Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies

Dear Friend;
As part of the activities of WAED- World Architecture for Equal Dignity, this piece of news might be of interest to you.
Regards
Ashraf Salama

Design Like You Give a Damn
Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
Edited by AFH - Architecture for Humanity
Metropolis Books

Founders: Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr See the Website of AFH
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/default.htm

A talk by Sinclair was given at Tasmeem Doha: The Annual Design Conference of Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar VCU-Q (March 5-8, 2007). A similar talk can be found by clicking on the following link
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/07/tedprize_winner_1.html

Dear HumanDHS Friends!

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: In light of our view, as Lindner has documented so well, that the terms humiliation and humility have only recently come to have separate meanings. I found it fascinating to discover that there was, a hundred years after that separation in the 1750’s a call for a national day of “humiliation” and not a national day of “humility”. Seems to me good evidence of an evolution of the use of the words going on.

ARTICLE:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Congress-and-the-Founding-Fathers-Pray&id=340141″
The founding fathers of the United States of America, the pilgrims, attributed their success to God through fasting and prayer. Setting aside special days of fasting and prayer was an accepted part of life in the Plymouth Colony. A law was passed on November 15, 1636, allowing the Governor and his assistants “to command solemn days of humiliation by fasting, etc. And, also, for thanksgiving as occasion shall be offered.”

COMMENT: And here we see Lincoln persisting in the use of the word “humiliation” in 1863.

ARTICLE:
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/bpf/pathways/lincoln.html
“A Day Of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer in the The United States Of America on April 30, 1863.”

Dear HumanDHS Friends!
Words play out in our daily use of them. What follows are a number of news stories that reference “humiliation”. The first one is an editorial that disturbingly enough calls for the public humiliation of bad drivers. This for me is an example of how “benign” such ideas can seem to be but also how insidious they are.
Brian Lynch

ARTICLE: Victoria Tang
You Can’t Drive—Dot-Com
Thursday, May, 24th, 2007
Everyone thinks they’re a good driver. Especially the bad drivers. You probably can’t count the number of times this pops into your mind when you have to get from point A to point B by car. There are just so many of them. The overly cautious ones who think the speed limit should never be reached and insist on driving 10 miles per hour slower. The distracted ones who don’t realize the light’s turned green, leaving you stuck behind them for the next 15 seconds reading about how their kid made the honor roll and how they voted in the ’04 election from their bumper sticker collection. And, my personal favorite, the capricious ones who zigzag in and out of traffic, oblivious to the purpose of the dashed white lines on the asphalt…
http://www.dailycal.org/column.php?id=25113

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: Once again tales of childhood trauma that draw a straight line to present problems.

ARTICLE: Coach’s Diary: Beat the Bullies
Olivia Stefanino’s client revisits some difficult childhood memories to make sense of his current problems. Simon admitted that he had always been an underachiever. Fidgeting nervously, he told me that also had problems with completing tasks – indeed he constantly found that he missed deadlines and let down his colleagues and clients…
http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=168509&d=680&h=608&f=626&dateformat=%25e-%25h-%25y

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: And once again street violence due to inflicted and perceived humiliation.

ARTICLE: Prosecutor says murder suspect was avenging earlier humiliation
The Journal News / Lohud.com - Westchester, NY, USA
By BILL HUGHES. WHITE PLAINS - “Omar Washington didn’t want to be a punk,” Assistant District Attorney John O’Rourke told jurors yesterday at the opening of…
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070524/NEWS02/705240371/1023/NEWS07

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: This case of a man being asked to remove his turban certainly brings up many issues of conflict amongst institutions, individuals and security issues. Is this at base a case of the security agent having a personality problem?

ARTICLE: “I was told to remove turban at Buffalo airport for security check”, blames US NRI Gurinder Singh

Punjab Newsline Network
Thursday, 10 May 2007
SACRAMENTO(USA): Gurinder Singh a resident of Sacramento in USA a green card holder Sikh who allegedly faced humilation in the hands of TSA security and US police officials said he was asked to take off the turban for security clearance at the Buffalo airport…
http://www.punjabnewsline.com/content/view/4076/38/

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: The term “Humiliation” has been used a great deal in the last weeks in terms of the Palestinian question.
Several examples follow.

ARTICLE: U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during their meeting in Jerusalem early last week (archives)

ARTICLE: Rice: Palestinians should live free of ‘humilation of occupation’
By The Associated Press
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that Palestinians deserve to live under better conditions than they are subjected to and be “free of the humiliation of occupation” in a state of their own…

Report: Deprived of Dignity
Degrading Treatment and Abusive discipline in
New York City And Los Angeles Public Schools

A report by NESRI shows that middle and high school students in New York City and Los Angeles are frequently ignored and mistreated in their classrooms, and subjected to harsh discipline policies that punish, exclude and criminalize them.

Report: Deprived of Dignity - PDF
Executive Summary - PDF

Press Release - New York City and Los Angeles
Press Conference Statement

The report uses a human rights framework to document the use of suspensions, law enforcement and other punitive disciplinary strategies that ignore students’ educational and emotional needs. Schools with the most repressive policies are overwhelmingly under-resourced, overcrowded and primarily attended by low-income students of color.

