Eyewitness History

Every historical event was a current event to the people who lived through it.

In this unique class, a series of guest speakers who participated in pivotal moments in history will share their experiences with students who are currently wading through the turbulent, one-for-the-history-books year of 2020.

Classes will meet once a week on Zoom. Prior to each meeting, the week's speaker will assign some articles or a documentary for students to read or watch. We will try to leave at least 20 minutes at the end of each talk for questions.

SPEAKER LIST:

Usama Alshaibi is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and Visiting Assistant Professor at Colorado State University. Usama was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and spent his formative years living between the United States and the Middle East. In early 2004, nine months after the United States invaded Iraq, Usama returned to his birthplace to shoot his first feature documentary Nice Bombs. Usama will talk about the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the perspective of Iraqis who experienced it, and will address questions about living under the Bush administration as an Arab Muslim after 9/11. See Usama’s full biography here.

Rich Aranow is a retired doctor living in San Francisco. He will talk about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Rich came out in 1983, at the age of 22, right after college and just as AIDS was beginning to hit the gay community. He finished medical school in Syracuse, New York, and moved to San Francisco in 1989. As a gay man and an AIDS doctor he watched many of his patients, friends and community members sicken and die while much of the world turned a blind eye or cheered on the deaths. During this period Rich participated in ACT UP demonstrations, community led prevention programs, education workshops, and was involved with the grassroots organization Queer Nation. He continued to work as an HIV doctor as treatments were discovered and has attended international AIDS conferences in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Arlene Dalallfar is professor emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Arlene was born and raised in Tehran, Iran to Jewish Iraqi parents. She first came to the US in the early 70’s to get her BA in Social Psychology and returned to Iran in 1977 to work in communications and ethnographic film. She was part of the anti-shah protests that led to the 1979 revolution. Arlene will talk about her experiences during and after the revolution, both in Iran and in the US to address tensions and misrepresentations that have been escalating in recent years.

Rim El Kasaby is a lawyer currently living in Dubai. In 2011, she was an Egyptian expatriate living in Bahrain. She will talk about the Arab Spring protests in Bahrain and her family's response to the revolution in Egypt.

Rakaia El-Kasaby is a video artist pursuing an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology in Berlin, Germany. She gained her first experiences as a grassroots organizer after becoming active in the Occupy Wall Street movement at the age of 17. Between 2011 and 2012, she spent six months traveling the country, visiting protests and encampments in different cities and working on projects related to income inequality and advocacy for homeless youth.

Caroline Heller lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Lesley University. Caroline wrote a book about her parents’ and uncle’s experiences in Prague before WWII, and then through the war and out of the war. Her father survived six years in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. He was the young doctor who escorted Edward R. Murrow around Buchenwald in the days after Hitler was defeated.

Jeannette M. - Rwandan genocide [1994]

Nina Katz - Soviet Union [1980s, with background on the Stalin period]

Cat Lafuente is a freelance writer and former book editor living in Florida in the Tampa Bay area. Cat lost her father, Juan Mendez Lafuente, in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. She subsequently got her MA degree in Islamic Studies, and spent summer of 2011 studying Arabic in Amman, Jordan.

Mohamed Mansour is a physicist, musician, poet, and writer who lives in London. He was an Egyptian expatriate in Libya in 2011. He will talk about escaping Libya when the civil war erupted on Feb 17, 2011, and being crushed manning the barricades to Tahrir Square in Cairo on Nov 19, 2011.

Isabel Torres -Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico [1968]

Ron Walker is the founder and executive director of the non-profit organization Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBOC). Read Ron’s full biography here.
- Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi [1964]

Instructor: Laura Fokkena

DETAILS:

Suggested age range: 13+

Outside work: Short readings or documentaries assigned by speakers. NOTE: Most Rise Out classes take a casual approach to homework, but in this class we ask you do your best to commit to it each week, as a courtesy to our speakers.

When & where: Fridays on Zoom from 11:00-12:00, Sept. 11 - Dec. 4, 2020. No class Nov. 27 (Thanksgiving break).

Fee: $250 for the semester, which includes a non-refundable registration fee of $10. Please read our media policy. Payment plans available. Fees waived for families with financial need.  (Waivers and payment plan information.)

Photo credit: Laura Fokkena