The Women's and Gender Studies Program will host the first event of its fall colloquium series at 7 p.m., Sept. 13 in the Nebraska Union. The series opener, "Building Dignity: From Scholarship to Activism in Latin America," is free and open to the public.
The event will include a blend of lecture, poetry, photography, and advocacy. Featured presentations are by Paul Dosh, associate professor of political science at Macalester College; and Emily Hedin, a master's student in international development at the University of Oxford.
In 2008, activist scholars Hedin and Dosh founded Building Dignity, a nonprofit development organization that advances an anti-poverty agenda grounded in scholarship and grassroots action. With the assistance of Peruvian collaborators, Hedin and Dosh built the Center for Development with Dignity in the impoverished district of Villa El Salvador in Lima, Peru. The center focuses on popular education and communication, human rights and cultivating youth and neighborhood leadership.
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, and plans to return to Peru.
Dosh is a Fulbright-Hays scholar, a Montessori educator, and a spoken-word poet. Trained at Carleton College and University of California, Berkeley, he is the author of "Demanding the Land: Urban Popular Movements in Peru and Ecuador" (Penn State, 2010).
- Catherine Medici-Thiemann