer reviewed journals and popular outlets. His research interests include the intersection of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics with global politics, military innovation, the role of leaders in international politics, and geopolitical forecasting methodology. Professor Horowitz worked for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He is a life member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Horowitz received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his B.A. in political science from Emory University.

Beth Simmons is an Andrea Mitchell Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor of Law, Political Science and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation, Simmons is currently researching the paradox of hardening international borders in an era of globalization. Two of her books, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years (2004) and Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (2009) won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs. The latter was also recognized by the American Society for International Law, the International Social Science Council and the International Studies Association as the best book of the year in 2010. Simmons directed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, is a past president of the International Studies Association, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Simmons leads the Borders and Boundaries Project, part of our Global Shifts theme, at Perry World House. Her research group is documenting and will explain the paradox of hardening international borders between states in an era of globalization using satellite imagery as evidence of state presence at international border crossings.

Deputy Director Michael Weisberg is the Bess W. Heyman President’s Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. A climate diplomat, philosopher of science, climate policy researcher, and experienced academic leader, he has negotiated and achieved collective outcomes in the complex landscape of climate, ocean, and development issues at the highest levels of international diplomacy.

An expert on the climate needs of small island developing states, Weisberg currently serves as senior advisor to Jamaica’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and as an advisor to the Fiji and Palau negotiating teams at COP. Weisberg was a leading voice in the development of the “mosaic of solutions” for addressing loss and damage due to the adverse impacts of climate change, which led to major breakthroughs on the topic at COP27 and COP28. This framework was developed in collaboration with the Maldivian Government and the International Peace Institute, where he is a Non-resident Senior Advisor.

Weisberg serves as editor-in-chief of Biology and Philosophy and director of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance. He is the author of Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World, co-author of the landmark photographic study Galápagos: Life in Motion, and a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.Weisberg educates the next generation of environmental leaders in the classroom, at the negotiating table, and in the field, ensuring that their voices have maximal impact on addressing the climate crisis.

Moderator:

Marie Harf comes to Penn with two decades of varied experience in the U.S. federal government, higher education, media, and politics. Previously she worked as senior advisor for strategic communications to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, as the foreign policy director on Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and as a Middle East analyst and spokesperson at the Central Intelligence Agency. She has also held senior roles at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and for Congressman Seth Moulton’s political organization. Since 2017, Harf has been an on-air commentator for Fox News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University with concentrations in Jewish Studies and Russian and Eastern European Studies, and a master’s degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia.