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For those of you who are joining us in Belfast for the 2010 International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations, please note that there is more detailed information available for download on the locations page of the conference website here.
We know that you will continue to have questions as the conference draws near. Please feel free to contact us at support@ondiversity.com with any inquiries or concerns that you may have.
We wish you safe and happy travels!
The 2010 International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations is fast approaching. In just a short week and a half, many of you will be joining Common Ground at Queen’s University for a unique exploration of Belfast and an important dialogue on the many facets of diversity throughout history, in present times, and for the future.
An important aspect of this conference is the community building that can happen when such a large and diverse group of people comes together to address such important issues. We hope to foster this community in a number of different ways from talking circles to tours (such as the political tour) to hosting a conference dinner.
The conference dinner is to be highlighted as a time when many of our speakers are able to come together for more intimate conversations over good food and wine. We hope that you will be able to join us for the dinner on 20 July at 19:00 (7:00pm).
The Conference Dinner costs $75 and will be held in the Canada Room at Queen’s University. There will be a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian menu available. The non-vegetarian menu will begin with a Red Pepper Bavarois with a palate cleanser of Champagne Sorbet before the main entree: Supreme of Guinea Fowl with wild mushrooms and rosemary.
The meal will end with Chocolate and Irish Cream Mousse topped with a Vanilla Chantilly, coffee, and tea.
The vegetarian menu will include fresh fruits and vegetables that are in-season and will be cooked in a way to compliment the rest of the meal.
There is still space available for the conference dinner. If you are interested in signing up, please contact us at support@ondiversity.com
From Faisal al Yafai, in The National
A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs.
“We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off.
Joel Whitney interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Guernica
Islam’s toughest critic on her new book, the Axis of Evil, and the neoconservatives’ moral high ground.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1. In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu’ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.
Here we are, again.
From Wonkette
Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face from the mural, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students pictured on the school wall to be repainted as light-skinned children.
By Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes
Secularism does not justify eliminating women’s clothing choices.
Having grown up in a traditional Hindu family in India, I understand something about the domestic pressure for public modesty on girls. Jeans came into vogue just when I hit puberty. But for years the only way I could step out of the house in them without risking a minor nuclear explosion by my dad–a fairly urbanized doctor–was if I slipped on a blouse loose enough to smother my front and long enough to conceal my behind. A bathing suit–much less a bikini like the one that the first Muslim Miss USA wore to victory this week–was out of the question. Hence I never learned to swim.
From Colin Marshall, in 3 Quarks Daily
So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.
Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?
Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It’s quite a while back, so I wasn’t really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that’s much more universal than the story being just a Korean story.
Disability Ethics: A Framework for Practitioners, Professionals and Policy Makers by Paul Jewell is now available from the On Diversity imprint.
The social arrangements with which we are familiar work fairly well for most of us most of the time. We work, we earn, we pay taxes. We engage professionals when we need their advice. We expect that there will be doctors whose expertise can be relied upon if we are ill, that there will be schools staffed with knowledgeable teachers and courts presided over by fair judges. We vote for politicians who offer policies we favour. We require government to provide us with security, protect our freedom and assist those of us who cannot help themselves.
These social arrangements rest on some shared assumptions and values. They assume that people are, by and large, free, self-determining persons who respect each other’s rights and independence, and co-operate rationally and productively with each other. Our social arrangements are challenged when this assumption does not hold. What policies should government have in place for people who are not independent, or not rational, or not co-operative, or not productive? If, by some catastrophe, through accident, disability or mental illness, you became such a person, how should you be dealt with by professionals and government services? If, on the other hand, you are a professional, how should you go about making decisions for clients who are not well placed to make decisions for themselves? Are there standards of professional ethics that can deal with this situation? Are there ethical standards that can be applied by managers of service organizations, or by policy writers, or by government officials? Are there ethical standards that concerned citizens should demand of government, of service organizations and of professionals who provide for vulnerable people?
Drawing on the stories of people with disabilities and their service providers, Paul Jewell explores ethical theories, tests their practical application, and offers strategies essential to practitioners, managers, policy-makers and professionals who provide services to people with disabilities.
By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times
For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.
“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Today the International Conference on Diversity Newsletter will be relaunched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Diversity Community. The Diversity Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Diversity Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to http://www.ondiversity.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at
support@ondiversity.com
By Tony Judt, in NYR Blog
I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.
I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious.
From Janelle Weaver, in Nature News
Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.
Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.
From Alexis Okeowo, in The Economist
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
The first time I felt deeply uncomfortable being black was when I was a kid. My family had just moved to Alabama, and I was in a car with my father and my brother. A white woman with a harshly lined face and brown frizzy hair yelled out a racial slur as we drove by. Dad immediately put the car in reverse and drove over to her as she pumped gas at a filling station. “What did you say?” he demanded. She glared at him and refused to respond. Shocked into silence, my brother and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive home.
From Susan Douglas, in In These Times
Spring 1997.
This was the Spice Girls moment, and debate: Were these frosted cupcakes really a vehicle for feminism? And how much reversion back to the glory days of prefeminism should girls and women accept—even celebrate—given that we now allegedly had it all? Despite their Wonderbras and bare thighs, the Spice Girls advocated “girl power.” They demanded, in their colossal, intercontinental hit “Wannabe,” that boys treat them with respect or take a hike. Their boldfaced liner notes claimed that “The Future Is Female” and suggested that they and their fans were “Freedom Fighters.” They made Margaret Thatcher an honorary Spice Girl. “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties,” they told the Guardian. “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a ’90s way of saying it.”
From Julie Bindel in Guardian
Iceland’s prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country’s first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996.
Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.
The 2010 Diversity Conference will be held in Belfast, Ireland at Queen’s University from July 19-21. For more information, please visit www.Diversity-Conference.com
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Diversity Conference, see: http://ondiversity.com/conference-2010/register/.
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