World Issues Forum Fall 2018
Location
Fairhaven Auditorium
(FA 300)
Next World Issues Forum Speaker
Wed 11/28 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM
EU has gradually become proactive actor in democracy promotion in the Eastern neighborhood, while several external events (Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Rose revolution in Georgia) played a role in this transformation.
In the lecture we discuss this EU “external democracy-promotion” via various funding programs (EU Neighborhood policy instrument, others), creation of Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum ; but also related problems such as possible loss of independence of NGOs as their priorities become externally driven.
I will also bring some practical examples of my own experience, working with development cooperation projects with NGOs in EaP Countries.
Margit Säre is a short term Cross-Border Research fellow, investigating transboundary civic environmentalism in the Salish Sea -Cascadia border region. For last fifteen years she has been involved in Estonian environmental NGO and working with transboundary water management, cross border environmental networks etc. in Estonian-Russian border area as well in various Eastern European countries.
World Issues Forum Fall 2018
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Wed 10/3 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  The full-on attack on immigrant communities by the current administration – exemplified by the family separation crisis and the “zero-tolerance” policy – has exposed the relationship between immigration policy and the prison industrial complex in the US. The continuous expansion of mass incarceration, which in the last 20 years has increasingly targeted immigrants, has had a profound effect on the shape of government. With an ever-expanding number of federal and local agencies caging immigrants, the American gulag is metastasizing. What does this mean for immigrants living in and coming to the US? What can be done to stop it? This presentation aims to answer these questions and also offer a primer on the current state of immigration detention in the US.
Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), a national coalition dedicated to abolishing the immigration detention system in the US. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, mass incarceration, and racial and migrant justice for over 15 years. She is regularly interviewed by national media outlets including The Guardian, La Opinión, The Hill, NPR, The Nation, and Houston Chronicle, and has appeared on MSNBC. Prior to joining DWN in 2009 Silky worked with Grassroots Leadership fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border and with the independent news program, Democracy Now!, in New York. |
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Wed 10/10 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  In the contemporary era, Indigenous nationhood exists at multiple scales. It’s most visible and recognized in elected councils that negotiate rights with settler states, but far less visible to the outside world are the dynamic ways of knowing, being and doing that continue to anchor Indigenous sovereignty in place. From the Ts’msyen Nation, I provide examples of feasting, land and waterway protection, repatriation and dance groups to highlight the role that embodied heritage plays in maintaining and reinforcing Ts’msyen law, politics and nationhood. Dr. Robin Gray is Ts’msyen from Lax Kw’alaams, BC, and Mikisew Cree from Fort Chipewyan, AB. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Prior to joining the faculty at U of T, she held a two-year UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California Santa Cruz and earned her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies (2015) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research focuses on the repatriation of Ts’msyen songs from archives, and foundational issues related to the preservation, management, ownership, access and control of Indigenous cultural heritage. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Indigenous Repatriation: Law, Property and Nationhood (in progress), analyzes the colonial power dynamics engendered by the transformation of Indigenous cultural heritage into the property of people, states and institutions unrelated to the source community. |
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Wed 10/17 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  Honduran journalist, artist, and documentary filmmaker, Jennifer Ávila, describes the threats to the freedom the press in Honduras. She describes the resistance to the illegal, and U.S. supported, reelection of Juan Orlando Hernández as President in 2017, and the crimes against humanity committed by his regime since the election. Jennifer Ávila, spent six years at Radio Progreso, an essential bulwark of freedom of expression in an increasingly hostile environment for journalism, before co-founding Contra Corriente in 2017. While at Radio Progreso, she directed Guardiana de los Ríos (about the defense of rivers incarnated by Berta Cáceres), No Se Van (about the whys and hows of migration), and Libertad Tiene Nombre de Mujer (about women organizing to protect community territory). Her award-winning work has been shown in international film festivals, and has represented a crucial documentation of the ways U.S. and Honduran policy from deportations to mega-projects have affected the most vulnerable Hondurans.