The report calls on the Department of Education in NYC and the Los Angeles Unified School District to take a holistic approach to school climate and safety by reducing overcrowding, increasing resources for teachers, and guaranteeing the participation of students and parents. Schools should view discipline and the teaching of behavioral skills as an essential part of education and prioritize counseling and mediation. The criminalization of discipline and use of police in schools must stop.

Will you join us in this course Monday-Wednesday June 4-6 in New York to image the end of climate change and make a timeline to shift its course?

Dr. Elise Boulding and Warren Ziegler created an imaging workshop to motivate behavior in the present by using images of the future. Their theory is that people will not be able to create something they haven’t envisioned. As people imagine a positive future, they then can work back into present time to achieve a different present with a timeline and concrete action steps.

Our final project in the course below, Designing and Implementing Interventions for Community, Institutional and Global Change, June 4-6 at the United Nations, will be designed around the following questions:

“What can participants do to design a process whereby states and people can work together to address amend the course of climate change? How can we create ecological balance while keeping human rights, gender parity, global ethics and universal values in mind? How do we begin to build trust between peoples to address the needs of the earth?

You will learn how to use the imaging workshop process and many other strategies to implement change from the perspective of the Reflective Leader.

Please let me know by Friday, May 25 if you will be attending.

Best wishes, Virginia.
508-753-4172, www.global-leader.org

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Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Patron and Key Presenter, Under Secretary-General and High Representative, the Least Developed Countries, Small Island Developing States and Landlocked Developing Countries

And Virginia Swain, Founder and Director, The Institute for Global Leadership

A Member of the Global Compact

Invites you to the Course

Designing and Implementing Interventions for Community, Institutional and Global Change at the United Nations

A Course of the Reflective Leadership Certificate Program (www.global-leader.org, Reflective Leadership)

In this course, the Reflective Leader learns how to introduce and sustain change in a resistant system using theoretical and practical skills to create peaceful, ethical, just, humane, culturally sensitive, and sustainable structures and frameworks. The course offers experiential learning as a way to integrate conceptual learning, engenders a cross-sectoral approach to intervening in crises, and elicits participants’ knowledge and wisdom in a course project to amend the course of climate change.

Change Management, Leadership and Conflict Prevention Strategies for Local and Global Challenges Developed Over Fourteen Years For the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2000-2010)

Monday-Wednesday, June 4-6 2007, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York

For registration and other information, www.global-leader.org, click on upcoming.

To apply, call 508-753-4172

Virginia Swain, Director, Institute for Global Leadership, Instructor

Tuition: $595 due by 25 May 2007. Send to The Institute for Global Leadership, 32 Hill Top Circle Worcester, MA 01609 508-753-4172 ext 2. 508-245-6843 (cell). Visa and Mastercard accepted.

This course is for people who are searching for a new way to address institutional, community and global challenges that emphasize respect for human rights, peaceful settlement of disputes, ethics, values and systems that will secure greater ecological integrity, economic and social well being.

The course started in 2001 in a partnership between Virginia Swain, the Instructor of the Course, and United Nations Under-Secretary General Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Key Presenter and Patron of the Course as well as the initiator of the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2001-2010) at the United Nations. Sixty-five participants from fourteen countries took the course in its first year.

Participants will learn about a Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service, developed by Virginia Swain and dedicated to the International Decade. Each day begins with reflection in the Dag Hammarskjold Meditation Room.

Virginia Swain is a member of the Academic Council of the United Nations. She is on the International Advisory Board of the Human Dignity Network at Columbia, Global Education Associates and a member of the National Coalition of Deliberation and Dialogue.

For more information about Virginia Swain, go to http://www.global-leader.org, click on “Who We Are”.

Participants will also learn:

· intervention processes to use in community, institutional and global challenges, based on ten years of research and practice.

· competencies for the practice of global citizenship as one of three levels of citizenship.

· how to build a learning community with a conflict transformation mechanism to reconcile differences without alienating one another, applicable at community, institutional, national and global levels.

Potential participants are invited to peruse www.global-leader.org to understand the philosophy of Reflective Leadership and the Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service. All applicants will be interviewed before admittance.

For more information on tuition, registration and general questions, call Virginia Swain at (508) 753-4172 or 508-245-6843 http://www.global-leader.org, click on upcoming. Room and board the responsibility of participants. Participants are required to be in the course the entire time as well as refrain from using cell phones during the course presentations.

Virginia Swain, Director
Institute for Global Leadership
32 Hill Top Circle
Worcester, MA 01609
508-753-4172 (office) 508-245-6843 (cell)
www.global-leader.org

Terrorism and Migration

A Two-Day Interdisciplinary Conference at the School of Humanities, University of Southampton, UK.

