Back in January we blogged about a competition for documentaries focusing on the multicultural city.  Right now the same organisation is calling for papers for a second festival.  One film I recently came across would certainly fit this framework.  Called, “Hear Every voice: NYC and the National Park Service”, this film is a collaborative effort between filmmaker Stephen Ogumah, the National Parks Service, and sociologists Professors Jerry Krase and Jennifer Adams of Brooklyn College, along with a number of their students.  The central question the film asks is how New York’s national parks can contribute to the experience of urban living, especially for the city’s highly diverse migrant population.

The film brings together the themes migration, multiculturalism, and the uses of urban space, particularly common space.  For example, it considers how shared spaces may be implicated in generating interactions in an ethnically diverse population through practices such as shared gardening, festivals such as carnivals, or even cricket.  Social research methodologies are also featured, as Brooklyn College students work as interns with the National Parks association to research knowledge of, and attitudes towards national parks in NYC.  Overall I found this interesting to watch, mainly because it brought together a themes that I wouldn’t normally associate with each other, namely the possible relationship(s) between migration and national parks.  It’s well worth a watch, and could possibly be a good resource in teaching courses on urban anthropology and/or migration.

more about “Hear Every Voice: NYC and the Nationa…“, posted with vodpod

Posted in Education, Film, Media, Migration, Multiculturalism, Urban Anthropology Tagged: National parks, New York City ]]> http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/nyc-national-parks-migration-and-visual-sociology/feed/ 0 Jovan http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/conference-scams-and-womens-empowerment/ http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/conference-scams-and-womens-empowerment/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:52:06 +0000 Third Tone Devil http://culturematters.wordpress.com/?p=894 ]]>

Have you been receiving conference scam spam? I have so far got about a dozen. It is a very interesting improvement on the Nigerian general’s widow scam, banking on the fact that if you are invited to a conference you might reasonably accept to get a visa. Presumably, though, there is a registration fee. (I wonder if such emails actually target academics.) Here is the text of the latest one I received:

YOU ARE SPECIALLY INVITED TO OUR 2009 YOUTH  CONFERENCE IN LONDON,UNITED KINGDOM.

” STOP EARLY MARRIAGE, CHILD ABUSE/YOUTH AND WOMEN EMPOWERMENT”Invation Ref: KY7712

 United Youth Redemption Outreach and co-organizers of the 10th international NGO’s & CBO’s conference on community Development and Development Planning have the  pleasure to invite Youth Organizations,Socio Cultural Organizations, Community Based Organizations (CBO)Scholars, Researchers, Health Organizations, Professionals, Business Organizations (NGOs) Religion Organizations,  Human Right Organizations & Women Groups to the International Conference on ” Stop Early Marriage, Child Abuse/Youth and Women Empowerment ” taking place from 31st august- 10th september 2009 in London,United Kingdom.

This is the most important event in the framework of the fight for human and community development which will take place in London,United Kingdom.

United Youth Redemption Outreach are registered 501(c) Nonprofit international organization whose aims & objectives are to empower individuals and communities worldwide through offering grants for business, education, economic enhancement, community development and environmental conservation, to support groups and organizations addressing social issues,  youth and women empowerment, and a variety of philanthropic projects through grants to non-profit organization;to provide education & information with view of limiting abuse and child molestation, to support and advocate on behalf of those infected and affected by the menace or abuse and neglect to promote the well-being of mankind by empowering the capacity of charitable organization to provide effective programs of quality.

This conference will bring together 1026 representatives of NGOs/CBOs and numerous numbers of interested individual participants from all over the world. The conference will be conducted on participatory bases with satellite plenary and simultaneous sessions followed by general and small group discussions.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT:

The conference receives financial support from CitiBank New York and United Nations Youth Commission,Ford Foundation,coca cola etc. This sponsorship covers the following:

(1) Return Airplane travel tickets for selected delegates from their home countries to venues of the event in London,United Kingdom, then back to their home countries.

(2)  Medical insurance cover for delegates throughout the entire conference duration.

(3) Visa procurement.

United Youth Redemption Outreach will not assume the responsibilities of any other costs other than those listed above.

NOMINATION & SELECTION OF PARTICIPANTS:
Intending participants are requested to nominate between Five (5) to Ten (10) active members to participate. Participants should be from 18years and above (Male or Female).

REGISTRATION PROCESS:

To register to take part in this Conference, please request for the International Delegates Registration form and other conference information. The request for registration form and other conference information should be addressed to the Secretary:

 Mrs. Victoria Rowel.
Secretary, Office of Organizing Committee,
United Youth Redemption Outreach. (UYRO)
Tel/Fax +44 70111 50794
Email: conference853@yahoo.com

While we anticipate your earliest response, you are advised to contact the Secretary by email and we look forward to meeting up with you in London United Kingdom, to assert a new change for a stronger society.

