News

What:
The new book Speaking Out: Women, War, and the Global Economy, and companion documentary DVD Diamonds, Guns, and Rice: Sierra Leone and the Women's Peace Movement, will be featured at a multimedia event at Portland State University. The creative teams behind the projects include Portland State students and faculty, as well as Sierra Leonean women from the community. Screenings of the documentary will be followed by a discussion panel led by lead author, PSU Psychology Professor Jan Haaken, as well as Karifa Koroma and Emma Fofanah, two local Sierra Leonean activists who served as consultants on both projects.

When:
Friday, January 27, 2006, 12-8 p.m. Documentary video showings will take place from 12-6 p.m. Discussion, speakers panel and catered reception from 6-8 p.m.

Where:
PSU Multicultural Center, Smith Memorial Student Union, Second Floor, Room 228 (1825 S.W. Broadway).

Cost:
Admission is free and open to the public.

Contact:
For more information, please contact Jonah Loeb at 503-810-3085 or jonah@pdx.edu.

Background:
Releasing this January from Portland State's student-run Ooligan Press, Speaking Out is a curriculum guide that builds on Sierra Leonean women's accounts of the civil war, introducing a series of questions concerning links between gender and war, and providing tools for addressing those questions at differing levels of education. A copy of Diamonds, Guns and Rice, a related documentary co-produced by Haaken, accompanies the book. Using the Sierra Leonean civil war as a case study, the video documentary, like the curriculum guide, brings into focus key forces operating behind the front lines of war zones-forces that continue to fuel armed conflict in regions throughout Africa, and other unstable areas of the world.

Jan Haaken is professor of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical and cultural psychologist and a documentary filmmaker. She is author of Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back, and co-author of Scarves of Many Colors, Muslim Women and the Veil, a Curriculum Guide.

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