Kasar Abdulla
Kasar Abdulla, a Muslim refugee from Kurdistan of Iraq and director of advocacy and education at the Nashville nonprofit Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, will speak at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 30, at the Oak Ridge Branch Campus of Roane State Community College.
Abdulla will tell her story and discuss immigrant and refugee rights in the first talk of 2017 in the RSCC-Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning, or ORICL, Lecture Series. Her lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be delivered in the City Room (A-111) of the Coffey-McNally Building.
Abdulla has received awards and recognition on television and in publications for her community activism in Nashville. In 2013, President Barack Obama named her a “Champion of Change” for her work on immigrant integration in Tennessee.
A resident of Nashville for more than 20 years, Abdulla is a passionate social-justice advocate, educator, and organizer, a press release said. As a child, she and her family experienced life in a refugee camp in Turkey after her Kurdish village was destroyed during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. They fled by foot to the camp, where some young girls were sexually harassed and young boys were physically tortured.
After Kasar’s family was sponsored, the Abdullas were transported to Fargo, North Dakota. After a backlash against the Kurds in Fargo sparked by the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, the family relocated in 1996 to Nashville because of its large Kurdish population, the press release said.
Kasar later attended Tennessee State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Eleven years later, she obtained a master’s degree in conflict management from Lipscomb University.
She completed the University of Southern California’s fellowship on American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute (AMCLI) in 2010. And she is a Leadership Nashville and Leadership Tennessee Alumna.
Refreshments will be served at 2:30 p.m. prior to the lecture.
This press release was submitted by Carolyn Krause.
Do you appreciate this story or our work in general? If so, please consider a monthly subscription to Oak Ridge Today. See our Subscribe page here. Thank you for reading Oak Ridge Today.
Copyright 2016 Oak Ridge Today. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Leave a Reply