The 2011-2012 Waterloo District Catholic School Board Lecture
Response to Post-Conflict Northern Uganda's Social Suffering
In the course of twenty years of brutal civil war in northern Uganda between a rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and the Ugandan army, the local people suffered abductions, displacement, impoverishment, and socio-cultural dislocation. Based on her involvement in the region since 2004, Professor Hackett will address the bewildering range of responses, internal and external, to what was once described as one of the world’s most neglected humanitarian crises. These responses have included emergency relief, political denial, international legal intervention, film documentaries, local peace building initiatives, controversial military operations, media distortions, opportunistic missionaries, and disaster tourism. With the (uneasy) peace in the region from 2006, the main town of Gulu is now enjoying an economic boom.
Rosalind I. J. Hackett
Rosalind I. J. Hackett, Ph.D., Professor and Head Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
Rosalind I.J. Hackett is Professor and Head, Department of Religious Studies, the University of Tennessee, adjunct in Anthropology, and faculty associate at the Baker Center for Public Policy. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Aberdeen in 1986. She also taught in Nigeria for eight years. She is an expert on religion in Africa, notably on new religious movements, and religion and conflict. Her latest (co-edited) book is Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (2011). She serves as President of the International Association for the History of Religions and is founder/coordinator of the Jazz for Justice Project and the Gulu Study and Service Abroad Program in northern Uganda.
This lecture is supported by the Waterloo District Catholic School Board.