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Call for Submissions
ShuoMii is a dynamic, responsive and collaborative not-for-profit based media Mega-source set with the purpose of changing the LGBT dynamic within itself and society. ShuoMii’s goal is to revolutionize the stereotypical opinion of our community by enabling a platform that will facilitate a positive image by influencing people with art poetry, film, photography, music and other literary works. Through empowerment ShuoMii plans to create a safer environment dedicated to promoting a positive image for the LGBT POCC, so that we may promote acceptance and understanding. At this moment, there is no major magazine which brings LGBT People of Color writers and artists to the forefront. We believe it is time to publish such a magazine!
ShuoMii will:
- Introduce a wide audience to literature and art (film, music, and photographs) by the LGBT community.
- Provide a unique opportunity for underrepresented writers and artists viewpoints.
- Discover and publish emerging and developing writers and artists.
ShuoMii will be published both in print and on the web. Print costs are high, so our agenda is to build a website first and print four magazines a year when we have the funds. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue! All LGBT people of Color artists, musicians, performers and writers are encouraged to submit work.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Prose and Poetry: Submit up to 3 pages of work(double-spaced, 12 pt.). It is best to send all of your work in one Microsoft Word (.doc) or text (.rtf) attachment. Graphic files: Submit up to 5 visual art images or photographs. Photography and visual art should be sent using .tif files ( at least 300 dpi /300 pixels per inch resolution) or .jpeg files. Please include a short artist’s statement about the work submitted. Songs and Sound Art: Submit up to five MP3 files. Please include a short artist’s statement about the work submitted. All sound art and music will be featured mostly on our website. Video Art/Movies: Please send a URL to the work if it is online. If not, fill out the submission form and we will contact you about how to submit your video. Please include an artists statement about the work. ALL submissions: Please include a short bio (two sentences) with your name (as you want it to appear in print), email, phone, and mailing address. Issue Topic: Acceptance (coming out, etc)
DEADLINE for submissions to be considered for the inaugural issue will be May 16, 2011.
Ready to send in your work? The submission form is HERE.
Thank you! We look forward to seeing your work!
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The Guardian 2011
International Development Journalism Competition on Global Poverty
Deadline: 13 June 2011
Many crucial issues facing the developing world are often overlooked or underrepresented by the media. The Guardian International Development Journalism competition 2011 aims to highlight some of them. We are searching for enthusiastic writers who want to demonstrate their journalistic abilities by examining these issues.
The competition, in partnership with a group of UK-based international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – is now in its fourth year, building on the successes of 2008, 2009 and 2010.
The NGOs are Marie Stopes International, CARE International UK, The David Rattray Memorial Trust (UK), Direct Relief International, FHI, International Childcare Trust, Malaria Consortium, Plan UK, and Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture.
The competition is sponsored by Barclays and GlaxoSmithKline.
The challenge is to write a feature of 650 to 1,000 words by 10 June on an aspect of global poverty that deserves greater media exposure. The 16 best writers (eight amateur, eight professional) will be selected from a longlist of around 40 entrants, all of whom will have their articles published online at guardian.co.uk.
The 16 finalists will be flown to a developing country to research a new assignment. The finalist pieces will then be published in two Guardian newspaper supplements, after the announcement of the two winners at an awards ceremony in November 2011.
Theme
To enter the competition, you need to write a 650-1,000 word feature on one of the 16 themes listed below.The page for each theme listed tells you more about the subject, giving background information on the theme, guidance on writing about it and some initial links to help your research. This is the brief.
Make sure that you follow this brief. You can interpret the theme in whatever way you think fit, but should not veer off the subject or your entry will not be accepted.
# Aids orphans and the challenges they face
# Can empowering women end poverty?
# Can long-term disaster recovery lead to improved healthcare?
# Early marriage: what is the right age for a girl to become a woman?
# Emergency Preparedness - how do prepared areas fare better post-disaster?
# From small farmers to big levers: how can smallholders best link up to improve their livelihoods?
# Gender inequality and limitations in impoverished areas
# Increasing access to anti-malaria drugs in sub-Saharan Africa. The role of community change agents
# Long-term disaster response in impoverished areas
# Making the small scale businessman a behavioural change agent for malaria control in Africa
# Socio-cultural barriers to family planning
# The challenges faced by disabled girls
# The impact of unsafe abortions on MDG 5: Improve maternal health
# What are the challenges and the long-term importance of providing shelter after emergencies?
# What role, if any, should the private sector / multinationals play in development?
# What stops children in rural areas going to school?
# Why are Neglected Tropical Diseases neglected?
# Youth unemployment: what future?How to enter the awards
All you need to do is write a 650-1000 word article on an aspect of global poverty covered by the themes set, and upload it using our online entry form. The entry period closes on Monday 13 June 2011.
FAMILIARISE yourself with the Guardian and guardian.co.uk. Online, the Katine and the Global Development section of the site provides a good template of the sort of writing the Guardian values.
Judging criteria What the judges will be looking for, particularly in the first round of the competition:
• Clear and concise argument based on the chosen theme
• Supported by factual evidence
• That your piece meets the theme brief
• A piece that "lives" to the reader. Does it feel real? Are the people or situations described vivid and believable to the audience?
• No patronising or sensationalist statements
• Sense that the writer has understood the subject
• Accessible to people who don't know much about the subject.
• Good writing skills, grammatically correct with an absence of jargon
• Readable from a journalistic perspectiveEntry guidance
Additional/support material
Please do not send any additional material with your entry
Tips
• Familiarise yourself with the Guardian and guardian.co.uk. This will give you an idea of what we are looking for in terms of tone, style and content.
• Numerous styles of journalism – comment, news reports, personal testimonies – can come under the rubric of development journalism. For the purpose of this competition, however, we are looking for features.
• Don't be sensationalistic or use hyperbolic, objectifying language. Be measured and objective, even if you are writing about a situation that makes you angry. The experience of one person – however interesting – may not be representative of the situation.
• If you are going to write about something that is very controversial, or has not had any publicity in the UK before, you should be able to back up your facts through at least two unimpeachable sources.
• Although many people will have been to the countries they write about, it is not essential to writing a good piece for this competition. One of last year's finalists compared a situation she knew about in the UK with the developing world.
• Make sure you stick to the theme and keep to the maximum word count of 1,000 words.
