WWU / Fairhaven College of Interdiscipinary Studies

World Issues Forum: Winter 2013

The World Issues Forums occur weekly on Wednesdays from 12:00-1:20pm each quarter.

All events are free and everyone is welcome. See our college calendar to view this schedule by date, where the World Issues Forum events are listed in red.

 

Subscribe to our World Issues Forum Channel to see videos as they become available.

 

Co-sponsors include Anthropology, Canadian American Studies, Center for Law, Diversity and Justice, Communications, Political Science, Women’s Studies, WWU Diversity Fund.

 

Winter 2013 Schedule

Date & Time	Lecture
Wed 1/16 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	"A Line in the Sand: Cherry Point, Power Past Coal and Community Resistance" Matt Krogh, North Sound Bay Keeper with RE Sources for Sustainable Communizes         Dana Lyons,songwriter, performer and activist     Description: The same conditions that make Cherry Point the last, best site for a deep water port on the west coast also make it an immensely productive ecosystem, sustaining people for millennia. Cherry Point is squarely in the sights of coal companies desperate for new markets. Matt and Dana will discuss the economic roots of the problem and the probable impacts if Gateway Pacific Terminal goes forward, describe the growing resistance to NW coal export, and offer ways both to resist and to affirm a positive vision for the future.
Wed 1/23 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	“Revitalizing Northwest Coastal Indian Food Culture through Food Sovereignty" Valerie Segrest, Muckleshoot Native Nutrition Educator     Description: Roots, berries, elk and salmon were at the center of traditional food culture for the Coast Salish people of the Pacific Northwest. During colonization these foods were replaced with a diet of a modern and dominant culture that impacted tribal communities today with degenerative diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Several tribal communities, such as the Muckleshoot, are utilizing concepts of food sovereignty and reclaiming their food systems in order to collectively focus on the crucial role culture plays in successfully defining healthy food behaviors, revitalizing traditional food systems and increasing the health of the community.
Wed 1/30 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	“Facts & Fictions about Islam in Prison: Assessing Prisoner Radicalization in Post-9/11 America” SpearIt, Assistant Professor of Law, University of St. Louis   Description: This presentation assesses prisoner radicalization in the post-9/11 era. Using ethnographic data, it shows how Muslims have been characterized as a threat to national security, particularly, due to foreign jihadist connections. These assertions, however, are false alarms—neither extremist violence nor foreign infiltration has materialized in any meaningful way; the discussion will conclude by considering social and penal policies for keeping it this way.   http://www.ispu.org/GetReports/35/2593/Publications.aspx
Wed 2/6 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	“Nicaragua Then and Now: Long Term Impacts of US Policy” Pamela Fitzpatrick, teacher; Paul Dix, professional journalist     Description: Working in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace from 1985 to 1990 documenting the effects of the U.S. funded Contra War on the civilian population, Paul photographed the war. In 2002, he and his partner, Pam Fitzpatrick, began return trips to Nicaragua searching for the people he previously photographed. In 2011, this culminated in the publishing of a compelling bilingual photo/testimony book, "Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of US Policy." After a brief history of the Contra War, Dix and Fitzpatrick will talk about the genesis of the book and share testimonies of people who, otherwise, would have disappeared into the amnesia hole of history.
Wed 2/13 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	“Estamos en la Lucha: Immigrant Women Light the Fires of Resistance” Christina López, Seattle-based immigrant rights activist & Radical Women Organizer   Description: Even though immigrant women endure economic hardships and a xenophobic culture, they have not accepted victimization and manipulation. Instead they provide indispensable working-class leadership in the social justice movements. López, author of the pamphlet, Estamos en la Lucha: Immigrant Women Light the Fires of Resistance, will illuminate migrant women’s fighting spirit and impact. She will present strategies for unity and creating solidarity between Latina/o immigrants, newcomers from other regions of the world, and U.S. residents of all races.
Wed 2/20 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >	“They Like to Work Bent Over: Latino Migrant Health and the Normalization of Inequality” Seth Holmes, Martin Sisters Endowed Chair and Assistant Professor of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California Berkeley   Description: Based on ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented, indigenous Triqui migrant laborers from the Mexican State of Oaxaca, Seth Holmes will present research from his forthcoming book: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers in the United States. In following their migration circuit from the mountains of Oaxaca through the desert borderlands of Arizona to the farmlands of Washington State, his research explores indigeneity, ethnicity, citizenship, labor, and suffering hierarchies as well as the processes by which these are rendered invisible, normal, and natural. He will address the structures of this injurious hierarchy and how they are channeled through international borders, domestic racism, classism, sexism and anti-“illegal” immigrant prejudices.
Wed 2/27 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium     VIDEO >	“Just getting warmed up: why the Arctic and Antarctic matter to everyone." Eric Steig, Isotope Geochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle   Description: TBD
Wed 3/6 12:00 - 1:20pm ES 100   VIDEO >	"Immigrant Rights in a Changing World" Lourdes Fuentes, Seattle Attorney at Law on immigration     Description: There are few things in U.S. society today as controversial and politically and emotionally laden as our immigration policy. The complexity of the immigration system is perplexing even to those who dedicate their lives to helping people maneuver through its maze. It is further complicated not only by language and cultural barriers but by myths of who is allowed “in” and who is not. In this changing world, with issues of Mexican asylum, family-based asylum in light of same sex marriages and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the consequences are life-altering and sometimes deadly.
Wed 3/13 12:00 - 1:20pm Fairhaven Auditorium   VIDEO >

