Weekend Reading

This weekend’s reading is brief, but it’s also going to be the last one for a while. We’ll be taking a hiatus from keeping up with the Internet for the remainder of the summer, approximately. Life, research, and summer have been calling for a while, and it’s about time I answered. So, without further ado:

• Fast Food and the Future of the Working Class.
• Transitional Justice as Politics.
• African Traders in Guangzhou.
• Nyerere’s Legacy.
• Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream.
• No to Profit:

The student protesters demanded that the universities be investigated for profiteering. They demanded that municipalization be reversed. They demanded free education. They shut down several universities for an entire academic year. They took over government buildings. On June 30, 2011 some 100,000 Chileans turned out in the streets of Santiago and were joined by another 300,000 or so in solidarity marches in the rest of the country. Demonstrators paralyzed entire sections of Santiago during marches. Yet, at its peak, the student movement had an 81 percent approval rating. The public was on board.

• I’m a Scholar, Not a Criminal: The Plight of Black Students at USC.
• Angelina Jolie Controls the Narrative.
• Snatching Activism from the Jaws of the Enough Project.
• Reclaiming Activism.
• Beyond the LRA Lobby and the Hunt for Kony… And Towards Civilian Protection.
• What if People Told European History Like They Told Native American History?
• The View from Flyover Country:

In St Louis, the museums are free. At the turn of the 20th century, the city built a pavilion. They drained the wetlands and made a lake and planted thousands of trees and created a park. They built fountains at the base of a hillside and surrounded it with promenades white and gleaming. Atop the hill is an art museum with an inscription cut in stone: “Dedicated to art and free to all.” On Sundays, children do art projects in a gallery of Max Beckmann paintings. Admission is free, materials are free, because in St Louis art is for everyone.

In St Louis, you can walk 20 minutes from the mansions to the projects. In one neighbourhood, the kids from the mansions and the kids from public housing go to the same public school. On the walls of the school cafeteria are portraits of Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama, to remind the children what leaders look like.

• The Rwandan Genocide 20 Years On.
• Free to Work, Free to Marry.
• Second-Class Citizens to Second-Class Victims.
• Thinking Utopian: What about a Universal Basic Income?
• Curious Utopias.
• Who Are the People Who Get to Make This Thing We Call Art?

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Blogging the Caine Prize!

The shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced, which means a growing cabal of bloggers will be writing reviews/analyses about the five stories soon. This will be our third year going, and I’m really excited about it. The stories are always really interesting, and I get exposed to things I would never find otherwise. The shortlist itself is often more exciting than just the ultimate winner, and seeing the various types of stories that make it this far is really interesting. I’ve learned a lot from my co-bloggers in how to read a text, and it’s helped me recently as I’ve been organizing the African Studies Reading Group here at Yale, an ad hoc eating and close-reading group of folks, within our department this past year.

And so, with that, I’m excited to announced that I’ll be joining the ranks in reading the Caine Prize shortlist this year in the last week of May and throughout June. If you want a taste, feel free to click the “Caine Prize” tag and see posts from the proceeding years, and I hope you’ll check out posts by the whole crew of bloggers at the bottom of each of my reviews. If you’re interested in joining us, please do! Drop me a line and I’ll make sure to link to it.

The shortlisted stories for the 2013 Caine Prize are [links to pdfs]:

• “Bayan Layi,” by Elnathan John
• “Transition,” by Tope Folarin
• “Foreign Aid,” by Pede Hollist
• “The Whispering Tree,” by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
• “America,” by Chinelo Okparanta

We’ll be tackling them weekly and in that order, starting the week of May 27th. Won’t you read with us?

Weekend Reading

• On Depression.
• The Battle Over Tamerlan’s Body.
• The Tragedy of U.S. Higher Education.
• When Drone Strikes Collide with Stop-and-Frisk.
• The Reformation Beast and the MOOCs That Come With It.
• The Heteronormativity of How the Media Talks About Sexual Identity.
• Teach for America Has Gone to Far:

And TFA wants to go into those communities after mass layoffs–where many quality veteran teachers will be displaced and many may not be rehired, teachers who fought side-by-side with the students and parents of the schools, teachers loved by the community–and offer them uncertified, poorly-trained novices many of whom have never even been to the Midwest, much less know the varied individual neighborhoods of Chicago.  It’s like TFA is kicking these communities while they are down.  “I know your school was just robbed from you, despite your loud, relentless, justified protest, but here are some uncertified, severely undertrained non-educators who won’t stick around long.  We at TFA don’t think your kids deserve properly trained teachers dedicated long-term to your community any more than you deserve the choice of democratic neighborhood schools.”

