Thursday, October 23, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Traveling While Arab
By Alaa Al Aswany
The New York Times – October 16, 2014
Some years ago, I was invited to a literary festival in London whose slogan was “change the world.” I had some festival brochures in my hand as I went through the usual entry process at Heathrow Airport. But before I reached the exit, I was surprised to be stopped by a police officer. He examined my passport and leafed through the brochures. Then he asked, “How do you wish to change the world?”
His demeanor was apprehensive, so I took the question seriously and started explaining, in simple terms, that I was an author invited to the festival, that I had not personally chosen the slogan but it implied changing the way people think by means of writing. He seemed persuaded but, all the same, took my passport and I had to wait half an hour before it was returned.
I could provide scores of similar anecdotes. My literary works have been translated into 35 languages, and so I have traveled to various countries for numerous seminars and book signings. Despite the amicable way I am treated by people in the book world, in airports I am just another Arab, a potential terrorist.
READ MORE....
The New York Times – October 16, 2014
Some years ago, I was invited to a literary festival in London whose slogan was “change the world.” I had some festival brochures in my hand as I went through the usual entry process at Heathrow Airport. But before I reached the exit, I was surprised to be stopped by a police officer. He examined my passport and leafed through the brochures. Then he asked, “How do you wish to change the world?”
His demeanor was apprehensive, so I took the question seriously and started explaining, in simple terms, that I was an author invited to the festival, that I had not personally chosen the slogan but it implied changing the way people think by means of writing. He seemed persuaded but, all the same, took my passport and I had to wait half an hour before it was returned.
I could provide scores of similar anecdotes. My literary works have been translated into 35 languages, and so I have traveled to various countries for numerous seminars and book signings. Despite the amicable way I am treated by people in the book world, in airports I am just another Arab, a potential terrorist.
READ MORE....
From Miasma to Ebola: The History of Racist Moral Panic Over Disease
By Stassa Edwards
Jezebel – Tuesday October 14, 2014
On October 1st, the New York Times published a photograph of a four-year-old girl in Sierra Leone. In the photograph, the anonymous little girl lies on a floor covered with urine and vomit, one arm tucked underneath her head, the other wrapped around her small stomach. Her eyes are glassy, returning the photographer's gaze. The photograph is tightly focused on her figure, but in the background the viewer can make out crude vials to catch bodily fluids and an out-of-focus corpse awaiting disposal.
The photograph, by Samuel Aranda, accompanied a story headlined "A Hospital From Hell, in a City Swamped by Ebola." Within it, the Times reporter verbally re-paints this hellish landscape where four-year-olds lie "on the floor in urine, motionless, bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open." Where she will probably die amidst "pools of patients' bodily fluids," "foul-smelling hospital wards," "pools of infectious waste," all overseen by an undertrained medical staff "wearing merely bluejeans" and "not wearing gloves.”
Aranda's photograph is in stark contrast to the images of white Ebola patients that have emerged from the United States and Spain. In these images the patient, and their doctors, are almost completely hidden; wrapped in hazmat suits and shrouded from public view, their identities are protected. The suffering is invisible, as is the sense of stench produced by bodily fluids: these photographs are meant to reassure Westerners that sanitation will protect us, that contagion is contained.
Pernicious undertones lurk in these parallel representations of Ebola, metaphors that encode histories of nationalism and narratives of disease. African illness is represented as a suffering child, debased in its own disease-ridden waste; like the continent, it is infantile, dirty and primitive. Yet when the same disease is graphed onto the bodies of Americans and Europeans, it morphs into a heroic narrative: one of bold doctors and priests struck down, of experimental serums, of hazmat suits and the mastery of modern technology over contaminating, foreign disease. These parallel representations work on a series of simple, historic dualisms: black and white, good and evil, clean and unclean.
READ MORE....
Jezebel – Tuesday October 14, 2014
On October 1st, the New York Times published a photograph of a four-year-old girl in Sierra Leone. In the photograph, the anonymous little girl lies on a floor covered with urine and vomit, one arm tucked underneath her head, the other wrapped around her small stomach. Her eyes are glassy, returning the photographer's gaze. The photograph is tightly focused on her figure, but in the background the viewer can make out crude vials to catch bodily fluids and an out-of-focus corpse awaiting disposal.
The photograph, by Samuel Aranda, accompanied a story headlined "A Hospital From Hell, in a City Swamped by Ebola." Within it, the Times reporter verbally re-paints this hellish landscape where four-year-olds lie "on the floor in urine, motionless, bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open." Where she will probably die amidst "pools of patients' bodily fluids," "foul-smelling hospital wards," "pools of infectious waste," all overseen by an undertrained medical staff "wearing merely bluejeans" and "not wearing gloves.”
Aranda's photograph is in stark contrast to the images of white Ebola patients that have emerged from the United States and Spain. In these images the patient, and their doctors, are almost completely hidden; wrapped in hazmat suits and shrouded from public view, their identities are protected. The suffering is invisible, as is the sense of stench produced by bodily fluids: these photographs are meant to reassure Westerners that sanitation will protect us, that contagion is contained.
