Most post-modern societies are being challenged by a widening gap that divides their populations by the classic cleavages of age, class, region and religion. Exacerbated by the forces of globalization and the immediacy of technology, they result in constant clashes that cause an exponential increase in social tensions and insecurity. Even if the Norwegian killer was insane and can not be used as example, he was still a member of the dominant culture failing to accommodate to post-modern circumstances. In the United States this gap is vividly evident in the current debt ceiling debate, which is only a symptom of much serious divisions that threaten the country's social unity and political future.A brief look at recent headlines in the United States can give outsiders and idea of the country's social and political environment.On Sunday July 24th, a new law approving gay marriage came into effect in New York, making it the sixth and largest state in the nation (plus the District of Columbia) to have legalized same-sex marriage. In Manhattan, people celebrated on Fifth Avenue, singing and dancing to the music and well-suited lyrics of New York, New York ("If we can make it here, we'll make it anywhere…"). On July 0th, Republican candidates Michelle Bachman and Rick Santoro a "Marriage Vow" swearing fidelity to their spouses, promising they would "vigorously oppose any redefinition of marriage" and would take steps to amend welfare legislation that did not reinforce conventional marriage. This is only a sample of the extreme polarization the country is facing both economically and socially. It is a critical moment in United States history, one that may require a deep reflection on the basic principles the nation was founded upon and a renewal of the social compact.Prodded by the Tea Party leaders, who presently wield an amount of power disproportionate to their numbers, Republican candidates have been signing pledges on an array of different topics in order to prove their conservative credentials. Both Michelle Bachman and Mitt Romney also signed a no-new-taxes pledge, together with a "cut, cap and balance pledge" to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget and congressional super majorities to raise taxes. These two pledges, albeit non-enforceable and thus largely symbolic, are now the single most important obstacle to reach a deal in Congress about balancing the budget and avoiding default on the national debt. Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips has threatened to recruit candidates to mount primary challenges against any GOP member that votes for a compromise on the debt ceiling that involves any type of revenue increases to balance the budget. The GOP Congressional leadership has been hijacked by intransigent ideologues, represented in the House by 87 freshmen with disproportionate power over the more established professional politicians who understand that democratic governance requires give and take, and that politics in a pluralistic society is the art of the achievable.This country was founded on the premise of compromise, negotiation and cooperation, as it is evident from the history of the Constitution and the layers of governmental power devised mainly to counterbalance one another: states versus federal, legislative versus executive, Senate v. House, and an independent judiciary. It was clear even then, that solutions in what promised to be a huge, diverse society with deep regional and religious cleavages would require compromise. But today, in the "worst Congress ever" as Norman Ornstein calls it in his recent article in Foreign Policy, compromise is a bad word. The House is controlled by a GOP freshmen class that owes its seats to Tea Party ideologues and is refusing to raise the debt ceiling even as President Obama has agreed to cuts in spending that include cuts in entitlements, in exchange for ending subsidies on ethanol and other corporate subsidies (he has even given up on the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts he had included in his first proposal). This package that would represent over 3 trillion dollars in cuts from the federal budget, including reductions in Medicare and other social programs, would have allowed the debt ceiling to be raised so that the US could avoid defaulting on its debt by August 2nd. It was on the table last week and close to being signed on by House Speaker John Boehner but he refused it at the last minute because of pressure from his own caucus. The Tea Party is pushing professional legislators toward the abyss, and with them, the whole country. The Tea Party is a social movement that was born out of frustration and disappointment with government spending over the last twelve years. President George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus from the Clinton-Gingrich years. But that surplus quickly vanished as Bush proposed and got passed serious tax cuts on the wealthy and then embarked on two wars that are still going on today. In response, a large coalition of Independents, Republicans and a few former Democrats formed a protest movement that defines itself for what it is against: big government, big media, big banks, unsustainable deficits and intrusive federal regulation. In spite of some evident intrinsic contradictions in their philosophy (for example some the new regulations they so vehemently oppose such as the Dodd-Frank legislation are meant to constrain the actions of "big banks" they so strongly abhor), the Tea Party has been very successful in focusing the public's attention on the federal budget deficit and on the federal debt that has ballooned in the last two decades. Those are its core concerns, together with a deep-seated contempt for and rejection of, everything the well-educated elites are for the most in favor of: environmental sustainability, a foreign policy based on multilateralism, gay rights and immigration reform legislation that recognizes the realities of the estimated twelve million undocumented workers in the country. After two months of wrangling, neither side has managed to get what it wanted, the US credit rating is about to be downgraded (with the subsequent increase in interest rates and damaging effects on an already slow economy) and the vitriolic Washington environment is alienating people on the Right and on the Left. Pressured by the Tea Partiers and their anti-tax obsession, Republicans have refused to compromise to avoid a default, and in so doing they are sabotaging their own chances for 2012. Most Americans are appalled at the GOP's refusal to endorse Obama's proposal that would cut the deficit by $3.7 trillion through a mix of spending cuts, entitlement reform and ending some corporate subsidies and tax deductions. In so doing, the GOP is alienating independent voters that want to avoid default and are ready for a deal. A new political center of gravity is forming. The number of registered voters that identify themselves as Independent is growing (40% in latest poll), while the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are sinking and there is a new online movement from the grassroots to form a third party.Paradoxically, out of all this Byzantine intrigue in the hallways of Congress, and given the outcome of no deal announced on Monday night, President Obama may come out as the winner. To the dismay of his most progressive base, Obama, intent on finding some common ground with the opposition has shifted to the center-right of the political spectrum on his proposals, daring to sacrifice some cuts on entitlements in exchange for revenue increases, only to see them rejected by the Republicans. He is close to winning a stand-alone debt ceiling increase while having proven to be the only reasonable adult in this struggle. This would gain him the support of many independents and help him avoid a confrontation within his own party. It would also allow him to focus on unemployment, the real immediate crisis that most directly impacts people's lives. However, Democrats in the House and Senate are afraid that concessions on reducing some Medicare benefits, for example, or postponing the eligibility age, would ruin the clarity of their message to seniors during the election. Conversely, Tea Partiers see a compromise involving any sort of revenue increases by the government, even non-tax measures such as ending corporate subsidies, as a betrayal of their principles. The Tea Partiers have brought into focus the spending crisis that has been growing unchecked for a long time, and one the country cannot obviously tax its way out of. Some facts cannot be denied: debt is the result of spending not backed by revenue. Total government spending at all levels has risen to 37% of the GDP today from 27% in 1960. It could reach 50% by 2038. The debt-to-GDP ratio has reached 100% today, from 42% in 1980. The big moral struggle is still ahead. There is no question that the government is spending too much, but the real debate is about priorities and the philosophies that underlie those priorities. The President has recognized that the budget deficit is important to voters, most of which have come to the conclusion that since the stimulus spending did not solve the problem of unemployment, deficit reduction appears to be a better way to improve the economy than investing in education, infrastructure and new energy technologies. Obama must acknowledge this, and make it part of his discourse.But the President must also continue to make a case for the common good ("there are things we can still do together", he said in his last speech), the social safety net and America's future. He can do this by personalizing the budget battles the way Clinton did. Are budget battles about choices or necessities? Why give more tax cuts to the wealthy if their wealth has grown through the recession while the rest saw their wealth diminish? Why subsidize corporate agriculture and ethanol production? Social programs like Medicare serve all Americans, why focus on cutting it while giving a pass to the upper income- and- wealth echelon? General elections are won from the center. Strong strident advocates make for weak candidates. Undoubtedly, the 2012 election will be about money, about fiscal discipline, but it will also be about a more equal distribution, and it will require strong leadership from the two respective philosophical corners to come to a consensus. That is why the Republican establishment is so worried about the lack of gravitas in their field of candidates. That is why some yearn for budget whiz Paul Ryan, or Governor Chris Christie or Rick Perry….or anybody really, that looks and sounds as if he can take on Obama in the intricacies of the budget, the debt ceiling, and social programs reform. That may also be why Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News about his intentions to run for President again two days ago. This time his response was more nuanced: he said that while he doesn't anticipate it, he hasn't ruled it out ("but, he added, "I haven't ruled out being in Dancing with the Stars, either").In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal today announced that, based on the Pew Research Center tabulations of SIPP and Census date, the wealth gap between America's whites and its two largest minorities, Blacks and Hispanics, has widened to unprecedented levels due to the housing crisis and the Great Recession. Alan Greenspan, former President of the Federal Reserve has said repeatedly that the wealth gap that has grown consistently for the last decade is a threat not only to our country but to capitalism itself. Poverty and unemployment are a combustive mix: if fiscal responsibility ends up being based on the back of the poor, social conflict will erupt. It is unconscionable, for example, to think that hedge fund managers pay significantly less taxes than their secretaries.Some Republicans want to abolish every piece of social legislation and re-litigate every progressive judicial decision since the New Deal. As part of pledge game, Michelle Bachman and four other candidates also signed the "Susan B. Anthony pledge "promising to appoint abortion opponents to their cabinets and to deny all funding for Planned Parenthood when they become presidents. The bizarre "Marriage Vow "pledge signed by Bachmann and Santoro not only opposes same-sex marriage and includes a personal promise to be faithful to their spouses, but (most peculiarly yet redundantly) it also rejects Sharia Law (which, by the way, like Bachman, also opposes gay marriage and female adultery, which it punishes by death!)The only candidate that has refused to sign any pledge is Jon Huntsman, who understands the perils of siding too closely with the rebellious Tea Party. Even if some of its main points have successfully brought into focus the deficit issue, the Tea Party is still supported by a minority and resented by most Republicans. Its anti-technocratic, anti-Washington message has resonance, but it may have pushed the GOP too far into a corner. Its message is also becoming blurred when it steps into the social arena: its racist and homophobic overtones do not reflect the spirit of the times and are offensive to the "millenials", the youngest generation of voters born in the 80s and 90s, which Republicans still hope to attract in 2012. Social movements are major vehicles of participation and can re-energize a worn out party. They reflect the spirit of the times, often in an extremist way that is what gives them prominence: their passion for the cause, their original approach, are all important, but their message has to resonate with the public if they are to succeed. They emerge, coalesce, grow and achieve some successes. However, once their main point is made, three things can happen: they can become a party, their main ideas can be incorporated into mainstream politics, or they dissipate and be quickly forgotten. The Tea Party brought into focus the issue of fiscal responsibility, it infused conservatism with new energy and found a natural home in the Republican Party, which had become profligate, and will have to prove from now on that it is sincere about austerity. Its impact is undeniable: it has also attracted Independents and in so doing, has per force moved the Democratic Party to the center-right. Mimicking the "big tent" approach of Republicans, the Tea Party has lately been focusing strategically on fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets and its main groups have avoided divisive social issues when speaking to the general public. But their demands of ideological purity from their candidates, their emphasis on returning to the strict meaning of the Constitution and the values of the Founding Father, their defense of states rights and gun rights, belie their claims of inclusiveness for all Americans; in its coded language, its contempt for immigrants and its not-so- veiled racism, one senses a strongly reactionary sentiment bordering on uncontainable fanaticism which is completely out of step with most Americans and which will make it very difficult to widen its appeal beyond what it has already achieved.To paraphrase deceased Republican leader Barry Goldwater, the Tea Party's aim isnot to streamline government or make it more efficient, but to get rid of every piece of social legislation and economic regulation passed since the New Deal. Their purpose is not to share the burden of the weakest members of society, nor to educate their children so they can have equality of opportunity, but to defend the individual freedoms of those who can stand on their own. In sum, they are extremists for whom tolerance and moderation are vices, not virtues, and therefore they have no place in a democracy.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
As a Caribbean institution of Higher Learning, the University of the West Indies is seen as a major contributor to integration efforts in the Region very often mandated by CARICOM to carry out educational missions to that effect. Working in a geographically fragmented and multilingual space, foreign language education is a major preoccupation for academic departments or sections in the respective campuses. The Mona Campus, based in Jamaica, was very one of the earliest to recognize the need to add LSP courses in its curriculum as electives (Business) or as 'service courses' for other programmes (Tourism and Hospitality Management). To these existing LSP courses, the French Section at the Mona Campus added in 2003 a new LSP course geared toward International Relation students. The originality of the course lays its chosen method of delivery by total simulation. The course was offered twice since its approval and under two different schedules (two-week intensive and semester-long). This chapter discusses the impact of these two schedules on the course delivery and learning process. The comparison shows the importance of student's motivation and learning autonomy. The study also comments on the use of blended learning (on-line module complementing face-to-face delivery) and suggests that virtual reality may offer a new addition to Total Simulation for LSP. ; To cite the digital version, add its Reference URL (found by following the link in the header above the digital file). ; TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 73 French for International Conference at The University of the West Indies, Mona: Total Simulation in the Teaching of Languages for Specific Purposes Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo The University of The West Indies, Mona Gilles Lubeth The University of The West Indies, Mona Abstract: As a Caribbean institution of Higher Learning, the University of the West Indies is seen as a major contributor to integration efforts in the Region very often mandated by CARICOM to carry out educational missions to that effect. Working in a geographically fragmented and multilingual space, foreign language education is a major preoccupation for academic departments or sections in the respective campuses. The Mona Campus, based in Jamaica, was very one of the earliest to recognize the need to add LSP courses in its curriculum as electives (Business) or as 'service courses' for other programmes (Tourism and Hospitality Management). To these existing LSP courses, the French Section at the Mona Campus added in 2003 a new LSP course geared toward International Relation students. The originality of the course lays its chosen method of delivery by total simulation. The course was offered twice since its approval and under two different schedules (two-week intensive and semester-long). This chapter discusses the impact of these two schedules on the course delivery and learning process. The comparison shows the importance of student's motivation and learning autonomy. The study also comments on the use of blended learning (on-line module complementing face-to-face delivery) and suggests that virtual reality may offer a new addition to Total Simulation for LSP. Keywords: CARICOM, French for international trade, international conferences, Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), methodology Introduction Language for Specific Purpose (LSP) has developed with the expansion of international trade and the development of multilingual and multicultural working teams. Short language courses are designed at the request of enterprises or institutions in order to meet the specific demands related to the work environment. Though LSP courses have been in existence for more than three decades, their introduction in the academic programs of language majors is quite recent and has been a hot debate for several years at MLA and ADFL meetings. In the Caribbean, with the development of integration, the need for LSP has been felt as the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) started to look beyond the English-speaking Caribbean and opened itself to non-English-speaking territories (Surinam and Haiti joined the organization in 1995 and 2002 respectively while Cuba and the Dominican Republic have observer status). These political trends impacted on our foreign language offerings, stressing the need to open our curriculum to professionally oriented courses. The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the language sections of the two other campuses TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 74 had various responses: at the St. Augustine Campus (Trinidad and Tobago), a Latin American Studies program was developed; at Cave Hill (Barbados), a cross-faculty program in Management Studies with a minor in a foreign language was approved; at Mona, LSP courses were developed and students from other faculties were allowed to declare minors in French or Spanish. In this article, we present the circumstances surrounding the design of the latest addition to French for Specific Purpose courses offered at the University of The West Indies, Mona (UWI, Mona), the methodological choices made and their implication for assessment. Because the course has been offered twice since its approval by the University Academic Quality Assurance Committee and with two different schedules, we will compare and discuss these two delivery modes. Language for Specific Purpose at the UWI, Mona At the UWI, Mona, the introduction of French for Special Purpose came out of a pragmatic approach at a time when high schools were experiencing a high turnover of French teachers and a reduction of schools offering A-level French (equivalent to the Baccalauréat). Noting that our graduates were being hired in the insurance and tourism industries, it was thought that equipping them with professional language skills would give a 'practical' touch to our program. The recruitment of a colleague with professional experience in translation led to discussions about a more professionally oriented program. "French for Business" was the first LSP course to be designed in 1991–1992 with the creation of a level III course of French for business or "Business French." The course was developed as an elective in response to a situation in which French graduates were moving toward the business sector instead of education. In the subsequent years, other LSP courses were introduced: "French for Hospitality" in 1998–1999 and "French for International Conferences" in 2003. The introduction of this last course coincided with a drastic overhaul of the French curriculum. The offering of "French for International Conferences" came at a time when the French section of the Department was repositioning itself and revising its offerings. The course was designed with a view to attracting International Relations (IR) students while capitalizing on the latest trend in French foreign language teaching methods. The decision was based on the fact that IR majors and French majors minoring in IR outnumbered students majoring in French only. It was taken at a time when the section was going into a survival mode, taking drastic measures and moving away from the traditional language curriculum (36 credits equally divided between language and literature). The section opted for a mix of language, literature, film and culture, and French for specific purpose courses. It was a drastic choice since the section was moving away of the traditional literary offerings. Though the section has not fully recovered, it has increased its numbers and the majority of students pursuing French are double majors (French and Spanish) with a professional objective of becoming translators or interpreters, followed by IR and Linguistics majors. Total Simulation in French Foreign Language Teaching and Learning Even though Total Simulation in French Foreign Language Education was initiated in the 1970s at the BELC (Bureau d'Enseignement de la Langue et de la Civilisation Françaises à l'Étranger / Office for the Teaching of French Language and Civilization TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 75 Abroad) it did not really become mainstream until the late eighties. This approach to language teaching evolved from role playing and the need to expand role playing over a longer period of time with a view to involving diverse aspects of communication (Yaiche, 1996). Total Simulation was borrowed from continuous professional education where staff received specific training to deal with job-related situations. Total Simulation for French Foreign Language Teaching was first conceptualized by Francis Debyser, a professor at the CIEP (Centre International d'Études Pédagogiques / International Center for Peda-gogical Studies). In the 1980s, Total Simulation became more broadly accepted and moved from experimental to established status. Publishers become interested and several textbooks were published by Hachette between 1980 and 1990 (Yaiche, 1996). By the 1990s, Total Simulation was redirected toward the teaching of French for Specific Purpose (Business French, French for International Relations, Hospitality French). Total Simulation benefits today from IT and its use in the classroom. It is still at the experimental stage as is the case of 'Virtual Cabinet' for the teaching of English, which has been developed by Masters' students at University of Lyon II (http://sites.univ-lyon2.fr/vcab/demo/) or 'L'auberge' developed by University Lille III for incoming French Foreign Language Students (http://auberge.int.univ-lille3.fr/). Characteristics of a Total Simulation Course in Foreign Language Learning Total Simulation in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning could be considered revolutionary in its approach and methodology. First, the role of the teacher is transformed as he or she becomes a facilitator and a participant in the simulation instead of an instructor. For instance, in the International Conference Simulation, the teacher plays the part of the Secretariat. He or she compiles and archives the material needed for the progress of the conference. He or she also provides documents and the linguistic tools needed for the project. Secondly, simulation follows a set pattern of five stages (See Bourdeau, Bouygue, & Gatein, 1992; Yaiche, 1996). The first stage is the creation of the setting. In the case of the International Conference, it means, choosing the theme and the place of the conference. The second stage is to identify the participants. At this point, the role playing starts as the learners have to choose an identity and the country that they will represent. Learners will have to play several roles: delegates from their chosen countries (Minister of Foreign Affairs or High Ranking Civil Servant or Ambassador). At one point, they also play the part of journalists. The countries are fictitious but based on the characteristics of real countries. During this stage, learners choose their identity and civil status; they invent a short biography indicating two physical, moral, psychological, intellectual characteristics, two distinctive objects, (Yaiche, 1996). The third and fourth stages consist in conducting the simulation: the official opening ceremony and the working sessions. At this point, learners are to present their country's respective position paper. Interaction takes place as well as negotiations for a common position and action plan. During this stage, the facilitator plays an important part in ensuring the archiving of all productions and the elaboration of a data bank for the progress of the conference. Students are provided with documents and assisted in acquiring the mastery of the linguistic tools needed for the exercise (e.g., mastery of high language register for official speeches; mastery of diplomatic lexicon for the phrasing of the final resolution and the press release, TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 76 ability to write an abstract or a synthetic report from a news article, etc.). The final stage is geared toward ending the simulation. In the case of the International Conference, it is marked by the writing of the final resolution and a press conference. Since IR students are to be prepared to face and manage diplomatic incidents/crisis during negotiations, elements that could lead to such incident are introduced between the fourth and fifth stage of the simulation when students are drafting the final resolution of the conference. Students are expected to draw on their negotiating skills in order to solve the problem or assuage the potential conflict and bring the conference to a positive closing ceremony. Assessment is blended in the simulation: oral expression is assessed during the opening ceremony (a five-minute presentation) and during the press conference. Students are video recorded and marking takes place afterwards. (See evaluation sheet in appendix B). Both examiners are present to abide by University Examination Regulations. Writing proficiency is assessed through a press release and the conference final resolution, which is done individually during a traditional in-class test. It is also assessed 'outside' of the simulation through the submission of a take-home assignment, the format of which is either a précis writing or a critical review of a newspaper article related to the theme of the conference. Students are provided with a choice of articles from Le Monde Diplomatique, a well-established and recognized reference journal from which they will select an article for review or summary. LSP and Total Simulation in Jamaica and at the UWI, Mona French teachers in Jamaica were introduced to Total Simulation in 1993 thanks to a new French Linguistics Attaché who was also appointed at The University of the West Indies from 1992–1997. A specialist in Total Simulation, she organized two workshops for the Jamaica Association of French Teachers and one for the Tourism Product Development Company (TPDCo), a Jamaican state agency responsible for the training of the workforce in the tourism sector. The co-authors received additional training at the annual training seminar organized by the Centre International d'Études Pédagogiques (CIEP) held in Caen in July 1996 (Nzengou-Tayo) and July 2009 (Lubeth) respectively. The first total simulation course at the UWI was developed in 2003. Two factors contributed to the choice of this methodology. One was the renewed interest in LSP with the review of the French program. After a quality assurance review in 2003, the French section, threatened by low numbers in registration, revised its program with a stronger professional component (introduction of an additional LSP course and translation modules). The second was the institutionalization of summer courses, which offered the possibility of using an intensive format. The idea was to design a course that could imitate a real life situation: an international conference taking into account that such an event is usually limited over a period of time (1–2 weeks) and requires a full work day. The course was submitted to the University Quality Assurance Committee for approval (See course proposal in Appendix A). In the initial submission, evaluation was by 50% coursework and 50% final examination (Appendix A). However, when the course was first taught in 2006, we requested a change of the evaluation scheme to 100% coursework (50% oral presentation and 50% written assignment). The reason for this change was directly related to the philosophy behind total simulation, which required a formative form of assessment that would blend seamlessly in the simulation. TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 77 Case Study: The 2006 and 2009 Experiences Since its creation, French for International Conferences (FREN 3118) has been offered twice: first, in 2006 as an intensive summer course over two weeks, and secondly, in 2009 as a regular semester course over thirteen weeks. These two modes of delivery will be compared and discussed in this section. Course delivery schedule. In 2005–2006, during the two-week period during which the course was offered, the timetable averaged 25 hours per week with 5 daily contact hours. FREN 3118 was the only course attended by the students. Students were put in an immersion situation as they interacted with a native speaker of French during the week. During the second week, ten hours were set aside for independent research in an attempt to give students an opportunity to develop learning autonomy. In 2009–2010, the course was taught during the first semester according to the regular schedule. The timetable featured 3 one-hour sessions per week. In addition to FREN 3118, students were simultaneously registered for four other courses whose demands were competing with the French course. The fast pace of the semester (13 weeks) did not allow for a scheduled independent research. Students had to use their free time for independent research to develop their learning autonomy. The difference between the schedules of the 2006 and 2009 course delivery had an impact on the course management as well as the students' learning experience. It is evident that 2009 students did not have the same learning stimulus as the 2006 ones. They had the pressure of their other courses in term of time and workload. In addition, regular attendance was an issue since students sometimes missed classes either due to timetable clashes or assignment deadlines to meet in other courses. The running of the course was affected as each student had a part to play in the progress of the simulation and absence from class meetings affected the proceedings of the conference. Student profile and number. The course targets third-year students and requires a general language module at level III as a co-requisite. However, the co-requisite can be waived depending on the level of the students. For instance, when the course was offered during the summer 2006, it was waived for second-year students who had received a B+ in the two modules of the level II language courses. In 2009, a third-year International Relations student who had completed level I of the French language courses with A and was reading the level II language course was allowed to register. The waiver was granted based on his outstanding results at level I and also after an interview in which he demonstrated a high level of motivation and learning autonomy. In 2006, the course was offered with 9 students and in 2009 there were 14 registered students. Numbers can be an issue for conducting a total simulation course. For instance, our experience taught us that, even though Cali, Cheval, & Zabardi (1992) suggest a number of 20 participants divided according to a ratio by type of countries1 in La Conférence Internationale et ses Variantes, country-ratio balance can still be observed TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 78 with lesser numbers. Based on our 2006 experience, we recommend a minimum of 8 students. Indeed, a lesser number would not allow their distribution according to the recommended country ratio. In addition, work in commissions, which is part of the simulation process, would be less productive. Similarly, 20 is the maximum manageable number of students during total simulation. The attention to be devoted to students' progress and the group dynamics become a challenge with larger numbers. Therefore, beyond 20, the group would be divided and two concurrent simulations conducted, provided that staffing is not an issue for the institution. Topics and scenarios. On both occasions, the theme of the conference was inspired by current affairs relevant to the Caribbean region. In 2006, the conference was titled "Libre circulation des travailleurs à l'échelle mondiale: Faisabilité et conditions" (Feasibility and Conditions for a Global Free Movement of Labour). The theme was inspired by discussions taking place in the media about the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) put in place by CARICOM countries that year. The scenario was developed to involve a group of 9 countries, members of a regional organization seeking to achieve integration through free movement of workers. The 2009 edition of the conference, "Réchauffement climatique: Stratégies et équité" (Global Warming: Strategies and Equity) was inspired by the then ongoing international negotiations on global warming. The course started in September, just three months before the Copenhagen Summit. The scenario was based on the creation of an international organization, the Group of 14 (G14) specially dedicated to addressing the issue of global warming, and therefore holding its first conference accordingly. The choice of topics related to current international or regional issues stimulates the students' interest as they can have access to current reference material. They develop their critical thinking as they are exposed to various diverging opinions and asked to present their country's position at the start of the conference. For example, at the 2009 conference, the delegate of "Bonangue" expressed the country's position as follows: Conscient des graves effets [du réchauffement climatique] sur l'environnement, nous tenons à prendre action immédiatement parce que les effets poseront un problème pour le pays. Par le passé, la Bonangue a donné priorité aux revenus, dans certains cas, au détriment de l'environnement. Le pays est disposé à porter [sic] les changements nécessaires. The delegate of "Kalasie," on the contrary, indicated, "La Kalasie est favorable au recours aux crédits d'émission de gaz utilisables par les investisseurs." Another delegate from "Lisérbie" chose to stress the social impact and the importance to reach a consensus on the matter. The multiple and sometimes diverging country positions will contribute to the life of the conference as the objective is to find a common ground and sign a final resolution, which would bring the conference to a close. TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 79 Resources and methods. The course outline was developed in accordance with the prescribed textbook La Conférence Internationale et ses Variantes (Cali et al., 1992). The authors' recom-mendations were followed with some adjustments, which will be presented below. Since countries have to be fictitious to respect the principle of Total Simulation, two websites, CIA: The World Factbook, and Quid were used to establish the profile of these invented countries.2 Using the principle of 'mots-valises' students invented the name of the countries they were representing. For instance, "Lisérbie," "Kalasie" or "Dukenyah" were obviously created in reference to existing countries or regions. Other names were arbitrary and left to the students' imagination as "Cadeaux d'Ouest," "Amapour" or "Kadia." Other web resources were used in accordance with the theme of the conference and a companion website was developed on the University Virtual Learning Environment (OurVLE) (UWI, Mona "Virtual Learning Environment") to take advantage of information technology at our disposal at the Mona Campus. The 2006 intensive format. We introduced some slight variations from the standard format of the simulation. First, the course started with a screening of the French movie Saint-Germain ou la Négociation (2003) with Jean Rochefort. The objective was to highlight the objectives, modalities of diplomatic negotiations as well as to insist on the high-language register used during negotiations, which the students would have to use. Despite the historical context (the 16th century), the film was particularly suitable as it showed protocol and behind-the-scene events taking place during political negotiations. Secondly, students were given an introductory lecture on the processes of international conferences coupled with a tour of the Jamaica Conference Centre in Kingston. This was facilitated by a colleague and professional translator who worked at international conferences and was familiar with the facility. Various documents were made available online on a range of topics: international organizations pursuing regional integration through implementation of free movement of labor (the European Union, CARICOM) and a compilation of documents on immigration and globalization. In 2006, the course page on OurVLE was used only for archival purposes. The instructor, playing the part of the conference Secretary, uploaded for future reference documents that had been identified as relevant to the conference. Since the students' time were dedicated to the course, it was easy to simulate the rhythm of a conference with meetings in commission and plenary sessions. The course outline was design to be the "agenda" of the conference. The intensive format helped to develop a group dynamic based on solidarity and conviviality, which stimulated weaker students to make efforts to improve their proficiency. The 2009 semester-long format. The semester-long delivery of FREN 3118 differed from the intensive summer course on some points. The presentation by the guest lecturer and the film screening were maintained, but, due to timetable constraints, the tour of the Conference Centre did not take place. The main innovation was in the extensive use of the online module and the exploration of the functionalities offered by the Moodle platform supporting OurVLE TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 80 where all the material necessary for the presentation of the theme and the conduct of the activities of the conference were uploaded. All documents were made available online via OurVLE, expanding from print and website links to audio and video. Students' productions were added to the resources identified by the instructor. The instructor/facilitator provided the following resources: explanatory documents on global warming (its geopolitical implications and the negotiation process); documents with terminology used in diplomatic language; and audiovisual documents from France2, France3, and YouTube. A link to Yann Arthus-Bertrand's documentary Home (2009) was also put on the course portal. As Secretariat, the instructor/facilitator uploaded reports of sessions held during the preparatory phase (the preconference meetings). These reports gave students a regularly updated overview of progress made, a review of notions covered as well as the calendar of events (the schedule of meetings). Using the functionalities offered by Moodle, students were able to contribute to the development of the course portal. Using the 'upload a single file' and the forum features, they uploaded their own production, including country and delegate profiles, reports resulting from the sessions in commission and plenary sessions, and draft resolutions. The course portal was useful for archiving the various activities conducted during the course. Students were able to refer to a central repository outside of the contact hours. This tool also had financial and ecological benefits as it reduced the cost of photocopying. Indeed, whereas all documents had to be printed in 2006, only documents produced during the conference (student-generated commission and plenary reports, agenda and list of speakers) were printed for circulation in 2009. Because of the discontinuity of the timetable (3 hours spread over 13 weeks), the 2009 conference did not flow as harmoniously as the 2006 one. With competing interests, students found it difficult to dedicate themselves to the conference. Running from one class to another, they sometimes lost track of the conference objectives, which in turn had an impact on the group dynamics and progress as indicated by the results of the continuous assessment (i.e., the coursework). Evaluation and students' results. As mentioned earlier, the course assessment was done by 100% coursework. The percentage was equally divided between oral and writing proficiency (50% each). Oral proficiency was assessed as follows: delegate's address at the opening ceremony weighting 25%; delegate's interview at the press conference (15%); and one intervention as a journalist interviewing the delegates at the press conference (10%). Writing proficiency was assessed through a press release (10%), an individual proposal for the final resolution (15%), and one précis writing/critical review of document(s) (25%). Students' oral and written productions were graded using a criterion-referenced assessment grid (See Appendix B for details). In 2006, we got a 100% pass rate with results ranging from A+ to C. In 2009, the pass rate was 71.42%. With the intensive format, students demonstrated their mastery of high-level register. Students who were considered 'weak' based on their low grade in the general language courses, managed to improve their proficiency level and achieve acceptable performances in oral presentations. In 2009, there was a large gap between the TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 81 best and the weakest students (2 students got As, 4 students failed, and 8 students' grades ranged from B+ to D). Group average was 49.79%. When comparing the two groups' results, we have to admit that we had some doubts initially about the intensive format because of the limited time given to students to properly absorb the notions and the various tasks required in the course. Yet, it appears that stretching the process over a semester is not a decisive factor for improved performance. The role of group dynamics in total simulation is yet to be measured though it is generally recognized in class interaction and learning. During the regular semester, the group dynamics did not play a cohesive role as it did in the summer course where more proficient students helped to strengthen the weaker ones. Competing academic interests and irregular attendance during the regular semester also had an impact on students' low performance. Conclusion At the UWI, Mona, we introduced LSP courses in our academic programs as part of our major from a pragmatic standpoint in reviewing our curriculum. Though we are aware that LSP courses generally target professionals already in the field, as a result, the design and offering of such courses is usually preceded by a need analysis and the identification of the language processes (i.e., register, lexicon, syntax, speech acts) needed to achieve the requested proficiency (Mangiante & Parpette, 2004). Both "Business French" and "French for International Conferences" count toward the major, though only one can be taken as a core course, the other being an elective. Because LSP courses have a professional orientation, they give undergraduates the impression of being prepared for the world of work. The use of total simulation comforts this impression because of its task-based approach and the fact that it recreates a work environment with its idiosyncrasies. Combined with information technology (OurVLE), it becomes an original and valuable method. The dual-mode adds flexibility to the course and expands access to authentic material. However, success depends heavily on students' learning autonomy, which is enhanced by a tool like OurVLE. Motivation and participation are essential for the success of students as evidenced by the results of the third-year student who was accepted while doing the first module of level II French and was one of the top two students in the course. Our experience suggests that the intensive format yields better results because it reinforces student concentration, dedication, and performance, which also benefit from the positive impact of the group dynamics. Recent development in the field shows an orientation toward multimedia and information technology to create virtual worlds where Total Simulation is made possible on a large scale. The combination of the two is very promising for language learning and teaching but presents new challenges to foreign language teachers and course developers. Notes 1Cali, Cheval, & Debardi (1992) identify the following categories: developing countries, developed countries, least developed countries, and Central or Eastern European countries in transition towards market economy. The latter category being now obsolete, the decision was made to replace it with countries in the same geographical region. TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 82 2See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ and http://www.quid.fr. References Arthus-Bertrand, Y. (2009). Home. Home Project. Retrieved (September–November 2009) from http://www.youtube.com/homeprojectFR L'auberge. Retrieved February 21, 2010 from http://auberge.int.univ-lille3.fr/ Bourdeau, M., Bouygue, & M., Gatein, J. J. (1992). Le congrès médical: Simulation globale sur objectifs spécifiques. Ministère des affaires étrangères, sous direction de la coopération linguistique et éducative, CIEP-BELC, 1991/92. Sèvres: CIEP. Cali, C., Cheval, M., & Zabardi, A. (1992). La conférence internationale et ses variantes. Paris: Hachette, Français langue étrangère. Mangiante, J. M., & Parpette, C. (2004). Le français sur objectifs spécifiques: De l'analyse des besoins à l'élaboration d'un cours. Paris: Hachette. Le Monde Diplomatique. 2009. Paris: Editions "Le Monde." Retrieved from http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/ Virtual Cabinet. Retrieved February 21, 2010 from http://sites.univ-lyon2.fr/vcab/demo/ Yaiche, F. (1996). Les simulations globales: Mode d'emploi. Paris: Hachette, Français langue étrangère. TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 83 APPENDICES Appendix A Original submission to the Academic Quality Assurance Committee of the UWI, Mona Campus in 2003–2004. The assessment was subsequently modified to 100 percent coursework in 2005–2006. DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES & LITERATURES COURSE PROPOSAL Course Title: French for International Conferences Course Code: FREN 3118 Level: 3 Semester: 1 Credits: 3 Prerequisite: A Pass in F24A (FREN 2001) Co-requisite: F34A (FREN 3001) Contact hours: 4 hours per weeks (1 lecture, 1 writing tutorial, 1 oral expression, 1 listening comprehension) Rationale: French is one of the major languages of the United Nations and other inter-national institutions. In response to increased demand for specialized foreign language courses, this course will introduce students to the technical French of international relations and negotiations Course description: This course is designed to reproduce an international conference setting during which various aspects of diplomatic negotiations will be envisaged with a view to using French at the formal/foreign affairs level. Objectives: At the end of the course students should be able to Demonstrate understanding of French spoken in a formal/diplomatic setting Read articles in French on international issues. Write press reviews, press releases in French about an international issue. Express a personal view about a topical International issue in French Express a simulated official view about a topical International issue in French Simulate an official address in French Simulate a press conference in French TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 84 ASSESSMENT 50% in-course: 3 one-hour in-class tests: Reading comprehension (15%); Writing (20%); Listening comprehension (15%) 50% Final Examination: Oral presentation (25%) and 2-hour written examination (25%) TEXTS La Conférence Internationale et ses Variantes. Chantal Cali, Mireille Cheval and Antoinette Zabardi. Paris: Hachette Livre, Français Langue Étrangère, 1995. Audio-visual material from TV5 (such as Kiosque, Une fois par mois, Le dessous des cartes). Articles from journals such as Le monde diplomatique. REFERENCES Plaisant, François. (2000). Le ministère des affaires étrangères. Toulouse: Editions Milan, Les Essentiels Milan, 2000. Kessler, Marie-Christine. (1998). La politique étrangère de la France. Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po. http://www.france.diplomatie.gouv.fr Appendix 2. Assessment grid for oral presentation Official Address: (5-minute presentation at the Opening Ceremony). Press Conference Part 1 and 2: Presentation of Country Position followed by Questions and Answer session). Students plays the country official and then the journalist parts. FREN 3118: Oral Presentation Assessment Grid NAME: Grade Comments Relevance of Arguments /5 Fluency /5 Consistent use of high-language register /3 Communicative skills /2 Accuracy and richness of vocabulary /5 Accuracy and use of complex syntactic structures /5 Accurate pronunciation /5 FINAL GRADE (25%) /25 TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 85 FREN 3118: Press Conference Assessment Grid—Presenter NAME: Grade Comments Relevance of Arguments (5 pts. x 3 = 15) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Fluency (5 pts. x 3 = 15) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Consistent Use of High Language Register (3 pts. x 3 = 9) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Communicative skills (2 pts. x 3 = 6) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Accuracy and Richness of Vocabulary (5 pts. x 3 = 15) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Accuracy and Use of Complex Syntactic Structures (5 pts. x 3 = 15) Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Accurate Pronunciation /5 marks x 3 = 15 Presentation Answer (1) Answer (2) Unconverted Total (90 pts.) / FINAL GRADE (15%) TOTAL SIMULATION IN TEACHING LSP Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 86 FREN 3118: Press Conference Assessment Grid—Journalist NAME: Grade Comments Relevance of question (5 pts. x 4 = 20) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Fluency (5 pts. x 4 = 20) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Consistent use of high-language register (3 pts. x 4 = 12) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Accuracy and richness of vocabulary (5 pts. x 4 = 20) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Accuracy and use of complex syntactic structures (5 pts. x 4 = 20) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Accurate pronunciation (5 marks x 4 = 20) Question 1 (Name) Question 2 (Name) Question 3 (Name) Question 4 (Name) Unconverted Total (112 pts.) FINAL GRADE (10%)
This guide accompanies the following article: Christian Fuchs, 'New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance', Sociology Compass 5/2 (2011): 134–147, [DOI]. 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2010.00354.xIntroductionThe Internet has become part of our everyday lives. Many of us use it for work, hobbies, entertainment, politics, staying in touch with friends and family, learning to know new people and other cultures, for getting all kind of information, etc. In the past 10 years, we have seen the emergence of platforms like Facebook and Myspace (social networking sites), Wordpress and Blogger (blogging) Twitter (social networking, microblogging), YouTube (video sharing), Wikipedia (wiki‐based encyclopaedia), or the Pirate Bay (filesharing index site). The notions of 'web 2.0' and 'social media' have been used by some scholars to describe features of such sites such as community‐building and maintenance, continuous communication, user‐generated content production and diffusion, collaborative authoring, and distributed content classifications (the latter mechanism is also called folksonomy). Most web 2.0 platforms collect, store, and share a lot of personal user data and data about usage behaviour. Therefore, questions about privacy violations and online surveillance have arisen in public discussions, especially concerning Google (for example the discussions about Google targeted advertising, Google Street View, Google Buzz, etc.) and Facebook (for example the discussions concerning Facebook targeted advertising, Facebook beacon, the Facebook privacy policy, Facebook places, etc.). The field of web 2.0 surveillance studies critically asks questions about the data protection aspects and power dimensions of the contemporary Internet. It is crucial for students and scholars, who are interested in the contemporary media landscape, and who study in fields such as media/communication studies, cultural studies, political science, law, computer science, social informatics, information science, sociology, business studies, advertising, marketing and public relations, philosophy, ethics, science and technology studies etc., to also engage with web 2.0 surveillance studies.Recommended readings Fuchs, Christian. 2010. 'Labour in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet'. The Information Society 26(3): 179–96. doi: 10.1080/01972241003712215 Christian Fuchs discusses in this article the political economy of the contemporary Internet. He does so by giving first an introduction to Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism that is then applied for understanding aspects of the exploitation of the users of contemporary commercial Internet platforms like Facebook. Fuchs uses Dallas Smythe's notion of the audience commodity for critically discussing the business models of web 2.0. He coins the notion of Internet prosumer labour in this context. He concludes that on commercial web 2.0 platforms, user activity tends to become exploited and is unpaid labour. Surveillance is situated in the framework of this analysis. Andrejevic, Mark. 2002. 'The Work of Being Watched'. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19(2): 230–48. doi: 10.1080/07393180216561 Mark Andrejevic argues in this article that contemporary commercial forms of interactive media make use of surveillance for exploiting consumers. He introduces in this context the notion of 'the work of being watched'. This concept is based on Sut Jhally's concept of the work of watching. Andrejevic also introduces the notion of the digital enclosure and gives very good examples for online surveillance. Albrechtslund, Anders. 2008. 'Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance'. First Monday 13(3). [online]. Retrieved on 1 March 2011 from: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949. In this article, Anders Albrechtslund introduces the notion of participatory surveillance. Other than Fuchs and Andrejevic, Albrechtslund has a rather positive concept of surveillance, he focuses on the description of potentially empowering aspects of social networking sites and other web 2.0 technologies. Albrechtslund stresses the social dimension of web 2.0, its ability for enabling communication, sharing, and community‐building. Mathiesen, Thomas. 2004. Silently Silenced. Essays on the Creation of Acquiescence in Modern Society. Winchester: Waterside Press. In this short 100 page book, Thomas Mathiesen discusses mechanisms and examples of how political opposition is silently silenced, that is ideologically forestalled. The work is a masterpiece of contemporary ideology critique. Mathiesen identifies mechanisms of how silent silencing works and gives many examples. In chapter 8, it is discussed how the corporate Internet works as system of silent silencing or what Mathiesen terms the synopticon. Mathiesen's work is influenced among others by Foucault and Frankfurt School ideology critique. Campbell, John E. and Matt, Carlson M. 2002. 'Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy'. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46(4): 586–606. doi: 10.1207/s15506878jobem4604_6 In this paper, Campbell and Carlson discuss the usefulness of Michel Foucault's notion of the panopticon as technology of surveillance for explaining how Internet advertising and marketing work. They employ a political economy framework and argue that Internet advertising and marketing commodify users' private data and their privacy.Online materialsThe following online journals are very good sources for further papers about critical internet studies, information society studies, surveillance studies, and privacy studies:
tripleC: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. http://www.triple‐c.at Surveillance and Society. http://www.surveillance‐and‐society.org First Monday. http://firstmonday.org/ Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality. http://repository.cmu.edu/jpc/
Sample syllabusTopics for Lectures and DiscussionWeek I: Foundations of surveillance studiesReadings:Foucault, Michel. 1977. 'Panopticims.' (Part 3). Pp. 195–228 in Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.Lyon, David. 1994. 'Surveillance in Modern Society' (Chapter 2). Pp. 22–39 in The Electronic Eye. Cambridge: Polity.Lyon, David. 2007. 'Explaining Surveillance' (I.3). Pp. 46–70 in Surveillance Studies. An Overview. Cambridge: Polity.Week II: Foucault's surveillance theory and the panopticon: criticism and defenceReadings:Lyon, David (ed.) 2006. 'Pre‐ and Post‐Panopticism: The Search for Surveillance Theories.' Pp. 3–20 in Theorizing Surveillance. Portland, OR: Willan.Haggerty Kevin. 2006. 'Tear Down the Walls: On Demolishing the Panopticon.' Pp. 23–45 in Theorizing Surveillance, edited by David Lyon. Portland, OR: Willan.Fuchs, Christian. 2010. How Can Surveillance Be Defined? Remarks on Theoretical Foundations of Surveillance Studies. Vienna: Unified Theory of Information Research Group. SNS3 Research Paper No.1. ISSN 2219‐603X. http://www.sns3.uti.at/wordpress/wp‐content/uploads/2010/10/The‐Internet‐Surveillance‐Research‐Paper‐Series‐1‐Christian‐Fuchs‐How‐Surveillance‐Can‐Be‐Defined.pdfWeek III: What is web 2.0?Readings:Fuchs, Christian. 2010. 'Social Software and Web 2.0: Their Sociological Foundations and Implications.' Pp. 764–89 in Handbook of Research on Web 2.0, 3.0, and X.0: Technologies, Business, and Social Applications. Volume II, edited by San Murugesan. Hershey, PA: IGI‐Global.Castells, Manuel. 2009. 'Communication in the Digital Age' (Chapter 2). Pp. 54–136 in Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Alternative to reading Castells (2009):Castells, Manuel. 2010. 'Communication Power: Mass Communication, Mass Self‐Communication, and Power Relationships in the Network Society.' Pp. 3–17 in Media and Society, edited by James Curran. London: Bloomsbury.Scholz, Trebor. 2008. 'Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0.'First Monday 13(3). [online]. Retrieved on 1 March 2011 from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2138/1945.Week IV: Computing and surveillanceThe role of surveillance in the age of computingReadings:Marx, Gary T. 2002. 'What's New About the "New Surveillance"? Classifying for Change and Continuity.'Surveillance & Society 1(1): 9–29.Lyon, David. 1998. 'The World Wide Web of Surveillance. The Internet and Off‐World Power‐Flows.'Information, Communication & Society 1(1): 91–105.Clarke, Roger. 1988. 'Information Technology and Dataveillance.'Communications of the ACM 31(5): 498–512.Week V: The capitalist business and ideology of surveillanceReadings:Gandy, Oscar H. 1996. 'Coming to Terms with the Panoptic Sort.' Pp. 132–55 in Computers, Surveillance & Privacy, edited by David Lyon and Elia Zureik. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Mathiesen, Thomas. 1997. 'The Viewer Society. Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" Revisited.'Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215–34. doi: 10.1177/1362480697001002003Week VI: The Internet prosumer commodityReadings:Smythe, Dallas W. 1981. 'On the Audience Commodity and Its Work.' Pp. 230–56 in Media and Cultural Studies, edited by Meenakshi G. Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Fuchs, Christian. 2010. 'Labour in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet.'The Information Society 26(3): 179–96. doi: 10.1080/01972241003712215Week VII: The work of watching and the work of being watchedReadings:Jhally, Sut. 2006. 'Chapters: Watching as Working. The Valorization of Audience Consciousness. The Political Economy of Culture'. Pp. 25–61 in The Spectacle of Accumulation. New York: Peter Lang.Andrejevic, Mark. 2002. 'The Work of Being Watched.'Critical Studies in Media Communication 19(2): 230–48. doi: 10.1080/07393180216561Week VIII: Economic online surveillance and web 2.0Readings:Mathiesen, Thomas. 2004. 'Panopticon and Synopticon as Silencing Systems' (Chapter 8). Pp. 98–102 in Silently Silenced. Essays on the Creation of Acquiescence in Modern Society. Winchester: Waterside Press.Fuchs, Christian, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, Marisol Sandoval (eds) 2011. The Internet and Surveillance. New York: Routledge.