• Unions to Banks: Pay Up.
• Mirror Binge.
• May I Have Your Pantelegraph? The Ritual of Book Signing in the Digital Age.
• Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Enslave Girls.
• How Austerity Pushed American Colonists To Revolt.
• The Rape-Joke Double Standard:

As eloquent as Oswalt’s message about Boston was, it is not particularly challenging to side with the victims of a horrible act of violence committed against civilians. Americans are united in their desire to condemn such atrocities. Many comedians, including Oswalt, also condemned the Aurora theater shooting and made an explicit point not to joke about it. None of this is to compare these different types of violence, but to offer an observation on the types of violence that are universally condemned as opposed to culturally sanctioned. The consensus formed by the majority-male comedy population is that sexual violence is not just OK to joke about, but joke about with extraordinary frequency and viciousness, where the targets of the jokes are the victims, not the perpetrators.

What is challenging, though, is speaking out against the normalization of sexual violence, the degradation of women, and the role and responsibility that men have in either perpetuating or combating rape culture. It is challenging to confront the ways that we do and do not value affirmative consent. I believe that Morril, Oswalt and the comedians who came to Tosh and/or Morril’s defense are against rape; but Oswalt chose not to use his platform to speak about it with sincerity or gravity. As a man with a platform and a gift with words, he missed an opportunity to be an ally and to support the millions of women who experience violence daily. The suffering in Boston, as horrifying as it is, is largely abstract to a nation that has, for the most part, never experienced such a thing. On the other hand, in every room Oswalt performs comedy in, there will be a rape survivor. Statistically speaking, there will be many. There will be even more if he is performing at a university. If exceptional violence illuminates our human capacity for empathy, then structural violence shows the darkness of indifference.

• Listen Up, Bro:

Listen. Being a woman is a bitch. Not only does everyone treat you like a fucking idiot all of the time, being a woman can be scary! Not scary in a big, obvious, goofy way—it’s less like a horrible slavering dog running toward your face (except for when it is like that) and more like when you can’t find that huge spider you saw on your bed earlier (if spiders also had the capacity to transform into slavering face-hungry dogs). We’re not walking around actively terrified in the middle of the afternoon, but there’s always a small awareness that we are vulnerable simply because we are women. Cavalier jokes about domestic violence and rape (jokes that target victims, not perpetrators) feed that aura of feeling unsafe and unwelcome—not just in the comedy club, but in the world.

• Why I Won’t Diet – An Ode to My Father.
• The Surprising Sartorial Culture of Congolese “Sapeurs.“
• How One Conspiracy Group Pushes Anti-UN Legislation Across the Country.
• When Science Goes Silent.
• Why Restrict Jury Duty to Citizens?
• The Last of the Great Chained Libraries.
• An Open Letter to Facebook on Its Banning Policy.
• The Awkward Laughing Moment of Charles Ramsey’s Hero Tale.
• What Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry Knew:

[O]ne phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.

Summer Plans in Africa

Greetings, dear reader. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m sorry for inundating you with only weekend reading lists and none of the usual amateur commentary that usually comes along during the week. Things have been busy here – I’m halfway done with my time at Yale now, and final papers this semester were a wreck for me. Now that school’s out, though, I have a small group of draft posts waiting in the wings. Until then, though, I thought I’d give you an update on recent occurrences in the House of Backslash.

This summer, I will be abroad for about two months, spending time in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (and maybe South Sudan) to conduct thesis research. I’ll then be spending a short bit of time in Benin with my BFF who is a PCV there. A short note on my thesis, for those interested:

In the early 2000s, a radio station in Gulu, northern Uganda, ran programming that urged defections from the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is comprised predominantly of conscripted youths. The defection messaging promoted the Ugandan government’s amnesty program and encouraged rebels to surrender and be reintegrated back into their home communities. There has been a lot of fanfare about the defection messaging, but it hasn’t been without criticism. During the mid- to late-2000s, the LRA moved westward towards northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and eastern Central African Republic (CAR). Since then, radio stations in both of those countries and South Sudan have been using similar tactics in urging defections. Meanwhile, organizations such as Catholic Relief Service and Invisible Children have helped patch together a network of HF radios that function as an early warning system for villages that are in danger.

My research plan is to better understand how radio is used in the LRA conflict and how it affects people in the region. I hope to be conducting interviews in Gulu about radio’s use in the early 2000s, and then doing the same for contemporary usage in Yambio, South Sudan, and Dungu, DRC. The goal of these interviews will be to get a clearer picture of what the radio programs said, who was in charge of determining the programming, and how radio stations dealt with outsiders’ (NGOs or the government) involvement in their work.

