Samara Lectures Speakers
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Rebekka Armstrong
HIV+ Playboy Playmate, Bodybuilder, and Fitness Expert
At the age of 18, Rebekka became a Playboy Playmate after being chosen to be Miss September 1986, a culmination of her childhood dream. For the next four years, she led an exciting life as a Playmate, traveling, modeling, and attending star-studded parties. However, she was often tired and bruised easily. At the age of 22, she was diagnosed with HIV.
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Ellen Bremen
Say This, Not That to Your Professor
Two people have control over your success in any college class: you and your college professor. In classrooms around the country, as professors teach quantum physics, Russian literature, and Western civilization, they rarely teach students the most important lesson of all:
“The way you behave and communicate with me can affect your success in this course and in college.” -
Arianne Cohen
The Sex Diaries Project on Campus
What's really going on behind closed doors on your campus?
Arianne Cohen spent six years collecting 3,500 anonymous seven-day sex diaries from people all over North America and the world – including college towns. In The Sex Diaries Project On Campus, she takes you on a tantalizing tour through the sometimes shocking, always entertaining real diaries of college students, creating a compelling portrait of sex and sexuality on campus today that will forever change how you look at relationships. -
Gabriel Bol Deng
The Power of Hope
"Lost Boy" Helps Rebuild South Sudan
At the age of 10, Gabriel Bol Deng was separated from his family and became a refugee; after twenty years of separation he returned to his home village in Sudan and founded 'HOPE for Ariang', a non-profit supporting education. An inspiring story about the power of hope.
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Warren Etheredge
How To Speak To Human Beings:
Step Away From the Computer
In this age of social media, texting, twittering, and facebooking, truly inspiring conversations are becoming harder to hold. From dating to networking to elevator-pitching, too many of us squander opportunities for wisdom, wit, love and profit.
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Gary Groth
From Comix to Comics to Graphic Novels:
A First Person History of Independent Comics Over the Last Half Century
Gary Groth became an activist-publisher when he co-founded The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books in 1976. Groth narrates the coming-of-age story of the comics form from the underground comix revolution of the late 1960s to the rise of alternative comics in the ‘80s to today’s graphic novel renaissance from his unique perspective as a keen observer and active participant.
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Eliaichi Kimaro
A Lot Like You:
The Culture We Inherit and the Legacies We Choose
A first-generation American goes in search of her identity and discovers that the cycle of gender violence she’s been working hard to break in the US is part of her history and culture on another continent. A Lot Like You raises questions about the cultures we inherit and what we choose to pass down, and reveals how bearing witness can break silences that have lasted lifetimes...
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Amanda Koster
Imagine What You Can Do
The Power of Citizen Journalism
Amanda Koster is an internationally acclaimed photographer with a passion for finding and sharing stories of real people, human rights, cultural diversity and global equality. She asks you to ‘Imagine What You Can Do’ with the tools at your disposal to make a difference in peoples’ lives.
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Jen Marlowe
Reflections on Resistance:
Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Bahrain and Death Row
Jen Marlowe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, author, playwright and human rights activist. Through film, writing, theatre and other artistic platforms, Jen seeks to share the resilience and courage of those who have been marginalized and oppressed and are choosing resistance with nonviolence, humanity and dignity.
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David Montgomery
Geomorphologist, Environmental Author
Rocks Don't Lie & Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
Prof. David Montgomery really likes dirt. In his two lectures, The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood and Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, he explains how rocks and soil tell us about our world's past, our present and our possibly endangered future, focusing on flood myths in the former lecture, and soil erosion and agriculture in the latter.
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Dr. Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy
Astronomer Phil Plait talks about Bad Astronomy with a humorous look at popular science myths and misconceptions.
Phil’s latest talk is ‘Where Has Our Curiosity Taken Us?‘ – all about Mars and the Curiosity rover. -
Socheata Poeuv
Speaker, Filmmaker and Activist
Socheata Poeuv is the founder of Khmer Legacies, which has the goal of recording 10,000 testimonies of survivors of the Cambodian genocide by encouraging children to interview their parents. Her award-winning documentary New Year Baby documents her family's story of survival and healing.
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Rebuilding Hope
A lecture/film program about South Sudan
Rebuilding Hope chronicles the homecoming to South Sudan of Gabriel Bol Deng, Garang Mayuol and Koor Garang, and their efforts to develop healthcare, clean water and education in their villages. All three were forced to flee their homes twenty years ago as young children, when militiamen led violent attacks on their villages. They crossed South Sudan on foot, surviving disease and paralyzing hunger to reach safety in a refugee camp in Ethiopia and then Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, before coming to the US in 2001. In 2007, accompanied by filmmaker Jen Marlowe, Gabriel Bol, Koor and Garang returned to Sudan to seek their families and help their communities.
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Dr. Terrence Roberts
Lessons from Little Rock
All the seats at the hamburger joint were reserved for white patrons, so 13 year old Terrence Roberts ordered food to go. While waiting, he impulsively sat down at the counter and then realized a hush had fallen over the place. Suddenly everyone seemed to be looking at him threateningly. He canceled his order and left. As he walked home, Roberts remembers wondering "what it would take for (him) to be treated like a real human being."
Two years later, in 1957, he volunteered to be one of the 'Little Rock Nine' who desegregated Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Charlene Strong
Marriage Equality and Civil Rights Advocate
Charlene's partner of many years, Kate Fleming, was hospitalized after a flash flood. Charlene was denied access to Kate's hospital room during her final moments because Washington state did not recognize their relationship. She is now a nationally respected LGBT advocate for social justice and civil rights issues including marriage equality and non-discrimination policies.
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Loung Ung
Author, Cambodian Landmine Activist
Loung is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. She was five years old when the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh. Over the next three years, Loung lost half of her family, including both parents, and spent time in a camp for child soldiers. After the war was over, she and her older brother relocated to Vermont, where she grew to adulthood. Today she is an internationally best-selling author and a well-known human rights activist.
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Jennifer Worick
Things I Want to Punch in the Face
Molly Ringwald’s prom dress in Pretty in Pink.
Celebrity baby names. Twenty-minute coffee prep.
People who hog the sidewalk or use excessive punctuation!! Jazz.
Jen wanted to punch them all. That’s when she decided to turn her frown upside down. She created Things I Want to Punch in the Face — a blog, a book, and now a lecture that uses her signature cheeky humor to diffuse her frustrations. -
Chaplain James Yee
Islamophobia & Guantanamo Bay
Former U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain James Yee has experienced religious discrimination first hand. He first saw it as a Muslim chaplain stationed at the Guantanamo detention center, where he observed religious abuses against the prisoners. After objecting to the abuses, he was accused of being a spy himself. Now, with his name cleared, James Yee fights the prejudices that lead to hate crimes and the violation of constitutional rights of American Muslims in our society.