Pernicious undertones lurk in these parallel representations of Ebola, metaphors that encode histories of nationalism and narratives of disease. African illness is represented as a suffering child, debased in its own disease-ridden waste; like the continent, it is infantile, dirty and primitive. Yet when the same disease is graphed onto the bodies of Americans and Europeans, it morphs into a heroic narrative: one of bold doctors and priests struck down, of experimental serums, of hazmat suits and the mastery of modern technology over contaminating, foreign disease. These parallel representations work on a series of simple, historic dualisms: black and white, good and evil, clean and unclean.
READ MORE....
Monday, October 6, 2014
Who Are ‘We the People’?
By ERIC L. LEWIS
The New York Times - OCT. 4, 2014
WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?
Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.
Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.
As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.
The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. Even within the conservative and liberal blocs there are a range of views on the limits of executive power, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the protection of politically expressive speech and the applicability of the Constitution abroad. But the bulk of the most controversial cases come down to 4-to-4 bloc voting, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s worldview defining the court’s path.
READ MORE....
The New York Times - OCT. 4, 2014
WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?
Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.
Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.
As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.
The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. Even within the conservative and liberal blocs there are a range of views on the limits of executive power, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the protection of politically expressive speech and the applicability of the Constitution abroad. But the bulk of the most controversial cases come down to 4-to-4 bloc voting, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s worldview defining the court’s path.
READ MORE....
Sunday, October 5, 2014
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS SPECIAL ISSUE OF CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY A CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
We are constantly confronted by competing and contradictory narratives
concerning the importance of education. On one hand, a steady mantra
stresses success in the new economy requires at least a college
degree—and evidence shows that workers with a college degree earn more
and get better jobs over their working lives. On the other hand, the
educational system in the US is under assault as public sector funding
at all levels is cut, teachers as public sector workers are demonized,
and by everyone’s assessment the US is rapidly moving towards a society
where a select few receive an elite education and the rest are being
left behind. The editors of Critical Sociology are looking for
scholarship that delves into the nature and consequences of
education—both within the US and comparatively. At a time when costs to
students in public universities in the US double while state
governments cut allocations, we read that Germany has decided higher
education for all will be free of fees and tuition costs. Are any
colleges educating underserved students without leaving them with
crippling debts, and if so how? Students and teachers in Colorado
resisted revisionist changes to the high school curriculum, are these
strategies for institutions of higher education? What is the future for
the next generation in the US? How can we understand the logic and role
of education (and not pedagogy) under advanced capitalism in the
neoliberal era?
Some suggestive topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
* 600,000 students in the US attend colleges where the dropout rate is 85 percent
* many students amass debt but leave without a degree, facing a life of indentured work
* by some estimates three quarters of all college instruction is done by casualized faculty
* school budgets are driven by administrative and not instructional costs
* slashed public sector support for education shift costs onto students
* corporate logic (failed and successful) reshapes governance and decision-making
* faculty are silenced under rules of "civility"
* faculty should avoid "disturbing" students with content that may raise challenges
* graduate program recruit students without funding and few job prospects
* institutions fail to recruit underserved faculty and students
Potential contributors should send a proposal containing a tentative title, a short (100-150 word) abstract, and contact/affiliation details to critical.sociology (at) gmail.com by 1 December 2014; please put EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM in your subject line. All authors will be notified by 15 January and first drafts of papers will be due by 15 June. We plan on having a session at the annual Critical Sociology one-day conference after the SSSP annual meetings in Chicago, where authors will discuss their draft papers and get feedback.
Depending on the number of submissions, we anticipate producing an edited volume to augment the journal symposium. Contact David Fasenfest, Editor, at the email above with any questions.
Some suggestive topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
* 600,000 students in the US attend colleges where the dropout rate is 85 percent
* many students amass debt but leave without a degree, facing a life of indentured work
* by some estimates three quarters of all college instruction is done by casualized faculty
* school budgets are driven by administrative and not instructional costs
* slashed public sector support for education shift costs onto students
* corporate logic (failed and successful) reshapes governance and decision-making
* faculty are silenced under rules of "civility"
* faculty should avoid "disturbing" students with content that may raise challenges
* graduate program recruit students without funding and few job prospects
* institutions fail to recruit underserved faculty and students
Potential contributors should send a proposal containing a tentative title, a short (100-150 word) abstract, and contact/affiliation details to critical.sociology (at) gmail.com by 1 December 2014; please put EDUCATION SYMPOSIUM in your subject line. All authors will be notified by 15 January and first drafts of papers will be due by 15 June. We plan on having a session at the annual Critical Sociology one-day conference after the SSSP annual meetings in Chicago, where authors will discuss their draft papers and get feedback.
Depending on the number of submissions, we anticipate producing an edited volume to augment the journal symposium. Contact David Fasenfest, Editor, at the email above with any questions.
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