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Photo by Dijana Muminovic

Feb. 19, 2016 – “Welcome the Stranger: Stories of Immigrants and Refugees in the 21st Century,” the fourth annual journalism multimedia conference at Allegheny College, will bring together students, professional journalists and the community on March 4-5 to explore a topic that is particularly timely in this election year. All conference presentations are free and open to the public, and no preregistration is required.

Three award-winning journalists will be among the speakers, mentors and coaches for the conference: David Gilkey, Dijana Muminovic and Carrie Kahn. Also working with conference participants will be Allegheny faculty members from across the academic disciplines, including international studies, political science, journalism, communication arts and modern languages.

The invited journalists will work as mentors with students to produce multimedia pieces that will debut at the end of the conference. Muminovic and Kahn will also visit classes on the government and politics of Latin America, human rights, and global health transitions.

Conference presentations will be held in the Vukovich Center for Communication Arts at Allegheny College. The schedule includes:

• “No Quarter: Fleeing War, Seeking Shelter,” with David Gilkey, at 7:30 p.m. on March 4. A staff photographer and video editor for NPR, covering both national and international news, Gilkey has produced award-winning photo essays, videos and multimedia presentations. He received a 2007 national Emmy award for a video series, “Band of Brothers,” about Michigan Marines in Iraq. Most recently, he documented the life of a Syrian refugee family settling in Toledo, Ohio.

• “I’m a Refugee,” with Dijana Muminovic, at 10:30 a.m. on March 5. Muminovic is an award-winning Bosnian-American photojournalist who most recently documented the plight of Middle-Eastern refugees and migrants passing through Croatia in a personal project titled “I’m a Refugee.” Born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Muminovic survived the Bosnian war as a 12-year-old girl. In 1997 she moved to the United States with her family and grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

• “La Migración: Latin America’s Migration Crisis,” with Carrie Kahn, at 2 p.m. on March 5. Kahn is NPR’s international correspondent based in Mexico City. Her reports can be heard on NPR’s signature news programs including All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. From 1994 to 2001, Kahn was the border and community affairs reporter at NPR station KPBS in San Diego, where she covered Northern Mexico, immigration, cross-border issues and the city’s ethnic communities.

• “Welcome the Stranger,” a presentation at 7:30 p.m. on March 5, with students from Allegheny College, Ohio University and the University of Mississippi presenting the results of their previous day’s work. The presentation will be preceded by a reception at 6:30 p.m.

The conference is sponsored by the Journalism in the Public Interest program at Allegheny College and The Campus newspaper, with support from the Ohio University School of Visual Communication and the Scripps College of Communication, the University of Mississippi Meek School of Journalism and New Media, Allegheny students in the Bonner program, and a grant to Allegheny College from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For more information on “Welcome the Stranger” – or to suggest story ideas – contact conference organizers Cheryl Hatch at chatch@allegheny.edu or Richard Sayer at richardsayerphotography@gmail.com. More information can also be found at sites.allegheny.edu/welcomethestranger.

Following the conference, The Campus will run a special edition to highlight the work from the conference and the Erie Times-News will publish a page of the students’ work.