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Held every year on 21 March, World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanityâs most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. Practiced throughout history â in every culture and on every continent â poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values, transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace.
World Poetry Day is an occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media. As poetry continues to bring people together across continents, all are invited to join in.
In the video recording above, Ms. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, civil society representative from the Marshall Islands, recites her poem âDear Matafele Peinamâ at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit 2014. In this poem, she promised her baby daughter that she and an army of others would work ceaselessly to ensure that her homeland would not be overcome by the rising tides threatening its shores and that she would not become a homeless climate refugee.
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Gmail may clip the displayed part of the publication. To enjoy the full issue, click on the âview entire messageâ link at the bottom of this message or select the âview this email in your browserâ option at the top.
This e-bulletin contains 27 unique entries (textual, graphic and video materials), referenced by subtitles in dark-brown bold font. It will be easier for you to access the full content of the issue by knowing this, even if your email program ends up clipping the displayed part of the publication. |
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By Amy Goodman and Viet Thahn Ngueyn ~ Democracy Now!, 3/22/21
Anti-Asian hate in the United States is ânot anything new,â says Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American writer and chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. âThe history of anti-Asian violence in this country goes back to as long as weâve had Asian immigrants in this country.â In the first part of the interview he also speaks about the dangers of anti-China rhetoric from both Republican and Democratic leaders and how that contributes to suspicion of Asian Americans.
In the second part of the interview, âWe Are Here Because You Are There,â professor Nguyen speaks about how U.S. foreign policy creates refugees and his own experience as a refugee. âThe Committed,â Nguyenâs new novel, tells the story of a refugee from Vietnam, and explores the main characterâs questioning of ideology and different visions of liberation.
[Image credit: Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, a multidisciplinary artist behind the âI Still Believe in Our Cityâ public awareness campaign. This campaign was developed with the NYC Commission on Human Rights to combat anti-Asian discrimination, harassment, and bias as a result of COVID-19, and launched with the support of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. The art featured here is from an upcoming Art Display Case exhibition presented in partnership with the NYC Department of Transportationâs Temporary Art Program.]
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The health crisis brought on by the novel coronavirus has plunged the global economy into a recession. While billions of people around the world turn to culture as a source of comfort and connection, the impact of COVID-19 has not spared the creative sector. Artists across the world, most of whom were already working part-time, on an informal basis or under precarious contracts prior to the pandemic, are struggling to make ends meet. Today, we are experiencing a cultural emergency. This is why UNESCO launched ResiliArt, a global movement joined by cultural professionals worldwide that sheds light on the current state of creative communities through virtual discussions.
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By Bart Hawkins Kreps ~ An Outside Chance, 3/8/21
John (Fire) Lame Deer was a Lakota holy man born in South Dakotaâs Black Hills area in 1903, only thirteen years after the US Army had massacred hundreds of Lakota at Wounded Knee, marking an end of the military phase of the long campaign to seize the US heartland for white settlers. Lame Deer had seen the highways built through his peopleâs sacred territories, he had seen lands turned into bombing ranges for US military tests, he had travelled to big cities on the US east coast, he lived long enough for radios, TVs, and the threat of nuclear war to become part of everyday life. âThe green frog skin â thatâs what I call a dollar bill,â he said. âFor the white man each blade of grass or spring of water has a price tag on it.â
In fact, in the green frog-skin world everything has a price tag â but this world will not last. How can a civilization last, when its governing force is something so fleeting and artificial as money? And yet ⊠this bad-dream-world has power â power to rip open the earth, build huge cities out of concrete and steel, power to cut down whole forests in weeks or months, power to fly squadrons of planes to the far side of the world and drop deluges of bombs? How can a society, which stupidly believes its price tags are the essential measure of value, still have the power to dance in both awesome and awesomely destructive ways?
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By Tim Jackson ~ The Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, 12/23/18
Novelty has always carried vital information about status. Having a faster car or a bigger house alerts others to our place in the world. Having the latest mobile phone or Ipad or HDTV conveys the vital message that we are ahead of the crowd, or at the very least that we move with the herd. The language of cool is conveyed through a vocabulary of the new. Novelty even allows us to explore the wider aspirations we hold for ourselves and our families. Our dreams of the good life are cashed out through a kaleidoscope of clever toys and sparkling ornaments. Confidence in our place in the social world hangs or falls on our ability to participate in consumerism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the peer pressures to which teenagers are today increasingly exposed. The âshopping generationâ is instinctively aware that social position hangs on the evocative power of stuff.
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With the development of contemporary social technology, we are witnessing a new phenomenon: information pollution on a global scale. Its direct and indirect impacts are difficult to quantify, but long-term implications of dis-information campaigns are most worrying. The Council of Europe report entitled âInformation disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy makingâ is an attempt to comprehensively examine the challenges related to
mis-, dis- and mal-information and to outline ways to address information pollution.
