Using a system so highly randomized that I can’t even remember how I picked the order, here is our schedule for 5-minute presentations. You’ll hit on three points:
We’re in our last week of content for the semester. Today we’re discussing the controversy of great powers conflict and Thursday we look at our final chapter from Battle for the Arab Spring, focusing on the rise of Islamist politics and supplementing that with some readings on ISIS and the counter-revolution.
But first, we have our cases from last Thursday to adjudicate:
Defense arguments–
Prosecution arguments–
As a class, we’ll analyze these and try to impartially predict if the Syrian regime would be convicted of war crimes charges.
Then I would like us to spend a good twenty minutes expressing our thoughts on the four discussion questions in Controversies in Globalization. After discussing those questions, I’d like you to spend about ten minutes with a partner researching China’s stake in the Syria conflict and sharing some ideas you have about how Syria might or might not be a “flashpoint” between the US and China.
Add questions you would like to bring up on Thursday in the comments section below, relevant to the topics of that day’s class.
Thursday’s Class:
We’ll use the first 20 minutes of class after the quiz for course evaluations.
There are a number of topics and questions I would like you to comment on in the written section:
After the evaluations, we’ll watch this Vice video about ISIS and the Syria-Iraq border:
There weren’t any comments to raise topics to discuss, but I’m sure there are enough ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions for us to pose in class.
Our reading for today was Khawla Dunia’s “And the Revolutions Go On,” the final chapter of Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution. It’s significant that this chapter ends the book since Syria’s conflict has become something like a litmus test of the Arab Spring and has also become the fulcrum of all of the regions dynamic tensions and contests for domination.
For our activity today, I want to do an active reading exercise with Dunia’s diary entry that will involve a bit of group work on the reading and some application of ideas from the Geneva Convention IV (page four has a good plain-English summary of the convention’s articles related to civilians).
Our plan is, after the reading quiz, to split into two sides of the classroom–a defense team and a prosecution team–to briefly argue a case of war crimes charges against leaders of the Syrian regime. You’ll split your legal teams into two task forces: one responsible for finding evidence in Dunia’s chapter and the other responsible for evidence found online.
I’ll throw a few links in here for you to use, but please feel free to Google to your heart’s content. Finding evidence to exonerate the regime might seem like a challenge, but if you look at SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), RT (Russia Times), or Fars News you’ll find plenty of pro-regime reporting.
Timing:
5 minutes for quiz.
5 minutes to set up and introduce the activity.
30 minutes to study the war crimes articles and assemble some evidence.
30 minutes to present the case–fifteen minutes for each side. (Describe your evidence and explain how it proves or disproves guilt for a war crime.)
5 minutes for arbitration and ruling.
For today’s class I want to try working with Diigo as a class activity, as a way of saying goodbye to the platform after your final Diigo curations yesterday.
To tie together the reading we had for today from Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution with some of the standard models for studying political-economies in the thrall of globalization, I want us to do some combined, collaborative annotation.
We’ll work in small groups of about four and the materials we’ll need are at least one digital device with Diigo running as an app or browser plug-in. You’ll also need Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution.
Open up this article from our CULF 3331 Diigo group. You should see a number of parts highlighted. You’ll have two annotating tasks for this article:
First, I want you to skim through the DUR chapter with your group and add notes to sections of the Al-Monitor article that correspond with historical events and topics that Jamal Jubran mentions in his diary entry.
Second, I want you to look at the highlighted passages and discuss in your groups which related controversies, trends or concepts of globalization you see reflected in those passages. Add notes to the Al-Monitor article in Diigo to explain what trends you see in your group’s analysis.
We’re going to start our classes this week with reading quizzes on Canvas. There shouldn’t be any “gotcha” questions in them. As long as you read and pay an appropriate amount of attention to significant details, they should be a piece of cake.
We’ll start with a look at a slideshow of Col. Gaddafi’s fashion over the years, which will be an indirect way of reviewing some of the big historical brackets in the 42 years of his rule. The main theme that I want us to discuss in looking at the chapter “Bayou and Laila” is dystopia. Dystopia is typically a genre of fiction, and there’s a lot of room for error in using fictional genres to interpret history (and vice versa); however, the topics that Mohamed Mesrati addresses in his diary entry warrant the discussion. I’d like to talk about what you all understand to be mainstays of dystopian stories and then we’ll list instances of those mainstays in Mohamed’s diary.
On Thursday this week we’ll be reading “Military Intervention and Human Rights: Is Foreign Military Intervention Justified by Widespread Human Rights Abuses?” in Controversies in Globalization. I’ll help you understand Just War Principles and we’ll talk about the political realist vs. political liberalist perspectives on military intervention for human rights.
As we briefly touch ground before going off for another long-ish holiday, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on the themes and grand motifs of the first half of the semester and contemplate what’s coming up in the next five weeks. Continue reading
This week on Tuesday we’ll connect some ideas that I introduced briefly about trade liberalization to the evolution of Egypt’s economy through the 1970s and 1980s. We’ll be reading this article that examines that question in detail.
We’re also officially at the middle of the term, which means we have a midterm exam coming up next week. On Thursday we’ll spend some time reviewing for the midterm and discussing trade and economic equality using the chapter on the syllabus from Controversies in Globalization.
I’ll post a new blog entry for Thursday with details about the design of the exam, but if you want to start studying early, start reviewing your classmates’ geotagging blogs and paying attention to the items from each reading that have the highest frequency–that is, the largest number of students tagged particular items from each reading.
On Thursday this week I introduced the assignment sheet for the Global Understanding Workshop and we discussed the relationship between forms of mass media and revolutions.
We’ll continue with many of those ideas on Tuesday next week when we discuss this Wall Street Journal article on how the young activists who started the Tahrir uprising pulled it off. [Bad news: that article is now behind a paywall. The gist of it is that the activists used a subterfuge to disperse State Security forces to something like twelve mosques around the city on Friday, January 25, while a couple of activists went to a tightly packed working-class neighborhood and sparked a spontaneous rally there. They then started marching toward Tahrir Square picking up enough people along the way to create a critical mass of bodies. This mass was too large for the dispersed Security forces to immobilize, so they marched into the square and started their sit-in.] We’ll also take a look at this article from Jadaliyya about the battle of Mohammed Mahmoud Street, just off Tahrir Square in Central Cairo. We’ll continue watching The Square, leaving the last bit of it for Thursday next week when we’ll take a lot more time to discuss your thoughts on it and the Egyptian revolution.
Here’s an optional video that includes the banner image I used on our class blog:
On Tuesday Brown University’s Dr. Sarah Tobin will be visiting our class by Skype. Dr. Tobin is an anthropologist with extensive fieldwork in Jordan and lately has been studying Syrian refugee camps there–including Za’atari, Azraq and Cyber City.
For Tuesday, read and geo-tag (two items) her article “Security and Resilience among Syrian Refugees in Jordan,” co-authored with Denis Sullivan.
On Thursday, read the chapter “The Media Revolution” in Battle for the Arab Spring and geo-tag two items from it. We’ll discuss the role of the mass media in the modern Middle East and then watch another stretch of The Square. I’ll also share some information with your about the Global Understanding Workshop reflection paper.
I’m looking forward to reading your first blog posts. I’ll have comments and feedback for you in the next two days.
Today our immediate goal in class is experimental: Can we use remote sensing techniques–at least very basic ones–to empathize with or evaluate another person’s sentiments. The collateral goal of this experiment is to give you some practice with using your blog and examine the rubric for the weekly blogging activity.
We’ll work from a handout today–probably one of only two or three printed things you’ll get from me this semester. I’ll add it here after class.