Ráday Salon

Our visit to Marosvásárhely

On March 26-29, we traveled to Marosvásárhely in Romania, on the invitation of a friend and former colleague of Linda's, Enikő Szigeti.  Enikő is the co-founder of a new NGO called the Civic Engagement Movement, established to promote awareness of human rights, active citizenship and participation, diversity, and tolerance in an area where there is a high degree of tension between the Hungarian and Romanian members of the community.

Enikő invited Michael to give a presentation on the experience of the US Civil Rights Movement as an example of a minority population fighting for human rights. (Click to see the flyer: Hungarian [pdf ]; English translation [Word doc ].)

A short article about Michael's presentation was published in the Marosvásárhely newspaper Népújság the day afterwards.  You can read it below.

See the article in Hungarian [pdf ]
Read the English translation [Word doc]

Ráday Salon evening -- Thurs., Apr. 26

Participants in the PhotoVoice project

We are happy to be able to announce our next Salon evening -- scheduled for next Thursday, April 26th.

For this event, we will be joined by Krista Harper and Jutka Bari, who will be sharing with us their presentation, "Exploring Environmental Justice in a Hungarian Roma Community"

Krista Harper and Jutka Bari are collaborators in a participatory action research project investigating environment and health issues in a Roma community in northern Hungary.  In this project, they are conducting research with a team of six young people from a grassroots  community organization using the "PhotoVoice" method of participatory visual documentation, interpretation, and community-building.  They will present preliminary research findings from the project, discuss how concepts of environment, health, and justice are interpreted by community members, and share their initial experiences of using the PhotoVoice method.

Krista Harper is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She is the author of "Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Postsocialist Political Ecology in Hungary," (East European Monographs 2006). 

Krista & Jutka with members
of the organization

Jutka Bari is founder of the Sajó River Association for Environmental and Community Development, a grassroots organization based in a predominantly Roma community near Miskolc.  She also serves as a civil society representative in Hungary's Decade of Roma Inclusion program.

We are very excited to be able to present this event, and look forward to seeing you there.

Krista and Jutka will also be sharing some of the images from the project.

Preview of the Global Network for Non-violence

Back at the end of October/beginning of November, Michael and Linda traveled to Amman, Jordan for a conference sponsored by the United Nations University -- International Leadership Institute.  The conference was actually a 5-day course, entitled Nonviolent Approaches to Conflict Resolution, Peace-Building, and Reconciliation; Michael participated as a faculty member, giving two presentations on the antecedents of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s non-violent philosophy, and its impact.  We met passionate and committed leaders and activists from all over the globe -- people of all different ages and backgrounds, many from the Middle East, especially Israel and Palestine, but also from Africa, South America, Asia and Russia.  They all had wisdom and experience to share, and were equally willing to hear and learn from others, and work together in the pursuit of non-violent solutions to seemingly "intractable" conflicts.

The course was a wonderful experience, bringing together such a diverse, talented, energetic, and truly dedicated group of participants, that the momentum built up during our time together continued well after the gathering.  Although Michael and Linda talked much about the conference with our Budapest friends after our return, we haven't yet gotten around to putting anything on our blog about it.  However, you'll soon be hearing and reading a lot more about it from us, as the success of the course led to the creation of a new organization -- the Global Network for Non-violence.  A steering committee has officially been formed (of which Michael is a member), and Michael and Linda will be responsible for mainitaining a soon-to-be-launched website for the organization.

So we just wanted to give you a little preview.  The video linked above was the brainchild of an amazing Israeli activist named Hagit (she's the last one to speak in the video) who thought through the concept, managed to corral all the participants (no small task, that), and enlisted a local cameraman to do the shooting. 

We'll have more links and information in the weeks to come...  In the meantime, you can check out:

• A description of the course on the UNU-ILI website
• A few photos, also on the UNU-ILI website
• An article written by one of the participants in the course, Helena Cobban, that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor shortly after the course

We have more photos as well as the audio from Michael's presentations, which we will hopefully get around to putting online soon!