Peace X Peace
Through the Communication Initiative I learned of Peace X Peace, “pronounced peace by peace.” They are DC-based and provide a “global network [to] connect individuals and circles of women everywhere in the world, through the Internet, for spirited conversation and mutual support.” It looks like they primarily use video, radio and email to develop women’s leadership skills. On their website they have a preview of a film they’ve made that followed women leaders in Argentina, Afghanistan, Burundi and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Patricia Smith Melton founded Peace X Peace with her husband, Bill Melton, who is a businessman with Global Internet Ventures and was part of America Online.
And, just to contemplate how deep a hole we are in, take a look at this hilarious video about the Bush Administration’s misdeeds: http://blip.tv/file/520347
Take Back the Tech
Take Back the Tech is a campaign that started November 25 and ends December 10, which also happens to be Jane Addams Day. This is an effort to ask how to use information technologies to help prevent violence against women. But they also challenge ways that abusers use information technology–to track a woman, to harass someone online, and to post porn. The group behind this campaign, the Association of Progressive Communications, Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP), “is a global network of more than 175 women in over 55 countries promoting gender equality in the design, implementation, access and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and in the policy decisions and frameworks that regulate them.” There are interactive options on the site–like making a postcard or uploading a digital story–that invite people to share their own experiences. Betty’s story, the brief video available for viewing, is about her torture and abuse in Uganda as a teenager and the healing that she found afterwards.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
Andrea Smith, an organizer of INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, did a post-doc at UIUC a couple of years ago. Someone introduced her as a scholar-activist and she began by discounting that label. She said, we don’t say florist-activist or dentist-activist, why do we say scholar-activist? What about scholarship necessitates adding the noun activist if one is engaged in social justice work, for example? What was clear is that activism among scholars is rare enough that people find it remarkable.
INCITE! has a relatively new compilation, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, about the US non-profit sector, the “non-profit industrial complex.” Andrea Smith has an essay in it as does Ruth Gilmore.
