Global Citizenship
By Adam Frick-Verdine
My name is Adam Frick-Verdine, I am a husband, father, sound designer, and audio artist currently based in St Louis, MO, USA. I have taught in the Audio Aesthetics and Technology Department at Webster University in Missouri for the last 10 years, and was a lucky recipient of the Sverdrup Faculty Mobility Fellowship this year. I taught an intro to audio course at Leiden in Spring 1 of 2020.
An important part of my recent work has been interactive audio maps and other unique ways to tell stories with sound. Part of the goal with my storytelling is to help listeners understand the world and themselves more deeply; whether that means understanding the history of their own town or learning about a culture unique from their own. The opportunity to live in the Netherlands for 8 weeks with my family only deepened my interest in this idea, and grew my passion for finding new stories to tell.
So, for my professional development project in Leiden, I interviewed seven people involved in the Webster Leiden campus, from the director Jean Paul to adjunct professors and many people in between. I wanted to know more about them and their work, but it became immediately clear that they and the Leiden campus as a whole truly embrace the Global Citizenship Program in unique and exciting ways. From Sukai who self-defines as a global citizen (as opposed to "being from Gambia" or "growing up in Michigan," both of which are true) to Jean Paul who set out to make Leiden's faculty reflect the diverse student body, these 7 people embrace the importance of thinking and living globally in our 21st century world.
The final result of these interviews is an interactive audio map available at http://viewer.mapme.com/websterleiden. Each interview is placed on the map at a location relevant to that person's global mindset; not necessarily "where they're from" or "where they grew up" - though that's true in some cases - but what part of the world helped shape them or what part of the world they bring to their work at Webster Leiden.
My and my family's time in Leiden was life-changing, and that's mostly due to the warm welcome of the Webster Leiden community. The faculty, administration, staff, and students are all unique but form an environment that is like nothing I've seen before. I'm thrilled to be able to share just a piece of that through this project; you can also hear the stories of my students from my class there at https://anchor.fm/webster-worldwide-podcast
