ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ presents a community forum for local labor leaders and Latino immigrants in an event starting at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 4, in the IBEW 567 Hall, 238 Goddard Road, Lewiston.

The program includes a dinner at 5:30 p.m., followed by a screening of the documentary “Morristown: In the Air and Sun” from 6 to 7 p.m. and a discussion with labor and civil rights activist Fran Ansley from 7 to 8.

Open to the public at no cost, this event is presented as part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Public Scholars Symposium, and is sponsored by the Western Maine Labor Council and the Maine Fair Trade Campaign. For more information, please contact 207-786-6202.

The intent of the gathering is to provide “a forum at which labor leaders and Latino immigrants in the Lewiston-Auburn area can meet each other and discuss how the events depicted in the film might shed light on the situation here in Maine,” explains Leila Kawar, visiting assistant professor of politics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and an organizer of the event.

“Professor Ansley has organized similar events in Tennessee and this event aims to build coalitions between labor and immigrant groups in Maine.”

In 2007’s “Morristown,” director Anne Lewis’ film documents the impacts of globalization in East Tennessee. She recorded nearly a decade of change in Morristown, interviewing displaced or low-wage Southern workers, Mexican immigrants and other people impacted by globalization.

The hourlong documentary looks at issues of immigration, factory flight and the organized demand for economic justice. The film depicts the effects of massive economic change and the challenges it poses to working people’s assumptions about work, family, nation and community. Learn more: http://www.annelewis.org/Morristown.html.

The story of Morristown is not unique. Communities throughout Maine are struggling with plant closures and a downward pressure on jobs and wages. Meanwhile, immigrants struggle to provide a livelihood for their families in a system designed to exploit their labor.

Law professor emerita at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Ansley was the principal humanities adviser to the documentary. She has actively sought to unite her scholarship, teaching and service in collaborative projects aimed at understanding and addressing problems of social justice.

Ansley speaks frequently and is widely published in the areas of civil rights, labor rights, impacts of globalization, and issues of race and gender, taking a special interest in the American Southeast and the evolving economic and cultural relations between the U.S. and Latin America.

The numerous awards and accolades she has received for her work include the 2002 W. Allen Separk Award for Superior Achievement in Scholarship and the 2003 Carden Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship.

Funded by a grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, the Harward Center’s Public Scholars Symposium is a new program supporting annual presentations and discussions of academic civic-engagement work.

Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, and her family have lived in the United States for more than two decades.  Many of her humorous yet poignant stories describe the everyday lives of women in Pakistan and of Pakistanis living in the United States.

Naqvi’s short fiction has appeared in journals and is widely anthologized. The author of two short story collections, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan (Three Continents Press, 1997) and Dying in a Strange Country (TSAR, 2001), she has just completed her first novel.

Naqvi is committed to translating work by such writers from Urdu into English. She hopes that South Asian women writers will become more accessible to Western readers. Her translations include several works by the renowned Indian writer , and a collection of stories by well-known Pakistani writer Khadija Mastur.

She teaches English at Westchester Community College and Urdu at NYU and Columbia University.

Sumarsam, a Wesleyan University professor who had his first experience with Indonesian performing arts as a boy in his East Javanese village, devotes two evenings to Indonesian shadow puppetry this week.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, Sumarsam (who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name) gives a lecture titled “Performing Hindu Stories in Indonesia: Introduction to Shadow Puppet Theater (Wayang Kulit).” At 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 24, he performs a puppet play accompanied by Indonesian and American musicians, including ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ own gamelan ensemble. Both events take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., and are open to the public at no cost.

As the name indicates, the essence of Indonesian shadow puppetry is the action of puppets silhouetted against a backlit cloth screen. Performance is labor-intensive for the “dhalang,” or puppet master. This person manipulates the puppets, speaks for all the characters, sings, directs the accompanying musicians and makes sound effects (usually with his feet).

Born in Dander, East Java, in 1944, Sumarsam took part in an all-night performance of Indonesia’s traditional, percussion-based gamelan music when he was 7, sitting in for a sleepy drummer. He joined that ensemble at age 8 and stayed with music, studying gamelan at a performing-arts high school and later at the college level in Indonesia.