I will then (hopefully) visit villages in DRC, most likely in Haut Uélé district, to learn about the HF radio stations. Similar to the first phase, I hope to learn more about how the messages function, who is in charge of operating them, and how villagers interact with those who help establish the stations. I would also like to look into how the messaging system affects the daily lives of civilians in these areas, and am interested in learning if the radios are used for anything beyond the NGOs’ intended purpose. Lastly, I’d like to evaluate the effects of the defection messaging in terms of actually encouraging defections. Both of these sections will depend on my resources and the situation on the ground, so I’ll provide updates once I’m there.

I’m sure I’ll be writing about this over the course of the next year. I’ll try to post research notes from the field, and I’m sure that I’ll use the blog as I plod through the thesis-writing process, especially in preparation for any presentations I have to give. If you have any questions or comments, go for it. If you’ll be in any of these places, we should chat. As I prep for my trip, I should probably thank the Lindsay Fellowship, the Coca-Cola World Fund, and my parents for their financial help, my wife and my friends for the emotional support, and a host of grad students and professors for their intellectual help. I have never done a lot of the things I’ll be doing, and I’m glad I’ll have all three kinds of support throughout. As we get closer to June (I’ll be leaving at the beginning of the month) I’ll let you know more about my plans. Until then, keep on keeping on everybody.

Weekend Reading

Here, do some reading:

• Occupy the Education System.
• On Kiera Wilmot and Being a Smart Black Girl.
• Scientists Tweet Support for Kiera Wilmot.
• On Quitting.
• The Ghetto is Public Policy.
• Chiquita Banana Jingle.
• The Great Gatsby Still Gets Flappers Wrong.
• Facebook Likes Don’t Save Lives.
• The Tragedy of Cooper Union:

The United States is full of higher-education institutions trying to carve out “a global brand” for themselves, often through “investment”. They generally have multi-billion-dollar endowments, global name recognition, and undergraduate tuition costs somewhere north of $40,000 a year. You could name a dozen of them off the top of your head, and Cooper Union would never be one of them. On the other hand, what you can’t do is name a dozen — or even two — institutions like Cooper, based on a social mission and free tuition and low-key excellence, where the pedagogy is not reliant on the provision of climbing walls, and where the health of the institution is not reliant on jet-setting deans who address the World Economic Forum on the subject of Global Leadership.

An investment is what you do when you spend money today, with an eye to reaping a profit in the future. Investments, by definition, are associated with future cashflow: if they’re not, then they’re not investments. Once Cooper Union starts “investing” in programs and faculty, it will have to charge for those programs and faculty in order for the investments to bear fruit. All of which is to say that this tuition charge is permanent: once it’s implemented, the chances of it being reversed are de minimis.

• Rick Perry’s War Against the University of Texas.
• How Competition is Killing Higher Education.
• Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC.
• On May Day and The Democracy Project.
• Wikipedia’s Women Problem.
• Who Speaks for the Women of Wikipedia? Not the Women of Wikipedia.
• Dear Superprofessors, This is How a Labor Market Works.
• Boston and Militarism:
  • The Colonial Era.
  • The Fugitive Slave Hearings.
  • The Modern Drug War:

In 1988, Boston Det. Sherman Griffiths was shot and killed during a police raid on a residence they suspected was occupied by Jamaican drug dealers. The suspected shooter, 34-year-old Albert Lewin was acquitted three years later after a series of investigations revealed widespread corruption and perjury within the department. In the raid that ended one of their colleague’s life, one BPD sergeant admitted in testimony that he had fabricated the informant whose alleged tip led to the raid in the first place. Waiting to establish probable cause — in other words, respecting Lewin’s constitutional rights — was too time consuming. Sources in BPD told the Globe that “enormous public pressure on police to arrest drug dealers . . . has led some detectives to find ‘workable’ solutions to what police see as unworkable constitutional requirements for warrants.”

The Lewin/Griffiths case also brought to light that Boston narcotics cops were routinely falsifying search warrants in drug cases — which means they were routinely raiding homes without probable cause. A Boston Globe review of 350 drug warrants found that fabrication of informants, exaggeration of probable cause, and boilerplate language was common. By one estimate, the number of drug warrants served by Boston police jumped from around 300 in 1985 to more than 3,000 by 1990.

• Why Sexism is Civilization’s Greatest Shame.
• On Cheerleading for Professional Sports.
• The U.S. Military in Africa, Mapped.
• Against Civility: Dartmouth and the Logic of Administrative Discourse.
• Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and Sexuality and Masculinity in Sports.
• The WNBA Can Teach Male Athletes About Coming Out and Being Allies.
• They Mocked Her “Science Fantasy.” Then She Wrote Empire Strikes Back.
• Mom Recaps The Matrix.
• Fortress Arizona?