• Ask someone else to proofread your story. Typos and grammatical errors are a big turn-off for judges and editors.
• One way in which last year's amateur entries stood out from the professionals was in energy, passion and enthusiasm. If you are a professional, we don't want to read cynicism and world-weariness.
Entry to the 2011 International Development Journalism competition opens on Tuesday, 3 May.
Contact Information:
For submissions: click here
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk
National Geographic Multimedia Grant
for Minority-Culture Storytellers
Deadlines: 15 June 2011, 15 September 2011, 15 December 2011National Geographic's All Roads Film Project
A MULTIMEDIA FESTIVAL AND GRANTS PROGRAM CREATED TO PROVIDE A PLATFORM FOR INDIGENOUS AND UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITY-CULTURE STORYTELLERS.
All Roads Seed Grants
The Seed Grant Program funds film projects from indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture filmmakers year-round and from all reaches of the globe. The program awards up to 16 film projects annually with grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. Submission deadlines are quarterly on the 15th of each March, June, September and December. All applications must be received in the National Geographic All Roads office no later than midnight Eastern Standard Time on each of the quarterly due dates. If the due date falls on a Saturday or Sunday Eastern Standard Time, then applications are to be received in the National Geographic All Roads office no later than the Friday before the 15th of that particular quarterly due date.
SEED GRANT APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
1. All submissions must be written in English.
2. Submit a one-paragraph synopsis, a treatment, and describe how the Seed Grant will result in a tangible completed work (e.g.: fully produced documentary or film, short promo for the project; a treatment; etc).
3. Submit a proposed All Roads Seed Grant budget in U.S. dollars itemizing the amount requested ($1,000 - $10,000). Also provide the full production budget on a separate sheet.
4. Submit a narrative paragraph on why you have chosen a specific cultural identifier, for example, Native American tribal affiliation, Tibetan refugee, Masai, and what that identifier means to you. If you do not come from a minority culture or indigenous community, please submit documentation that you have been designated to speak for such a culture or community.
5. Submit a short bio and a resume including any institutional affiliation, current position and educational degrees.
6. A complete Application Form, including the Festival Rights Form (see below), is required for consideration.
7. Submit a production timeline or schedule indicating deadlines that move the production to completion.
8. Grant applicants must provide documentation that they are actively soliciting all necessary rights, licenses, clearances and releases necessary for exhibition of their finished works at the All Roads Film Festival screenings, promotional opportunities and events.
9. Applications will only be reviewed once all required materials have been submitted.
10. When the project is completed, awardee will provide a copy of the project to All Roads Film Festivals in the project’s final cut.
ELIGIBILITY
This grant is open to indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture filmmakers, as well as filmmakers who can demonstrate that they have been designated by indigenous or minority communities to tell their story.
HOW TO APPLY
To apply for an All Roads Film Project Seed Grant, you must complete and submit the Application Form (below) as well as the information and items listed under, Application Requirements (above) to, All Roads Seed Grants, National Geographic, 1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; or submit your application with attachments via email to allroads@ngs.org, Subject: All Roads Seed Grant Application.
For additional information, call 202.857.7660 or email at allroads@ngs.org.
GRANT RESTRICTIONS
All Roads Seed Grant funds must be used toward the development and production of a feature film, long documentary, short documentary, shorts, animation or music video. These grants are intended to function as primary or secondary support for your film project. They may be used for equipment, travel for field research, editing time, etc. ENTRANTS MAY SEEK SUPPLEMENTARY FUNDS FROM OTHER ORGANIZATIONS.
As a condition of the grant, you are required to provide an accounting of moneys spent. Awardees must send updates to All Roads at least every three months.
This grant MAY NOT be used for indirect costs, overhead, and other expenses not directly related to the development and production of a film project. Funds MAY NOT be used for travel to film/media-related meetings or conferences, legal actions, land acquisition, endowments, fees or salaries. (For clarity, the monies may not be used for “above the line” costs). Further, the monies must be spent as specified in the budget form.
GRANT TERMS
NGS shall have the right but not the obligation to present the finished works at the All Roads Film Festival after the completion of the work. Therefore, it is required to submit a signed copy of the Festival Rights Form, attached to the Seed Grant Application. If NGS chooses not to premiere the film project, NGS will release those rights to you and you may exploit them as you wish, subject to the credit requirements listed below.
As a condition of the grant, you give to National Geographic the exclusive, irrevocable option to premiere your film project at a National Geographic All Roads Film Festival. Grant recipients are expected to provide National Geographic Society and its affiliates or subsidiaries with the right of first negotiation and last refusal to license the broadcast and distribution rights to their film project.
Further, if the film project is included in a All Roads Film Festival, you will be required to provide documentation that all necessary rights have been cleared for the contemplated uses. Attached is a sample personal release that must be used is order to demonstrate that rights have been cleared.
Grant recipients MAY be offered the opportunity to screen their finished works on NGS’s Domestic and International Channels, which reach well over 200 million people worldwide, or to sell or license their film to NGS’s Feature Film group. Seed Grant recipients can sell or license finished works wherever they choose, subject to the credit requirements below. NGS, however, reserves the option to match all outside offers for broadcast and distribution. If the recipient IS offered the opportunity for television broadcast through NGC, an additional rights release form will be necessary.
All grant recipients are required to add a “Thank you to the National Geographic All Roads Film Project” and/or the All Roads Film Project logo to the credits at the end of their film, and required to give a verbal acknowledgement such as, “thank you to the National Geographic All Roads Film Project” to all audiences at any of the finished film’s festival screenings if the producer and/or director are present to introduce or moderate the film’s screening.
GRANT LIMITS
All Roads Film Project Seed Grants range up to a maximum of $10,000. Grants granted subject to applicable U.S. law.
TIME FRAME FOR ANY GIVEN YEAR
Receive Applications by/ Award Notifications:
March 15th/ May 1st
June 15th/ August 1st
September/ 15th November 1st
December 15th/ February 1st (of the following year)Contact Information:
For inquiries: call 202.857.7660 or email at allroads@ngs.org
For submissions: All Roads Seed Grants, National Geographic, 1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Website: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
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Moderated by Isolde Brielmaier, a conversation with artists Sanford Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Renee Cox and Xaviera SimmonsAdmission: Free
Information: http://bit.ly/eIOgep
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'If power is not seized,
counter-revolution will rise'
Monday, 31 January 2011
Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia. He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut. He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals. His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007) has been widely acclaimed as the most authentic rewriting of the world history of the postcolonial Global South and the idea of the "Third World".
