Ráday Salon

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Just a reminder to all our friends: because these days our Salon schedule has been somewhat irregular, and also because we reach so many more people on Facebook than with our blog, you should definitely be following our Facebook page. We still update the blog with our events and send event notices out on our mailing list, but the most up-to-date stuff is on our Facebook page. There you'll find Salon event info and invitations, photo albums, and also lots of other stuff we share, including articles on human rights topics and other events and info from Ráday Salon partners and friends. You'll find us at facebook.com/RadaySalon. See you there!

The Deaf Community: The invisible Community

On Thursday, 17 May, the Ráday Salon was joined by Mark Rust, professor of Deaf Education and Department Chair of the undergraduate American Sign Language minor program at McDaniel College in Maryland. Prof. Rust has spent the Spring 2018 semester as a visiting professor at McDaniel’s Budapest campus, teaching a course called ”The International Deaf Community”.

In his Salon talk, “The Deaf Community: The invisible Community”, Prof. Rust discussed the history of the deaf community and the language it uses. He talked about the history of deaf education in the US, as well as culture and politics related to the deaf community. Prof. Rust discussed attitudes both within and outside the deaf community about teaching sign language, and also shared some basic information about sign language in different countries.  During his stay in Budapest, Professor Rust has also been getting to know the deaf community in Hungary, and he shared some of what he has observed and learned.

 

"NO!" at MigHelp

Our long-time Salon friends have become very familiar with the powerful documentary about race and sexual assault, "NO!", made by Michael's daughter, filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons, as we have screened it at the Salon on many occasions over the years. This year, at the intersection of what is designated in the US as Women’s History Month (March) and Sexual Assault Awareness Month (April) -- and in the era of the #MeToo movement and an intense public focus on sexual harassment and sexual assault -- we took the opportunity to partner with Migrants Help Association of Hungary (MigHelp) to bring "NO!" to a new audience.

 

On Thursday, March 29,the documentary was screened at MigHelp, with a broadly diverse audience in attendance. The post-film Q & A and discussion on the ever-present problem of abuse against women was as intense and thought-provoking as ever, with a wide range of perspectives offered by participants from several different cultural backgrounds.

Roma and African American Oppression - Similarities and Differences

Over the years, for both Linda and Michael, a major focus of our human rights work in Europe has been on Roma rights and fighting discrimination against Roma. Michael in particular is often asked about drawing connections between the struggle for Roma rights and his experiences with the African American Civil Rights movement.

On February 21, 2018, we started our Salon year off with a Salon featuring Michael and the young Spanish Romani activist, Vicente Rodriguez Fernandez. Vicente is a close friend of ours, and, more importantly, a committed, energetic, creative, and innovative organizer for Romani rights and human rights, who is as passionate about truly grassroots work as we are, and whose out-of-the-box ideas challenge the direction of existing human rights work in Europe. He is the founder of RomaPop, an organization devoted to challenging racist images of Roma in pop culture and was named by Forbes as one of the 2016 "30 under 30" in the policy field. He is currently Co-director of the Legacies of Empires program for the University of Washington.  Of course, most of you already know Michael, who has had a lifelong career in human rights, as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which played a central role in the African American Civil Rights movement, and later as Director for European Programs of the American Friends Service Committee.

In their conversation, Vicente and Michael began by recounting their personal and family histories, illustrating some of the commonalities between the challenges faced by Roma and African American communities, and discussed what drew each of them to connect with the history of the other's community. Moving into the current day, their presentations emphasized the need to question stereotypes and stock narratives about marginalized communities, and, in our European context, about Roma in particular. The presentation sparked intense conversation that continued in deep discussions long after the formal program ended.

Photos: Canada's Mobilization for Migrant Justice

In our most recent Salon event, our speaker Sharmeen Khan gave her presentation, Internationalism and Refugees Welcome: Lessons from Canada's Mobilization for Migrant Justice. Sharmeen's topic attracted a big audience, many friends old and new, and we have received lots and lots of positive feedback both about her talk, and the vibrant and challenging discussion that followed.

Many thanks to Sharmeen for her presentation!  To get a sense of the evening, check out the event photo album on Facebook: 
Ráday Salon: Canada's Mobilization for Migrant Justice photo album

 

Ráday Salon evening -- Canada's Mobilization for Migrant Justice -- Thurs., 12 Nov., 7pm

Although many of our friends have been involved with refugee issues for several years, this year, as we all have seen, the crisis has become more and more acute around the world. As the numbers of refugees and migrants have grown, so have many grassroots efforts aiming not only to address the immediate needs of refugees, but also to challenge existing policies that create barriers to migrants gaining safety and stability in a new home.

