may day message from the frontlines

I found this comment by Kim Solga in response to Margaret Wente's despicable rant about the Quebec student protestors and thought I should post it here. I am not linking to the Wente column because it is so hateful but you can find it over at the Globe and Mail.

Kim made her comment at 5:01 AM on May 1, 2012. And it seems like a perfect May Day post. Thank you Kim! Happy May Day everybody.

I looked up Kim Solga and found these links - this and this. Not sure if this is the same Kim Solga or not but it looks like a good match.

Update: I emailed Kim and it is the Kim in the links. She sent me a lovely reply. She is a good ally in the Please Wake Up Brigade.

And here are those good words randomly tucked away amongst almost 1200 other comments:

I'm constantly amazed at how easily many who comment miss the larger picture of columns like these. C'mon, everyone - think critically about this story!

Are Quebec's students spoiled brats? I have no idea - I don't know any of them. The media image isn't pretty, but, then, the media isn't a public service - it's a for-profit industry in this country. For-profit industries are not generally kind to those invested in not-for-profit ideals.

Are all these students Arts and Humanities majors? Again, I doubt it - there's no census-taker in the crowd, and Stephen Harper has certainly assured StatsCan will be unavailable for comment - but it's very easy to make blind and frequently wholly inaccurate assumptions about demographics.

Every one of us who has graduated from a Canadian university has benefitted - and rightly so - from subsidized schooling. Whether you are successful or not is a matter of many factors - including how our culture, at any given moment, has chosen (or been pushed, by a mix of government and private interests) to value certain kinds of "knowledge" over others. Right now, we're encouraged to believe that only science and business grads will get jobs later, because that's the "real" knowledge that "matters". In fact, smart students across the disciplinary spectrum will find work, because the industries thriving the most right now are those that are creative and adaptive. Just take a look at Apple, famous not just for great computers but also for hiring a lot of very different kinds of people with a wide variety of skills.

As for the rest of us? Sorry, Ms Wente, but we are in fact victims of neoliberal capital's power to pull the wool over our eyes. We're oddly back to the same aggravated discourse about winners and losers, science and business vs everything else that we were having in 2007-08, before the bottom fell out of the markets. Why have the consequences of that fall-out adversely affected the middle classes, and not those far higher up the food chain? And why are we not angrier about it?

Perhaps we're all too busy trying to blame Quebec's postsecondary students for a much, much larger problem.

Update 2: Erika Shaker has another excellent response to Lady Wente over on Rabble.

an historical gaze

This just in from the Reuters Live Blog:

At Centre Pompidou in Paris, in Elles, a women-only exhibit I (Katherine Govier) found this quote from the French artist Michelle Perrot’s “Preface a Une Historie des Femmes, est-elle Possible?”

“It is not a matter of establishing some new territory for women, a peaceful reservation where they might desport themselves at ease without fear of contradiction; it is rather a question of changing the direction of the historical gaze, placing the relationship between the sexes at the center of concern.”

Do you call yourself a feminist?

Annie Lennox says:

Despite the fact that half of the world’s population is female, women’s rights have become marginalized as a ‘minority issue’. Many young women feel that the label of ‘feminist’ is, at best, irrelevant to their lives and, at worst, a stigma to be avoided at all costs.

Sullied by stereotypes of hairy arm-pitted man haters, the concept of feminism and its principles of equality and anti-sexism need to be refreshed and reclaimed by a new generation. Feminism shouldn’t be an F-word. We should embrace it.

From Milwaukee to Malawi, women are being short-changed on life chances. From India to Illinois, women face violence just for being female. Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, the vast majority are female. For many, just getting an education is a real struggle, major decisions such as who to marry and when to have children are made for them by others, and without economic independence or a say in their own future the chances of women escaping the poverty trap are virtually non-existent.

Whether you’re a woman or a man, this affects you. And you are part of the solution. The impact of inequality is felt by every woman worldwide - your friends, your family, your colleagues, your neighbors, the people you emailed today, the woman in the car next to you, the faces you saw on television and the voices you heard on the radio. How many have been abused or faced discrimination today?

