Censored 2014 (36 page)

For this the police were called, and we were escorted off campus grounds under threat of arrest.

A Little Background

Stop Patriarchy attended the CLPP conference due to our opposition to the war on women, especially as a result of the extreme escalation of attacks on abortion rights across the country. Today, abortion is more difficult to access, more stigmatized, and more dangerous to provide than at any time since
Roe v. Wade.

StopPatriarchy.org sees this as the “mirror opposite” of the increasingly degrading, cruel, brutal, humiliating, and mainstream nature of pornography, and was eager to get into all this with conference participants. Within this, some members were bringing the view of all-the-way revolution and communism as it has been reenvisioned by Bob Avakian.
¹⁷

It came as no surprise that people had strong reactions—positive and negative—to our politics. Some loved that we challenged the feelings of shame and guilt many women are made to feel about their abortions, while others claimed it was wrong to “tell women how to feel.” Some appreciated that we called out President Barack Obama for conciliating with restrictions on abortion, for his drone program,
for assassinating US citizens, and for continuing torture at Guantá-namo. Others insisted that Obama is “our friend.” Some loved our opposition to porn and began wearing our stickers (“If you can't imagine sex without porn, you're fucked!”), others got into thoughtful discussion, and still others strongly disagreed.

We welcomed this. Isn't one of the purposes of a conference on social justice to make opportunities for people to hear different approaches as they are put forward by those who share a commitment to defending the lives and rights of oppressed people?

However, we cannot dismiss that these political differences may have played a role in the CLPP organizers' eagerness to seize on the opportunity to remove us from their conference.

One Final Irony

We sent an open letter to the CLPP organizers and the Hampshire community:

For more information about this use of police by Hampshire College's program for Civil Liberties and Public Policy, visit our website at
StopPatriarchy.org/opposesuppression
.

SUNSARA TAYLOR
is a writer for
Revolution Newspaper
(revcom.us) and the initiator of the movement to End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women (
StopPatriarchy.org
).

THE WEAVE

John Collins

The Weave: Mediocracy Unspun
(
WeaveNews.org
) emerged out of a seminar on global news analysis that I have designed and taught since 2000 in St. Lawrence University's Global Studies Department, one of the first degree-granting undergraduate global studies programs in the United States. The seminar sought to use analytical tools associated with political economy, ideology critique, and discourse analysis to help students engage critically with mainstream news media texts while also examining the mass media's broader social role. In keeping with the intellectual orientation of global studies, the course placed significant emphasis on how news media help create and reproduce power/knowledge regimes that are grounded in pervasive global hierarchies. As the course evolved to take into account the rise of the Internet and the proliferation of web-based independent and alternative media outlets, however, students decided that rather than simply engaging in the detached analysis of CNN and the
New York Times,
they wanted to be part of the solution.

Discussions around these concerns became the catalyst for the transformation of the seminar into a more praxis-oriented course. Students in the 2006 seminar developed the idea of creating a blog-based website that would attempt to provide the kind of context that is often lacking in mainstream news reports. One student came up with the project's name after researching the etymology of the word “context”: from the Latin
contextus,
meaning “to weave together.” An-other student built the initial
Weave
website, and each member of
the seminar worked on researching and blogging about a particular underreported story. Some of the topics covered during the project's early stages included the US practice of so-called “extraordinary rendition,” threats to the world's oceans, and the rise of private military companies.

The current
Weave
website, launched in 2011, continues to feature blogs focusing on underreported stories. Many of these are created by students who take the news analysis seminar now titled “Blogging the Globe: News Analysis and Investigative Journalism.” In the seminar, students are trained in basic media analysis, investigative journalism, and blog-style writing. Some notable topics in recent years include the global politics of trash, internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia, legal and jurisdictional politics on Native American reservations, and underreported aspects of the environmental movement.

According to its mission statement, the
Weave

This core mission is supplemented by a series of five overlapping commitments to public intellectual work, responsible representation, citizen journalism, democratic dialogue, and social justice.

A second type of content found on the
Weave
website is the Big Questions project inspired by the example of Dropping Knowledge (
DroppingKnowledge.org
).
Weave
staffers have developed a series of broad questions that concern people in all parts of the world (e.g., “What comes after capitalism?” or “What is today's most underreported story?”) and have developed a growing archive of video responses to these questions. The responses are gleaned from interviews conducted both on the SLU campus and beyond, such as on
study trips or at national conferences. Examples of interviewees who have responded to the Big Questions include prominent scholars (e.g. Dr. Linda Alcoff), journalists (e.g. Amy Goodman, the late Anthony Shadid), public intellectuals (e.g. Dr. Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben), community activists (e.g. Ruben García), and artists (e.g. Staceyann Chin). Participation in the Big Questions project helps students gain valuable training in techniques of basic media production as they work to record, edit, and upload videos, and circulate them through social media.