Pothik Ghosh (PG): In what sense can the recent events in the Arab World be called revolutions? How are they different from the colour revolutions of the past two decades?
Vijay Prashad (VP): All revolutions are not identical. The colour revolutions in Eastern Europe had a different tempo. They were also of a different class character. They were also along the grain of US imperialism, even though the people were acting not for US but for their own specific class and national interests. I have in mind the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Otpor in the Ukraine, among others, was well lubricated by George Soros's Open Society and the US government's National Democratic Institute. Russian money also swept in on both sides of the ledger. These Eastern European revolutions were mainly political battles in regions of the world still unsettled by the traumatic transition from state socialism to predatory capitalism.
The Arab revolt that we now witness is something akin to a "1968" for the Arab World. Sixty per cent of the Arab population is under 30 (70 per cent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small population of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world: Tunisia's literacy rate is 75 per cent, Egypt's is just over 70 per cent, Libya almost 90 per cent. The educated lower-middle-class and middle-class youth have not been able to find jobs. The concatenation of humiliations revolts these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being a second-class citizen on the world stage - second to the US-Israel and so on - was overwhelming. The chants on the streets are about this combination of dignity, justice and jobs.
PG: Does the so-called Jasmine Revolution have in it to transform the preponderant character of the politico-ideological topography of oppositional politics - from Islamist identitarianism to an organic variant of working-class politics - in West Asia and the Maghreb? Under what circumstances can this series of general strikes, which seem to be spreading like a brushfire through the region, morph into a constellation of counter-power? Or, would that in your eyes merely be a vicarious desire of Leftists from outside the region?
VP: I fear that we are being vicarious. The youth, the working class, the middle class have opened up the tempo of struggle. The direction it will take is not clear. I am given over to analogies when I see revolutions, largely because the events of change are so contingent.
It is in the melee that spontaneity and structure jostle. The organised working class is weaker than the organised theocratic bloc, at least in Egypt. Social change of a progressive type has come to the Arab lands largely through the Colonels. Workers' struggles have not reached fruition in any country. In Iraq, where the workers movement was advanced in the 1950s, it was preempted by the military - and then they made a tacit alliance.
One cannot say what is going to happen with certainty. The Mexican Revolution opened up in 1911, but didn't settle into the PRI regime till the writing of the 1917 constitution and the elevation of Carranza to the presidency in 1920 or perhaps Cardenas in 1934. I find many parallels between Mexico and Egypt. In both, the Left was not sufficiently developed. Perils of the Right always lingered. If the Pharonic state withers, as Porfirio Diaz's state did, the peasants and the working class might move beyond spontaneity and come forward with some more structure. Spontaneity is fine, but if power is not seized effectively, counter-revolution will rise forth effectively and securely.
PG: What are, in your opinion, the perils if such a transformation fails to occur? Will not such a failure lead to an inevitable consolidation of the global neoliberal conjuncture, which manifests itself in West Asia as fascistic Islamism on one hand and authoritarianism on the other?
VP: If such a transformation fails, which god willing it won't, then we are in for at least three options: (1) the military, under Egyptian ruling class and US pressure, will take control. This is off the cards in Tunisia for now, mainly because the second option presented itself; (2) elements of the ruling coalition are able to dissipate the crowds through a series of hasty concessions, notably the removal of the face of the autocracy (Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia). If Mubarak leaves and the reins of the Mubarakian state are handed over to the safe-keeping of one of his many bloodsoaked henchman such as Omar Suleiman…. Mubarak tried this with Ahmed Shafik, but he could as well have gone to Tantawi….all generals who are close to Mubarak and seen as safe by the ruling bloc. We shall wait to see who all among the elite will start to distance themselves from Mubarak, and try to reach out to the streets for credibility. As a last-ditch effort, the Shah of Iran put Shapour Bakhtiar as PM. That didn't work. Then the revolt spread further. If that does not work, then, (3) the US embassy will send a message to Mohamed El-Baradei, giving him their green light. El-Baradei is seen by the Muslim Brotherhood as a credible candidate. Speaking to the crowds on January 30 he said that in a few days the matter will be settled. Does this mean that he will be the new state leader, with the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and certainly with sections of Mubarak's clique? Will this be sufficient for the crowds? They might have to live with it. El-Baradei is a maverick, having irritated Washington at the IAEA over Iran. He will not be a pushover. On the other hand, he will probably carry on the economic policy of Mubarak. His entire agenda was for political reforms. This is along the grain of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment part 2, viz., the same old privatisation agenda alongside "good governance". El-Baradei wanted good governance in Egypt. The streets want more. It will be a truce for the moment, or as Chavez said, "por ahora".
PG: The Radical Islamists, their near-complete domination of the oppositional/dissident politico-ideological space in the region notwithstanding, have failed to rise up to the occasion as an effective organisational force - one especially has the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt in mind. What do you think is the reason?
VP: The Muslim Brotherhood is on the streets. It has set its own ideology to mute. That is very clear. Its spokesperson Gamel Nasser has said that they are only a small part of the protests, and that the protest is about Egypt not Islam. This is very clever. It is similar to what the mullahs said in Iran during the protests of 1978 and 1979. They waited in the wings for the "multitude" to overthrow the Shah, and then they descended. Would the MB do that? If one says this is simply the people's revolt and not that of any organised force, it's, of course, true. But it is inadequate. The ‘people' can be mobilised, can act; but can the ‘people' govern without mediation, without some structure. This is where the structured elements come into play. If there is no alternative that forms, then the Muslim Brotherhood will take power. That the Muslim Brotherhood wants to stand behind El-Baradei means they don't want to immediately antagonise the US. That will come later.
PG: What does the emergence of characters like El-Baradei signify? Are they really the "political face" of the resistance as the global media seems to be projecting?
