NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE               DATE: 10/30/06 CONTACT: LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATIONS ASST., (413) 545-0162   SECOND ANNUAL COLLOQUIUM ON SOCIAL CHANGE “Building the Left in the Age of the Right: Developing a Lifetime Commitment” Amherst, MA – Activists and writers Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann will speak on Wednesday, November 8 at 5:30 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge of the Student Union at UMass Amherst.  Their talk, “Building the Left in the Age of the Right: Developing a Lifetime Commitment,” is the second annual colloquium on social change, and is sponsored by Special Collections and University Archives at the UMass Amherst Libraries and the UMass Amherst History Department.  The event is free and open to the public. Eric Mann is a prolific writer, and has been a civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, labor, and environmental organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, and the United Auto Workers, including eight years on auto assembly lines.  In 2001 he was a delegate to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa where he participated in the protests against the U.S. government’s walk-out.  He is the co-host of the weekly radio show, “Voices from the Frontlines,” on KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles.  Mann is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and sits on the Bus Riders Union Planning Committee. Eric Mann is the author of Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson; Taking on General Motors: Insurgency in a United Auto Workers Local; L.A.’s Lethal Air: New Strategies for Environmental Organizing; The 2004 Presidential Elections: A Turning Point for the U.S. Left; and Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies.  His latest book, Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, will be available at the event. Lian Hurst Mann is a founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the editor of the political magazine, AhoraNow.  She coordinates the Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing and is co-author of Towards a Program of Resistance: We Make These Demands Against the Institutions of U.S. Imperialism and Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up.  A Marxist, feminist, and anti-imperialist, Lian spent ten years as a shop-floor organizer against racism and for union democracy.  She was a founding member of the Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Union and member of the Berkeley Radical Psychiatry collective in the early 1970s. Educated as an architect and culture critic, she is co-editor of Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Strategies and Social Practices, and author of Structures for Knowledge for Change: Architecture as Social Practice. She has written extensively on culture, ideology, hegemony, and strategies for organic intellectual practice, particularly in the arts. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) at UMass Amherst is a center for research in the history and impact of social change.  Building upon the activist legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, SCUA collects materials relating to individuals and groups who create positive change in American society through political, economic, spiritual, or cultural means.  For more information, contact Robert Cox at (413) 545-6842 or rscox@library.umass.edu.