Some Important Citizen Journalism:

Tibet:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Gth30EbfSUg


Burma:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QnIRjU5fKug


Zimbabwe:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pBHFWbYcjS0


Los Angeles:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ssg2IkIhbxU

Internet Resources:

Alternative and Independent Content Providers


alternet.org: Alternet is an influential online news magazine focusing on progressive issues and opinions. It describes its aim as “to inspire citizen action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, and health care issues. It does employ its own journalists, but much of its content is produced by partners, many of which are major liberal and left-leaning blogs like the Huffington Post.


allafrica.com: Based in Mauritius, with offices in Johannesburg, Dakar, Lagos and Washington, D.C., allAfrica.com is “the largest electronic distributor of African news and information worldwide.” It is a for-profit organization that aims to promote quality journalism and free, independent media in Africa.


cinemapolitica.org: No introduction, of course, is necessary for the vaunted, celebrated, global phenomenon that is our beloved Cinema Politica.


engagemedia.org: Engage Media is less a content provider than a content aggregator and online distributor. Based in Melbourne and largely donation-funded, it bills itself as a “space for critical documentary, fiction, artistic and experimental works that challenge the dominance of the mainstream media” in South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific. It maintains a well-edited, regularly updated library of web video, focusing on anti-globalization campaigns.


pacifica.org: Pacifica Radio is a network of community-based radio stations, funded by listener donations, that provides commercial-free programming in major American markets. Many of its shows, like Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, are produced independently. Its mission statement describes it as having “educational” purposes.


newsreel.org: California Newsreel is a documentary producer generating content for education and public broadcast. It’s funded by managing the broadcast and distribution rights to its proprietary content, most of which remains in celluloid form. As it approaches its 40th birthday, it claims to be “the oldest non-profit, social issue documentary film center” in the US.


tvac.ca: The Toronto Video Activist Collective is included because its amateurish style and tone illustrates some of the common weaknesses attributable to the online activist media landscape in general. Rhetoric like “with the class war escalating daily, the bias and myopia of ‘the news’ grows clearer and clearer,” a line from the “manifesto,” betrays the bias and narrow scope that characterizes this site. Anti-war activism is its current raison d’être. Examples of sites like this abound.


NGOs and Advocacy Groups


amarc.org: The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters is an NGO that serves community radio producers around the world by providing policy research, advocacy, and knowledge sharing. Its goal is to “support and contribute to the development of community and participatory radio along the principals of solidarity and international cooperation.” Its “International Secretariat” is headquartered in Montreal.


fair.org: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is an American nongovernmental media watch group that describes itself as a First Amendment defense and advocacy organization. It produces a media criticism magazine, a weekly radio program, and an email newsletter with over 55,000 recipients. Fair is primarily concerned with American network news; it is critical of corporate news in general and Fox News in particular. Asking “what’s wrong with the news,” it answers: “corporate ownership, advertiser influence, telecommunications policy, the PR industry, [and] pressure groups.”


mediaed.org: Founded in 1991 by University of Massachusetts Communication professor and media scholar Sut Jhally, the MEF is now a leading advocacy organization and content producer in the field anti-corporate media criticism. It provides free videos and educational resources promoting social justice in American media and addressing issues from homophobia and sexism in hip hop culture to a perceived lack of content scrutiny in the video game industry. Noam Chomsky, Jeff Cohen, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Naomi Klein, and Robert W. McChesney are all members of the board of advisors.


ourmedianetwork.org: OURMedia Network is a coalition of 500-or-so researchers, activists, scholars around the world collaborating on communication and information infrastructure, policy, and research. They’re most notable for their annual conferences, which appear to garner considerable attention. It was founded in 2001 following an alternative, community, and citizens' media conference called "Our Media, Not Theirs." It’s a nongovernmental nonprofit.


unesco.org: One of the six UNESCO “Themes” identified on this site is “Communication and Information.” “Media Development” is one of the programs listed under this category, with both “Community Media” and “Public Service Broadcasting” identified as components of the broader media development effort. Programs include “training for media specialists, particularly women journalists, in developing countries; strengthening news agencies, public service broadcasting and community media in developing countries; [and] training in media literacy for users, particularly children and youth.”


