I get catcalled on the street by a construction worker. He says that he can see I’m smart because I have enormous books. He tells me he’s reading the latest Zadie Smith novel. I invite him to join my book club, and spend all night fantasizing about his insightful commentary around non-linear plot structure.
Less than a month after Mauricio Macri's inauguration as president of Argentina in December 2015, a manual for micro-resistance was released online to guide resistance against Macri's election and policies. The manual suggests specific actions that people can perform in their everyday lives to build opposition against the new president.
The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, completed in 1968, is one of China’s most iconic infrastructural projects and a potent symbol of national pride. Spanning over 6,700 meters across the Yangtze River, it was the first double-decked road-rail truss bridge designed and built entirely by Chinese engineers, without foreign assistance, during a time of intense geopolitical isolation.
Yumi Ishikawa, a Japanese actress, freelance writer, and part-time funeral parlor worker, started the #KuToo Movement because she feels it’s unfair she has to wear heels at work. She also feels that being required to wear heels is rooted in a cultural problem, one much deeper than physical discomfort.
Boricua artist Castorillo discusses the crisis, diaspora, and the enduring significance of the Young Lords Party for Puerto Rican social movements today using illustrations:
The Critical Engineering ManifestoThe Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.
Mine is not Arts for the sake of Arts. It is a revolutionary INSGINA carved into the artistic plaque of my DNA to speak FREEDOM of expression and then freedom after EXPRESSION. The footprints of my revolutionary walk are dipped in the paths of RESISTANCE. My Ideological Swag -word is CREATIVITY. My spiritual birth mark is RESILIENCE. My revolutionary slogan is a nonviolent but a poetic fist of MASS INSTRUCTION. I am non-selfish believer.
In “Speech/Acts,” a group exhibition organized by Meg Onli at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden stood out as artists who take up voices, histories, and experiences that can help audiences move forward and endure in the future.
Sima Qian: China's 'grand historian' By Carrie Gracie BBC News, Beijing
Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price.
Students from Colombia College teamed up with Greenpeace and The Yes Men to take on the Chicago coal industry in an elaborate, multi-layered hoax. The group created a scheme to announce that a new coal plant was planned—but instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist), this one would be built in a rich one.
ONGOING ORGANIZATION:
CALLED: Iranti [pronounced írantì] is the Yoruba word for ‘memory’. Largely found in South West Nigeria and parts of Benin Republic, the Yoruba people consider memory a prized form of intelligence which determines how often one remembers what they see and hear.
In 2006, art historian Claire Bishop lit a fire under the collective seat of the art world with her Artforum piece “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” It set off — as much as any essay in the hermetic and staid world of contemporary art theory can — an uproar. The article inspired Grant Kester, an art historian also specializing in relational art practices, to respond:
The problem with feminism is that it’s just too familiar. The attention of a jaded public and neophiliac media may have been aroused by #MeToo, with its connotations of youth, sex and celebrity, but for the most part it has drifted recently towards other forms of prejudice, such as transphobia. Unfortunately for women, though, the hoary old problems of discrimination, violence and unpaid labour are still very much with us.
The story behind Thea, the 12-year-old child bride from Norway
By Andrew Russell - Global News
WATCH ABOVE: Hear the whole story of Thea, a 12-year-old child bride from Norway.
Her name is Thea.
She is a 12-year-old girl living in Norway and on Saturday she is set to marry a 37-year-old man named Geir, becoming the country’s first official child bride.
Vince Staples mentioned Long Beach's Ramona Park approximately 80 times on his debut album Summertime '06 and even allotted the park two of its own tracks: "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 1" and "Ramona Park Legend Pt. 2." "The sun come down and guns come out, you know Ramona Park."
The Acción Poética movement is a literary phenomenon that began in Monterrey, Mexico in 1996. It was founded by Mexican poet Armando Alanis Pulido and involves painting and intervening abandoned walls in cities with fragments of poetry. The content is usually love poems or optimistic phrases. Also, some phrases refer to the current situation in the cities (though one of their rules is to not talk about politics or religious beliefs).
The Arte Útil archive presents a growing archive of over two hundred case studies that imagine, create and implement beneficial outcomes by producing tactics that change how we act in society.
In Citizen, Claudia Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time.
The development of the Nights from the oriental oral and literary traditions of the Middle Ages into a classical work for Western readers is a fascinating one. The notebook of a Jewish book dealer from Cairo around the year 1150 contains the first documentary evidence for the Arabic title. The oldest preserved manuscripts, comprising a core corpus of about 270 nights, appear to date from the 15th century.
The Ogden Ar(t)chives Mailbox is a community project that was initiated by Ogden poet, Angelika Brewer. The project involves a metal sculpture of a mailbox, which has various decorative elements such as a typewriter, a birdcage, and a heart. The mailbox serves as a platform for the public to submit their creative works such as poems, drawings, letters, or anything that can fit in an envelope.
Students at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University are celebrating International Women’s Day with banners making light of a proposed constitutional amendment to scrap term limits for the country’s president.
One banner joked that a boyfriend’s term should also have no limits, while another said, "A country cannot exist without a constitution, as we cannot exist without you!”
The outbreak of the coronavirus has brought international scrutiny down on China’s political system. Again. A few commentators have applauded the efficiency of the Chinese Communist Party’s response, but most have zoomed in on its weaknesses. Some have even blamed the party itself for the outbreak, calling the disease a “Communist coronavirus” or “the Belt and Road Pandemic.”
On February 19, 2012, the Chinese young feminism leaders, included Maizi Li and Churan Zheng, initiated an activity, "Occupy the Men Bathroom." The protesters occupied the male public restroom and invited the women waiting for the women restroom to use the male one.
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.