See the video recording of the Chai Wai panel here.

Note: you can also go to the event video my clicking on the photos at the end of the page

Chai Wai: Brazil & Rio 2016 Olympics: Playing the BRIC Game

Tue., March 8th, 2016, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

International and Area Studies Library, Room 321 Main Library

"Chai Wai" is Hindi for "tea or something like that" and is the name of our  event series at the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois. See the event page on Facebook here. Chai Wai events give the campus community an opportunity for enlightened conversation on important global issues. To see previous Chai Wai lib guides, click here. In this edition, our panel discussion will be moderated by Latin American and Caribbean Studies Librarian Dr. Antonio Sotomayor, who is also a historian of nationalism and politics of sport. We will also have four faculty members with various specializations including health and kinesiology, Brazilian tourism and culture, and Brazilian history and politics to discuss the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics and Para-Olympics.  A central focus of the discussion will be in what ways does these major sporting events affect or are involved in the economy, society, culture, and politics. The main theme will be Brazil's character as part of the BRIC countries-- a category assigned to the up and coming economic powers Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Our panelists include:

Dr. Werner Baer, Department of Economics 

Werner Baer is a Jorge Lemann Distinguished Professor of Economics. Author of numerous books and articles throughout a career that spans five decades, his research focuses on the industrialization of Latin America, its consequences, and the process of privatization in Latin America. Consultant to the World Bank, Ford Foundation, Brazilian Planning Ministry, the U.S. Information Agency, and the U.S. State Department,  Dr. Baer has taught subjects including international economics, the economics of Latin America, economic development, and macroeconomics. He has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois since 1974, and has also held positions as Visiting Lecturer at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1989); Visiting Lecturer at New University of Lisbon, Portugal (1989); Professor at Vanderbilt (1965-74); Assistant Professor at Yale University (1958-65) and Instructor at Harvard University (1958-61).

Dr. Laurence Chalip, Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism

Laurence Chalip received his Ph.D. in policy analysis from the University of Chicago. He is published widely on sport policy and the Olympic Movement, winning awards from the North American Society for Sport Management, and the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand. He has held faculty positions in the United States, New Zealand, & Australia, and invited lectureships to universities in Canada, China, Korea, Spain, and the UK. He has had extensive work with the Olympic Movement including being the International Chair of Olympics (IOC & Centre for Olympic Studies) (1999-2001), and part of evaluation research teams at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Seoul, and Sydney. He has served various times as coordinator of the International Olympic Academy (Olympia, Greece). Currently, he’s on the Board of Directors of Olympism for Humanity (an international nonprofit working to realize ideals of the Olympic Movement) and a Principal with the Leverhume Project – an international project examining the political uses and misuses of mega-sporting events including a consultant to the Brazilian government on the uses of the Rio Olympics for sport development.

Dr. Synthia Sydnor, Department of Kinesiology

Synthia Sydnor earned her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities at The Pennsylvania State University and began her career here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is associate professor with appointments in Kinesiology & Community Health and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.  She is co-author of "To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out" (2003), and has been a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar.  Her work, focused on cultural-historical analysis of sport and ritual, has appeared in journals such as Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and Interface: A Forum for Theology in the World.  She is currently working on a book about the “nature of sport.”

Dr. John Tofik Karam, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

John Tofik Karam advances the transnational turn in area and ethnic studies by reframing South America and the Middle East through their mutually entangled imaginaries. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press, 2007), won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association. It was translated by the Editora Martins Fontes into Portuguese (2009) and by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies into Arabic (2012). With María del Mar Logroño Narbona and Paulo G. Pinto, Karam co-edited the volume Crescent Over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino U.S.A. (University of Texas Press, 2015). His current book project is entitled Manifold Destiny: Arabs at a South American Border Remaking the Hemisphere. His article "The Lebanese Diaspora at the Tri-Border and the Redrawing of South American Geopolitics, 1950-1992," was awarded the best article prize by the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2014.

Dr. Antonio Sotomayor, International and Area Studies Library

Antonio Sotomayor is Assistant Professor, Historian, and Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with faculty appointments in Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, and Recreation, Sport, and Tourism, and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His book, The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), studies the political process of Puerto Rico’s entry into the Olympic movement. His work also appears in journals such as Caribbean Studies, CENTRO Journal, and Journal of Sport History. He is currently working on a study of religion, sport, and imperialism through the YMCA in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and an anthology on Latin America’s Olympic Movement.