VP: El-Baradei comes with credibility. He served in the Nasserite ministry of external affairs in the 1960s. He then served in the foreign ministry under Ismail Fahmi. One forgets how impressive Fahmi was. He resigned from Sadat's cabinet when the Egyptian leader went to Jerusalem. Fahmi was a Nasserite. For one year, El-Baradei served with Boutros Boutros Ghali at the foreign ministry. That was the start of this relationship. Both fled for the UN bureaucracy. Boutros Ghali was more pliant than Fahmi. I think El-Baradei is more along Fahmi's lines. At the IAEA he did not bend to the US pressure. Given that he spent the worst years of Mubarak's rule outside Cairo gives him credibility. A man of his class would have been coopted into the Mubarak rule. Only an outsider like him can be both of the ruling bloc (in terms of class position and instinct) and outside the ruling apparatus (i. e. of Mubarak's cabinet circle). It is a point of great privilege.
With the MB careful not to act in its own face, and the ‘people' without easy ways to spot leaders, and with Ayman Nour not in the best of health, it is credible that El-Baradei takes on the mantle.
PG: Is the disappearance of working-class and other avowedly Left-democratic political organisations, which had a very strong presence in that part of the world till a few decades ago, merely the result of their brutal suppression by various authoritarian regimes (such as Saddam Hussein's in Iraq, Hafez Assad's in Syria and Nasser's and Mubarak's in Egypt) and/or their systematic physical decimation by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood? Or, does it also have to do with certain inherent politico-theoretical weaknesses of those groups? Has not the fatal flaw of left/ communist/ socialist forces in the Islamic, particularly the Arab, world been their unwillingness, or inability, to grasp and pose the universal question of the "self-emancipation of the working class" in the determinateness of their specific culture and historicity?
VP: Don't underestimate the repression. In Egypt, the 2006 budget for internal security was $1.5 billion. There are 1.5 million police officers, four times more than army personnel. I am told that there is now about 1 police officer per 37 people. This is extreme. The subvention that comes from the US of $1.3 billion helps fund this monstrosity.
The high point of the Egyptian working class was in 1977. This was the bread uprising. It was trounced. Sadat then went to the IMF with a cat's smile. He inaugurated the infitah. He covered the books by three means: the infitah allowed for some export-oriented production, the religious cover (al-rais al-mou'min) allowed him to try and undercut the Brotherhood, and seek some funds from the Saudis, and the bursary from the US for the deal he cut with Israel. This provided the means to enhance the security apparatus and further crush the workers' movements.
Was there even space or time to think about creative ways to pose the self-emancipation question? Were there intellectuals who were doing this? Are we in Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs, worrying about the decline of the questions? Recall that in March 1954 the major Wafd and Communist unions made a pact with the Nasserite regime; for concessions it would support the new dispensation. That struck down its independence. The unions put themselves in the service of the Nation over their Class. In the long run, this was a fatal error. But the organised working class was small (as Workers on the Nile
shows, most workers were in the "informal" sector). The best that the CP and the Wafd could do in the new circumstances was to argue that the working class plays a central role in the national movement. Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council, on the other hand, heard this but did not buy it. They saw the military as the agent of history. It was their prejudice.
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'It prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon': Vijay Prashad on the Arab revolt (Part II) |
| Tuesday, 01 February 2011 | |
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This is the concluding part of our interview with Vijay Prashad, a prominent Marxist scholar who teaches at Trinity College, Connecticut. To read the first part, please click here. His recent book, The Darker Nations, was chosen as the Best Nonfiction book by the Asian American Writers' Workshop in 2008 and it won the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award in 2009.
Vijay Prashad (VP): Strictly speaking, Gramsci's "national-popular" is the emergence of the mass throughurban collective action, with the rural bursting through, and then being guided by the Jacobin (his word for an organised political force). The mass might drift into a-political action or passivity, Gramsci wrote, without the guidance of that Jacobin force. In today's times, there is a tendency to hear about something like the Jacobin and shiver in fear that the energy of the "multitude" will be usurped by the Jacobin, that the authentic politics of the street will be taken over by the Organisation. It is in essence a misreading of anarchistic politics that this sort of fear has taken hold. I do not believe that anarchism is pure disorder; for those who believe this I propose a reading of Errico Malatesta's "Anarchy and Organisation." Of course, for those on the Marxist side of the ledger, Gramsci's comments are our bread and butter. There is a need for the national-popular to be articulated through mass protest and the Jacobin canals. There is not so much that divides the Black and the Red. It is not the case that only Edward Said has dealt with the national-popular in the Arab world. Take the case of Lebanon, where it is the Marxist historian (and eminent journalist) Fawaz Trabulsi who has written a remarkably informative account of the thwarted national-popular, with the emergence of Hezbollah. To my mind, Trabulsi's is the best account of the Lebanese problem. It must be read widely to better understand the national dilemmas and the national-popular potentialities. My own interest in the Arab predicament was partly drawn by the work of people from an earlier generation like the writer and PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated in 1972. In the context of this new Arab Revolt, I recommend Kanafani's pamphlet The 1936-37 Revolt in Palestine, a model for how to theorise the national-popular through the material of a revolt. These are role models for those who want to do detailed work on the Arab potential. The contingent is important, no doubt, but so too are the broad structures that need to be unearthed and developed.
