Windham World Affairs Council

10/26/2026

THIS FRIDAY! Join for a thoughtful conversation on how to live through trauma and how to bear collective responsibility. At 118 Elliot at 6:30 pm, October 30.

10/21/2026

From Gaza to Vermont: Although Gaza is thousands of miles from Vermont, the questions at the heart of Dr. Nijim’s talk are not distant ones. How do communities respond to violence and displacement? How is trauma carried across borders and generations? What does it mean to witness suffering from afar—and what responsibilities come with knowing what is happening?

These questions have particular resonance in Brattleboro and across Vermont, where local communities have a long tradition of engaging with international affairs, human rights, peace and justice, and the experiences of people displaced by conflict. Southern Vermont has welcomed refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, while residents have gathered for vigils, public conversations, educational programs, and humanitarian efforts responding to events far beyond our state.

Dr. Nijim’s visit offers an opportunity to bring those global and local threads together. By hearing directly from a Gazan scholar whose academic work and personal life have become inseparable, we can move beyond headlines and geopolitical arguments to consider the human consequences of mass violence and the ways trauma, memory, displacement, and survival shape communities.

For the Windham World Affairs Council, this conversation also speaks to a fundamental purpose of engaging with world affairs locally: creating spaces where people can encounter perspectives they might not otherwise hear, ask difficult questions, and consider what informed global citizenship means from here in Vermont.

Join us next Friday, October 30th. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2002306562830?aff=oddtdtcreator

10/17/2026

Join us for our annual Galbraith lecture on Nov 17th!

The Windham World Affairs Council welcomes historian Ilan Pappé and neuroscientist and writer Yoav Litvin for a discussion of their new book, Wired to Steal. Bringing history and neuroscience together, they examine how fear and belonging can be used to justify dispossession and violence, with Israel/Palestine as their central case. They will also explore how these patterns might be challenged and changed. The conversation follows WWAC’s October program with Dr. Ayman Nijim on genocide and collective trauma.

How do images and stories of violence shape what we fear, whose suffering we recognize, and where we feel we belong? What helps a community discuss a painful global conflict with honesty and care? This conversation invites us to examine those questions in our own lives and to consider how local dialogue can resist dehumanization.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wired-to-steal-zionism-and-the-shaping-of-the-western-mind-tickets-2002947254155?aff=oddtdtcreator

10/13/2026

Join us for a talk by Dr. Ayman Nijim, a Gazan scholar of liberation psychology, on Friday, October 30, at 7:00 p.m. at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro. This event is co-sponsored in collaboration with Southern Vermont for Palestine.

Drawing on his doctoral dissertation, written while the destruction of Gaza was unfolding and his own family and community remained directly affected, Nijim will examine Gaza through the intersecting lenses of genocide, collective trauma, and liberation psychology. His presentation will combine scholarship with personal experience to explore both the broader processes of destruction and their profound psychological and human consequences.

10/07/2026

Filmmaker Robbie Leppzer and Palestinian Vermonter and human rights activist Mohsen Mahdawi will speak at the Brattleboro screening of AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR at the Latchis Theater this Sunday, October 11 at 4pm.

AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR is a new documentary film that chronicles Bread & Puppet founder Peter Schumann's use of paintings, puppets and theater productions to protest war from the Vietnam War in the streets of New York City in the 1960s to the current war in Gaza. Through Schumann’s evocative imagery, we see the brutality of the war machine and the complicity the United States as seen through the eyes of this artist. In an age desperate for hopeful figures of cultural resistance and resilience, this film is a testament to the radical, enduring idea that art is not a retreat from the world — it is a way of fighting for it.

Will we see you there?

09/02/2026

Next Wednesday, September 9: Join WWAC for “An Assassination on US Soil: the Long Blowback of US Support for Pinochet’s Chile,” with Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The evening will also feature four Chilean arpilleras from IPS’s exhibit collection. These hand-sewn textile works became a form of testimony and resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship, often made by women to document repression, poverty, protest, and disappearance.

Doors open at 6:30 pm at 118 Elliot.

07/13/2026

Will we see you this Friday?

WWAC's mission has always been about building understanding across borders and cultures. Often, this happens through lectures and panels. And it always happens through direct human connection.

Bossa Nova Across Borders embodies our mission in its most joyful form: musicians from two countries, brought together by curiosity and collaboration.

RSVP if you plan to come :))

Music has always crossed borders more easily than diplomats do, we all know that. This event, co-sponsored with Thrush Hill Stage, is a reminder that cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States has been happening informally and joyfully for decades, through friendships like the one between musicians Vadeco Schettini and Jesse Lepkoff.

At a moment when so much of the conversation around borders is about division, this evening is a chance to hear what cooperation actually sounds like.

Rsvp if you'll be there! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bossa-nova-across-borders-tickets-1990098685741?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true

07/06/2026

Music has always crossed borders more easily than diplomats do, we all know that. This event, co-sponsored with Thrush Hill Stage, is a reminder that cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States has been happening informally and joyfully for decades, through friendships like the one between musicians Vadeco Schettini and Jesse Lepkoff.

At a moment when so much of the conversation around borders is about division, this evening is a chance to hear what cooperation actually sounds like.

Rsvp if you'll be there! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bossa-nova-across-borders-tickets-1990098685741?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true

06/01/2026

Brattleboro is navigating a lot at once: a downtown that needs strengthening, a housing crunch, local businesses under pressure, and a long-term shift toward more resilient energy and infrastructure. The question isn't whether to change, but how to do it in a way that reflects who we are and where we want to go.

Join us for a "Main Street Brattleboro" version of the Sustainability Lens Game, developed by Tamara Stenn of Marlboro, to work through exactly that, together. You'll test ideas, weigh trade-offs, and come away with something more than a conversation.

05/15/2026

Today is Nakba Day, marking 78 years since the displacement and loss that shaped the modern Middle East.

Also rooted in 1948: the Marshall Plan. At 7pm tonight, we're hosting a conversation, "Unwrapping the Marshall Plan." Paul Vincent will give us a closer look at the U.S. aid program that reshaped postwar Europe that same year. Who designed it, who benefited, and what it was really trying to accomplish. Importantly, why does it matter now?

Our events are always free and open to the public. RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unwrapping-the-marshall-plan-tickets-1984573571977?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true