Regards,

Prof. Mitchell Harlow.
President, Summit Organizing Committee.
United  Youth Redemption Outreach

Apart from the great travesty of academia and “civil society”, what’s especially interesting here is the use of “women’s empowerment.” Most emails I have received have similar topics, presumably because they seem so unquestionably legitimate and real. It drives home the point that Sverre Molland noted in his recent Macquarie PhD: that issues such as “human trafficking” (and, one could add, others involving women and children — a point noted by E.M. Forster) garner unquestioned support from left and right.

Next month the University of Western Sydney will be launching a new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.  Here are the details of the Centre and the launch:

Launch of the new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies

The University of Western Sydney is its new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies on the 16th of July, 2009 (Sydney, Bankstown Campus, Lecture Theatre 4, Building 23)

Prof. Jim Beckford (Warwick University, UK), Prof. Riaz Hassan (Flinders University), Prof. Fethi Mansouri (Deakin University), A/Prof. Gabriele Marranci (UWS), and Prof. Bryan Turner (UWS) will be
speaking on the day.

A copy of the program for the launch can be downloaded at

http://tinyurl.com/mqkwrj and the invitation can be found at the following URL http://tinyurl.com/nceisinvite

For more information or to RSVP, please contact Judy Crabb, Executive Officer, College of Arts: j.crabb@uws.edu.au, or (02) 9772 6765.

Attendees are welcome to attend the dinner but bookings for this are essential.

The development of this Centre has been assisted by a Federal Government grant of $8m which established the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies and brings together the University of
Melbourne, Griffith University, and the University of Western Sydney. Collaboration between these institutions has already established a new undergraduate program in Islamic studies.

The Director of the Research Centre is Professor Bryan Turner,Professor of Social and Political Thought in the School of Humanities and Languages in the College of Arts.

The Research Centre is essentially concerned with the contemporary world and will seek to foster comparative studies of Muslim communities both within and outside Australia.

It happens that a small “arthouse” (?) cinema in central Amsterdam is simultaneously screening two award-winning feature films that are in one way or another about illegal Chinese migration: Frozen River, a quite lyrical film about two women smuggling people from Canada to the US through an Indian reservation to make ends meet, and Gomorra, based on Roberto Saviano’s bestseller, in which the Camorra works with Chinese crime syndicates to bring in “slave labour”. Although both films reflect the general obsession with this trope, the way in which it is presented is very different.  

In Frozen River, everybody — perhaps even the migrants themselves, two of whom curse at the women because they don’t trust women drivers — have individual motives; there don’t seem to be either dupes or villains in the story (though the idea that somebody would pay $40 thousand to be smuggled into what they perceive is a struggling country strikes the women as crazy). Gomorra, by contrast, is full of victims, villains and heroes, and seems to be very much in sync with Italy’s current political trends that are more anti-immigrant, anti-South (I mean Italy’s South) and pro-strongman than probably at any time since World War II.

A few days ago Jovan wrote about Gabriele Marranci’s blog. When I was in Singapore I had a chat with Gabriele about xenophobia in Italy, and to my surprise he told me that the main xenophobic party, Lega Nord, which is part of the current government,  has recently upgraded Chinese immigrants to being as dangerous as Muslims. I had thought that in the last few years Muslims have become the unchallenged embodiment of the dangerous Other. This does have its flip side, though. At a conference today in Amsterdam I heard a paper by Gargi Bhattacharya denouncing Britain’s criminalization of forced marriage as a step to stigmatize Muslims/South Asians further. But, commenting on her paper, anthropologist Jacob Rigi reminded us that “slavery” (combatting which was one of the rationales for the legislation) really does exist; just look at all those trafficked Chinese. In other words, even those in the academia who are sensitive towards “security talk” about Muslims may not be so critical when the same type of rhetoric crops up with regard to other migrants.

In my native Hungary, the situation is somewhat different. A few years ago, a social worker at Hungary’s single migrant-aid NGO told me how, when the organisation took a group of Afghan children on a trip to the countryside, an unfriendly villager asked: “Why did you bring all this gypsies here?” Told that the children were not Gypsy but Aghan, the man was visibly relieved and said that was okay then.

Today I came across a blog post on the Hungarian subsite of Stormfront a white-supremacist online forum.  The site seems to be populated by members from Hungary, other Eastern European countries, and ethnic Hungarians abroad (including North America).  Here is what the post, by Corvinus, said:

Here is a funny ad, posted at the most chinese-immigrant centers such as chinese food markets and such:

It says:

Dear Chinese!
For every 10 gypsies you kill , you get a greencard in exchange!

