Search Results for “IRan” – Page 3

The death of the “twitter revolution” and the struggle over internet narratives

Published March 24, 2011

By Donya Alinejad In her latest speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the internet the “town square” of the 21^st century. Clinton seized on the widespread attention for Facebook during the Egyptian revolution and used the opportunity to reiterate internet-oriented US foreign policy. Just days earlier the Egyptian people had ousted Hosni Mubarak, their dictator of 30 years. Cairo’s Tahrir Square had been occupied by protesters, stained with the blood of the revolution’s martyrs, and gained iconic status as the center of the 21^st century’s most populous revolutionary movement. Soon after, protesters in Libya named the Northern Court in Benghazi “Tahrir Square Two.” If these events show us anything, it is that the town square of the 21^st century is still, simply, the town square.

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Wat is er aan de hand in de Arabische wereld?

Published February 1, 2011

5375477395_8df788933b[1] — Protest in Tunis (door Nasser Nouri)

Door Erik van Ommering … hoor ik u denken deze dagen! Nu eens geen heibel tussen Palestijnen en Israëliërs, maar revolutie in Tunesië, opstand in Egypte, rellen in Jemen, demonstraties in Jordanië, protesten in Libanon – waar gaat dat heen? Vanuit mijn positie als onderzoeker in het laatstgenoemde land zal ik een poging in de richting van een antwoord wagen – waarbij ik me bewust ben van de snelheid waarmee de huidige gebeurtenissen mijn relaas ongetwijfeld zullen inhalen. Hierbij nu eens een macro-analyse door een antropoloog!

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Cuts to Education: Impressions from the national student demonstration

Published January 31, 2011

179866_1747137609116_1559072250_1755342_7593602_n — Photos by Coen van der Steen and Markus Balkenhol

In the Netherlands, the cutbacks to higher education have become a controversial issue. They are part of wider austerity measures taken by the Dutch government in the wake of the global financial crisis. In this context, education reform has become a focus of discussion inside and outside universities. This series, “Cuts to Education,” includes pieces from various vantage points in the education cutbacks debate.

By Donya Alinejad The student demonstration in The Hague last Friday was referred to as one of the largest in the country since 1988. In a historical first, approximately 1000 Professors – that’s one third of all the professors at Dutch universities – marched in full academic garb as a statement of solidarity with the protesting students. The reason: Opposition to the cabinet’s drastic education cutbacks. Since then, Prime Minister Mark Rutte has announced during a routine press conference that the plans for cut backs will simply continue. So what was the effect of the student demonstration?

Barbaric Others

Published November 22, 2010

By Scott Dalby Europe is changing. Political debate and policy initiatives have become fixated on issues like immigration and Islam in particular and more generally on excluding outsiders, whether they are Black youth in Paris suburbs, Roma immigrants, or Eastern European workers. There has been a clear shift towards the political Right, and the popularization of conservative discourses and “solutions.”

This seems to have exposed a crisis within Left politics, its authenticity and potential for offering an alternative argument to the growing Right-wing discourses currently running amok in Europe. I write this blog as an anthropologist and as a person who knows that these ongoing changes affect us all. And it seems to me that these are bad times for Europe; for minorities especially but also the rest. But why has this happened and what are the consequences?

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Migration and the politics of names

Published May 27, 2010

By Mohammad Amer It was not the first time I was asked about my ‘actual’ surname or, achternaam, as they say in Dutch. This time was during my introductory meeting with the FSW staff at the VU. I have been dealing with this question now for over a decade. Years ago my Dutch language teacher called me ‘Mohammad’ following the order of my full name ‘Mohammad Amer’. I told her that ‘I am called ‘Amer’, and if you call me ‘Mohammad’ I might not respond to you’. She said ‘that means Amer is your, roepnaam’ (meaning, in Dutch, literally the name people call you)? ‘Kind of’, I told her. Thus she noted my name as ‘Amer, Mohammad Amer’ on the attendance list. I accepted that as it sounded quite lyrical whenever she spoke it.

