Religion, Violence, and Revolutionary Love - a lecture by Valarie Kaur

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Valarie Kaur (Stanford 2003) is an American interfaith leader. As a lawyer, filmmaker, social entrepreneur, and Sikh activist, she works with communities to channel their stories into movements for social change. She has made award-winning films and led multimedia campaigns on many issues including racial profiling, gun violence, marriage equality, immigration detention, solitary confinement, and hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans. She is a television commentator on MSNBC and opinion contributor to CNN, NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Hill, and The New York Times. Valarie founded Groundswell Movement of 200,000+ members, the largest multifaith online organizing community known for “dynamically strengthening faith-based organizing in the 21st century.” She earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School, where she founded the Yale Visual Law Project to train future lawyers to make films for social and policy change. Valarie has served as the Media and Justice Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, where she co-founded Faithful Internet and advocates for Internet freedom. The Center for American Progress calls Valarie “ a standout figure in the world of interfaith organizing and activism.” In 2013, she was named Person of the Year by India Abroad and one of eight Asian “Women of Influence.” Valarie has addressed audiences at the White House, Pentagon, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, UN Office on the Prevention of Genocide, the US Institute of Peace, and on more than 250 U.S. college campuses. In 2013, she was the youngest person to deliver the Stanford Baccalaureate Commencement Address. She was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2015.