Zones of Emergency

Kayvan Zainabadi was kind enough to join our discussion with Alfredo Jaar last week. Kayvan is the former president of MIT Amnesty International and brought his perspective on working here at MIT on the crisis in Darfur. Despite resistance from the administration, Kayvan led MIT to divest in companies related to genocide. Kayvan made the point that student advocacy is the most important factor in MIT’s development of an ethical investment standard. Here’s what MIT Media Lab graduate student Adam Kumpf participating in Networks, Tactics, Breakdown had to say about Kayvan’s talk:

Kayvan presented his work with the Amnesty International chapter at MIT, as well as his work with MIT-STAND supporting the divestment from companies potentially funding genocide in Darfur, Sudan. His story revolved around the closed nature of MIT’s investment decisions and the difficulty of trying to incorporate changes within it. After a year and a half of lectures, meetings, and demonstrations, MIT agreed to retract investments with companies related to the genocide in Darfur. Kayvan saw this as a small win, but closed his talk suggesting that there will be more battles like this to come if MIT does not make its investment policy open to the public.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.