Social Activism

The article uses the case of AMANA, a charity organisation for colonial migrants, to analyse the humanitarian and political underpinnings of social assistance in postwar France. It shows how the organisation drew upon colonial experiences in the creation of programmes aimed at immigrant adaptation and contributed to the definition of assimilation from a colonial project to a republican imperative.

""With the transition from oral culture to written culture, there came the rise of authority or power (e.g., organized tribes, religion etc.) that in effect began to control the creation, gather, processing and/or diffusion of information. Not surprisingly, this control planted the seeds for conflict -between those who wanted to keep information in their "mono-oligopolies" and those who wanted information to remain free and open. The latter types of person or their organized systems are often conceptualized as pirates and so on.

What is the differences between consuming via mass media or pirated internet? Is the pop culture happy with that? Or as always does the capital has some issues with loosing some? Why the information must be free? Is the cyber underground world made of criminal like in real world? What about the Habermas’s Public Sphere diffusion? But also the Baudrillard’s reality in a high definition cyber culture? The distance between the real and virtual getting close? Or is the simulation getting more real? What do we call to the new culture? Is cyber just enough for the definition of new one? The questions can be more and more.

Where do we stand vis-à-vis piracy in the current age of knowledge society? To be sure, piracy, as noted above, was not invented by the computer age, but rather with the creation of information by the humanity. Piracy, is arguably, a social insurance through horizontalization of power systems that otherwise enact on information. Seen in this light, piracy is a method to examine the contemporary culture in the digital age where information is co-produced in distributed locales, and where see not only proliferation of information but also the locales that embody it.

In the early day of 21st Century, and with the change in the mode of diffusion from transportation (where information co-travels with its human agent), to transmission (where information can travel digitally without its human agent), the character of piracy has changed to 21st Century digital form but the attendant power systems remained in a more physical form of 20th Century's authoritarian oligarch.

As we struggle for a more horizontal and free planet and 21st Century human society, we shall continue our discoveries in the present book through the following #hashtags (click for the list of hashtags in text format) for individual chapters.

WHO AM I?
I am a self‐funded independent scientist and working an Asst.Prof (holding a PhD in Informatics under Journalism), also head of the departments of Journalism and Communication Informatics.

WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Pirates: Discovering the Planet is a scientific book project about realizing/explaining the 21st century that we are living in it, you can find the subjects as in # hashtags at the website http://pirates.arifyildirim.com

Flying Editor ‐ Editorial Round The World Travel: is an another project to support the scientific part by traveling as an Editorial Round The World Traveler for the interviews with authors and also final editorial revisions and approvals for all chapters of Pirates:Discovering the Planet Book. My travels depend on where chapters of the book come from.
P.S. These projects are still looking for a host university in Europe as visiting professor/researcher/project.

LINKS FOR THE PROJECTS:
Pirates: Discovering the Planet Book http://pirates.arifyildirim.com
Flying Editor: http://www.flyingeditor.org
A brief description can be found also at: http://www.flyingeditor.org/2014/03/20/a‐brief‐description‐of‐the2ideas/""

"Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism is a reflection on ten years of activities of the documentary screening non-profit Cinema Politica. Marking a transformative and inspiring decade of connecting audiences, artists and activists through provocative political film and video, Cinema Politica brings together diverse voices in this collection of essays, interviews, impressions and specially curated ‘favourite docs’ lists.

With analyses from filmmakers and academics like Shannon Walsh and Darrell Varga, and film and media scholars like Thomas Waugh and John Downing, lists of political documentary favorites from Kim Longinotto, John Greyson, and Sylvia D. Hamilton, among others, as well as reflections from a host of other docuphiles, doc critics and doc-theorists, Screening Truth to Power is an eclectic and original contribution to literature on the genre.

This collection also reflects the mandate of Cinema Politica to seize upon documentary's transformational potential in order to advance progressive socio-political and ecological change. As such, the firebrand texts between these covers promises to engage, inspire, and activate."