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By Kurt Cobb ~ Resource Insights, 2/7/21
While today pressure to attract readers and advertising revenues is daunting in our current clickbait environment, obtaining both has always been the challenge for any news outlet. What is different today is that we are fighting over what our shared reality should be. The narratives offered by news outlets and the many blogs and journals of opinion are so varied and sometimes bizarre, that the reading public can no longer find a single, unifying story to make sense of it all. [Editorâs note: The video clip featured above this story is a story of its own delivered by a super creative crew at The Juice Media.]
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By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat & City Lights Publishers
âAmerica has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated,â says Henry Giroux, a world renowned educator, author, and public intellectual. In his 2014 book
The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America's Disimagination Machine, Giroux explores how neoliberal discourse and the ongoing commodification of everyday life constitute an active assault on public memory, chips away at civil rights, and diminishes the publicâs capacity to speak and act in its own interests. Alarmed at the increased authoritarianism creeping into all levels of national experience, Giroux looks to flashpoints in current events to reveal how the institutions of government and business are at work to generate false narratives that promote mass fear, quietism and passivity.
The Violence of Organized Forgetting makes visible the untruth of these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that produce them. Giroux analyzes how various institutions in American society are distracting and miseducating the public. Read the introduction and an excerpt from chapter one of the book.
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Why, when Godâs world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?
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In this episode of âPodcast from the Prairie,â Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen discuss the creativity of both humans and the larger living world. In addition to finding expression in art, human creativity also is essential in the scientific enterprise and is part of everyday life. The ecosphere is creative as well, making diversity out of the raw elements of the universe. A theologian even suggested that âserendipitous creativityâ was an appropriate metaphor for God. Jackson, who brought many of these ideas together in his âart without egoâ exhibition last year, will help make sense of the role of creativity in life and in our lives.
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By Clifford Dean Sholz ~ Green Hand Initiative, 12/16/17
Language, which gathers its power to signify from cultural contexts and values, also shapes both what we can see and how we see the things. In influencing the range of consciousness, it also changes our interactions with the world. This in turn generates feedback cycles both within societies and between a given society and its local and global contexts. We treat the earth and one another as we see the earth and one another. In practical terms, this shapes the world. These feedback vortices, like hurricanes, are more or less stable for a period of time, depending on a host of factors, primary among them being the adaptability of language and culture in response to changing feedbacks and conditions.
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By John Michael Greer ~ Ecosophia, 10/21/20
The Shadow is everything about yourself you hate so much that youâre not willing to admit that itâs part of yourself. Thus, just as inevitably as your anima or animus projects itself on your actual or potential lovers, your Shadow projects itself on your enemies. Still, thereâs a difference between the Shadow and the other archetypes. The contents that fill the other archetypes mostly come from other people: every mentor youâve ever had helps provide raw material for the archetypes of the Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman, for example, the archetypes that exist for the purpose of getting you to listen and learn from elders, just as whatever aroused your sexual desires most strongly in adolescence provided raw material for your anima or animus.
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By Dan Simon ~ Throughline on NPR, 2/18/21
Does it ever seem to you that there are people among us who hold up the sky and make the rivers flow, people who are just like other people, just like the rest of us, only different? They are the structural beams in the house we all share, the house that has a sky for a roof. And usually they donât want to call attention to themselves. They just want to be who they are, do what they do with as little interference as possible. Octavia comes to my mind as first among that group of people. In her books, she showed us the horrors and the great good that humans can create, and the choices that she made in her books and in her life always gave us new ways of seeing. She was a beacon of hope, sometimes even when she wasnât trying.
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Through Namakaâs Eyes
By Ê»Ćiwi TV
Raised by preeminent Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui and her mother Paahana Wiggin, Patience Namaka Bacon was one of Hawaiââiâs most beloved kĆ«puna and keeper of Hawaiian traditions. Her storied life unfolds in this 60-minute documentary directed by Jeff DePonte and produced by KaâiwakÄ«loumoku, the Hawaiian cultural center at Kamehameha Schools KapÄlama. |
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By Daniel Christian Wahl and Jeremy Lent ~ Age of Awareness, 1/30/21
Jeremy Lentâs forthcoming âThe Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universeâ will be published by New Society Publishers in mid 2021. Here is how the author describes what the book is about: âWe need a new story. Our civilization is careening rapidly toward a precipice. Climate breakdown, ecological degradation, and gaping inequalities are symptoms of an underlying pathology: the worldview of the dominant culture that has brought us to this crisis. Itâs a worldview based on disconnection, telling us that weâre each split within ourselves between mind and body; that as individuals we are separate from each other; and that a fundamental gap exists between humans and the rest of the natural world.
This worldview has passed its expiration date. It was formed in seventeenth-century Europe, and is based on a series of flawed myths that have been superseded by modern findings in science. It is causing enormous unnecessary suffering throughout the globe and driving our civilization toward collapse.
