Social Change Colloquium
NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 9/22/09
CONTACT : LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION PROGRAM COORDINATOR, (413) 545-0162
UMASS AMHERST LIBRARIES HOSTS
SIXTH ANNUAL COLLOQUIUM ON SOCIAL CHANGE
~ Talks by Steve Lerner and Amy Bass ~
Amherst, MA – As part of the Sixth Annual Colloquium on Social Change, the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives will co-sponsor two talks. On Friday, Oct. 1, 2010, Steven Lerner will give a talk, “Sacrifice Zones: the Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure," from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., in the Conference Room at Gordon Hall, 418 North Pleasant Street, Amherst. On Thursday, October 28, 2010, at 6:00 p.m., as part of the Feinberg Family Lecture Series and in conjunction with the Colloquium on Social Change, Amy Bass will give a talk, “Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The 1968 Olympics and the Creation of the Black Athlete,” in Room 803, Campus Center, UMass Amherst. The talks are free and open to the public.
Steve Lerner is research director of Commonweal, a nonprofit health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California. He is the author of Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States; Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor; Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today's Environmental Problems; and Earth Summit: Conversations With Architects of an Ecologically Sustainable Future.
Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say "Enough is enough." In Sacrifice Zones, published by MIT Press in 2010, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution.
Amy Bass is professor of history at the College of New Rochelle. She is the author of Not the Triumph But the Struggle: 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete and Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois. She is the editor of In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century. Bass has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history from Stony Brook University. Her research interests include African American history, modern American culture, identity politics, and historical theory and methodology. She has served as research supervisor for the NBC Olympic unit at the Atlanta, Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, and Torino Olympic Games.
Dr. Bass’s talk will explore the black power protest at the Mexico City Olympic Games by Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos in 1968. Their moment on the victory dais effectively linked American sports and racial politics in the U.S. She will examine how the black power protest in Mexico became the defining image of the 1968 Olympics. She will also explore how the Olympic Project for Human Rights mobilized black athletes to assume a new set of responsibilities alongside their athletic prowess, forcing Americans, and the world, to reconsider the role of sports within civil rights movements.
The talk on October 1 is co-sponsored by the Political Economy Research Institute and the talk on October 28 is co-sponsored by the Feinberg Family Lecture Series.
For more information, contact Rob Cox at rscox@library.umass.edu, or 413-545-6842.
-30-
Last Edited: 15 November 2010