Saturday November 17th-Sunday November 18th, 2007

CALL FOR PAPERS
Contemporary anxieties about terrorism in the mainstream media and politics have clearly articulated the war against terrorism and the struggle for global security to the control of immigration, as well as the criminalisation of Islam. As A. Sivanandan has argued in a recent article, ‘the war on asylum and the war on terror […] have converged to produce a racism which cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum speaker, an asylum speaker from a Muslim, a Muslim from a terrorist’. In response to the conflation of discourses of counter-terrorism, global security and the control of migration, this conference invites papers from any area of the humanities and the social sciences that are related to the following topics:

· Terrorism and Migration in Literature, Film, Visual Art and Music

· Histories of migration, immigration law and political sovereignty

· Migration, Terrorism and the State of Emergency

· Ethnographies of migration and terrorism

· Terrorism, Migration and the Public Sphere

· Asylum, Imperialism and War

Confirmed Speakers include: Margaret Scanlan, Elleke Boehmer, Ranjana Khanna, David Glover and Matthew Gibney.

Please submit a 200-300 word abstract via email or post to the address below by September 1st, 2007:

Sandy White
English, School of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton
S017 1BJ
E-mail: sw17@soton.ac.uk

‘Ensuring success in post-conflict reconstruction; learning how to reduce risk of failure in the post-conflict process
Tasks for peacekeepers and those who follow them’

Conference to mark the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers

Includes Lesley Abdela on the evolving role of women in the post-conflict process and General Philippe Stoltz, Chief of Staff, UNIFIL on UNIFIL’s new ‘robust mandate’.

Seminar at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, Whitehall, London

Wednesday May 23 2007 from 10.00am to 4.30pm.

Session presenters include GENERAL PHILIPPE STOLTZ, Chief of Staff, UNIFIL, PROFESSOR PAUL COLLIER, Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, and LESLEY ABDELA, UK Gender/Post-Conflict specialist (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Aceh)
Chairing sessions: SIR MARRACK GOULDING, LORD HANNAY OF CHISWICK, MICHAEL CODNER , Director of Military Sciences, RUSI, DAME MARGARET ANSTEE

Further info from David Wardrop at the UNA Westminster on info@unawestminster.org.uk

An uncertain future for UNIFIL
GENERAL PHILIPPE STOLTZ, Chief of Staff, UNIFIL

UNIFIL’s new “robust mandate” including authorization to use force against “hostile activity”, set up

temporary checkpoints and intercept the movement of “unauthorised weapons”. It has also intensified its public

relations offensives, emphasising the boost the force gives to the local economy. So what are its priorities?

General Stoltz will identify the daily challenges and limitations against which the mission must operate.

The evolving role of women in the post-conflict process

LESLEY ABDELA FRSA, FRGS, Eyecatcher Associates/Shevolution ( lesley.abdela@shevolution.com )

JOAN LINK, Head of Conflict Issues Group, Foreign & Commonwealth Office

UN SCR 1325, developing women’s full participation in peacekeeping

Helping or hindering: Aid, donors and fragile states

KARIN CHRISTIANSEN, Research Fellow, Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure, ODI

PROFESSOR PAUL COLLIER, Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Professor Collier will share his findings from his ground breaking 2006 research programme. Compiled from

the analysis of over 70 conflict scenarios, it analyses the potential risks in post conflict situations of regression

back to unstabilized scenarios and prompts much reflection on traditional thinking in this area.

The role of Private Security Companies in post-conflict states

ANDY BEARPARK, Director-General, British Association of Private Security Companies

In the post-conflict environment, aid agencies may see the needs of the host state and the international community

as in conflict, not mutually re-enforcing, leading to implications for other actors including the military. Private

Security Companies play an increasing role here, seeking to develop trusting and accountable relationships with

all these parties. How can success be identified and measured?

The conference fee of £30 (student and UNA members, £15) includes related documents, lunch and all refreshments. At 1pm, the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph just outside the conference rooms will honour UN peacekeepers who have died in service.

The Band of the Irish Guards will provide musical support.

Twinned with UNA Connecticut for World Peace, Disarmament, Development and Human Rights

JOINT PRESIDENTS: BARONESS COX OF QUEENSBURY, LORD RUSSELL-JOHNSTON, LORD JUDD OF PORTSEA

EXPOLINGUA Praha 2007
17th International Fair for Languages, Education and Cultures
When: November 9-10, 2007
Where: Národní dum na Vinohradech, Námestí Míru 9, 120 53 Prague 2, Czech Republic
Organiser: ICWE GmbH, Leibnizstr. 32, D-10625 Berlin, Germany, Tel.: +49-30-327 6140, Fax: +49-30-324 9833, www.icwe.net, info@icwe.net
Contact: Cornelia Horn, prague@expolingua.com, www.expolingua.cz
Short description:
EXPOLINGUA Praha is the most important fair for Languages and Student Recruitment in the Czech Republic. Exhibitors from countries around the world will present their products and services in international education, further education, study abroad and work experience opportunities. The fair is targeted towards visitors who are interested in learning or teaching a foreign language, studying or working abroad. EXPOLINGUA Praha 2007 will offer an extensive seminar programme open to all visitors with workshops, round-table discussions and presentations. Topics will include Study and Work Experiences Abroad, Language Learning and Language Teaching.
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The 7th edition of the Global Directory of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution programs is now available in print and as a constantly updated online resource.

You can order just the book or the database, or both, from:
http://www.peacejusticestudies.org/globaldirectory/purchase.php