World Issues Forum
Welcome to Fairhaven College’s Fall 2026 World Issues Forum (WIF). World Issues is Western Washington University’s human rights and global justice speaker series. The WIF challenges students, faculty, staff, and community members to be active and engaged global citizens. Distinguished guest speakers address urgent global justice topics including planetary survival; decolonization and anti-racism; human rights; migrations; and the world economy.
Interests, Values, and the Messy Middle: Diplomacy in Practice
Ambassador (ret.) Jeffrey Hovenier, former U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo and career U.S. Foreign Service Officer.
In this talk Ambassador Hovenier will explore the role American diplomats play in identifying national interests, weighing them against competing values, and building and implementing strategies that survive the messy realities of politics, power, and time.
A Nation’s Undesirables: Mixed-Race Children and Whiteness in the Post-Nazi Era
Tracey Owens Patton, PhD, Professor, University of Wyoming
A Nation’s Undesirables centers interracial coupling, German women’s rights, mixed-race children, and racism while questioning how the German Nation-State removed mixed-race persons in favor of fantasies of whiteness. As a result, a new narrative of women and Black German children in the postwar era emerges.
Still Standing: From Bir al-Saba to Be’er Sheva—How a New Palestinian Town Became an Israeli Old City
Dr. Yoav Duman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Green River College
How did a recently built Palestinian town become an Israeli Old City? This talk traces Beersheba’s transformation after 1948, showing how dispossession, institutional reuse, heritage, and antiquity reshaped surviving places. It argues that selective depoliticisation made Palestinian history visible while limiting its power to shape the present and future claims.
The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States
David J. Silverman, PhD, Professor of History at George Washington University
An examination of the ways Indigenous people have factored as objects and actors into the invention of racial identities in the United States and its colonial predecessors.
The Contested American Revolution Today: Thinking about the 250th
Johann Neem, Prof. of History, Western Washington University
Today, Americans are as divided about the past as they are about the present. In this talk, Prof. Neem will explore the competing visions we Americans have about the country’s founding as we commemorate the United States’s 250th anniversary and how we might move beyond the false choices offered by partisans on both sides.
FILM: The River Remembers
The River Remembers is a character-driven documentary that follows Tribal members of the Elwha and lower Klamath Rivers as they lead the largest dam removals in U.S. history — restoring salmon and renewing culture after a century of struggle. The film is a story of resilience and hope, showing that when rivers heal, people heal too.
Panel discussion to follow.
The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Adoption Rights: Lessons Learned for the Next Generations
Lynn Grotsky: MSW, Clinical Social Worker (retired); Lisa Brodoff: JD, Emerita Professor of Law Seattle University
In 1986, Lisa and her partner Lynn had a baby via donor insemination, but Lynn’s legal parenting rights as the non-biological mother were not guaranteed.
Hear their story: a two-year court battle that won parenting rights for themselves and same-sex couples across Washington. Follow their journey from state law to D.C., and their ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ equality today.