Cinema Interruptus

Conference on World Affairs

Abbreviation	CWA
Formation	1948
Founder	Howard Higman
Location	Boulder, Colorado
Director	John Griffin
Parent organization	University of Colorado Boulder
Slogan	Everything Conceivable
Website	www.colorado.edu/cwa

The Conference on World Affairs (CWA) 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.

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.

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 (in April, 2010) 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.