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Antropologisch Kieskompas: Education Cutbacks

Published May 20, 2010

In our new series “Antropologisch Kieskompas (Anthropological Election Compass) anthropologists express their views on important issues in the upcoming Parliamentary Elections. These include integration, development, environment, and education. The authors reflect critically on how particular current affairs are being dealt with in the public. In this week’s posting, Donya Alinejad writes about the changes to higher education and the student reactions.

By Donya Alinejad This Friday, May 21st, at 13.00, a demonstration against the financial cut-backs on Dutch education will be held in Amsterdam. Demonstrators will start gathering at 13.00 on Damplein and will lead a procession march to Museumplein, where speeches, concerts, and rallies will commence from 14.00 onward. The aim is to fill the Museumplein in defense of higher education and against the planned 20% cutbacks, thus sending a clear political message to leaders in the Hague: no more cutbacks on education. The initiators of the protests are the student groups, LSVb, ISO, JOB, LKvV, and Comite SOS. They are sponsored by radio station Wild FM and have the support of other student and grassroots organizations.

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Steeds meer betalen voor minder

Published February 7, 2010

De oorzaak van de studentenprotesten

www.studentendemonstratie.nl — Foto van bezetting afgelopen week in Amsterdam

Door gastauteur Max van Lingen (m.m.v. Donya Alinejad)

De boodschap van de studenten die de afgelopen week collegezalen in Rotterdam, Nijmegen, Utrecht en Amsterdam bezetten was helder: 1) Schaf de studiefinanciering niet af, want daarmee schaadt je de toegankelijkheid van het hoger onderwijs, 2) Investeer in de kwaliteit van het hoger onderwijs, want dat is goed voor de samenleving.

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Haiti in the news

Published January 22, 2010

How to Mock the Past of a People in Shock

Security For Food Distubution — US Marines monitor food distribution in Haiti

By Donya Alinejad

The aftershocks of the earthquake continue to hurt and haunt Haitians. As the nightmare goes on, the estimated death toll has reached 200,000 and the European Commission has estimated that 2 million people are homeless. Emergency aid from all over the world is being mobilized. But news of international aid seems to be reaching us much faster than the aid itself is reaching those who need it.

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Bolivia: het hoofddoekdebat

Published January 18, 2010

Door Ton Salman Het is een hard gelag: vroeger kon je je als antropoloog in alle onschuld beperken tot de prototypische thema’s van je eigen regio. Je deed wat hekserij in Afrika, of wat heilige koeien en Boeddhisme in Azië, of een beetje indianenrituelen in Latijns Amerika. En je luisterde respectvol maar met een waterige blik in de ogen naar de verhalen van de collega’s die altijd een ander vliegtuig namen. Die onnozele tijd is voorbij. Eerst waren er de kritische stokebranden die de antropologie uit het exotisme en de dweperij met my village losweekten, toen kwamen er de masochistische etnografieën over de biased sociotopen van de postkoloniale antropoloog zélf, en daaroverheen kwam de globalisering. Het gevolg is dat we nu uitgenodigd worden over hoofddoekjes in Bolivia te schrijven.

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Hungarian nationalists claim Eastern origins

Published September 22, 2009

‘Hungarian Party campaigns for recognition of Scythian heritage’, Pál Nyiri recently wrote on the Culture Matters blog. Here we reproduce his post, which raises many interesting points about the politics of ethnic identity and the relationship between nationalism and academic writing.

According to Hungarian newspapers, the xenophobic, anti-Semitic party Jobbik (“The Righter”), which has three seats in the European Parliament, has launched a campaign to expunge from textbooks the accepted theory according to which Hungarians are a Finno-Ugric people, and replace it with one according to which they are related to the Huns, Avars and Scythians, Indo-Iranian nomads that inhabited large parts of the Eurasian steppe in the first half of the first millennium C.E.

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30 search results for "IRan"

‘Hungarian Party campaigns for recognition of Scythian heritage’, Pál Nyiri recently wrote on the Culture Matters blog. Here we reproduce his post, which raises many interesting points about the politics of ethnic identity and the relationship between nationalism and academic writing.