Summary

One in a series of seminars presented by The Paley Center for Media in New York. This seminar honors political activist and Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams. Pat Mitchell (president and CEO, The Paley Center for Media) offers opening remarks before introducing Williams to the stage. Mitchell and Williams touch on such topics as: how her feelings on being a Nobel laureate have changed since she received the prize in 1997; her rural upbringing and how she was angered by the bullying her deaf, mentally disabled brother suffered when they were children; her early forays into activism; her extensive international campaign to ban anti-personnel land mines in the 1990's; her protests against the conflict in El Salvador in the 1980's; the story of Williams being sexually assaulted by a member of a Salvadoran death squad, which she did not reveal for many years afterward; her feelings upon finding out that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize; how winning the Prize changed Williams's relationship with media; the foundation of the Nobel Women's Initiative alongside fellow Nobel laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi in order to promote global women's rights; responses to Williams's "definition of peace"; her current activism against unmanned military weapons, or "killer robots" as she calls them; her thoughts on women in positions of political leadership; what she feels is the "decline of democracy" in the United States; her work supporting women's rights organizations in Burma and against gender-based violence on a global scale; her recollections of her visit to a summit of the African Union, along with a number of victims of sexual assault from across the continent; and her view of herself as an "optimistic pessimist." Clips are interspersed throughout, including: excerpts from Williams' 2011 appearance on "The Colbert Report" with Stephen Colbert; and a clip of Williams speaking at a 2010 TEDWomen conference. Also includes Williams reading an excerpt from her 2008 autobiography "My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize."