Snedden lecturer Parvaz will discuss refugee crises
February 22, 2017
Dorothy Parvaz, a senior producer with Al Jazeera English, will present "On the Run:
Covering the Global Refugee Crisis" as part of the Snedden lecture series at 7 p.m. Thursday,
Feb. 23, in the Murie Building auditorium.
Parvaz has covered humanitarian crises across the world. Her recent work told the
story of nearly 2 million refugees caught in political limbo between Pakistan and
Afghanistan in the winter of 2016.
In 2011, after entering Syria to cover protests, Parvaz was questioned and deported
to Iran, her birth country, where interrogations continued. In all, she was held almost
three weeks.
"I was standing in two fist-sized pools of smeared, sticky blood, trying to sort out
why there were seven angry Syrians yelling at me," Parvaz wrote later of the experience.
"Only one of them — who I came to know as Mr. Shut Up during my three days in a detention
center, where so many Syrians 'disappeared' are being kept — spoke English.”
Parvaz's family moved to Canada when she was a teen. She studied journalism in the
United States and worked for both the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspapers before joining Al Jazeera.
The free public event is organized by the Department of Communication and Journalism
in the University of Alaska Fairbanks' College of Liberal Arts. The Snedden lecture
series is made possible by endowment established by the late Helen Snedden to honor
her husband C.W. Snedden, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner from 1950 until
his death in 1989.
The College of Liberal Arts, the largest of UAF’s academic units, comprises arts,
humanities, social sciences and language disciplines across 20 departments. In 2016,
the communication and journalism departments combined.
ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/cla , www.uaf.edu/cojo
TWITTER: @dparvaz, @uaf_cojo
NOTE TO EDITORS: Download a flier here. Photos are available.
CONTACT: Naomi Horne, nehorne@alaska.edu, 907-474-6464