The World Issues Forums of Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies is dedicated to providing educational opportunities to the campus and Bellingham community that support an informed and engaged global citizenry.

Paths to Global Justice, an expansion of the forums, is a collaborative effort of several campus departments to strengthen interdisciplinary international education at Western Washington University by inviting scholars to address global justice issues.

An optional and repeatable two-credit class (375t) accompanies the forums.  Students explore varied media information sources related to the topics, learn to digest and question what they read and hear, and are consistently challenged to act for positive social change.

Biographies of Spring 2008 Speakers:

April 9th

Yamileth Perez, Nicaraguan born and raised in Managua, currently lives and works in Acahualinca, a large community located in and around the Managua city dump.  A committed community leader and trained as a community health promoter, she has developed various health, education and sports programs in her community. Yamileth also works for a fair trade Artisan organization called Esperanza en Accion; and is a single mother of four daughters.

Patty Narvaez, is part of the Witness for Peace International Team in Managua, Nicaragua.  She holds a BA in International Studies Latin America from Portland State University, and most recently worked as a community organizer and medical interpreter.  Born to Nicaraguan immigrants, Patty is proud to call herself Nicaraguan-American, and after having lived in Oregon for fifteen years, calls Portland home.  She will provide professional interpretation during the tour

April 16th

Tamir Moustafa is Associate Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Prior to coming to SFU, Moustafa taught at the University of Wisconsin, as well as Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley, where he held post-doctoral fellowships. His research stands at the intersection of comparative law and courts, religion and politics, and state-society relations, all with a regional focus on the Middle East.   

Moustafa’s first major project focused on the politics of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court, the most important experiment in constitutionalism in the Arab World to date. This project culminated in the publication of The Struggle for Constitutional Power: Law, Politics, and Economic Development in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (edited with Tom Ginsburg, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2008).

April 23

Maria Ruth Sanabria  with her twin daughters – Maria Jose and Maria Camila:
Maria Ruth was elected to the Arauquita municipal council as a representative of the Alternative Democratic Pole opposition party in October 2007.  As she was traveling with the mayor and other council members on January 26, their caravan was attacked by the guerrillas and four police escorts were killed. 
     In addition to the threats from the guerrillas, Maria Ruth has also been threatened by the government security forces.  Her first husband was assassinated because of his involvement with the Patriotic Union party - which posed a strong challenge to the Colombian government.

    “Arauca is a very beautiful and fertile state that is being destroyed by the war and the oil corporations,” says Maria Ruth.  “I want my children to be able to live in peace and to enjoy the rivers, estuaries and grasslands of Arauca.  Instead of sending more weapons, we ask that the U.S. government use your tax dollars to provide support for schools, health care and decent housing – in Arauca, as well as Washington.”

     Maria Ruth and four other women organized the creation of the Guaduales neighborhood in Arauquita and she was the first neighborhood president.  She is a founding member of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Arauca and is the Committee’s representative in Arauquita.  She is also the president of the municipal human rights commission

April 30

Lama Mugabo is a community development planner with a keen interest in engaging local communities in understanding how global issues affect local communities, and ways participatory processes can serve as a catalyst for solving global issues. He uses the art of storytelling through film, photography, and music, as a tool to engage local actors in finding solutions to community development problems. His collaborative approach to community development has taken him across Canada. He has also worked in Africa from Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Maputo, (Mozambique), Bujumbura (Burundi) and to Kigali (Rwanda) where he has worked in private, public and civil society sectors.
      In 2004, Lama served as the National Coordinator for RR10, Remembering Rwanda 10th Anniversary Memorial Project, at the Liu Institute for Global Issues (UBC). He is a founding member of Building Bridges with Rwanda (BBR), an organization that was founded after several years of consultation with different stakeholders in Rwanda and Canada, to initiate alternatives ways Canadians and Rwandans can collaborate to rebuild the Rwandan society from the ashes of the 1994 genocide.

May 7

Shafqat Hussain, is a sixth year PhD student at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, Connecticut. Prior to becoming a doctoral student, he completed a one year masters program in environmental management at Yale. He comes from Pakistan where he worked for about ten years with the marginal communities in the northern mountainous region. Shafqat has worked with the communities in northern Pakistan in three different capacities. He started his career in 1992 with the pioneering community based rural development organization, Agha Khan Rural Support Program. In 1996 he joined IUCN – The World Conservation Union and became Monitoring Officer of Pakistan’s first Biodiversity Conservation Project. In 1999 he left IUCN and started a commercial mountaineering and trekking company. In 1999 Shafqat also designed an innovative project for snow leopard conservation in northern Pakistan, called Project Snow Leopard. The project won the prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2006.  Shafqat is married and has three children, his wife is also a PhD student in Anthropology at Yale.

May 14

Michaela Rollins grew up in Spokane, WA and is currently pursuing a Fairhaven concentration in Eurasian Studies and Political Economy with a minor in Russian language. She spent the last academic year living in post-Soviet Tajikistan through an Adventure Learning Grant. Throughout her term abroad, she volunteered with a local development NGO, researched dried fruit processing, and interviewed women to explore different aspects of economic transition.

May 14

 Devin Malone was born in Anchorage, AK, to Dru Malone and Salli Burgin. He spent his formative years hiking, camping, and snowboarding, and would occasionally go to school to argue about the writings of Kant, John Stuart Mill, or Einstein. After graduating, he lived in a leaky shack on San Juan Island, and along the banks of the Willamette in Eugene, Oregon. He is a senior in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, studying Environmental and Energy Policy.  During his Adventure Grant travels in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, he shot three documentary films on political economy and environmental conservation, and learned to surf. In addition, he has worked in a widow's village and hiked the Himalayas in India, and he worked in an AIDS orphanage and helped build a micro-hydro power project in Thailand.

May 23

Benjamin J. Muller completed his PhD in the School of Politics and International Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2005. Dr. Muller’s dissertation considered shifts towards the securitization of citizenship and immigration after September 11, 2001, focusing specifically on the emerging reliance on biometric technologies. This research drew on Dr. Muller’s background in International Relations Theory, Critical Security Studies, and International Political Sociology, which he also studied in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. In addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in International Relations and Critical Security Studies at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Muller is engaged in a series of research projects, including: analysis of the contemporary relations between liberty and security and the emerging reliance on risk management by governmental and non-governmental actors; questions surrounding aviation security and registered/trusted traveler programs; emerging notions of citizenship in light of the increasing application of biometric technologies in everyday life; national ID card schemes; and, the use of visual technologies and their impact on identity and imagination in contemporary conflict. Dr. Muller’s work is published widely in various edited collections and academic journals such as Citizenship Studies, Refuge, and Security Dialogue, and his work has also been presented at international conferences and to the media, public, and policy audiences. 

May 28

Wendy Call (www.wendycall.com) is Writer-in-Residence at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, the country’s third-largest literary arts center. She is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (Plume/Penguin, 2007). She has spent three years living and working in rural Oaxaca, Mexico, writing about social movements there. Her writing has been supported by grants from Arts Commissions of Seattle, King County, and Washington State; the Institute of Current World Affairs; and the Oberlin College Alumni Association. Before becoming a full-time writer and editor in 2000, she devoted a decade to work for social change organizations in Seattle and Boston.

All events are free and everyone is welcome.  For more information, call 650-2309 or visit our website: http://www.wwu.edu/depts/fairhaven