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Dr. Asma Abdel-Halim

Asma M. Abdel Halim is associate professor at the University of Toledo, Department of Women's and Gender Studies. She graduated from the faculty of Law, University of Khartoum with an LL.B. Honors in Common Law and Shari'a–Islamic Law; as well as a master's in commercial law. She earned a Master in International Affairs, African Studies, and a Ph.D. in Education from Ohio University. She taught at several universities and has been a human rights activist for over 25 years. Her research is mainly on women's rights with a focus on African and Sudanese Muslim women. She authored a book, Sudanese Women in the United States: The Double Problem of Gender and Culture (Mellen Press, 2006) and has written many papers on religion, human rights, and women's legal rights, including "The Time is Now," The Sudanese Human Rights Quarterly 14 (Oct. 2002). She was also the initiator of Mutawinat, an NGO providing legal aid and documenting women's human rights in the Sudan since 1991.

Dr. Trudy Bond, Psychologist

Trudy Bond has been a licensed psychologist for 31 years. Dr. Bond reacted to the news of psychologists' involvement in torture at Guantanamo by filing ethics complaints against the first psychologist who was publicly identified as participating in the torture of a detainee.

"Thanks to a series of lawsuits filed by the ACLU in 2005, Dr. Steven Miles, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, closely analyzed and categorized over 10,000 pages of documents from Abu Ghraib. From his work as well as the contribution of an invaluable document from Wikileaks, [Dr. Bond] gathered information to file an ethics complaint against a second psychologist. Somewhere along the way, students at Harvard Law School heard about the complaints [she] had filed and called one afternoon asking for resources. [Their] collaboration on health care providers and torture began at that point."

In the past four years, Dr. Bond has worked with the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic in an attempt to hold health care providers accountable for their involvement in torture. She is a board member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and is on the steering committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. In 2010 she was recognized as an ACLU civil libertarian of the year.

Sue Carter (Moderator)

Sue Carter (M.Ed., L.S.W., L.P.C.C.) graduated from the University of Toledo with a Master's degree in counseling and is a licensed Social Worker. For the past 20 years she has worked at the U.T. Medical Center with people who are living with HIV/AIDS and cancer. She is a long-time board member of the Ohio A.C.L.U and served as president for 12 years. Sue is a member of the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition, Ohioans to Stop Executions, and an associate member of Veterans for Peace.

"There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."
  — Audre Lorde

Prof. Emeritus Al Cave

Al Cave is a retired history professor and the author of several books and articles dealing with violence against Native Americans , the most recent being Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Early Virginia . He is currently at work on a study of Andrew Jackson's treatment of Native Americans tentatively entitled "Sharp Knife." In early days of radicalism, he was faculty adviser to Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Utah and a supporter of Fair Play for Cuba; his affiliations today include Pax Christi and the Catholic Workers movement. He was also a good friend and colleague of Chuck DeBenedetti's.

Greg Coleridge

Greg Coleridge is director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-related social action group, where he educates, advocates, and organizes against wars and occupation and for economic and political justice. Coleridge is also a member of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) national collective; and an original Move to Amend national steering committee member. He is author of Citizens over Corporations: A Brief History of Democracy in Ohio and Challenges to Freedom in the Future, writer of the documentary CorpOrNation - The Story of Citizens and Corporations in Ohio, and contributor of several articles to the anthology Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy - A Book of History and Strategy. Coleridge is the recipient of the 1998 national Common Cause Public Service Achievement Award.

Mike Ferner

Mike Ferner is a writer and an activist from Ohio. He has served as a former national president of Veterans For Peace, a member of Toledo City Council, a union organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) AFL-CIO and as Communications Director for the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee AFL-CIO.

He went to Iraq for one month, immediately prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003, with a Voices in the Wilderness delegation, returning in 2004 for another two months as an independent journalist. His book about those trips, Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq was published by Praeger in 2006. In 2005, Mike wrote the "VFP Case for Impeachment and Prosecution." His activism includes several arrests for "disturbing the war," including disrupting a session of Congress.

During the Vietnam war he served as a Navy Hospital Corpsman, took care of hundreds of wounded soldiers, and was discharged as a conscientious objector. His current interest is to learn how the Populists organized the largest democratic, mass movement in U.S. history and what that might mean today for people who are demanding a better life.

