Cornell College welcomes speaker to discuss genocide

There are lots of questions to be answered about genocide, defined as the deliberate killing of a large group of people.

Wahutu Siguru will take up some of those tough questions during his visit to the Hedges Conference Room in the Thomas Commons on the Cornell College campus at 11:10 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15. Siguru will discuss: When is an atrocity considered to be a genocide? Who makes the decision to label it a genocide? What does labeling an ongoing atrocity a genocide mean for those that are ongoing but are not considered as genocidal?

Siguru will also look at how the U.S. State Department and media organizations in African countries framed genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.  The event is free and open to the public.

Later in the evening the Rev. Catherine Quehl-Engel, Cornell’s college chaplain, will moderate an event called “Confronting Genocide” in Sinclair Auditorium on the Coe College Campus in Cedar Rapids. That event starts at 6:30 p.m. Siguru will be a featured panelist for the program, which also includes a speaker from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Survivor Speakers’ Bureau, Gideon Frieder, who will discuss his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Organizers are asking people to RSVP for the Coe College event.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013-2014 and the 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at the University of Minnesota. His current research focuses on how Africa’s media framed Darfur between 2003 and 2008 and compares this to how media from the global north compared Darfur in the same period. He also writes a monthly blog article called “Eye on Africa,” which focuses on news surrounding conflict in Africa. It appears in the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies website blog.