In honor of World AIDS Day 2012, you are invited to attend two
events related to the photo exhibit 30 Years/30 Lives:
Documenting a Pandemic.
As the world community approached the thirtieth year of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, Dr. Vrudny, a theologian at the University of
St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, traveled to South Africa,
Thailand and Mexico to photograph thirty individuals whose lives
have intersected in some way with HIV/AIDS, whether through care
for or loss of a loved one, engagement in humanitarian response, or
acquisition of an infection personally. The exhibit will be on
display in the St. John’s Gallery in Sun Yat Sen Hall from December
3, 2012 – January 31, 2013.
World AIDS Day Common Hour Lecture
Beyond ‘Doing No Harm’: Photographic Ethics in the Age of
AIDS
Dr. Kimberly Vrudny, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology,
University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota
Monday, December 3, 2012
1:50-3:15 p.m.
Bent Hall 277A
Opening Reception and Meet the Artist
30 Years/30 Lives: Documenting a Pandemic
Monday, December 3, 2012
4:30-6:00 p.m.
Yeh Art Gallery, Sun Yat Sen Hall
For Faculty and Administrators:
Faculty Academic Service-Learning Workshop:
“Beyond 'Doing No Harm': Principles for Ethical Practice in
Service-Learning and Community Engagement”
Led by Dr. Kimberly Vrudny
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
D’Angelo Center 416A
Breakfast will be served
Kimberly Vrudny has served as Interim Director of Service-Learning
at the University of St. Thomas since January 2012, where she has
practiced this potentially transformative pedagogy since 2004 as
founding project director for the University of St. Thomas'
HIV/AIDS Initiatives. In asking primarily students of privilege to
engage with folks in the HIV/AIDS community, Vrudny was immediately
attentive to ethical concerns that quickly took her and her
students beyond the idiom, "do no harm." Concerned about issues
such as voyeurism, employment of rhetoric, matters of relative
degrees of privilege and disadvantage, exploitation, and structural
violence, Vrudny has been simultaneously a champion and a critic of
service-learning—advocating at her University and beyond for
faculty to engage community partners and their clients in an
ethically informed, civilly minded, and culturally competent way.
In this dialogue with St. John's faculty, Vrudny will share
materials she has developed to encourage her students to recognize
how doing harm to one directly and indirectly brings harm to all,
and how we find our own well-being in seeking the well-being of the
city (Jeremiah 29:7) as a means to break open conversation among us
as we share insights from the field.
To register for the faculty workshop, please
email Jessica R. Cook, Associate Director of Academic
Service-Learning, cookj@stjohns.edu.