Corvinus’ signature says: “We are all Palestinians right now.” This did not seem to bother Norum, from Latvia, who posted the following response:

Chinese – “bad”
Gypsies – “worse”
Muslims – “worst”

 Most respondents from Eastern Europe seemed to agree that Chinese, though bad, were nonetheless better than Gypsies and Muslims. But a member who identified his location as “Europe – Catalonia – Spain” disagreed:

Chinese is a closed community but this reason doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous.  (…) Though they work silently they ruin our economy (I speak about my country) with their disloyal competence [competition] (because their prices are very low) and our local companies cannot do anything against them. In zone manufacturer near to my house there are dozens of stores that they dedicate to the manufacture of clothes and shoes while our merchants lose money or have to close the business. They were never mixing with us, but their economic activities are harmful to us. And if they come in mass, with the democratic system, they were finishing deciding for us. They are destroying our economy from the inside.

Every immigration is bad and the silent immigration is the worst.

Resentment of Chinese traders seems to be greater in Spain and Italy than elsewhere, as there they are successfully competing with the existing local garment and shoe industries. More broadly, I wonder if the recession, besides increasing xenophobia overall, will shift it towards migrants who are seen as economically successful, including Chinese as well as skilled white(-collar) migrants (witness the demonstrations against Italian workers today in England and Wales). Although I don’t think it will be easy to dislodge Muslims and Gypsies from the seat of the top threat, concerns about cultural norms may for a while be overshadowed by economic competition. It may also increase antisemitism, which has a difficult relationship with Islamophobia on the extreme right (especially in Eastern Europe).

If Corvinus is right and this sticker has really been put up around Chinese shops in Hungary, I wonder about reactions by Chinese. Anti-Gypsy prejudice is quite widespread among them, and some may feel vindicated.

Just quickly.  The Sydney Morning Herald currently has a nice little multimedia presentation entitled “20 Little Australians”.  A condensed version of a longer story that will appear in the weekend paper, obviously designed to coincide with Australia Day on the 26th.  The presentation features 20 children who have migrated to Australia and provides snippets of their experiences and impressions in and of Australia.  Overall the presentation has a glossy, feel-good feel but the Herald folk avoid presenting Australia as the promised land for all comers.  There are some negative impressions, mentions of racism and so on, but most appealing and interesting to me were the unexpected comments, like the Russian boy who noted that people don’t speak as much to each other as they do in Russia, or the Pakistani boy who was amazed that he was allowed to call his neighbour by his first name.

Besides containing these little gems, the presentation is well worth the watch just to get a two minute overview of the astounding variety of migration to Australia and a couple of hints at what we do well and not so well for those who have chosen to settle here.

[Link.]

The Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa has just put out a call for video and photo presentations on the theme of the ‘multicultural city’.  Sounds like an exciting venture.  Here are the details:

Diversity in Place: Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City April 24th, 2009
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

More than half of the population in the world now lives in cities, and the urban share of the globe will continue to increase dramatically to reach 70 percent by 2050. Migration, both from within and among societies, is a major source of urbanization, with multicultural cities on the rise everywhere.

Call for Documentary Film/Video Entries

In an innovative way toward mutual learning, we invite the submission of video and photo documentaries whose emphasis is on exploring multicultural cities and processes of place-making. Scholars, teachers, students and practitioners alike are searching for alternative methods to conventional data analysis and academic writing to be able to capture ethnic diversity and multicultural interactions in real world settings. The use of documentaries to show the daily practices of multiculturalism in the city can make several key contributions to research, teaching and action.

Videos not in excess of 15 minutes are requested for submission to screenings which will be held at the conference venue at the University of Hawai’i Manoa Campus on April 24th, 2009. Selections of videos to be included in the seminar will be made by a committee of students and faculty who are organizing the event. Artists, video- and filmmakers, researchers, writers and others interested in the relation between people and places and the making of multicultural cities are invited to join the project, participate to the seminar to discuss their ideas and work.

Questions, themes, topics and issues to be addressed in the documentaries can include, but are not limited to:

* How documentaries by recoding the presence of people of different origins over time can reveal ‘invisible’ minority cultures in a way that no other media can.
* The efforts at historic preservation of elements of the city that might otherwise have been overlooked but are of high cultural value to members of a community.
* How multiculturalism can work well in practice and thus contribute to a more positive attitude about and pride in the multicultural city, and thereby assist in fostering mutual accommodation and tolerance.
* In an age of global migration in which significant segments of multicultural cities do not have citizenship or are otherwise marginalized in the city, how documentaries can help identify issues of social justice.
* How multiculturalism inscribes itself into the city by everyday uses of urban space and lead us to a greater appreciation of the many different identities that make up the multicultural Cosmopolis of contemporary times.

