organization:university of georgia

  • The World’s Recycling Is in #Chaos. Here’s What Has to Happen | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos-heres-what-has-to-happen

    Even before China’s ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12 percent was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8 billion tons have been produced worldwide over the past six decades—continues to grow.

    [...]

    Over the coming decade, as many as 111 million tons of plastics will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of as a result of China’s ban, according to Brooks and University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck. However, the places trying to take up some of the slack in 2018 tended to be lower-income countries, primarily in Southeast Asia, many of which lack the infrastructure to properly handle recyclables. Many of those countries were quickly overwhelmed by the volume and have also now cut back on imports

    #déchets #plastique #recyclage #Chine

  • “A #Femifesto for Teaching and Learning Radical Geography”

    The Athena Co-Learning Collective[1] is a group of graduate students and faculty at the University of Georgia who are committed to living and learning differently in the academy and our communities. We came together in the wake of the 2016 election with various needs for community, praxis, and feminist theory in our work and lives. Our purpose is to work together in active resistance to white supremacist heteropatriarchy and toxic masculinist practices that have underpinned knowledge production and instruction at our universities. We seek to engage, share, and learn from a diversity of knowledges, experiences, hopes, and fears as a means to rehumanize our relations and learning communities. We are inspired by the many feminist collectives who have formed inside and outside the academy before us.[2]

    Recently, many decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist scholars have expanded radical geography and related fields to include a greater diversity of thinkers, writers, and activists. Yet, few of these interventions have materialized as changes to the practices of the academy, or even the discipline of geography (de Leeuw and Hunt 2018). In this, our own intervention, we describe the Athena Co-Learning Collective’s efforts to reject the traditional and enduring graduate seminar format and to structure a seminar based instead on intentionally feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial theory, pedagogy, and praxis.[3] Our work begins in the classroom because it is a key location in the perpetuation of hegemonic ways of thinking and doing that have remained largely the same for centuries (Mohanty 2003). We collaboratively craft the content of our shared learning space, and focus on transforming the oppressive social relationships that were laid bare in new ways for many (but not all) the members of our collective in the wake of the Trump election. By centering the ideas of scholars who build theory for liberatory praxis, we can change how we know ourselves and each other, and how we act within these intimate and broader relations. Furthermore, we intentionally create a “collective” (as opposed to a classroom) as a way to name and define our project as something that is intended to be more than a learning experience, but responsive to emotional needs as individuals and in our community.

    As a means of undoing white supremacist heteropatriarchy, we began by undoing the toxic masculinist practices that materially and metaphorically make the traditional graduate seminar space possible. These masculinist performances typically involve one or more “expert” faculty determining the important scholars to read, then overseeing class “discussion” (often structured as debate) where students seek to prove they have learned something (ideally more than their peers). It includes, furthermore, the privileging of totalizing narratives frequently emanating from the work of Eurocentric male scholars (e.g. Marx, Heidegger, Althusser, Foucault); the performance of competitive behavior (i.e. individualized performances that prioritize speaking out loud, debating, correcting); the enactment of microaggressions (i.e. talking over, ignoring, minimizing the contributions of women, queers, and people of color); and the deployment of reductive logics (i.e. finding one thesis or explanation in a text).

    We believe that liberation from white supremacist heteropatriarchy requires that: 1) we conduct ourselves differently in the teaching and learning process with new feminist, anti-racist, and de-colonial practices and agreements; and 2) we give women, POC, queer people, Indigenous people, and other thinkers the same seriousness and focus we might afford the historical objects of our disciplinary canons. To put this into practice, we began our collective with several key principles and goals: to enact non-hierarchical power relations among all in the room (including faculty); to do away with hypercompetitive performativity; to keep realistic workloads and expectations through “slow” scholarship (Mountz et al. 2015), while also recognizing that faculty, across racial identifications, experience very different time and labour pressures that we must collectively be conscious of; to learn with one another to collectively understand the multiple meanings in the texts we read; to create a space to learn free of shaming; to imagine what radical potential can emerge through this work.[4] This begins to constitute what we understand as the rehumanization of our collective efforts to teach and learn.