PG: Lebanese-French Marxist Gilbert Achcar writes in his 'Eleven Theses on the Current Resurgence of Islamic Fundamentalism': "What is an elementary democratic task elsewhere - separation of religion and state - is so radical in Muslim countries, especially the Middle East, that even the "dictatorship of the proletariat" will find it a difficult task to complete. It is beyond the scope of other classes." Does the 'Jasmine' Revolution portend a change for the better on that score? If not, how, in your view, should the working class forces in the region go about their business of shaping an effective ideological idiom that is rooted in local culture and yet articulates a question that is fundamentally global? VP: We tend to exaggerate the authority of the clerics, or at least to treat it as natural, as eternal. Certainly, since the 1970s, clericalism has had the upper hand in the domain of the national-popular. In the Arab world, this has everything to do with the calcification of the secular regimes of the 1950s (the new states formed out of the export of Nasserism: from Egypt to Iraq), the deterioration of the Third World Project (especially the fractures in OPEC that opened up in the summer of 1990 and led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), and the promotion and funding of the advance guard of the Islamism through the World Muslim League (by the Saudis. The WML's impact can be seen from Chechnya to Pakistan, and in parts of Indonesia). If one goes back and looks at the period when the Third World Project and Nasserism were dominant, what you'd find is clerical intellectuals in the midst of an ideological battle against Marxism (mainly), at the same time as they borrowed from Bolshevik techniques of party building to amass their own organisational strength. I wrote about this in New Left Review ("Sadrist Stratagems," in 2008) where I catalogued the intellectual work of Baqir al-Sadr, with his Iqtisaduna, a critique of Capital Vol. 1. Baqir's al Da'wah al-Islamiyah was modeled on the Iraqi Communist Party, then dominant in the Shia slums of Baghdad. If you go farther East along this tendency, you will run into Haji Misbach, an Indonesian cleric, also known as Red Haji, who confronted the dynamic Indonesian Communist Party with his own brand of Islamic Communism. Like Baqir, Misbach was perplexed by the popularity of the CP in his society. He wanted to find a way to bring the spiritual to socialism. These are all precursors of Ali Shariati, the great Iranian thinker who was influenced by the Third World Project, and by Marxism, but once more wanted to bring the spiritual into it. For all these thinkers, the problem was quite the opposite to what it is today: the workers seemed ascendant, driven by the science of secular socialism. It terrified them, as much as we are assaulted by the rise of the clerics over the last few decades. It is also not the case that the religious is more difficult to expunge in the Arab lands, or that Islam is more intractable than other faiths. If one turns toward India, or turns toward the United States, it is clear that the religious domain is often very reluctant to wither away. It was equally hard to push it away in the USSR. This is not just a question of religion, or Islam, but of cultural change in general. Cultural change from below is slow-moving, excruciating. Cultural change from above is much faster, the tempo clearer. It has to do with who controls the cultural institutions, but also with the depth of cultural resources. Religion emerges over the millenia as a shelter from the turmoil of life, and it enters so deeply into the social life of people that it cannot be so easy to remove its tentacles. Of course Islam might be harder to walk away from, given that it, unlike say Brahmanism or Catholicism, has a much finer edge to its egalitarianism. This is what propelled it from a minor Arabian religion to Andalucia and China within fifty years of its emergence. I would say one more thing on this: since the Utopian horizon of socialism is in eclipse, why should someone risk their lives in struggle for it? The idea of the inevitability of socialism inspired generations to give themselves over to the creation of the Jacobin force. Religion has an unshakable eschatology, which secular politics absent Utopia lacks. No wonder that religion has inspired action, even if destructive rather than revolutionary, whereas secular politics is less inspirational these days. The Arab Revolt of 2011 prefigures for the Arab people a new horizon. That is why it has moved from Tunisia to Jordan. Ben Ali's departure set the new horizon. It is what the youth hold onto. If he can be made to flee, why not Mubarak, why not Abdullah II, and if the remanants of the Saudi Voice of the Vanguard decide to blow off the cobwebs and get to the streets, then the repellent Abdullah of Saudi (whose idea of political reform was to bring in his son-in-law into the Education ministry!).
PG: Does not the ongoing 'Jasmine' Revolution explode the myth of a postcolonial, anti-imperialist Third World, which is precisely what you deal with and kind of theoretically anticipate in your book The Darker Nations? If that is so, what is the new programmatic direction that the anti-imperialist struggle must now take? VP: My book, The Darker Nations, provided the history of the collapse of the Third World Project. This collapse begins to be visible by the early 1980s. The roots are there in the defeat of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) process (that opens in the UN in 1973), in the break-down of solidarity in OPEC, in the exhaustion of the import-substitution industrialisation model, and in the narrowing of political freedoms in the Global South. The "assassination" of the Project comes through the debt crisis (1982 in Mexico opens the door) and through the reconfiguration of the international order by the late 1980s with the disapperance of the USSR, and the push for primacy by the US (the salvo was fired in Iraq in 1991, when the US pushed out the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and ignored an attempt by the USSR to mediate on behalf of Saddam Hussein). US primacy by the early 1990s throws salt on the wound of the Third World Project. My interest in the book was to seek out the dialectics of freedom that would emerge out of the corpse of the Third World Project. What is left in it to be revived, and what are the social forces capable of building a new revolutionary horizon? The other side of history opens up with La Caracazo, the rebellion in Caracas in 1989 that prefigures the emergence of Chavez. By the way, in 2009, a Brookings survey found that Chavez was the most popular world leader in the Middle East! Where is Chavez of Arabia, we asked, but were not confident. In 2007, in his "Jottings on the Conjuncture," Perry Anderson bemoaned the paralysis on the Arab Street. The mutterings existed, and indeed the insurgency in Iraq showed that the will was there. Protests in Western Sahara and in Lebanon had become commonplace. But these did not say what the Tunisians said, which was that they, like the Bolivarians, were prepared to stake themselves for an alternative pathway into the future. From Caracas to Cairo, the expressway of Freedom is being paved. The Bolivarians are at a much more advanced stage. They have been able to stave off counter-revolution, and even though still in peril, they are able to leverage their oil wealth into some very interesting experiments toward socialism. It is going to be imperative to prove for our Egyptian and Arab friends that the path out of Ben Ali and Mubarak does not lead to Paris and New York, but to Caracas and La Paz. The programme of socialist construction is being tentatively written (with lots of errors, of course). We have to nudge in that direction, and against the idea of liberty as the value above egalitarianism and socialism. There are few explicitly anti-imperialist slogans in the air at this time. By the way, this other side of history will form the final chapter of The Poorer Nations, which I am now putting together, and which should be done by the Summer of 2011.
