The Bob Graham Center for Public Service provides a wide variety of programs for students and the larger public on topics related to public service, public leadership and civic engagement.
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Award-winning multimedia journalist Jose Antonio Vargas
January 30, 2012
Jose Antonio Vargas, an award-winning multimedia journalist, is the founder of Define American, a new campaign that seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration. He’s been a journalist for over a decade, writing for some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country. Jose Antonio Vargas spoke at the Bob Graham Center in Pugh Hall on Monday, January 30th at 6:00pm. The event and parking are free and open to the public.
Most recently, he was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post, where he launched the Technology and College sections. Prior to that, he covered tech and video game culture, HIV/AIDS, and the 2008 presidential campaign for the Washington Post, and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
His 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. inspired a feature-length documentary — The Other City — which he co-produced and wrote. It world premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime. In 2007, the daily journal Politico named him one of the 50 Politicos To Watch. News media’s evolution, and the breakdown of barriers between print and broadcast journalism, has guided his reporting career. He’s written for daily newspapers (Philadelphia Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle) and national magazines (New Yorker, Rolling Stone) and has appeared on CNN, ABC News and PBS NewsHour.
On HuffPost, he created the blog Technology as Anthropology, which focuses on tech’s impact on people and how we behave. He taught a class on “Storytelling 2.0” at Georgetown University and served on the advisory board for the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism, housed at American University.
About the moderator:
Kelly Kirschner is the former Mayor of the City of Sarasota. As Mayor, he led the City in being the first municipal government in the state of Florida to formally adopt a resolution, opposing Arizona-style, anti-immigrant legislation.
Kirschner is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, receiving his BS in Environmental Issues in International Politics and MA in Latin American Studies.
Having lived and worked in Central and South America, Kirschner is fluent in Spanish and uniquely positioned to discuss the challenges that migrant populations face upon arrival in the United States. He worked in rural Guatemala as a US Peace Corps Municipal Development volunteer. Following the Peace Corps, he led a USAID Mayan-community conservation project in the same region of Guatemala.
Currently, Kirschner is the director of UnidosNow.org – a nascent, non-profit organization aiming to unite Florida’s Hispanic and associated communities in integrating and accessing the full benefits of the state’s civic, economic and cultural weave.
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