For our next Salon, our guest speaker Sharmeen Khan will discuss some of this grassroots work, in Canada, in her presentation:  “Internationalism and Refugees Welcome: Lessons from Canada's Mobilization for Migrant Justice”

About the presentation:

When images of the body of Alan Kurdi exposed the hardship and dangers of migration, the international migrant justice movement experienced a resurgence of activism and organizing. There were urgent calls and pressure demanding action from international and state governments to adequately respond to the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

In Canada, where the Kurdi family was trying to migrate to but were denied, migrant justice organizers mobilized over 50 coordinated and spontaneous actions across 40 cities in Canada. From large centers to small towns, communities have not only been demanding that the government open the borders to refugees, but are linking those demands to broader anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles against displacement in Canada and across the globe.

 

Photo credit: No One Is Illegal

Under the slogan "Freedom to move. Freedom to stay. Freedom to return" - communities across Canada mobilized quickly to challenge the current refugee policies of Canada and to expose the complicity of Canadian government policies and corporations in displacing people from their homes in the first place, in the form of resource extraction, militarism, and environmental destruction. Demanding dignity and safety for refugees and migrants, a national movement has emerged in Canada that engages in various forms of protest, direct action, consciousness raising, and mobilization.

Active in No One Is Illegal and Refugees Welcome, Sharmeen Khan will be in Budapest to share the lessons in Canada and its struggle to maintain momentum. As a way to connect the Canadian refugee migrant justice struggle internationally, she will explore how anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles need to be shared internationally for real gains to be achieved.

Sharmeen Khan is a member of No One Is Illegal, Toronto, an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-racist migrant justice group. She is also a founding editor of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action (uppingtheanti.org). She has been active in activist media and community radio broadcasting for 15 years and is also a trainer and facilitator in grassroots media and anti-racism. She currently works at a labour union in Toronto and is also a researcher with the Media Action Research Group.

For more information on the struggles of migrant justice in Canada, please check out:
http://www.refugeeswelcome.ca/
http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/
http://www.neverhome.ca/

Celebrating the Life and Work of Fred Branfman

On Sunday, May 17, we will be hosting a very special Ráday Salon event.

Some of you will surely remember having met our friend Fred Branfman at previous Salons. He was an American human rights activist who had been living in Budapest for many years with his wife Zsuzsa Beres, and he often joined our events, always engaging in conversation with folks long after the main program was over. To our great sadness, Fred passed away in September 2014, and together with Zsuzsa, we have put together this Salon to celebrate, remember, and learn from Fred.

Fred’s interests spanned a broad spectrum, combining a fervent commitment to human rights and justice, as well as an influential political career, with an equally powerful concern for spiritual and ethical matters. He was also a modest person, passionate about his subjects but not given to self-promotion, so many of you who met him here may not have known all about his history. Through this event, we aim to celebrate his life, as well as perhaps to introduce him to some of you through his work. The program will include two videos, starting with a short clip in which Fred talks briefly of his own experiences bearing witness to war and human rights abuses, and seeing them in the context of the exercise of strength by a powerful government. The second video is of one of Fred’s last public presentations, given at the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Community College in March of 2014, on the “Modern U.S. Executive Secret War”. We will, of course, follow the films with discussion.

There will be material available at the Salon for our guests to read and learn more about Fred’s life and work, but we also encourage you to check out the following links for more background and information:

• An inconvenient truth -- a brief obituary published in the Economist
• Celebrating the life of peace hero Fred Branfman -- a fuller tribute to Fred, published in Counterpunch, which provides more detail on his anti-war activism and his central role in exposing the U.S. secret war in Laos in the late 1960s-early 1970s
• Stories by Fred Branfman -- Alternet’s page of links to selected articles written by Fred in Alternet and elsewhere
• Fred’s website Truly Alive (www.trulyalive.org) -- after years of political activism, Fred turned his attention to the spiritual, and believed strongly that a “life-affirming death awareness” had the power not only to transform individual lives, but to bring the world closer to peace and justice. His website sets forth this concept and provides a wealth of materials to encourage people to explore this theme further.