Chapter by Christian Fuchs: 'Critique of the Political Economy of Web 2.0 Surveillance.' Chapter by Marisol Sandoval: 'A Critical Empirical Case Study of Consumer Surveillance on Web 2.0.' Chapter by Thomas Allmer: 'Critical Internet Surveillance Studies and Economic Surveillance.'
Campbell, John E. and Matt, Carlson M. 2002. 'Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy.'Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46(4): 586–606. doi: 10.1207/s15506878jobem4604_6Focus questionsDiscussion in week 1:What different kinds of definitions of surveillance are there? Compile various definitions by making a literature search. Compare these definitions and discuss how surveillance should best be defined.Discussion in week 2:Discuss first in small groups of 3–5 and compare then the results of the group discussions in a general discussion.Consider the following list of information processing phenomena. Which one do you consider as surveillance, which one's not? Compare your results with the results of your colleagues. Discuss then if a Foucauldian understanding of surveillance fits your understanding of surveillance or not. Discuss pro and con arguments for 'demolishing' Foucault's notion of the panopticon. Discuss if using the notion of the panopticon makes political and theoretical sense in contemporary society or not.
teachers watching private activities of pupils via webcams at Harriton High School, Pennsylvania, the employment of the DART system (Deep‐ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis) in the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea for detecting tsunamis, the scanning of the fingerprints of visitors entering the United States, consensual online video sex chat of adults, parents observing their sleeping sick baby with a camera or babyphone in order to see if it needs their help, the use of speed cameras for identifying speeders (involves state power), the seismographic early detection of earthquakes, electronic monitoring bracelets for prisoners in an open prison system, the scanning of Internet and phone data by secret services with the help of the Echelon system and the Carnivore software, the usage of a GPS‐based car navigation system for driving to an unknown destination, the usage of full body scanners at airports, biometrical passports containing digital fingerprints, the use of the DoubleClick advertising system by Internet corporations for collecting data about users' online browsing behaviour and providing them with targeted advertising, CCTV cameras in public means of transportation for the prevention of terrorism, the assessment of customer shopping behaviour with the help of loyalty cards, the data collection in marketing research, the usage of smog and air pollution warning systems, the publication of sexual paparazzi photos of celebrities in a tabloid, the assessment of personal images and videos of applicants on Facebook by employers prior to a job interview, drinking water quality measurement systems, the collection of data about potential or actual terrorists in the TIDE database (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment) by the US National Counterterrorism Center, Passenger Name Record (PNR) data transfer from Europe to the United States in aviation, the permanent electrocardiogram of a cardiac infarction patient, the activities of radioactivity measuring stations for detecting nuclear power plant disasters, Telekomgate: spying on employees, trade unionists, journalists, and members of the board of directors by the German Telekom, measurement of meteorological data for weather forecasts the video filming of employees in Lidl supermarkets and assessment of the data by managers in Germany, the usage of a fire detector and alarm system and a fire sprinkling system in a public school, watching the watchers: corporate watch systems, filming of the police beating of Rodney King (LA 1992), YouTube video of the police killing of Neda Soltan (Iran 2009) systems for detecting and measuring temperature, humidity, and smoke in forest areas that are prone to wildfires.
Discussion in week 3:Work in groups of 3–5 people. Compile a list of Internet platforms that you use. Based on the literature that you have read about web 2.0, try to identify key qualities of the communication processes that are supported by the Internet platforms on your list. Discuss if it makes sense to employ notions like 'web 2.0' and 'social media'. Discuss how the communication qualities of the platforms you listed are connected to/enable surveillance. Compare the results in a plenary discussion.Discussion in week 4:Work first in groups of 3–5 people. Discuss the meaning of the notions of the panoptic sort and the synopticon. Make a list of examples, where surveillance plays a role in the economy. Make a list of examples, where surveillance, the media, and information technology function as means for advancing ideologies. Discuss to which examples the notions of the panoptic sort and/or the synopticon can be applied. Discuss first in the small group and then in general with all colleagues in the seminar how useful the notions of the panoptic sort and the synopticon are for understanding the contemporary Internet and media landscape.Discussion in week 5:Work first in groups of 3–5 people. Find examples for the connection of computers and surveillance. Based on your list of examples and the read literature, try to identify key qualities of computer‐based surveillance. Compare the three articles of Marx, Lyon, and Clarke: What are the key characteristics of computer‐based surveillance for each of the three authors? How do the three approaches differ? What do they have in common? If you compare computer‐based and non‐computer based forms of surveillance, what are commonalities and differences? Can we speak in the case of computer‐based surveillance of a new form of surveillance?Compare the group discussion results to the results of the discussions in the other groups.Discussion in week 6:Work first in groups of 3–5 people. Discuss the meaning of the notions of the audience commodity and the Internet prosumer commodity. Find examples for how the audience commodity works in the area of advertising in newspapers and TV. Find examples for the Internet prosumer commodity in relation to web 2.0 platforms that you use. Discuss the role of surveillance in Internet prosumer commodification. Discuss if you as Interner prosumers that use Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc. are exploited by the companies owning these platforms or not. If you think you are exploited, what can be politically done in order to overcome the exploitation of labour on the Internet? Compare the results of the group discussions and conduct a general discussion about the crucial questions.Discussion in week 7:Work first in groups of 3–5 people. Discuss the meaning of the notions of the work of watching and the work of being watched. Discuss the role of surveillance in the work of being watched. Find examples both for the work of watching and the work of being watched. Compare Dallas Smythe's concept of the audience commodity to Sut Jhally's concept of the work of watching. Compare Fuchs's concept of Internet prosumer commodification to Andrejevic's concept of the work of being watched online. What are differences and commonalities? Compare the results of the group discussions. Discuss with all colleagues what the political implications of economic online surveillance are: How dangerous is economic online surveillance and online labour exploitation? What can be done about it politically?Discussion in week 8:Work first in groups of 3–5 people. Based on the read literature, make a list of qualities of economic surveillance on web 2.0. Identify which web 2.0 platforms you read most frequently. Read the terms of use and privacy policies of these platforms. Make a list, how each of these platforms exactly uses your data and usage behaviour data, for economic purposes. List for each platform what kind of data about you it stores, collects from other Internet platforms, which data it is allowed to sell for advertising purposes, and which data about you or that you upload becomes property of the platform owner. How does the organization model of Wikipedia differ from the ones of Facebook and Google? Inform yourself about the alternative web 2.0 platform Diaspora. What are its organizational principles, how do they differ from Facebook? Compare the results of the group work.Conduct a general discussion about the following questions: What are the problems of surveillance on web 2.0? What are the advantages and disadvantages of platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter? How can advantages and disadvantages be overcome? Do you see possibilities for creating a non‐commercial Internet or non‐commercial Internet platforms? What are advantages and disadvantages of a non‐commercial, non‐profit, commons‐based Internet?Seminar/project ideaInternet Studies in general and Critical Internet Studies and Web 2.0 Surveillance Studies are very young fields of studies. There are a lot of unexplored topics relating to the political economy of web 2.0 that have thus far not been pursued. Writing master's theses and dissertations in this area is not only interesting and important, but is also a lot of fun because one engages in research about those media that we have come used to utilize in our everyday life and work. Students may also consider to present chapters from their dissertations or theses at international conferences, like the PhD student workshops and conferences of the ICTs and Society Network (http://www.icts‐and‐society.net) or the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (http://www.air.org).Research results can also be presented to the public in the form of blog postings or small articles for popular journals or newspapers. For writing for these more popular formats, it is good to connect more theoretical ideas to concrete events and phenomena in the world of the Internet (see the example writings on the NetPoliticsBlog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog). One can also pursue writing an op‐ed piece for a daily newspaper.Social movements and groups that discuss Internet politics and want to foster a common and free access to knowledge and the Internet can be interesting discussion and co‐operation partners for scholars, which can give a more practical dimension to research.Short BiographyChristian Fuchs holds the chair in media and communication studies at Uppsala University's Department of Informatics and Media. He is also board member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria, and editor of tripleC (cognition, communication, co‐operation): Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. He studied computer science at the Vienna University of Technology in the years 1994–2000. He completed his PhD in 2002 at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2000–2006, he was lecturer for information society studies at the Institute of Design and Technology Assessment of the Vienna University of Technology. He was a research associate at the same department in the years 2002–2004. At the University of Salzburg, he was assistant professor in the years 2005–2007 and associate professor from 2008 to 2010 in the field of ICTs and society. His main research fields are: social theory, critical theory, critical political economy of media, information, technology; information society studies, ICTs and society. He is author of many academic publications, including the books Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (New York: Routledge, 2011). He is co‐editor of The Internet and Surveillance (edited by Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval). He co‐ordinates the research project Social Networking Sites in the Surveillance Society (2010–2013), which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and is management committee member of the EU COST Action Living in Surveillance Societies (2009–2013).
Criterio Libre magazine has played an important role in promoting scientific dissemination as a fundamental mechanism in the transformation processes of our Latin American nations towards better formed societies, with a healthy balance between the necessary growth of the production of tangible and intangible goods and a more fair distribution of wealth, for the benefit of all its populations, which seek to eradicate poverty, which is the greatest scourge that humanity has not yet been able to overcome. Therefore, we rely on criteria of the development of science that contribute to these ideals, choosing then the best articles, subjected to rigorous evaluation processes by recognized national and international researchers, who have also contributed to raise the scientific quality of them through his thoughtful observations and also to develop scientific thinking and the use of the best style for their communication, enriching the social scientific thought in our nations. We can summarize these principles as follows: the development of science and technology as an expression of given sociocultural and valorative systems, the development of science at the service of productive transformation for the benefit of society, the awareness of the role of science and technology in the definition of power relations at the national and international levels and its insertion in development policies, the use of science and technological innovation as instruments of autonomy, openness to novel approaches in the consolidation of social science, the freedom of critical thinking at all levels of scientific knowledge management, among others. In this sense, we have tried to strengthen the analysis and critical development of economic, administrative, financial and accounting sciences, opening a space for the discussion and development of the epistemology of these social sciences, which increasingly becomes the central axis of our magazine. The present edition of Criterio Libre includes two articles that enrich this epistemological discussion: in the first one the researcher José J. Ortiz B. poses a dilemma that accompanies the development of accounting science, "The crisis of accounting representation: problems of science social or power politics?", which seeks to clarify the factors that originate the problem of accounting representation from a reflection on the theoretical foundations that support this important topic and the empirical references that show this problem, factors that have been seen as an epistemic obstacle in the consolidation of this young science and to which the author intends to contribute in his epistemological clarification and in the proposal of alternative solutions, which he proposes for discussion to the scientific community with an interdisciplinary approach and from the paradigm of complexity. In the second article, Professor Jean Paul Sarrazin poses an interesting dissertation on "Religion: do we know what we are talking about? Examination on the feasibility of an analytical category for the social sciences". The objective of this review was to find an analytical category that is precise, clear and sufficiently broad to study empirically the vast range of sociocultural phenomena that can be or have been considered as "religious". It concludes that in spite of the absence of a unified analytical category, some of the most prominent elements in the different definitions can constitute, by themselves, useful analytical categories for empirical research. It can be deduced that this section has been faithful to the principles that we exposed at the beginning of this editorial and that we hope will continue to become an open forum for the scientific development of our disciplines. A second section, devoted to accounting and finance, defines topics that have become of substantial interest due to the strong theoretical development that these disciplines have reached, arriving to a phase in which the disputes of the paradigms that support different approaches have been decanted, and it is in this field where contributions arise that consolidate important theoretical schemes or that, on the other hand, discard hypotheses that allow debugging systems that, in the manner of the layers of an onion, are grouped by levels, which contributes to the consolidation of the social sciences. In this section we find two important articles oriented under this philosophy: the first one analyzes the effects on the accounting information of public companies in the Colombian electricity sector of the implementation of Resolution 743 of 2013 regarding the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for some public companies. This topic is one of the applications of the important advances in the development of accounting theory for the financial economy, which in spite of this does not manage to establish solid roots for the conditions of the developing countries, as this article proves that the transformations assumed are the result of a change in the organizational economic model, where, rather than attending to the international regulation model, it responds to a process of concentration of strategic assets by actors that have the ability to capture regulation, demonstrating that the interdisciplinary approach is a fertile ground to explain in a better way the reality of these countries in the globalizing environment that characterizes the current economy of these countries. The second article, about the "Impact of self-financing on the innovation of micro, small and medium-sized Colombian companies," allows us to delve into an aspect that has not been explicitly studied and that is located at the frontiers of knowledge between economics, finance and the administration, especially directed at an important sector of the economy of the developing countries, that of the MSME companies, which despite their great contributions to the economic well-being of the population, occupying 80% of it in these countries, no intellectual effort has been devoted by our researchers, wasting a space of potential development of autonomy that will clear the way for the true socioeconomic development of our region. The descriptive results show that Colombian MSMEs use their own resources as a priority for their investments, and inferential results obtained through linear regressions indicate that internal financing has a positive and significant influence on their overall innovation, as well as on their products/services, productive processes and management. This is a variable of fundamental importance to be involved in the development policies for the Latin American industry and that very little is taken into consideration until now, in what has been called the Orange economy, which countries like Colombia want to promote. The reality is that internal or own resources are still the main source of funding for the investment projects of these companies, and while this is consistent with the postulates of the theory of financial hierarchy, everything seems to indicate that the reasons for this are mainly the barriers they encounter to access the external financial market. The next section, dedicated to economic discipline, shows us an important article focused on the analysis of the relationship between "Good governance and effectiveness of development aid", a topic of high relevance for our economies. The article aims to deepen the origin and changes experienced by the notion of good governance; analyzes the constituents and determinants of it, as well as its relationship with close concepts such as institutional quality, and above all, the ideas and evidence created on the relationship between good governance and the effectiveness of development aid. Finally, it concludes that there is no general consensus that aid has been effective in promoting economic growth, and there are both supporters and opponents of this idea. Reflectively, it paves the way for empirically verifying the true effects of economic aid and the conditions under which better results would be possible for the benefit of large masses of the population. This edition closes with two sections: the first one, traditional on topics of administration as a discipline that is structurally integrated with the economic, accounting and financial, and where two articles are developed: the first of these is entitled "Co-creation and new challenges of generating value that organizations face". This matter is very topical and marks a trend in modern administrative theory, which is revolving around the new approaches to the generation of value. It is concluded that, in order to generate a sustained value in organizations, the focus of the managers' actions must be the creation of joint value with their clients and not the exclusive goal of increasing the sales of their products or services usually designed internally and closed. The second article, under the title "Model to analyze the incidence of social capital in human development in Bogotá, DC", focuses on identifying whether there is a type of relationship between social capital and human development in the endogenous context of the city of Bogota. For this purpose, it is proposed to conduct a descriptive investigation, based on multiple regression analysis, which facilitates the proposal of a model that determines the level of incidence of social capital in human development, based on the calculation of the Human Development Index and the Index Decomposed social capital in cognitive capital index, ICSC, structural social capital index, ICSE, social representation index of social capital, IRSCS, components of the integral calculation of the social capital index. Based on these calculations, it is verified that the scope and use of social capital are unknown in the city, which generates a society with a high level of atomization and disinterest about the problems of citizenship. Being able to verify these assertions has the utmost importance to adopt policies of social and human development in the D.C., taking into account the different analytical components that were used in the study. In the last section, dedicated to knowledge management, the issue of bullying is analyzed pedagogically by sexual orientation among male students in the environment of secondary education, which seeks to contribute to the prevention of bullying behaviors, due to the effects that this has in the welfare of a population that tends to segregate in an undemocratic manner and that is already part of the educational models that should be oriented towards the formation of values. As pedagogues, we believe that education can and should create environments of respect and appreciation of difference, where everyone can access it, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or other social or cultural constructions. The set of the eight articles that we put at the disposal of the academic community, organized in the sections oriented according to the principles that support the scientific philosophy and the editorial policy of the magazine, is configured in a new effort that we are sure will contribute to the strengthening of the scientific and technological development of our disciplines in an environment that is ours, but that dialogues with the universality of knowledge at a global level, and that progressively will become the great pillars of our human and social development ; La revista Criterio Libre ha venido desempeñando un rol importante en la promoción de la divulgación científica como mecanismo fundamental en los procesos de transformación de nuestras naciones hispanoamericanas hacia sociedades mejor conformadas, con un sano equilibrio entre el necesario crecimiento de la producción de bienes tangibles e intangibles y una más justa distribución de la riqueza, en beneficio de todas sus poblaciones que buscan la erradicación de la pobreza, el mayor flagelo que la humanidad aún no ha podido superar. En ese orden de ideas, nos hemos fundamentado en criterios del desarrollo de la ciencia que contribuyan a esos ideales, seleccionando los mejores artículos, sometidos a procesos rigurosos de evaluación por reconocidos investigadores nacionales e