PG: The 'Muslim Question' has rightly been one of the key preoccupations of the Indian Left in all its variegated multiplicity. Yet it has consistently failed to frame and articulate it as a question having a transformative potential. What lessons must the Indian Left - which has in large measure centred its articulation of the 'Muslim Question' on solidarity with the Islamicised anti-Americanism of the Perso-Arabic peoples - draw from the current upsurges that would enable it to overcome its failing on that score? VP: To get to the heart of the issue of the 'Muslim Question,' one has to understand the theory of alliance formation. In today's world, the principal contradiction, the Large Contradiction, is between Imperialism and Humanity. The social force of imperialism seeks to thwart the humanity of the planet by creating political rules for economic theft (the preservation of intellectual property for the Multi-national corporations, the allowance of subsidies in the North and not in the South, the enforcement of debt contracts for the South, but not for the international banks), and if these rules are broken, by military power. Imperialism is the principal problem in our planet, for our humanity. The Lesser Contradiction is between the Left and the Reactionaries, who are not identical to imperialism. Indian Hindutva, American Evangelicalism and Zionism are all reactionary, but not part of the Lesser Contradiction. Those forms of Reaction are ensconced in the Larger Contradiction, since they are handmaidens of imperialism. What I refer to as the Reactionaries of the Lesser Contradiction are organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and so on. I indicate the Muslim groups not from an anti-Islamic point of view, but because, as I just mentioned, most of the other Reactionary religious formations are inside the essence of imperialism (they are joined there by the official clerics of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt). These other groups are antagonistic to imperialism, and are from this standpoint able to capture the sentiments and politics of the people who are anti-imperialist nationalists. We are divided from them, but not against them in the same way as we are against Imperialism. To make these two contradictions the same is to fall into the liberal error of equivalence. We need to retain their separation. That said, it is important to always offer a scrupulous and forthright critique of their shortcomings and their social degeneration. In 2007, the Communist Parties in India held an anti-imperialist meeting in Delhi. A Hezbollah representative (I think it was Ali Fayyad) came for it. At the plenary, Aijaz Ahmad lit into Fayyad regarding Hezbollah's position on women's rights. It is just what should be done. By all means form tactical alliances, if need be, but don't let them get away with silence on the issues that matter to us, on social equality, on economic policy, on political rights. Even the Lesser Contradiction needs to be pushed and prodded. It has virulence at its finger tips. That has to be scorched. Clara Zetkin warned that the emergence of fascism can be laid partly on the failure of the workers and their Jacobin to move toward revolution effectively enough. Part of that effectiveness is to challenge those in the Lesser Contradiction, who are equally willing in certain circumstances to turn against the Left and become the footsoldiers of fascism. In the 1980s, Hezbollah mercilessly killed cadre of the Lebanese Communist Party. Over the past three decades, relationships have mellowed and the much weaker LCP now works with Hezbollah in various ways. The LCP sees Hezbollah as "a party of resistance," as it were. Part of the Lesser Contradiction. That has to be the attitude in the short-term. The LCP seeks out elements who are not fully given over to Dawa, the hardened Islamic militants in Hezbollah. There is another side that is more nationalist than Islamist. They are to be cultivated. There is also a part of Hezbollah that is perfectly comfortable with neo-liberalism, privatisation of the commons and so on. They too lean toward the Larger Contradiction. One has to be supple, forge a way ahead, be assertive in unity, find a way out of the weakness and reconstruct a left pole. A weak left with the national-popular in the hands of the "Islamist" parties: that is the context. |
via radicalnotes.com
Kenyan youth find their superhero
April 21, 2011 6:02 a.m. EDT
Staff and artists at the offices of Shujaaz FM creating the next issue of the comic.
Copyright Brendan BannonSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Shujaaz.fm is a daily radio show, monthly comic book and online community
- Radio show and comic carry educational and inspirational messages for young people
- The characters have thousands of friends on Facebook
- The story lines mainly have an agricultural theme or are about how to make money
(CNN) -- An unlikely superhero is coming to the rescue of a generation of young Kenyans.
Meet Boyie, a 19-year-old guy who has left school and can't find a job. To keep himself busy he's built an FM radio station in his bedroom and hacks into other programs in order to broadcast his show under his alter ego DJB.
Boyie is slowly taking over the hearts and minds of Kenyans across the country with Shujaaz.fm -- a radio show, comic and lively online community. There's even talk of his own television show.
But there's a twist -- Boyie is a fictional character, played by an actor.
Despite this, the team behind Shujaaz.fm says he has reached out to more people than any government or NGO has managed to in the past.
"We didn't think there was anyone around having an interesting conversation with Kenyan youth," explained Rob Burnet, director of Nairobi-based Well Told Story, the company behind the project.
"There was quite a lot of commercial media aimed at people with money in their pockets and there was very little for people who were younger and didn't have any money and need access to bright ideas and inspiration," he added.
Funded by a mixture of corporate sponsorship and international donors Shujaaz.fm is about getting messages out to young people, an important job in a country where nearly a third of the population is under 30.
Our first goal is to entertain our audience and be cool and be fun.
--Rob Burnet, director, Well Told Story"Shujaaz" means "heroes" in Sheng, a Kenyan combination of Swahili and English. Shujaaz.fm has only been broadcasting from Nairobi since the end of 2009 but it already reaches nearly a third of the young population in Kenya.
A survey carried out by the independent research company Synovate found that around 8 million Kenyans aged under 35 had read the comic and that around half of this group had heard of the radio show.
Through the lives of Boyie and his three fictional friends, Maria Kim who lives in a slum; a farmer's son, Charlie Pele and rebellious teenager Malkia, they share their adventures and bright ideas with the masses.
Youngsters are educated about everyday topics such as farming, how to make money, human rights and staying out of trouble. But Burnet said the service's one underlining rule is to always put the audience first.
"Our first goal is to entertain our audience and be cool and be fun. It's not to deliver development ideas, that comes later," said Burnet.
The radio show is broadcast daily on 22 FM stations nationwide and the storylines are continued in the monthly comic. The team says it is currently working on a daily television show as well.
"This last week we've been interviewing reformed Kenyan gangsters telling us about how they gave up the life of crime to get on with something good. We've also been talking recently about drunkenness and drug abuse," said Burnet.
"We are guided by what we think our audience wants to know about us. The biggest topic young people want to talk about is how do you put a bit of money in your pocket, what cool ideas are out there that you could apply," he continued.
The station's audience is more than happy to tell DJB and his friends what they think. Fans interact with the characters like they are real people and, because the story lines are similar to their own lives, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred.
He (DJB) is also trying to survive and make a responsible member of the community out of himself like every other young person out there.
--Kades, actor who plays DJB.DJB receives 2,000 text messages a month and the characters have thousands of friends on Facebook who interact with them daily. If a fan has a bright idea they are invited to the show to tell others about it.
"DJB has become popular simply because he is true," said Kades, the actor who plays Boyie in the radio show.
"His popularity is growing because he is not different from his fans in that he is not coming from a rich family. He is also trying to survive and make a responsible member of the community out of himself like every other young person out there," he continued.
The story lines have mainly had an agricultural theme and a team of writers works closely with science organizations and citizen groups to make their message interesting.
