Stories of Resistance and Protest

A diverse panel of experts will shed light on how individuals and communities have stood against oppression and persecution during World War II, the civil rights movement, and in struggles for social justice today.

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, a professor of History, and Founding Director of the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC. He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2017. He is the author of eleven books, among them the prize-winning The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. His new book, Resisters. How Ordinary Jews fought Hitler's Persecution, is a National Jewish Book Award finalist.

Susan H. Kamei, the managing director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, a professor of History, and author of When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II, is recognized as a leading scholar and educator on our country's unjustified wartime imprisonment of more than 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, solely on the basis of their race. A descendant of incarcerees, she draws upon personal and community stories to convey the continuing relevance of this tragic episode in our history to contemporary issues of racial identity, immigration, and citizenship, and today's threat to civil liberties.

Hajar Yazdiha is an assistant professor of Sociology at USC, faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute, and author of the book, The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. A public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Hill, and The Grio, Hajar researches the politics of inclusion and exclusion, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures. 

Moderator: Allissa V. Richardson is an associate professor of journalism at USC's Annenberg School and the founding director of the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab. The award-winning journalism instructor, scholar, and author studies how marginalized communities use mobile and social media to produce innovative forms of journalism, especially in times of crisis. Richardson's best-selling book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism, explores the lives of 15 mobile journalist-activists who documented the Black Lives Matter movement using only smartphones and Twitter.