By combining the reflections and findings emerging around the objectives of the conference, and understanding the inevitability of increasing diversity in urban places, this conference aims at drawing lessons and recommendations as to what makes the creation of ethnic spaces possible, and further what helps to form and shape livable cities with healthy intercultural relations, namely, cities as multicultural places where migrants’ place-making is understood and acknowledged as an inherent human right to the city.

This conference is sponsored by the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED), University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

The purpose of the call is a selection of a maximum of eight documentaries to be screened in a one-day conference on April 24th, 2009 at the University of Hawai’i.

Submission deadline: March 1st, 2009

Guidelines

Videos should be short — no longer than 15.00 minutes. International and Domestic submissions are encouraged.
The formats accepted are: DVD
Please include: Synopsis, Bio, CV and Contact Information. All submissions will be added to the Diversity in Place Video Library for possible inclusion in future projects. If included in other projects, artists will be contacted for permission.

Send submissions to:

Vera Zambonelli, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, 96822 Honolulu HI

Travel and lodging aid:
Pending application, the Project will cover part of travel expenses and lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of Honolulu. If traveling to Honolulu is not an option, we will arrange videoconferencing through skype.

For more information: diversityinplace@gmail.com
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

This post has been removed at the request of the author.

The Australian government has just announced a very positive change to the policy detaining asylum seekers.  According to the new policy, detention of asylum seekers will no longer be mandatory and will only apply to those arriving by boat or who are deemed to pose a threat to the community in some way or another.  It would also appear that even those detained will be subjected to a less draconian form of detention, with an emphasis on resolving cases quickly.

Not surprisingly, the Liberal opposition has condemned the move, claiming that this will send the wrong message to people smugglers. The opposition spokesman for immigration, Chris Ellison stated that:

“The fact that we only have six unauthorised arrivals in detention in Australia today demonstrates the past success of the coalition government’s strong border protection policies,” he said.

The decision would send a message to people smugglers in the region that the nation is relaxing its border control, he said. (SMH, 29 July 2008)

I have always been horrified by the logic of such arguments, which essentially says that some people, whether “genuine” refugees or not, should be punished in order to prevent criminal behaviour on the part of others.  This is a form of exemplary punishment akin to flogging some prisoners in order to serve as a warning to others.  It is particularly disturbing that a logic of this kind has the sort of respectability it does in public discourse in Australia.  Politicians from the right have been justifying mandatory detention, including the incarceration of children, for years.  Even now, Labor is careful to emphasise that they are not “opening the gates”, or going soft on asylum seekers.  For me this is a false framing of the debate: it shouldn’t be about who is “hard” or “soft” on asylum seekers but rather whether it is justified to use the misery of some as a deterrent to others.

In any case, the new policy direction is indeed welcome, though the online activist group GetUp! has noted that it could be easily reversed due to a change of heart of this, or a future, government.  They are calling for an ammendment to the Migration Act (PDF) in order to reverse the “presumption of detention”.  This is something I wholeheartedly support and I would encourage people to sign the online petition in order to put pressure on the Rudd government to do just that.

Jovan Maud

Scott Thill at Alternet has published an article on the social impact of climate change.  The article goes as far as coining a new term: ‘envirogee’.  The implication seems to be that ‘refugee’ has a certain amount of baggage, being intrinsically associated with political persecution.  We are entering an age, mainly due to climate change, but also because of other cheery current/future phenomena such as peak oil, in which the traditional definitions of refugee will need to change to retain relevance.  The article is certainly polemic in tone, but I think it does the job of provoking thought on what the world is going to look like in the not too distant future and how our understandings of human movement, human rights, national boundaries and so on.  Here’s an excerpt:

Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven’t been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth’s various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth’s surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis — a manufactured war with its own clock.

And the clock is ticking.

From earthquakes in China to cyclones in Myanmar to water rationing in Los Angeles, societies are shifting like their borders. And all the outcry over so-called illegal immigration neglects to answer one time-honored question: If the borders aren’t standing still, why should the people who live in their outlines do so? Especially when they’re under attack from catastrophic floods, fires, droughts and any number of other environmental dangers?

Right now, the 1951 Geneva Convention does not recognize the envirogee phenomenon, instead focusing on immigration as a result of political persecution. But then again, it was established over five decades ago when Earth’s climate was anything but a terrorist. But the Geneva Convention, like everything that must adapt or die, needs to mutate in time with the rest of the world and its hyperconsuming inhabitants in order to remain relevant in our still-new millennium.