Our main feature this Wednesday, February 1 on the Peace & Justice Report will be an interview Bob did with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (USA Ret.). Wilkerson is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary. He previously taught for six years in the University Honors Program at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He holds an advanced degree in International Relations and another in National Security Studies. Wilkerson will be speaking in Sarasota Saturday night at the Florida Veterans for Common Sense annual Thomas Paine dinner. It’s at The Francis, 1289 Palm Avenue in Sarasota, at 6pm. Tickets may be purchased here.
Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army and is a Vietnam Veteran. Some career highlights are service as the Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia and special assistant to
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell.
Upon confirmation as Secretary of State, Secretary Powell placed Wilkerson on his Policy Planning Staff. His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff (2002-2005) and Associate Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haas.
Wilkerson has spoken to groups all across America including the United States Congress. He has written extensively on military and national security affairs, and has been published in a number of professional journals such as the Naval Institutes’ Proceedings, and The Naval War College Review as well as in newspapers and magazines. He has appeared on television with Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, and many others as well as in documentaries such Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” and Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight.”
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Our other feature this Wednesday will be a recorded interview Bob conducted with Thaddeus Müller. Müller is a senior lecturer at the Law School of Lancaster University (criminology). His current research is about homeowners who fight foreclosure fraud in general and especially the ‘Mortgage Justice Group’ in Sarasota. Some of his other interests are a) the marginalization of ‘ethnic’ youth in late modernity, especially in the context of the criminal justice system and b) related to the former, the social construction of perspectives on safety in public spaces of multicultural neighborhoods. Another major interest is the production, regulation and consumption of cannabis, especially how different US states and countries are legalizing recreational cannabis.His PhD-dissertation, ‘The warm city’ (2002) is based on a micro-sociological study of the (positive) meanings of fleeting interactions among strangers in the public realm. These public interactions help to create the experience of feeling at home in the city. After working for the University of Amsterdam, he did applied research for one of the major architect firms in the Netherlands and as a self-employed researcher. His commissioners range from municipalities, ministries to housing corporations and consultancy firms. In 2009 he gained a position as a faculty member at the section criminology at the Rotterdam Erasmus University. He also has been a lecturer at the Technical University in Delft and at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design.
Besides publications on the themes described above, he also has published on other topics such as on academic fraud (and its relation to academic organizations), especially on the case of Diederik Stapel and on Rock ‘n Roll, especially on Lou Reed. He has been an active member of the board of the European SSSI, has organized the conference of the European SSSI in Rotterdam (2012) and has edited several publications on European qualitative research.