Richard W. Hanusz

Richard Hanusz is retired in-house counsel for the Lucas County, Ohio, Department of Human Services. He received an A.B. from John Carroll University and an LL.B. from Boston College. He became interested in Central America and the School of the Americas as a result of a research project his daughter Clare completed while an undergraduate at Ohio University. He has been a member of the Toledo Committee on Central America since 1991 and a past active supporter of Pastors for Peace caravans to Central America and Cuba. He has participated at the annual vigil to close the School of the Americas (a.k.a. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia, on numerous occasions.

Prof. Renee Heberle

Renee Heberle came to the Department of Political Science at the University of Toledo in fall of 1997. She teaches courses in the field of political philosophy and various topical seminars such as "Sexual Politics" and "The Politics of Violence in Law and Society." She has published essays and edited collections about contemporary political philosophy, gender and the death penalty, and feminist theories and practices that challenge sexual violence.

Dr. Heberle did her Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts where she had her first experience teaching in prisons. Her current research and teaching about prisons focuses on the place of prisons in our collective life as citizens. She examines the historical and contemporary stories we, as citizens of a liberal democratic state, identify with prisons in themselves and with those who inhabit them. These narratives have facilitated the massive expansion and increasingly violent impulses of the modern carceral state; effective counter narratives must be established to challenge the collective obsession with punishment. She is interested in cultivating the interdisciplinary study of prisons and forms of punishment at the university and working with the community to raise awareness of the crisis of mass incarceration.

In 2010 Dr. Heberle helped launch the Inside/Out Prison Exchange program to the UT campus and the Toledo Correctional Facility.

Dr. S. Amjad Hussain

A 1962 graduate of Khyber Medical College, Peshawar, Pakistan, Dr. Amjad Hussain is an Emeritus Professor of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at the University of Toledo, where he also serves on the university's Board of Trustees. Dr. Hussain has been a columnist on the op-ed pages of the daily Toledo Blade since 1994 and also writes for a number of other newspapers in the United States and Pakistan. He is the author of six Urdu and six English books, including Treading a Fine Line, a collection of his op-ed columns with readers' comments. He has served as president of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, president of the Academy of Medicine of Toledo, and president of the Toledo Surgical Society. In Pakistan, he is known as Baba-e-Peshawar, or Father of Peshawar, for his efforts in preserving and recording the cultural and linguistic legacy of the city where he was born and raised. He has also led four expeditions to explore and photograph the entire 2200 miles of the Indus River in Tibet and Pakistan, and in 1996, his team was the third group in history to reach the source of the river in Western Tibet. (See the documentary Indus River: Journey of a Lifetime [2005].)

In 2009, the University of Toledo created an endowed professorship in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery in his name and has also created an annual visiting Lectureship in the History of Medicine in his name. Dr. Hussain is also the recipient of the Lawrence Conway Award of the Medical Mission Hall of Fame for his volunteer medical work in Pakistan and the Dominican Republic.

Terry J. Lodge, Esq.
Trial lawyer

Terry Lodge is a Toledo, Ohio, trial lawyer who has represented many clients in civil rights, civil liberties, corporate welfare reform, and environmental cases. A long-time critic of the corporate state, he has represented opponents of nuclear weapons, antiwar activists, and many who have stood against government-corporate combines that would destroy nature and pollute the land and water forever for one generation's profit. Holder of bachelor's, master's and law degrees, he was recognized as an ACLU civil libertarian of the year in 2005, won a regional access to justice award in 2003, and was knighted as "redoubtable" by Ralph Nader in his book, Crashing the Party. One of his greatest honors has been to represent protesters against mountaintop removal who were listed as a low-to-moderate security threat in a recent newsletter of the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security.

Staughton Lynd

Staughton Lynd took part in the Southern civil rights movement (he was the coordinator of Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project) and the antiwar movement (he was chairperson of the first march against the Vietnam War in Washington DC in April 1965). After becoming a lawyer and moving to Youngstown, Ohio, in 1976, he and his wife Alice have represented rank-and-file workers and advocated for prisoners.

Alice Lynd edited We Won't Go, a collection of personal accounts by objectors to the Vietnam war, and coordinated draft counseling in the Chicago area in the late 1960s. After many years as a paralegal she became a lawyer, and has spearheaded advocacy for prisoners at the Ohio supermaximum security prison in Youngstown and for prisoners on Ohio's death row.

The Lynds have jointly edited: Rank and File and The New Rank and File, collections of oral histories; Homeland, a compilation of oral histories by Palestinians; and Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, second revised edition. They have written a joint memoir entitled Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together.