The Web of Meaning offers a rigorous and intellectually solid foundation for an alternative worldview based on connectedness, showing how modern scientific knowledge echoes the ancient wisdom of earlier cultures.â
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In
Dancing with Dugongs, Drs. Bill Dennison and Peter Oliver promote two Greek terms for the scientific approach; praxis and phronesis. Praxis, defined as practical, thoughtful doing, combined with phronesis, practical wisdom where values intersect with knowledge describe what needs to happen in environmental science. The authors feel that these two terms are at the core of developing a practical philosophy for environmental science. It is simply not enough to know what should be done, or even recommend what should be done (e.g., science integration). Action is also required and this âdoingâ in terms of environmental science can take the form of protection or restoration activities.
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Noam Chomsky: Language, creativity, and the limits of understanding
The University of Rochesterâs Distinguished Visiting Humanist for the 2015-16 academic year was Professor Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, at MIT, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences). Professor Chomsky is one of the most influential thinkers and public intellectuals of our time, writing and speaking about everything from linguistics and the mind to the nature and cultural significance of power, force, exploitation, manipulation, the media, and just government. [The lecture starts around 07:30:00 in the recording.] |
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Join Morag Gamble, global permaculture ambassador, in conversation with leading ecological thinkers, activists, authors, designers and practitioners to explore âWhat Now?â - what is the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive and regenerative way forward, what does a thriving one-planet way of life look like, where should we be putting our energy. In this changing world and in challenging times, we hear these voices of clarity and common sense.
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By Genevieve Boast ~ Beyond Human Stories, 2/25/21
Years ago when I was learning NLP, I was taught a neat storyhacking trick for creating our future. It was called, âstanding in the futureâ. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Now imagine you can project yourself five years into your future. Notice where you land. What part of the world are you in? Who is around you? What are you doing? How do you feel? Most importantly, do you like what you see and hear?
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By SĂ©golĂšne Tarte ~ Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012
Ancient textual artefacts, as individual objects and as corpora, are the substrate of our scholarly knowledge of ancient civilisations. This knowledge is discovered, extracted, and created through the daily practice of interpretation of these ancient documents. The subjects of the enquiry presented in this paper are the scholars who make sense of the textual artefacts, rather than the task they engage in. This paper therefore explores the cognitive aspects of knowledge creation and meaning extraction. In contrast with cognitive archaeology, where the endeavour aims to understand the minds of the ancient people, the cognitive approach adopted here sets out to understand the minds of contemporary people.
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10 Billion is a graphic novel about the psychological journey of a man whose belief system is dashed by a look into the future. He believes technological âprogressâ to be impervious to ecological limits. He thinks nature is obliged to give humans all the resources we need to keep âadvancing.â Most grandiosely of all, he assumes human prowess to be so indomitable as to render the very destruction of Earth by our sun a mere inconvenience, one to be skirted by simply growing out of our earthly existence and spreading across the galaxy. All these assumptions are upended when he is permitted a glimpse into an unexpected, almost incomprehensibly strange future [
from Frank Kaminskyâs 11/19/20 review]. |
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The January 6 Capitol riots were a uniquely tumultuous moment in American democracy. But they werenât so unusual in the course of world events. It remains to be seen if Trumpâs insurrection marked a peak of violence and political instabilityâor just the beginning. VICE News speaks with Mike Duncan, the author and award-winner podcaster behind âThe History of Romeâ and âRevolutions,â about parallels between the United Statesâ recent chaos and other historic societal upheavals. |
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Is this where our civilizationâs priorities lie? |
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The following documentary is presented by REI, a member-owned co-op producing recreational equipment since 1938.
Wyn Wiley (he/him), a.k.a. Pattie Gonia (she/her), has made waves over the past year as an environmental advocate drag queen. We follow Wyn as he travels to Hawaiâi to see first-hand the impacts of careless consumption and plastics on Mother Nature (or as Pattie says, âMother Natchâ). Wyn meets with scientists, non-profit leaders, volunteers, then rallies the Pattie community to lead a beach clean-up. Ultimately, Wyn partners with sustainable fashion designer, Angela Luna, to create three dresses that personify the plastics crisis. |
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This publication is aimed at stimulating public imagination and understanding of the cultural constructs that reinforce the grotesque unsustainability of our modern thermo-industrial civilization and lead to collective functional decerebralization (an academic term for one of the dimensions of mass idiotization) of societies. It is also an attempt to initiate a democratic, collaborative
restorying endeavor to write into existence the world in which we want to live.
If you have suggestions concerning what we could do differently or improve, drop us a note at create@hawaii.edu. Please forward this synthesis to your colleagues, students, elected representatives or fellow community members using the forward email link below, or share it on social media.
As a collective intelligence initiative, the IMUA Scholarly Society (a.k.a. IMUA Labs) welcomes a diversity of ideas and epistemic pluralism. Thus, the arguments expressed in our knowledge syntheses do not necessarily reflect the views of IMUA Labs or the Hawaiʻi Institute for Socioecological Transformation (HISET). As part of our unwavering commitment to the democratization of local knowledge creation and sharing practices, starting next month, we plan to transition to virtual open-door editorial meetings. To receive an e-vite, send us a note at digirati@hawaii.edu.
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