STOCKBRIDGE – Norman Rockwell Museum’s Four Freedoms Forum series returns on Feb. 16, at 5:30 p.m., with a look at today’s refugee crisis. As borders tighten around the world, millions of people from impoverished and war-torn nations seek a safe place to restart their lives.

Featured speakers will include: Asma Abbas, associate professor of Politics and Philosophy at Bard College at Simon’s Rock; Hilary Greene, director of Berkshire Immigrant Center; and Dr. Charles Park, director of Berkshire Immigrant Stories Project. Community conversation at the Four Freedoms Forums is free and open to the public.

Abbas is associate professor of Politics & Philosophy and Emily H. Fisher Faculty Fellow at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She is also founding director of Hic Rosa, an art, politics, and education collective which hosts the Falsework School – moving communities of study on key social and political issues – in the Berkshires and abroad.  Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, she is a transdisciplinary political theorist interested in the history of forms of political existence. Situated at the intersection of politics, ethics, and aesthetics, her work addresses how these domains and their demands shape the tasks of knowledge and subject production in a global postcolonial context and inform struggles for peace and justice. She is the author of “Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics”  and several published essays, and is completing her second book, “Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited.”

Greene is the director of the Berkshire Immigrant Center. She grew up in the Berkshires and graduated from Mt. Greylock Regional High School, and earned her BA in Soviet and Russian Studies from Colby College. Her interest in immigration began in the early '90s when she spent four years living and working as an expatriate in St. Petersburg, Russia.  After returning to the United States, Hilary worked as the refugee resettlement coordinator at the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and helped to establish the Berkshire Immigrant Center. For the past six years Greene has helped coordinate United States Citizenship Naturalization Ceremonies held at Norman Rockwell Museum, in partnership with Berkshire Immigrant Center.

Park is an assistant professor of English at Berkshire Community College. Prior to joining BCC, he taught a wide range of composition and literature courses at both two-year and four-year institutions. His research, presentations and teaching focus on the creation of multicultural identity in contemporary consumer culture. Berkshire Immigrant Stories Project, his pilot program at BCC, will collect and share the stories of recent local immigrants. Park earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from California State University and his Ph.D. from Purdue University.

This series of Town Hall conversations inspired by Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings will explore aspects of our democracy and important social concerns in a rapidly changing and increasingly global world. Noted commentators will offer observations and inspire community discourse, with a reception to follow.

The tradition of Town Hall meetings has it roots in the founding of our nation where small New England communities would gather to invite citizen opinion and vote on matters of importance to the town.