internacionales, quienes también han contribuido a elevar la calidad científica de los mismos con sus atinadas observaciones y también a desarrollar el pensamiento científico y la utilización del mejor estilo para su comunicación, enriqueciendo el pensamiento científico social en nuestras naciones. Dichos principios los podemos sintetizar de la siguiente manera: El desarrollo de la ciencia y la tecnología como expresión de sistemas valorativos y socioculturales dados, el desarrollo de la ciencia al servicio de la transformación productiva en beneficio de la sociedad, la concientización del papel que tienen la ciencia y la tecnología en la definición de las relaciones de poder en los niveles nacional e internacional y su inserción en las políticas de desarrollo, la utilización de la ciencia y de la innovación tecnológica como instrumentos de autonomía, la apertura a enfoques novedosos en la consolidación de la ciencia social, la libertad del pensamiento crítico en todos los niveles de la gestión del conocimiento científico, entre otros. En tal sentido hemos querido fortalecer el análisis y desarrollo crítico de las ciencias económicas, administrativas, financieras y contables, abriendo un espacio para la discusión y desarrollo de la epistemología de estas ciencias sociales, que cada vez más se convierte en columna vertebral de nuestra revista. En el presente número se incluyen dos artículos que enriquecen dicha discusión epistemológica: en el primero de ellos el investigador José J. Ortiz B. nos plantea un dilema que acompaña el desarrollo de la ciencia contable, "La crisis de la representación contable: ¿problemas de la ciencia social o de la política del poder?", en donde busca dar claridad a los factores que originan la problemática de la representación contable a partir de una reflexión sobre los fundamentos teóricos que sustentan este importante tópico y los referentes empíricos que muestran dicha problemática, factores que necesariamente se han expresado como un obstáculo epistémico en la consolidación de esta joven ciencia y al que el autor pretende aportar tanto en su esclarecimiento epistemológico, como en la propuesta de alternativas de solución, que pone para discusión a la comunidad científica con un enfoque interdisciplinario y desde el paradigma de la complejidad. En el segundo artículo el profesor Jean Paul Sarrazin nos plantea una interesante 18 Universidad Libre disertación alrededor del concepto "Religión: ¿sabemos de lo que estamos hablando? Examen sobre la viabilidad de una categoría analítica para las ciencias sociales". El objetivo de esta revisión fue encontrar una categoría analítica precisa, clara y suficientemente amplia para estudiar empíricamente la vasta gama de fenómenos socioculturales que pueden ser o han sido considerados como "religiosos". Se concluye que a pesar de la ausencia de una categoría analítica unificada algunos de los elementos más destacados en las diferentes definiciones pueden constituir, en sí mismos, categorías analíticas útiles para la investigación empírica. Se puede deducir que esta sección ha sido fiel a los principios que expusimos al comienzo de este editorial y que esperamos se siga convirtiendo en tribuna abierta para el desarrollo científico de nuestras disciplinas. Una segunda sección, dedicada a la contabilidad y las finanzas, define temáticas que se han tornado de interés sustancial dado el fuerte desarrollo teórico que han venido alcanzado esas disciplinas, llegando a una fase en que las disputas de los paradigmas que sustentan diversos enfoques se han venido decantando y es en ese terreno donde florecen aportes que consolidan esquemas teóricos importantes o que, por otro lado, descartan hipótesis que permiten depurar sistemas que, a la manera de las capas de la cebolla, se van agrupando por niveles, lo cual contribuye a la consolidación de las ciencias sociales. En esta sección encontramos dos importantes artículos orientados bajo esa filosofía: el primero de ellos analiza los efectos que sobre la información contable de las empresas públicas del sector eléctrico colombiano tuvo la implementación de la Resolución 743 de 2013, la cual se refiere a la adopción de Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera (NIIF) para algunas empresas públicas, siendo este tópico uno de los aplicativos de los avances importantes del desarrollo de la teoría contable para la economía financierista, que a pesar de ello no logra asentar sólidas raíces para las condiciones de los países en desarrollo, como lo comprueba este artículo que encuentra que las transformaciones asumidas son el resultado de un cambio de modelo económico organizacional, en donde más que atender el modelo de regulación internacional, responde a un proceso de concentración de activos estratégicos por parte de actores que tienen la capacidad de capturar la regulación, demostrando que es el enfoque interdisciplinario un campo fértil para explicar de una mejor manera la realidad de estos países en el entorno globalizador que caracteriza la economía actual de dichos países. El segundo artículo acerca del "Impacto del autofinanciamiento sobre la innovación de las micro, pequeñas y medianas empresas colombianas", permite profundizar en un aspecto que no ha sido explícitamente estudiado y que se ubica en las fronteras del conocimiento entre la economía, las finanzas y la administración, dirigido especialmente a un sector importante de la economía de los países en desarrollo, el de las empresas Mipymes, que a pesar de sus grandes aportes al bienestar económico de la población al ocupar 80% de la misma en estos países, no se le ha dedicado un esfuerzo intelectual por parte de nuestros investigadores, desaprovechando un espacio de potencial desarrollo de la autonomía que permitirá desbrozar el camino del verdadero desarrollo socioeconómico de nuestra región. Los resultados descriptivos muestran que las Mipymes colombianas utilizan prioritariamente recursos propios para sus inversiones, y los resultados inferenciales obtenidos mediante regresiones lineales señalan que el financiamiento interno influye positiva y significativamente en su innovación global, así como en la de sus productos/servicios, procesos productivos y gestión. Esto es una variable de importancia fundamental para ser involucrada en las políticas de desarrollo para la industria latinoamericana y que muy poco se toma en consideración hasta ahora, en lo que se ha venido denominando la economía naranja, que países como Colombia quieren fomentar. La realidad es que los recursos internos o propios siguen siendo la principal fuente de financiación para los proyectos de inversión de estas empresas y si bien ello es coherente con los postulados de la teoría de la jerarquía financiera, todo parece indicar que las razones de esto son principalmente las barreras que encuentran para acceder al mercado financiero externo. Nuestra siguiente sección, dedicada a la disciplina económica, nos muestra un importante artículo enfocado al análisis de la relación entre "Buen gobierno y eficacia de la ayuda al desarrollo", tema de altísima pertinencia para nuestras economías. El artículo se propone profundizar en el origen y los cambios experimentados por la noción de buen gobierno; analiza los constituyentes y determinantes del mismo, así como su relación con conceptos cercanos como el de calidad institucional, y sobre todo, las ideas y la evidencia creada sobre las relaciones entre el buen gobierno y la efectividad de la ayuda al desarrollo. Finalmente llega a la conclusión de que no existe un consenso general en cuanto a que la ayuda haya sido eficaz para promover el crecimiento económico, y existen tanto defensores como detractores de esta idea. De manera reflexiva deja abierto el camino para verificar empíricamente los verdaderos efectos de la ayuda económica y las condiciones bajo las cuales se harían posibles unos mejores resultados en beneficio de grandes masas de la población. Cerramos este número con dos secciones: la primera, tradicional sobre temas de administración como disciplina que se integra estructuralmente con la económica, la contable y financiera, y donde se desarrollan dos artículos: el primero de estos se titula "La co-creación y los nuevos retos de generación de valor que enfrentan las organizaciones", siendo esta temática de gran actualidad y que marca una tendencia en la moderna teoría administrativa, que está girando sobre los nuevos enfoques de la generación de valor. Se concluye que, para generar un valor sostenido en las organizaciones, el foco de las acciones de los gestores debe ser la creación de valor conjunta con sus clientes y no la exclusiva meta de aumentar las ventas de sus productos o servicios habitualmente diseñados de manera interna y cerrada. El segundo artículo bajo el título "Modelo para analizar la incidencia del capital social en el desarrollo humano en Bogotá, D.C.", se centra en identificar si existe un tipo de relación entre el capital social y el desarrollo humano en el contexto endógeno de la ciudad de Bogotá. Para tal fin, se propone hacer una investigación descriptiva basada en análisis de regresión múltiple que facilita la proposición de un modelo que determina el nivel de incidencia del capital social en el desarrollo humano, partiendo del cálculo del Índice de desarrollo humano y del Índice de capital social descompuesto en índice 20 Universidad Libre de capital cognitivo, ICSC, índice de capital social estructural, ICSE, Índice de representación social del capital social, IRSCS, componentes del cálculo integral del índice de capital social. Con base en esos cálculos se llega a comprobar que en la ciudad se desconocen el alcance y uso del capital social, lo que genera construir una sociedad con alto nivel de atomización y desinterés por los problemas de la ciudadanía. Poder comprobar estos asertos es de suma importancia para adoptar políticas de desarrollo social y humano en el D.C., atendiendo los diferentes componentes analíticos que se utilizaron en el estudio. En la última sección, dedicada a la gestión del conocimiento, se analiza pedagógicamente el tema del bullying por orientación sexual entre estudiantes masculinos en el ambiente de la educación media, que busca contribuir a la prevención de comportamientos de bullying, por los efectos que ello tiene en el bienestar de una población que tiende a segregarse de manera antidemocrática y que ya hace parte de los modelos educativos que deben orientarse a la formación de valores. Como pedagogos, creemos que la educación puede y debe crear ambientes de respeto y valoración de la diferencia, en donde todos puedan acceder a ella, sin importar la orientación sexual, el género u otras construcciones sociales o culturales. El conjunto de los ocho artículos que ponemos a disposición de la comunidad académica, organizados en las secciones orientadas según los principios que fundamentan la filosofía científica y la política editorial de la revista, se configura en un nuevo esfuerzo que estamos seguros contribuirá al fortalecimiento del desarrollo científico y tecnológico de nuestras disciplinas en un entorno que nos es propio, pero que dialoga con la universalidad del conocimiento a nivel global, y que progresivamente se constituirán en los grandes pilares de nuestro desarrollo humano y social. ; La revue Criterio Libre a occupé un important rôle en promouvoir la divulgation scientifique comme mécanisme fondamental dans les procès de transformation de nos nations latino-americaines vers sociétés meilleure conformées, avec un sain équilibre entre la nécessaire croissance de la production de biens tangibles et intangibles et une plus juste distribution de la richesse, au profit de toutes ses populations, que cherchent éradiquer la pauvreté, qu'il est le majeur fléau que l'humanité encore n'a pas pu surpasser. Par l'antérieur, nous basons sur des critères du développement de la science qu'ils contribuent à ces idéals, en choisissant alors les meilleurs articles, soumis à des rigoureux procès d'évaluation par des reconnus chercheurs nationaux et internationaux, qui ont aussi contribué à élever la qualité scientifique des mêmes par leur sages observations et aussi à développer la pensée scientifique et l'utilisation du meilleur style pour sa communication, en enrichissant la pensé scientifique sociale dans nos nations. Nous pouvons résumer dits principes: le développement de la science et la technologie comme expression de systèmes d'évaluation et socio-culturelles donnés, le développement de la science au service de la transformation productive au profit de la société, la prise de conscience du rôle de la science et la technologie dans la définition des relations de pouvoir en les niveaux nationaux et internationaux et son insertion dans les politiques de développement, l›utilisation de la science et de l›innovation technologique comme des instruments d›autonomie, l›ouverture à nouvelles approches dans la consolidation de la science sociale, la liberté de la pensée critique en tous les niveaux de la gestion de la connaissance scientifique, entre autrui. Dans ce sens, nous avons essayé fortifier l'analyse et développement critique des sciences économiques, administratives, financiers et comptables, en ouvrant un espace pour la discussion et développement de l'epistemologie de ces sciences sociales, que de plus en plus se convertit dans l'axe central de notre revue. La présente édition comprend deux articles qu'ils enrichissent dite discussion epistémológique: en le premier d'ils le chercheur José J. Ortiz B. pose un dilemme qu'accompagne le développement de la science comptable, "La crise de la représentation comptable: ¿problèmes de la science sociale ou de la politique du pouvoir?", dans lequel cherche éclaircir les facteurs qu'ils causent la problématique de la représentation comptable à partir d'une réflexion sur les fondements théoriques qu'ils soutiennent cet important question et les référents empiriques qui montrent cette problématique, facteurs qui ont été considérés comme un obstacle épistémique à la consolidation de cette jeune science et aux quels l›auteur entend contribuir dans sa clarification épistémologique et dans la proposition de solutions alternatives qu›il donne à lacommunauté scientifique avec une approche interdisciplinaire et du paradigme de la complexité. Dans le deuxième article, le professeur Jean Paul Sarrazin fait une thèse intéressante sur "Religion: savons-nous de quoi nous parlons? Examen de la faisabilité d›une catégorie analytique pour les sciences sociales". L'objectif de cette revue était de trouver une catégorie analytique précise, claire et suffisamment large pour étudier empiriquement la vaste gamme de phénomènes socio-culturelles qui peuvent être ou ont été considérés comme "religieux". Il conclut qu'en dépit de l›absence d›unecatégorie analytique unifiée, certains éléments les plus saillants des différentes définitions peuvent euxmêmes constituer des catégories analytiques utiles à la recherche empirique. On peut déduire que cette section a été fidèle aux principes que nous avons énoncé au début de cet éditorial et que nous espérons qu'ils continuera à devenir une plateforme ouverte pour le développement scientifique de nos disciplines. Une deuxième section, consacrée à la comptabilité et à la finance, définit les sujets qui sont devenus d›un intérêt substantiel en raison du fort développement théorique que ces disciplines ont atteint, atteignant une phase dans la quelle les différends des paradigmes qui soutiennent diverses approches ont été réglés et c'est dans ce domaine que les contributions surgissent qui consolident des schémas théoriques importants ou qui, d'autrepart, écartent les hypothèses qui permettent des systèmes purifiants qui, à la façon des couches d›oignons, sont regroupés par niveaux, contribuant ainsi à consolider les sciences sociales. Dans cette section, nous trouvons deux articles importants orientés selon cette philosophie: le premier analyse les effets sur l›information comptable des entreprises publiques du secteur de l'électricité colombien de la mise en oeuvre de la résolution 743 de 2013 concernant l'adoption des normes internationales d›information financière (IFRS) pour certaines entreprises publiques. Ce sujet est l›une des applications des avancées importantes dans le développement de la théorie comptable pour l›économie financieriste qui malgré cela ne parvient pas à établir des racines solides pour les conditions des pays en développement, comme enté moigne cet article qui constate que les transformations supposées sont le résultat d›un changement du modèle économique organisationnel, où, plutôt que de s›intéresser au modèle de réglementation internationale, répond à un processus de concentration des actifs stratégiques par des acteurs qui ont la capacité de saisir la réglementation, démontrant que l'approche interdisciplinaire est un terrain fertile pour mieux expliquer la réalité de ces pays dans l'environnement mondialisant qui caractérise l›économie actuelle de ces pays. Le deuxième article, intitulé "Impact de l›autofinancement sur l'innovation dans les micro, petites et moyennes entreprises colombiennes», donne un aperçu d'un aspect qui n›a pas été explicitement étudié et qui se situe aux frontières de la connaissance entre économie, finance et administration, en particulier dans un secteur important de l›économie des pays en développement, celle des MPME, qui malgré leur grande contribution au bien-être économique de la population, occupant 80% de la population de ces pays, n'a pas fait l›effort intellectuel de nos chercheurs, gaspillant un espace de développement potentiel d'autonomie qui ouvrira la voie à un véritable développement socioéconomique de notre région. Les résultats descriptifs montrent que les PMI colombiennes utilisent principalement leurs propres ressources pour leurs investissements, et les résultats inférentiels obtenus par régression linéaire indiquent que le financement interne a une influence positive et significative sur leur innovation globale, ainsi que sur celle de leurs produits/services, processus de production et gestion. Il s›agit d'une variable d›une importance fondamentale à impliquer dans les politiques de développement de l'industrie latino-américaine et que trèspeu de choses sont prises en considération jusqu›à présent, dans cequ›on a appelé l'économie orange, que des pays comme la Colombie veulent promouvoir. En réalité, les ressources internes ou propres restent la principale source de financement des projets d'investissement de ces entreprises et, bien que cela soit conforme aux postulats de la théorie de la hiérarchie financière, tout semble indiquer que les raisons en sont principalement les obstacles qu›elles rencontrent pour accéder au marché financier extérieur. Notre prochaine section, consacrée à ladiscipline économique, nous présente un article important centré sur l'analyse de la relation entre "La bonne gouvernance et l'efficacité de l'aide"; un sujet de la plus haute pertinence pour nos économies. Il analyse les composantes et les déterminants de la bonne gouvernance, ainsi que sa relation avec des concepts étroitement liés tels que la qualité institutionnelle et, surtout, les idées et les preuves créées sur la relation entre bonne gouvernance et efficacité de l'aide au développement. En fin, il conclut qu'il n'y a pas de consensus général sur l'efficacité de l'aide dans la promotion de la croissance économique, et qu'il y a à la fois des défenseurs et des détracteurs de cette idée. D'une manière réfléchie, elle laisse ouverte la voie à la vérification empirique des effets réels de l'aide économique et des conditions dans les quelles de meilleurs résultats seraient possibles pour le bénéfice de larges masses de la population. Nous clôturons ce numéro avec deux sections : la première, traditionnelle sur les thèmes de l›administration en tant que discipline structurellement intégrée à l'économie, la comptabilité et lafinance, et où deux articles sont développés: le premier d'entre eux estintitulé "Co-création et lesnouveaux défis de création de valeur aux quels les organisations font face. Ce sujet est d›actualité et marque une tendance de la théorie administrative moderne, qui s›articule autour de nouvelles approches de la création de valeur. Il est conclu que, pour générer une valeur durable dans lesorganisations, les actions des gestionnaires doivent être axées sur la création de valeur conjointe avec leurs clients et non sur l›objectif exclusif d'augmenter les ventes de leurs produits ou services habituellement conçus en interne et de façon fermée. Le deuxième article, intitulé "Modèle d'analyse de l'incidence du capital social sur le développement humain à Bogotá, D.C.", vise à identifier s›il existe un type de relation entre capital social et développement humain dans le contexte endogène de la ville de Bogotá. Cette fin, il est proposé demener une recherche descriptive, fondée sur une analyse de régression multiple, qui facilite la proposition d'un modèle qui détermine le niveau d'incidence du capital social dans le développement humain, à partir du calcul de l'indice de développement humain et de l'indice de capital social répartis en composantes du calcul intégral de l'indice de capital social, soit l'indice de capital cognitif, l'ICSE, l'indice de capital social structurel, l'ICSC et l'IRSCS, et de l'indice de représentation du capital social. Sur la base de ces calculs, on constate que l'ampleur et l'utilisation du capital social dans la ville sont inconnues, ce qui engendre la construction d'une société avec un haut niveau d'atomisation et un désintérêt pour les problèmes de citoyenneté. Pouvoir vérifier ces affirmations a une importance capitale pour l'adoption de politiques de développement social et humain à Bogotá, D.C., en tenant compte des différentes composantes analytiques qui ont été utilisées dans l'étude. Dans la dernière partie, consacrée à la gestion des connaissances, le sujet des brimades dues à l'orientation sexuelle chez les élèves de sexe masculin estanalysé pédagogiquement dans l'environnement de l'enseignement secondaire, qui cherche à contribuer à la prévention des comportements debrimades, en raison des effets que cela a sur le bien-être d'une population qui tend à se séparer de manière antidémocratique et qui fait déjà partie des modèles éducatifs qui doivent être orientés vers la formation des valeurs. En tant que pédagogues, nous croyons que l'éducation peut et doit créer des environnements de respect et de valorisation de la différence, où chacun peut y accéder, indépendamment de son orientation sexuelle, de son sexe ou d'autres constructions sociales ou culturelles. L'ensemble des huit articles que nous mettons à la disposition de la communauté académique, organisés en sections orientées selon les principes qui sous-tendent la philosophie scientifique et la politique éditoriale de la revue, s'inscrit dans un nouvel effort qui, nous en sommes sûrs, contribuera à renforcer le développement scientifique et technologique de nos disciplines dans un environnement qui nous est propre mais qui dialogue avec l'universalité du savoir à un niveau global et qui deviendra progressivement les grands piliers de notre développement humain et social. ; A revista Critério Livre tem desempenhado um importante papel em promover a divulgação científica como um mecanismo fundamental nos processos de transformação de nossas nações latino-americanas para sociedades melhor formadas, com um equilíbrio saudável entre o necessário crescimento da produção de bens tangíveis e intangíveis e uma mais justa distribuição da riqueza, em benefício de todas as suas populações, que buscam erradicar a pobreza, que é o maior flagelo que a humanidade ainda não conseguiu superar. Pelo exposto, nos baseamos em critérios do desenvolvimento da ciência que contribuam para esses ideais, escolhendo então os melhores artigos, submetidos a rigorosos processos de avaliação por renomados pesquisadores nacionais e internacionais, que também contribuíram para elevar a qualidade científica dos mesmos através de seus atinadas observações,e também a desenvolver o pensamento científico e a utilização do melhorestilo para sua comunicação, enriquecendo o pensamento científico social em nossos países. Podemos resumir esses princípios assim: o desenvolvimento da ciência e da tecnologia como expressão de sistemas valorativos e socioculturais dados, o desenvolvimento da ciência a serviço da transformação produtiva em benefício da sociedade, a conscientização sobre o papel da ciência e da tecnologia na definição das relações de poder nos níveis nacional e internacional e sua inserção nas políticas de desenvolvimento, a utilização da ciência e da inovação tecnológica como instrumentos de autonomia, a abertura a abordagens inovadoras na consolidação da ciencia social, a liberdade do pensamento crítico em todos os níveis da gestão do conhecimento científico, entre outros. Neste sentido, tentamos fortalecer a análise e o desenvolvimento crítico das ciências econômicas, administrativas, financeiras e contábeis, abrindo um espaço para a discussão e desenvolvimento da epistemologia de estas ciências sociais, que cada vez mais torna-se o eixo central de nossa revista. A presente edição inclui dois itens que fazem parte desta discussão epistemológica: no primeiro deles, o pesquisador José J. Ortiz B. planta um dilema que acompanha o desenvolvimento da ciência contábil, "A crise da representação contábil: problemas da ciência social ou política do poder?", em que busca esclarecer os fatores que originam a problemática da representação contábil a partir de uma reflexão sobre os fundamentos teóricos que sustentam este importante tema e os referentes empíricos que mostram esta problemática, fatores que foram vistos como um obstáculo epistémico na consolidação dessa jovem ciência e o que o autor pretende contribuir para seu esclarecimento epistemológico e a proposta de alternativas de solução, que propõe para discussão com a comunidade científica com uma abordagem interdisciplinar e a partir do paradigma da complexidade. No segundo artigo, o profesor Jean Paul Sarrazin levanta uma interessante dissertação sobre "Religião: nós sabemos do que estamos falando? Análise da viabilidade de uma categoria analítica para as ciências sociais". O objetivo desta revisão foi encontrar uma categoria analítica, precisa, clara e suficientemente ampla para estudar empiricamente a vasta gama de fenômenos sócio-culturais que podem ser ou foram considerados como "religiosos". Conclui que, a pesar da ausência de uma categoria analítica unificada, alguns dos elementos mais destacados nas diferentes definições podem constituir, em si mesmos, categorias analíticas úteis para a investigação empírica. Pode-se deducir que esta seção tem sido fiel aos princípios que expusemos no início deste editorial, e que esperamos que continue transformando em uma tribuna aberta para o desenvolvimento científico de nossas disciplinas. Uma segunda seção, dedicada à contabilidade e as finanças, define temáticas que se tornaram de interesse substancial devido ao forte desenvolvimento teórico que atingiram essas disciplinas, chegando a uma fase em que as disputas dos paradigmas que sustentam várias abordagens foram decantado e é nesse terreno onde surgem contribuições que consolidam os importantes esquemas teóricos ou que, por outro lado, descartam hipótese que permitem depurar sistemas que, à maneira das camadas duma cebola, serão agrupadas por níveis, o que contribui para a consolidação das ciências sociais. Nesta seção encontramos dois importantes artigos orientados sob desta filosofia: o primeiro analisa os efeitos que sobre a informação contabilística das empresas públicas do setor elétrico colombiano teve a implementação da Resolução 743 de 2013, relativa à adopção de Normas Internacionais de Informação Financeira (NIIF) para algumas empresas públicas. Este tópico é um dos aplicativos de importantes avanços do desenvolvimento da teoria contábil para a economia financierista, que apesar disso não consegue establecer sólidas raízes para as condições dos países em desenvolvimento, como o comprova este artigo que encontra que as transformações assumidas são o resultado de uma mudança de modelo econômico, organizacional, onde, mais que atender o modelo de regulação internacional, responde a um processo de concentração de ativos estratégicos por parte de atores que têm a capacidade de capturar a regulação, demonstrando que a abordagem interdisciplinar é um campo fértil para explicar de uma maneira melhor a realidade destes países no ambiente globalizador que caracteriza a economía atual de tais países. O segundo artigo, sobre "o Impacto do autofinanciamento sobre a inovação das micro, pequenas e médias empresas colombianas", permite aprofundar um aspecto que não tem sido explicitamente estudado e que se situa na fronteira entre a economia, as finanças e a administração, dirigido especialmente a um setor importante da economia dos países em desenvolvimento, as empresas Mipymes, que apesar de suas grandes contribuições para o bem-estar económico da população, ao ocupar 80% da mesma em cada um destes países, não lhe foi dedicado um esforço intelectual por parte dos nossos investigadores, desaprovechando um espaço potencial de desenvolvimento da autonomia que permite desbrozar o caminho do verdadeiro desenvolvimento sócio-econômico de nossa região. Os resultados descritivos mostram que as Mipymes colombianas utilizam prioritariamente os recursos próprios para os investimentos, e os resultados inferenciales obtidos através de regressões lineares indicam que o financiamento interno influencia positiva e significativamente na inovação global, assim como a de seus produtos/serviços, processos produtivos e de gestão. Esta é uma variável de importância fundamental para ser envolvida nas políticas de desenvolvimento para a indústria latino-americana e que muito pouco se leva em consideração até agora, no que se tem denominado a economía laranja, que países como a Colômbia querem promover. A realidade é que os recursos internos ou próprios continuam sendo a principal fonte de financiamento para os projectos de investimento destas empresas, e se bem que isso é coerente com os postulados da teoria da hierarquia financeira, tudo parece indicar que as razões são principalmente as barreiras que encontram para acessar o mercado financeiro externo. A nossa seguinte secção, dedicada à disciplina económica, mostra-nos um importante artigo focado à análise da relação entre "Bom governo e eficácia da ajuda ao desenvolvimento", tema de altísima pertinência para as nossas economias. O artigo propõe-se aprofundar na origem e as mudanças experimentadas pela noção de bom governo; analisa os constituintes e determinantes do mesmo, bem como a sua relação com conceitos próximos como a qualidade institucional, e sobretudo, as ideias e a evidência criada sobre as relações entre o bom governo e a efetividade da ajuda ao desenvolvimento. Finalmente chega à conclusão de que não existe um consenso geral quanto a que a ajuda seja eficaz para promover o crescimento económico, e existem tanto defensores como detratores desta ideia. De maneira reflexiva deixa aberto o caminho para verificar empiricamente os verdadeiros efeitos da ajuda económica e as condições baixo as quais seriam possíveis uns melhores resultados em benefício de grandes massas da população. Fechamos esta edição com duas secções: a primeira, tradicional sobre temas de administração como disciplina que se integra estruturalmente com a económica, a contável e financeira, e onde se desenvolvem dois artigos: o primeiro destes se titula "A co-criação e os novos reptos de geração de valor que enfrentam as organizações". Esta temática é de grande atualidade e marca uma tendência na moderna teoria administrativa, que está a girar sobre as novas focagens da geração de valor. Conclui-se que, para gerar um valor sustentado nas organizações, o foco das ações dos gestores deve ser a criação de valor conjunta com os seus clientes e não a exclusiva meta de aumentar as vendas dos seus produtos ou serviços habitualmente desenhados de maneira interna e fechada. O segundo artigo, baixo o título "Modelo para analisar a incidência do capital social no desenvolvimento humano em Bogotá, D.C.", centra-se em identificar se existe um tipo de relação entre o capital social e o desenvolvimento humano no contexto endógeno da cidade de Bogotá. Para tal fim, propõe-se fazer uma investigação descritiva, baseada em análise de regressão múltipla, que facilita a proposição de um modelo que determina o nível de incidência do capital social no desenvolvimento humano, partindo do cálculo do Índice de desenvolvimento humano e do Índice de capital social decomposto em índice de capital cognitivo, ICSC, índice de capital social estrutural, ICSE, Índice de representação social do capital social, IRSCS, componentes do cálculo integral do índice de capital social. Com base nesses cálculos chega-se a comprovar que na cidade se desconhecem o alcance e o uso do capital social, o que gera construir uma sociedade com alto nível de atomização e desinteresse pelos problemas da cidadania. Poder comprovar estes asertos é de soma importância para adotar políticas de desenvolvimento social e humano no D.C., atendendo os diferentes componentes analíticos que se utilizaram no estudo. Na última secção, dedicada à gestão do conhecimento, analisa-se pedagógicamente o tema do bullying por orientação sexual entre estudantes masculinos no ambiente da educação média, que procura contribuir à prevenção de comportamentos de bullying, pelos efeitos que isso tem no bem-estar de uma população que tende a segregarse de maneira antidemocrática e que já faz parte dos modelos educativos que devem orientar à formação de valores. Como pedagogos, achamos que a educação pode e deve criar ambientes de respeito e valoração da diferença, em onde todos possam aceder a ela, sem importar a orientação sexual, o género ou outras construções sociais ou culturais. O conjunto dos oito artigos que pomos ao dispor da comunidade académica, organizados nas secções orientadas segundo os princípios que fundamentam a filosofia científica e a política editorial da revista, se configura em um novo esforço que estamos seguros contribuirá ao fortalecimiento do desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico das nossas disciplinas em um meio que nos é próprio, mas que dialoga com a universalidade do conhecimento a nível global, e que progressivamente constituir-se-ão nos grandes pilares do nosso desenvolvimento humano e social.
Transcript of an oral history interview with General Gordon R. Sullivan, conducted by Sarah Yahm at the Sullivan Museum and History Center on 23 April 2015, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project. Gordon Sullivan was a member of the Norwich University Class of 1959. After graduating from Norwich University, he served in a variety of Army command and staff assignments in the United States, Germany, Korea and Vietnam. He became Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army on 21 June 1991. The Sullivan Museum and History Center at Norwich University was named in his honor. Topics of interest within the oral history include General Sullivan's Army career as well as his legacy, philosophy, and activities after his retirement from the U.S. Army. ; 1 Gordon Sullivan, NU 1959, Oral History Interview April 23, 2015 Interviewed by Sarah Yahm GORDON SULLIVAN: I have often talked -- I talk a lot to troops and groups and so forth and so on and I'm very quick to tell them that I have been in and around the United States Army since 1955 in one form or another, either as a cadet at Norwich when I took my oath in the summer -- late summer of 1955 -- and obviously as a commissioned officer in the United States Army since 1959, 1995. Then, in my retired life, other than a two-year period when I was doing something in the commercial sector which I frankly didn't -- it wasn't for me. I knew it wasn't for me. I did okay at it but I didn't want to continue doing it. The job was open as the president of the Association of the United States Army, which is the Army's professional association, designed to tell the story of land power and the story of the Army and to do whatever we could to help soldiers and their families. So, in reality, I've spent my adult life in or around the United States Army. Since I retired, in addition to the association and the United States Army, I've done a couple of things which, to me, fit with the way I wanted to live my life. One was to create with three other retired officers an organization known as the Marshall Legacy Institute, Marshall being General George C. Marshall, former Secretary of State who, in 1948, created the Marshall Plan; he and others who worked for him. The essential nature of the Marshall Plan was to help war-torn nations recover in a collaborative way, not in a Big Brother way where we went in and did all the work and they stood by and watched us. It was where we collaborated with them and enabled them to help themselves. So, by happenstance, I was asked, since I had been the chief of staff of the Army to help commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the Marshall Plan. I found out that what they wanted was celebratory activities; a cocktail party and so forth and so on, which didn't interest me. So, I found some kindred spirits and we created the Marshall Legacy Institute, which has been around since 1997, and we have over 200 mine detection dogs out around the world. We have raised the money. The State Department has supported us, and these dogs are in some of the worst places in the world, enabling others to take landmines, a silent killer, out of the ground, and to provide safe living and a way of being; food, commerce, and so forth in war-torn countries such as in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, Iraq, African countries like Angola, one of the most mine-infested countries in the world, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, so forth and so on. We have -- those dogs have cleared, along with their indigenous handlers, millions and millions of square you-name-it -- square kilometers or yards or whatever, whatever metric you want, ground for people to live safely. I view that as sort of right up along with everything else I did when I was in uniform. It's the same kind of a business, making the world safe for others to live, save lives, not take lives, save lives. As a part of -- for some reason, let's put it this way. Sometimes in life, things happen that you really don't -- you didn't expect and so forth. I was asked to be a part of a study group in 2006. The study group was on -- conducted by CNA. That's otherwise known in a previous life as the Center for Naval Analysis. Well, I'm an Army general and it was kind of odd to be asked to do something 2 with the CNA but I was asked to do it and I did. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was to look at the national security implications of global climate change. Well, the implications of global climate change, no matter how you feel about it, the trends of anything related to climate are going in the wrong direction; not the specifics. If you argue point data, there is always someone who has better data or different data. So, that becomes very contentious. All right, I think it was twelve retired admirals and generals were on this study group and by some fluke, I guess, I became the chairman of this group. We published a study in '07 which said that climate change is a national security threat or presents a national security threat to the United States of America. Failed and failing states, whether they failed because of drought or political reasons or why they failed, become like a Petri dish within which extremist groups grow, and that goes from Somalia to the Sudan and you name it; Syria and so forth. Syria was later but the ones we were dealing with at the time were mainly in the Middle East and Africa and we could see it. So, we published that study and it got some attention. Actually, we, within reason, steered away from the maelstrom of political stuff because we were the least likely people to say it. All of us were mostly operators. Now, we had one astronaut, a naval officer, and one of them was a nuclear -- you know, you would expect the Navy because of the nuclear-powered submarines and ships and so forth. So, they were scientists, really, and they had access to data and they knew about the phenomenon. But, the rest of us were either fighter pilots or I'm a ground combat guy or Marine -- Marines; you know, just people with a lot of experience in international stuff and defense and security. So, anyway, that study was replicated in '14 and said, "Well, this is what we said in '07. It's worse." Things got worse, and that's what we said; that not only was it bad then, but it's worse today. Obviously, we had Syria and various other garden spots on the table; Syria, Libya, on and on and on. Arab Spring was caused, in many places, since -- Arab Spring, what became known as Arab Spring, was caused by drought or one of the causes was drought in Russia, which -- and the Russians stopped exporting wheat because they had to -- they had a shortage of wheat so they stopped exporting it. That caused ripples throughout North Africa and Mesopotamia, specifically, Syria. SARAH YAHM: So, I have a couple questions for you, and I do want to -- you know, I feel like we're talking now for a little bit and I do want to sit down when I have more time to prepare and really give a couple hours. GS: I want you to do that. What I'm telling you is I put it all together and my time here at Norwich here as the chairman and it's all a piece. SY: Well, that's what I sense is that you felt this urgency to come in today. GS: I want you to know that in case -- I'm now 77, almost 78. I want to take advantage of you being here, me meeting you, so that you know how I really feel about it. SY: So, yeah, so you feel this urgency about your legacy. So, what -- so, you're telling me something now that it seems like you're afraid isn't in the historical record or won't be in the historical record. GS: It's not. SY: So, is it the idea that this global warming work, this landmine work, that is all part and parcel -- GS: That's all a part and parcel of how I view my life.3 SY: OK, and so you see this linear thread that goes through your life. GS: Yes. SY: So, if you were to articulate the values of that linear thread, how would you articulate it? GS: I think -- I don't know it. I think that when I sit here today, this morning I was talking about -- I was introducing these 200 things that you don't know about Norwich, and I said to myself, well, there's a lot I don't know about Norwich but I know about myself. I don't think I'm unique, by the way, in the history of Norwich. I think I'm just one of the people who went here. So, you have this museum which, you know, is -- I find this hard to say, but, okay, there's this museum here, and you've got some of my stuff. It doesn't -- it's hard -- yeah, how do -- what do I think? How do -- there's some stuff out there. There's nobody but me who could tell you why I think some of those artifacts tell the story. SY: No, you need to interpret the story of your life. GS: Yeah, I need to interpret it. SY: You need to interpret it. GS: It's me. I don't think -- SY: Absolutely. GS: I don't think -- I can go to things out there. I can show you one panel that shows me as a young man struggling to figure out who I am and Norwich, my buddies, this institution enabled me to mature and they didn't throw me out, because I was, struggling. I don't mean that in a -- I was struggling to figure out how I would fit in the world, and I don't think I'm unique and Norwich helped me do that. Okay? SY: Absolutely. GS: So, on the same panel, it goes from me being, you know, this guy I was who was whatever. I'm not apologizing for any of it because I don't have anything to apologize for. But, I can tell you it went from somebody who was immature to the chief of staff of the Army with the woman I was married to for 49 years standing beside me when I became the chief of staff in the Army. I will tell you, I'd do it all the same way and marry the same woman. SY: I think your vulnerability matters, and I think that's something that needs to go in the record, too -- the confusion of being a 20-year old, right? GS: Yeah, the confusion of being a 20-year old and now 70 -- in my late seventies. I'm reasonably healthy but I know my own -- I mean, I'm human. I've figured it out obviously since my wife essentially died, you know. I mean, well, she did die. I'm also struggling. I'm not struggling with it. I think I've accommodated. I understand it all but I know, okay, that's the way it is, and I want you to know it. SY: Yeah, and you're evaluating. You're in a moment in your life of evaluation, right? GS: Yeah, right. What did I do? What did I do with my life? SY: Yeah, and that has to be richer than a list of accomplishments, right? GS: It's not the accomplishments. It's what do you -- how does it fit? I think I am occupying a very large part of the space there, and there are many people like me and I know that, and they should be here, too. SY: Yeah, and we're actually -- I mean, we are collecting their voices, but maybe the key is to figure out how you're representative of a moment.4 GS: Yeah, whatever. You're the expert. I'm just here, and I don't think for one minute -- I have a hard time telling people. I talk about this as 'the museum.' SY: Not the 'Sullivan Museum.' GS: No, no, I don't say that. I have never said it. SY: So, we'll sit down and we'll talk and we'll have you curate the story of your life, you know, and that will help enrich our museum. I also think -- I mean, you oversaw a messy century, you know. The second half of the 20th century was a messy century, right? GS: Well, yeah, here's the cycle, though. I just came back from Germany. I was in the headquarters of the United States Army Europe. I went to Europe for the first time in 1965, 50 years ago, when the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, was right up against the border. I went up into a part of Germany. I was about 40 miles from the inner German border in a tank battalion. I later commanded a tank brigade -- an armored brigade -- in the same division, the largest brigade in the US Army at the time; five maneuver battalions, three tank battalions, two mechanized infantry battalions, about 5000 men and women. There were some women. The Cold War -- so the Cold War is over. I go 50 years later. Twenty years ago, Russia was sort of off the screen militarily. So, I'm sitting in the room and I look out at this expanse of Europe and in Eastern Ukraine, there's this major penetration, this major red thrust. What goes around comes around. In my life, I have gone from an officer who spent twelve and a half years in Germany during the Cold War, became the chief of staff in the Army. I saw the Wall come down and now this, where the Russians are back moving again. I mean, it's -- what goes around comes around, and I'm seeing the nation-state, the concept of nation-states being questioned. Will the Middle East unravel so that it's just tribes? This is -- I mean, this has been in my lifetime, and I've been a part of it, in a sense. SY: No, in a very concrete sense. Does it lead you to despair? Does it lead you to -- GS: No, it doesn't lead me to despair. It leads me to understand that the cycles of history have a way of repeating themselves and it's the human interaction. That's missteps. Did we handle it right? Did we appreciate how -- well, how Russia would perceive what happened when the Cold War ended. How would the Russian people perceive it? Clearly, as an amateur looking at it, people say, "Well, Russia needs --." Russia has needs like any country, and they have always wanted to have the near abroad as a buffer. So, let's say that's real. Let's say that's true for the sake of argument. Then, now we have a nationalist. That's what he is. Putin is a nationalist and he has turned the switch. They sign up politically. They sign up. SY: Yeah, they always do. GS: They always do. They always have, and they are again, and here it is. So, look, that doesn't -- I don't think I'm the first Norwich grad to figure that out. I