By SUSAN JONES
Pitt professors Jennifer Murtazashvili and Abdesalam Soudi will lead a second Community United in Compassion event on Dec. 5.
The event, organized by a Jewish professor and a Muslim professor, is designed to promote unity through dialogue. While it is open to anyone, the organizers are particularly interested in bringing students together this time. Find more information through the University Calendar.
“This is a really important event for us — to come together and celebrate our shared humanity,” Murtazashvili said at the Nov. 29 Faculty Assembly meeting. “The first event that we did was extremely moving and brought a lot of people together. And given the tensions that many of us feel on campus, many of our students are feeling, it is a really nice way at the end of the semester for people to come together.
“It's a hard time for many of our students right now,” she said. “I think it's important for them to see each other not as adversaries, especially those who are most affected by this — and I'm seeing this on on all sides.”
What to expect:
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Share personal experiences that promote compassion and togetherness
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Connect with fellow students, colleagues, and community members.
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Participate in a cultural engagement exercise.
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Close with personal reflections
“It's not about politics. It's just about compassion and how we treat each other and how we talk about things,” said Murtazashvili, founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets and a faculty member in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. “We will not talk about Israel or Hamas or anything. It is about us and how we treat each other.”
Murtazashvili and Soudi, a faculty member in linguistics, organized the first Community United in Compassion event on Oct. 26, in response to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.
The organizers are collaborating with a documentary filmmaker based in New York who wants to chronicle this work as a model for other universities to follow to talk about civil discourse.
“We're all about freedom of speech, but how we treat each other with that speech is really important,” Murtazashvili said. “We’re doing a really nice job talking about freedom of expression right now, but we could do better in treating each other with dignity and respect.”
The Dec. 5 compassion event is from noon to 2 p.m. in the University Club, Ballroom A. A vegetarian lunch will be served. Questions/RSVP to cgm@pitt.edu or HinH@pitt.edu.
Co-sponsors of the event are the Center for Governance & Markets; Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences; David C. Frederick Honors College; Office for Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion; UCIS/Pitt Global; and the Student Affairs’ Office of Inclusion & Belonging.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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