Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

09/10/2026

"I feel like I'm doing a form of anthropological work that can push our discipline to tell stories that inspire us for the future, but also make us proud of where we came from," shared Craig Stevens, who just completed his Anthropology PhD at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences as a Buffett Dissertation Fellow. In our short documentary on his work, Atypical Anthropologist, he shared that when community members see their expertise valued and recognize they have something to contribute, the fieldwork becomes as much about giving back as gathering knowledge. 🎥 Watch the full documentary: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/news/2026/buffett-short-documentary-craig-stevens-atypical-anthropologist.html

09/09/2026

"Chennai has some of the most expansive welfare programs in India, yet still so many people are food insecure. I was interested in researching how communities have been organizing to fill those gaps, not just today, but also for decades and centuries," said Buffett International Senior Thesis Research Grantee Anusha Kumar, a 2026 graduate of Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy and Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. She traveled to Chennai, India, to conduct research for her thesis, “From Scarcity to Solidarity: Mutual Aid as a Pathway to Food Justice and Urban Resilience in Chennai, India." She won the top overall poster award and first place in the social justice division at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium. Since then, Kumar received a US Student Fulbright Award to teach English in Linz, Austria. Learn more about Kumar's experience conducting research in Chennai: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/news/2026/buffett-qa-mutual-aid-in-the-global-south-with-anusha-kumar-international-senior-thesis-research-grantee.html

09/08/2026

"We can make important, serious [media] fun, too. We just made this arbitrary gap — that this [media] is boring but serious and this [media] is really fun but stupid — but it doesn't have to be. You can learn all the time. You can be the really playful but also smart person," said Allison Yang, founder and CEO of video game studio Reality Reload, during the Roberta Buffett Institute's Brave New Futures symposium panel on new media. Hear more from Yang on our Live from the Buffett Reading Room podcast, which gives listeners a front-row seat to events held in the Buffett Reading Room, where global leaders and pioneering scholars convene to investigate the world’s most pressing problems.

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7HFluyTJMVQXKDkTiuWBVo
🔉 Listen on Apple Music: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/live-from-the-buffett-reading-room/id1833056668

09/04/2026

How might art and technology converge in the pursuit of African sovereignty in the age of AI? That question drove the inaugural African Arts Futures Symposium held this summer at the University of Ghana with the support of a Buffett Global Collaboration Grant. More than 100 artists, technologists, and business leaders joined live performances and discussions ranging from African autonomy in the age of AI and the future of African cultural performance.

The symposium was organized by Buffett Faculty Fellow Sally Nuamah (Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences) and Dotun Ayobade (School of Communication) alongside Reginold Royston (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang (University of Ghana).

Learn more: https://www.africanartsfutures.com/

09/03/2026

While the US-led invasion of Afghanistan sees its 25th anniversary on October 7, the stakes remain urgent for Afghan women and girls as they fight for education, safety, public voice, and basic human rights under Taliban rule. Join the Rule of Law Institute at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Art Works Projects, and the Roberta Buffett Institute for The Sharp Edge of Peace: Global Struggle and Local Action for Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. This event includes the "Women Between Peace and War: Afghanistan" exhibit and an excerpt from "The Sharp Edge of Peace," a film by Roya Sadat that documents four women peace negotiators during the transition preceding the Taliban’s 2021 return to power.

📆 Friday, September 11 from 12:00–3:00 p.m.
📍Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Chicago
👥 Learn more and register:

The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan sees its 25th anniversary on 7 October 2026. August 15, 2021, marked five years since the Taliban’s return to power after the U.S. withdrawal. The stakes remain urgent. For Afghan women and girls, the consequences are not distant or abstract, but present in the

09/02/2026

China recently pledged to share data to help developing countries build their own AI systems. However, rules in place so that Chinese AI models cannot deviate from the Chinese Communist Party's official narratives mean that Chinese chatbots can evade answering sensitive questions and revise history even when queried using software to circumvent the country’s internet controls. How does training AI models on regionally-biased data influence how global challenges are interpreted and framed? The Roberta Buffett Institute’s Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group is studying exactly what sociopolitical values different countries embed in the LLMs (Large Language Models) they create and the data they provide to existing models. The group is undertaking the world’s first comprehensive and internationally comparative study investigating how LLMs from countries around the world respond to prompts about climate change, migration, and other hot-button topics.

💻 Learn about the Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group: https://buffett.northwestern.edu/research/global-working-groups/global-llm-values-benchmarking.html

08/31/2026

Cyberattacks on US water systems that officials suspect may be linked to Iran-backed hackers have been reported in at least a dozen states and over 100 municipalities across the country. How can AI help predict and protect against these cyberattacks? Northwestern Security & AI Lab (NSAIL), jointly housed in the Roberta Buffett Institute and McCormick School of Engineering, has created the Counterproliferation Triad (CoT), a framework that brings together people, processes, and technology to identify and mitigate AI-related proliferation risks. NSAIL, led by VS Subrahmanian, developed the framework in collaboration with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program's Daniel Byman and the Netherlands Defence Academy's Roy Lindelauf and Herwin Meerveld.

Learn more about the Counterproliferation Triad and access the project's handbooks, executive course, and testbeds: https://sites.northwestern.edu/evcap/

08/27/2026

This week, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle lawsuits alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children and teens. The settlement raises a bigger question: What responsibility do social media platforms have for the environments they create?

As our experts discussed at our Disinformation in a Post-Moderation World symposium, social media companies may not control speech — but they do control what gets amplified, monetized, and made visible.

08/27/2026

This month, heat index temperatures rose to 132 degrees Fahrenheit in an underground subway station in New York. July was the hottest month ever recorded in the US, and rising global temperatures are increasing pressure on cities around the world to address stifling heat on public transport. New York is exploring a new system, called a thermal energy network, to capture heat, push it deeper underground, and use the trapped heat to heat surrounding buildings in the winter. “Extracting the heat and moving it away is a rational approach,” said Alessandro Rotta Loria, Associate Professor at McCormick School of Engineering and a co-lead of the Roberta Buffett Institute's new Underground Climate Change Global Working Group. “You can deploy this universally, in New York City, London, Rome, wherever you are. The only issue is space restraints and the expertise and willingness to install it,” shared Loria. The working group, which will be formally announced soon, aims to bring together scholars, governments, utilities, and industry partners to develop solutions for the ways climate change and rising temperatures threaten the durability and safety of underground infrastructure in urban areas. Learn more about their work:

Jack Klein takes heat readings, gives fans to overheated passengers and lugs big jugs of water into the stations

08/26/2026

"I was really curious how communities [in Chennai] are organizing to address the fact that climate change is increasingly threatening urban communities and their food security,” said recent Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy graduate Anusha Kumar, who received an International Senior Thesis Research Grant from the Roberta Buffett Institute to travel to Chennai, India, to examine how community-led mutual aid networks help people access food and build resilience in the city. Her resulting thesis, “From Scarcity to Solidarity: Mutual Aid as a Pathway to Food Justice and Urban Resilience in Chennai, India" won the top overall poster award and first place in the social justice division at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium. Since then, Kumar received a US Student Fulbright Award to teach English in Linz, Austria. Stay tuned for an upcoming Buffett Q&A featuring Kumar and her research trip to Chennai. Learn more about her accomplishments: https://sesp.northwestern.edu/news-events/sesp-news/2026/kumar-wins-fulbright-award.html