Conference on World Affairs


The Conference on World Affairs is an annual conference, open to the public, featuring panel discussions among experts in international affairs and other areas, hosted since 1948 by the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

History

The Conference was founded in 1948 by Howard Higman, a professor of sociology at the University. He ran the conference until he retired, shortly before his death in 1995. The Conference resumed in 1996 and was directed for 16 years by Professor James Palmer, currently by John Griffin.
In mid-March 2020, with ever-increasing public health concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, CWA announced the cancellation of the April event - the 72nd conference. It left open the possibility of rescheduling the conference if the situation improved sufficiently.

Content and panelists

The conference started out as a forum on international affairs, but, under Higman, morphed into a discussion on a multitude of topics. The core of the conference consists of panel discussions, usually with 3–6 panelists, on topics such as music, art, literature, environmental activism, business, science, journalism, diplomacy, technology, spirituality, the film industry, pop culture, visual arts, politics, medicine, and human rights. Half of a panel typically consists of experts on that panel's subject, and half with people having no professional connection to the topic, who offer fresh perspectives and insight. Only a one-line topic for the panel is announced two or three weeks before the conference. The panelists are given no other direction or guidance about what they should say.
Each year the conference hosts over 100 panelists, and conducts over 200 sessions. All sessions are free and open to the public and are held in rooms varying in capacity according to anticipated popularity, from 50 seats to 2000. The total annual attendance of all the events at the 62nd Conference on World Affairs was estimated to be over 92,000. Numerous distinguished people have served as panelists over the years, including Patch Adams, Betty Dodson, Buckminster Fuller, Adam Hochschild, Arianna Huffington, Andy Ihnatko, Molly Ivins, Henry Kissinger, Paul Krugman, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Yitzhak Rabin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Studs Terkel, and Ted Turner.
The CWA is governed by a board selected by both community volunteers and by the university administration, and includes volunteers, faculty members, and students .

Cinema Interruptus

One of the events of the conference is the Cinema Interruptus, hosted for many years by film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert selected one movie and showed it late afternoon at the beginning of the week, in a normal, uninterrupted way. Then, for a total of 8 hours spread over the following four afternoons, the movie was dissected almost on a frame-by-frame basis. Ebert, or anybody else in the audience, could pause the movie at any point and comment about any aspect: plot points, acting or directing techniques, camera movement, frame composition, etc.
Roger Ebert moderated Cinema Interruptus from 1969 to 2006. In 2008, he shared an explanation on the program's beginnings:
While Ebert was recovering from cancer surgeries in 2007 and 2008, RogerEbert.com founding editor and CWA participant Jim Emerson stepped in to moderate during his absence. Ebert returned for 2009 and 2010, but mainly as a contributor, using his computer as his voice in order to participate. In 2011, Ebert announced that he would not be returning, and Emerson would carry on as moderator.
The Cinema Interruptus film-viewing process started in 1975 and continues to the present.