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A Comics Presentation with Nate Powell
Why are graphic novels so good at capturing history? Find out when Nate Powell stops by AADL for this presentation. Best known for his work on the award-winning March series he co-created with Andrew Aydin and legendary Civil Rights activist Congressman John Lewis, Powell explores many of the unique and immersive storytelling principles used in comics.
Powell’s work also includes You Don’t Say, Any Empire, Swallow Me Whole, The Silence of Our Friends, and The Year of the Beasts. If you’ve ever wanted to tap into the power of graphic novels to explore history, or just wanted a deeper look into why they move us as readers, you won’t want to miss this!
Special thanks to the Conflict and Peace Initiative at the University of Michigan’s International Institute. This event was part of the Fall 2017 social justice events series: Marching Forward.
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Author Julia Turshen Discusses Her Book “Feed the Resistance”
From cookbook author Julia Turshen comes Feed the Resistance, a practical and inspiring handbook for political activism—with recipes.
As the millions who marched in January 2017 demonstrated, activism is the new normal. When people search for ways to resist injustice and express support for civil rights, environmental protections, and more, they begin by gathering around the table to talk and plan. These dishes foster community and provide sustenance for the mind and soul, including a dozen of the healthy, affordable recipes Turshen is known for, plus over 15 more recipes from a diverse range of celebrated chefs.
With stimulating lists, extensive resources, and essays from activists in the worlds of food, politics, and social causes, "Feed the Resistance" is a must-have handbook for anyone hoping to make a difference.
Julia Turshen is a writer who lives in upstate New York, the author of "Small Victories" and numerous other cookbooks. She hosted the first two seasons of Radio Cherry Bombe and has written for Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Saveur, SELF, T Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Lucky Peach.
This event was created in partnership with the University of Michigan Library and Literati Bookstore.
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From Stigma to Strength: Rethinking How We Do Diversity
Attempts at enhancing diversity often begin with a notion of enhancing tolerance for a minority group, resulting in ongoing senses of disenfranchisement by the minority group and resentment by members of the dominant group.
Mira Charlotte Krishnan examines opportunities to move from reactive to strategic to a new kind of essential diversity approach by examining the rise of the multicultural workplace, the rise of autistic people and in the world of work, the rise of women and gender and sexual diversity.
Reactive diversity increases fairness while producing existing outcomes. Strategic diversity optimizes those existing outcomes.
The goal of essential diversity, however, is to enable new outcomes altogether. These outcomes are only identified via co-creation among diverse groups, and are only possible when diversity is not a tool or a fundamental principle, but the source or driving force which causes the organization to exist.
Mira Krishnan is a social entrepreneur and feminist activist, passionate about the lives of girls and women, early childhood development, and sustainable communities
This event was in partnership with UM Investing in Ability and was part of Investing In Ability Week 2017: Diversity Includes Disability.
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Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal Discusses Her Book “An American Sickness: How American Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back”
Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, an award-winning New York Times reporter, reveals the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, and tells us exactly what we can do to solve its myriad of problems in her book, An American Sickness: How American Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.
In her talk, she tells stories of the doctors and patients she encountered in researching An American Sickness, and offers suggestions to consumers on ways to fight back against the rising costs of healthcare.
Elisabeth L. Rosenthal is a New York Times senior writer who trained as a medical doctor, and the author of Paying Till it Hurts, the award-winning series on health care costs and pricing. During 20 years as a reporter and correspondent for the New York Times, she has covered a wide variety of subjects. Born in New York City, Rosenthal received a B.S. in biology from Stanford University, an M.A. in English literature from Cambridge University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
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Washtenaw Reads 2017 Author Event: Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, Authors of "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America"
Hundreds of community members throughout Washtenaw County read and discussed the award-winning book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, which was selected as the Washtenaw Reads in September 2016 by a panel of community judges.
About the book:
After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no income, a level of destitution so deep as to be unthought-of in the world’s most advanced capitalist economy. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children.
The result of their investigative teamwork is this book, which received much critical acclaim. "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America" won the prestigious Hillman Prize for Book Journalism by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, was short-listed for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
About the authors:
Kathryn J. Edin, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, is the coauthor of "Promises I Can’t Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" and "Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work." H. Luke Shaefer, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where he studies poverty and social welfare policy in the United States.. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and received the 2013 Early Career Achievement Award, given by the Society for Social Work and Research.
