Around the world, the institutions of liberal democratic systems are
waging a rear-guard action against sustained attacks from populist
and extremist movements. These trends are not new, but can be
traced to events in the recent past, as well as broader historical
developments. In this session, participants will learn why political
scientists are so concerned about these trends, and what ordinary
citizens can do to improve democratic accountability in Canada.
This blog post was originally produced for BCCIC, read the full post here: https://www.bccic.ca/womens-security-is-human-security-climate-and-gender/
The foundational idea that women’s rights are integral to the politics of liberation, solidarity and justice has been mainstreamed in many international agreements and organizations.
The momentum on women’s rights should now be strongly carried forward to inform the politics of climate and security.
Moving forward, the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change means the world will be pushed to recognize and institutionalize the principle that women’s security is human security.
The challenge is urgent, the climate will not negotiate. Any efforts to address climate change will be that much poorer for the absence of women’s voices and experiences. Any efforts to address climate change will be that much richer with the power, strength and leadership that women bring as agents of change. The need for human security gives even more reason to ensure that women are not left behind.
Rosalind Warner, 2022
Recently I prepared a poster on the Top Ten ways to gain students’ attention. It was displayed at the UBC Okanagan Centre for Teaching and Learning’s Annual Conference Engaging Every Learner a few years ago. As part of my project, I asked viewers of the poster to share their favourite ways to gain attention in class. So, here is the collected list, with some additional ideas from one of the sessions I attended on Interactive Techniques with Richard Plunkett, including a list of interactive techniques prepared by Kevin Yee.
It can be a challenge to design activities in which everyone feels engaged, but Liberating Structures has a number of great suggestions for format, invitations, and content that can ensure that everyone has a stake in the proceedings. Contributed: give the whole class a task that can only be accomplished by everyone fulfilling their assigned role. Another one: use ‘lecture reaction’ where students take on the roles of ‘questioners’, ‘example givers’, ‘divergent thinkers’ or ‘agreers’ and discuss in small groups accordingly. I also assign the role of ‘researchers’ who can google or search for interesting information and share it with the class.
Stating your purpose clearly, for the course, and for the learner, is an important first step in helping to establish a connection.
Accountability is important to helping learners engage. Using quizzes or surveys to gauge the level of knowledge without giving the impression of ‘judgement’ means keeping these low-stakes and fun. IFAT (Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique) scratch cards encourage teams to arrive at consensus before answering.
Asking learners to think about a situation, case, or example immediately after explaining a concept can help concretize the material and aids retention. Contributed variation: invite learners to attend a professional meeting or to interview a practitioner in the field of study. Use ‘finger signals’ instead of clickers for multiple choice or true or false questions (students hold up fingers against their chest so others can’t see, to indicate the correct choice).
It sounds trite, but having an agenda for the class and carefully signposting each activity shows respect for learners’ time. Include an opening, buildup and closing at the very least. Contributed variation: use a one-minute paper to have learners identify the ‘Muddiest Point’ and address next class.
Solving a tough problem can be like unravelling a ball of string. Metaphors help learners to connect the familiar with the unfamiliar. Contributed variation: use a ‘Snowball’ technique with this one.
Don’t give away the ‘answers’ prematurely! Build up to the big reveal with hints and clues. Variation: Picture prompts, in which an image is presented without explanation, asks students to identify/explain, discuss and describe any structures or processes shown (can be written or discussion format).
Use incongruity, contrasts and comparisons to spur thinking. It doesn’t have to be flashy or shocking, just curious or odd. Contributed variation: use movement, have students move to different areas of the classroom for group work, writing comments on sticky notes, posting under categories, etc.
A picture speaks volumes. Well, you knew that…but visual culture in the age of Instagram is even more vital. Contributed variation: give learners objects to ‘play with’ during long lectures (colouring, playdough). Use demonstrations.
For most people, this requires increasing your volume and variability in a conscious way. It may seem uncomfortable at first, but listeners will thank you. Contributed variation: be enthusiastic and show your passion! Capture the emotional content in your subject to create a hook.
A few years ago, I visited the Mauritshuis Museum in Den Haag, Netherlands, where I learned about the famous Vermeer painting Girl With a Pearl Earring. With the painting before me, an app guided me through its history, stories of the painter, and offered comparative works to explore right on my phone. This is just one example of how the internet of things can assist with learning. The Internet of Things refers to the idea that everything becomes a node on a network. It is focused on the use of smart sensing for pervasive connectivity and ubiquitous computing (University of Wisconsin-Madison).
