Academic Year 2024-2025

FALL 2024: Bonita Bennett; Nemanja Nestorović and Milivoje Raičević; Pedro X. Molina

SPRING 2025: TBD

FALL 2024

Bonita Bennett, District Six Museum

September 9-13, 2024

Bonita Bennett is an activist and scholar of memory based in Cape Town, South Africa. She was appointed as executive director of the District Six Museum in 2008, a role she occupied until 2020.  The museum is dedicated to memorializing the displacement that occurred under apartheid, when thousands of families, which included her own, her forcibly removed from their homes in the vibrant District Six community to make way for a ‘whites only’ university.  The museum provided Bonita a platform to confront issues both directly related to the affected community and their descendants, as well as raise awareness about human rights and sensitize people to situations which call for solidarity and empathy.  She was a key player in developing dynamic and inclusive memorialization initiatives, which focused on untold stories about the city’s painful past.  After a nearly 20-year career at the District Six Museum, she now works as a freelance memory and heritage consultant.  She remains engaged with the museum as a research associate and member of its Board of Trustees.      

Nemanja Nestorović and Milivoje Raičević, Coomunity Building Mitrovica

October 28-November 1, 2024

Nemanja Nestorović and Milivoje Raičević work for Community Building Mitrovica (CBM), a non-governmental peace and community building organization in northern Kosovo, where they serve as Deputy Director and Communications/Monitoring and Evaluation Officer respectively.  CBM is an interethnic organization of Serbs and Albanians that identifies, encourages and facilitates joint actions of citizens in the region to promote cooperation, co-existence and democratic values.  CBM’s aim is to restore the confidence and friendships that war and politics have destroyed.  Community Building Mitrovica’s work is even more remarkable since Mitrovica, the main city in the north of Kosovo, is effectively divided into an ethnic Albanian part and a Serb-held part, and the two sides rarely mix. 

Nemanja has worked for CBM for 15 years, where he has been in a senior management position for the past five years.  Mili has worked for a range of projects at CBM for the past 11 years, where his responsibilities have grown over time.  He graduated with his Master’s of Public Administration from Binghamton University in 2020 after receiving a competitive and prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to study in the U.S.  

Pedro X. Molina, Confidencial

November 18-22

Pedro X. Molina published his first cartoons in 1995, and later became a cartoonist for the newspaper Confidencial, one of the county’s only media outlets independent of government control.  Pedro’s work was regularly critical of President Daniel Ortega.  In December 2018, the Nicaraguan police killed a Confidencial journalist, detained two others, and ransacked and occupied its offices.  Pedro went into exile, settling in Ithaca, NY as a visiting scholar at Ithaca College.  He continues to produce a cartoon of the day for Confidencial’s digital newspaper and has become a prominent voice in the Nicaraguan diaspora, using his platform to advocate for human rights and freedom of expression. In 2019, Pedro was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize by Columbia University, journalism’s oldest international award for journalists who make significant contributions to upholding freedom of the press in the Americas.  Pedro’s work has also been awarded the Gabo Award for Excellence, one of the most prestigious journalism prizes in Latin America.