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League of Women Voters Forum: Taxes: Is the State Legislature Playing Fair with Local Governments?
Total revenue sharing payments sent by the state of Michigan to local governments have decreased by 45% since 2001. How have our local governments met this challenge? What can be done to reverse this trend?
League of Women Voters of Michigan Board Secretary Harvey Somers will moderates a panel which includes representatives from county, city, and township levels of government, and discusses how the Michigan Legislature’s revenue sharing policies and budgets have affected local governments and how local governments are meeting these challenges.
The program is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Ann Arbor Area.
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Proving Innocence: Freeing the Wrongfully Convicted
The success of podcasts like Serial and documentaries like Making of a Murderer has drawn attention to the issue of wrongful convictions, and to flaws in the criminal justice system that allow these problems to persist.
In 2007, Bill Proctor, a journalist and reporter with WXYZ-TV Channel 7 in Detroit, founded Proving Innocence to investigate wrongful conviction claims and educate the public about the need for reforms. Bill talks about the cases that inspired him to take action, and brings along guest speakers who have experienced wrongful conviction and exoneration to share their perspectives.
Proctor was an award-winning journalist, reporter, producer, and anchorperson whose career of nearly forty years spanned electronic media, radio, television, and documentaries. He concluded his career as senior staff reporter for WXYZ-TV in Southfield, MI, retiring in May 2013.
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Nerd Nite #38 - Bonkers Borders: Crazy Ex(clav)es, Drunken Surveyors, and Uzbeki Seas
Borders are all around us, literally! These days, too many people struggle to place Poland on a map and even have trouble identifying West Virginia. If we paid more attention to our geopolitical frontiers, we’d find not only fascinating shapes but also rich histories behind them! Was moonshine consumption involved in delineating the Carolinas? Could poker have been a driving factor in demarcating India? Is there still unclaimed land out in the world? Let’s explore these and other intriguing cases of bonkers borders!
About Alex: Alex is a Michigan alum from New York and Bulgaria who loves the borders of all three. He looks to be a neuroscientist by day and a geography hobbyist by night, a sort of “Doctor With Borders”.
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Participatory Budgeting
The League of Women Voters of the Ann Arbor Area, A2Ethics, and the CivCity Initiative hosted an informative session on participatory budgeting, one of the fastest growing democratic innovations occurring in the U.S. and Canada today. It is a new way for residents to have direct involvement in government by deciding how designated parts of a city budget will be spent.
There are 60 cities in the U.S. and Canada with participatory budgeting initiatives, however, the movement has both proponents and critics. This program introduces and discusses the concept through an objective forum.
Jeana Franconi and Michelle Monsegur, directors of the Participatory Budgeting Initiative in Cambridge, Massachusetts conduct this session. They describe the Cambridge Participatory Budgeting project; outline how it works; what it funds; their experiences; and what has worked and what has not. The Cambridge project includes youth and noncitizens in the process and also has a very strong evaluation component. For more information on Participatory Budgeting from A2 Ethics, visit their website.
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Crossing Racial and Social Divides
The United States is moving toward being a majority-minority country where less than half of our population will be classified as white. Already four states and the District of Columbia have more than 50% non-white populations, and, as of 2015, Nevada was evenly split white and non-white. A central question for our multiracial and multicultural United States is how to achieve both unity and appreciation for racial and ethnic diversity. The key is talking and collaborating across differences.
In this presentation, Dr. Patricia Gurin will describe the challenges we face in talking and collaborating with people whose racial/ethnic backgrounds and experiences differ from our own, and offer the example of intergroup dialogue as an effective practice for accomplishing it.
Patricia Gurin is the Nancy Cantor Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a Faculty Associate of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research and of the Center for African and Afro-American Studies, and she directs the research program of the Program on Intergroup Relations, a curricular program co-sponsored by the College of LS&A and the Division of Student Affairs. A social psychologist, Dr. Gurin’s work has focused on social identity, the role of social identity in political attitudes and behavior, motivation and cognition in achievement settings, and the role of social structure in intergroup relations.
This program is co-sponsored by the University of Michigan Department of Psychology.