HSU Dialogue Weighs Human Rights, Reproductive Justice

Humboldt State University’s annual Campus Dialogue on Race, Oct. 29 – Nov. 9, will center on human rights, reproductive justice and the history of California’s freedom struggles.

Zakiya Luna, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, UC Berkeley School of Law, will deliver the keynote address, “Race, Gender and Human Rights: the Future of Reproductive Justice in the U.S.” Luna will speak on Monday, Oct. 29 at 6 p.m. in the Kate Buchanan Room, University Center. A luncheon with her on the subject of community engagement will follow at noon on Tuesday, Oct. 30 in Goodwin Forum, Nelson Hall East.

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Luna’s research encompasses social movements, law and society and reproduction and identity. She focuses on why and how U.S. women of color seek to broaden international human rights to encompass the rights to have children and rights to parent.

Luna has published in Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, Sociological Inquiry, Feminist Studies and Societies without Borders: Social Science and Human Rights. In 2011/2012, she was the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar in Human Rights Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is also affiliated with Gender and Women’s Studies and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.

Another centerpiece of this year’s Campus Dialogue on Race is the bilingual traveling exhibit “Wherever There’s a Fight,” a history of the civil rights movements in California. The exhibit is based on the award-winning 2009 book Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California, by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi.

Spanning the period from the Gold Rush to post-9/11, the exhibit and the book recount the civil liberty struggles of workers, the disabled, Chinese immigrants, the interned Japanese Americans of World War II and other peoples of color.

Elinson, a San Francisco-based communications consultant for legal and social justice organizations, is former editor of the ACLU News. She teaches classes in media advocacy at major Bay Area law schools and is a book reviewer and columnist on legal history for the Los Angeles Daily Journal.

Yogi has managed ACLU development programs for northern California since 1997. He is the co-editor of two books: Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley and Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography.

Elinson and Yogi will be the featured presenters on Friday, Nov. 2 at 5 p.m. They will speak in the Kate Buchanan Room at University Center, second floor. The exhibit is installed in the HSU Library Lobby through Nov. 19.

The annual Campus Dialogue on Race comprises free workshops, film screenings and entertainment for HSU students, faculty, staff and the community on diversity, racism, social and environmental justice and equity in education. It includes the Native Pathways Speakers Series, multiple Latinologues, a forum on environmental inequality and films about the World War II Japanese internment and the prison industrial complex. The full schedule of events is posted at humboldt.edu/dialogue, including an RVSP for the Oct. 30 luncheon with Luna.