Moderator: Kelsey Ryan-Simkins
This roundtable session features a panel of speakers who have applied their studies in religion, nature, and culture to careers in nonprofits, creative writing, and international research. Panelists will discuss their paths from graduate school to their current work and offer advice for current graduate students who are considering alt-academic career paths. The remaining 45 minutes of the session will be open to questions and discussion.
Roundtable participants:
Hayley GlaholtHayley earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life from Northwestern University in 2014. Dr. Glaholt is an Accredited Family Mediator and she serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (Ontario). She is also Certified Ethnic and Religious Conflict Mediator through the International Centre for Ethno-Religious Mediation (ICERM). In addition to working in family mediation, Dr. Glaholt is the co-founder and Executive Director of Link Coalition Toronto, a non-profit dedicated to educating the public about the links among domestic violence, child abuse, animal abuse, and elder abuse. She lives and works in Toronto.
Gavin Van HornGavin Van Horn is the Creative Director and Executive Editor for the
Center for Humans and Nature. His writing is an entangled, ongoing conversation between humans, our nonhuman kin, and the animate landscape. He is the author of The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds, and co-editor of Wildness: Relations of People and Place and City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness. Gavin edits and writes for the
City Creatures Blog and has published works of creative nonfiction and poetry in Emergence, Orion, The Learned Pig, Undark, Sky Island Journal, Belt Magazine, The Red Wheelbarrow Review, Everyone Quarterly, and Zoomorphic, among others.
Olivia WilkinsonDr. Wilkinson is the Director of Research for the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI), an international collaboration on evidence for faith actors’ roles in the humanitarian and development sectors. She directs JLI’s research work, collaborating with partners from UN agencies and governments, such as UNICEF and UNHCR, to faith-based organizations and NGOs, including Islamic Relief and World Vision, and in collaboration with universities such as the University of Leeds and University College London. Dr Wilkinson is a sociologist, working at the intersection of sociology of religion and humanitarian/development studies. She published her book, "Secular and Religious Dynamics in Humanitarian Response" with Routledge in early 2020, which unpicks how secularity is one of many privileges and biases in the humanitarian system that makes aid irrelevant and inappropriate. She co-edited a new volume also with Routledge called “International Development and Local Faith Actors: Ideological and Cultural Encounters,” which was recently released. She has a PhD and Master's in humanitarian action from Trinity College Dublin and Université catholique de Louvain respectively. Her PhD research focused on the response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and she has since conducted collaborative research work around the world, most recently with local faith actors in South Sudan. Her undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies is from the University of Cambridge.