Citizen Journalism


citizen.nfb.ca: CITIZENShift is a National Film Board project that provides a media portal offering films, photography, articles, blogs and podcasts “where you can explore social issues.” Though not a citizen journalism program in the strictest sense, it is a “participatory media site,” which means it openly seeks submissions from the public.


orato.com: Orato was an early citizen journalism innovator and still displays an impressive degree of commitment to its founding ethos, namely to “put a human face on the news by showcasing vivid, first person stories from individuals involved in current events.” The content is provided by Orato members—who could be anyone—and ranked according to popularity. The top ranked stories rarely adhere to more traditional journalistic conventions, like responsible sourcing and accountability to the facts, and frequently are not topical or relevant. What they are is fun read and an alternative perspective. Orato is a Canadian, advertising-funded, for-profit site; the editor in chief is Paul Sullivan, a former Globe and Mail bureau editor.


witness.org: WITNESS exemplifies the potential of citizen journalism to be a major global force for social change and human rights. Its goal is to use online video streaming and widely available consumer video-capture technologies to “empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.” It’s a very simple idea: individuals film human rights abuses using anything from a high-end DV camera to a cell phone, then upload their videos to hub.witness.org where they can be viewed around the world or picked up by mainstream media. WITNESS, founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel following the Rodney King beating, is non-profit and donation-funded.

Finally found that article that explains the debt economy....Now I am sad and scared.

Really I need to not read Metafilter as soon as I wake up, it takes an hour off my day easily. An hour I could spend at the gym instead of getting panicked by financial forecasting. Oh well, later when I have no money and have to eat those plastic wrapped old vegetables with brown spots that they sell for 50 cents I am sure I will look svelte and have nicely hollowed cheek-bones. Why am I worrying now, we're headed for a massive recession!

More than a decade of economic and financial-market chaos followed, as the dollar remained the international currency but traded without an absolute measure of value. Inflation rose not just in the United States but around the world, grinding down the worth of many securities and brokerage firms. The Federal Reserve pushed interest rates into double digits, setting off two global recessions, and new international standards and methods for measuring inflation and floating exchange rates were established to replace the gold standard. After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance, and real estate—FIRE.

It's a long complicated article but well worth the read.

African garb is the new thing this spring!

This post is on behalf of Gracia (Jalea) who wants our class to share in her disgust over H&M's spring line:

Hello all,

I thought you might enjoy the new H&M line for Spring 2008. Work your way through the catalogue..and just enjoy (cough cough):

http://www.hm.com/ca/#presspic2008

Africa is on sale! What is wrong with us!?!?! And the model. Phew! I guess there was just no one else available! Well she is just ready to hit the Safari and be one with the people!

Stay tuned...Fall 2008...Kimonos, White powdered faces and oriental fans!

Enjoy!
Grass

Beyond Petrol

This is a spoof site made by the Yes Men a group whose mission statement is:

"Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."

"Evolution" and Trapped - Tableaus by Ainsley Jenicek

"Evolution" - March 2008. (By: Ainsley Jenicek)




(lightened copy)





Trapped. March 2008. (By: Ainsley Jenicek)

(Apologies about the light switch and cramped format. My walls at home are nowhere as luxurious as those at school.)

If you want my write-up or closer photos, send me an email.

Books on Kara Walker

Hey everyone,

Here are the books on Kara Walker I used for my presentation.

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. Eds. Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.
(Contains many photos and three essays on her work.)

Shaw, Gwendolyn Dubois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

(This one's a very thorough critical review of her work that, in parts, links her work to other critical race artists.)

Interesting Talk on Postcolonial Scholarship

Hey all, this is coming a bit late as the event is today but if anyone is interested a well known Anthropologist Ann Stoler is speaking about colonial governance at the end of the History Graduate Students' Conference todayat 6:00.



Closing keynote lecture: Dr. Ann Laura Stoler, "Along the Archival Grain: Thinking Through Colonial Ontologies"

Postcolonial scholarship has become predictable precisely because our engagement with historical materials remains more an extractive enterprise than a dense ethnographic one. This lecture is both a challenge to what we think we know about how colonial governance worked and an invitation to think differently both about the content in the archival form and how we inhabit archival terrain.

Professor Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research, NY. Her work is wide-ranging and addresses colonial cultures, critical race theory, gender studies, political economy, historical methodologies, and Southeast Asia. Her current research focuses on the politics of comparison on North American empires and postcolonial studies as well as bourgeois Europe and colonial exiles. Her publications include Along the Archival Grain: Colonial Cultures and Their Affective States (forthcoming); Tense and Tender Ties: Race and Empire in North American History (forthcoming); Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002); Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997); Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995); Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985).

Rita Deverell's Lecture on Diversity

Hi,

I spoke with Rita and asked her permission to distribute her lecture to you which she happily gave.  So here it is - I know those of you who were there wanted a copy and those who weren't can now read what you missed.

Enjoy,

Lorna

Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits

The United Nations warned yesterday that it no longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay this year in the face of a dramatic upward surge in world commodity prices, which have created a "new face of hunger".

"We will have a problem in coming months," said Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP). "We will have a significant gap if commodity prices remain this high, and we will need an extra half billion dollars just to meet existing assessed needs."

With voluntary contributions from the world's wealthy nations, the WFP feeds 73 million people in 78 countries, less than a 10th of the total number of the world's undernourished. Its agreed budget for 2008 was $2.9bn (£1.5bn). But with annual food price increases around the world of up to 40% and dramatic hikes in fuel costs, that budget is no longer enough even to maintain current food deliveries.