 

Speaker Biographies

 

Matt Krogh is the North Sound Bay keeper at RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, and the northwest Washington director of the Power Past Coal coalition. He earned BS and MS degrees from Huxley College in Environmental Science and Geography, respectively.

 

Dana Lyons is a songwriter, performer, and activist with an intimate knowledge of local and regional environmental and social causes. He has been touring the coal transport route from the Powder River Basin to the San Juans, working with community members to empower them to stop Gateway Pacific Terminal.

Valerie Segrest is a native nutrition educator who specializes in local and traditional foods. She received a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition from Bastyr University in 2009. As an enrolled member of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, she serves her community as the project coordinator for the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project and also works for the Northwest Indian College’s Traditional Plants Program as a nutrition educator. In 2010, she co-authored the book Feeding the People, Feeding the Spirit: Revitalizing Northwest Coastal Indian Food Culture. She is currently a fellow for the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy. Valerie hopes to inspire and enlighten others about the importance of a nutrient-dense diet through a simple, common sense approach to eating.

Spearit joined the Saint Louis University Law faculty in 2010, bringing extensive teaching experience, including certification in college and university teaching. Previously he served as a teaching assistant at Harvard University, University of California, Santa Barbara, and University of California, Berkeley. In addition, SpearIt taught undergraduate courses for several years at the Law & Society Program at UC Santa Barbara, including Criminal Justice, Social Theory & Law, God Behind Bars, and Law & Society. As a law student, he taught undergraduates in addition to teaching inmates for two semesters for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. SpearIt’s research and scholarship concentrates on criminal justice, paying particular attention to sentencing and corrections. Most recently his work has appeared in the Federal Sentencing Reporter, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, as well as Praeger Security International, ABC-CLIO, and SAGE publications. Currently, SpearIt serves on the Board of Governors for the Society of American Law Teachers as well as the Leadership Board for the SLU Prison Program; he has work forthcoming in Michigan State Law Review, Columbia Journal of Race & Law, Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, as well as book chapters in The Muslims in U.S. Prisons (Lynne Rienner) and Religion and American Cultures (ABC-CLIO).

Paul Dix is a professional photographer who has been widely published - Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, Patagonia Catalog, Cooking Light, Ladies Home Journal, Readers' Digest, Men's Journal, Outside Magazine to name a few. Paul has traveled extensively in Latin America as a mountain climber as well as a professional photographer. From 1985 to 1990, he was based in Nicaragua as the photographer for Witness for Peace, a US organization opposed to US funding of the Contra War.

