Alex Mosher
Staff Writer
The Frank Church Symposium started on Thursday, Jan. 31 and ended on Friday, Feb. 1. The two-day event was hosted by the student-run International Affairs Council in the PSUB Salmon River Room and was attended by Pocatello community members and those from surrounding areas.
The 2019 symposium theme was “The Best and the Worst of Us: Confronting Injustices in the World.” The event brought together academics, refugees and activists who debated the challenges and successes around environmental justice, refugee rights and minorities rights.
“The students chose this topic because they have been hot topics in the media during the current administration as well as the previous administration,” said Paige Tarr, student president for the International Affairs Council. “The students wanted a safe platform for these topics to be discussed and for awareness and information to be spread.”
The panels were held in a roundtable format. This allowed for each speaker to present in a way that made the audience feel more comfortable interacting with the speakers and allowed the liberty to ask more questions and feel engaged in the topics.
The Minorities Rights Panel members consisted of Carmen Febles, Farida Jalalzai and Srobana. This panel brought discussions on topics such as immigration and border conflicts, women’s rights and the Rohingya crisis.
The Environment and Water Rights Panel members consisted of Shin-Kyu Ryu, Elizabeth Brunner and Geoffrey Buckley, who talked about water rights, environmental activism, urban sustainability and environmental justice.
The final panel, Refugee Rights, featured Zeze Rwasama, Justin Lee, Mona Heern and Anselme Sadiki.
“Our biggest hope for the public is to learn as much as possible from the experts we have at ISU as well as the experts we have brought from around the country,” said Tarr. “We hope that they will realize how important these issues [are] globally, but also how important they are even here in Idaho.”
The keynote address, given by Steven Feldstein from Boise State University, was held at 6 p.m. on Thursday in Frazier Hall.
Feldstein, who is Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs and an associate professor in the School of Public Service, is a former deputy assistant secretary in the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor for the U.S. Department of State as well as a former director of policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