Many of the activists who made their names in the roughest stretch of the immigration wars, from the failure of the 2006 reform bill in Congress to the passage of SB 1070, have disappeared from the scene. Michelle Dallacroce, whose work with Mothers Against Illegal Aliens made her a cable news regular for years, basicallypacked it up in 2008. Chris Simcox, who led the Minuteman Project to prominence from a newspaper office in Tombstone, Ariz., grew absorbed in a brutal legal battle against his wife at the same time three Minutemen went on trial for a robbery that devolved into a triple murder.

The media’s paying less attention now, and the hosts who could be counted on to shower the anti-immigration crowd with coverage have either lost their perches (Lou Dobbs) or moved on (Bill O’Reilly). Talk radio made celebrities out of the restrictionists in the 1990s and 2000s; the Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist famously first heard his calling when he caught Simcox being interviewed by a right-wing California talker. But driving around the Phoenix suburbs, the conservative talk radio that comes in clearest is Salem Radio’s lineup—hosts like Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt, who want Republicans to sign on to reform and win some elections.

• Jeff Flake Learns to Be Disliked.
• The TSA Can’t Even Make a URL.
• The Gilded City: Struggling to Survive in Bloomberg’s New York.
• On Education Reforms and Cheating Scandals.
• Octopus: The Footed Void.
• Are We Just Going to Ignore That the King of Sweden is Fucking Hilarious?
• In John They Trust.
• Bartleby in the University of California: The Social Life of Disobedience.
• Why American Education Fails:

In recent years, the U.S. education system has become overly focused on the last element — accountability — at the expense of progress on the others. The most ambitious federal education reform in recent years, No Child Left Behind, increased accountability by measuring schools annually on student tests in reading and math, with escalating consequences for those that did not improve. But it largely failed to address the other elements of the field, an imbalance that partially explains why the initiative has not achieved its aims. By contrast, stronger professions in the United States, such as medicine, law, and engineering, focus more on building their foundations than on holding their practitioners accountable. Doctors, for example, must clear a series of high bars before entering the field; develop a broad knowledge base, through course work and then extensive clinical training; and continually revisit their training, with practices such as hospital rounds. The medical profession places less emphasis on setting targets and making sure physicians meet them — there is no such thing as No Patient Left Behind.

Other countries, meanwhile, have figured out a better way to educate their children, one that looks less like the United States’ education system and more like its stronger professions. Recent international research suggests that the countries that top international education rankings owe their success to approaches that are in many ways the inverse of the American one. Such countries — which include Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, top scorers on the Program for International Student Assessment, an internationally recognized test for 15-year-olds that measures higher-order problem solving in math, reading, and science — all do certain things similarly. They choose their teachers from among their most talented graduates, train them extensively, create opportunities for them to collaborate with their peers within and across schools to improve their practice, provide them the external supports that they need to do their work well, and underwrite all these efforts with a strong welfare state. Because these countries do a good job of honing the expertise of their educators to begin with, they have less of a need for external monitoring of school performance.

Weekend Reading

A short list this week, as school comes to a close:

• After Austerity.
• The Lost City of Solidarity.
• Google Glass and the Demise of Ownership.
• The Power of Food in Tarantino’s Films.
• Young and In Debt.
• Bush and the West Explosion: The Untold Story of Deregulating Chemical Plants.
• What Does a Bunch of Celebrities Living Below the Poverty Line Accomplish?
• The Economics Department That Challenged Reinhart and Rogoff.
• Brown and Black and Blue, on Stop and Frisk’s effect on New York culture.
• On Gift Horses and Trojan Horses:

It’s probably true that better facilities and resources aid performance.  But shouldn’t we be applying that principle first to the 99% of Berkeley students who are not intercollegiate athletes, and to the object of academic performance?  Instead, a valuable public resource (the land granted to the university to educate California’s citizens) would be diverted to serve the interests of only a few.  Even if the construction costs of the proposed Aquatics Center are entirely covered by private donations, the plans for the building effectively monopolize that space, excluding 99% of the Berkeley community from its usufruct.

Wherever we turn today, we read that the “bricks and mortar” university is no longer viable; that it’s too costly and denies access to high-quality education.  At Berkeley we’re all too familiar with the crumbling of bricks and mortar; after nearly every winter rainstorm one can find pieces of mortar or peeling paint, along with puddles, in some of the campus’ most historic buildings, including the hallways and locker rooms of Hearst Gymnasium, the poor but beautiful elder sister of the Spieker complex.  Faculty try to teach and conduct research in deteriorating classrooms and laboratories. Donors, we are told, have no interest in funding the repair of existing facilities, in upgrading and greening the heating and plumbing systems.  And the state’s declining support for the UC system makes even everyday maintenance a financial challenge.  To respond to these challenges, the administration tries to find ways to cut costs—diminished library hours, fewer books bought, class enrollments capped to accommodate available classroom space and diminished numbers of ladder-rank faculty.

