Category: Applied ICD

EIUC Venice School of Human Rights (Venice)

European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (EIUC) is ready to accept applications for the Venice School of Human Rights which will take place in Venice, Lido from 26 June to 4 July 2015. Candidatures will be accepted until 17 May 2015. The topic is “(Dis)Integration through Human Rights: Citizens, Courts, Communities”.

Since 2010 EIUC’s Venice School of Human Rights studies today’s challenges in the field of human rights examining their reasons and possible solutions to deploy. In 5 years more than 500 participants from all over the world have attended the Venice School in the beautiful surrounding of the Monastery of San Nicolò at the Lido of Venice.

The 2015 Venice School is structured in the following three thematic clusters, which will be chosen by the participants when applying:
*Business and Human Rights, 
*Human Rights and New Technologies and 
*Human Rights and Gender Issues.

This year the Venice School for Human Rights will be opened by two prestigious lecturers:
Maria Virginia Bras Gomes, member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Senior Social Policy Adviser in the Ministry of Solidarity and Social Security of Portugal.

Albie Sachs, South African activist and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa under appointment by Nelson Mandela

Furthermore its international faculty includes prestigious lectures in human rights such as Stefano Rodotà, former President of the Italian Data Protection Commission and of the European Group on Data Protection and Emilio De Capitani, Executive Director of the Fundamental Rights European Experts Group. See full list of lecturers here.

The Venice School is designed for postgraduates from all areas of the social sciences and humanities and for practitioners who want to address the topics proposed from a multi-disciplinary approach that will be useful in further engagements in their respective field of work. The lectures will be held in English.

Link between Climate Change and Conflict in Syria

“There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.”

Source:
Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager and Yochanan Kushnir.  2015. Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print March 2, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1421533112.

Abstract:
“Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.”

Discussion:
Fountain, Henry. (2 March 2015). Researchers link Syrian conflict to a drought made worse by climate change. New York Times.

Comments?

A month of tolerance in Belgian schools

Belgium’s response to intolerance is one example of applied intercultural dialogue:

“After the attacks in Paris and in Copenhagen, Belgium launches “the month of tolerance”, the Francophone Education Minister Joelle Milquet said. She announced that during the month of March there will be an intensification of the initiatives aiming to promote intercultural dialogue in the schools of Wallonia and Brussels. External partners, including journalists, along with lawyers and the Movement against Racism, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia, will support teachers in activities aimed at promoting dialogue of young students on democracy, terrorism, freedom of expression and intolerance. An initiative that through videos, documentaries, theater and more will try to inform students on the  current events by spreading the values of intercultural and interreligious dialogue.”

Original publication: Battista, Paola. (24 February 2015). A month of tolerance in Belgian schools.

Applied ICD: 3-D Printers and Prosthetic Hands from the US to South Africa

Sometimes the most extraordinary intercultural collaborations result from contacts made through social media. The following story started through a connection made through YouTube, between an artist in the US and a carpenter in South Africa, using the latest technology (3-D printers) to create a prosthetic hand.

“A former school supplies salesmen and special effects artist, Ivan Owen in December 2011 shared a video on YouTube of a giant puppet hand that he had made. That video was seen by Richard Van As, a carpenter in South Africa who had cut off some of his fingers with a table saw. He asked Mr. Owen to help devise a prosthesis, and over two years, the pair came up with a workable design. A 3-D printer, they figured, would make the prosthesis cheap and easy to produce. When Mr. Van As learned of a boy in South Africa who also needed a prosthetic hand, they made one for him, too. The idea caught on.”

Mroz, Jacqueline. (February 16, 2015). Hand of a superhero. New York Times.

State of the art prosthetics cost a lot, and children grow so quickly that often people decide they just aren’t feasible. e-Nable has changed that by matching technology and volunteers to over 1000 recipients, many children, in dozens of countries to date.

Multilingual Signs and Intercultural Pedagogy

When visiting Macau, I was surprised by seeing trilingual street signs (Chinese, Portuguese and English), a rare phenomenon in the US. A recent article in ELT Journal by Chiou-Ian Chern and Karen Dooley documents how such signs can serve as a resource to language teachers and learners. They conclude: “Environmental print . . . has become a useful, if politically complex, resource for learning English in contexts where language teachers once lamented the paucity of English input outside the classroom.” (p. 122).

Chern, C.-I., & Dooley, K. (2014). Learning English by walking down the street. ELT Journal, 68(2), 113-123. Available from: http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/68/2/113.full

(The full article is available to download for free as I write this, though that may temporary.)

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Yang Liu Graphic Designs: East Meets West

Academics tend to discuss cultural differences in words. Designers show them visually. Yang Liu grew up in China, but then moved to Germany, becoming a designer. One of her projects, East meets West, consists of a series of comparisons of Chinese vs. German assumptions based on  her own experiences.

