Food Deserts: The Impact on Community Health
May 20th, 2008 – 4:00-5:30 p.m. The Adler School, 65 E Wacker Place, Chicago. Room 1705

Featured Speaker:
Dinah Ramirez, R.N. is the founder and Executive Director of Healthy Southeast Chicago and Healthy South Chicago Coalition.  She will talk about "food deserts" in Chicago and their impact on community health. She will also discuss the use of urban farms in southeast Chicago and their dual purpose of growing nutritious food for the local community and facilitating local community building. This presentation will be linked to an ISE Student Association-driven project of collecting seeds, soils, and other materials for urban farms in Ramirez's Southside community.

Social Justice in Urban Regeneration Processes: From Rhetoric to Reality
June 7th, 2008, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Kennedy King College, 747 W. 63rd Street

Featured Speakers:
John McCarthy, MBl is a Reader in Urban Studies at the School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. He is a practitioner-scholar whose work focuses on urban regeneration, social exclusion, and community participation. His work also addresses the relationship between the social justice approach of the Scottish Government and its policies for urban regeneration -- with implications for social exclusion.

Douglas Gills, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Urban Planning, School of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a practitioner-scholar whose work focuses on community development, community organizing, and issues of race, ethnicity and class. He will address the challenges that low income African American and Latino communities have faced in the urban regeneration processes.

The conference will also convene a panel of local community-based activists who talk about social justice in urban regeneration processes. Confirmed panelists include: Jay Travis, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Affordable Housing/Education; Orin Williams, Center for Urban Transformation, Food Access, Environment, Green Industries; Hal Baskin, President PEACE Community Organization. This event will engage the local community in the dialogue.

American Military Interrogation in the Iraq War
June 24th, 4:00-5:30 p.m. The Adler School, 65 E Wacker Place, Chicago. Room 1705

Featured Speaker:
Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis was a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005 and served a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005. Upon arrival in Iraq, he was stationed at Abu Ghraib. Later in the spring of 2004, he joined a special intelligence gathering task force that moved among detention facilities around the country. During his tour of duty, Mr. Lagouranis witnessed "a 'culture of abuse' permeating interrogations" (PBS Frontline, 2005). Since his return from the war, he has publicly denounced the interrogation practices used in Iraqi prisons.

In addition to the above-cited PBS Frontline Documentary entitled "The Torture Question," Mr. Lagouranis has told his story on Democracy Now! and MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. He also wrote a New York Times op-ed piece, entitled "Tortured Logic", in which he discussed American military practices in Iraq and argued that senior officers and politicians bear responsibility for the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.  He is also co-author of the 2007 book entitled "Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq."

In his presentation at the Adler School, Lagouranis will discuss role that psychologists and psychiatrists play in the interrogations in Iraq, the effects of torture on detainees, and how the Bush administration sanctioned the interrogation abuses he witnessed in Iraq.

TAMMS Supermax Prison
July 15th, 12:00-1:00 p.m. The Adler School, 65 E. Wacker Place, Chicago. Room 1705

At this event, lawyer/activist for prisoners' rights Jim Chapman will discuss ongoing efforts improve the conditions and oversight of TAMMS CMAX, a ""supermax"" prison located in southern Illinois where inmates live in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day, everyday, with no human contact, no phone calls, no communal activity.  Opened in 1998, TAMMS was originally intended as a short-term ""shock treatment"" for the worst of the worst of Illinois prisoners.  Now, ten years later, more than one-third of the original prisoners are still there.  The speaker will discuss the misguided and inhumane policies at Tamms C-MAX and the growing call for an end to the psychological torture.

Featured Speaker:
Jim Chapman, LLB is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.  For the last 35 years, while maintaining his law offices in the Loop, he simultaneously devoted substantial efforts in the low income communities of Chicago.  In 1976, Chapman helped to organize the Uptown Peoples Law Center in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood to work with former coal miners and their families.  The center is run essentially by people of the community with some lawyer supervision.  It has thrived to this day and is a model of its kind.  Chapman also organized the Prison Action Committee (PAC) and founded the Illinois Institute of Community Law and Affairs, both of which focus on issues relevant to prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families, organizations, and officials.  Chapman also serves as a consultant to the federal courts in prisoners' rights cases and teaches communication skills to prisoners at Stateville Correctional Center and to young people on probation at Probation Challenge of Olive Harvey City College.   

Kevin Coval "Hip-Hop" Poet
September 11, 2008 – 4:00-5:30 p.m., The Adler School, 65 E. Wacker Place, Rm. 1705

Coval is a hip-hop poet and author of poetry books, Slingshots, A Hip-Hop Poetica, and Everyday People, poems about people who are societal outsiders (June 2008).  Coval has performed and taught hip-hop poetics at universities, high schools and theaters on four continents in seven countries. He has performed on Russell Simmons' HBO Def Poetry Jam, for which he serves as artistic consultant.  Coval's writing can be heard regularly on Chicago Public Radio, where he is resident poet and hip-hop correspondent.  He is also the founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, the largest youth poetry festival in the world, a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Minister of Hip-Hop Poetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hilary Armstrong, Member of Parliament (MP), Former Minister for Social Exclusion, Government of the United Kingdom.
October 2 & 3, 2008 – Times and Locations to be Determined

Former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Social Exclusion in the Labor government of Prime Minster Tony Blair, Ms. Armstrong coordinated cross-governmental efforts to breakdown the barriers for those excluded from society.  Ms. Armstrong will visit with the Adler students and faculty at the School on October 2nd.  She will be the keynote speaker at the October ISE Conference on October 3rd.

Click Here for a printable information sheet about Coming Events in 2008.