By BETHANY SHERROW
Assistant News Editor

(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — Students at the University of Missouri-Columbia gathered in front of the columns to burn a homemade Islamic State flag on Oct. 8.

The protest began trending on social media and garnered traditional media coverage.

It is not the first time ISIS has been in the news and prevalent on social media and it will certainly not be the last, according to UCM’s Interdisciplinary Panel, which gathered the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 14, in the Elliott Student Union to discuss the rise, evolution and the future of ISIS.

Panelists included professors from the political science, sociology and English departments.

The panel was organized with the help of the history department, under department chair Eric Tenbus.

Representing political science, panelist Michael Makara said the group has had the ISIS panel in mind since last fall when the same departments hosted a talk about the Arab Spring.

“ISIS is very important,” Makara said. “Having the interdisciplinary panel, not just looking at what a political scientist has to say, but this idea of different lenses. We can approach understanding these topics by taking different disciplinary lenses.”

Makara said he thought the best part of the panel was the Q&A.

“I thought the questions from the audience were fantastic,” he said. “I’ve been to many panels and presentations on ISIS at this point. This was by far the most thoughtful audience that I’ve seen.”

While Makara has spent time in the Middle East and has a doctorate in political science, he said some of the questions were very difficult to answer.

“It’s one of those things where whenever I talk about the Middle East, I keep in mind something that a very wise man once said when he was giving a similar talk on ISIS about a year ago,” Makara said. “He started his talk by saying, ‘There are no experts on the Middle East. There are only varying levels of ignorance.’ It was very humbling, showing that these things are very complicated.”’

Makara said the group who put the panel together plans to continue doing these talks every fall semester.

“I think it went really well,” he said. “The feedback that we got from all sorts of folks was very positive, and we will do another one.”