While estimates vary, it is expected that the expectation of internet connectivity for many everyday devices will begin to impact education within 4-5 years. Although opinions vary on the speed of roll out, many observers note the rapid development of sensor, miniaturization, mobile and wearable technology as key drivers. Business Insider predicts that “there will be 34 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, up from 10 billion in 2015. IoT devices will account for 24 billion, while traditional computing devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc.) will comprise 10 billion (Greenough and Camhi, 2016). “These developments emerge from outside the education sector, and to the extent they have implications for everyday life, work, consumption, decisionmaking and service provision, they will also impact the education sector. Specifically, the Internet of Things intersects with personalized learning and adaptive technologies by creating new opportunities for real-time data to impact learning. It may also impact blended learning, since connectivity creates “Hypersituational” (Educause) learning environments such as augmented reality.
These developments emerge from outside the education sector, and to the extent they have implications for everyday life, work, consumption, decisionmaking and service provision, they will also impact the education sector.
Educause
These new blended learning environments allow for wider exploration of the physical and virtual worlds in synchronous and asynchronous formats. For example, students can tour physical spaces with supplementary sound, text, video, or interactive elements (QR codes or Google Glass). Students can create projects that integrate crowd-sourced or networked data from physical systems in real-time. Similarly, redesigned learning spaces may be affected by the IofT because of the integration of physical and virtual worlds that is made possible by interconnectivity. As well, IofT may boost a focus on place-based education by localizing some aspects of the learning experience and making use of the environment in innovative ways. Another area of potential high impact is environmental, economic, and social sustainability, as the IofT has the potential to make every institutional operation more efficient by more closely integrating systems, from building temperatures to classroom scheduling and parking.
The power and appeal of the IofT lies in its flexibility and convenience. For learners, great benefits arise from improved efficiency and responsiveness of systems to real-time demands. On the other hand, hesitations are widespread and may slow the adoption of IofT in the education sector. Chief among these concerns are privacy, security, automation of decision making, and information overload (Pew Research Centre). Networked systems are vulnerable to hacking or infiltration by phishing or scam artists. Personal information is more vulnerable on a network, and algorithms are imperfect sources of analysis for decision making. The ability to collect data on physical and emotional states has severe implications for personal security and privacy. At the same time, if the IofT grows as many predict it will, students will need to acquire new technical and social skills for employability. IofT will require people to manage data, interpret and apply information, make ethical judgements, and effectively share and contextualize information. How might you put the Internet of Things to use in your classroom?
COVID-19 disrupted the world and peoples’ lives in unimaginable ways. It seems likely that future disasters, whether natural or human-made, will be no less disruptive and challenging. This talk will explore how disaster risk shapes our policy, governance, and planning. Using examples, we will look at how risk is unevenly distributed, and how (and whether) we have learned to better prepare and reduce loss and damage from future disasters.
Bibliography and Reading List to Follow
A talk for the Multihazard Risk and Resilience Group Seminar at the Western University. MARCH 25, 2021
Canada’s response to global disasters has been characterized by a certain degree of push and pull between the domestic and the international levels, and between the provision of immediate relief and the support of long-term resilience and risk reduction. In the area of disaster risk reduction, progress at the international level since 2011 has been marked by a sustained movement away from reactive and relief-based approaches toward “disaster risk governance”. As a signatory to the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, Canada has been a supporter of this move as well as the move to integrate disaster responses with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), blurring the boundary between “relief” and “development” activities and policies. In this talk, I will explore the meaning of ‘disaster risk governance’ as it is addressed in the Sendai and Hyogo Frameworks, and consider practical examples of how a shift toward governance might improve disaster responses by the Canadian government, and in turn, reduce loss and damage from disasters.
Nature is one of the most complicated terms in English or any language. It carries the weight of projected human fears and hopes, the marks of history and political conflict, the grounds for moral legitimation or condemnation.
Peterson, A. L. (2001). Being Human. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511488733
Hurricanes that have increased in number and volume, forest fires that have burned larger swaths of land, flooding, mudslides, viruses, and extinctions are multiplying. The planet is experiencing cascades of disasters that overwhelm human adaptation efforts.
Is nature our enemy?
For most of human history, and for ancient peoples especially, the answer to that question would have been ‘yes’. At every turn prehistoric farmers, hunters, gatherers and herders had constantly to battle the elements to put food on the table. In Medieval Europe, when the stories of Hansel and Gretel and Little Riding Hood were written, nature was represented as a hungry wolf, an evil force with malicious intent, ever ready to attack and consume the vulnerable children of the village. Plagues and diseases were a feature of urban city life, an invasion of human settlements, a product of the devil or evil forces from outside of otherwise peaceful and vulnerable God-fearing folk.