• How Did the World’s Rich Get That Way? Luck.
• Somalia to Begin Delivering Mail Again.
• If Media Covered America the Way We Cover Foreign Cultures.
• The NFL is a Tax-Exempt Organization.
• In Which a Cat Has More Publications to His Name than Some Academics.
• The Death of the University.
• Where Tuition is Free.
• Do You Know the $8.25 Man?

The $8.25 man, Bloomberg News wrote in December, has worked at McDonald’s for twenty years. Still, he can’t get forty hours a week or anything more than minimum wage. He can’t make rent payments, can’t afford a computer, and has to go to the Apple store to update his Facebook. After picking cigarette butts out of a bathroom drain, he has to clean off before his next job—at another McDonald’s. The $8.25 man is cheap goods compared to the $8.75 million man. The $8.25 man would have to work roughly a million hours to make what McDonald’s’ CEO made in 2011. The $8.75 million man stands atop an industry that added jobs at double the U.S. average post-recession. Between 2008 and 2011, McDonald’s profits alone rose from $4.3 billion to $5.5 billion. If the $8.25 man became a $15 man, a report from theEconomic Policy Institute suggests, the labor market wouldn’t lose any jobs. In downtown Chicago’s retail and food service sectors, raising the minimum wage to $15 would cost $103 million, small change compared to the $14.2 billion in revenue accrued by these sectors in 2011. Even if the aggregate raise were passed on directly to consumers, prices would go up only 2.6%.

• Why I Let My Students Cheat on Their Game Theory Exam.
• How Cuban Villagers Learned They Descended from Sierra Leone Slaves.
• Selfies and Selfhood.
• The Purpose Driven Nation, on Christian Adoptions in Rwanda.
• No Dads: Cuckolds, Dead Fathers, and Capitalist Superheroes.
• On Mad Men:
  • Just a Couple of Young Secretaries.
  • Daytime Drama, or To Discipline and To Punish.
  • Mad Style.
  • On Mad Men and Race.

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Weekend Reading

• Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready.
• The Saudi Marathon Man.
• A World Without Trash Cans.
• Being a Marathon Spectator.
• Why You Should Care about Miranda Rights.
• Why Chechens Think the Tsarnaev Brothers were Framed.
• Don’t Judge the Chechens Yet.
• Are Chechens White?
• What Happened to the People Who Fled Chechnya?
• Tamerlan and Tamerlan: American Journalism Gone Nuts.
• This is the Modern Manhunt:

When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180. So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd.

Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. Police, FBI, and the other investigators opted to let spectator surveillance supplement and augment their own. When they called for that imagery, locals flooded it in. They spoke to the public frequently, both in person and especially on Twitter. All that represented a modern twist on the age-old law enforcement maxim that the public’s eyes and ears are crucial investigative assets, as the Internet rapidly compressed the time it took for tips to arrive and get analyzed.

• Do E-Readers Inhibit Reading Comprehension?
• How TurboTax Fought Free, Easy Tax Filing.
• How Student Debt is Holding Back the Housing Market.
• Inequality and New York’s Subways.
• A History of Liberal White Racism.
• Do Not Scab for Fashion Police!
• Imagining Non-Work.
• How the One Percent Rules:

The essence of the 1929 plan was the division of the region into Slab City—the high-rises of Manhattan—and Spread City, the suburbs that surround the city center. This was enabled by the building of a set of highways that made it possible to travel to and from the city, or comfortably around it if you were traveling elsewhere. The guiding idea was to concentrate high-end activities in the city center—finance and other fancy service businesses that could afford high rents—and move the noxious stuff out to Jersey.

The city would be reconfigured in line with this rough hierarchy: (1) financial business, (2) fancy retail, (3) fancy residential, (4) inferior retail, (5) wholesalers and, at the bottom of the list, (6) industry and working-class housing. The ultimate goal was to turn the city into one of the peaks at the commanding heights of global economic activity: finance, senior management and media.

As Fitch would later argue in The Assassination of New York, the deindustrialization of the city—more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs, two-thirds of the total, disappeared between 1950 and 1990, a period when national factory employment rose by more than a third—wasn’t merely the product of “outside forces” like globalization and technological change. It was planned, via the influence of the RPA and other entities like the Real Estate Board of New York on the city planning apparatus. Instead of protecting manufacturing as a valuable resource using zoning and tax breaks, exactly the opposite tack was taken: zoning changes and tax breaks designed to squeeze the little factories out and replace them in accordance with the six-part hierarchy listed above.

• What Essays Affected International Relations?
• Waiting for the Gay Jackie Robinson.
• One Narrative Fits All, on the latest Dove commercials.
• Stop Reposting That Dove Commercial.
• The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment.
• The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism.
• The Dangers of Thinking Like an Economist.
• The Other Form of Violence.
• Nowhere to Turn:

Forced migration from environmental causes—be they sudden onset, like a typhoon, or slow onset, like a drought—does not a refugee make. There is simply no such thing as an “environmental refugee” because to be a refugee, one must face persecution. Even if you were to argue that climate change is a form of indirect persecution of the world’s most vulnerable by the world’s richest and most over-consumptive countries (like the U.S. or China), who pump enough CO2 into the global sky to change weather across the globe, according to McAdam, you’d have to prove that the persecution was on account of the impacted person’s race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group. That is to say, you’d have to make the case for intent. And you’d be hard-pressed to do so.

But we have to start somewhere, because the predictions are astonishing. As Alice Thomas, of the Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement at Refugees International, says, “If we don’t act now to put policies in place, we’re going to really limit our ability to act in the future.”

As the world heats up and crowds with more humans who are hungry, thirsty, and consuming fossil fuels, more and more people are finding their homes unlivable: nearly one million Somalis displaced (many to Kenya) during the 2011 famine; 600,000 displaced by flooding in Bangladesh this past July; the entire population of islands like Tuvalu (11,000) and Kiribati (over 100,000) threatened with forced departure as their islands sink slowly but surely into the sea. Given that climate change has brought us a new set of international conditions that impact the way people live (and if they can live at all) on a very large scale, the U.N. recognizes that there is a dire need to plan for protection of current and future climate migrants.

• Burma Punks: The Colorful Youth of Rangoon.
• School Reform in Major Cities Brings Few Benefits, Some Harm.
• The U.N. Keeps Failing Right When We Need It.
• The Floating Hippo, analyzing Mali.
• One Newspaper, Two Elections.
• A Radical Anthropologist in Academic Exile.
• Joining the Ranks, Demystifying Harvard’s Tenure System.
• Dead White Reds.
• On Last Week’s Mad Men:
  • The Rules of Engagement.
  • Do You Know What You’re Fighting For?
  • Mad Style.
  • Mad Men is the Most Anti-Pregnancy Show.

On Animal Rights Activism

Earlier this year I saw a talk about armed conservancy. The talk centered on nature reserves in northeastern Central African Republic where conservancy groups employ armed teams to patrol the grounds for poachers. The act of hunting hunters is really fascinating, and it’s actually not that uncommon. A lot of African countries have shoot-on-sight policies regarding poachers in order to protect the wildlife (and therefore the tourism industry). But what was interesting was that some of the anti-poaching men Lombard talked about were not from Africa. There was a Frenchman and a couple of Russians who were active in these groups either for ideology or for the money. It reminded me Battleground: Rhino Wars .

Battleground: Rhino Wars is a mini-series that follows four U.S. ex-military as they work to stop poachers. I haven’t seen it, I’ve only seen commercials and that video linked above. But it’s not hard to see what happens on the show. They wander the preserves looking for snares and other traps, they go into markets looking for ivory, and they try to arrest poachers. Animal Planet is documenting the horrors of poaching and showing the more extreme ways to fight it, with a heavy dose of neo-colonialism throughout (like in this video, for example, but that will have to be another post). It’s not too different from a more popular Animal Planet show, also about the more militant types of halting illegal animal trade: Whale Wars.

Whale Wars is a program that’s been around for a few years now. The show follows the crew of several ships that are part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an environmental and animal rights group that the U.S. had designated as eco-terrorists, as they work to interrupt Japanese whaling vessels. The group has done a lot in its history, but the series concentrates on its action against Japanese whalers. On the show, I’ve seen them lobbing jars of butyric acid at ships (to taint the deck with odor so they can’t work) and try to break the propellers of ships while at sea. The Japanese ships usually respond with water cannons, sound cannons, or flash-bang grenades. It’s direct action, as to whether it’s violent – judge how you want. It might be worth noting that these shows don’t cover violence against people, but rather attacks on the infrastructure and ability to make the animal trade financially nonviable.

But whenever I think about environmental activists and their extreme actions, I wonder where the line is. Raiding a poachers’ camp and boarding a whaling vessel are disputed, but they’re at least accepted enough to serve as entertainment on a television program.  But when animal rights activists firebomb a research clinic or environmentalists burn down construction sites in new, expensive neighborhoods, people are quick to label them terrorists (again, your call). These acts also attack property and infrastructure, trying to make it more difficult to abuse animals and more expensive to clear forests for the rich. What changes our understanding of these acts? Is it the escalation of the attack, from stink- and smoke-bombs that render a ship’s deck unfit for whales to fires that actually destroy? Are people less likely to object to Whale Wars and Rhino Wars because they take place outside the U.S., and so it has less to do with us? Is it merely because it’s on television, so it seems somehow less real? Better question: how would people react if activists sabotaged the Keystone XL pipeline?

