Tips on Hosting an Accessible Event

June 22, 2009 in Access, Campus Protests, Disability, Politics, Student Power | by | 4 comments

Cripchick has a great, thorough post up on how to ensure that your events are accessible to everyone. Here’s the list of topics she covers:

  • childcare
  • sliding pay scales
  • different ways of getting information out
  • gender-neutral bathrooms
  • food options
  • wheelchair and other mobility-related access
  • structured schedules and awareness of time
  • alternative formats
  • audio description
  • accessible language
  • understanding different learning styles
  • access to quiet space
  • commitment to being anti-oppression
  • trigger warnings
  • arrangements for carpools/room sharing
  • identities and experiences

There’s more in comments, too. Go read.

American Universities, Nazism, and Jim Crow

June 21, 2009 in History, Race, Religion | by | 1 comment

A new book, The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, examines American academics’ response to the rise of Nazism, specifically noting that many “maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich” until after (sometimes well after) Kristallnacht, in 1938.

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein makes a provocative point about that subject:

While Germany from 1933 through 1938 treated Jews very badly, it wasn’t until Kristallnacht that one could say that Germany was more vicious in its treatment of minorities than, say, Mississippi. American universities certainly weren’t boycotting Mississippi, so it strikes me as an obvious issue of hindsight bias to argue that American universities that were exceedingly tolerant of domestic racism should be specifically excoriated for paying little attention to foreign anti-Semitism, just because in historical retrospect we know that German anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust.

Without getting into an argument about whether one or the other was “more vicious,” I’d say that Bernstein doesn’t go far enough here. Many Americans put the German racism of the mid-1930s in a different category than the American racism of the same era not because of hindsight bias, but also because they don’t fully grasp, or haven’t fully come to terms with, just how brutal and horrific our country’s 20th century racial legacy actually is.

(I should note, by the way, that I’m not vouching for the rest of Bernstein’s post. I strongly disagree with parts of his arguments about Spanish fascism and American Stalinism, but that’s another topic for another time.)

This is The Big One: Clay Shirky on Twitter, Iran, and Activism

June 17, 2009 in Media, Student Power | by | Leave a comment

The folks at TED interviewed Clay Shirky on the Iran uprising yesterday, and the transcript is a great read. Seriously, you should go read the whole thing. There are a few snippets that I think are worth expanding on, too:

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true.

It wasn’t quite true then, and it isn’t quite true now, but Clay makes a good point.

In 1968, television and satellite transmission of information were transforming media. What happened on America’s streets that summer was broadcast nationwide in real time, and the news didn’t stop at the water’s edge. Images of protests in Chicago appeared within hours in newspapers and on television screens in Paris. Images from Paris appeared in Mexico City. Images from Mexico City appeared in Tokyo, and so on. The whole world wasn’t watching, but more of the world was watching than ever before.

As it was in 1968, so it is in 2009. The whole world isn’t watching, but more of the world is watching than ever before, and as Clay went on to say, “people throughout the world are not only listening but responding.”

Asked which social media platforms have had the most impact on the Iranian uprising, Clay answers flatly:

It’s Twitter. … Twitter [is] so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents.

I’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot recently about the fact that Facebook has such a bigger buy-in among American student activists than Twitter does, and I think that though Facebook has a lot of strengths, Clay raises a point here that activists ignore at their peril. Twitter is easy and open and shareable, and because of that, a campaign that takes off on Twitter can get really big really fast. If you want to reach beyond your circle, you need to be on Twitter.

I have to head out for a while, but I’ll pick this up later with my thoughts on the rest of the interview.

Attack on Tehran University Students Divides Iranian Leadership

June 16, 2009 in Campus Protests, Civil Liberties, Politics, Student Power | by | 1 comment

Sunday night’s violent attack on students in a Tehran University dorm by police and religious militia members has exposed fault lines at the highest levels of Iranian government.

Yesterday, a group of parliamentarians visited the campus and spoke with students. After that visit, they called upon the government to release all those arrested and fire those responsible for the attack. In response, parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a longtime Ahmadinejad rival, announced the creation of an investigatory committee to investigate the incident.

Reports have circulated in the last 24 hours that as many as five students — three men and two women — were killed in the assault. The chancellor of the university has denied that any deaths occurred, but condemnation of the incident has been growing, as Speaker Larijani has publicly asked “What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?”

At the mass rally held yesterday, presidential candidate Ali Mousavi charged that the government had “attacked dormitories and brutally broken legs, heads, arms, [thrown] some of the students out of the windows, and arrested a lot of people.” Today, some eight hundred students are reported to have staged a sit-in at the university’s gates.

Iran is a young country, and its students have for decades stood at the forefront of political agitation. The Tehran University incident is not the only violent campus assault to occur since last Friday’s election, but it appears to be galvanizing — and polarizing — the country in a way that the others have not.

If the uprising now taking place in Iran does grow into a true rebellion, the Tehran University dormitory assault of June 14 will likely be seen as a turning point in the struggle.

3 pm update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has finally picked up the Tehran University story.

5 pm update: The chancellor of Shiraz University has resigned in protest over a similar attack there.

Iranian Lawmakers Stand in Support of Tehran University Students

June 15, 2009 in Campus Protests, Police, Politics, Student Bashing, Student Power, Voting Rights | by | Leave a comment

Members of the Iranian parliament are repudiating last night’s government attack on students in dormitories at Tehran University, and the parliament’s speaker has appointed a committee to investigate the event.

According to a report by INSA, the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of parliamentarians visited the university today, taking testimony from students who witnessed the previous night’s events.

After their trip to the campus the group made a statement calling “for the damages [to dormitory buildings] to be repaired … arrested students to be released and those who carried out [these] unfortunate events to be arrested.”

In response to the lawmakers’ call, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani constituted the group as a formal committee charged with investigating the “unfortunate incidents.”

5 pm update: Larijani is a longtime rival of Ahmadinejad, but he conspicuously congratulated the president on his re-election over the weekend. His appointment of this committee may suggest that he believes the political winds are shifting.

10 pm update: The Guardian (UK) says it has received an unconfirmed report that five Tehran University students died in the dorm assault. It names the five students, and reports that they are believed to have been buried today. The Guardian also reports that seven people involved in a student protest are said to have been killed by riot police in Shiraz, and that students at Isfahan University may have been thrown from upper-story windows.

11 pm update: According to this site, two of the five students killed were women. The female students who were said to have died were Mobina Ehterami and Fatemeh Barati, and the men were Kasra Sharafi, Kambiz Shoaei, and Mohsen Imani.

About This Blog

n7772graysmall
StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.