The shortfall is all the more worrying as it comes at a time when populations, many in urban areas, who had thought themselves secure in their food supply are now unable to afford basic foodstuffs. Afghanistan has recently added an extra 2.5 million people to the number it says are at risk of malnutrition

"This is the new face of hunger," Sheeran said. "There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before."

WFP officials say the extraordinary increases in the global price of basic foods were caused by a "perfect storm" of factors: a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly prosperous populations in India and China, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/26/food.unitednations

Canada in Afghanistan Lecture

This Friday, March 7th, at 19:00 Amnesty International Concordia will be hosting a lecture by Dr. Alistair Edgar who has written extensively on international relations and is the director of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (www.acuns.wla.ca) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Council_of_the_United_Nations_System).

His lecture will surround Canada's military presence and human rights concerns thereof. While not a human rights activist, Dr. Edgar's presentation will illuminate human rights issues from the angle of international law and peacekeeping. We hope his presentation will attract students who are interested in the issue, and that they will feel free to ask questions at the end of the lecture.

The talk will be held in a conference room on H-763, at 19:00 this Friday. See you there!

Amnesty International Concordia

in case you're having trouble procrastinating: belated banana politics youtube vid's

For your enjoyment.

Carmen Miranda - O Que É Que A Baiana Tem?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojo3I59Gn6c

(this one's just for fun: Carmen Miranda is a Chica Chica Boom Chic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERYKzez97lA&feature=related)

Chiquita Banana The Original Commercial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFDOI24RRAE

(What doesn't Sesame Street do? Sesame Street - One Banana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D6LWxqUd2E)

Subprime Primer

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?revision= latest&fs=true&docID=ddv7hj34_03774hsc7&skipauth=true

Check this out when you want a break.

Lorna

Links to Fukuyama's writing/speaking

Here are a few of the resources I will be referencing on Thursday.

Francis Fukuyama Interview
From "The First measured Century" on PBS

QUESTION: And he used public data as the basis of his argument. How important in a modern society is measurement?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I think that measurement really is extremely important as the basis for any kind of social or public policy in a modern society. And politicians frequently don't recognize this. Politics is always argued on the basis of anecdote: "I know somebody that had a broken family and the son went wrong, and therefore broken families cause crime." You cannot get beyond that kind of anecdote slinging unless you turn to statistics that apply to broad populations.

And one of the problems, I think, in understanding our own social history is that, for most categories of things that we now regard as important, a lot of those statistics simply weren't kept reliably up until some point in the early twentieth century. So that now if you want to go back and look at things like rates of alcoholism, or rates of illegitimacy, or other sorts of anything beyond plain vanilla - births, deaths and marriages - for most of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, they simply don't exist.

QUESTION: The other great measuring tool that we have is, of course, public opinion data - specifically in the realm of trust. Could you sort of march me through how that came about?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, public opinion polling really got its start in the 1950s. It is possible to get public opinion data that goes back [to] earlier decades. But I think it becomes institutionalized really in the 1950s with the rise of the Roper Organization and other organizations that are dedicated to creating what's called "time series" data. Where you ask the same question year after year or at regular intervals, and so you can trace the evolution of popular attitudes over time. And I think that that became an extremely useful thing to politicians simply to track opinions of voters, and to try to develop marketing data.

For social scientists, I think [the public opinion poll] was very important [in] getting at this whole layer of values. Because, you know, the conventional sorts of statistics can [only] measure behavior: how many marriages are recorded, how many people are killed in a particular city or a particular neighborhood. What is much harder to get at is motives, why people were behaving the way they were, why they were disaffected or poor or ended up without a job. And for that, survey data was really the only source by which you could get behind the behavior to intentions and beliefs.

Of course, survey data has got its own weaknesses, because most surveys ask very simple-minded questions. They don't probe in depth. They often require just a yes or no. But it's better than nothing.

QUESTION: When you look at the survey research data for the 1960s in the realm of trust, what do you pick up?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, first of all, there's been a massive shift towards distrust. The Roper [Organization] and organizations like the General Social Survey [have data that very consistently shows] that in the 1950s [there] are really high levels of trust for all sorts of things: for the federal government, for Congress, for scientists, for all the major institutions in society - corporations, the military and the like. And all of those see a very dramatic decline over the next 30 years. So that in the late 1950s people were asked, "Do you generally trust the [federal] government to do the right thing?" And perhaps 70 percent of the respondents would answer yes. By 1991 that number was down to something like 15 percent, which is a just astonishing change.

It wasn't just government. The General Social Survey asks a question, "Do you trust your fellow citizens, or can you never be too careful in dealing with other people?" And in the 1950s about 60, 65 percent said that they could trust their fellow citizens. By the 1990s that [number] had fallen to about 30 percent.

