Enjoy the online events hosted by our partner organization, the Alaska World Affairs Council in Anchorage. AWAC hosts a variety of engaging speakers on a wide variety of important topics.
Check them out!
JWAC's 2025-2026 Season #43:
(Events are added all year, so check back often.)
-Date and time details are determined as events approach, and events are added to the schedule throughout the season. Check back often for new information, and be sure to join our e-mail notifications list to receive regular updates. You can also sometimes find information repeated on Facebook.
-This page is the primary repository of JWAC event information. If you can't find what you're looking for here, then it simply doesn't exist yet.
-All JWAC presentations are free and open to all to attend as an audience member. Please arrive a few minutes early. Posted event times are when presentations start.
-JWAC does not stream presentations. They are instead professionally recorded at Juneau's public media station for later broadcast on Alaska public television, and also posted on YouTube (see season archives for links). All event postings include location information in their headers. Most often, Travelogues take place at the Gold Town Theater, and speaker presentations and Forums at KTOO Studio 1.
-Every person involved with JWAC is a volunteer. These events are a gift to our community.
Next event:
'The Politics of Hunger in Sudan' with Dr. Nisrin Elamin
Tuesday, September 15 | 5:30 | KTOO Studio 1
As millions of Sudanese face starvation, global markets are also experiencing a surge in the value of key Sudanese commodities such as gold, gum Arabic, and livestock that are smuggled out of the country to places like the UAE, Egypt and Kenya. This talk situates Sudan’s current famine within a broader historical context of neoliberal economic restructuring, US aid policies, foreign land investments, and resource extractivism. It traces how this history is connected to the current dismantling of rural livelihoods and agricultural infrastructures and to the ongoing resource extraction facilitated by this war. Using food insecurity and hunger as a lens, the talk examines the role of foreign -particularly Gulf- actors in fueling and sustaining the war.
Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the African Studies Program at the University of Toronto. Her work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. She uses land and struggles over land as a lens through which to examine state surveillance of Sahelian migration as well as Gulf Arab corporate investments and political interventions in Sudan and neighboring countries. She is currently working on a book project based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Sudan, where she conducted research in local courts, farming communities, investor conferences, agribusiness farms, government ministries, and in the zawiyas of Sufi religious leaders mediating land disputes in the aftermath of large-scale land enclosures. Before pursuing a PhD, Elamin spent over a decade working as an educator, researcher, and organizer in the United States and taught for several years in Tanzania. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she taught at Bryn Mawr College and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.
[All JWAC speaker events are free and open to all]
Future WorldQuests!
February 6, 2027 | February 5, 2028
JAHC is so good they already have us scheduled! Mark your calendars.
All of our speaker events are free and open to the public, so please join us!
JWAC takes no stance on any public issue, nor recommends any policy, party, viewpoint, or candidate.
