Women's and Gender Studies Colloquium on Latin America Sept. 13

Equipped with neither pantry nor toilet, the needs of Peru's shantytown settlers are fundamental -- food, shelter, clean water -- yet with just a modest level of support, they resolve the crises afflicting their community with breathtaking commitment and tenacious creativity.

In 2008, activist scholars Emily Hedin and Paul Dosh founded Building Dignity, a non-profit development organization that advances an anti-poverty agenda grounded in scholarship and grassroots action. With their Peruvian collaborators, they built the Center for Development with Dignity in the impoverished district of Villa El Salvador, Lima. The Center focuses on popular education and communication, human rights, and cultivating youth and neighborhood leadership.

Come and share their journey through a dynamic blend of lecture, poetry, photography, and advocacy at a 7 p.m., Sept. 13 lecture at the Nebraska Union, part of the Women's and Gender Studies Colloquium.

Emily Hedin speaks four languages and her work in Peru, Senegal, England, and the United States has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Phillips Foundation, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and Upper Midwest Human Rights Fellowship Program. A Minnesota native, Hedin is completing a master's degree in international development at the University of Oxford, after which she plans to return to Peru.
Paul Dosh is a Fulbright-Hays scholar, a Montessori educator, and a spoken word poet. Trained at Carleton College and UC Berkeley, he is now an Associate Professor of Political Science at Macalester College and is the author of "Demanding the Land: Urban Popular Movements in Peru and Ecuador" (Penn State, 2010).

More details at: http://go.unl.edu/j6k