The cosy relationship between corporate and industrial power and political systems was vividly evident in the 2012 American Election which returned president Barak Obama to the White House despite the expenditure of billions of dollars by the Republican political opponents attempting to unseat him. In New Zealand, a similar system operates, albeit with less size and overt gerrymandering.The public is still left to pay for the costs of pollution cleanup that greedy industrialists and corporations foist upon the environment. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in the contradictory relationship between the New Zealand Tourism Industry - NZ's second largest export earner that relies on its marketing imagery of a pristine, pure and green environment - and the dairy industry (our primary export earner that is almost single-handedly responsible for the widespread pollution of New Zealand rivers and lakes. Scientists like Dr. Mike Joy who would speak out to reveal the true and actual state of the environment  and to challenge the false imagery of the Tourism Industry appear to be the object of an attempted campaign to suppress their views. This article responds to this apparent campaign to silence Dr. Joy and presents the true picture of New Zealand's environmental record.

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From 1840 to the present, this critical analysis covers Maori land marches, Manapori Dam protest, logging protests, anti-nuclear activism (including the Rainbow Warrior), pesticide and herbicide (Agent Orange) protests, State asset sale protests, GMO protests, and the reality and future probablility of State repression and State terrorism. We point to the Ruatoki "Anti-terrorism" raids as a thing of the future. We celebrate and salute the "troublemakers" of New Zealand who have thus far prevented the complete ruination of this land and the expropriation of its "resources" through a collusive relationship between government and international capitalism. It makes the point that we are approaching or have already passed the limits of our ability to dramatic and cataclysmic environmental, political, economic and social change. There is no alternative left other than direct uncompromising activism in the face of a recalcitrant government and the theft of our heritage."

Anarchism is a perennially misunderstood idea. Far from representing violence and chaos, anarchism is instead a form of praxis that centers on non-hierarchical organization and the practice of mutual aid, implemented through the everyday politics of direct action, voluntary association, and self-management. Although often misrepresented as an ideology solely concerned with the destruction of the state, the power of anarchist geographies resides in their integrality, which refuses to assign priority to any one of the multiple dominating apparatuses that constrain our lives, as all are seen as irreducible to one another. Anarchism is the struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation, a protean and multivariate process that is decidedly geographical.

This work engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the legitimatory discourse of the governing Australian Labor Party in relation to the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory policy 2012. The policy effectively prolonged central provisions of the Northern Territory Emergency Response 2007 and can be perceived as neocolonial intervention directed at the incorporation of Black Australians into the Australian nation-state. The analysis focuses on speeches by members of the Labor party, delivered in the context of the parliamentary debates on the SFP. Four recurring discourses have been identified and investigated according to their ideological content and their legitimising function. While a discourse of listening can be perceived as genuine commitment to take the views of Black Australians seriously, discourses of learning/progress and caring/vulnerability are rather ambivalent. The discourse of agency, which is identified based on an analysis of transitivity – the power position which is ascribed to individuals or groups based on the semantic and grammatical structure of a text –, overshadows the other discourses and strips Black Australians of their ability to change and deal with their social problems themselves. Positive transformation is rendered possible exclusively through contact with white Australians’ social and cultural forms, which can be seen as the central legitimising argument by the speakers. This perception that outside intervention is the only solution, however, must be considered as serious hindrance to the policy aim of empowering Black Australians in general, and vulnerable Black Australians in particular.

A student-led movement to divest university endowments from the fossil fuel sector is gaining momentum on many campuses. This forum is intended to educate and foster debate amongst our university community about the implications of divesting The New School’s $220M endowment of fossil fuel companies. A panel discussion and audience Q&A will address the following questions: - How is our endowment managed, invested and used? - What are the symbolic, practical, and financial implications of divesting from the fossil fuel sector? - As a shareholder, how else might the university influence these companies? - Are there other more effective strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? - How does the divestment question factor into the university’s overall commitment to environmental sustainability? Reception to follow. This event is sponsored by the President's Office, the University Student Senate, University Faculty Senate, and the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR).