Journalist Alice Su visits LaGuardia Community College on Wednesday, March 11, to take an in-depth look at her reporting on how refugees survive days, weeks and years away from their homelands. Pulitzer Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer joins Su for the visit, which coincides with the launch of the Pulitzer Center-LaGuardia Community College Campus Consortium partnership.
LaGuardia Community College is the newest partner in the Pulitzer Center's Campus Consortium network, which numbered more than 20 universities and colleges as of February 2015.
Jordan and Lebanon are overwhelmed with millions of refugees, conflict across every border, and the need for water, electricity and jobs. Syrians are not the first refugees here, but the newcomers to a mix of Iraqi, Palestinians, Sudanes, Somalis and others who have waited years to either return home or resettle.
In the meantime, they are forbidden from working. Su's Pulitzer Center-reporting project "Interim Lives: Refugee Survival in Jordan and Lebanon" examines how refugee businessmen, lawyers, mothers, students and artists forge a new way forward.
Joining Su for a further discussion of refugee issues will be Jehangir Khattak, Senior Editor of the Center for Community and Ethic Media, CUNY Journalism Graduate School, and Mujeeb Lodhi, Publisher of Pakistan News.
Khattak (also known as Mohammad Jehangir Khan) began his journalism career in 1986 in Pakistan working for a variety of English daily newspapers before becoming news editor of The Frontier Post. During the 1990s, he covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent civil war, the rise of the Taliban and upheavals in Pakistan. Lodhi studied at Karachi University and has run the Urdu-language weekly Pakistan News community newspaper since 1995.
Su is one of four winners of the 2014 Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize from the United Nations Correspondents Association. The prize is for written media (print and online) coverage of the United Nations and its agencies, and is named in honor of Neuffer, The Boston Globe U.N. bureau chief who died while on assignment in Baghdad in 2003.
Free and open to the public
Panel discussion includes international reporting student fellowship information session at conclusion.
Wednesday, March 11
3:00-5:00 pm
LaGuardia Community College
LaGuardia Performing Arts Center
The Little Theater
31-10 Thomson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101