This week, APEX Contributors Karl Jagbandhansingh and Marie Choi bring us APEX’s final segments recorded at the Moana Nui 2013 Teach In. Speaker Bios below (generated from Moana Nui conference):
Kyle Kajihiro (Hawai’i) See Video
American Friends Service Committee; DMZ Hawai’i/Aloha Aina
Kyle Kajihiro is a board member of Hawai’i Peace and Justice, the successor organization to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Hawai’i Area Program. From 1996 to 2011, Kajihiro served as a program coordinator, and later program director, for the American Friends Service Committee Hawai’i. Born and raised in Hawai’i, Kajihiro was involved in human rights activism, Central America solidarity, and immigrant worker organizing while living in Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s. His current work focuses on research, education, and action to counter U.S. militarization in Hawai’i. He has published numerous articles about militarization and resistance in Hawai’i and has participated in solidarity delegations and international conferences to speak about resistance to the U.S. military occupation of the Hawaiian Islands.
Dante C. Simbulan (Philippines)
Professor, Author
Dante C. Simbulan earned his doctorate in Political Science from the Australian National University, received his master’s degree from the University of the Philippines and his Bachelor of Science from the Philippine Military Academy. He taught politics, government and sociology at the Philippine Military Academy, University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University and Maryknoll College. His book, The Modern Principalia: The Historical Evolution of the Philippine Ruling Oligarchy (University of the Philippines Press, 2007, 2nd ed.) based on his doctoral dissertation written in 1965, was a pioneering study of the socio-economic elite in Philippine politics and government—the ruling family political dynasties of today. Dr. Simbulan was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. A former political prisoner, he was arrested and detained for more than three years, without charges, when he actively and openly opposed the dictatorship; he was adopted as a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International. While in exile in the United States, he served as the first Executive Director of the Church Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (based in Washington, D.C.), which worked for the termination of U.S. support to the Marcos dictatorship. He has since been a leader of the Philippines’ protest movement opposed to U.S. military presence and intervention in the Philippines. He taught at Montgomery College in Maryland and lectured in several universities in the United States and Canada.
Christine Ahn (United States)
Co-founder, Korea Policy Institute
Christine Ahn is a policy analyst with expertise in Korea, globalization, militarism, women’s rights, and philanthropy. She is the editor of Shafted: Free Trade and America’s Working Poor (2003) and contributor to The Revolution Will Not be Funded (2009). She has addressed Congress, the United Nations and the National Human Rights Commission in South Korea. Ahn has been interviewed on Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, NPR, NBC, and Voice of America. She is a columnist with Institute for Policy Studies’ Foreign Policy In Focus, and her op-eds have appeared in The International Herald Tribune/The New York Times, Asia Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is co-founder of the National Campaign to End the Korean War and Korean Americans for Fair Trade. Ahn is currently the Senior Research and Policy Analyst at the Global Fund for Women and Senior Fellow with the Oakland Institute. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a certificate in ecological horticulture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has been inducted into the OMB Watch Public Interest Hall of Fame and recognized as a Rising Peacemaker by the Agape Foundation.
Hosted by Karl Jagbandhansingh.