OXFORD, Miss. – Global reconciliation issues will be examined during a University of Mississippi panel discussion Wednesday (April 7) in the Overby Center Auditorium.
The 7 p.m. program, “Ole Miss and the People of the World: A Symposium on Reconciliation,” is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation.
The panelists include Desaix Anderson, Ralph Eubanks and Rob Springs, whose expertise stretches from North Korea to the Mississippi Delta. UM Chancellor Dan Jones will moderate the discussion.
“The University of Mississippi desires to be a leading force for reconciliation around the world,” Jones said. “We offer ourselves not as experts, but as fellow pilgrims on the pathway of reconciliation.”
Anderson, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, spent most of his career working on Asian issues. He was the first envoy to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, following establishment of diplomatic relations, serving as charge d’affaires from August 1995, when the embassy opened, until 1997. He was appointed as executive director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization in 1997, implementing, in part, the United States’ 1994 agreement with North Korea to freeze that country’s nuclear activities.
Eubanks, a UM alumnus, is author of “Ever is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past” (Basic Books, 2003) and “The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South”(Smithsonian, 2009). He was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation.
He is director of publishing at the Library of Congress.
Springs is president and CEO of Global Resource Services, an international humanitarian aid and development organization.
Springs founded the company in 1997 in response to the complex natural disasters in North Korea. GRS, which began as a way to advance the efforts of private sector humanitarian organizations in an effort to facilitate a unified approach, works in regions challenged by conflict to bring about reconciliation.
For more information on the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, go to http://www.winterinstitute.