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At Wick Alumni Center

This interactive event will feature local students and young professionals sharing their lived experiences as immigrants and refugees. Each panelist will tell their story, presenting a multi-dimensional picture beyond what’s portrayed in the news. Panelists will then respond to questions on a range of relevant topics, moderated by Karla Hernandez Torrijos, the inaugural Student Storyteller in Residence with the Center for Great Plains Studies. Karla is an undergraduate student, poet and workshop facilitator whose writing “interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between.”

Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist who regularly photographs for The New York Times, National Geographic, and TIME magazine. Focusing on humanitarian and human rights issues, Addario's recent bodies of work include an ongoing reportage on Syrian refugees, ISIS' push into Iraq, the civil war in South Sudan, and African and Middle Eastern migrants arriving on Sicily's shores. In 2009, Addario received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Her memoir, It's What I Do, chronicles her personal and professional life as a photojournalist coming of age in the post-9/11 world.

Leilani Farha is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and Global Director of The Shift. Farha has helped develop global human rights standards on the right to housing, including through her topical reports on homelessness, the financialization of housing, informal settlements, rights-based housing strategies, and the first UN Guidelines for the implementation of the right to housing. She is the central character in the documentary PUSH regarding the financialization of housing. Farha launched The Shift in 2017 to advance the movement through advocacy, research and campaigning.