And Mariella Fostrop says:

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different. From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. At female gatherings all over sub-Saharan Africa you'll find enthusiasm and eager signatories to the cause. ...

The emancipation of women is the only possible future for the developing world, as it was and continues to be for us. There are too many people on this planet for us to be able to afford to leave nearly 50% of them in penury, uneducated and without a voice. Making women equal partners makes sense for both sexes. My profound hope is that we can, men and women alike, work together to create the circumstances in which International Women's Day can become the cause for celebration it should be.

100 Years of IWD

It is that time of year again. For the 100th time!

I was working at home last year for the Reuters International Women's Day live blog (see details below) and spent quite a bit of time over there reading and talking about where women are today. It was fascinating. If you are using computers with your class on March 8, this might be a fun thing to check out.

There are some good videos here: www.trust.org/trustlaw/womens-rights/womens-voices that you can watch to get ready for an International Women's Day discussions - either on the live blog below or in your class.

There is some excellent reading at the Trust Law blog: www.trust.org/trustlaw/blogs/100-years-of-international-womens-day

________________________________________________________

Call out to all bloggers and Tweeters for International Women’s Day – 8 March 2011

As part of the Women @ Thomson Reuters network’s focus on International Women's Day, Julie Mollins [my sister] has created a dedicated International Women’s Day web page on reuters.com.  Click here to view.  Not only does this page bring together great Reuters news content, we also have a fantastic dynamic live blog which will capture insights and perspectives from both staff and external contributors around the world throughout the day.

View our initial blog postings here.  We invite you to participate on that live blog.

We have begun to populate dedicated pages on reuters.com and Thomson Reuters Foundation’s site in advance of 8 March with some initial stories. Take a look at the blog posts on Reuters The Great Debate site - please feel free to start adding your own responses to these articles. In addition we also have special coverage on TrustLaw and AlertNet broadening the range of topics and angles for reflection.

This year will be the 100th anniversary of IWD, so perhaps you would like to join the live blog and discuss:

• What progress do you believe has been made, or ground lost, on the gender agenda over the past 100 years?
• What needs to be achieved over the next decade and into the future?  

Thomson Reuters Foundation also launched a new page titled TrustLaw Women this week.  View that page and blog your thoughts. 

Blog on this year’s IWD 2011 theme which is “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women” 

Perhaps you could attend a local IWD march in your area and tweet back.  Check here for a list of activities around the world. 

Are you hosting an International Women’s Day event?  Celebrate by sharing your Tweets with us. Follow us on Twitter at @women_on_iwd.

We would love to have you contribute on 8^th March and welcome you to “dip in” and blog or tweet throughout the day.

Have a great International Women’s Day!

________________________________________________________ 

hyperventilating over learning

Here is a great story about the power of blended learning written in preparation for International Women's Day:

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

 In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

You don’t have to live in New York or own a library card to access the Gallery. Like Google Books—which also digitizes historical books—the Gallery is available to anyone with an internet connection. All you need is five quiet minutes in the morning with your coffee cup—or four, depending on the day.

Today I will only have four minutes. Students are rapping on the door, pounding harder. They want in, and come barreling through.     

 “Morning, Miss!” “What new books do you have?” “Can I use a laptop?” “Can I borrow headphones?” “How do I embed video in PowerPoint?” “Where are the Shakespeare plays?”

revolutionary literacy

So what is the state of the debate on whether or not the revolution will be tweeted?

It rages on of course.

I agree with @navalang that a great addition is to be found here in this blog post, Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public, by @zunguzungu.

His argument, if I read him correctly, is that generalizations about how social movements are developed and how they become effective are not helpful in describing the internal rationality of any specific movement or event.

If, as Malcolm Gladwell argues, the success of the American Civil Rights movement can be attributed to strong links among activists and a well-developed hierarchy there is nothing that says that the next, equally effective, civil rights movement could not start with weak ties and a flattened hierarchy.

He goes further to suggest that Western generalizers are reluctant to learn the specifics of movements because they are reluctant about losing their power to create the official story.

We live in an era we can get glimpses of the different ways the stories are being framed. We can read and listen to and watch mainstream media reports side-by-side with what we learn from our fellow "citizen journalists" on Twitter and You Tube. The official analysts can help us organize the information but our own critical literacy skills are forced into high gear as we try to understand the context and the content. These are fine times to be hanging around this little blue planet.

update 2

As you know, Mubarek's speech yesterday was a huge disappointment to people who are fighting for democracy in Egypt. I guess it was one of those "trial balloons" politicians are so fond of :)

Today at about 6:30 p.m. in Cairo...

egypt update

Hosni Mubarak 'may step down' - Al Jazeera English (live stream here - Feb. 10 live blog here)

Egypt's Mubarak 'may stand down' - BBC (click on Live tab for updates)

revolution 2.0

from Three Weeks in Egypt with Alan Taylor (The Atlantic) - John Moore/Getty Images

On October 4, 2010 the New Yorker published this in a piece called Small Change - Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell:

The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

and

The evangelists of social media ... seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

I think the recent use of social media to galvanize a group of web savvy internet users to sign an online petition against a CRTC ruling (that would allow large telecom companies to impose usage based billing on their competition) is an example of how the internet can be an efficient place for communities of interest to come together and advocate. I also think that participating in online referenda about irksome billing policies is qualitatively different than engaging in high-risk activism such as "sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960."

In the case of the anti-UBB petition, the petition signers saw a good result when Minister of Industry Tony Clement tweeted this:

As Gladwell says, the internet can foster a kind of activism but not the kind that requires the activists to develop a strong enough sense of commitment to the cause, and to each other, to support the risk-taking essential to creating deep social change.

On January 27, the day he was to be detained in Egypt, Wael Ghonim tweeted this:

And yesterday he tweeted this:

So what is all that about? Why is this participant in the January 25th uprising in Egypt, an uprising where hundreds of participants have been injured and detained and a number have been killed (there is controversy over the death toll numbers but most put the number at over 100), making this claim? Is it because he works for Google and sees the world through a 2.0 prism? Or is he experiencing a magnification of commitment that occurs when a revolution is tweeted?

I think there's an unmistakable effect that the Internet has had on dissident communities, that it has emboldened them. I recall when I was in the Islamist slums of Cairo, a friend of mine that I started to talk politics with silenced me immediately and said in Arabic (SPEAKING ARABIC) "The walls have ears."

There was a sense of fear in daily life in Egypt. And what I believe the Internet has given to dissidents is the -- the feeling that there are those in the West who care about them, an ability to talk with other people. So, it's a really -- a very empowering feeling that -- that nothing can take away.

David Keyes from CyberDissidents.org on NPR
(see video below - transcript here)

Gladwell might well argue that the ties between the Egyptian protesters and other Twitterverse participants are the weak ties of low-risk activism

but if those ties, however weak, strengthen the commitment and motivation of the people who have ties strong enough to support each other in high-risk activism, perhaps the revolution should be tweeted... and retweeted.

legacy numeracy

Another legacy of the Reagan presidency, and of all the hawkish regimes everywhere that preceded and followed him, is off the charts military spending.

happy birthday mr. president?

Last week there were a number of television moments dedicated to reflections about the presidency of Ronald Reagan on what would have been his 100th birthday. I found it all quite bewildering. Here is one of the reasons why:

literacy by the numbers

VIDA - Women in Literary Arts - was founded in August 2009 to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.

They have just published The Count - a breakdown by gender of who writes for some major publications and whose writing gets reviewed by these same publication. Here is one example:

We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity. Many have already begun speculating; more articles and groups are pointing out what our findings suggest: the numbers of articles and reviews simply don’t reflect how many women are actually writing. VIDA is here to help shape that discussion. Please tell us about the trends you’ve witnessed in your part of the writing world. Let us know what you think is going on. We’re ready and anxious to hear from you. We’re ready to invest our efforts and energy into the radical notion that women are writers too.

