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October 18 Leo Chavez,
Professor of Anthropology School of Social Sciences at University of California, Irvine

Professor Chavez’s research examines various issues related to transnational migration, including immigrant families and households, labor market participation, motivations for migration, the use of medical services, and media constructions of “immigrant” and “nation.” He is the author of Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1992, 1997 2nd edition), which provides an ethnographic account of Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants in San Diego County, California, and Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (University of California Press 2001), which is the culmination of his interest in the ways immigrants are represented in the media and popular discourse in the United States.. His recent articles include “Beliefs Matter: Cultural Beliefs and the Use of Cervical Cancer Screening Tests;” “Immigration and Medical Anthropology” (2003), and “A Glass Half Empty: Latina Reproduction and Public Discourse” (2004); “Framing Immigration: A Comparison of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, 1965-1986” (with Kevin Keogan)[forthcoming 2006); “Culture Change and Cultural Reproduction: Lessons from Research on Transnational Migration” [forthcoming 2006]; “Imagining the Nation, Imagining Donor Recipients: Jesica Santillan and the Public Discourse of Belonging” [forthcoming 2006]; “U.S. Citizenship: Americans by Birth.” The Miami Herald, Monday, March 14, 2005. Opinion-Commentary; “COMMENT on Nathalie M. Peutz, “Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal.” [Forthcoming in Current Anthropology 2006].

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October 25, Antonia Juhasz from San Francisco
Antonia Juhasz is a Visiting Scholar at the Washinton, DC based Institute for Policy Studies. She is author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time” (REGAN, Harper Collins Publishers, April 2006) and contributing author to “Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible” (Berrett-Koehler, 2004). She has served as Legislative Assistant to two United States Members of Congress and as the Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization. An award winning writer, her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including as a frequent contributor to the Op Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

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November 1, Afrose Ahmed
Afrose Ahmed is a Fairhaven student and spent the last academic year volunteering in Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt for women's and refugee rights organizations.

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November 8, Tunde Fatunde from Nigeria
FATUNDE, Tunde (1955-), Nigerian playwright, gained a BA in French from the University of Ibadan and an MA and Ph.D. in France. He combines university teaching, writing and directing plays, trade union activities, and journalism; his newspaper columns especially have made him well known as an activist intellectual. He has published five plays: Blood and Sweat (1985), first performed in 1983; No More Oil Boom (1985), staged in 1984; No Food, No Country (1985), performed in 1985; Oga Na Tief Man (1986), staged in 1985; and Water No Get Enemy (1989), staged in 1988. The plays are unique for having been written, in the playwright's words, for 'the general public with minimum level of formal education', and their purpose, as noted by Femi Shaka in his introduction to the third play, is 'to encourage a culture of resistance, struggle and liberation amongst our working people and their families'. To this end, plot, characterization, dialogue, and language are highly simplified and predictable. Subject matter is usually a class conflict, and in the confrontation that inevitably ensues, the proletariat always act with courage and unity, and they always win morally, or physically, or both. While the proletariat are always positively portrayed, bourgeois elites are always depicted as villains. Dialogue is carried out either in a stepped-down standard English or in Pidgin, Nigeria's unofficial lingua franca.

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November 15, Roya Hakakian
ROYA HAKAKIAN has collaborated on over a dozen hours of programming for leading journalism units on network television, including 60 Minutes and on A& E's "Travels With Harry", and ABC Documentary Specials with the late Peter Jennings, Discovery and The Learning Channel. Commissioned by UNICEF, Roya's most recent film, Armed and Innocent, on the subject of the involvement of underage children in wars around the world, was an official entry in the documentary category at several festivals, and a nominee for best short documentary at the Hollywood Film Festival.
Roya is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian, the first of which, For the Sake of Water, received honorable mention in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and was nominated as the poetry book of the year by Iran News in 1993. Her poetry has consistently appeared in numerous anthologies around the world, including La Regle Du Jeu, the Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, and the forthcoming W.W. Norton's Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World: An Anthology of Poems. She contributes to the Persian Literary Review and served as the poetry editor of Par Magazine for six years. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in English language publications, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal among them. She is also a contributor to the Weekend Edition of NPR's All Things Considered.
Roya is a fellow at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center. She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and serves on the board of Refugees International. She speaks on the subject of the Middle East and human rights and has appeared on CSPAN-Book TV, CNN International, CBS Early Show, and Now with Bill Moyers. Her memoir of growing up a Jewish teenager in post-revolutionary Iran, Journey from the Land of No(Crown) was Barnes & Noble's Pick of the Week, Ms. Magazine's Must Reads of the Summer, Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year, and Elle Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of 2004. It also received the Persian Heritage Foundation's Latifeh Yarshater Literary Award. Journey from the Land of No has been translated into several languages and is available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Born and raised in a Jewish family in Tehran, Roya came to the United States in May 1985 on political asylum. She lives in Connecticut.

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November 28 John Ross from Mexico
Author, activist, correspondent. Raised in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Ross has lived in Mexico since 1985 and is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction and the winner of the American Book Award in 1995 for Rebellion from the Roots, the first look at the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. Ross has published a novel of the Mexican cataclysm, Tonatiuh’s People, a political guidebook to Mexico, an anthology of basketball writings and eight chapbooks of poetry, the latest of which is Against Amnesia (Calaca de Pelon, Mexico City). He is also long-time Mexico correspondent for Noticias Aliadas inLima, Peru, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Texas Observer and publishes his on online newsletter Blindman’s Buff. His latest book is Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006.

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November 29, Cecilia Santiago Vera from Chiapas
Cecilia Santiago Vera is a social psychologist from Chiapas, Mexico. Her work is focused primarily on gender and intercultural studies and through strengthening the community. She has worked with the displaced population, especially with women survivors of the Acteal Massacre, people in prison, and indigenous communites that live in violent contexts. Cecilia also collaborates on the Psychological Program in Chiapas, A Mexico that works to develop psychological interventions in populations experiencing human rights violations and works to take back the resources of the community.