Hosted by The Interfaith Summer Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movements and the J. S. Woodsworth Lecture Series at SFU
Sunday, April 1, 2007
SFU Harbour Centre, Room 1800
515 West Hastings, Vancouver
3:30 p.m.- 5: 00 p.m.
Reserved seating is recommended: call 604-291-5100 or email cs_hc@sfu.ca
Junaid S. Ahmad is a JD candidate in law at the College of William and Mary School of Law, Williamsburg, VA. He is on the Executive Board of the Domestic Violence Resource Project (DVRP). For the past few years, he has worked with the National Interfaith Committee on Worker Justice - building alliances with some of the leading religious figures - of all faith backgrounds - who are working on issues of worker and social justice. He has presented on this theme of interfaith solidarity for worker justice at the previous two annual meetings of the largest gathering of Muslims in North America, the Islamic Society of North America convention. In addition, he has worked as a labor organizer in Washington , DC , on two principal campaigns, the "Justice for Janitors" campaign and the Hotel and Restaurant Workers campaign, as part of the national organization, Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He has been active in campus and community living wage campaigns, and is at present part of the Williamsburg, VA-based group, Tidewater Labor Support Committee (TLSC), a group advancing the rights of workers on the campus of the College of William and Mary.
Junaid is an editor of the Richmond Independent Media Centre. He has been a longtime activist on issues related to corporate-led globalization, HIV/AIDS and gender justice, and militarism and war, working in organizations such as Amnesty International and the Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ). He writes for webzines (such as ZNet, Counterpunch, Hot Coals, Left Hook, etc) and has written for magazines and journals such as Left Turn, Chowrangi (progressive Pakistani-American magazine), Muslim Public Affairs Journal, Studies in Contemporary Islam, and Islamic Studies. In Pakistan, he has worked with groups such as Educate Pakistan and the Peoples Rights Movement, the latter being at the forefront of issues related to social and economic justice in Pakistan. He continues to maintain an association with Positive Muslims, the Cape Town-based organization working on issues related to Muslims, HIV/AIDS, and gender justice, a group with which he worked while he was in South Africa in 2004.
He is currently involved in a collaborative project with the International Islamic University, Islamabad, on developing an annual "State of the Muslim World" report. Most recently, he, along with other Muslims, has formed the Abu Dharr Collective, which is committed to the ideal of social justice and to articulating an Islamic theology of liberation.
Junaid Ahmad's visit to Vancouver is being co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the SFU Economic Security Project.
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Trish Graham
Institute for the Humanities
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