Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Juliana Yat Shun Kei, “Do you know this place used to be a camp?”

Fred Pearce, “China’s Mega Dam Project Poses Big Risks for Asia’s Grand Canyon”

Stella Robertson, “Has the Milk Tea Alliance Spoiled?”

“Whipling”, “China’s army launches media hiring spree”

Xinrui Zhuang, “Africa and the U.S.-China Rivalry w/ Maria Repnikova”

Wanderings Around the World

Basma El Atti, “Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors”

To watch these changes unfold without naming them for what they are is to participate in a collective amnesia about how knowledge infrastructures shape power relations. Like the shopkeeper in an authoritarian society described by Vaclav Havel in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” who participates in his own oppression through small daily acts of complicity, placing a party slogan in his window not out of conviction but out of habit. To remain on advisory boards that have been stripped of meaningful advisory function is to become that shopkeeper, to lend legitimacy to a process that has been systematically delegitimized.

Alondra Nelson, “Why I’m Resigning from Positions at the National Science Foundation and Library of Congress”

Julia Simon, “This country is slowing climate action. Its capital city is stepping up”

Catching Up

Featured photo: The Philadelphia skyline, Schuylkill River, and Schuylkill Expressway, photographed from an Amtrak train approaching the city, June 28, 2016.