Speaker Biographies

Biographies

Nunu Kidane & PANiDMR

Nunu Kidane

San Francisco, California

Nunu Kidane is from Eritrea, currently the Director of the Priority Africa Network, a progressive organization based in the San Francisco/Bay Area. For over two decades, Nunu has worked on issues of global policy analysis as it relates to Africa. She’s written on militarism and resource extraction, migration in racial, social and economic justice context. In January 2012, she was recognized by the White House as a “Champion of Change” for her diaspora related activism. She is founding member of the US-based Black Immigration Network, the global Pan African Network in Defense of Migrants Rights (PANiDMR), as well as the Network Council of the National Network for

Immigrant & Refugee Rights (NNIRR). Nunu has been the voice for enhanced

transnational dialogue on immigration, globalization, race, culture and identity. She is a graduate of the University of California in Berkeley where she resides with her husband and two children.

About PANiDMR

The Pan African Network in Defense of Migrants Rights (PANiDMR) is an organization that is Africa-led and brings together voices of Africans in the continent and the diaspora, to promote the well being and interests of migrants, refugees and stateless persons from Africa. To learn more, please visit their website.

Stuart Schussler & Mexico Solidarity Network

Stuart Schussler is a professor of social movement analysis in the Mexico Solidarity Network’s (MSN) Study Abroad and Master’s programs and also a speaking tour coordinator. He holds a master’s degree in International Relations from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Ecuador and a BA from DePauw University. His previous work includes popular education work teaching English as a second language, human rights observation concerning a mining conflict in Intag, Ecuador and work with undocumented Colombian refugees organizing for their rights in Quito.

About MSN

The Mexico Solidarity Network organizes for fundamental social change grounded in democracy, economic justice, human rights and redistribution of power on both sides of the US-Mexico border.  The foundations of effective social change are education, community building, and organizing.

Jared Lunkenheimer & No More Deaths

Jared Lunkenheimer

Rochester, NY

Jared Lunkenheimer has volunteered in the borderlands with No More Deaths since the summer of 2011, with various months-long periods providing aid in the desert. He is also currently a 4th year medical student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. After graduation in May, he will begin a residency in family medicine and pursue the removal of barriers to care for undocumented travelers who find themselves in need of emergency medical services once in the U.S. 

About No More Deaths

No More Deaths is an organization whose mission is to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative: the conviction that people of conscience must work openly and in community to uphold fundamental human rights. As per their mission statement, their work embraces the Faith-Based Principles for Immigration Reform and focuses on the following themes:



• Direct aid that extends the right to provide humanitarian assistance

• Witnessing and responding

• Consciousness raising

• Global movement building

• Encouraging humane immigration policy.

To learn more, please visit their website.

Colin Rajah & Global Coalition on Migration

Colin Rajah is the International Coordinator of the Global Coalition on Migration (GCM). The GCM is the largest international coalition of civil society networks and movements collaborating around international migration policy. Colin is a co-founder of the GCM through the National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (NNIRR) in the U.S., where he was the International Program Director. He has extensive expertise in international migration and migrant rights, and their intersections on trade and development.

Rajah is also a co-founder and co-chair of the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development & Human Rights (PGA), an annual international civil society process held in conjunction with intergovernmental summits on migration since 2006, particularly the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). He is also currently a member of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) of the GFMD’s Civil Society process.

Rajah is a founding Steering Committee member of Global Bersih (an international advocacy network for Malaysian democracy), and a Fellow at the Oakland Institute. He was a co-founder and former Steering Committee member of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) and served on the National Planning Committee of the U.S. Social Forum (USSF). He has been a consultant to the Malaysian Migration Working Group (MWG), the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), Asia-Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), Urban Habitat, the Borneo Project, and other community organizations in Asia and around the U.S.

Colin was previously the Executive Director of JustAct: Youth Action for Global Justice (a U.S. network of grassroots youth organizations engaged in international issues), and Vice-President of Youth for Development & Cooperation (YDC) (an international network of youth movements collaborating on development.)

About GCM

The GCM members represent regional and international networks of migrant associations, migrants rights organizations and advocates, trade unions, faith groups and academia, covering every region around the world. The concept of the GCM was born out of the collaborations of its initial member organizations around the Global Forum on Migration (GFMD) and the corresponding People’s Global Action on Migration, Development & Human Rights (PGA) processes. To learn more, please visit gcmigration.org.

Natalia Fajardo

Montpelier, VT

Natalia Fajardo is a full-time paid organizer with Migrant Justice. She has been a leader of student organizing and international campaigns against various free trade agreements and Plan Colombia. She became involved in migrant farm worker issues when a good friend was arrested then deported for being undocumented. Natalia is a founding member of Migrant Justice. 

About Migrant Justice

Migrant Justice builds the voice, capacity and power of the migrant farmworker community and engages community partners to organize for social and economic justice and human rights. As per the mission of Migrant Justice, the organization works to engage, educate and organize communities and allies to effectively challenge US immigration, economic, and trade policies and practices that adversely affect farm workers and family farmers. They work towards the vision of truly humane and dignified farming communities and fair food systems everywhere making migration a choice and not a need.

To learn more, please visit their website. 

Robyn Rodriguez

UC Davis, California

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez holds a BA in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rodriguez earned her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently assistant professor of Asian studies at UC Davis.

Rodriguez’s research is broadly concerned with understanding how processes of globalization, particularly international migration, impact the societies that migrants leave and the societies to which they move.  Her book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippines Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), won an Honorable Mention for Best Book in Social Science by the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Rodriguez’s co-authored book, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Approaches will be published by Polity Press in 2014. Currently, she is finishing a book entitled In Lady Liberty’s Shadow: Race and Immigration in Post-9/11 New Jersey to be published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.

Rodriguez’s background in Asian American studies informs her actions as an activist, and uses the skills she has developed as a researcher to contribute to communities. Rodriguez is currently working closely on different projects with the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns. 

For full details on Rodriguez’s publications, teaching, and community work please see her website: robynrodriguez.com.

Jamie McCallum

Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT

Jamie McCallum is an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College and author of the book Global Unions, Local Power. His scholarship specializes in the sociology of globalization and the sociology of labor, and emerges from McCallum’s engagement with political activism and social movements. As an organizer, McCallum has helped build labor unions and protests against corporate globalization. As a scholar, his work examines the global context for workers to cooperate and exercise power across national borders. 

To learn more, visit Jamie McCallum’s faculty profile.

Mary E. Mendoza

UC Davis, California

Mary E. Mendoza will speak about the history of the U.S.-Mexico border with a specific focus on how both the United States and Mexico built border fences for various reasons over the course of the twentieth century. Professor Mendoza is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis and a Ford Foundation Fellow. She is working on writing an environmental history of the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition to border fences, Mendoza looks at race, gender, and public health in the borderlands. 

Professor Mendoza is teaching the course “Unnatural Border” this Winter Term at Middlebury College.

Click on a name to find out more about the speaker and affiliated organization, if any.