'Telling Our Stories' empowers high school students to write creatively

On May 6, 2010, several Madison-area high school students presented their creative writing pieces at the UW Memorial Library as part of the Telling Our Stories project.

Telling Our Stories, coordinated by Sociology Ph.D. student Mytoan Nguyen, connects UW-Madison graduate students and community educators with high school students to empower the youth to creatively write about their families' histories.

The intention is to help the students of immigrant and refugee backgrounds to learn about and document how their families came to Madison, Wisconsin, and the daily challenges and rewards that they experienced.

For many youths, the journey toward uncovering their unique family history helped enrich their sense of place in the world and enhance their tools to critically construct their own version of history and events.

A printed anthology of the students' work will be released this summer.

The creative writing pieces were composed on seven Saturday morning workshops where youths learned the components of storytelling and about the different creative techniques they could use to present their stories.

Telling Our Stories is supported by the Humanities Exposed Program, and has partnered with after-school youth programs such as GEAR UP and the PEOPLE program as well as a Room of One’s Own Foundation, the Madison Children's Museum, the Mess Hall Press, and the UW Departments of Sociology, Educational Policy Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Category: Humanities & the Arts
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La Follette School to host discussion about modern-day slavery

A prize-winning author known for his global research on modern-day slavery will deliver a free public lecture this month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of a daylong symposium on human trafficking.

Madison native E. Benjamin Skinner, author of "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," will speak at 4:30pm on Friday, April 30, in Ebling Auditorium in the Microbial Sciences Building, 1550 Linden Drive.

Skinner, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of Harvard Kennedy School and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, went undercover, when necessary, to infiltrate trafficking networks, slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels.

His work received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction, as well as a citation from the Overseas Press Club in its book category for 2008.

"We are excited to host Ben to bring awareness to the global issue of modern-day slavery," says professor Carolyn Heinrich, director of UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs, which is organizing the lecture and symposium.

"Modern-day slavery touches on many public policy issues, including international trade, legal, human rights, social welfare, labor, public health, economic and education," she says. "Yet, due to legal, territorial and institutional barriers-not to mention culturally ingrained practices -- it is a very difficult problem to address and resolve."

Skinner will also be part of the symposium, which will be held from 8:45 a.m.-4 p.m. in 8417 Sewell Social Sciences, 1180 Observatory Drive. Both events are free and open to the public. No registration is required.  

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Category: Social Sciences
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Southeast Asian Summer Institute underway

The Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute is now underway. 

The institute is hosted by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and is an eight-week intensive language program with instruction in nine Souteast Asian languages: Burmese, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Javanese, Khmer, Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Instruction began on June 15th with 141 student participants from all over the US.  For more information, contact Mary Jo Wilson.

Category: Area Studies
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$200k grant will digitize resources for PBS series "In Our Image"

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies was awarded a second grant from The Henry Luce Foundation for $200,000 for a project to create a web-based resource on United-States-Philippine Relations.

The project will digitize a wide range of resources on the Philippines (archival, film and video, photographs and printed material), all of which were collected and utilized in the three-part documentary (PBS) series “In Our Image” produced by Andrew Pearson.

For more information, contact Mike Cullinane. 

Category: Area Studies
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