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SMC Global Citizenship

Santa Monica College promotes global citizenship—developing, sharing, and using inter-cultural understanding to foster a more livable, sustainable world. Visit www.smc.edu/globalcitizenship for more details.

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brewinggeographer The Brewing Geographer

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I think that human-rights abuse is the same no matter where you are. … Unfortunately, to be truthful, we don’t care until it happens to us.

- Global Hip Hop star K’naan, of Somalia via Toronto, discussing some of the inspiration behind his music and poetry in this short video for Amnesty International and Link TV.

via utnereader.

I think that human-rights abuse is the same no matter where you are. … Unfortunately, to be truthful, we don’t care until it happens to us.

- Global Hip Hop star K’naan, of Somalia via Toronto, discussing some of the inspiration behind his music and poetry in this short video for Amnesty International and Link TV.

via utnereader.

Subway lines as transects, revealing the urban geography of economic inequality in New York City.

ilovecharts:

Inequality and New York’s Subway [article]

(via theatlantic)

After the Tiananmen protests, China’s reform seemed to have been aborted. Yet if one asks today which political leader did most to transform the world through a shift towards markets the answer would be Deng Xiaoping, not Reagan or Thatcher. The transformation of China is the great economic and political event of our era.

Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, reflects on the mixed but transformative legacy of Margaret Thatcher, and reminds us that a global perspective on Thatcherism/Reaganism/neoliberalism necessarily includes the point of view of China and other emerging regions, as well as the trans-Atlantic and trans-Channel worlds to which Britain belongs. Another veteran European journalist, Wolfgang Kaden of Der Spiegel, provides a similarly mixed review of the neoliberal world that Thatcher ushered into place.

As for the view from China, it is of perhaps little surprise that one of angles most emphasized is Thatcher’s role in facilitating the peaceful transfer of the former British colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. Meanwhile, as news of Thatcher’s death broke worldwide on Monday, the new Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, was meeting with Bill Gates and other global business dignitaries offering assurances of China’s commitment to an “open and fair market” of international trade.

abundanciasmc:

Earth Week - April 22-26

Kicking off a great week with the Honeybee Festival and Film on Monday April 22.

Mark your calendars and plan to help out!

The truth is, outside of arithmetic, it’s hard to teach anything worth learning that someone won’t find offensive or upsetting or frightening or off-putting. If it’s interesting, if it’s something people care about, then people are going to have opinions about it. That means somebody, somewhere, isn’t going to like it. The drive to keep our children perfectly safe from dangerous knowledge just ends up reducing their education to a bland, boring, irrelevant slog.

Noah Berlatsky makes the case for un-censoring education. Books such as Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran, Persepolis, are so valuable precisely because they provoke thinking and discussion of controversial topics. Satrapi, by the way, has also told her story via an excellent animated film by the same name:

A creative and compelling use of animated graphics to help us visualize the scale of economic inequality in the United States today, as measured by personal net worth. The video is largely a presentation of data from a 2011 study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely. Also underlying this presentation is the career’s worth of work on wealth inequality by Nobel laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz. The interview linked here was published in October last year.

Over the next two decades, three billion people are projected to join the global middle class (for comparison’s sake, one billion people did this in the past 20 years). Their emergence will of course be one of the great success stories of the 21st century. But it will also cause tremendous resource strain across the world and, at worst, new global conflicts over the raw ingredients for middle-class living.

Emily Badger, in TheAtlanticCities.com, sets the context for Patrick Doherty’s argument that promoting walkable urbanism should be seen as a key component of the USA’s natural-security strategy for the 21st Century.