Suzi Weissman

Suzi Weissman "is Professor and Chair of Politics at Saint Mary's College of California and sits on the editorial boards of Critique and Against the Current. She is the author of Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (Verso, 2001); and edited Victor Serge: Russia Twenty Years After (Humanities, 1996), and The Ideas of Victor Serge (Critique Books, 1997), as well as many articles on the Soviet Union and Russia. Her emphasis is on working class and left dissent. She has participated as a speaker at dozens of conferences and public meetings around the world. She is on the National Workers' Rights Board, which is composed of 50-75 national leaders who intervene with employers and the public to help resolve situations that threaten workers' rights.

"Suzi Weissman has broadcast drive-time public affairs programs on KPFK for more than two decades. During the years of turmoil and disintegration of the Soviet Union, she hosted many special programs and live broadcasts from participants in the political turmoil. Suzi Weissman's radio programs from 1986 to 2001 are a featured archive at the Hoover Institution for War and Peace at Stanford University. [Began as host of "Portraits of USSR" and "Read All About It;" later "The New World Disorder" before it morphed into "Beneath the Surface."]

"She is the recipient of the 1999 "Mover and Shakers Award" from the Southern California Library of Social Research. Her knowledge of Eastern Europe was a strong feature in programming her independent coverage of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, as well as the pro-democracy and independent media movements in Serbia and Kosovo during the recent regime changes and street protests in that region.

"In recent years Weissman has broadened her focus to labor and community struggles in the US in both her radio broadcasts and teaching. She has taught three travel courses with her students, taking them to Russia and Siberia to see the transition first hand, interviewing workers, visiting factories, hospitals, housing estates and prisons. She has also collaborated with Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods in two travel courses through America’s Hoods and Barrios (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Trenton, Buffalo, NYC, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, Tijuana, San Francisco, Oakland) called ‘Life and Hope in America's Hoods and Barrios’ -- meeting the ordinary heroes working without resources to improve their neighborhoods and cities, largely without the help and support of political leaders and funds from corporate America."

• Editorial Advisory Board, Amandla!
• Director, International Endowment for Democracy