Kumi Naidoo | Writing Climate 2025 Artwork

Lannan Center Podcast

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University is a literary, critical, and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and poetics in the contemporary world. Based in the President’s Office, the Center brings attention to a traditional domain of academic research, but sees poetry as a current practice rather than as a field of historical research. The Center recognizes that “art’s social presence,” in the phrase of Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture; that poetry, or writing more generally, traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of imagination. The Lannan Center hosts Readings and Talks throughout the academic year. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

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Lannan Center Podcast

Kumi Naidoo | Writing Climate 2025

March 26, 2025 • Lannan Center

On Wednesday, March 26th, the Lannan Center welcomed human rights and environmental justice activist Kumi Naidoo for a conversation with Climate Rights International Founder Brad Adams as part of the center's annual symposium, this year entitled "Writing Climate".

Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. At the age of fifteen, he organized school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa. His courageous actions made him a target for the Security Police, leading to his exile in the United Kingdom, where he remained until 1990. Upon his return to South Africa, Kumi played a pivotal role in the legalization of the African National Congress in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.

Currently, Kumi serves as a Senior Advisor for the Community Arts Network (CAN). He holds the position of distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Additionally, he continues to represent global interests as a Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. He also holds positions as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College.

Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Brad Adams was the Executive Director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch from 2002-2022. In this position, he oversaw investigations, advocacy, and media work in twenty countries, including China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Japan, and North Korea.

He worked on issues such as attacks on environmental and human rights defenders, land rights, labor rights, the protection of civil society, freedom of expression, refugees, women’s rights, impunity, and international justice. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He has regularly appeared on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other major media.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.