keith watenpaugh

Backpacker, Go! 2:2 2024 is Live

The Spring/Summer edition of the official newsletter of the UC Davis Article 26 Backpack, Backpacker, Go! has hit the stands. Last night, our team shared information about our new Backpack Guide Badge Micro-credential, scholarship and support opportunities, a user survey, and a short bio of a Backpack Guide with over 5000 displaced and refugee young people, educators and allies in the Backpacker community.

At the Crossroads: Honoring Global Impacts Amidst Funding Challenges

What has been lost and what is the path to repair? On a warm afternoon at the directors of the seven international development and human rights projects eliminated by the illegal dismantling of USAID gathered to explain the value of these projects to the American people and the world.

“Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide”

On a warm Fall afternoon in 1915 in Syria, a Protestant missionary lifted a five-year-old Armenian boy, Karnig Panian (1910-1989), onto a train headed to Beirut. From there he was taken to a small village called Antoura, where a boarding school had been established to transform Armenian and Kurdish children into Turks. Panian’s family had been murdered over the previous months as part of the World War One-era genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.

Babyn Yar, the Holodmor and Ukraine’s Past of Violence — Revisiting Genocide in Ukraine a Year Later

Noted scholar of genocide, Alexander Hinton, citing both the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russian institutions and families and the embrace of the specious argument by Putin and others that the war against Ukraine is an effort to cleanse — to “de-Nazify” — is evidence enough that beyond war crimes and crimes against humanity, Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.  I’m in general agreement with Hinton, especially as news of the