See also Carl Mirra, "Peace Profile: Staughton Lynd and Nonviolent Direct Action," Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 22 (Spring 2010): 82-88.

Prof. Ashley Pryor

Ashley Pryor is an associate professor in the Honors College. Her primary research concerns sustainability and Buddhism. She is currently working on a monograph concerning the non-human voice of nature in Eastern and Western philosophies.

Sr. Paulette Schroeder

Sister Paulette Schroeder was a teacher for twenty-one years in elementary and high school, but she has always tried to live as sister to the folks on the margins. She went to Nicaragua during the Sandanista Revolution, took a year off to work on the streets and in a nursing home, organized an inner city neighborhood, and taught in the Delta of Mississippi when segregation was still in place (1986–).

She has crossed the Atlantic eighteen times now in the capacity of a Christian Peacemaker Team member from August 2008 to August 2011. During those three years she worked on the ground in Hebron, West Bank. She lived with a team in H2, which is an area controlled by martial law. Team accompaniment involved patrolling the streets, accompanying children to school through checkpoints, monitoring checkpoints, and responding to the many changeable aspects of life for the Palestinians, since settlers and military control every movement of life for them.

After three years Sister Paulette has returned to work for the liberation of the Palestinians on this side of the ocean, where the real problem is with U.S. policy; and for Jewish brothers and sisters, whose deepest values (as a faith community) are eroding in the Israeli Occupation. The name of this new effort is O.N.E. (for Oneness, Nonviolence, Engagement), and all who hope to change U.S. policies toward Palestine and Israel are welcome.

Josie Setzler

Josie Setzler cofounded and leads two community peace groups, Tiffin Area Pax Christi and People for Peace and Justice Sandusky County, through which she has organized numerous protests, speakers, and advocacy efforts for an end to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, human rights for Palestinians, and other social justice causes.

She and 13 other members of the community Witness Against Torture were arrested in the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2011 when they enjoined members of Congress to close Guantanamo and end indefinite detention. The group will stand trial in January 2012, the week before the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo.

Josie is certified as a nonviolence training facilitator in the nationwide program "Culture of Peace Initiative (CPI)". She is trained in conflict transformation and mediation skills by Lombard Mennonite Peace Center. She holds a doctorate in chemistry and is a former college professor and environmental scientist. She currently serves as executive director of the Sandusky, Seneca, and Wyandot County affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Prof. Marc Simon

Marc V. Simon (Ph.D., Indiana University) is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and coordinator of the minor in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) at Bowling Green State University. He teaches courses on international relations, foreign policy, peace studies, and conflict resolution. His research examines war and political violence, nonviolence, conflict resolution, economic sanctions, environmental policy. He has published articles in International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Peace Research. He is currently working with other BGSU faculty on a textbook for the introductory course on Peace and Conflict Studies.

Prof. Dale Snauwaert

Dale T. Snauwaert, Ph.D., is associate professor of Philosophy of Education and Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Democratic Education in the Judith Herb College of Education at the University of Toledo. He is the editor of In Factis Pax: Online Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice. He received his M.Ed. in Educational Policy and Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He is the author of Democracy, Education, and Governance: A Developmental Conception (State University of New York Press, 1993), which received an American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award in 1995. He has published scholarly articles on such topics as democratic education, the nature of teaching, moral education, holistic education, and international ethics. He is currently working on a book on the ethics of war and peace and human rights education with the Earth Charter as a framework. His research interests focus on moral and political philosophy as they pertain to educational theory, especially the ethics of war and peace, democracy, human rights, and peace education.

Andy Thayer

Andy Thayer is a co-founder of the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism and the Gay Liberation Network, a Chicago-based LGBT direct-action group which has been at the forefront of gay rights, anti-police brutality and antiwar organizing. He has been one of the lead organizers of most of the city's large antiwar protests for the last several years, including a march of 15,000 on Lake Shore Drive at the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He has been arrested numerous times in various protests and was recently found not guilty of two felony counts from a January 2008 protest against a Chicago visit by then-President George W. Bush. In May he was among a handful of Western LGBT activists arrested along with dozens of Russian activists at a government-banned gay pride demonstration in Moscow, Russia. He currently is among the activists organizing a march on the Obama 2012 National Campaign Headquarters in Chicago on the 10th anniversary of America's longest-ever war, the Afghanistan War. He and other activists are also helping organize the huge protests that will confront the May 2012 NATO/G8 meetings in Chicago.