Weekend Reading

April showers bring holy crap that’s a lot of links.

• Joan Walsh and Roger Ebert: White Folks Writing About White Folks.
• Clear Satire.
• How Bullying Coaches Work Like Domestic Abusers.
• Melissa Harris Perry and the Firestorm Over Collective Parenting.
• Humanism and Holocaust History.
• Of Institutional Instragram Accounts and the Spectrality of Service Work.
• Kitchen Sink Socialism.
• Pay No Attention to the Spies on the 23rd Floor.
• This is Not Advice on Whether to Go to Graduate School in Literature.
• Academia’s Indentured Servants:

Is academia a cult? That is debatable, but it is certainly a caste system. Outspoken academics like Pannapacker are rare: most tenured faculty have stayed silent about the adjunct crisis. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair, the American author famous for his essays on labour exploitation. Somewhere in America, a tenured professor may be teaching his work, as a nearby adjunct holds office hours out of her car.

On Twitter, I wondered why so many professors who study injustice ignore the plight of their peers. “They don’t consider us their peers,” the adjuncts wrote back. Academia likes to think of itself as a meritocracy - which it is not - and those who have tenured jobs like to think they deserved them. They probably do – but with hundreds of applications per available position, an awful lot of deserving candidates have defaulted to the adjunct track.

The plight of the adjunct shows how personal success is not an excuse to excuse systemic failure. Success is meaningless when the system that sustained it – the higher education system – is no longer sustainable. When it falls, everyone falls. Success is not a pathway out of social responsibility.

• Tenured Radicals.
• Autofill Mythologies.
• Researching While Black.
• U.S. Centrism and Inhabiting a Non-Space in #FemFuture.
• Margaret Thatcher and Death Etiquette.
• The Lady’s Not for Turning.
• Blair’s Thatcher, Thatcher’s Blair.
• No, Africans Don’t Remember Thatcher Fondly.
• Mrs. Thatcher and Africa.
• Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher.
• Thatcher is Dead, Long Live Thatcher: Misogyny and the Neoliberal Order:

[N]eoliberalism thrives on structural misogyny. Gender is one powerful mechanism by which the neoliberal order converts our potentially resistant common worlds into positive externalities, into social formations functional for the maintenance of life in an unlivable world. After all, the state’s abdication of its responsibility for social care does not mean that care disappears. (Well, for some it does.) The burden of care, rather, is displaced (in part) to the family, as Thatcher made clear, which means that this burden is displaced disproportionately (if not entirely) onto women caught up within patriarchal family structures. For poor women of color in particular, neoliberal structural adjustments create conditions in which the routinized hyper-exploitation of unsalaried care labor intensifies. To take an example geographically proximate to me, consider Rahm Emmanuel’s impending shutdown of over 50 Chicago public schools. Kids slated to travel to out-of-neighborhood schools will have to get up earlier. Maybe they’ll have to be dropped off or picked up. Maybe they’ll have to travel through inhospitable neighborhoods or feel sad and isolated in their new worlds. Maybe they won’t learn as well and so require extra hours of tutoring. Maybe available social services (one or two meals a day, say, or after-school care) will be cut. Negotiating these transformations will require new investments of time, affective energy, attention, and (if it is available, and even if it is not) money. Someone is going to surrogate for the dismantled structure of care. It’s not hard to guess at the demographic profile of this someone.

• Arizona’s Unprecedented Assault on Students.
• Land of Many Nationalisms.
• Madonna, Malawi, and Manners.
• Welcome to the United States.
• The Sun Was Once New.
• A History of NRA Advertisements.
• Increasingly Large Classes.
• Obama’s Morning After:

When Secretary Sebelius rejected the FDA’s recommendation in 2011, the president let drop this paternalistic gem in support: “As a father of two daughters … I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.” And it’s Obama who now has to decide whether to appeal this ruling, or to allow Plan B to be finally shelved where it belongs: next to the condoms and lube, where women and girls can access the care they need without having to submit themselves to the moral judgment of a doctor or pharmacist.

Memo to Obama: “Common sense” says that the government has no public-health interest in shaming sexually active girls or in increasing the odds they’ll become unintentionally pregnant. Quite the contrary: The Supreme Court found in 1977 that teens have a right to privacy, and that the right includes access to contraception, and that states can’t use “moral” arguments to obstruct that right.