It matters less to us whether an inanimate force is real, and more whether we interpret it broadly as a good or bad function.
This was not by any measure a universal human attitude. Inuit and other indigenous people around the world developed a sense of partnership and community with nature even in the harshest environments, embedding themselves into the natural order. Animals, birds, and even rivers and trees were endowed with spirit and force, which could be destructive or generous. Many civilizations also grew to understand nature’s harshness as part of the order of the world, a way of creating balance and humility.
Humans often mistake their interactions with nature as a form of natural intentionality. It could be thought of as a twist on the idea of an ‘attribution error’. An attribution error happens when people explain individual actions as functions of the innate characteristics of the actor rather than as responses to a situation. In this twist, the actions of a natural or artificial being might be interpreted as intentional, and worthy of either blame or admiration. So, it might matter less to us whether an inanimate force is real, and more whether we interpret it broadly as a good or bad function. The cultural attitudes around nature affect how we make decisions, how we plan, how we use resources. Humans’ interpretation of nature then becomes a cultural force shaping decisions about how to understand the natural world, and the feedback cycle between natural and social worlds accelerates.
With the coming of the Anthropocene and the ‘triumph’ over nature wrought by the industrial revolution, newly-urban city folk softened their fears of nature and began to view it as benevolent, even spiritual and inspirational. During the late 1800s at the height of the colonial era, European estates became filled with exotic trophies, animals, plants, tokens, and artefacts gathered from around the world. The astounding successes of scientific methods convinced Europeans that they could master nature. Europeans were uniquely able to distance themselves from the worst of nature’s wrath, and so they perceived a kind of immunity to its harsher judgements. This sense of immunity allowed Europeans to believe, as they sheltered in cities that became dirty and disease-ridden, that nature was nothing to be feared. A view of the ‘natural cathedral’ and the wilderness ethos fueled a global tourism industry as Europeans sought benign natural experiences in remote locales.
Where are we today? Unsurprisingly, the ‘friendly wilderness’ image has not caught on with people in colonial situations, because culturally and materially their struggle continues and is made worse by colonial relationships. These experiences have heightened a material approach to nature quite different from the ‘wilderness’ view. This view sees nature as a complex partner in human endeavors, sometimes vicious and sometimes generous.
Going to war means we’ve forgotten that a war on nature is exactly how we got into this mess. And also that war hardly ever ends well even for the victors.
Today, climate change has upset the sense of immunity, insulation, separation, and benevolence enjoyed by the world’s cultural elites. Wilderness offers no escape from disease, extinction, pollution, and disasters, perhaps except for a brief respite and retreat. There is a growing awareness that nature is not defeated but is increasingly outside of human control and understanding, and nature is pissed.
With our classic inability to see past ourselves, some engage in an attribution error of growing proportions, nature is blamed for all of our own mistakes. The response is either resignation or a call to war. Resignation in this sense means divvying up spaces on the lifeboat. Going to war means we’ve forgotten that a war on nature is exactly how we got into this mess. And also that war hardly ever ends well even for the victors.
What are we to think in a time when nature seems to be again our enemy? There are plenty of people around all over the world who have a different view. Indigenous peoples with centuries of learning and experience understand nature as a complex system, of which we are an integral part. Consciousness, morality, and will is also natural, and not unique to humans. A reflective turn is needed to shift our understanding. We need to pierce the sense of immunity, separation, and distinctiveness that has led us down this road. The Anthropocene shift pushes us towards a degree of humility. It prompts a sense of connection and complex systems thinking which will not only bring a better understanding of nature, but will enable our survival and adaptation to it.
This post is inspired by a short conversation I had months ago about climate change. It went something like this:
Since ‘the great hunkerdown’ began, I’ve been thinking about this point of view alot. I see similar, if more extreme, ideas being circulated in the media. There’s an invisible line drawn between ‘my world’ and ‘what I’m responsible for’ and ‘the world of others’ and ‘what they are responsible for’. An individualistic approach to problems is our reflexive reaction in the Anglo settler countries of the developed industrialized world. Individualistic liberalism dictates that the line of ethical responsibility for others is determined by each person, as they make free decisions based on their own values and interests.
There’s something to be said for the power of this idea and its influence on liberal culture. After all, it is liberalism which first originated the modern language of rights and constructed a political space for imagining an ethic of agency which has been highly effective, at least within its own parameters.