He went to Wesleyan in the early 1970s as a visiting artist, earned his master’s degree there in 1976, and in 1992 earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology and Southeast Asian studies at Cornell. Today he is an adjunct professor of music and director of graduate studies in Indonesian music and theater at Wesleyan.

Wayang kulit integrates the percussion-based music called “gamelan.” Performing with Sumarsam on Jan. 24 will be several highly regarded, U.S.-based musicians, including singer Jody Diamond of the American Gamelan Institute and drummer Harjito, also of Wesleyan, which has one of the premiere gamelan programs in the United States. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ ensemble Gamelan Mawar Mekar will also perform.

The puppets that Sumarsam will use in the performance are part of a collection of more than 300 on permanent loan to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. David Eisler, an attorney in Dover, N.H., has loaned the collection to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to honor the memory of his father, Dr. Milton Eisler. Eisler made the loan, he says, to ensure that the collection remains intact. It includes characters, animals and scenic elements.

Wayang kulit, Eisler says, is a “theater tradition as sophisticated as Shakespeare and 1,000 years old.”

Sumarsam’s performance on Jan. 24, depicting a climactic battle scene from a much longer play, is based on a Hindu story. “In Java, which is primarily Muslim, where most of the musicians are at least nominally Muslim, most of the traditional wayang is based on Hindu epic,” says Rose Pruiksma, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gamelan program.

“Indonesian Islam is not generally fundamentalist Islam,” she says. It assimilated beliefs and practices from Indonesian Hinduism and pantheism. “There’s actually a very rich mixture of traditions and a very high degree of religious tolerance in certain ways,” she explains.

These presentations are part of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ program “Islam in the World, the World and Islam,” made possible by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation.

For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

In January 2002, Harris Wofford was named chairman of America’s Promise, an organization dedicated to building character and raising aspirations of the nation’s youth, and founded by U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. As a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and more recently CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Wofford has dedicated much of his life to the goal of making citizen service a common expectation and experience for all Americans.

Wofford played a key role in both crafting and working to pass the trailblazing legislation that created AmeriCorps, the Learn and Serve America program and the Corporation for National and Community Service. He was an instrumental figure in organizing the 1997 President’s Summit for America’s Future, establishing America’s Promise.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College announced the creation of a new Center for Community Partnerships last November to bring together service-learning and applied research in the community interest and to create a permanent structure for partnering with community projects. The naming and dedication Friday will honor a primary legacy of the Harward presidency: a commitment to community engagement by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, according to Jill N. Reich, vice president for academic affairs.

“The Harward Center for Community Partnerships will become the college’s focal point for all partnerships with the community,” Reich said. “It will become the organizational home of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College’s highly effective and nationally recognized service-learning program. More than that, it is being organized as an academic program, in the heart of the institution, which underscores the commitment of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Board of Trustees to an enduring relationship between campus and community.”

Reich noted that the many existing relationships created through LA Excels and the Center for Service-Learning will remain operative. Eventually, the center will offer a single point of contact, making it easier for community members to approach the college with new ideas for relationships that have academic value and mutual benefit. The college plans to hire a director for the Harward Center during the next year.

The Harward Center for Community Partnerships will consolidate existing and new programs, current and future collaborations, personnel and resources.

* The center will enhance ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ focus on and support to service-learning. Service-learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ goes beyond traditional volunteerism by incorporating community service into academic course work. Since 1995, more than half of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student body has engaged in service-learning projects, while more than a third of the faculty has included a service component in their courses. In the year ending May 2001, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students participated in 53,547 hours of service in the local community. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ service-learning program involves nearly 150 community agencies and institutions.

* The center will provide an ongoing institutional structure and resource for collaborations with the community, including LA Excels. A community-based strategic alliance founded in 1998, LA Excels is composed of colleges, schools, hospitals, municipal governments, arts organizations and businesses that work together to create a shared vision of excellence in community development. After two conventions involving more than 1,000 local citizens, LA Excels decided to champion plans that no single entity could accomplish, including: the development of a performing arts center, a community arts learning center, and a museum devoted to the area’s industrial and social heritage. It also supports an LA conference center, neighborhood housing improvements, green corridors and bicycle pathways linking the two cities, and projects to increase educational aspirations of local schoolchildren.

