What to See at Duke This Week
The early days of the AIDS epidemic was not a high point for global health. Dr. Michael Merson, founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute, is honest about how slow the World Health Organization was to react. Policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere were hampered by homophobic and post-colonial rhetoric that distracted from the principal issue at hand, Merson says. But beneath that story are tales of dogged persistence by researchers, working with local health care providers around the world, that changed the global response. Merson joins David Boyd, Hymowitz Professor of the Practice of Global Health, to tell those stories and to discuss Merson's new book, “The AIDS Pandemic: Searching for a Global Response.” Noon, Ahmadieh Family Conference Hall, 240 Franklin Center.
In 2004, a small jet took off from a North Carolina airstrip in Smithfield, just outside of Raleigh. It landed in Afghanistan to pick up Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native living in Canada who under disputed circumstances was arrested by Pakistani officials and charged with terrorism. What isn’t disputed is what followed: Mohamed was taken to a U.S. secret prison in Morocco where he was tortured. The flight was one of dozens documented by activists as being “torture taxis,” conducted by Aero Contractors out of the Smithfield, North Carolina, airport. To date, little of the information about the flights have been made public. A collection of scholars, lawyers, educators and activists – including three Duke faculty members – will discuss their latest effort to bring accountability for violations of international law. The talk will be moderated by Aya Fujimura-Fanselow, supervising attorney of the Duke International Human Rights Clinic. 12:30 p.m., 4045 School of Law.
The title of the discussion is “Can Fraternities Be Saved: Can They Save Themselves?” John Hechinger, senior editor at Bloomberg View and author of "True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America's Fraternities," will explore the embattled campus fraternities culture, once a mainstay of campuses and now marred by scandal and deaths and under attack as an institution of white privilege. John Burness, adjunct professor at the Sanford School, will moderate. Registration required. Noon, Breedlove Conference Room (Rubenstein Library 349).
We live in a time of surging gas and oil production because of the fracking revolution. It’s keeping energy less expensive and more plentiful as well as promising energy security for this country. That’s one side. The other is opponents have successfully highlighted the environmental and social risks of increased oil and gas production and of the fracking process itself. Daniel Raimi, a 2012 Sanford School graduate and a faculty member at the University of Michigan, takes a balanced view in a discussion of his new book “The Fracking Debate,” presenting both the scientific evidence and stories about how local communities have been affected by fracking, for good and for worse. 4 p.m., 330 Gross Hall, Ahmadieh Family Grand Hall. Registration required.
Even before the current #metoo moment, painter Natasha Powell Walker was exploring how women are seen in the business world. Her experience working in corporations inspired her “#Sexy, Not Silent” paintings, now on exhibit in the Jameson Gallery in the Friedl Building on Duke’s East Campus. “It can be conflicting for women to have to be one way working from 9-5 and then come home and flip the switch to more nurturing in the traditional mother role.” She will discuss that conflict in a free, public talk. 5:30 p.m. Jameson Gallery, Friedl Building.