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Please join us for the following event, co-sponsored by the History Department, the Center for European Studies, and the Borderworks Humanities lab:
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This Fall BorderWork(s) Lab faculty Claudia Koonz and Erika Weinthal are leading a Focus cluster on Humanitarian Challenges: Borders, Environments, and Rights. Designed for first-year students, the Focus program provides clusters of courses designed around an interdisciplinary theme. Students come together for dinner once a week to process what they learn in the classroom. In tandem with Humanitarian Challenge’s weekly dinners, Profs. Koonz and Weinthal have organized an ambitious speaker series that features academics, activists, and artists. See below for the full schedule (with links to more information about the speakers).
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The BorderWork(s) Lab invites you to:
An opening reception for the Student Action with Farmworkers exhibit at Perkins Library
5:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 20, in the Perkins Library Rare Book Room.
Latin American food and live music.
Free and open to the public.
Three new library exhibitions at Duke explore the human experience of farmworkers and the history of a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving their lives.
For twenty years, Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) has worked to bring together students, community members, and farmworkers in the Southeast to work for justice in the agricultural system. What began as a small group of Duke Public Policy students documenting farmworker conditions has since grown to an independent nonprofit with a national impact. The organization’s papers are held by Duke’s Human Rights Archive in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
The first of the exhibits, Student Action with Farmworkers: 20 Years of Growing Farmworker Activists, is located in the Perkins Library Gallery and features documentary photos, protest signs, campaign materials, and more items from SAF’s history. An adjacent exhibit onThe Art of SAF demonstrates the organization’s use of creative arts in education and outreach. And in the nearby Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery, Documenting the Politics of Food features photographs of American agriculture and agricultural labor from the Rubenstein Library’s documentary photography collections.
All three exhibits reflect historical and contemporary concerns with student activism, access to safe and healthy food, organized labor, and immigration. The exhibits run through December 9, 2012.
An opening reception for the exhibits will be held at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 20, in the Rare Book Room of Duke’s Perkins Library on Duke’s West Campus. The reception, which will feature Latin American food and live music, is free and open to the public.
“Contrary to the perception of some, Duke students have a rich and impressive legacy of progressive activism,” said Robin Kirk, co-director of the Duke Human Rights Center. “No group symbolizes this more effectively than Student Action with Farmworkers. This feisty group has made a real difference in the lives of farmworkers, normally invisible and largely forgotten by all of us who benefit from their backbreaking work. The partnership between the Human Rights Archive and SAF brings this history into view at a time when the issues involved—fair wages, immigration, and safety for these important workers—are at the forefront of a presidential campaign.”
The exhibits are co-sponsored by SAF, the Duke University Libraries, the Center for Documentary Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute BorderWorks Lab, the Duke University Service Learning Program, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
These exhibits are part of a larger series of events around the state celebrating the 20th anniversary of Student Action with Farmworkers, including a portable mural display and oral history interviews with National Public Radio’s StoryCorps. More information can be found atwww.saf-unite.org or https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/human-rights.
Please join the BorderWork(s) Lab for two events this week with Kenyan environmental activist Ikal Angelei:
*Monday, September 10, 2012 – 7:00pm – 8:00pm BorderWork(s) Lab – B189, Bay 5: Please join the BorderWork(s) Lab and the Humanitarian Challenges FOCUS cluster for “Monday Evenings @ BorderWork(s): Ikal Angelei, Kenyan environmental activist / Goldman Prize Winner 2012.” More information here: https://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/monday-evenings-borderworks-ikal-angelei
*Wednesday, September 12, 2012 – Lunchtime conversation: “Dams, Human Rights and Local Livelihood in Lake Turkana Region, Ethiopia” 12:00pm – 1:30pm, BorderWork(s) Lab – B189, Bay 5: Please join us for a lunchtime conversation with Ikal Angelei, 2012 recipient of the Goldman Prize for Environmental Activism, sponsored by the BorderWork(s) Lab. RSVP required to erin.parish@duke.edu.
Ikal Angelei is the 2012 recipient of the Goldman Prize for Environmental Activism. Angelei founded Friends of Lake Turkana (FoLT) in response to the proposed construction of the Gibe III Dam, a project that could threaten food security and local economies of a half million people in Ethiopia and Kenya. As a result of the organization’s work, major dam financers such as the World Bank withdrew funding and the Kenyan Parliament demanded independent environmental assessment of the dam’s impact.
Angelei’s visit is sponsored by the BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab and the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI. With support from Duke University Middle East Studies Center.
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December 4: Rights, Camera, Action! Film Screening
7:00 pm, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4 Garage
A bittersweet time capsule of alienation, discovery, racism and belonging, this is a chronicle of immigration in Britain, as seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their movie camera. In 1965, Yash Pal Suri left India to pursue his medical studies in England. He immediately bought two sets of home movie equipment; one he sent to his family in India, and the other he kept for himself. For forty years, this extended family exchanged “cine-letters,” chronicling their daily lives. As time passes and the planned return to India becomes an increasingly remote possibility, the joy and curiosity of the early exchanges give way to the darker reality of alienation, racism and a family falling apart. A bitter-sweet time capsule of alienation, discovery, racism and belonging, “I for India” is a chronicle of immigration in sixties Britain and beyond, seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their movie camera.
In Hindi and English, with English subtitles.
“A cinematic journal spun tight with drama and intrigue… a rare and precious insight into the immigrant experience.” BBC
The screening will be followed by a panel with BorderWork(s) faculty Phil Stern and Sumathi Ramaswamy.
Free popcorn and drinks will be provided!
Cosponsored with the Duke Human Rights Center and South East Asian Studies
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BorderWork(s) student Hillary Martinez has created an interactive exhibit of her senior poetry thesis in the Lab. The exhibit, entitled “Finding Home,” explores homes and walls in Durham, Israel, Belfast, and in the poet’s own life. The exhibit opened on April 19 to an audience of roughly 40 students and faculty. It will be on display for the rest of the semester. We invite you to stop by the BorderWork(s) Lab to engage with Hillary’s work.
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W@TC is broadcast live on: ustream.tv/dukeuniversity. Archives of the series are available for free on the Franklin Center’s iTunes U store.
Subscribe to the series by searching “Wednesdays at the Center” on the iTunes. More information mlr34@duke.edu
Check back for updates in the coming days. Workshop Site: Click Here
BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab Presents:
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