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Wed 10/24 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  The last thirty years have seen an enormous expansion of documentary practice and the proliferation of documentary across a wide variety of platforms on a global scale. This expansion comes at a time of increasing global integration and the growing need to address problems on a planetary scale, such as climate change, refugees and mass migration and continuing armed conflicts around the world. Canada is a founding nation of documentary practice and continues to be a world leader, advancing the use of visual and audio documentary to address global economic, environmental and cultural challenges and recording the human experience. Incorporating clips from relevant films, this talk will address Canadian documentary practice in the global context and examine the traditional role of documentary to record and reveal human stories and to ‘speak truth to power’ in an increasingly integrated world. Tim Schwab is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal where he teaches video and sound production and documentary studies. He has produced and directed numerous documentaries including THE BURNING BARREL, winner of the Distinguished Achievement in Documentary award from the International Documentary Association, and the acclaimed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary BEING OSAMA, broadcast on television networks worldwide. His feature documentary CINEMA PALESTINE was released 2014 and has played in over twenty film festivals in North America, the UK and the Middle East. |
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Wed 11/7 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  In Guatemala’s Ixcán region, Indigenous communities have successfully resisted the imposition of the Xalalá Dam for over a decade. Join the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA) and the Association of Communities for Development & the Defense of Land and Natural Resources (ACODET) in learning from the lessons of this long-term grassroots organizing. Maya Mam community leader José Gómez will speak about ACODET's struggle to protect land and water, cultivate Indigenous identity and leadership, and build community power in the face of harmful corporate and state-led megadevelopment. José Gómez is a Maya Mam community leader from Guatemala who has been a member of ACODET since 2012, first as a community representative for Copal AA La Esperanza in the municipality of Cobán, then as the association's spokesperson, and now as a member of the Coordination Team. As Co-coordinator, Mr. Gómez is a primary liaison between national, regional, and local actors to channel information about the status of megaprojects in the territory. He works with a variety of stakeholders to build Indigenous leadership, unify strategy, and strengthen community defense. |
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Wed 11/14 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM  Enforced disappearance is one of the most heinous human right violations. As an independent expert member of the UN Human Rights Council Special Procedure mechanism, Professor Baik will explain the UN’s efforts to fight against the human rights violations based on his first-hand account experience as member and Vice-chair of the Working Group. Baik will also discuss the reality of human rights norms, institution, and enforcement introducing new challenges that the world community is encountering such as the violations committed by non-state actors, short-term enforced disappearances, the disappearances in the context of migration, and protecting the rights of the victims in the context of counter-terrorism and national security campaign.
Dr. Tae-Ung Baik is Professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law, and Director of Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is also a member and Vice-Chair of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), which reviews the enforced disappearance cases submitted by the UN member states as a mandate holder of the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Procedure. Dr. Baik teaches international human rights law, comparative law, and Korean Law. Before joining University of Hawaii Law School, he taught at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia. He received his first law degree from Seoul National University College of Law, and earned his master (LL.M.) and doctoral (J.S.D.) degrees on international human rights law from Notre Dame Law School. He was admitted to the Bar as an attorney-at-law in the State of New York, and had been a visiting scholar at the East Asian Legal Studies Program, Harvard University Law School. He worked for Human Rights Watch in New York as a research intern and consultant, and served at the 56th United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights as a legal adviser to the delegation of South Korea. Dr. Baik was engaged in the democracy movement in the Republic of Korea in the 1980s-90s, and experienced incarceration twice, while Amnesty International designated him as prisoner of conscience. His publication includes: Seeking Human Rights Community in Asia (Changbi, 2017), Emerging Regional Human Rights Systems in Asia (2012), and Non-judicial Punishments of Political Offenses in North Korea - With a Focus on Kwanriso, 64 Ame. J. Comp. L. 891 (2016). |
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Wed 11/28 from 12:00 PM to 1:20 PM EU has gradually become proactive actor in democracy promotion in the Eastern neighborhood, while several external events (Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Rose revolution in Georgia) played a role in this transformation.
Margit Säre is a short term Cross-Border Research fellow, investigating transboundary civic environmentalism in the Salish Sea -Cascadia border region. For last fifteen years she has been involved in Estonian environmental NGO and working with transboundary water management, cross border environmental networks etc. in Estonian-Russian border area as well in various Eastern European countries.
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