* The center will align and support research projects by students and faculty that have application in the community — research that brings external support that otherwise would not occur. Examples include a student who developed a Geographical Information System for Lewiston and Auburn and saved the municipalities nearly $200,000 in labor and consultants’ fees. Another gave 34 students from Lewiston’s Longley Elementary School a chance to conduct hands-on science experiments with four ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professors.

Significant grant support from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provide resources that enable these college and community collaborations.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Board of Trustees voted to create the center and authorized a search for its first director at its meeting last October. During board discussion, Trustees Chair Burton Harris, among others, noted the importance of a lasting partnership between campus and community. “The fences, physical and metaphorical, have come down,” Harris said. “The college and its partner, the community, now have a direct, a sustainable, and a mutually-reinforcing relationship.

“The establishment of this center, one of the most significant steps taken by the college, will assure the Lewiston-Auburn community that, as partners now and in the future, both the college and the community can reinforce their strengths, their mutually beneficial interactions and their missions of excellence.”

“The Center for Community Partnerships will ensure a sustainable link of the College’s academic mission to its commitment to service, and to mutually valuable partnerships with the community beyond the College — partnerships that bring benefits and support that otherwise would not be possible,” Harward said in remarks at a breakfast seminar of business, civic and health-care leaders from the Lewiston-Auburn community. “Our engagements with the community outside of the College have been true partnerships. They serve mutual, yet independent, interests that honor the integrity of both partners.”

The Center for Community Partnerships will consolidate existing and new programs, current and future collaborations, personnel and resources:

* The Center will enhance ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ focus on and support to service-learning. Service-learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ goes beyond traditional volunteerism by incorporating community service into academic course work. Since 1995, more than half of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student body has engaged in service-learning projects, while more than a third of the faculty has included a service component in their courses. In the last academic year, September 2000 to May 2001, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students participated in 53,547 hours of service in the local community. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ enjoys national recognition, having successfully integrated academic excellence, with a model service-learning program involving nearly 150 community agencies and institutions.

* The Center will provide an ongoing institutional structure and resource for collaborations with the community, including LA Excels. A community-based strategic alliance founded in 1998, LA Excels is composed of colleges, schools, hospitals, municipal governments, arts organizations and businesses that work together to create a shared vision of excellence in community development. After two conventions involving more than 1,000 local citizens, LA Excels decided to champion plans that no single entity could accomplish, including: bringing Lewiston and Auburn together to develop a performing arts center, a community arts learning center, and a museum devoted to the area’s industrial and social heritage. It also supports an LA conference center, neighborhood housing improvements, green corridors and bicycle pathways linking the two cities, and projects to increase educational aspirations of local schoolchildren. In its second year, the Civic Institute is offering leadership training for area citizens and middle-school personnel. The Institute is supported by grants from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds.

* The Center will align and support research projects by students and faculty that have application in the community — research that brings external support that otherwise would not occur. Examples include a student who developed a Geographical Information System for Lewiston and Auburn and saved the municipalities nearly $200,000 in labor and consultants’ fees. Another gave 34 students from Lewiston’s Longley Elementary School a chance to conduct hands-on science experiments with four ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professors. Significant grant support from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provide resources that enable these College and community collaborations.To reinforce its grounding in the academic life of the College, the director of the Center will work with the new President and under the direction of Dr. Jill Reich, Vice President for Academic Affairs and the lead academic officer of the College.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Board of Trustees voted to create the Center and authorized a search for its first director at its meeting Oct. 27. The work of the Center will be supported by a new Board of Trustees Committee, confirming the centrality of its work to the mission of the College.

During Board discussion, Board Chairperson Burton Harris, among others, noted the importance of a lasting partnership between campus and community. “The fences, physical and metaphorical, have come down,” Harris said. “The College and its partner, the community, now have a direct, a sustainable, and a mutually-reinforcing relationship.

