Lecture Series
2010 - 2011
Issues Forums/Paths to Global Justice
Fall Quarter 2010 * Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
Coordinator: Shirley Osterhaus shirley.osterhaus@wwu.edu
All events are free and everyone is welcome.
Information: call 650-2309 or visit our website: http://www.wwu.edu/depts/fairhaven
Captain Paul K Chappell Wednesday, September 29th Thursday, September 30th Capt. Paul Chappell graduated from West Point in 2002, served in the army for seven years, deployed to Baghdad Like most Americans, Paul Chappell grew up thinking that peace was a naive dream. In this talk, he explains how he learned – at West Point and in the military, no less, that peace is possible, and how we can take steps toward achieving it. He will address the meaning of waging peace; and how it is required for our survival in the 21st century. |
October
Debra Harry, Ph.D. (Kooyooee Dukaddo) Wednesday, October 6th 2:45 pm - 4pm (Kooyooee Dukaddo), member of Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe in Nevada is Executive Director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism In the face of globalization and diminishing natural resources, Indigenous knowledge and biodiversity is regarded as a vast untapped market by both private and governmental researchers. Dr. Harry will discuss the fundamental conflicts between Indigenous worldviews and values and the globalizing forces that seek to force nature and Indigenous knowledge systems into the global market. She will critique how international forums, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Intellectual Property Organization are developing new global standards. Will the standards facilitate the commodification of genetic resources and Indigenous knowledge or promote true conservation and sustainable use? Advocacy efforts are centered upon Indigenous peoples’ right of self-determination and within a human rights framework. |
Joan Connell
“Bearing Witness to Tragedy”
Wednesday, October 13th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
Joan Connell Associate Director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, Columbia University, NY
Journalists are trained to wrest information from the powerful: But what about those rendered powerless because they are caught up in tragic events? The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is a global alliance of psychiatrists, journalists and educators that gives those who bear witness to human tragedy the support they need to stay sane. This session explores the challenges of being ethical storytellers in an increasingly violent and dangerous world.
Jordon Flaherty
“Community and Resistance from Katrina
to the Jena Six”
Wednesday, October 20th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
7:00pm Village Books
Jordon Flaherty, a writer and community organizer based in New Orleans.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha , Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher and part-time professor at UC Berkeley
With the livelihood and culture of Gulf Coast residents once again at risk from BP’s drilling disaster, New Orleans writer Jordan Flaherty delivers his new book "Floodlines" as a timely account of catastrophe, community and resistance. Flaherty tells the stories of public housing residents, gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, women prisoners and grassroots activists in the struggle for justice in a post-Katrina landscape. (On tour with Haymarket Books)
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
“Human Rights and Environmental
Justice in Guatemala: A Case Study”
Monday, October 25th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, Director, University of Washington Center for Human Rights
In recent years, the impacts of global climate change have increasingly threatened the livelihood of many of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Faced with declining prospects for survival, residents of these communities risk becoming “climate refugees,” dependent on aid and/or forced to migrate. Yet in places like Guatemala, where this year’s rains have left thousands without homes and harvests, this is a manmade disaster. This talk is about a new project at UW’s Center for Human Rights, conducted in partnership with Guatemalan peasant leaders who are organizing to demand sustainable resource management to protect their communities from the ravages of repeated tropical storms.
Andrew Gardner
“In the Shadows of Skyscrapers: Labor Migrants in the Petroleum States of the Arabian Peninsula”
Wednesday, October 27th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
Andrew Gardner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Comparative Sociology, U of Puget Sound
While Dr. Gardner’s most recent book, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Cornell 2010), ethnographically explores the migrant and diasporic Indian community in the Kingdom of Bahrain, his larger ongoing research interest is with the experiences of the labor migrants in all the petroleum states of the Arabian Peninsula. Gardner will address this extraordinarily large and understudied migration flow of the lowest echelons of the migrant workforce and examine the patterns and common threads that weave through these migrants’ experiences, and peers from that vantage point at the evolving power of the modern Gulf State.
November
Augusto Obregon
“Migrating Towards Justice: Stories
to Transform People and Policy”
Wednesday, November 3rd
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
7:00 Labor Hall on State Street
Augusto Obregon, community leader and activist of El Regadío, Estelí Nicaraguan
Free trade agreements, neoliberal policies and aid conditions from international financial institutions have brought Nicaragua to extreme poverty. Desperate to work for their families, people migrate to countries such as Costa Rica, Spain and the U.S. In the community, El Regadío, a tobacco factory was installed under the free trade zone. It generates employment, but the salaries are miserable; contami- nates the environment, principally the water supply; and causes diseases, mainly with women and children. Some farmers are selling their land to cultivate tobacco, causing less production of food which only harms the health of the community rather than feed them. (On tour with Witness for Peace Northwest)
“Postville Raid: U.S. immigration enforcement and the effects on immigrant children and families”
Wednesday, November 10th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
6:00 potluck followed by
7:00 talk at Labor Hall on State Street
Luis Argueta, Guatemalan born, U.S citizen, film producer and director 5
On May 12th, 2008, 389 undocumented workers were arrested by 900 heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at Agriprocessors, Inc., the largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant in the country. In just 4 days, nearly 300 of these workers were fast-tracked through the US legal system, convicted, imprisoned, deported. Families and communities were devastated. The raid itself cost taxpayers 5.2 million dollars.
Argueta: “What began as a weekend trip to Iowa to see the first-hand effects of the raid has become my life’s passion. Since, I have traveled to Postville 25 times and 10 times to the mountain villages in Guatemala, home to the arrested workers to interview victims from the raid, community members, legal experts, Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, and others”.
“Being Muslim in America,
why it's not an oxymoron!”
Wednesday, November 17th
12:00 pm (noon) -1:20 pm
Fairhaven College Auditorium
Iman Salam, President of the Bellingham Association of Muslims
“I'm a Muslim, but I'm also American, yet the media tells me I have to choose one or the other. Does wearing a headscarf mean I'm less of an American?” Reflecting on how Muslims have been thrown in the spotlight after 9/11 and, more recently, with a Florida pastor and his small following, Iman Salam will talk of her experience as a Muslim, how her religion has been hijacked, and what this means for her children growing up in America.
Bellingham Human Rights Film Festival Location: Anthropology Lounge - AH 319 |