"I speak to the experts to ensure that the right information goes into the stories," explained Audrey Wabwire, a content producer for Shujaaz. "I speak to the audience to find out whether they understand the stories to ensure that the content remains relevant to them."
Stuart Brown, from the NGO GALVmed, approached Shujaaz to raise the profile of livestock in Kenya and the vaccinations available for animals.
"They (Shujaaz) are phenomenally successful in their outreach and getting into rural communities," he explained.
"The authenticity that Shujaaz offers underpins and legitimizes the information that needs to be communicated. The pictures, thinking and writing is produced by the very people they are addressing -- it's written and drawn by Kenyans," he continued.
<p>Mariakim Iss.01 from Shujaaz.fm on Vimeo.</p>
Shujaaz says its ability to spread often-complicated messages has begun attracting the attention of large technology companies, keen to reach out to young Kenyans.
But Burnet is quick to point out that they won't work with all companies that approach them.
"We have an internal filter that makes us ask 'does this story have a benefit to our audience?' and if it doesn't, we don't do it," he explained.
Kades said he wishes that he'd had a superhero like DJB when he was growing up.
He said: "If we had someone open and truthful like DJB most of my friends would not have been dead; the other half will not have wasted themselves in drugs and become parents in their early teenagehood."
via cnn.com
__________________________
Shujaaz FM - inspiring Kenya's young entrepreneurs
Shujaaz FM comic is Kenya's most widely distributed publication
© Shujaaz FM
© Shujaaz FM
Each day across 17 leading Kenyan FM radio stations at national, regional, district and community level, DJ Boyie broadcasts a short five minute show to millions of listeners. While DJB may be a fictional character, and the programme not really made in his bedroom, the popularity of the daily broadcasts, and linked monthly comic-strip magazine, is very real.
"As a young person I want new projects, new ideas, new things to help me grow up, positively," says Paul Peter Kades. His voice, familiar to millions of Kenyans, provides the character DJB, the dreadlocked, glasses-wearing school leaver who runs a radio station in his bedroom: Shujaaz FM.
Launched in February 2010, Shujaaz is the inspiration of Well Told Story, a Nairobi-based communications company. Since then the growth in Shujaaz FM's audience of readers and listeners has been phenomenal. Recent independent research revealed over 50 per cent of 18-24 year olds in Kenya were aware of the programme, with 6 million copies of the magazine now in circulation. With a monthly print run of 600,000 copies, available free from Safaricom 'm-pesa' (mobile-based money transfer agents) and as an insert in the Nation newspaper, the Shujaaz FM comic is already Kenya's most widely distributed publication.
Comic inspiration
Around a third of readers report sharing ideas from the comic with their friends
© RIU
© RIU
Drawn by young Kenyan artists, the Shujaaz comic portrays the lives and adventures of four 'ordinary' young people. 'Shujaaz' means 'heroes' inSheng - Kenyan slang widely spoken by the youth, and used within the comic strip. Empowering young people to be heroes in their own communities is at the heart of the project, and surveys suggest that the Shujaaz characters have already become inspirational for many. Around a third of readers report sharing ideas from the comic with their friends - something the magazine promotes strongly - and it's estimated that each copy is read by as many as 20 people.
Generally younger readers, from 11-18, are the most likely to act on what they read. Agricultural technologies are popular, especially when they are seen to be new and relatively easy to apply. Partner organisations FIPS-Africa and the DFID Research into Use (RIU) programme have supported the Shujaaz team to suggest simple and accessible technologies with countrywide relevance. Early editions of the magazine included stories about painting chicks pink to stop them being taken by predators, growing kale in sacks, and soaking seed before planting.
Building bridges and businesses
Early editions of the magazine included stories about painting chicks pink to stop them being taken by predators
© Shujaaz FM
© Shujaaz FM
Storylines for both comic-strip and radio programmes are closely linked, and offer a careful balance of entertainment and education. Tolerance and citizenship have been key themes, particularly in the run-up to polling on the new Kenyan constitution, when three special editions of the magazine were written in collaboration with the National Cohesion and Integration Commission. Surveyed readers have high aspirations, particularly in business, so stories that contain advice on obtaining loans or writing a business plan have been well-received.
In admiring DJB's integrity, social skills and good advice, listeners are sending over 1,000 texts a week to his radio show. In addition, a personal Facebook page created for Boyie, quickly reached the limit of 5,000 friends, and so Shujaaz now has an unlimited 'fan-site' page. DJB's popularity and example, and that of the other characters, has encouraged young people to feel more confident and to explore new options presented in Shujaaz. Standing up against tribalism, speaking more effectively to authorities and working on a business plan are all commonly cited by readers as ways the magazine had prompted them to take action.
Managing and maintaining success
Younger readers, from 11-18, are the most likely to act on what they read
© RIU
© RIU
At times, the popularity of Shujaaz has raised expectations too high. In one edition, football-mad Charlie Pele, who lives in a camp for displaced people, tries to impress a local girl. Nothing works, until he decides to grow some new varieties of sweet potato - the taste of which wins her over. According to Keith Sones, head of communications for RIU, readers in 86 districts subsequently contacted Shujaaz to get information about the new varieties, but could only be referred to a handful of sources of planting material. To avoid similar disappointment, a planned storyline on a new cassava variety has been delayed until sufficient planting material is available to meet the anticipated demand.
Despite this, Rob Burnet, the social-entrepreneur behind Well Told Story, is hugely excited by Shujaaz's progress and keen to see it working more with the private sector, to balance commercial and development interests. At a meeting in September to celebrate the 5 millionth copy of the magazine, 150 Kenyan business and development leaders were invited to consider sponsoring the project, in return for either advertising or product placement. "To ensure Shujaaz FM can survive into the future, we want to see the balance of our income shift from 60 per cent donor funding to 60 per cent corporate funding," explains Burnet. The next step, he hopes, will be to have animated versions of the comic, already available on the Shujaaz website, sponsored for television broadcast.
>via: http://www.new-ag.info/en/focus/focusItem.php?a=1854
My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday. It's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else. Or when you drink a little too much at a party just out of anxiety. Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever. And when we do these kind of things, when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors, then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and no one intended. And that's what I look at with my photographic work.