Her designs have been exhibited in both China and Germany, as well as being widely available on the internet. For further information, see her own website, or one of the many articles describing her work, including these:

Aw, Jean. (2007). Interview with Yang Liu- 11.13.07. NOTCOT.

Saleme, Shawn. (2013). East Meets West : An Infographic Portrait by Yang Liu. Visual News.

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Clothing as a Tool of Intercultural Dialogue: New Zealand and India

New Zealand fashion students recreate modern-day wear from traditional Indian silk saris

In a unique celebration joining New Zealand and Indian cultures, 15 New Zealand Fashion Tech students won Prime Minister’s Scholarships for Asia, covering travel to the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology in India to participate in a five week Apparel and Textile Practicum. Students earned the awards by creating garments made from traditional Indian sari fabrics. The inaugural Resene Designer Selection showcased the hand-crafted silk from Southern India made especially for their garments. Four of the NZ students were Maori. The goal was to take students outside the classroom and give them an international and applied perspective.

Further information about this project is available in a New Zealand journal article entitled “A pattern for success” published in Educator Review, and in an Indian newspaper article entitled “Indian silk, New Zealand patterns”. Continuing descriptions by the students of their experiences are also available on their university’s website.

Museums in an Intercultural Context

The result of a collaboration between the Department of Cultural Management at the Universiteit Antwerpen (Flanders, Belgium) and the Department of Museum Studies at the Université du Québec a Montréal (Quebec, Canada), an intercultural tool aimed at museums in urban context has recently been published. The grid was conceived as an analytical framework for a research project entitled The city museum in an intercultural context. Fostering dialogue in culturally diverse urban environments: perspectives from Montreal, Antwerp, Ghent and Rotterdam.

Inspired by the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities programme, collaboration between researchers and students at both universities involved an analysis of four city museums in Quebec, Flanders and the Netherlands and how they approached intercultural dialogue.

The analytical grid produced in the context of the research project can be used by all types of museums and heritage institutions wishing to reflect upon their engagement with diverse communities. Museums may find it useful for initiating brainstorming sessions and self-assessment exercises, supporting planning processes, conducting intercultural project evaluations or facilitating benchmarking and the exchange of strategic information. Researchers in the heritage and cultural management fields may also find it useful for collecting, analysing and comparing data on issues related to diversity and intercultural dialogue in the museum sector.

The grid addresses three levels of analysis:
*Environmental analysis, including the sociodemographic environment of the city, the policy environment of the museum, the institutional environment of the museum and the governance environment of the museum.
*Museum analysis, including an institutional overview of the museum and an intercultural audit of the museum.
*Project analysis, including an analysis of projects with intercultural components.

Museum professionals and researchers may use one or several of these sections, depending on their needs. Data can be collected using a variety of means, including interviews with museum staff, examination of strategic documents and field observation.

The intercultural tool for museums is available for free.

Original article published by Asia-Europe Museum Network.

Culture is Mirriam-Webster’s 2014 Word of the Year

MERRIAM-WEBSTER ANNOUNCES “CULTURE” AS 2014 WORD OF THE YEAR

Merriam-Webster Inc., America’s leading dictionary publisher, has announced its top ten Words of the Year for 2014. This year’s list was compiled by analyzing the top lookups in the online dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com and focusing on the words that showed the greatest increase in lookups this year as compared to last year. The results, based on approximately 100 million lookups a month, shed light on topics and ideas that sparked the nation’s interest in 2014.

The Word of the Year, with the greatest number of lookups and a significant increase over last year, is culture. Culture is not associated with any one event, but instead dominated the headlines this year, on topics ranging from “celebrity culture” to “rape culture” to “company culture.” In years past, lookups for the word culture spiked in the fall, as students encountered the word in titles and descriptions of courses and books, but this year lookups have moved from seasonal to persistent, as culture has become a term frequently used in discussions of social phenomena.

“Culture is a word that we seem to be relying on more and more. It allows us to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group with seriousness,” explains Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large for Merriam-Webster. “And it’s efficient: we talk about the ‘culture’ of a group rather than saying ‘the typical habits, attitudes, and behaviors’ of that group. So we think that it may be the increased use of this newer sense of the word culture that is catching people’s attention and driving the volume of lookups.”

CID in The Washington Post

About CIDI was contacted a few days ago by a reporter at the The Washington Post, who asked me to discuss the comments made by Airbnb about their impact on intercultural relations. She did a fair job of representing what I said. See for yourself:

Dewey, Caitlin. (2014, November 24). How Airbnb promotes world peace. The Washington Post.

If you’ve stayed in Airbnb yourself and want to join the conversation, add a comment below.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue