To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), the Aurora Forum joins with Stanford’s King Institute to host a day-long conference on the struggle for economic justice, arguably Dr. King’s primary concern throughout the whole of his life.

Related Themes: globalization, justice, Martin Luther King, poverty

We join three Iraqi artists to discuss the challenges of filmmaking in present-day Iraq.  Maysoon Pachachi and Kasim Abid, who set up the Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad in 2004, will show and discuss clips from their students’ films.  This will be followed by a screening and discussion of producer Fady Hadid’s Hometown Baghdad, a documentary web series that follows the lives of young Iraqis struggling to survive during the war.

Related Themes: film, Iraq

The rise of religiously motivated threats to scientific practice and instruction in American schools has motivated biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss to engage in a public dialogue on strategies for science education in the twenty-first century. Their open conversation concerning science literacy and related issues began in the July 2007 Scientific American and continues at this Aurora Forum event moderated by Mark Kay of the Stanford School of Medicine.

Related Themes: education, science

Forty years have passed since the Beatles released The White Album, introducing "Blackbird," "Rocky Raccoon," "Sexy Sadie," "Helter Skelter" and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" into the cultural lexicon. Please join us for a conversation with three Stanford alums whose research explores the musical and cultural innovations that made the Beatles a powerful force for innovation in society and the arts. Related Themes: art, music, social change

In this fourth installment in the IRAQ: REFRAME series with Montalvo Arts Center, we enter into conversation with Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who went to Iraq in 2003 and embedded himself with Iraqi people. His reports have been published in The Nation, The Guardian, and The Independent. On radio as well as television, he has reported for the BBC, Democracy Now! and numerous other stations around the globe. His writings have recently been collected and published in book form as Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Related Themes: Iraq, journalism, media