AMHERST – Amid the destruction and violence of the Syrian civil war in 2012, journalist James Foley was kidnapped and publicly beheaded by his ISIS captors. But Foley’s legacy and spirit lives on for his friends, family and colleagues.
“It’s become cliche to say ‘give voice to the voiceless,’” said Charles M. Sennott, one of Foley’s former editors. “He really did it.”
Sennott and others will gather next week for “The Task of Witnessing: A Symposium in Honor of James W. Foley,” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The symposium begins at 7 p.m. Monday in Room S240 of the Integrative Learning Center with a screening of the new film “Jim: The James Foley Story.” A discussion will follow with Foley’s parents, Diane and John Foley, and film co-writer Heather MacDonald.
The event continues Tuesday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with panel discussions, poetry, remarks by Foley’s colleagues and a reading by English professor Martín Espada from the thesis Foley completed for his master’s degree in fine arts in writing at UMass. Espada was on Foley’s thesis committee.
Foley was working as a war correspondent in Libya in 2011 when he was kidnapped and held by Libyan forces for over a month. He was released and made a safe return to the U.S. But the ordeal did not deter him for further work.
He left again for the Middle East, where he did freelance reporting for media outlets including Boston-based GlobalPost. He was kidnapped and ultimately beheaded by ISIS members in a video released in August 2014.
He had a passion for telling stories in the region, said Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost. Sennott said he looks for similar ardor at The GroundTruth Project, where he is executive director.
“We look for journalists who share his spirit,” Sennott said. “It is wanting to tell the story of conflict, immigration, dislocation, from the perspective of the people who are living through it and being as close as possible to those people and actively listening to their stories in a way that you pull yourself away from the demands of the daily.”
Sennott will sit on the “Journalists on the Frontiers” panel discussion. He will be joined by Southampton resident Ben Brody, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a soldier and a civilian, and Dalia Mortada, a Syrian-American independent jounrnalist and recipient of The GroundTruth Projects’s 2015 fellowship in honor of Foley.
That discussion runs from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Bernie Dallas Room at Goodell Hall.
Stephen Clingman, professor of English and director of the UMass Interdisciplanry Studies Institute, which is hosting the event, said the symposium aims to pay tribute to the memory of Foley himself while also honoring the values to which he dedicated his life.
“He was always trying to find a way to give voice to people and giving them authority where they didn’t have any voice or authority,” Clingman said. “How do you do it in a very complicated world that we live in at present?”
For a complete schedule of the symposium visit www.umass.edu/isi/foley-symposium.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.