“The establishment of this Center, one of the most significant steps taken by the College, will assure the Lewiston-Auburn community that, as partners now and in the future, both the College and the community can reinforce their strengths, their mutually beneficial interactions and their missions of excellence.”

Costlow, professor of Russian and East Asian languages and literature, is the inaugural Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. Parakilas, professor of music, is the inaugural James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts.The Johnson Professorship is funded through a $1.2-million grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation of New York City. As Harward says, “it recognizes the ever-increasing connections among academic disciplines. It brings a new level of visibility and confidence in the value of taking research and teaching wherever they lead, even when beyond the boundaries of established fields of study.” The Johnson Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies is held for a four-year term. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation was incorporated in 1952 in New York with funds donated by Christian A. Johnson, a Swedish immigrant who eventually became a prominent financier and industrialist.

A member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty for 15 years, Costlow has been a full professor since 1999. She is the author of two books on Russian literature and was recently awarded a Phillips Faculty Fellowship funding her studies in Russia.

Costlow graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1976 and received her doctorate in Slavic languages and literatures from Yale University in 1987. She is the author of Worlds Within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton University Press 1990) and co-editor of Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Russian Culture (Stanford University Press 1998).

Costlow’s research includes examining the significance of the forest in Russian culture, as a source of legend and an economic resource, as well as an historic place of refuge and resistance. She is studying the role and representation of the forest in Soviet and World War II-era partisan activity in Bryansk Forest and in current projects to create a national park in a Taiga forest area of central Russia.

Her translation of The Tragic Menagerie, a recently rediscovered piece of Russian literature, received critical acclaim from both The New York Times and the New Yorker and garnered a 1999 prize for best translation from Russian/East European languages by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Costlow’s introduction won the 1997 Heldt Prize for best essay in Slavic women’s studies. The Johnson Professorship is the only chair at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ specifically devoted to interdisciplinary studies.

The Moody Professorship was established through a $1.5-million endowment gift from James L. Moody ’53, chair of the Board of Fellows at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and retired CEO and chairman of Hannaford Bros. Co. The professorship reflects the Moody family’s interest in the performing arts. James Parakilas has taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 1979. He was chair of the Humanities division from 1996 through 2000 and is currently the chair of the department of Music. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1970, received his master’s degree in music history from the University of Connecticut in 1975 and his doctorate in musicology from Cornell University in 1979.

Parakilas is the author of many articles and four books on music, including Ballads Without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Amadeus Press 1992). Most recently, in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the piano, Parakilas co-wrote and edited Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, (Yale University Press 1999).

An exploration of the musical and social roles played by the piano in its long history, Piano Roles received glowing praise from the New Yorker, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Parakilas, who teaches a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ course “The Piano as a Culture Machine,” writes in the introduction to his book: “The piano is the instrument, the product, around which the modern entertainment industry was created.”

Parakilas’ essay “Nuit plus belle qu’un beau jour’: Piano, Song and the Voice in the Piano Nocturne received the 1999 Wilk Prize, awarded annually by the Center for Polish Music Studies at the University of Southern California.

There are more than 21 endowed professorships at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, recognizing the academic qualities of its faculty and the generosity of donors to the College.

“Faculty members from a range of departments wanted to see the college take a pause from normal academic activities in order to offer a program that concentrates campus energies and interests on an issue of importance and real world consequence,” said Donald W. Harward, president of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. “The series is an opportunity to show how complex issues need to be examined from interdisciplinary perspectives, blending intellectual approaches.”

“International conflicts have created refugees all over the world,” said one of the conference organizers, Elizabeth Tobin, professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. “Although the conflicts sometimes find resolution and sometimes do not, life for these refugees and for those in permanent diasporas are forever changed. This series should be especially interesting for area residents, in light of the controversies that surfaced this summer about whether refugees from Kosovo should be settled in Lewiston.” This series of events will explore the historical and contemporary problems of refugees and the responsibilities and policies of the U.S. government, its immigration agencies and citizens. Primary events for the series include:

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 3, Room 104 Olin Arts Center
“The Port of Last Resort” (1998): This film documents the lives of nearly 20,000 Jewish regugess who survived the Nazis in Europe by fleeing to Shanghai. Steve Hochstadt, professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, will introduce the film and lead a discussion after its conclusion.

