This EHS grad seminar is a special one, covering a really important topic: the need for legal and safety protection for refugee women and children. As you probably know, there are scores of large refugee camps in different parts of the world, and, all too often, women and children are abused or worse, either in the camps or on their way to the camps. We are even seeing some of this here in the States, in the commercially staffed refugee detention centers on contract to ICE.

If you look at the refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Hungary, Libya, Central African Republic, etc, human rights abuses against women and children are rampant. So, come and learn from our own students (Noor Abdel Rahman, Taylor Lutich, and Kara Buckmaster) about this important issue dogging the world's attempts to provide emergency health and humanitarian services for refugees in disparate parts of the world. Non-EMS students and faculty are welcome to attend.

Portrait Garden is a series of audio and photographic portraits of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, MD, culminating a 1-1/2 year long collaboration between Ruby Award winning artist and Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lynn Cazabon. In the collaboration the inmates created perennial gardens on the prison grounds consisting of plants chosen to represent each woman, and Professor Cazabon recorded interviews with each about the selected plants and her past and present experiences with gardening. The completed portraits are photographs of the selected plants that were planted and cultivated over the course of a year, displayed with a short textual excerpt from the audio interviews and QR codes, which when scanned with a mobile device, play the full interview with each woman. The complete set of images and audio interviews are available through the project website: http://portraitgarden.org

For the month of December, Portrait Garden will be displayed as a series of 100 posters in trains within the Baltimore Light Rail system. This public dissemination is conceived as a moving gallery designed to bring the women metaphorically into the community of Baltimore City.