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Reflections on violence in Norway, U.S.

Spikersuppe_Fountain
Photos courtesy of Frankie Shackelford: Spikersuppe is a downtown park and Storting (lion statue) is the national Parliament

Sonja Blackstone ’12 and professor Frankie Shackelford reflect on the violence in Norway which occurred this summer and its connections to Sept. 11, 2001. Blackstone and Shackelford were in Norway during the attacks for the Nobel Peace Scholars program.

9/11-7/22

By Sonja Blackstone

I was living two miles from downtown Oslo this summer, studying peace and conflict at the University of Oslo. On the afternoon of Friday, July 22 my friends and I were enjoying the beginning of our weekend when we thought we heard thunder. Twenty minutes later everything changed. Word of an explosion began murmuring through campus, students who had been downtown flooded back, scared, with stories of broken glass and people running. Continue reading “Reflections on violence in Norway, U.S.”

"Vagina Monologues" raises money and awareness

v_monologuesRecently a group of Augsburg students staged two performances of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s episodic play which began off-Broadway and has spawned V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. This year’s production raised more than $800 to benefit the House of Sharing, an organization in Seoul, South Korea that houses and cares for the surviving “comfort women,” young Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII.

Augsburg senior Krystal Mattison is the granddaughter of a comfort woman. After spending time with this group of women during her year in Korea, she came back to Augsburg committed to raising awareness about this issue. Her own grandmother (halmoni) died when Mattison was five years old, but she learned of her grandmother’s story from her father. Continue reading “"Vagina Monologues" raises money and awareness”