Northern Ireland Community Relations Council - About Us - News - Civility and Reconciliation in the Age of Obama

23 February 2009

INCORE are delighted to advise you of their public lecture which will be delivered by Professor Jon Van Til on Monday 2 March 2009 at 6.00 p.m. in the Great Hall, Magee Campus. The lecture is entitled ‘Civility and Reconciliation in the Age of Obama’. Professor Van Til is a Professor of Urban Studies and Community Planning at Rutgers University, Camden. Replies by 23rd February to Mrs Janet Farren INCORE University of Ulster Northland Road Londonderry BT48 7JA je.farren@ulster.ac.uk Fax (+44) 028 7137 5446

In this talk, Professor Van Til builds on the newly issued paperback edition of his Growing Civil Society to examine the choices that face the Obama administration in the area of civil society, that vast but amorphous
set of individual and group actions that lie outside the formal boundaries of government, business, and family/kin in contemporary society. Three embodiments of Obama -- orator, pragmatist, and organiser -- frame the
policy choices of his new Administration, which may find itself forcefully driven by a global transformation incivil society that Obama himself has done much to engender.

Jon Van Til is Professor of Urban Studies and Community Planning at Rutgers University, Camden. Among the twelve books he has authored or edited are Growing Civil Society (2008, 2000), Breaching Derry's Walls
(2008), and Mapping the Third Sector (1988).

In 1994, Van Til received the Career Award for Outstanding Research and Service from the Association for Research in Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). He is listed in Who's Who inAmerica. He has also served as Carlson Distinguished Visiting Professor of Social Science at West Virginia University, Distinguished Fulbright Scholar at the University of Ulster in 2004, and Fulbright Senior Specialist
at INCORE in 2006.