Well here I am at the end of Week 2 of intensive residency with the 26 people who I'll be going on this MA journey with for the next 2 years. My sub-group of 4, the one I'll be working in for the foreseeable future, rocks. We are four amazing women and we have called ourselves (we had to name our groups): ATHENA. Yes, we are wise. And yes, we kick ass. We are the only group who got 30/30 on our group presentation (the one on Tuesday of this week for marks, vs. the one I describe later in this email that we did today). That Tuesday presentation went all the way through economic theories and history, to current world realities of globalization and transnationalization, to the effects and outcomes of the current world political and economic systems. Whew.
On another note, attached is a charming piece of fine art by Jer (if any of you don't know who my friend Jer is or how we connect, see Facebook for details!), which I'm seriously considering putting on business cards in future. [This is a reference to the photo called "Melanda the Builder: Of Peace, which is one of my older profile photos on FB.] And I particularly enjoyed his suggestion that I be absolutely literal about my security brief and put a one sentence statement on a piece of paper and lock it in a box and hand it in.
I am giving this some real thought as I google "India" and peruse CIA, Canadian Government, and various think tank websites for information on India's activities any and all that might relate to security issues that would affect Canada. Certainly the Sikh separatist terrorist groups are the obvious first thought, but as I dig deeper I see movement towards a large Asian trade bloc, and I wonder.... if India joined fully and sorted out its beefs with China (borders, and the are-you-supplying-Pakistan with nuclear stuff question), would the US be even more paranoid than it alread is about an Asian hegemony.... or what if India's current and largely licit poppy production became somehow destablized and illicit (like Afghanistan's is currently), would that make it yet another target for the "War on Drugs" approach of trying to destroy the opium/heroin source? Hmmm... the locked box is looking pretty attractive just now, and not so much for putting my brief in it as for locking myself inside and not coming out.
I am also struggling to produce a valid thesis statement for my International Law paper. I have chosen (shock, surprise!), Religious Freedom as my topic, and the question is really "do we need a Convention?". Currently, this is stated in the UN Charter and a few other places (Human Rights, I think) in about one sentence... so the principle exists in some proto form, regardless of how many states have signed on (or not!). There is also a Declaration on this topic gathering dust at the UN which has never come to the General Assembly basically because no states are championing its cause. If it became a Declaration, it might one day become a Convention which states could then sign onto.... is there any point in pushing forward a Declaration on this topic if it is not high enough on anyone's agenda? If it was moved ahead as a declaration and then a Convention followed, what % of states would sign on anyway? On the flipside, how else do we create international customary law (accepted norms by which we can measure the appropriateness of states' actions and behaviours) except this way? Is there a way to turn this on its head and seek examples of where religious freedom and tolerance are working well on a grassroots level within or between states, without any external rules having been applied but solely through local regulation and/or negotiations between governing bodies, and translate those precedents of up into the international scene? Obviously my assumption on which all the rest depends is that the UN Charter and Human Rights actually ARE valid, generally accepted norms (despite the fact that many states, the US in particular amongst the central powerful ones, have never signed on as parties to much of this stuff). It is from this same assumption that other Declarations and Conventions arose and went forward, such as the Rights of the Child (which, by the way, ALBERTA as an independent party under Ralph Klein's government REFUSED to be party to when Canada federally DID accept!!!! Go figure.) But back to Religion - how do we define it safely so that it cannot be interpreted in a way that runs counter to Human Rights, if some fundamentalist wing of any religion decides that women or children are not persons?
I am sunburnt. Today the Athenas took the class outside for some "under the tree learning", giving a nod back towards the roots of pedagogy but also reminding us all that most of the world learns outdoors, without benefit (or hindrance) of pen and paper. We had them work on laying out a whole variety of topics and issues (which we had written on big construction paper circles... ok we did use some pen and paper in our teaching!) on the grass and moving them around while discussing how they connect. Poverty, human trafficking, political unrest, water pollution, fuel accessibility, infant mortality, refugee flows, natural disasters, corruption, food scarcity, internally displaced peoples.... those kinds of fun things! It was amazing the discussion that came out of it and how we worked through the interconnectedness of all things.
I think the main learnings we are taking away from this residency will be essentially the following:
- everything connects to everything, everything, everything!
- perspective and environment as well as individual and collective ideologies shape perception, which creates our reality
- in human-created systems, the observer is also a participant shaping the outcome so social sciences require constant learning, awareness and evolution and cannot be said to be perfect or 'final' since we are both the authors of them and the participants in them and are affected by their outcomes when we let the systems supposedly 'run themselves' (e.g. 'free market', 'neoliberalism'... in practice loosely translated as "rich get richer poor get poorer middle class disappears too bad so sad")
- therefore the only truly humanitarian intervention is actually literally seeing it from the perspective of the group you are trying to help FIRST, then asking "what are your objectives" and sharing knowledge, perspective, technology and so on to help achieve those aims; in turn asking for learnings to apply 'back home'; and leaving when you're asked to rather than causing damage by 'trying to help'
- only by sharing all possible perspectives can we even begin to see the whole picture and "know" anything together... so we had best start now with that sharing and get on with it! Then we can actually begin evolving our systems of governance and interaction, rather than creating static ideologies and systems and then fighting to maintain or overthrow them!
Which only makes me all the more excited to see what comes in the next two years of learning...
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