Careers that Care, Chicago Edition
Thursday & Friday, March 26–27
Chicago

Meet the people behind the policies, programs, and practices that make communities thrive. On this two-day Career Trek to Chicago, you’ll connect with professionals from government agencies, nonprofits, and wellness organizations who spend their days creating safer, healthier, and more supportive communities.

Discover how caring can be more than a calling, it can be a career.

We will be meeting with the following organizations...

Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research" will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...

This is a keynote lecture for the 2025-2026 Obermann Symposium: "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."

Esther Pereen, University of Amsterdam: "Reimagining the Rural from Idyll to Hinterland: Exhausting Rural Childhoods”

Across the social and cultural realms, the rural is often imagined through idyllic and pastoral genres that allow it to be conceived as a refuge from globalization. Pereen's European Research Council–funded project RURAL IMAGINATIONS, concentrating on...

In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has...

Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research" will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...

Title: "Making It Known: Creating and Sharing Plain Language Summaries in CSD"

Speakers: Charlotte Hilker, M.A., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist at Mercy Medical Center and a research associate in the Psycholinguistics Lab at the University of Iowa. Lindsey Nichol, M.A., CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist and a research associate in the Psycholinguistics Lab in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.

An estimated 85% of medical research...

The EPA’s proposal to reconsider its long-standing Endangerment Finding raises major questions about the future of climate and public health protections in the United States. In this discussion, panelists will begin by explaining what the Endangerment Finding is, why it matters, and how administrative law shapes EPA’s authority to revisit it. The discussion will then turn to the scientific response to EPA’s proposal, including how a coalition of more than 100 climate and health experts came...

Lori Gruen, Wesleyan University

"Empathy’s Role in Care Ethics"

Supported by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, The Office of the Vice President for Research, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Philosophy Department, the Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Department, the Religious Studies Department, and the Psychiatry and Early Neurobiological Development Lab.

Speaker: Palle Jorgensen, Dept. of Mathematics

Join us for a reading with Workshop visiting faculty member, Farnoosh Fathi and the English department's Director of the English and Creative Writing Major, Associate Professor Louisa Hall.

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (Canarium 2013) and Granny Cloud (NYRB Poets 2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets 2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York. Her research...

"Unraveling PFOA Pyrolysis: From Nanoreactor Simulations to Microkinetic Reaction Networks"