    Furthermore, by engaging with feminist, Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and decolonial epistemologies and theorists, we learned that we must not deny or artificially tidy up incommensurabilities, conflicting truths, and uncomfortable subjects. In seeking hard boundaries and sharp gulfs between subjects and objects, us and them, fact and fiction, white supremacist heteropatriarchal forms of knowledge production have violently erased difference and replaced it with hierarchy (Gilmore 2002). Therefore, our politics of knowledge production include:

    1) Generating Collective Solidarity: The first step is to relate to one another – and to support each other – as complex human beings embodying a number of subject positions. None of us enters the classroom as only student or only teacher. Rather, we are also parents, children, partners, laborers, survivors, and so on. Feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory is personal to us all. We cannot engage it in a disembodied or individualistic way. This means allowing time and space to discuss personal, emotional, and non-academic issues as part of the learning process. This also includes being honest about why we may not be fully present or prepared for class activities; getting to know one another outside of the classroom; acknowledging how our own experiences shape our understandings of texts and ideas; engaging in hard conversations about difference and disagreement; kindly confronting misogynistic, racist, or homophobic actions or words among one another; “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and working through the discomfort individually and collectively.

    2) Engaging in Co-Learning Praxis: We make a commitment to learning with and from each other. We learn more when we cooperate, and we gain power through collectivizing the work of learning. Rather than keeping our knowledge and education to ourselves, we share – share accountability for each other’s learning and share our ideas and knowledge with each other. For example, in the context of the seminar, we collectively chose texts to read, generated shared class notes, collaboratively engaged with texts in large and small groups, and wrote final papers as a class based on our collective (not individualistic) engagement with the readings. We frequently revisited and adjusted course expectations, activities, and assignments to support these efforts.

    3) Enacting Our Ideas through Real World Politics: We believe that it is essential to practice applying this knowledge within our real lives. We develop skills and personal practices for confronting sexism, racism, and unquestioned settler futurity in our workplace and in our communities. We advocate for “radical vulnerability” (Nagar 2014) in communication practice to help realize this aspirational goal. This means modeling intentional courage with each other to raise and navigate difficult topics in our shared workspace, establishing group agreements and conflict mediation norms, and accepting that conflict or difference do not render relationships disposable. While we were not always able to fully enact the principles of feminist collective praxis, we committed to the ongoing task of working through the messiness, especially during critical moments of feedback about the class process and politics. We defined success by our ability to create openings and to keep moving forward.

    Given these political commitments, we present the following principles that all scholars (teachers and students) can implement in their own classrooms and relationships to transform teaching and learning practices to rehumanize ourselves, the academy, and society.

    1) Find Promise and Potential in Affirming Ambiguities: Refuse to submit to the myth of the totalizing rigidity of any one concept and the masculine construction of “realness” which attempts to “stabilize meaning” (Rose 1996: 68), and, thereby, to divide. Seek to explore those multiple narratives and spaces on the outskirts – those unruly contradictions and relentlessly rich complexities of socionatural life, of working-class life, of Black life, Mestiza life, Indigenous life, queer life, of lives in solidarity. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) taught us that we must embrace internal contradictions, incommensurabilities, conflicting truths, and the uncomfortable subjects they might introduce as sites of radical possibility and struggle. Commit to the always ongoing work of fostering spaces where “hybrid” or “mestiza” ways of being in the world can flourish free from the fetters of categorization.