Photos: Stereotyping and Discrimination Salon and McDaniel College Human Rights Forum

We had a great turnout for our 20 November Salon on Stereotyping and Discrimination.  For those of you who were unable to attend our Salon, or the Human Rights Forum at McDaniel College the following day, photos are available on our Facebook page:

Ráday Salon: Stereotyping and Discrimination photo album

McDaniel College Human Rights Forum photo album

Ráday Salon evening -- Stereotyping and Discrimination-- Thurs. Nov. 20, 7pm

For our next Ráday Salon event, happening Thursday, 20 November, we will be screening a short episode from a US news program called "What Would You Do?" The program is a series of hidden camera episodes where unsuspecting people are put into a situation involving an ethical dilemma. The episode we will be watching challenges viewers to examine how stereotypes and discrimination influence our behavior.

As we mentioned in our previous post, the day after our Salon, on Friday, 21 November, McDaniel College Budapest will be hosting a Human Rights Forum, where the theme will be “Inclusion, Mobility, and Cultural Encounters”. We hope to have many of the conference participants present at the Salon, and we encourage our Salon friends to attend the conference (click to see the conference poster and schedule with paper abstracts). Anyone may attend either event or both, but we hope that for those who do attend both events, the Salon will be an opportunity not only to discuss topics related to the conference theme, but also to meet and get to know other participants over food, drink, and friendly conversation. 

As an added treat, one of our Salon friends will be opening the evening with a little Latvian folk music, too!

Human Rights Forum -- 21 November 2014, McDaniel College Budapest

November is here, and we’ve been busy preparing for our next Salon, which we are holding in conjunction with an upcoming event to be held at the McDaniel College Budapest campus. This coming Friday, 21 November 2014, McDaniel will host a Human Rights Forum in partnership with the McDaniel College US campus and the Migrants Help Association of Hungary. The Forum is a full-day conference on human rights, migration, and multiculturalism highlighting student research papers, many focused on our immediate geographical region. The final session is a panel discussion by human rights experts on minority and migrant rights in the region as well.

For more information, we encourage you to take a look at the conference schedule and paper abstracts. It promises to be an excellent and varied event, and we hope very much to see many of you there! At the end of the day, there will also be a reception and open-mic event, where we will enjoy multi-cultural food and drink and conversation and music, which guests are invited to participate in as well! To learn more about the conference -- including interviews with presenters -- follow the Human Rights Forum page on Facebook.

Our Salon will be held the previous evening, Thursday, 20 November, so our guests will be able to meet and interact with conference presenters -- more information on the Salon will be coming to you soon, in a separate email.


For full details on the Forum, please see the conference program linked above, but in summary:

McDaniel Human Rights Forum
21 November 2014
9:00 to 16:40
McDaniel College Budapest, Bethlen Gábor tér 2
(Reception and open-mic event to be held at Bharata Kulturtér, Tivadar u. 3, 19:00 - 21:00)


PS: One extra note -- For those of you who follow us on Facebook, you will already have seen our posts about one of our favorite Budapest events, the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, going on right now. In case you missed it, we encourage you to check out their website and see some of the films.

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook!

Special Ráday Salon event -- Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation -- Sat., Oct.18

Our first Ráday Salon event of Autumn 2014 isn’t exactly a typical Salon. Our guests are two friends from the U.S., Pat Clark and Inelle Cox Bagwell, who will have only a very short stay in Budapest at the beginning of a longer trip through the Danube valley. Pat and Inelle are both human rights and social justice activists, and within the short time they will be here, we are hoping to give them the opportunity to meet as many people interested in human rights as we could. So, we’re expecting this evening to be a little shorter on politics but long on social interaction. For the more “formal” part of the evening, Pat will speak about her work and we’ll have a question and answer period, and after the formal part, both Pat and Inelle are looking forward to talking one-on-one with our Salon friends.

The event date and time are a little different than usual, but we do hope that you will be able to join us. 

A little more information about our main presenter: 

Pat Clark currently serves as a Program Officer for the Themis Fund, an initiative that works toward the abolition of the death penalty in the US. Issues she has worked on in the past include prison control units, hate violence and restorative justice, juvenile justice, prisoner reentry, prison reform and alternatives to incarceration, racial and economic justice, demilitarization, nuclear disarmament, peaceful resolution of conflicts, and the development of the concept of a center for healing and transformative justice. Pat has has also been involved in truth and reconciliation work, serving as consultant to the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as a commissioner with the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Organizations she has worked with include the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Habitat for Humanity.

To learn more, click to read Pat's full bio (PDF)