 

Pam Fitzpatrick has worked as a middle school science teacher, director of Lane County WIC Program, coordinator of the north pacific US office of Witness for Peace, and had a private business representing individuals who were being denied Social Security disability benefits. In the early 1980s she was very involved with the Sanctuary Movement. Paul and Pam live in Eugene, Oregon and Livingston, Montana. For the past few years Eugene has been their main home.

Christina Lopez grew up in the projects in Phoenix, Arizona. Her working-class family has roots in the Southwest that predate U. S. borders. She was introduced to political activism when she joined with the Chicano student organization MEChA and fought against an Arizona English-only law. A veteran organizer for equality, López advocates fighting for racial liberation and women’s rights as essential components of building class solidarity. She has spearheaded protests against police brutality and worked with Somali women to protest FBI raids. Her deep involvement in the immigrant rights upsurge of 2006 and 2007 included opposing a profoundly flawed “guest worker” bill. This summer she was a special guest at Tucson Freedom Summer, where she collaborated with teachers and students organizing to defend ethnic studies and immigrant workers. On the national steering committee of Radical Women and president of the Seattle chapter, López has mobilized across the country to protect reproductive justice, immigrant rights, quality education, and affirmative action. A Sisters Organize for Survival co-founder, she is an outspoken advocate for those most affected by social service and education cutbacks. López was the vice-presidential candidate on the Freedom Socialist Party’s 2012 presidential ticket, with an anti-war, tax the rich, end discrimination platform. Author of the pamphlet Estamos en la Lucha: Immigrant Women Light the Fires of Resistance, López offers a unique view of the crucial, but often ignored leadership that immigrant women provide in the U.S. workforce and society despite formidable barriers.

Seth M. Holmes is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Health and Social Behavior at UC Berkeley. Dr. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health disparities, and the ways in which perceptions of social difference naturalize and normalize these inequalities. He is completing a book regarding social hierarchies and health disparities in the context of US-Mexico migration and the ways in which these inequalities become understood to be natural and normal. This project draws on approximately eighteen months of full-time participant-observation, during which time Dr. Holmes migrated with undocumented indigenous Mexicans in the United States and Mexico, picked berries and lived in a labor camp in Washington State, pruned vineyards in central California, harvested corn in the mountains of Oaxaca, accompanied migrant laborers on clinic visits, and trekked across the border desert into Arizona. An article from this work has been awarded the Rudolf Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Concurrently, he is conducting research into the processes through which medical trainees learn to perceive and respond to social difference. In addition, Dr. Holmes is exploring new interdisciplinary research into the social, cultural, and political processes producing high HIV death rates among specific groups of people, notably Latino day laborers and other ethnoracial minorities, homeless people, and sexual minorities. This new project addresses the ways in which political economic structures and social categories affect individual behavior and vulnerability.

Eric Steig is an isotope geochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. His primary research interest is use of ice core records to document climate variability in the past. He also works on the geological history of ice sheets, on ice sheet dynamics, on statistical climate analysis, and on atmospheric chemistry. He received a BA from Hampshire College at Amherst, MA, and M.S. and PhDs in Geological Sciences at the University of Washington, and was a DOE Global Change Graduate fellow. Dr. Steig was on the research faculty at the University of Colorado and taught at the University of Pennsylvania prior to returning to the University of Washington 2001. He has served on the national steering committees for the Ice Core Working Group, the Paleoenvironmental Arctic Sciences initiative, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative, all sponsored by the US National Science Foundation. He was a senior editor of the journal Quaternary Research, and is currently director of the Quaternary Research Center

Lourdes Fuentes, an immigrant from Cuba, currently has her own firm where she limits her practice to immigration matters. Lourdes was previously Director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law and a partner at the law firm of MacDonald Hoague & Bayless in Seattle. She received her B.A. from Eastern Illinois University; M.A. from the University of Michigan; and J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law. She served as a law clerk for the Honorable Charles Z. Smith of the Washington State Supreme Court. She frequently teaches Continuing Legal Education courses to attorneys; has been a guest lecturer at colleges and universities; been featured on national public radio and Spanish-language radio stations; and has published multiple articles related to immigration law. For more information see www.LFuentesJD.com.