A notable recent addition to the
Weave
project was the creation of a credit-bearing internship course in 2011.
Weave
interns study the history of independent and alternative media, read about and discuss some of the particular dilemmas confronting such efforts, and work on collaborative projects designed to move the
Weave
forward. The projects help them develop a range of practical skills—fundraising, public relations, community outreach, media production, grant writing, event planning, professional presentations—that will serve them well in a variety of post-graduation career paths.

Lukasz Niparko, a global studies major from Poznan, Poland, was a
Weave
intern in 2011 and subsequently created a blog titled
Solidarity Avenue.
“When I heard about the
Weave,
I decided to make it my ‘little solution' to the world's problems,” he recalled. “After all, the
Weave
embraces Gramsci's idea of organic intellectualism, understands the ideological apparatuses of Althusser, promotes the self-empowerment and social organizing found in Freire, and is a form of praxis that comes from Marx.
The Weave
became my ultimate answer to ‘what I can do as a student,' but also to what can I do as a citizen who is striving to understand this globalizing world.”

Given the ongoing realities of media consolidation and the erosion of the core investigative role of professional journalism, there is an urgent need to develop opportunities for the next generation to fill in the informational gaps left by the mainstream media—and to build new alternatives that can contribute to positive social change. With this in mind, the
Weave
is looking to expand its reach and impact by creating collaborative relationships with other colleges and universities, working with professors to build investigative blogging into their courses, providing more in-depth training to its staff
members, networking with other independent journalists throughout the United States and beyond, and expanding its roster of bloggers and videographers.

JOHN COLLINS, PHD
, is professor and chair of the Global Studies Department at St. Lawrence University, and director of
The Weave.

IT'S TIME TO FIX THIS MESS: WHAT THE WORLD COULD BE

Ken Walden

What the World Could Be
is a series of short movies meant to empower people by helping them access and understand often difficult information regarding the problems we face, to help transcend these problems with achievable solutions in effort to make the world, well, more of what it could be—a better place for all.
What the World Could Be
focuses not just on problems, but how to work through them in creative, often simple ways. So, I want to talk about more than problems, something that will make you smile: solutions.

We face many problems as a species, but since that is a pretty large topic I'm going to start with one example we deal with in our film shorts: global warming. The best part is that the solutions are really easy to implement, they will save you tons of money, and improve your health. Yes, it sounds like and cheesy sales pitch . . . but it's very true. Read on!

First, if you want to know more after reading here, please watch videos we produced about these troubling issues by visiting our site at WhatTheWorldCouldBe.com. Our goal is to provide assistance through learning about these complex issues and then show how you can become an active part of solving these issues. This article is an example of how our series of film projects works, and all of the resources for this article and our project are listed on our website.

Problems vs. Solutions

Most people get a knot in their stomach just hearing the word “news.”

Have you ever noticed how a lot of “journalism” or “news” is based on reporting a problem and then leaving you at this point?

You are left to figure out what, if anything, to do about what you just read or saw, and that can be a very difficult task. In fact, after going through this process ourselves for years, we can tell you that it is. Feeling ill about reading news is a major reason why 30 to 40 percent don't read news at all. Our goal is to make that easy. Let's get to our example, the key issue of global warming.

Global Warming and Climate Change

For many, the discovery of the very problems we face as a society is the scary part. But once we understand a problem, we must move to the solutions, and that doesn't have to be an immobilizing process.

Yes, global warming is real and it's very dangerous, as in “extinction-level” dangerous.

In short, we are putting too much carbon into our environment, and most of it is from coal power plants and transportation. Let's look at a few main areas of concern with doing this.

Melting Ice Caps = Rising Seas

One problem is that this carbon is heating up the planet's oceans and atmosphere, which in turn melts our ice caps and glaciers. According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite photos, roughly one-third of our ice caps have melted since around 1980. When we melt too much ice, the oceans rise, which makes a mess of our coastal cities . . . and most of our major cities are on the coasts. The result would be like a disaster movie—or worse, like a
real
disaster, like Hurricane Sandy.

Crazy Weather and Droughts

The other tricky thing to understand is that this slight increase in temperature makes the weather more erratic and unpredictable. We have bigger big storms, colder cold weather, hotter hot weather, and bad droughts. Droughts interfere with our ability to grow food. Yes,
food . . . that yummy stuff we eat every day. We're already having major drought problems.

Also, water from glacial runoff supplies water to hundreds of millions of people. So if we melt the ice caps, there goes the water supply.