Activists to speak at Social Change Colloquium

Photojournalist Lionel Delevingne and anti-nuclear activist Anna Gyorgy will speak on Tuesday, Oct. 2 from 4-7 p.m. on the lower level of Du Bois Library as part of this year’s Social Change Colloquium.

 

Their talk coincides with Delevingne’s exhibition, “To the Village Square: an Experiment in American Democracy,” and celebrates the acquisition by Special Collections and University Archives of Delevingne’s photographic works and Gyorgy’s papers. 

 

Delevingne will discuss the mass media’s role in the nuclear power issue and his own responsibility before and after the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl disaster. Gyorgy will discuss citizen action and democracy, with international examples based on her work with the Clamshell Alliance and more recently with the strong German anti-nuclear/pro-solar movements.

 

New England was an epicenter of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Sparked by the proposed construction of nuclear power plants in Montague and Seabrook, N.H., a grassroots movement blossomed in the region, drawing on a long tradition of non-violent political protest. Shortly after arriving in the U.S. from his native France in 1975, Delevingne began covering the anti-nuclear movement, including the history of civil disobedience and occupation at Seabrook, the aftermath of the Three Mile Island disaster and other protests from New York to South Carolina and Europe.

 

Delevingne is the co-author of Drylands, a Rural American Saga, Northampton: Reflections on Paradise and Franco-American Viewpoints. His work has been exhibited frequently in the U.S. and abroad and published widely in the mainstream and alternative press, including the New York Times, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, Le Figaro Magazine and Die Zeit. Delevingne has participated in many award-winning projects sponsored by National Endowment of the Arts, Massachusetts Endowment for the Humanities, University and College Designers Association, University Professional and Continuing Education Association and Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

 

Gyorgy was active in the early movement against nuclear power and is the author-editor of NO NUKES: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear. She is in the process of returning to the U.S. after 25 years abroad, where she has since 1999 coordinated the multilingual website project: “Women and Life on Earth” (www.wloe.org).

 

Refreshments will be served and the public is invited to join in the discussion.

 

The related exhibit, “To the Village Square,” includes some of the movement’s most memorable images, shot by Delevingne, along with materials drawn from the rich anti-nuclear collections held in the Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives.