Darfur Action Campaign Offers Program Exploring Hopes and Fears of the New Sudan on February 23
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College’s Darfur Action Campaign, a STAND (Student Anti-Genocide Group) chapter, announces an event that explores the hopes and fears of the transforming New Sudan, on Saturday, February 23. The program, presented by the Darfur Action Campaign and the Rift Valley Institute, is free and open to the public and begins at 2:00 p.m. in the Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center.
John Ryle—the Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard; chair of the Rift Valley Institute; author of Warriors of the White Nile, a popular ethnography of the Agar Dinka of Southern Sudan; and codirector, with Bapiny Tim Chol, of The Price of Survival, a video documentary about the recent war in southern Sudan—will discuss his perspective of working in Sudan and understanding of Darfur and how the larger region is threatened by such a conflict.
The headline speaker of the event is Bol Riiny—a senior at Concordia College and one of the southern Sudanese “Lost Boys”—who will share his experience as a survivor of the last civil war in Sudan, which ended in 2005 with a comprehensive peace agreement, and discuss its relation to the situation in Darfur.
Following the event there will be tables outside Weis Cinema with informational pamphlets and refreshments.
For those who wish additional background on the recent history of the Sudan, there is a screening of God Grew Tired of Us, a film chronicling the lives of several Sudanese lost boys on Friday, February 22, at 7:00 p.m. in the Weis Cinema.
The Bard Darfur Action Campaign, a student club, was founded two years ago by students Oliver Trialdi and Erica Cohen-Taub, with the mission to educate the community about the
Darfur conflict and raise funds for its victims in and around Bard College. The group has brought a multitude of influential speakers and events to the college’s campus, including last spring’s talks by Mia Farrow and Eric Reeves. This spring, the Darfur Action Campaign seeks to further energize and involve the campus and community through multiple teach-ins and events.
The Rift Valley Institute is an independent association based in Kenya, the United Kingdom, and at Bard College in the United States. The Institute has been working in Eastern Africa, particularly Sudan, since 2001, supporting research, publishing, and education. The fellows of the Institute are recognized specialists from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, distinguished in a range of scholarly and practical disciplines. The aim of the Institute is to connect local knowledge to global information systems, in the spirit of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Minorities and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Action-oriented social research is the Institute’s core activity—in the fields of history and culture, human rights, political economy, and environmental conservation. The Rift Valley Institute has received support from by the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Open Society Institute, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, UNICEF, UNEP, and DFID (the UK Government Department for International Development).
For further information about the February program, call Patricia Pforte at 617-894-4319 or
e-mail [email protected].
# # #
(2/14/08)