Women Hold Up Half the Sky
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
A number of friends have read the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. There’s also a movement by that name. The book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine recently, which is where I first learned of it. Then my friend Carol interviewed Sheryl on WILL Radio, after reading the book.
My sister Gail compiled a short list of groups from the book that we all have the opportunity to support:
Afghan Institute of Learning operates schools and other programs for women and girls in Afghanistan and in the border areas of Pakistan.
Apne Aap battles sex slavery in India, including in remote areas in Bihar that get little attention.
Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) supports schooling for girls in Africa.
Fistula Foundation supports the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, established by Reg and Catherine Hamlin.
Global Fund for Women operates like a venture capital fund for women’s groups in poor countries.
Heal Africa runs a hospital in Goma, Congo, that repairs fistulas and tends to rape victims.
Worldwide Fistula Fund works to improve maternal health and is building a fistula hospital in Niger.
With all the bad news in the world, it is gratifying to know of these amazing, tenacious efforts to support women, and men.
Loss within Loss
Last night I sat listening to the New Orleans Hot 8 Brass Band play “St. James Infirmary.” While I sat there I felt inconsolable about the losses experienced recently by friends, strangers, and acquaintances. This has been a particularly hard summer and fall for many in this community. Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) is a collection of essays edited by Edmund White. While I read it a while back, the title brings to mind a spiral of losses, loss upon loss, loss moving inward to our vulnerable centers, losses piling up, one after another with no time to process or adequately grieve. The New Orleans Brass Band “drummer Dinerral Shavers was shot and killed in late 2006 while driving with his wife and child in New Orleans. In addition, two other members of the band have lost their lives due to violence on the city streets. In response to these tragic setbacks, The Hot 8 Brass Band has recommitted itself to bringing people together through their unique brand of music to celebrate, to heal and to learn.” While it was weird to sit in a theatre listening to street music on a chilly autumn evening, I appreciated the opportunity to feel this band’s energy and to ponder the weight of violent death while feeling the beats of drums and hearts.
Hot 8 Brass Band
Community Informatics as “Activist” Social Informatics
Larry Stillman
Larry Stillman of Monash University wrote the original drafts on community informatics for Wikipedia. He just posted this comment to the “ciresearchers” listserv:
Larry Stillman and Henry Linger
There is an ongoing debate in Community Informatics about the need for a stronger conceptual and theoretical base in order to give the field disciplinary cohesion and direction. By investigating the body of reflective thinking in Information Systems, researchers in Community Informatics can develop a more rigorous theoretical context for their work. Information Systems can be considered as a fragmented adhocracy that allows many intellectual communities to co-exist under its umbrella. A sympathetic reading of Information Systems offers an opportunity to Community Informatics, in spite of its different orientation, to address both social and technological issues in its theoretical framework. This framework would be based on a common language that expresses a shared ontology and epistemology with Information Systems. Such a framework then allows Community Informatics to fully address its information systems problem solving agenda as well as its community problem solving activities. Strengthening this dual agenda will allow Community Informatics to work effectively with both the technical and social design and implementation problems. But it also provides Community Informatics with an opportunity to contribute to a discourse within Information Systems in order to broaden the traditional Information Systems concept of organisation and social action.