This is an image I just recently completed, that is,when you stand back at a distance, it looks like some kind of neo-gothic, cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution. And as you get a little bit closer, it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant, or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange. And as you get all the way up close, you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups. And in fact, this is one million plastic cups, which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours. We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled; they just don't do that in that industry.
Now that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee. I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas, but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like. That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption. And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life, that's the size it would be.And there's an hour's worth of our cups. And there's a day's worth of our cups. You can still see the little people way down there. That's as high as a 42-story building, and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference.
Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America right now has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth. One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison are Americans, imprisoned in our country. And I wanted to show the number.The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005. And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet. So I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms, and in the actual print of this piece, each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge. They're tiny, they're barely visible as a piece of material, and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print. And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide. This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York; those are my parents looking at the piece. (Laughter) Every time I look at this piece, I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad, "He finally folded his laundry." (Laughter)
I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction. And this particular one is about cigarette addiction. I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes.And so this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes. And, as you slowly step back,you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "Skull with Cigarette." It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9/11, when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died, and do you remember the response? It reverberated around the world, and will continue to reverberate through time. It will be something that we talk about in 100 years. And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died, and today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking. And we aren't talking about it; we dismiss it. The tobacco lobby, it's too strong. We just dismiss it out of our consciousness. And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes, we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters, to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking. And this is what the next piece is about.
This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes, which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month, and every month in the US. More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year.
One more strange epidemic in the United Statesthat I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin --well, actually I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times. (Laughter) And so as you stand back you see 213,000 Vicodin pills, which is the number of hospital emergency room visitsyearly in the United States, attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. -- and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything -- one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications. A strange phenomenon.
This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon, this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery. 384,000 women, American women, last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery. It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift, given to young girls who are about to go off to college. So I made this image out of Barbie dolls, and so as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern, and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls, which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month. The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21. And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction, and most of that is being done by men.
Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples. I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues. They're just examples. And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fearthat we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now.There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of world view, this holoptical world view, this holographic image that we're all trying to create in our mind of the inter-connection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers.
As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend. We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they'll matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that, then we'll be able to find within each one of us what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: How do we change? That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: How do we change? How do we change as a culture,and how do we each individually take responsibilityfor the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?
My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now. And if there are things that we see that we don't like about our culture, then we have a choice. The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon as we show up for the question of how do we change. It's already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that on into the future. And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life, of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. I'm not speaking abstractly about this, I'm speaking -- this is who we are in this room. Right now in this moment.
via ted.com
Nothing is where you think it is:
Maps and Social Equality.
Wow, Mother Earth. Isn’t she beautiful? This is the iconic image of our beautiful round earth, flattened for maps to hang in classroom walls all over the world. It’s too bad that widely used reference is grossly misleading and shares responsibility for social bias against large regions with people of color.
Mercator projection: projecting imperialism, ethnocentrism, and colonialist mentality for centuries.
The unavoidable problem with ALL maps of the Earth, which is round (although some still feel differently), cannot be represented on a flat surface without sacrificing some combination of size, shape, proportions, or distances of the land masses and bodies of water.
The Mercator Projection was designed in 1569 as an aide to navigate European sailors. It emphasizes shape at the expense of size, distance and proportion.
However, there have been many other projections made since then, many with a major emphasis on correcting the the land size bias also known as “The Greenland Problem”. On the Mercator projection, Greenland looks close in size to Africa, but in reality Africa is 14 times larger then Greenland. Equal Area Projections correct this problem. One of my favorites amongst them is the Gall-Peters Equal Area Projection:
Peter's Projection: "all areas, both land and water, are of relatively proportional size: one square inch anywhere on the map represents 158,000 square miles on the Earth’s surface."
This excerpt from ODT Maps explains further problems with Mercator maps:
The Mercator projection creates increasing distortions of size as you move away from the equator. As you get closer to the poles the distortion becomes severe. Cartographers refer to the inability to compare size on a Mercator projection as “the Greenland Problem.” Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, yet Africa’s land mass is actually fourteen times larger (see figure below right). Because the Mercator distorts size so much at the poles it is common to crop Antarctica off the map. This practice results in the Northern Hemisphere appearing much larger than it really is. Typically, the cropping technique results in a map showing the equator about 60% of the way down the map, diminishing the size and importance of the developing countries.
This was convenient, psychologically and practically, through the eras of colonial domination when most of the world powers were European. It suited them to maintain an image of the world with Europe at the center and looking much larger than it really was. Was this conscious or deliberate? Probably not, as most map users probably never realized the Eurocentric bias inherent in their world view. When there are so many other projections to chose from, why is it that today the Mercator projection is still such a widely recognized image used to represent the globe? The answer may be simply convention or habit. The inertia of habit is a powerful force.
A different type of projection is an “Equal-Area” projection. This shows sizes in proportion while sacrificing true shape. The Peters Projection is one type of equal area map. Is it the only one? No, there are hundreds of others, but only a handful of others are in common use. The Mollweide projection, developed in 1805, is commonly used for displaying distributions (people, telecommunications equipment, the world’s religions, etc). Karl B. Mollweide (1774-1825) specifically sought to improve upon the weaknesses of the Mercator projection. The Eckert IV is another equal area projection developed in the 1920′s by Max Eckert (1868-1938). This has the advantage of less shape distortion near the equator and the poles. A fourth equal-area map is Goode’s Homolosine created in 1921 by J. Paul Goode (1862-1932). This interrupted map looks like an orange peel (see figure below) and has less shape distortion than the other equal area maps. Read the rest HERE
Here is another favorite map projection or the “Orange Peel” projection which retains accurate size, shape and direction by putting the spatial errors in the “interrupted areas” in the ocean:
Goode Homolosine Projection
The map debate is a lively one. In my educational work, I prefer to use the Peters Projection. The stark contrast to the status-quo image of the Mercator map allows for instant discussion and teachable moments in the areas of Eurocentric socialization and conditioning, as well as the power of propaganda through science. Of course the most accurate map is not a map at all, but a globe.
Great links on mapping and correcting world views:
- Ten of the greatest maps that changed the world.
- Order your own Peters maps Here:
- Colonialism Through Maps from The Earth Center
- A PDF of the the first chapter of Seeing Through Maps, by Woods, Kaiser, and Abramms.
- A guide to Unusual Maps on the Web
- The Upside Down Map: A refreshing twist:
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