Staff Recommend: 5 May - 13 May 2020
This week, CRIN staff recommend: A hopeful view of human nature, how mutual aid can become more political, re-thinking education, the danger of a single story, articulating eco-feminism and finding humanity.
Read:
The Correspondent article on a hopeful view of human nature
Now more than ever we need a view of human nature based on trust and solidarity – because individualism and competition won’t get us through this pandemic.
Rutger Bregman writes in the Correspondent:
Theories about human nature – unlike theories about molecules or black holes – can come true simply because we believe in them. This phenomenon was noted in the early 1990s by Robert Frank, an economics professor who saw his students grow increasingly selfish the longer they studied economics. In time, they seemed to become the picture of humanity they were taught.
What would happen if we turned this around? What if schools, businesses, and governments assumed that most people are doing their best? What if we rallied round our tendency to trust and cooperate – a tendency with every bit as much of an evolutionary basis, over hundreds of millions of years?
Read the full article here.
New Yorker article on the role of mutual aid and the state
This article explores the role of mutual aid groups during a pandemic, asking if this current moment is an opportunity for mutual aid to become more political and to advocate for structural change.
Jia Tolentino writes:
[T]he differences among the many volunteer groups that had suddenly sprouted were already sharpening. Some crisis volunteers find their work encouragingly apolitical: neighbors helping neighbors. Some are growing even more committed to socialist or anarchist ideals. It will be a loss, Spade told me, if mutual aid becomes vacated of political meaning at the moment that it begins to enter the mainstream—if we lose sight of the fundamental premise that, within its framework, we meet one another’s needs not just to fix things in the moment but to identify and push back on the structures that make those needs so dire. “What happens when people get together to support one another is that people realize that there’s more of us than there is of them,” he said. “This moment is a powder keg.”
Read the full article here.
George Monbiot on rethinking education
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian about how we need to rethink education and include more of a focus on ecology, nature and the planet. As so many parents are at home trying to teach their children, now is a great time to think about what we should be teaching them.
Read the full article here.
Watch:
TED Talk: The danger of a single story
In this timeless TED talk, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how dangerous single stories are as they create stereotypes, speaks about how she found her authentic cultural voice and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Watch below.
TED Talk: Nature is everywhere, we just need to learn to see it
Watch Emma Marris’ inspirational Ted Talk below.
‘Right on’: the Wednesday web chat by Universal Group
The initiative is led by the Universal Rights Group and consists of a weekly web chat, every Wednesday, providing interesting conversations around the changes brought up by the Coronavirus outbreak as well as wider insights on human rights developments, going beyond the current crisis situation.
This week, the topic is 'A post COVID-19 world: how do we build back better?'.
Listen:
Finding Humanity podcast series
By bringing voices from the front lines of war and injustice, host Hazami Barmada peels back the layers that surround today's massive challenges.
Each episode puts a human face on a global topic that is overwhelming and difficult to grasp— be it the refugee crisis, climate change or LGBTQ discrimination. While set in unfamiliar places, Finding Humanity tackles recognisable themes: love of family, finding hope, and overcoming personal struggles.
Listen here.
Un podcast à soi (in French only)
Two episodes of this feminist podcast series looks to unpack ecofeminism (ecology and feminism). Currently only available in French: