Dr. Cora Fernandez Anderson (PhD Political Science, University of Notre Dame) is a Visiting Professor at the Gender and Politics Department at Mount Holyoke College. Her work focuses on women and human rights movements and their interaction with democratic governments in order to achieve their demands.

In particular, Cora has researched human rights movements demanding judicial accountability for the abuses committed under the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. Despite these countries sharing many cultural, social and economic characteristics, the way they have addressed human rights abuses since the time of their respective democratic transitions have varied widely. An examination of the human rights movements' strength and their alliances with political actors in each of these cases begins to cast light into these different outcomes.

Dr. Nina Siulc is an anthropologist, Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies Program, Department of Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Siulc has conducted numerous research studies exploring the human impact of detention and deportation policies. She will discuss the violence surrounding new mass deportations of persons convicted of crimes in the United States and sent back to the Dominican Republic, where new penalized spaces and privatized governance projects have emerged in response to the fears engendered by purportedly dangerous deportees.

The violence accompanying the formal and informal policing of and "retraining" practices directed at criminalized deportees--by both police officers and non-state actors--can be seen as part of a larger set of what Feldman dubs "securocratic wars" that have emerged in response to new perceived security threats across the Americas, threats that both result from and intersect with new instabilities wrought by nascent forms of democratic governance in post-dictatorial nations like the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Orla Muldoon hails from the Department of Psychology, University of Limerick, Ireland. The talk will review theory and research from Northern Ireland and other regions affected by conflict to consider the relationship between mental health and political violence. Dr. Muldoon will argue that the orientation of theory and research aimed at understanding the onset of psychopathology in response to political violence has been particularly informed by Western individualistic constructions of social phenomena.

This approach calls for an extension of understanding of psychological distress and post-traumatic stress in response to political violence by considering how a group level analysis can inform incidence, diagnosis and expression of psychopathology. Drawing on a group level analysis, she will use the integrated social identity model of stress, to consider some of the paradoxical consequences of identity processes for mental health and social attitudes in Northern Ireland.

Tyler Boudreau is a 12-year veteran of the Marine Corps infantry and served in the Iraq War in 2004. He is author of the book Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine and his writing has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and the Progressive.

In 2008, Boudreau traveled to Jordan to investigate and raise awareness about the on-going Iraq refugee crisis. In 2009, he bicycled across the country to talk with communities about war and post-traumatic stress. He now lives in Northampton and is a graduate student in the Communication Department here at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.