don't -- I wouldn't -- but it's been a part of my life, and I am what I am. What I am, for better or worse, is a soldier. I'm just a soldier that's retired. SY: Yeah. Could you talk a little about the connection -- so, you know, most of your life was concrete soldiering, right? GS: Yes, real soldiering. SY: Real soldiering. Now, you're talking about specifically this landmine work. How do you see the two as connected, because in one part of your life, you were in charge of --5 GS: Putting landmines in the ground. SY: Yes. GS: Right, and I wasn't -- I am a defender of that because it protects soldiers and so forth and so on because they do protect soldiers. It's one of these strange weapons. They protect soldiers and they kill soldiers. OK, so, in 1997, when I and three combat arms colonels -- retired colonels -- created this thing, this entity, we wanted to do something to help others and it was the mines. Get the mines out of the ground. Everybody was talking mines are bad but they were talking about it. Mines are bad, right? Got it. What are you going to do about it? We wanted to do something about it. It wasn't to philosophize. It was to take them out of the ground, help other people take them out of the ground; like to make things -- make something happen, action-oriented. That's more important to me than all the great ideas of the world. Yeah, global hunger -- I've got it. You know, make the world mine-free. Well, okay, if you want to take mines out of the ground, you can. We've actually, along with others -- there are other ways to take mines out of the ground mechanically and that's a lot of what Princess Diana was involved with -- Princess Diana was involved with and now Harry -- Prince -- SY: Yeah, the royal British family, yeah. GS: So, anyway, we -- so that's -- to me, that fits, okay? SY: Yeah, it's not something -- GS: Now, whether anybody else thinks it fits or not, I don't know, but to me it does. SY: But, to you, it doesn't seem like a contradiction to you? GS: It's not a contradiction to me. SY: Could you talk more about that? GS: Why? What? SY: Well, because I'm curious about getting at your sort of philosophy and understanding so that it does seem part and parcel of the same work. GS: It seems part and parcel of the same work because the country says -- I don't know where we are on the treaty, whether -- the chiefs have said, of which I was one; you know, in my former life, I was one of the Joint Chiefs, a member of the Joint Chiefs. We're protecting South Korea. We're partners with the South Koreans -- Republic of Korea -- and the UN protecting South Korea. Part of that defense involves the demilitarized zone, which is heavily mined. At certain points in Afghanistan and Iraq, I would suspect that there are mines which are -- you can turn them on and off. That type of protection is used, not much but it is periodically. It's there. It's available if they want to use them. I don't view that as much of a contradiction. These things are, as I say, you turn them on and you turn them off. You put them back in your rucksack and unless somebody hits one with a round or something, they're not going to detonate. SY: Yeah, they're safer. GS: Safer. SY: They're not going to get women and children 20 years later. GS: No. That's not -- no, that's not going to happen. SY: You know -- GS: So, anyway, I guess I'm a theory to practice guy. Okay, I've got the theory. I've got the concept and, okay, let's do something about it then.6 SY: That's the thread that goes through your life. GS: That's the thread for me. Let's do something about it. So, global climate change -- national security issue. I came up here and talked about that. You have the speech that I gave down here, and I gave another one at the Society of American Military Engineers, which -- a national security issue for the United States of America is -- and an economic issue and a health issue is we're running out of water -- fresh water -- fresh, potable water. Now, the Corps of Engineers, which US Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for a lot of that in some sense. So, I represent -- I'm trying to tell the Army story, right? It's my job -- Association of the United States Army. The Corps of Engineers is a part of it. The Army Medical Department -- just the researchers and medical researchers just discovered a vaccine which prevents Ebola. Walter Reed was an Army officer. So, we -- Lewis and Clark were Army people. SY: Do you remember, you know, the kid you were at Norwich -- the 20-year old kid -- and the world you lived in then? GS: Yes. SY: What do you think he would have thought of this particular world we're in now, of this US, of this globe? GS: Well, there's some that wouldn't have surprised him, given that I was a history major. I was quoted in the Boston Globe in 1989. I was giving a talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the Sonesta. I was at a conference. I was a three-star at the time. I was the chief of operations in the United States Army and before I got up to speak -- I was to speak on doctrine, Army doctrine -- I was handed a note that said, "Heads up. The Wall just came down and people are streaming and streaming into Berlin -- West Berlin." The heads-up was that the press was in the room. So, anyway, I gave my -- whatever I was going to say. The first question I was asked was, "The Berlin Wall just opened. What do you think?" I gave an honest answer. SY: What did you think? GS: I said, "I don't know what I don't know." I didn't. I mean, I was -- you know, I was obviously pleased. That was apparent, but in the back of my mind, I didn't -- you couldn't -- I couldn't predict it. SY: You couldn't -- GS: I couldn't then -- I couldn't predict it and I wasn't going to. SY: Your whole life had been a Cold War world. GS: Yes, I understand that, and I couldn't -- I didn't know what it would mean. Well, what it meant was genocide in the Balkans. What it has meant is a lot of things that aren't good. The whole world that we knew is over time coming apart, like the nation-state. Remember what I said earlier here? Will the nation-state, which was created by -- at the end of World War I -- will those boundaries hold in the Middle East? What about the Balkans? What about the Baltic nations? It's all a part. My uncertainty then -- it's all -- it's still playing out. What's the role of the United States of America? I have no idea. SY: What do you think it should be? GS: Well, I think everybody expects the United States of America to be what it has been since the end of World War II, like the United States of America, the leader; in some sense, the leader. I think we're struggling with that. Are we? Do we really want to be the leader? 7 What about a world where the United States is a reluctant leader? What kind of a world is that? I don't know. That's beyond me. All I know is what I know. That, by the way, if you can figure that out, all I know is what I know or what I feel -- SY: Yeah. Did you have any moments when you had -- when you were talking about you feel gut reactions that really helped you out, that steered you in the right direction? GS: A lot of time, a lot of time. I suppose there is some type that you could say this guy is this type of person. I'm pretty good at reading people. I can read -- I think I am, anyway. That may be a conceit of mine, but I think I am, and I can -- I don't -- yeah, sometimes I go by feel. Sometimes, when I'm doing things, which is why I like the give and take in a meeting, why I need to hear, I want to hear from people. I like ideas. I like the dialog because I learn from it. SY: Yeah, we're thinking a lot about this citizen soldier idea, right, which means a lot of different things to different people but to some people it means having the courage to stand up for what you believe in in moments where it's scary. Can you think of moments like that in your life where you pushed back out of your gut and it was scary? GS: Yeah, well, when you go up to Capitol Hill and you tell people things that politically they don't agree with or if the senator comes from a coal-producing state and you're there telling him that, hey, this climate change is serious, and certainly, one of the causes is carbon, hydrocarbons, whatever, in the air, okay, now don't ask me how many parts per million but for some reason, it's warmer in the last 10 years, like 4 or 5 of the years have been the warmest in recorded history. Something is going on which is warming the planet up. Is that a part of it? Perhaps, probably. You know, he's going to come back -- he or she is going to come back at you and say, "Well, you're smoking dope but it's not. It happens all the time, right?" Well, yeah, but you've got a lot of trends that are going in the wrong direction. Okay, but at any rate, yeah, sure, you know. People said, "Well, we need -- the country needs a peace dividend," which is all well and good. Right after the Cold War, the country did need a peace dividend but at some point, you get so small -- the Army gets so small that you wind up fighting wars. You fight two wars and the strength of the Army -- active Army -- was such that you asked too much from too few and you wind up with soldiers who are psychologically damaged because the same men and women went back and forth and back and forth. You think that's popular to say that? I don't care. It's true. SY: Yeah, I mean, right. You spent a lot of time in Capitol Hill, obviously the most partisan place in the country and you served under -- you were chief of staff under a Republican and then a Democrat, right? GS: That's correct. SY: How did you navigate that partisan world? GS: You just -- well, you know, first of all, you don't -- you're not partisan. I'm not partisan. Nobody knows what I am and that's the way I like it. I'm my own person. I'm essentially an independent and I decide. Frankly, many people like me -- I didn't vote when I was a chief of staff and before. I just didn't vote. SY: Talk about that. GS: Well, I think that that's fine. I mean, I didn't vote. I could have voted but I elected not to because I'm nonpartisan. I'm serving the country. Now, I know people would say, 8 "Well, you know, it's your duty to vote." Yeah, but when I -- the more senior I became -- first of all, I was overseas 17 years out of 36. In spite of what everybody says, getting absentee ballots to some of the places I was -- give me a break. It's not going to happen. You know, all the paperwork; who are you? What do you mean? Who? It wasn't worth it. Then, the more senior I became, it just became -- to me, it didn't make any difference. I was not going to be known as a Democrat or a Republican or anything. I didn't want to be known as anything other than as a soldier. But, I understand very clearly. There is a distinction between citizen soldier and soldier citizen. I always felt I was a citizen first. SY: What's that distinction? GS: Well, the distinction to me was that when I was retired that it was not -- I knew -- I always knew that I would leave the Army some day and that I would do something. Well, it just so happens so when it came, it came. I mean, I knew I was so I got a job. It just so happens that the job I ultimately have is related to the Army. SY: When you were here at Norwich and you were struggling just like any kid struggles, what were you struggling with? What were your ambitions? What were your visions? GS: I didn't know. I didn't know. I told somebody last night that, you know, one of my friends -- he's still a close friend of mine; like I talk to him once a week, anyway. He said to me -- I don't know whether I was a junior or a senior, but he said, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "Well, maybe," I think I answered him, "Well, maybe, I'll go in the Army," or maybe at that time I was writing a column for the newspaper for -- SY: The Guidon. GS: -- the Guidon. Sully's -- it was called Sully's Scratchings. I said, "Maybe, I'll get into the newspaper business or something, become a columnist or whatever." I mean, that seemed like a good idea at the time, you know. Whether I could have done it or not, I don't know but I thought it. Well, as it turned out, you know, as it turned out, it turned out. I found what I really liked. SY: When was the moment that you realized you had this passion? GS: In summer camp -- ROTC summer camp. SY: What -- GS: Went to Fort Knox. Well, I was very -- I found it very attractive what -- the kind of people I met there, the noncommissioned officers who were teaching the courses. Officers were sort of distant to cadets. It was the NCOs and I found that relationship in keeping with what I had done during the summer, working. I worked construction jobs and so forth and so on. I liked that kind of stuff, being outside and most of them were men who were doing labor and building things and making things. So, I think I found that attractive. SY: It seemed honest to you? GS: Well, it was honest. Yeah, it was an honest way of making a living, you know, but I knew I didn't want to do it for the rest of my life but -- and I liked that relationship. So, anyway, one thing led to another and I became a commissioned officer and I didn't want to stay a reservist because I thought that being a reservist was -- I mean, I didn't have anything against being a reserve officer but it was just I wanted to be a part of the -- in it, committed to being a soldier. Immediately upon becoming a regular Army officer, I was sent to Korea, and that's where I really, really knew that I was -- had chosen correctly.9 SY: Was there a moment when you knew it? GS: Well, I knew it as soon as I got there because it was -- first of all, the country, at that time -- it was in June of 1961. I had been at Fort Hood for a while but that was sort of kind of getting my feet on the ground. It was very, very under-resourced units and there was not -- it was not fulfilling at all. When I arrived in Korea, we were full up. We were up close to the DMZ. It was real soldiering, and that's where I learned how much I liked it. SY: Did you also learn that you were good at it? Was there a moment when you were like, oh, hey, I'm good at this? GS: No. I felt I was -- probably felt at that time I was a good platoon leader and company commander and I had a staff job for a while. Then, I volunteered to go to Vietnam and you can see a picture of me in that passport I gave yesterday. So, I went from Korea to Vietnam. Some people say, "Well, you know, why?" I said, "Because that's what I thought soldiers did." The chief of staff of the Army asked for volunteers and I thought that's what you do. You volunteer to go to war. That's what I was -- a professional soldier. So, I did that for 18 months and then I came back home. I didn't meet my wife. I knew my wife. I had gone to grammar --I'd gone -- I knew her. We grew up in the same town so I knew who she was as a kid. Then, we were in the same junior high school class. You know, like I'd known her forever. I knew her forever. Then, I went to public school, public high school. I blew that. My mother said, "This is not going to work out," so I wound up at what we called then a country day school -- a private school but not a live-in school. Gay was my classmate in summer school because she couldn't do math either and neither could I so I had to take a summer course. SY: Did you need more structure? Is that what happened with you and public school? GS: Yeah, it's probably the same thing. I mean, it was the same thing that you saw here. I had -- I'm the kind of guy that they would say, "Well, he has lots of talent but he doesn't apply himself because he's with his buddies and doing other things while he should be studying or something else." SY: You were like that at Norwich, too? GS: The same thing. It was the same thing. SY: What were you doing? GS: Well, I was working in the mess hall, selling sandwiches at night to make a couple of bucks for my buddy, actually, my buddy who I memorialized a building for him last week. I was a eulogist at his funeral. One of the things that's sort of fallen to me, you know, whatever, it's the sad kind of stuff is being the eulogist at two -- Jack (Dirgins?) who I came up here as a senior in high school when we both decided to come here. I went to high school with him and Norwich with him, and I'm the godfather of one of his children and I buried him. That's -- you know, that's hard duty -- SY: Yeah, it is. GS: -- because they're my buddies. I also -- my wife told me the day she died -- she said -- she gave me instructions. She said, "I want you to speak at my funeral service, not as an army general, as my husband." SY: Those are good instructions. GS: That's different. I said, "Are you sure?" She said, "I'm very sure." SY: What did she mean?10 GS: She meant she didn't want me to give some Army kind of speech. She wanted me to tell them what kind of a person she was. SY: She wanted you to be vulnerable. GS: Yeah, well, sure, sure. SY: It sounds like she was a good counterbalance. GS: She was a great counterbalance and a huge part of my life. SY: Yeah, 49 years? GS: Forty-nine years. One night she told me -- I was -- oh, I had something going on professionally and so forth and she was -- she said, "Look," we were in the kitchen, just the two of us. I think all the kids had gone by then. She said, "Look, I'm going to bed. I'm tired of listening to you, you know, sort of fuming around and stumbling around." She said, "Just remember this -- suck it up. It's a test." That was it. "Suck it up. It's a test," and it was and she was right, and how I handled it was a test and it all worked out. When I woke up the morning of her funeral and I had been through about eight drafts of what I was going to say, I had papers and notes all over the place. I laid in bed and I said to myself, "What would Gay have said?" She would have said, "Suck it up. It's a test." SY: That's beautiful. GS: Life's a test. I don't know whether I passed or not. It's a test. SY: Do you have doubts? GS: I have no doubts. That's false modesty. That's really not me. SY: So, you do think you passed. GS: I passed. (laughter) I passed. SY: All right! GS: OK? SY: OK. GS: I don't want Norwich -- anybody at Norwich University to think I think I failed. SY: Yeah. What are you proudest of? GS: I'm proud to say I'm a Norwich University graduate. I'm proud to say I was an American soldier and I don't care who knows it. SY: Proud of being a good husband? GS: I'm proud of being a good husband, and a good father, and a good grandfather. I'm proud of all of it. Was I as good a father as I could have been? Probably not. SY: Is anyone? GS: I don't know. I'm sure everybody has their doubts about that. Being a parent never ends -- never ends -- and being a grandfather is a joy. SY: Did you have to be away from them a lot? GS: Well, my children, I did, yes. My wife and I actually raised one of our grandchildren and that was the joy, extra joy, in our life. He's now a junior in college and doing pretty good. He's a good boy, thanks to his grandmother and me to some extent. Anyway, so that's what I wanted you to know, okay? SY: OK.11 GS: Now, I could show you some things in there which are more meaningful than others to tell that story but personally, frankly, I don't think that story holds. I don't think that what's in there -- I'm not arguing for any more space. You could probably do less and do the same thing. You've got some stuff. I mean, I can tell stories about almost everything you've got and how it all fits. SY: But, it sounds like, yeah, you have a slightly different narrative, so what -- GS: I have a different narrative than what a historian would pick out. SY: So, what would your narrative be? GS: Well, I think my narrative would be I can take you right in there right now and start -- and show you stuff that supports what I just told you. SY: All right. Do you want me to take the microphone and we can go in there? END OF AUDIO FILE
Not Available ; Strategies for Doubling Farmers' Income in Rainfed Regions of the Country Rainfed agriculture with nearly 53 per cent of the cultivated area contributes to 40 per cent of country's food production. Nearly 83% of the area under pulses, 85% of the area under coarse cereals, 70% of the area under oilseeds and 42% of the area under rice is rainfed. Rainfed regions are home to about 40% of the human and 60% of the livestock population and the performance of rainfed agriculture is critical to achieve and sustain higher growth in agriculture, enhance incomes and improve livelihoods. The productivity of several rainfed crops is around 1 t/ha and the adoption and diffusion of key rainfed technologies is still low resulting in large yield gaps between research stations and farmers' fields. Decline in the size of the holdings, continuous and unabated land degradation, widespread nutrient deficiencies, increasing climatic variability and climate change poses new challenges in the form of deficit rainfall, droughts and floods impacting the productivity and profitability. Besides, large livestock population inhabiting the rainfed regions require nutrient rich fodder and the demand and supply of fodder is widening. By 2025, the deficits will be to the tune of 65% in case of green fodder and 25% in case of dry fodder. The real incomes of the farmers are declining due to growing labour and input costs. In order to achieve doubling of farmers' income, besides meeting food and nutritional security of the growing population, enhancing the productivity of crops as well as an accelerated growth of livestock, fishery and horticulture sub-sectors will be required in rainfed areas. The short-term strategy would be deployment of location specific proven rainfed technologies depending on the resource endowments for bridging the yield gaps, cropping intensification in medium to high rainfall regions with appropriate water harvesting and efficient use, diversification of agriculture at farm level. Emphasis on strengthening of the farming system and enhancing income from livestock component, focus on market intelligence and dissemination of market information is key for enhancing income at farm. Upscaling of climate resilient integrated farming system modules with diversifying enterprises with high farm income is an essential strategy particularly for small and marginal farmers. The medium term strategy would be on high value crops and commodities including horticulture, protected cultivation of high value crops, value chain development for rainfed crops, capacity building of communities on market intelligence, skill up-gradation towards value addition, cost minimization by way of establishment of farmers producers groups, and risk minimization by way of providing access to water and insurance. For long-term sustainable agriculture, building Dr. K. Sammi Reddy soil organic carbon and promotion of application of organic manures and crop residues with reduced tillage to improve soil health is needed. These strategies have to be implemented in a system mode in association with all the relevant stakeholders so as to establish scalable and evidence based models for doubling of income for various rainfed agro-ecosystems in the country. The action plan need to be implemented in a mission mode pattern by DAC&FW and State line departments by converging with ongoing Central (PMKSY,PMPKVY, MGNREGA, RKVY, PMFBY, etc) and State (eg. Krishi Bhagya program of Karnataka, PantaSanjivani of Andhra Pradesh, PoCRA of Maharashtra, drought management program of Odisha, TSMIP of Telangana etc) programs. This may require adequate fund allocation and manpower. The focus should also be on capacity building/skill development of all relevant stakeholders at various levels. ICAR-CRIDA along with network partners through AICRPDA, AICRPAM, NICRA and SAUs would contribute for implementing the mission mode program through technical backstopping. K. Sammi Reddy Director (Acting), CRIDA CRIDA - Newsletter 2 Research Highlights New Research Initiatives Development of Microbial Consortia for Drought Tolerance in Rainfed Crops Plant beneficial microorganisms have great potential to enhance the drought tolerance and crop productivity. They exhibit variety of plant