So all across the board there was a growth of cynicism and [a] distinct rise of distrust on the part of Americans.

[note: This is actually a fantastic interview in terms of seeing what a broad brush Fukuyama uses, and the distinctly ideological purpose that drives his own work. - A purpose that is presented so objectively as to appear detached scholarship.]

Q&A with author and former neo-con Francis Fukuyama
MacLeans Magazine March 2006

Has the United States reacted -- or overreacted -- to threats because it is by far the strongest military power? You know, when you have a hammer you see all problems as nails?

"I actually used that metaphor in my book. America, in its domestic institutions, very deeply believes that concentrated power is a danger. Even when that power is legitimated by democratic majorities and represents the will of the sovereign people, we divide and limit and balance power in all sorts of ways. Yet somehow when we go into international politics we say, "Well, just trust us. Concentrated power in our hands is fine because we're benevolent and we will use this responsibly." That just seems like one of those contradictions. If you can't trust the sovereign with power in domestic politics why should you trust the sovereign with power internationally? In many respects, if we weren't in such a hegemonic position we wouldn't be tempted to do dumb things."

After Neoconservatism
New York Times Magazine February 2006

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

Identity and migration
Prospect Magazine feburary 2007

Taylor points out that modern identity is inherently political, because it demands recognition. The idea that modern politics is based on the principle of universal recognition comes from Hegel. Increasingly, however, it appears that universal recognition based on a shared individual humanity is not enough, particularly on the part of groups that have been discriminated against in the past. Hence modern identity politics revolves around demands for recognition of group identities—that is, public affirmations of the equal dignity of formerly marginalised groups, from the Québécois to African-Americans to women to indigenous peoples to homosexuals.

It is no accident that Charles Taylor is Canadian, since contemporary multiculturalism and identity politics were in many ways born in Canada, with the demands of the francophone community for recognition of its rights. Law 101 of 1977 violates the liberal principle of equal individual rights: French speakers enjoy linguistic rights not shared by English speakers. Quebec was recognised as a "distinct society" in 1995, and as a "nation" in 2006.

Multiculturalism—under- stood not just as tolerance of cultural diversity but as the demand for legal recognition of the rights of racial, religious or cultural groups—has now become established in virtually all modern liberal democracies. US politics over the past generation has been consumed with controversies over affirmative action for African-Americans, bilingualism and gay marriage, driven by formerly marginalised groups that demand recognition not just of their rights as individuals but of their rights as members of groups. And the US's Lockean tradition of individual rights has meant that these efforts to assert group rights have been tremendously controversial—more so than in modern Europe.

The radical Islamist ideology that has motivated terror attacks over the past decade must be seen in large measure as a manifestation of modern identity politics rather than of traditional Muslim culture. As such, it is familiar to us from earlier political movements. The fact that it is modern does not make it less dangerous, but it helps to clarify the problem and its possible solutions.

Excerpt from "The Great Disruption"
Republished from Atlantic Monthly

The circle that people can trust is necessarily narrower. The essence of the shift in values at the center of the Great Disruption, then, is the rise of moral individualism and the consequent miniaturization of community. These explanations go partway toward explaining why cultural values changed after the 1960s. But at the Great Disruption's core was a shift in values concerning sex and the family - a shift that deserves special emphasis.

Civil Society and Improved Governance in Developing Countries
March 20, 2007
Keynote Address by Francis Fukuyama

The second really has to do with problems of ownership and transmission mechanisms. I think actually more people agreed with this point than perhaps was evident, but ultimately institutional reform does not take place unless there is strong domestic demand for it either from the bottom up in terms of civil society or sometimes as in East Asia you get elite-driven demand for reform, you get the right minister in Uganda or somewhere else that has an agenda and wants to push it forward and has the power and opportunity to do it, and that is how this institutional reform happens. So in countries where you do not have this domestic demand, donors are always scratching their heads trying to say to themselves how do we generate demand for reform where it does not exist? So this is what gets you into conditionality in lending so maybe you can strong-arm them into wanting things that they otherwise would not want. I think the subject of the conference is another version of that where you are trying to promote bottom-up demand for good governance for all of the reasons that I think are quite evident in that Argentine example, that if you have media attention and public pressure on state officials, that will create opportunities for reform from the inside.

The second point is that in terms of institutional reform, not only does the impetus not come primarily from Washington, knowledge about how to do them ultimately cannot come from Washington, it really has to come from people who understand both the formal and informal rules by which their societies work and are governed. Therefore, the locus of research and work on this area has to be done by social scientists, journalists, and other people in developing countries themselves. There have been a number of efforts to promote this sort of thing like the Global Development Network that has been supported by the World Bank, but we need much, much more of that.