Don’t want your kids to use Plan B without your knowledge? Then do the hard work of parenting and build the kind of relationship with your kids that will let them know they can have frank and open conversations with you about sex. Let your daughters know that their “purity” is less important to you than their health and happiness. Instead of teaching them that sex is bad and wrong until a man turns you into a wife, equip your children to make positive sexual decisions on their own terms.

• How I Got Invited – and then Uninvited – to be a Guest on Huffington Post.
• My Radical Pedagogical Program.
• Like a Business.
• Black Skin, Blank Screens.
• The Rise of Debtor’s Prisons in the U.S.
• Emotional Cultures and Facebook.
• Conservative Scholars’ Investigation Says Bowdoin College is Awesome.

• And as you prepare for the next episode of Mad Men, check out these responses to the premiere:
  • Matthew Weiner’s Death Obsession
  • Rhapsody in Beige
  • Does Don Draper Want to Be Every Woman He Sleeps With?
  • Mad Style Part I & Part II
  • The Women of Mad Men
  • What Peggy Olson Teaches Us That Sheryl Sandberg Cannot

On Gender in Language

As I often do at this blog, I’m going to write about something that I know virtually nothing about. Keep that in mind – and feel free to comment – if you have anything to add. But I’d like to take a brief moment to talk about language, because I find linguistics fascinating despite my amateur experience with it. I speak a couple of languages at a fluent or near fluent level, and I speak a couple at a very, very basic level, and every once in a while I notice differences between them.

In Through the Language Glass, my first (and only) foray into linguistics – and a very introductory one at that – Guy Deutscher gives a broad overview of culture’s influence on language and language’s influence on culture. I read the book a couple of years ago, and every once in a while I think back to the studies that Deutscher mentions when I notice differences between the languages I speak or study. Recently, I’ve been learning Swahili, and it reminded me of something that Deutscher wrote about German, the language I learned in high school and college. In the book Deutscher quotes anthropologist Franz Boas as writing that “[Grammar] determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.” He then goes on to quote linguist Roman Jakobson: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” Deutscher continues:

If I say in English, “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor,” you may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we are speaking French or German or Russian, I don’t have the privilege to equivocate, because I am obliged by the language to choose between voisin or voisine, Nachbar or Nachbarin, sosed or sossedka. So French, German, and Russian would compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I felt it was your business. [151-2]

I found this really interesting, as I had never seen the constrictions of some languages from the gendered point of view. In Mandarin Chinese, I have very specific words for family members: my mother’s older brother has a different name than my mother’s younger brother, and their names differ from my father’s older and younger brother as well. Chinese is particularly specific when it comes to kinship terms, but broader nouns don’t carry such specificity. All neighbors are neighbors, in other words.

Fast forward a year and a half, and read this wonderful piece by Angust Johnston about the time he was asked his preferred gender pronoun at a party:

[I]t was actually a great question that I was asked that night. It was an exciting question. I’m a “he.” I’ve always thought of myself as a he, and I expect I always will. I’m a man, I’m a guy, I’m a dad, I’m a son, I’m a brother.

But in that moment, I got to choose. I was asked to choose, asked to pick whether for the duration of that conversation I wanted to be approached as a he or as something else. And I knew that whatever answer I gave, it would be honored, respected, taken seriously. And that recognition, far more than any of the rote rounds of he/she/they/ze responses I’ve seen given at the start of workshops, opened something up in me. It wasn’t a door — at least not a door I was tempted to walk through — but it was a window.

And I liked the view.

I attended a conference in February that was dominated by English graduate students, many of whom worked on queer theory. (Jack Halberstam gave the keynote, if that’s any indication of the audience). There were some situations in which I awkwardly didn’t know how to refer to people because I didn’t know what their preferred gender pronoun was. One of my hosts with whom I spent a lot of time tended to use “they” to refer to a person, and I picked up on that when I needed something to default to. At the time, though, I also reflected on how other languages deal with gender pronouns.

In Swahili, there is no “he,” no “she,” no “it.” There is only yeye. There are plenty of nouns that carry gender: there are men and women, brides and grooms. But both waiters and waitresses are wanunuzi. Your neighbor is a jirani. And you don’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you have a mpenzi. And using that language everyday for fifty minutes is a window into a life under a different gender system. Obviously this doesn’t mean that it’s easier being trans* or queer in a Swahili-speaking society, but it means that living in that type of setting might be in some ways different. In Mandarin Chinese there is no difference between the third person pronouns. Whether you mean he, she, or it, you say ta. But, oddly enough, when you tried to write about him, her, and it, you would be compelled to write 他, 她, and 它. And so, in a way, talking about people may give you more privacy than writing about them if you’re interacting in Mandarin.

There’s not an argument that I’m building to, I suppose. I’m just processing how the different languages I know use gender, and how they allow speakers some freedom or privacy, but also how they constrict.