Showing posts with label Disaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disaster. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Saturday, 17 November 2012
The NGO Republic of Haiti
The Nation
The wire fence that surrounds Haiti’s National Palace in the
heart of the country’s capital has been covered, recently, with a green mesh.
Inside, the multi-domed structure has been reduced to rubble, finally knocked
down after it was all but destroyed by the country’s deadly 7.0-magnitude
earthquake on January 12, 2010. The worst national disaster in the history of
the Western Hemisphere, the temblor killed an estimated 200,000 people in just
thirty-five seconds.
Friday, 6 July 2012
Waiting for helicopters?
by Deepa Panchang, Pambazuka
“Where you stand,” goes an old Haitian proverb, “depends on where you sit.” This article, the second in a series, will examine aid workers’ stereotypes and prejudices about residents of displacement camps in post-earthquake Haiti, stemming from acute disconnect between NGOs and the people they are there to work with. We explore how these misperceptions have perpetuated deliberate decisions to deny water and sanitation services to desperate survivors.
“Where you stand,” goes an old Haitian proverb, “depends on where you sit.” This article, the second in a series, will examine aid workers’ stereotypes and prejudices about residents of displacement camps in post-earthquake Haiti, stemming from acute disconnect between NGOs and the people they are there to work with. We explore how these misperceptions have perpetuated deliberate decisions to deny water and sanitation services to desperate survivors.
Sunday, 7 August 2011
The Politics of Disposability
by Henry Giroux, Dissident Voice
As we observe the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, citizens in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially, we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of a natural disaster and government incompetence, a perfect storm of bad luck that provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry.
As we observe the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, citizens in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially, we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of a natural disaster and government incompetence, a perfect storm of bad luck that provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth
by Lewis Gordon, 2007
Fanon Studies has gone through a considerable set of changes since the days of prescient scholarship by Renate Zahar and critics such as Hannah Arendt and Jack Woddis in the wake of his death and the set of 1960s and 1970s radicals who looked to him as a prophet of “the revolution.” In those days, where the thought of a black intellectual who did not stand as an apostle of nonviolence was enough to inaugurate the firing of professors who wrote on him and the expansion of secret service files on those who cited him, one could never imagine a future conference on university campuses as those held at Purdue University in 1995 and New York University in 1996, and the ones in 2007 at Lewis University and the University of Massachusetts Boston, in addition to a meeting on his work in the fall of 2007 organized in Paris by UNESCO.
Fanon Studies has gone through a considerable set of changes since the days of prescient scholarship by Renate Zahar and critics such as Hannah Arendt and Jack Woddis in the wake of his death and the set of 1960s and 1970s radicals who looked to him as a prophet of “the revolution.” In those days, where the thought of a black intellectual who did not stand as an apostle of nonviolence was enough to inaugurate the firing of professors who wrote on him and the expansion of secret service files on those who cited him, one could never imagine a future conference on university campuses as those held at Purdue University in 1995 and New York University in 1996, and the ones in 2007 at Lewis University and the University of Massachusetts Boston, in addition to a meeting on his work in the fall of 2007 organized in Paris by UNESCO.
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