No Canadian publications in The Count. I wonder if The Count would be any different here.

literacy alive

http://egypt.alive.in/

Volunteers have been working on translating the Arabic voice messages left by Egyptian protesters on Google’s Say Now service (which were then, with the help of Twitter, pushed out as tweets on the @Speak2Tweet account) into English.

happy international womens day

Who's counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics

In this feature-length (94 minutes) documentary from the National Film Board, Marilyn Waring "demystifies the language of economics by defining it as a value system in which all goods and activities are related only to their monetary value. As a result, unpaid work (usually performed by women) is unrecognized while activities that may be environmentally and socially detrimental are deemed productive. To remedy this, Waring maps out an alternative economic vision based on the idea of time as the new currency."

This documentary also examines Ms. Waring's career as a member of the New Zealand parliament and her ideas about democracy.

Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics by Terre Nash, National Film Board of Canada

Today Tara Hunt wrote about Marilyn Waring on the NFB blog.
And I copied her :)

Have a FANTASTIC International Women's Day women and men, boys and girls.

using our literacy skills for good

Last week we reported about the release of the United Nations Millenium Goals Report. The report shows that not enough progress is being made to meet the targets in time.

The G8 summit was also last week. They started, as we all should, with a nice breakfast:
"The official cook of the Italian national soccer team, Claudio Silvestri, was in charge of breakfast and served a staple from Italians' breakfast tables for nearly 65 years -- Nutella. The roasted hazelnut spread was offered in the form of a balanced breakfast -- on bread accompanied by milk and fruit. Fortified by this nutritious breakfast, the world's leaders were then ready to tackle the globe's pressing issues through the rest of the day."

One of the pressing issues they took on was maternal and child health last week. Here is how the Guardian reported the attempt:
"...perhaps believers of the Make Poverty History generation should not give up hope just yet. While the G8 failed to increase their aid for maternal and child health (which currently represents a miniscule 3% of total aid) they were persuaded to commission a new assessment of the finance that is needed to reach the millennium development goals (MDGs). Reportedly this line in the statement was hastily agreed as the meeting was breaking up and a number of leaders were impatient to leave for an earthquake tour."

And so it goes.

Anotonia Zerbisias posted a copy of this ad which exhorts these world "leaders" to use the literacy skills, learned from their mothers, to ensure global health and well-being.

Your mother taught you how to write your name, now she'd expect you to sign it.

Every single minute a mother dies in pregnancy or childbirth. 80% of those deaths are preventable. At this week's G8 Summit in Italy, you are the 8 people who can prevent them -- it's as simple as that. Reduce maternal mortality and make every mother proud of you.

Mothers everywhere are watching and hoping.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math,
that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
~ kurt vonnegut ~
in hocus pocus, 1990

But it could mean that we do all we can to help make the universe a humane and beautiful place for all of inhabitants. Hazelnuts and chocolate for all!

women hold up half the union

As many of you may know, the Toronto municipal workers are on strike. Most of what gets talked about is garbage -- where to put it and what to do with it once it is there. Yesterday, Antonia Zerbisias pointed to the gender politics of recent collective bargaining efforts in Toronto the good:

"Did you know that most city workers are women? Did you know that at least half of those are part-timers, who get no sick leave? Did you know that, while the city was relatively generous with male-dominated unions (the police, firefighters etc.), it is demanding all sorts of concessions from those female inside workers now on the picket lines? Did you know that the screw up is by the city which, when it gave SOME workers those controversial sick leaves in exchange for salary concessions, neglected to set aside funding to pay those sick days out?"

Antonia also linked to this video that I thought you might enjoy:

Antonia Zerbisias works for the Toronto Star where this happened on Monday. And this union-busting effort (see #6) is why I canceled my subscription to that paper in 2001.

And so it goes.

UN millenium development goals report

"Nine years ago, world leaders set far-sighted goals to free a major portion of humanity from the shackles of extreme poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. They established targets for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women, environmental sustainability and a global partnership for development. In short, they adopted a blueprint for a better world – and pledged to spare no effort in fulfilling that vision."

from the UN Millenium Development Goals Report (PDF)

The Development Goals are for:

1. Ending Poverty and Hunger
2. Universal Primary Education
3. Gender Equality
4. Child Health
5. Maternal Health
6. Combating HIV/AIDS
7. Environmental Sustainability
8. and Developing Global Partnerships.

Good stuff.

"More than halfway to the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), major advances in the fight against poverty and hunger have begun to slow or even reverse as a result of the global economic and food crises, a progress report by the United Nations has found. The assessment, launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Geneva, warns that, despite many successes, overall progress has been too slow for most of the targets to be met by 2015."

from www.un.org/millenniumgoals

And so it goes.

learning iran

For those of us who want to learn more about what has been happening in Iran, check out the Perspolis-style cartoons illustrating the chronicle of #iranelection.

"Since the Revolution in 1979, Iranians have coped with an increasingly repressive regime. Attempts for greater social and political freedoms have resulted in brutal crackdowns by the hardline government. The ensuing apathy and significant boycott of the 2005 presidential elections led to the election of the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Four years later Iran has become increasingly alienated and its people more polarized than ever before. The campaign of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi galvanized voters hoping for change, especially among the youth – two thirds of Iran’s population is younger than 32. On June 12th 85% of eligible voters cast their ballots and what happened next changed Iran forever…"

deep in my heart

It has been incredibly harrowing following the news from Iran. We are learning lessons about bravery, commitment and justice.

Joan Baez sings "We Shall Overcome" (with some lyrics in Farsi) for the Iranian people.

We are also learning more about how to navigate the so-called new media. One thing I like about the new media is that it is all critical literacy all the time. As I read along on Twitter, 140 characters or less at a time, it was interesting to watch how some sources came to be trusted(ish) and some were rejected.

Vietnam was the first "television war," the first "living-room war." What did it mean to the war and what did it mean to the people watching?

"The conventional wisdom has generally been that for better or for worse it was an anti-war influence. It brought the "horror of war" night after night into people's living rooms and eventually inspired revulsion and exhaustion. The argument has often been made that any war reported in an unrestricted way by television would eventually lose public support. Researchers, however, have quite consistently told another story... Only during the 1968 Tet and 1972 Spring offensives, when the war came into urban areas, did its suffering and destruction appear with any regularity on TV. For the first few years of the living room war most of the coverage was upbeat. ... By the fall of 1967, polls were already showing a majority of Americans expressing the opinion that it had been a "mistake" to get involved in Vietnam ... television was probably more a follower than a leader in the nation's [United States of America] change of course in Vietnam." -- from the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Television told its story from September 1959 to April 1975. The Winter Soldiers told theirs in February 1971:

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out." -- John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings :: transcript.

The Winter Soldier Investigation received little media coverage at the time but did prompt the April and May 1973 Fulbright Hearings.

But a revolution was tweeted and You Tubed. We turned our profile pictures green. We navigated amateur and professional news reporters and we tried to find a truth. As reporting gets more and more immediate and we hear more and more perspectives, we work on our media literacy skills so that we can understand our world better and see it more clearly and deeply. I am not happy about the violence and injustice in Iran but I am happy that everybody seems to be questioning everything again.

announcement: endangered languages program

Sacred Earth Network - Endangered Languages Program
by Jane Simpson
[passed on from the Foundation for Endangered Languages]

Media release:

Sacred Earth Network, a non-profit organization located in Petersham, Massachusetts, is continuing its Endangered Languages Program after its successful launch in 2008. Endangered Languages Program aims to support preservation and revival of those indigenous languages which are threatened with extinction and which are vital to indigenous cultures of Siberia and North/Central America. One of the components of the Program is financial assistance to projects working towards these goals. In 2008 we offered assistance to eight grassroots language preservation projects in Russia and the US.

With the deadline approaching soon - May 15th 2009, we would like to spread the word out to underfunded grassroots initiatives about financial assistance that we are offering to projects that work towards preservation of indigenous languages particularly in North America.

We are very much hoping for your assistance in dissemination of this information among interested organizations and individuals. If you would like to post this information on your website or newsletter you are encouraged to do this. If you would like to point out further contacts the coordinator would be very grateful as well.

Please address inquiries about the Endangered Languages Program to the Program's Coordinator, Mariyam Medovaya, at mariyamsacredearth AT gmail.com