    2) Embrace the Ethical Task of Uncovering “Absented Presences”: Model Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) unapologetic commitment to honoring the geographies, lives, histories, ideas, and languages held by Black, female, Indigenous, Chicana, queer, and other subjugated peoples (see also Anzaldúa 1987; Lugones 2007; Sandoval 2000; Simpson 2014; Tuck and Yang 2012). While women, POC, and queers have been reluctantly admitted to the ivory tower, their historical absence has simultaneously been a presence. The practice of maintaining these absences is one of “death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations” (Gilmore 2002: 16) and justifies the ongoing presence of white supremacist heteropatriarchy and toxic masculinist practices. Disrupting this means making changes to the spaces of knowledge production to accommodate multiple ways of knowing and being in the world. Claim the absented presences as spaces of legitimation of multiple narratives, non-settler futures, and difference as a life-giving, not death-dealing, way to organize social relations.

    3) Mobilize toward Collective Rehumanization: See and treat each other as full and complex human beings. Work with and through the troubling and uncomfortable moments. Conducting participatory research, honing perfect politics, and even taking to the streets are not enough to rehumanize our theory and practice. It is time to confront how structurally isolating academic labor is, and to value practices of care work, mentorship, conflict mediation, vulnerability, ambiguity, “presenting the absences”, subverting hierarchical social relations, and relationship-building at the “speed of trust” (brown 2017). When you transform your classrooms into “more humanly workable” spaces (McKittrick 2006: xii), the work to transform society becomes more clear.

    What we offer here is an invitation to all teachers and students, but especially to those successful, well-known, and structurally empowered scholars who profess liberatory politics, to re-evaluate your own teaching and learning practices. We, as the Athena Co-Learning Collective, are still learning how to be in the academy as a woman, as a person of color, as working class, as queer identified, as a feminist. Being radically vulnerable together is a constant struggle, sometimes uncertain and messy. It must be a collective enterprise, which prefigures, engages, and speaks across multiple communities, and insists upon the inseparability of knowledge and action to reject the hegemony of white supremacist heteropatriarchy and toxic masculinist practices. Our feminist collective is but one distillation of these commitments; it represents a form of initial rupture, alongside many other ruptures instigated by feminist comrades the world over. The hard labor yet remains: to rend the curtain fully and step out, together, into a new space.

    https://antipodefoundation.org/2018/11/27/a-femifesto-for-teaching-and-learning-radical-geography
    #manifeste #femineste #géographie_radicale #enseignement #géographie #université #résistance #féminisme #vulnérabilité

    The #Athena_Co-Learning_Collective
    https://www.athenacollective.org

  • • Chart: The Countries Polluting The Oceans The Most | Statista
    https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting-the-oceans-the-most

    A team of researchers in the United States and Australia led by Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia, analyzed plastic waste levels in the world’s oceans. They found that China and Indonesia are the top sources of plastic bottles, bags and other rubbish clogging up global sea lanes. Together, both nations account for more than a third of plastic detritus in global waters, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The original source data can be found here.

    #pollution #oceans

  • The Unique Neurology of the Sports Fan’s Brain - Issue 39: Sport
    http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-unique-neurology-of-the-sports-fans-brain

    Sports fans aren’t typically in the mood for academic research in the minutes before a big game. But Paul Bernhardt, an aspiring young behavioral scientist at Georgia State University, was determined. Armed with a bag of sterile vials, Bernhardt inched through the crowd at Atlanta’s Omni arena, politely asking anyone decked out in either University of Georgia or Georgia Tech basketball garb—the teams that were set to battle that evening—for a bit of saliva. The year was 1991. Fans of the Bulldogs and the Yellow Jackets, the state’s two most renowned collegiate sports institutions, had been hating each other’s guts since 1893, a rivalry affectionately known as COFH: Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. (Yes, sports rivalries can have names; COFH is historically significant enough to have a 5,000-plus (...)

