Day Five: January 26

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Tahrir Uprising in Egypt, and it was met with a lot of forlorn remembrance but little public display. You can dig back through our Diigo feed to see a number of prominent Egyptian thinkers and activists reflecting on it.

A couple of guiding thoughts for the geo-tagging project.

1. A tip for better geo-tagging: In response to one student’s question, you’ll keep adding tags to the same map rather than creating a new one for each reading. So, you only need to share your map with me once, and be sure you’re adding your tags to the same one I have linked on our class blog.
2. Another tip for better geo-tagging: Make sure that your map is viewable by anyone with the link, but with no option to edit. I would hate to see anyone’s work vandalized or otherwise tampered with.
3. Third tip: The best way to organize your map in layers, since there’s a limit before you have to pay for a pro account, is to make one layer for Battle for the Arab Spring, one for Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution, and one for articles posted on our class blog.
4. Fourth tip: put the citation for your tag somewhere in it’s label rather than the body of the tag. You may also put the date of the reading in the label and the page citation in the body of the tag. Either way, assume that if it’s not spelled out explicitly somewhere in the tag, I won’t know where it belongs and might not grade it.
5. Final tip for better geo-tagging: Make sure that the linked map on our blog is there and correct. I’m still missing a couple of them, and at least one is still private so only I and its author can view it. Missing maps: Eyad, Raad, Ceecee, Peter, Michelle, and Nathalie.
6. Check out how completed maps from a previous semester look here. This one is particularly good.

Okay, to our plan for the day.

We’ll have a visit from CULF Global Understanding Workshop interns today. I suspect Michele will be one of them. Other information about the Workshop will be forthcoming (like the assignment sheet, etc.)

I neglected to add Chapter Two to the readings for today, which was probably a mistake, but it just gives more regional analysis like “Arab Malaise,” so it’s not completely necessary context for understanding the chapter on Tunisia. In short, though, it addresses questions of economic concentration and the growing dependence of oil-poor Arab nations like Tunisia and Egypt on smaller oil-rich Arab nations like Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. That chapter also explains how some nations in the region like Egypt were governed by massive bureaucratic states that exercised a lot of real, direct power, while others like Libya projected that kind of totalitarian power but were actually very weak in terms of providing real structure to society. Egypt, according to economist Galal Amin, eventually became a “soft state,” meaning that, large though its state structures were, they were too weak to resist the influence of powerful private interests or internal government corruption.

So where to begin with Tunisia?

It’s important to remember that, while we can point to exceptionally symbolic events like Bouazizi’s self-emolation in Sidi Bouzid, they are just the recognizable tip of an iceberg. I’ll explain a few things about Tunisia’s formation as a modern nation-state.

Then we’ll watch this video by a Tunisian hiphop artist named El Général who faced jail and prosecution for this video that came out a few months before Bouazizi’s death, but fell into heavy rotation as it tapped into the frustations that average Tunisians were feeling in December 2010 and January 2011.

Watch the video and pay attention to the subtitles. What are some of the specific grievances El Général voices in the clip?

The topics we need to expand on through discussion:

1. The Ben Ali state.
2. The characteristics of the uprising that began in Dec. 2010.
3. The role of Islamist politics.
4. Tunisians from “the other side of the tracks,” the hinterlands.

How are we going to do that? More geo-tag workshopping!

GOAL: 1. Complete your familiarization with geo-tagging and create some ideal tags. 2. Fix the format of your map and any problems with the sharing of the link. 3. Practice generating collective knowledge about a topic geared toward personal understanding.

PROCEDURE:

1. Form relatively larger groups today to get a larger pool of tags to share, so groups of about six or seven.
2. Cluster in three parts of the classroom so that you’re well spread out.
3. Go through those four topics one at a time and share any tags you posted to your map related to that topic. If no one in your group tagged it, or if there as only one, take a few minutes to decide on a couple.
4. Update, correct and/or complete your own map as you go.
5. At about 12:05, pause to add a comment to this blog post talking about how you think one of the five perspectives on globalization might explain what caused the revolution in Tunisia or how it has unfolded.