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, in Room 104 Olin Arts Center
“Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family” (1984): Following the story of one extended family, this documentary film explores the problems of Palestinian refugees living permanently in a refugee camp.

7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Room G52, Pettengill Hall
“Taxi to Timbuktu” (1984): This documentary film examines African men living away from their homes and families, dispersed among strangers. Due to a drought in their village in Mali, they are forced to travel abroad, looking for work as migrants. The film focuses on the difficulties of these Malian men who earn a living for themselves and their families by driving a taxi in New York City and Tokyo.

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 10, in Room G52, Pettengill Hall
Dawn Calabia, senior officer of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, will discuss “Conflict, Displacement and the Long Road Home for Refugees: Whose Rights? Whose Wrongs? Who’s Responsible? What Should We Do?“ Calabia handles government and nongovernmental relations in the United States and Caribbean for the U.N. commissioner. This past summer she led a delegation of congressional staff members and NGO representatives to Cairo, Macedonia and Kosovo to consider refugee protection and reintegration issues. She has served as director of refugee policy and international affairs for the U.S. Catholic Conference Migration Office, one of the nation’s oldest service organizations for refugees and asylum seekers.

Calabia also has served as a staff consultant to the House International Relations Committee and as senior legislative staffer to former U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz. One of the founders of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, housed at the International Rescue Committee, Calabia has led numerous fact-finding missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.

4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, in Carnegie Science, Room 204
“Catholic Charities, Maine Refugees and Immigration Services,” a panel discussion with Sandra Hollett and other members of the Catholic Charities on the difficulties refugees face in southern Maine and the roles Maine residents play in creating or solving problems for refugees.

7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, in G53 Pettengill Hall Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini will present “Well-Founded Fear,” a documentary film about political asylum in the United States – who deserves it and who decides. The film provides an intimate, close-up view of what goes on behind the doors of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the dramatic real-life stage where American ideals about human rights collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. It is a world never before seen on screen – asylum officers, lawyers, translators and foreigners trying to exploit a fragile system, as well as legitimate refugees looking for protection in the United States. The film will be aired on PBS in June 2000. The filmmakers will answer questions and lead a discussion after this special screening.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ offers more than 15 courses this fall that include consideration of current and past events leading to the large-scale displacement of populations and the creation of refugees.

“We want to encourage faculty who are teaching these courses to entertain questions regarding refugees in a wider context, and we believe that this series will be a very effective means of doing so,” Harward said.

The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation in New York was established in 1952 by Christian A. Johnson, a leader in the public utility and investment company industries. A financier with wide-ranging interests, Johnson derived great personal pleasure from nurturing the curiosity and intellectual development of young people with whom he came into contact, as well as from providing for many whom he did not know the financial means to help them achieve their educational goals.

For more information about the series, call 207-786-6069.

The new Christian A. Johnson Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies is the 17th endowed professorship at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The new ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professorship recognizes changes in teaching and learning at the close of the millennium, President Harward said. “The boundaries between academic fields have become increasingly difficult to detect and defend, and an explosion of scholarship has led to the emergence of new fields,” he said. “For students to evaluate and be comfortable with this new information, they need talented teachers and scholars to guide them across disciplines.”

Held by senior members of the faculty, endowed chairs recognize faculty achievement and distinction. “Endowed chairs give us an opportunity to demonstrate that the accomplishments of our faculty have been achieved while devoting time, attention, and care to the needs of our students,” Harward said. “The Johnson Professorship brings a new level of visibility to, and provides a new level of faculty confidence in, the value of taking research and teaching wherever they lead, even if beyond the boundaries of established fields of study.

The Johnson Endeavor Foundation of New York City was established in 1952 by Christian A. Johnson, a leader in the public utility and investment company industries. A financier with wide-ranging interests, he derived great personal pleasure from nurturing the curiosity and intellectual development of young people with whom he came into contact, as well as from providing for many whom he did not know the financial means to help them achieve their educational goals.