It is appropriate to imagine that collective problems can be solved by individual action, indeed it is difficult to imagine how any progress can be made absent people ‘buying in’ to it, for example by changing their own consumption patterns.
Those countries around the world that ignored individual freedoms in favour of panicked enforced lockdowns in response to the pandemic will likely pay a high price in legitimacy, which will be costly in the end. Those countries that have enjoined their populations to ‘do the right thing’ have implicitly drawn on people’s genuine fears of their own contagion rather than a commitment to civic duty.
In the developed world, we should all pay deep respect and homage to the Italians for their sacrifice in helping us to learn that we were vulnerable. However, those countries that have relied almost exclusively on fears, without any reference to civic duty, have fared even worse than Italy, because in a liberal culture the absence of a sense of civic duty means that individual freedoms end up trumping everything else. Now more than ever, the paradoxical nature of individual freedom, based on a confident sense of security and separateness, is being laid bare.
It is liberalism which first originated the modern language of rights and constructed a political space for imagining an ethic of agency which has been highly effective, at least within its own parameters.
The gaps and limits of liberalism are being made visible, even obvious, as the logic becomes extended to its absurdities and extremes. Why not me first? Why care about others, isn’t that their job? My house is in order, I am healthy, I am reducing my footprint, I’m doing the right thing, I’m not the threat, why do I have to pay a price?
A really clear gap of liberal culture as it lives today, is its lack of any distributional ethics. Liberal thinking is essentially blind to the question of how security, or any other value, should be distributed. Since the only value worth distributing is individual freedom, and the only way to measure it is by each persons’ values and preferences, there is little to no room for considering exactly how equitable social distribution might actually work to enhance individual freedoms. The idea that each person’s freedom will be enhanced when decisions are made equitably, with the collective interest in mind, is alien and foreign.
The passerby who cares deeply about the cleanliness of her own household, and believes she alone deserves the benefit of her efforts, is blind to the myriad ways in which her choices are supported by the collective decisions of the past (and the present) that have made those choices possible. Indeed, the entire institutional structure of individual choices enjoyed today by those who most strongly defend their ‘freedoms’ has been made possible by the collective decisions of societies in the past (not by individuals). Ultimately, in history, it is only collective action that lasts, since the length of individual lifetimes is too short for leaders to see their ideas become permanently embedded. Thatcher had it exactly wrong: it’s not that there is no such thing as society, in the end there is only society.
Ultimately, in history, it is only collective action that lasts, since the length of individual lifetimes is too short for leaders to see their ideas become permanently embedded. Thatcher had it exactly wrong: it’s not that there is no such thing as society, in the end there is only society.
The cracks in this edifice are showing. The maldistribution of security, including the inequitable distribution of (in)vulnerability, is becoming glaringly obvious. The invisible line between ‘immunity’ and ‘vulnerability’ is being revealed for what it is: a collective construction. Immunity/vulnerability is a paradox. Immunity is always dependent, derivative of the vulnerability of and to others. The confidence in individual choice that liberalism empowers is at its core a function of the maldistribution of social vulnerability. Immunity can never be ‘just for me’ if it is to be a real thing and not an illusion or myth.
My protest to be mask-free is predicated on the existence of modern medical knowledge, nurses, doctors, and ventilators which can catch me if I fall. My resolve to open my business profitably is predicated on the willingness of customers to take risks AMA (against medical advice). All of this means that I have to be very strident to convince enough of the community to my side if I’m going to make a go of it.
My sense of safety in my own home, my ‘home immunity’ is predicated on the risks and vulnerability of service workers, first responders, grocery clerks, truck drivers, payroll clerks, meat plant workers, sewage workers, and an army of government employees. My insistence that I am only responsible for my own house is predicated on the edifice of social protections that society has established collectively. This edifice includes the effort and sacrifice of climate activists who may eventually contribute to finding a collective solution to the threat of climate change without my help.
If and when solutions are found, as a liberal focused on the ethics of individualism, I would have no qualms in making a claim for the immunity created by the vaccine for myself and my household. Similarly, I would have no qualms about defending my right to enjoy the benefits of a livable planet, including my freedom, as long as someone else pays the price. The question is, would anybody care enough about me to listen?
About how law can borrow from the language of human rights to foster greater respect and protection for the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world.
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Talk scheduled for October 18th. Oil is essential to industrial society as we know it. The history of the industrialized world has been shaped by changes in the environmental, economic, social, and political dimensions of oil. In this session, we will learn about the history, the present challenges, and the future of oil in an environmentally-stressed planet. Participants will emerge with a deeper appreciation for the complexities of oil politics.
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Dr. Rosalind Warner 
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