  • Interactive map: Loss of Indian land
    http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html

    Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

    This interactive map, produced by University of Georgia historian Claudio Saunt to accompany his new book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, offers a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776 and 1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear, indicating the establishment of reservations. (Above is a GIF of the map’s time-lapse display; visit the map’s page to play with its features.)

    http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org

    #terres #colonisation #États-Unis #Indiens #peuples_autochtones #cartographie

  • 13 million along US coast could see homes swamped by 2100, study finds
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/14/climate-change-us-coast-homes-2100-great-migration

    Research led by the University of Georgia has provided the first glimpse of how demographic changes in America will place greater numbers of people at the frontline of sea level rises. In a severe scenario involving a 6ft (1.8m) rise in sea levels by 2100, fuelled by the gradual collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets, a total of 13.1 million people would risk seeing their homes inundated.

    A less dramatic sea level rise of 0.9m, still considered at the upper end of IPCC projections, would risk land occupied by 4.2 million people being claimed by the sea.

    [...] The paper warns that finding new land for displaced people will be “problematic” as well as expensive, citing relocations of Alaskan villages that have cost as much as an estimated $1m per resident.

    [...] “#Adaption will be an option, such as deploying critical infrastructure, raising buildings and roads. If we don’t do anything, the migration will mimic the Great Migration from the south to the north, over similar timescales.

    “At the moment, roads and hospitals are typically being built in areas without these future projections in mind. In the future, this will need to be a factor in where we deploy roads, hospitals, people and so on.”

    #climat

  • What Do Settler Women and Female Suicide Attackers Have in Common? - Books - Haaretz -
    Israeli and Palestinian women will ‘transgress’ by suspending religious beliefs if it serves a political cause, discovers political scientist Lihi Ben Shitrit.

    Dahlia Scheindlin Feb 02,

    http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/1.700711

    “Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right,” by Lihi Ben Shitrit, Princeton University Press, 304 pp., $22.95
    In late January, Israeli settlers tussled with Israel Defense Forces soldiers charged with evicting them from two homes in Hebron. In a familiar sight on the Israeli news, settler women balanced small children on their hips as they berated and harangued the soldiers. The very next day, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl attempted to stab a security guard in the West Bank and was shot dead – joining numerous Palestinian women and youngsters who have participated in such attacks since October.
    Israelis tend to seek personal explanations for female Palestinian violence, as if political extremism is understood when it comes to men, but contradicts typically “feminine” qualities. Activism among women in conservative Jewish religious movements may seem counterintuitive as well, since traditional “feminine” behavior is not thought to include political activism or leadership.
    In “Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right,” Lihi Ben Shitrit, an assistant professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia in Athens, probes women’s activism in four conservative religious or religious-nationalist movements in Israel and its environs – Jewish settlers, the ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel and Hamas – in a search for shared ways of thinking. It’s unlikely that her research subjects would appreciate being categorized together, but social scientists who question gender, religious extremism, nationalism or social movements will.
    While Ben Shitrit’s academic discourse of contestation, intentionality, performatives, diagnostic and prognostic frames will at times alienate the average reader, it would be unfortunate to forgo the book by this Israeli-born author for that reason. Interested observers could learn much from the rare, up-close look at hugely influential political movements, beyond the subject of women’s roles within them.
    The political scientist and women’s studies expert conducted a formidable amount of research and displayed substantial tenacity in reaching her subjects. She spent several years winning the personal trust of leaders and members of the first three groups, who represent tight-knit and often highly suspicious social communities. She built relationships, attended events, transcribed extensive conversations and pored over media sources – especially in the case of Hamas where, as an Israeli, she could not forge personal ties. She read both Hebrew and Arabic texts, and when researching Shas, her Moroccan background prompted openness among some of the party’s figures.
    Ben Shitrit observes that gender and feminist researchers typically presume that women naturally seek greater empowerment and liberation. That leads such academics to puzzle over why some women work to advance conservative political movements that constrain them within gender roles. She believes these questions reflect a Western liberal feminist bias and mislead the inquiry.
    Instead, Ben Shitrit accepts as a given that women take part prominently and often enthusiastically in religiously conservative or religious-nationalist movements. In all four movements she examines, women have become active as participants, organizers or sometimes leaders. The question for the author is: How do these women justify activism and participation sometimes in front-line struggles that contradict traditional gender norms of Orthodox Judaism or conservative Islam? And could these justifications ultimately, or unwittingly, aid in shifting traditional roles?
    Thus, Jewish women settlers sometimes physically struggle with male IDF soldiers, although Orthodox Jewish law strictly proscribes touching a male stranger. On the Palestinian side, a woman suicide bomber abandons her role as mother (or future mother) and becomes a supporter of male fighters to advance a political-religious goal.

  • Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

    This interactive map, produced by University of Georgia historian #Claudio_Saunt to accompany his new book West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776, offers a time-lapse vision of the transfer of Indian land between 1776 and 1887. As blue “Indian homelands” disappear, small red areas appear, indicating the establishment of reservations. (Above is a GIF of the map’s time-lapse display; visit the map’s page to play with its features.)


    http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/06/17/interactive_map_loss_of_indian_land.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top

    #carte #cartographie #carte_interactive #timeline #USA #Etats-Unis #visualisation #peuples_autochtones #terres #réserves

  • Jenniffer Schuessler, In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

    The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.

    Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.

    “Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”

    In 1996, when the Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalism — the first of its kind, he believes — colleagues were skeptical. “They thought no one would be interested,” he said.

    But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses, as courses and programs at Princeton, Brown, Georgia, the New School, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowds — sometimes with the help of canny brand management.

    After Seth Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown, changed the name of his course from Capitalism, Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism, students concentrating in economics and international relations started showing up alongside the student labor activists and development studies people.

    “It’s become a space where you can bring together segments of the university that are not always in conversation,” Dr. Rockman said. (Next fall the course will become Brown’s introductory American history survey.)

    While most scholars in the field reject the purely oppositional stance of earlier Marxist history, they also take a distinctly critical view of neoclassical economics, with its tidy mathematical models and crisp axioms about rational actors.

    Markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor in the history of capitalism at the New School (the first person, several scholars said, to be hired under such a title).

    To dramatize that point, Dr. Ott has students in her course Whose Street? Wall Street! dress up in 19th-century costume and re-enact a primal scene in financial history: the early days of the Chicago Board of Trade.

    Some of her colleagues take a similarly playful approach. To promote a two-week history of capitalism “boot camp” to be inaugurated this summer at Cornell, Dr. Hyman (a former consultant at McKinsey & Company) designed “history of capitalism” T-shirts.

    The camp, he explained, is aimed at getting relatively innumerate historians up to speed on the kinds of financial data and documents found in business archives. Understanding capitalism, Dr. Hyman said, requires “both Foucault and regressions.”

    It also, scholars insist, requires keeping race and gender in the picture.

    As examples, they point to books like Nathan Connolly’s “World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida,” coming next year, and Bethany Moreton’s “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard, 2009), winner of multiple prizes, which examines the role of evangelical Christian values in mobilizing the company’s largely female work force.

    The history of capitalism has also benefited from a surge of new, economically minded scholarship on slavery, with scholars increasingly arguing that Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing economic systems, as the old narrative has it, but deeply entwined.

    And that entwining, some argue, involved people far beyond the plantations and factories themselves, thanks to financial shenanigans that resonate in our own time.

    In a paper called “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell, looked at the way small investors across America and Europe snapped up exotic financial instruments based on slave holdings, much as people over the past decade went wild for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations — with a similarly disastrous outcome.

    Other scholars track companies and commodities across national borders. Dr. Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, traces the rise of global capitalism over the past 350 years through one crop. Nan Enstad’s book in progress, “The Jim Crow Cigarette: Following Tobacco Road From North Carolina to China and Back,” examines how Southern tobacco workers, and Southern racial ideology, helped build the Chinese cigarette industry in the early 20th century.

    #capitalisme
    #histoire_économique