Dialogue with Carl Wilkens
“Why I Stayed in Rwanda”
Thursday April 28, 2022
2:30 - 3:45pm
Rowe Hall, room 130
“So what would you do if, like Carl Wilkens, you were caught in the middle of a genocide?,” asked Nicholas Kristof in a New York Times profile of Wilkens. “U.S. officials and church leaders ordered Mr. Wilkens to join an emergency evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda, and relatives and friends implored him to go. He refused.”
Carl Wilkens was the only American who chose to stay in Kigali, Rwanda throughout the 1994 genocide. Venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire, he worked his way through roadblocks of agitated soldiers along with paramilitary units (Interahamwe) armed with machetes and assault rifles in order to bring food, water, and medicine to groups of orphans trapped around the city.
For over a decade, Carl Wilkens has been sharing stories around the globe to inspire and equip people to “enter the world of The Other.” Each year he returns to Rwanda with students and educators to see for themselves how people are working together to rebuild their country and rebuild trust.
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
Follow us on Facebook
Announcing a new collaborative project
Modern Genocide: Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995:
Voices of the Survivors
We hope to expand this into a larger project of survivor testimonies, to include survivors of the Jim Crow South, Rwanda, and other survivors of genocidal violence.
"
October 2021: HGHR steering committee members John Cox and Amal Khoury, with long-time HGHR professor Dr. Sarah Minslow, have published a book on genocide-denial, based on our April 2019 conference.
Denial: the Final Stage of Genocide? includes contributions from well-established as well as emerging scholars.
More about the Center's research here
Spring 2021 events
April 13, 2021, 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Webinar / no registration required:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81964297075
Transgender Necropolitics and the Contemporary Anti-Transgender Movement
Lecture & dialogue with Haley Brown
Haley Marie Brown is a transgender woman and a recent graduate of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies M.A. Program at Stockton University in New Jersey. In 2019, her pathbreaking research in examining the genocidal nature of transphobia and anti-trans violence was recognized as “offering the most important contribution to the study of gender and genocide in nearly two decades” by IAGS [the world’s leading genocide-studies association] President Henry Theriault.
The recent legislation in Arkansas and North Carolina are an existential threat to all transgender people in the United States. With a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, such legislation is designed with one specific intention: to get the Supreme Court to effectively legislate transgender people out of existence altogether.
Sponsored by UNCC’s Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, and the university’s LGBTQ+ Caucus
April 15, 2021, 11:30 am - 1:15 pm
Kurdish Women Making Revolution in Rojava (North and East Syria)
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS and OTHER EVENTS
Events earlier this semester
February 25, 2021, 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
Hamlet, NC Fire of 1991: The Real Cost of “Cheap Labor”
Speakers include Bryant Simon, author of the award-winning 2017 book on the atrocity, and Ashaki Binta, long-time activist with Black Workers for Justice and other movements; she was active in advocating for justice for the victims and survivors in the aftermath of the tragedy.
January 26, 2021, 7:00pm, on Zoom:
Dr. James E. Waller
“Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing"
Information about our Minor,
including lists of Fall 2021 classes