Keynote Speaker
The keynote is Professor Brett Williams of American University, Washigton D.C.
Brett Williams began her work as an anthropologist working among migrant farm workers in Illinois, exploring how they coped with terrible poverty and helping them organize a lettuce boycott and raise money for a halfway house. Since coming to Washington in 1976, Williams has written about gentrification, displacement, and homelessness; urban renewal and public housing; race and poverty; environmental justice in the Anacostia Watershed; urban nature; illness and inequality; the culture of and credit and debt. She has published six books, including Debt for Sale, which explores the rise of the super-profitable credit industry, including credit cards, student loans, pawnshops, and other predatory lenders ( http://american.edu/cas/faculty/bwillia.cfm ).