growth promoting characteristics, which help in modifying the physiological responses to water scarcity and enhances the survival and growth of crop plants. Combination of microbial cultures potentially aid in multiple functions, which are not possible otherwise. Since the constituent individual species perform different functions such as nitrogen fixation, phosphorus solubilization, drought tolerance etc. which gives additive benefit for crop growth and development. At ICARCRIDA, a project entitled 'Development of microbial consortia for drought tolerance in rainfed crops' has been initiated in collaboration with AICRP on Dryland Agriculture to evaluate microbial consortia already developed at CRIDA under different rainfed regions of the country and to identify potential isolates/ consortia of microorganisms if any for drought tolerance and plant growth promotion from native soils. This study would help in characterizing the location specific effective consortia that could be used to improve plant growth and yield under drought stress conditions. District Action Plans for Drought Proofing ICAR-CRIDA has been given the responsibility to develop district action plans for drought proofing for 24 selected districts in 3 states i.e Karnataka (16), Andhra Pradesh (4), Rajasthan (4). The plans being developed in association with participation of district level officials of different line departments including agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, irrigation, groundwater and rural development and KVKs and state agriculture universities. A common template has been prepared by ICAR-CRIDA and circulated to all districts to collect the relevant information on all sectors covering climate information, crops, animals, water resources availability and prioritisation basis to identify the crops/horticulture systems/ livestock systems to assess the vulnerability and the possible interventions in terms of water management, watershed activities and crop based interventions for inclusion in developmental programmes. Capacity building workshops were organised for 3 states separately on the template and review meetings are also completed for district level officials. Co-4 fodder in the farmer's field Farmers FIRST Project Farmers FIRST project on "Farmer Centric Natural Resource Development for Socio- Economic Empowerment in Rainfed areas of Southern Telangana Region" being implemented since October, 2016 in Pudur mandal of Vikarabad district of Telangana State in a cluster of four villages namely: Thirumalapur, Rakamcharla, Pudugurthy and Devanoniguda comprising 400 households. Based on PRA and baseline survey information, an action plan and technology package for the area has been implemented. The technology package modules comprised of soil and water conservation, crops and cropping systems, horticulture, livestock, farm mechanization and socio-economic studies. Development of model irrigation system, vegetable nursery raising at farmers level utilizing portrays with cocopeat; seed and shade nets, backyard poultry; mineral supplementation; crop residue management by making total mixed ration and use of chaff cutter; ram lamb technology; fodder technology var.CO- 4 series were some of interventions carried out in the villages in participatory mode. CRIDA - Newsletter 3 Unreaped Yield Potentials of Major Rainfed Crops A Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed which can be hosted online. The DSS accommodates 15 rainfed crops. For a selected crop and district, the DSS identifies model district having agro-climatic features similar to target district and provides potential yield achieved by model district. It further explores the scope for bridging the yield gap with adoption of HYVs and proper nutrient management. Some validation checks were incorporated for nutrient use. Testing is being done for hosting the application on CRIDA server. Yield efficiency of a district was assessed under rainfed conditions by building a composite index. The index was built by combining crop-wise efficiencies (20 crops) using area sown under a crop as weight. There were 60 districts which have potential for doubling of yield under rainfed production system. Scientific Activities Orientation Workshop on Drought Management An Orientation Workshop on "Drought Management in Odisha" at Watershed Mission Building, Bhubaneswar was organized on 7th July, 2017 by Department of Agriculture and Farmers' Empowerment, Govt. of Odisha, involving all line departments. The workshop was attended by Director, CRIDA and Scientist representatives from CRIDA, IIWM and OUA&T. The meeting was chaired by Smt. Sujata Kartikeyan, Commissioner cum Director, Odisha Watershed Development Mission. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Acting Director, ICAR-CRIDA in his opening remarks, appraised the delegates about short, medium and long-term action plans of Drought management to be taken up and role of various stakeholders in carrying out the MoU. Two presentations were made, first by Dr. P. Vijaya Kumar, ICARCRIDA on the detailed approach for drought management and the other by Dr. G. Kar of ICAR-IIWM on Mitigation Strategies. Deliberations were made on identification of blocks which are vulnerable to drought based on data available for selected parameters. Further, stress on inclusion of socio-economic parameters was laid, as Odisha is lagging behind in these aspects though it has better natural resources. A core group was formed to work out the methodology of prioritizing blocks for drought management. Smt. Sujata suggested for development of detailed technical programme for the selected blocks at the earliest to initiate the activities and also for monitoring and evaluation of the Programme by ICAR and SAU. Institute Advisory Committee (IAC) Meeting under Farmers FIRST Project Institute Advisory Committee (IAC) under Farmers FIRST Project was conducted on 26th July, 2017 at ICAR-CRIDA, under the chairmanship of Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICARCRIDA in the presence of Dr. Y.G. Prasad, Director, ICAR-ATARI (Zone-X), Smt. S.V. Bharati, ADA, Vikarabad Dist., Ms. Vijayanti, HO, Parigi division, Dr. G. Nirmala, PI and all Co-PIs of the Farmers FIRST Project. A brief presentation on activities of project was made by Dr. G. Nirmala, PI which included the progress of work done and action plans for the year 2017-18. Some suggestions made by official includes to sum up each parameter of survey of 400 households in 4 villages, establishment of fodder bank, seed bank and IFS module in each village. Orientation Workshop on Drought Management in Odisha Institute Advisory Committee (IAC) under Farmer FIRST Project Interface Meeting on Agriculture Contingencies An interface meeting was organised on 8th August, 2017 at ICARCRIDA, Hyderabad, to assess the prevailing crop condition due CRIDA - Newsletter 4 to deficient rains in Telangana state under the chairmanship of Sri Parthasarathi, Agriculture Prin. Secretary, Govt of Telangana which was attended by District Level Officials and representatives of various institutes in Hyderabad. The rainfall for Southwest monsoon 2017, was predicted to be normal for the entire state. Rainfall during June month observed to be very good with majority mandals receiving normal to large excess rainfall in the state. A total of 264 mandals out of 584 mandals in the state received large excess rainfall. Only 63 mandals received deficient (59 mandals) to large deficient (4 mandals) rains in the state. Contingency measures to be taken up under the present condition were discussed. An assessment of available water in major, medium and minor tanks was also discussed. District level officials were advised to be cautious and also requested to monitor the emerging pests for cotton and other crops and requested to issue timely advisories to farmers using electronic media. Interface Meeting Standing Technical Committee (STC) Meeting of National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA). The Standing Technical Committee (STC) meeting of National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) was held on 8th September, 2017 at ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad under the Chairmanship of Dr.K. Sammi Reddy, Chairman, STC & Director, ICARCRIDA. Sri B.V.N. Rao, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare gave a brief on the importance of the pilot research projects being implemented by the various ICAR institutes sanctioned under NMSA. The committee reviewed these projects and suggested to develop Climate Resilient Farming System models. The committee advised to develop a withdrawal strategy for maintenance of assets created under the project and the outcome of the projects should indicate how the interventions of the project would contribute towards the vision of doubling of the farmers' income and reducing the risk due to extreme climate events. Hindi Fortnight Celebration The Hindi Fortnight was organized from 1-14 September, 2017. On this occasion Hindi Noting Drafting, Hindi-English technical, terminology, Hindi competitions and many others were organized. Winners were awarded with cash prizes on the concluding day by Director, CRIDA. Hindi Fortnight Celebration Dr.K.Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting) visited various experimental plots during Field IRC Field Institute Research Council (IRC) Meeting Field Institute Research Council (IRC) Meeting for 2017-18 was held on 21st September, 2017 at Gunegal Research Farm (GRF) and 27th September, 2017 at Hayathnagar Research Farm (HRF) under the chairmanship of Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting). The chairman IRC, Dr.K.Sammi Reddy, Project coordinators, Heads of Divisions/Sections and scientists visited various experiments and discussed thoroughly on various treatment effects. Various suggestions like displaying of the experimental and treatment boards at the experimental site, periodical Meeting in progress CRIDA - Newsletter 5 monitoring of soil moisture in CA related experiments, correlation of rainfall amount, rainy days and crop were made in Field IRC. Quinquennial Review Team (QRT) Meeting A two-day Quinquennial Review Team (QRT) meeting was organized at ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad during 20-21 December, 2017 under the Chairmanship of Dr. J.C. Katyal, Former VC, HAU, Hisar & Ex. DDG (Edn.), ICAR. The meeting was attended by Dr. V.M. Mayande, Former VC, PDKV, Akola; Dr. A. M. Shekh, Former VC, AAU Anand; Dr. V.S. Korikanthimath, Former Director, ICAR-CCARI, Goa; Dr. S.D.Gorantiwar, Head, (Dept. of IDE), MPKV, Rahuri and Dr. Rajender Parsad, Principal Scientist, ICAR-IASRI. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, in his welcome address briefed the members about historical background of the institute, organizational structure, achievements in brief. The QRT members appreciated the efforts of ICAR- CRIDA and recommended inter-divisional approach for carrying out research. An interaction session was also organized with the scientists of the institute. QRT meeting in progress Interaction session with scientists Technology Transfer Exposure Visit under Farmers FIRST Project An exposure visit was conducted for nearly 80 farmers from Devononiguda and Rakamcherla villages of Pudur cluster, Vikarabad district, Telangana state on 30th August, 2017 to expose the farmers to the horticulture exhibition which has been organized at Peoples plaza, Necklace road, Hyderabad by the State Department of Horticulture and Sericulture, Government of Telangana. During the visit the farmers were exposed to various horticultural technologies. A technical session was arranged on horticulture schemes of department and subsidies and prospects of organic farming in vegetable cultivation, and best management in vegetables particularly chillies which is grown by the farmers. The exposure visit provided farmers an opportunity to meet promoters of organic farming, medicinal and aromatic products, Bonsai practitioners etc. Farm Implements Distribution to Tribal Farmers In the month of October, 2017 two programmes were organized in Kothwalguda cluster of Adilabad district and another in Yellamma thanda cluster of Rangareddy district (27th October, 2017) to create awareness among tribal farmers and to distribute improved implements to the farmers, in the awareness programme organized in Rangareddy district. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting) emphasized the need of various improved implements and machinery and presented machines to the selected beneficiaries. CRIDA Farm machinery team under the guidance of Dr. I. Srinivas conducted demonstrations to farming community. Participation of Farmers in National Workshop Farmers from Pudur cluster under FFP project participated in 'A National Workshop on Doubling Farmers Income' from 22-23 December, 2017 at ICAR-NAARM. Feedback and suggestions on technology generation and dissemination for doubling farmers' income were provided to Telangana farmers during the meet. Dr. K.Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting) distributing power sprayers to farmers of Rangareddy Cluster Adilabad cluster village farmers display power sprayers received from CRIDA Participation of farmers in National Workshop Mera Gaon Mera Gaurav (MGMG) Activities Teams of Scientists from CRIDA have visited villages of Adilabad and Rangareddy districts in Telangana state under MGMG programme during July to December, 2017. During the period the following activities were undertaken in the programme: CRIDA - Newsletter 6 Districts Villages Activities Adilabad Seetagondi gram panchayat: Chinna Malkapur, Pedda Malkapur, Kothwalguda and Garkampet Demonstration and distribution of ten 5-hp pump sets and power sprayers to eligible beneficiaries, acquired under TSP plan Rangareddy Yellammathanda, Dadipalli thanda, Venkateswarthanda and Rangapur Distribution of power sprayers Nalgonda Kothathanda, Boringthanthanda, Lakma thanda Voice based Agro-advisries National Nutrition Week Celebration ICAR - KVK, Ranga Reddy district, CRIDA organized National Nutrition Week from 1 - 7 September, 2017 in the KVK adopted villages Narrepally and Gummadivelli. The theme of the event envisaged by the Govt. of India was "Better health and Improved diet in Infants and children". In Narrepally village, the programme was conducted on 6th September, 2017, where about 200 farm women, farmers and Anganwadi teachers attended the programme. Dr. V. Maruthi, Head KVK emphasized the traditional diets, their importance in nutrition to rural women. Smt. Shantisree, ICDS CDPO and chief guest presented a detailed picture of Nutritional programme for women nutritive value of synthetic diets nutritional disorders etc. In Gummadivelli, Kandukur Mandal, Ranga Reddy District the National Nutrition Week was celebrated on 7th September, 2017. Around 200 farm women attended the programme. Sri M.Babu Sarpanch, Sri Rameshwara Rao, District Training Officer, Zilla Parishad, Smt. Shobana CDPO, Kandukur mandal participated in the programme as Chief guests. Nutritional aspects of farm women and nutrition requirements were the topics of discussion during the programme. Field Day on Usage of Agricultural Implements ICAR-CRIDA KVK has conducted field day and an awareness programme on usage of agricultural Implements in field demonstrations on 18th September, 2017 at Gummadivelly village, Kandukur mandal, Ranga Reddy District. Dr. V. Maruthi, Head, KVK briefed the farmers on the need to adopt mechanization in all operations for cost reduction and yield enhancement with different implements and other technologies. Dr. B. Sanjeeva Reddy, Principal Scientist and OIC of farm Implements ICARCRIDA emphasized on CRIDA developed implements usage and availability. Er S. Vijayakumar, SMS (Agricultural Engineering), organized 30 field demonstrations in two villages with seedcum-fertilizer planter and the performance of demonstrated farmer fields with comparison to farmers' method and was found to be effective. About 67 farmers participated in the field day programme from two villages Gummadavelly and Kolanguda villages. The Farmers were educated on the improved production technologies through interactions and brochure prepared in local language. An exhibition was also arranged during this occasion to exhibit different agricultural implements developed from ICARCRIDA. Technology Week Technology week was organised at KVK-Ranga Reddy, ICARCRIDA, Hyderabad during 14-16 October, 2017. On the first day Dr.V.Maruthi, Head, KVK and Principal Scientist chaired the event and the Chief Guest of the day was Er.M.Mallikarjuna Swamy, State Technical Expert, State Level Nodal Agency, PMKSY and WDC, Telangana State, Guest of Honour was Dr.K.Dattatri, Principal Scientist, ICAR-ATARI, Hyderabad. Exhibitions were organized on farm machinery, livestock medicines, feed mixtures, bio-products, micro-irrigation, fodder cafeteria, books and literature on agriculture. National Women Farmers' Day National Women Farmers' Day (Mahila Kisan Divas) was organized by Krishi Vigyan Kendra, CRIDA on 15.10.2017 at Hayathnagar Research Farm with the participation of 250 women farmers from Ranga Reddy district. Dr. V. Maruthi, Head, KVK and Principal Scientist briefed the importance of the day and women's role in agriculture. Dr. K. Uma Maheswari, Head, PGRC, PJTSAU in her lecture discussed about the problems faced by women in farm activities. Dr. Sarah Kamala, Professor, AICRP (H.Sc.) discussed the issues related to drudgery reduction technologies for farm women, farm women's role and problems in agriculture. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA, Chief Guest of the programme addressed the women farmers by highlighting the KVK role in women empowerment, drudgery management and nutritional aspects. Dr. Y.G. Prasad, Director, ICAR-ATARI, Guest of Honour in his address sought the farmers to utilize the services of KVK by women farmers related to nutrition garden, drudgery equipment, trainings on farm and nonfarm activities. Live demonstrations, exhibits, technical sessions and farmer interactions with the experts were organized. National womens day celebration at CRIDA-KVK. CRIDA - Newsletter 7 National Agriculture Education Day ICAR-CRIDA celebrated National Agriculture Education Day on 3rd December, 2017 by organizing essay writing competitions for Class VIII & IX students and painting competitions for Class VI & VII students to mark the birth anniversary of first President of Independent India and Union Minister of Agriculture, Bharat Ratna (Late) Dr. Rajendra Prasad. Total 36 students from 12 different Kendriya Vidyalaya Schools located in Hyderabad and Secunderabad participated in the competitions. Dr. R.Nagarjuna Kumar, Scientist, briefed about the celebrations of Nation Agriculture Education Day. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA distributed prizes to the winners. In his address, he advised the students to choose agriculture science as a career option and also said that agriculture as a discipline which has huge opportunities and awareness of this has to be created through such science based programmes. oriented the farmers about soil testing facility, procedure of soil sample collection, analysis and usage of recommendations for higher crop yields. Sri. Pentaiah, Village Sarpanch thanked the CRIDA efforts in preparation and distribution of soil health cards and requested for similar cooperation and support in future. CRIDA scientists and extension functionaries from Agriculture department and Horticulture department interacted with the farmers. 140 Soil Health Cards were distributed with the crop related recommendations to the farmers of Rakamcharla, Tirumalapur and Devanoniguda villages of Pudur cluster under Farmers' First Project. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA explained the usage of Soil Health Cards and its National Agriculture Education Day Celebration World Soil Day Celebration at Rakamcharla Village KVK-CRIDA celebrated Agriculture Education Day on 3rd December, 2017 at KVK, Hayathnagar Research Farm. A batch of 164 school children from Ravindrabharathi School and St. Patrick School of 8th -10th standard actively participated. These school children were exposed to live field crops technologies, fodder cafeteria, farm mechanization, agricultural implements, livestock demonstrations etc. and also emphasized the importance of soil health status for agriculture crops and importance of soil by demonstration of soil testing in the laboratory. A debate competition on "Importance of organic Agriculture" was organized for students. Dr. V. Maruthi, Head, KVK and Principal Scientist and KVK staff interacted with children on various issues concerned to Agriculture education, followed by the distribution of appreciation certificates for the winners. World Soil Day Celebrations ICAR-CRIDA celebrate World Soil Day on 5th December, 2017 at Rakamcharla village, Pudur Mandal, Vikarabad district under the Chairmanship of Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICARCRIDA, Hyderabad. Around 200 farmers from the villages of Pudur cluster attended the Soil Health Card distribution program. Dr. G.Nirmala, Principal Scientist, Head, TOT welcomed the participants and explained the objectives of the programme. Shri Ram Mohan, Agricultural Officer from the Agriculture department World soil day celebration at CRIDA-KVK interpretation for effective nutrient management for sustainable crop yields. On this occasion farm literature on "Soil Health Cards", "Soil and Water Conservation measures" and "Nursery raising through portrays" were released by the dignitaries. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy along with CRIDA scientists reviewed the progress of Farmers FIRST project activities during the field visit. World Soil Day was celebrated by conducting programme in one of the KVK adopted villages: Nagireddipalli, Nawabpet Mandal on 5.12.2017. Honorable MLA Sh. K. Yadaiah, Chevella Assembly Constituency participated in the programme along with other local representatives, government officials, NGOs and 188 farmers and farm women. Expert lecture by Dr. K. Srinivas, Principal Scientist (Soil Science), ICAR-CRIDA was arranged on soil health, nutrient management and soil test based recommendations to the farmers. Dr. V. Maruthi, Head, KVK and Principal Scientist briefed the importance of world soil day to the farmers. Hon'ble MLA distributed few soil health cards to the farmers from 4 villages. Pledge on Soil Day was also taken. Video message was displayed. A total of 300 soil health cards were distributed. Exhibits on soil testing kit, bio-fertilizers and fodder were also arranged. CRIDA - Newsletter 8 News from AICRPs Farmers-Scientists Interaction Meeting AICRPDA Centre, Rakh Dhiansar organized Farmers-Scientists interaction meeting in AICRPDA-NICRA village Khaner, District Samba on 26th November, 2017. Dr K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA, Dr. G. Ravindra Chary Project Coordinator (AICRPDA), Dr. S. K. Dhyani, Principal Scientist, NRM Division ICAR, Dr. J. P. Sharma, Director of Research and other officials from SKUAST-Jammu, Scientists from AICRPDA centres, Rakh Dhiansar, Ballowal Saunkhri and farmers from the AICRPDA-NICRA villages Khaner and Dangervala participated in the meeting. Farmers appreciated the real-time contingency measures to cope-up with weather aberrations and farmers emphasized on farm mechanization in rainfed crops. Brainstorming Session on "Automation of Agromet Advisory Services" A meeting of scientists from IMD, AICRPAM and ICAR-CRIDA was organized on 3rd August, 2017 at ICAR-CRIDA. The meeting was chaired by Dr. K. J. Ramesh, Director General, IMD, in which Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA, Dr. P. Vijaya Kumar, PCAICRPAM and other scientists from IMD, AICRPAM Unit and Farmers-Scientists interaction in the AICRPDA-NICRA village AICRPAM Annual Working Group meeting National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) Annual Action Plan and Review Workshop of NICRA-KVKs Annual action plan and review workshop of NICRA-KVK's of various ATARI Zones were conducted in July, 2017 to review the progress in 2017- 18 and to discuss and finalize the action plan for 2018-19. The meetings captured the salient achievements and success stories from technology demonstrations in NICRA adopted villages. Dr. JVNS Prasad, Co-PI, TDC-NICRA emphasized about the approaches for scaling up of the proven resilient practices in the NICRA villages which is to be adopted in the next phase of NICRA in various workshops. Various suggestions were given to make the NICRA-KVK's achievements visible to other farmers and stakeholders. NICRA-KVK's of the zone presented from three AICRPAM centers attended and discussed about the collaboration between AICRPAM and IMD in preparation and dissemination of Agromet advisories. AICRPAM Annual Working Group Meeting The Annual working group meeting of AICRP on Agrometeorology was held at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agriculture Sciences & Technology (SKUAST) Jammu, Chatha during 27th-29th November, 2017 to evaluate the research progress made during Kharif 2016 and Rabi 2016-17. All the scientists from AICRPAM Unit and cooperating centers participated. The center-wise progress of AICRPAM was reviewed under each individual research theme. QRT member Dr. AM Shekh and other invited experts have provided their valuable suggestions. Training to IMD Scientist In a series of trainings to IMD scientists, Dr. (Mrs.) Lata Bishnoi was trained under AICRPAM, ICAR-CRIDA in Agrometeorology from 21-08-2017 to 8-09-2017. Brainstorming meeting on Automation of Agromet Advisory CRIDA - Newsletter 9 the consolidated achievements of the NICRA programme in the last 6 years and the action plan for the next year. Details of the Annual Action Plan and Review Workshop of NICRA-KVKs Sl.No Zones Place Date 1 Zone VIII Krishi Vigyan Kendra- Baramati (Pune) 3 July, 2017 2 Zone III ICAR-ATARI, Jodhpur 5 July, 2017 3 Zone V ICAR-ATARI, Kolkata 12 July, 2017 4 Zone VI College of Veterinary Sciences, Assam Agricultural University, Khanapara, Guwahati 10-11 July, 2017 5 Zone X ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad 13 July, 2017 6 Zone XI ICAR-ATARI, Bengaluru 29 July, 2017 Expert committee meeting in progress resilient agriculture, Up-scaling farm machinery custom hiring centres in India: A policy paper, "Roots of rainfed crops and Issues and remedies in rainfed farming" (in Hindi) were released by the Hon'ble DG, ICAR. Glimpses of Annual Action Plan cum Review Workshops Expert Committee to Review the Research Projects A two-day NICRA Expert Committee meeting was organized at NASC, New Delhi during 23rd-24th October, 2017.Dr. T. Mohapatra, Secretary, DARE and DG, ICAR in his address set the road map for next phase of NICRA with outputs that have impact at national level. Progress of 13 ongoing projects from Competitive Grants and two projects under Sponsored component were reviewed under the Chairmanship of Dr. K. Alagusundaram, DDG (NRM) and co-chaired by Dr. S Bhaskar, ADG (AAF & CC). Dr. K Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad presented the overview of progress under NICRA under CG and Sponsored components so far and the need for thorough monitoring of the progress by the expert committee. For each project a subcommittee of relevant members from NICRA Expert Committee was formed to mentor and monitor the progress of the projects. The committee deliberated on the identification of themes for inviting new proposals under Competitive Grants component for the next phase of NICRA. On this occasion, four publications from ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad viz., Farm innovations in climate ZMC visit at Kendrapara ZMC visit at Jharsaguda Zonal Monitoring Committee (ZMC) Visits Zonal monitoring committee's visits to various zones were organized to review the technical progress of different modules like NRM, crop production, livestock & fishery and institutional interventions in NICRA villages and for making appropriate suggestions for improvement. Details of ZMC visits during 2017-18 Sl. No Name of the ATARI Name of the KVK Date Name of the participating Member from CRIDA 1 Kolkata Kendrapara, Jharsuguda 31October - 1November, 2017 Dr. M. Osman 2 Barapani Ri-Bhoi and Imphal East 23-24 November, 2017 Dr. JVNS. Prasad 3 Hyderabad Nalgonda & Khammam 12-13 December, 2017 Dr. I. Srinivas, Dr. G. Pratibha 4 Patna Buxar, Jehanabad and Aurangabad 13-15 December, 2017 Dr. S.K. Bal, Dr. D.B.V. Ramana 5 Jodhpur Sirsa, Yamunangar 21-23 December, 2017 Dr. S.K. Yadav, Dr. K. Nagasree CRIDA - Newsletter 10 Important Visitors Visit of Dr. K. Alagusundaram DDG (NRM), ICAR Dr. K. Alagusundaram, Deputy Director General (NRM) has visited ICAR-CRIDA on 16th August, 2017 to review the research activities and oversee the completion of Climate Research Facilities (FATE, CTGC and SCADA) at Hayatnagar Research Farm (HRF). Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting) along with Project Coordinators, Heads of Divisions/Sections, other Scientists, staff of Administration and Finance have accompanied the DDG to HRF. The DDG (NRM) expressed his satisfaction Dr.K.A Lagusundaram, Deputy Director General (NRM) Interacting with Scientists about the progress made in installation of Climate Research Facilities. He visited the farm machinery workshop and gave valuable suggestions for improving the workshop facilities. Canadian Delegation Visit to ICAR-CRIDA Canadian delegation visited ICAR-CRIDA on 17th November, 2017. The team interacted with the Director and Scientists of the institute. The team got acquainted with the technologies developed by the institute displayed in Dryland Gallery and were exposed to various research facilities present at CRIDA. Visits Abroad Dr. D.B.V. Ramana participated in the International Conference on Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition (RAAN) held at School of Environmental and Rural Science, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia from 25-27, October, 2017 under 2015 Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Programme (Borlaug Fellowship) of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Foreign Dr. D.B.V. Ramana participated in the Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition (RAAN) conference Agricultural service, USA. The purpose of the visit was to get exposed to the recent advances in animal nutrition and had dialogue with mentor for possible future research linkages. Human Resource Development Training Programme on Efficient Watershed Management in Rainfed Agriculture A five day training programme on "Efficient Watershed Management in Rainfed Agriculture" sponserd by watershed development department, Govt. of Karnataka was organized at ICAR-CRIDA from 19-23 September, 2017. Twelve officials from the Karnataka agriculture departments participated in the programme. The training covered various aspects of soil and water conservation, water harvesting, farm machineries along Participants of the training programme Canadian delegation visit to ICAR-CRIDA CRIDA - Newsletter 11 with field visits and practical exposure to the water harvesting structures. Dr. K. Ravi Shankar, PS, TOT was the course director for the training course. Model Training Course on Participatory Natural Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Productivity in Rainfed areas Model Training Course on "Participatory Natural Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Productivity in Rainfed areas" sponsored by DOE was organised at CRIDA during October 4-11, 2017. Fifteen officials from eight different states viz., Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Goa, Punjab and Karnataka attended the model training course. The course covered focus on various technologies for sustainable NRM, horticulture systems in rainfed agriculture, enhancing productivity of crops and cropping systems through effective use of natural resources, farming systems approach, role of livestock and their management for enhancing productivity and income in drylands, gender mainstreaming, communication tools and techniques for sustainable NRM. Dr. K. Nagasree, Principal Scientist was the course director for the training programme. Participants of the training programme Training Programme on Farm Mechanization under CRP-Farm Mechanization and Precision Farming The programme was organized by the ICAR-CRIDA under CRP-Farm Mechanization and Precision Farming in association with KVK, RR District for TSP farmers on 27th October, 2017 at Yellamma Thanda village, Manchal Manda, Rangareddy District. The participants were addressed by Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), B. Venkteswar Rao, ADA, Alair Reddy District, Smt. G. Jayamma, MPP, Mr. Jagadeswar, village Sarpanch and ICARCRIDA Staff. The participants explained about the importance of farm mechanization in agriculture. Different farm machinery viz. manual weeder, six row multi crop CRIDA planter, bed planter cum herbicide applicator, bullock drawn weeder etc. were demonstrated. Around 200 farmers were trained from Yellamma Thanda village. The trainees were imparted skills in operation of different crop based agricultural implements. ICAR Short course on Tools on Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment of Rainfed Technologies and Development Programmes ICAR Sponsored Short course on "Tools on Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment of Rainfed Technologies and Development Programmes" was conducted for 10 days from 1-10 November, 2017 at ICAR-CRIDA. Dr. Y. G. Prasad, Director, ATARI (Zone-X) was the Guest of Honour for the inaugural session. Dr. Y. G. Prasad addressed the participants about the importance of Tools on Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment of Rainfed Technologies. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), ICAR-CRIDA highlighted significance of M&E for impact assessment of rainfed technologies in the context of doubling farmers' income. Dr. G. Nirmala, Principal Scientist and Course Director briefed the objectives of the short course. During the ten days of short course, the participants were familiarized with topics like concepts and principles of M&E, results-based management, theory of change, protocols for organic livestock interventions, impact assessment of KVK, IWDP and agricultural development programmes. Inaugural session of the short course Participants of the training programmes ICAR-Sponsored Training Program for ICAR Technical Staff ICAR-sponsored training program on 'Agrometeorological Data Collection, Analysis and Management' for ICAR technical staff was organized at ICAR-CRIDA during 11-23 December, 2017. All the trainees were exposed to various agro-climatic analysis techniques, and on hands on practicals. Besides these, they were exposed to national and international institutes where the Agrometeorological research is going on through field visits. CRIDA - Newsletter 12 Capacity Building Activities of Farmers Training on Crop Colonies and Soil Health Management in Horticulture Crops Department of Horticulture, Telangana and KVK-CRIDA organized the training programme on "Crop colonies and soil health management in horticulture crops for sustainable net returns" organized at Center of Excellence, Govt. of Telangana, Jeedimetla, Medchal on 8th September, 2017. About 150 practicing farmers from Ibrahimpatnam cluster attended the training. Sri. S. Parthasarathi, IAS, APC & Secretary to Govt.Agriculture & Cooperation, Government of Telangana, Sri L. Venkatram Reddy, Commissioner of Horticulture (FAC), Government of Telangana and department officials interacted with farmers and visited the fields. Importance of soil testing, procedures for soil sampling, soil test based fertilizer recommendations, vulnerability of small and marginal farmers in rain-fed/dryland areas, integrated farming with agri-horti-animal husbandry for sustainable net income, crop diversification, inter crops/mixed cropping, strip cropping, trap crops, boarder crops, sticky traps, pheromone traps, water traps etc were also demonstrated. Pest Management and Vegetable Cultivation in Nawabpet Mandal of Vikarabad Division (Kesavapalli and Thimmaredy palli villages). Dr. SM Vidya sekhar and Sh. G. Sri Krishna from KVK-CRIDA, Ranga Reddy District, Telangana, Sh. Nagabrahma Chari, CEO of Seed NGO and Village Sarpanch along with 67 farmers participated in the programme. The soil test based fertilizer recommendations were given to 200 farmers for crops like Rice, Cotton, Redgram, Maize, Vegetables and soil health management aspects were explained to farmers by Dr. S.M. Vidya Sekhar, KVK during the training programme. Around 200 soil health cards prepared by KVK were distributed to farmers of the two villages. Integrated Pest Management of Cotton and Redgram crops were covered and the farmers were given the demonstration of inputs of pheromone traps with lures for Pink bollworm, Helicoverpa, Spodoptera for Cotton and Redgram and bio-fertilizers, Trichoderma etc. Training Programme on Soil Health Management, IPM and Vegetable Cultivation An off-campus training programme in collaboration with SEED NGO under the sponsorship of NABARD was organized on 14th September, 2017 on Soil Health Management, Integrated Participants of the training programme Off-campus training on "Soil Health Management and IPM" Training on "Crop colonies and Soil health management" Training on Good Horticultural Practices in Tuber Crops KVK, ICAR-CRIDA conducted on-campus training on Good horticultural Practices in Tuber crops suitable for Ranga Reddy district farmers on 29th November, 2017 at KVK, CRIDA. About 42 vegetable growers and KVK staff attended the programme. Dr. D.Anitha Kumari, Scientist (Entomology) VRS, SKLTSHU explained about suitable major tuber crops viz. Colacasia, Sweet potato and Yam with reference to improved varieties, climate, soil characters, seed rate, spacing, planting methods, weeding, irrigation, fertilizers, pest, disease management, harvesting and yield. GHPs like Bio-fertilizers, Bio-control agents, plant derivatives, Raised bed cultivation, Use of Drip irrigation, Adaptation of Fertigation, Need based Micronutrient foliar sprays, trap crops, Boarder crops, sticky traps, pheromone traps, water traps etc. which will reduce the cost of cultivation were demonstrated. CRIDA - Newsletter 13 Forthcoming Events Sl. No. Title of the event Duration 1 26th Meeting of RAC at ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad January 11-12, 2018 2 International training on Strategies for Enhancement of Farmers Income in Dryland Agriculture" under the program Feed the Future - India Triangular Training (FTF-ITT) January 16-30, 2018 3 Republic Day January 26, 2018 4 XVI Working Group Meeting of AICRPDA at AICRPDA centre, Jagdalpur February 1-5, 2018 5 International Training programme on Rainwater Management for Climate Resilient Agriculture in Dryland under India-Africa Forum Summit-III February 15 - March 07, 2018 6 CRIDA Foundation Day April 12, 2018 7 IRC meeting April/May, 2018 8 World Environment Day June 5, 2018 For further details please visit the website : www.crida.in Participation in Seminars and Symposia Name of the scientist Workshops/seminars/meetings/symposia Duration Venue K. Sammi Reddy Chaired the Thematic Session-5 on Climate Resilient Agriculture in the 3rd World Congress on Disaster Management Nov 7, 2017 Visakhapatnam, AP Delivered a lecture in Summer School on "Recent Advances in Abiotic Stress Management in Climate Smart Agriculture" Sep 15, 2017 NIASM, Baramati, Maharashtra Attended World Bank aided Project meeting on Climate Resilient Agriculture (POCRA) and to give inputs regarding the effective dissemination Sep 22-23, 2017 World Trade Centre, Mumbai, Maharashtra Attended Interactive Seminar on the foresight – Agrimonde – Terre : 2050 The Indian Perspective Dec 7, 2017 NASC, New Delhi Attended International Groundwater Conference and delivered a keynote address Dec 11, 2017 New Delhi C.A.Ramarao Zonal Review and Progress Workshop for KVKs of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra July 13, 2017 ICAR-ATARI, CRIDA, Hyderabad Workshop on 'Green Revolution in Eastern India: Constraints, opportunities and way forward' organized by IFPRI & TCI Oct 9-10, 2017 NASC, New Delhi 77th Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics. Oct 12–14, 2017 CGPS, CAU, Umiam, Barapani Silver Jubilee Conference of Agricultural Economics Research Association on "Doubling farmers' income : Options & Strategies" Nov 7-9, 2017 ICAR-NAARM, Hyderabad Planning Workshop on Research Impact Assessment Nov 13, 2017 ICAR-NIAP, New Delhi C.A.Ramarao, V.Girija Veni International Seminar on 'Global climatic change : Implication for agriculture and water sectors' organized by VNMKV, Parbhani Dec 14 -16, 2017 WALMI, Aurangabad B.M.K.Raju ICAR, DAC and Dept. of Agriculture, Govt. of Telangana Interaction Meeting on 'Kharif 2017 Agriculture Scenario Assessment and Contingency Plan Preparation for Telangana' Aug 8, 2017. ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad R. Nagarjunakumar National conference on "Technological Challenges in Social, Environmental and Agricultural Reforms" Sep 9-10, 2017 ICAR-IIRR, Rajendra-nagar, Hyderabad International Conference on Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences Oct 23 -25, 2017 PJTSAU, Hyderabad Er. Ashish S Dhimate Workshop on "Advanced Farm Mechanization: Crop Sector" Sept 25-29, 2017 NIRDPR, Hyderabad CRIDA - Newsletter 14 Awards and Recognition AICRPDA-Ananthapuramu centre received "ICAR-Vasantrao Naik Award for Outstanding Research and Application in Dryland Farming Systems 2016" during ICAR Foundation Day and Award Ceremony on 16th July, 2017 at NASC, New Delhi. Dr. R.Nagarjuna Kumar, Scientist was awarded the best Ph.D. Thesis award and best paper award for the paper "Mobile Applications : Shaping the future of agricultural extension and advisory services" presented during the National conference on "Technological Challenges in Social, Environmental and Agricultural Reforms" organized at ICAR-IIRR, Hyderabad during 9-10, September, 2017. Ms B. Saraswati won 1st Prize in session on "Creativity and Innovation for excellence" and 3rd prize in session on "Effective Media Communication Skills" in training programme on "Enhancing Efficiency and Behavioral Skills for Stenographers Receiving Award at ICAR-IIRR, Hyderabad Grade III, PAs, PSs, & Sr. PPSs" of ICAR organized at ICARNAARM, Hyderabad during 25-31 October, 2017 Dr. Ravi Shankar received the Young Scientist Award-2017 from Indian Society of Extension Education, New Delhi at the ISEE National Seminar on "Doubling Farmers' Income and Farm Production through Skill Development and Technology Application" organized by the Department of Extension Education, Bihar Agricultural University, Sabour and Indian Society of Extension Education, New Delhi at Sabour, Bihar during 28-30 November, 2017. Mr. G. Venkatesh, Scientist (Senior Scale) awarded with the Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science and Technology by the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad on 15th July, 2017. Mr. AVM Subba Rao, Sr. Scientist was awarded Doctor of Philosophy on 12th December, 2017. Personnel Information Appointments/Promotions/Transfers/Joining Name and Designation Transferred/Joined/Promoted/Appointed Date w.e.f Dr. S.K. Bal, Principal Scientist (Agrometeorology) Transferred from ICAR - NIASM, Baramati, Pune 01.07. 2017 Dr. T. V. Prasad, Principal Scientist (Entomology) Transferred from ICAR-NBPGR, New Delhi 07.07.2017 Mr. Rajkumar Dhakar, Scientist (Agril. Physics) Joined back in ICAR-CRIDA after Ph.D. at ICAR-IARI, New Delhi. 01.08.2017 Shri. Ravi Dudpal, Scientist (Agril.Econ.) Transferred to ICAR-IISWC Research Centre, Bellari 28.09.2017 Ms. Sneha Verghese, Assistant Appointed in ICAR-CRIDA 07.12.2017 Shri. Putta Santosh Appointed in ICAR-CRIDA 06.09.2017 Promotions Dr. T. V. Prasad Sr. Scientist - Principal Scientist 17.06.2015 Shri. D. Sudheer STO - Assistant Chief Technical Officer 16.10.2015 Shri. Sri Krishna STO - Assistant Chief Technical Officer 28.12.2015 Receiving Young Scientist Award at Sabour, Bihar Name and Designation Transferred/Joined/Promoted/Appointed Date w.e.f Shri. I. R. Khandgond STO - Assistant Chief Technical Officer 16.10.2015 Smt. P. Laxmi Narasamma ACTO - Chief Technical Officer 01.07.2014 Shri. S. Srinivas Reddy ACTO - Chief Technical Officer 01.01.2014 Smt. Vidyadhari ACTO - Chief Technical Officer 01.07.2016 Smt. V. L. Savithri STO - Assistant Chief Technical Officer 01.07.2016 Shri. Manish Tomar Tech. Asst. - Sr. Technical Assistant 16.03.2017 Shri. Hemant Sahu Tech. Asst. - Sr. Technical Assistant 21.03.2017 Shri. P. Satish Tech. Asst. - Sr. Technical Assistant 02.03.2017 Shri. P. Ramakrishna Tech. Asst. - Sr. Technical Assistant 08.04.2016 CRIDA - Newsletter 15 Oath taking ceremony on Sadbhavana Diwas Independence Day Celebration The 71st Independence Day was celebrated on 15th August, 2017 with pride, patriotic zeal and gratitude towards the sacrifices of our freedom fighters. The Director hoisted the flag and addressed the staff of CRIDA. On this occasion Director distributed cash awards (CCS&CCRC) to the X class toppers of CRIDA staff children and motivated the staff with his message to work with dedication and boost institute's growth. Cultural and Welfare Activities Independence Day Celebration Name and Designation Transferred/Joined/Promoted/Appointed Date w.e.f Shri. Prem Kumar STO - Asst. Chief Technical Officer (Retired) 01.01.2011 Smt. D. Kalpana Assistant - Assistant Administrative Officer 30.12.2017 Shri. J. Mallesh & Shri. Ch. Balaiah Granted MACP from level 3 to level 4 28.07.2017 Smt. Avula Lalitha Granted MACP from level 2 to level 3 11.07.2014 Our hearty congratulations to all of them Sadbhavana Diwas "Sadbhavana Diwas" was observed on 18th August, 2017. Accordingly, a pledge taking ceremony was held on 18th August, 2017. Swachhta Hi Seva "Swachhta Hi Seva" was organized at ICAR-CRIDA during 14th September to 2nd October, 2017. The inaugural day started with oath by all the staff and various activities were carried out under "Swachhta Hi Seva". All the staff participated in the event for Retirements Name Designation Date of superannuation Mr. E. Ravindranath STO 31.11.2017 Shri. Bandari Sathaiah SSS 31.08.2017 Shri. Sama Sathi Reddy SSS 31.07.2017 Shri. P.Srinivasa Rao Assistant 31.07.2017 Our best wishes for happy and peaceful retired life to all of them Glimpses of Swachhta Hi Seva South Zone Sports Meet ICAR-CRIDA contingent participated in ICAR South Zone Sports Meet held at ICAR-Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu from 9-13 October, 2017. Mr. Mukund, Technical Assistant secured 2nd place in 1500 meters cycle race. Vanamahostavam CRIDA Cultural and Recreation Club organized Vana Mahostavam at Hayathnagar Research Farm of the Institute on 28th October, 2017. All the CRIDA staff members actively participated in the cultural activities. The events generated great enthusiasm and unity among staff. Vigilance Awareness Week "Vigilance Awareness Week" was observed from 30th October to 4th November, 2017. Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting) in his address emphasized the importance of vigilance week and suggested all the staff to be vigilant in day to day office activities. As part of vigilance awareness week Shri. B. Viswanath, Deputy Chief Vigilance Officer, South Central Railway delivered the lecture on "My Vision : Corruption Free India" on 2nd November, 2017. cleanliness in office premises and residential quarters. Trees were planted in KVK adopted village, HRF, GRF, CRIDA main office and residential complex. Samagra Swachhata Diwas Sharamadann was celebrated in KVK adopted village. CRIDA - Newsletter BOOK-POST To _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ Published by : Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director (Acting), CRIDA Editorial Board Chairman : Dr. K. Sammi Reddy, Director(Acting), CRIDA Editors : Dr. (Mrs.) K. Nagasree, Pr. Scientist, TOT Dr. P. K. Pankaj, Senior Scientist, TOT Dr. R. Nagarjuna Kumar, Scientist, SDA Dr. Jagriti Rohit, Scientist, TOT Dr. Anshida Beevi CN, Scientist, TOT Hindi Translation : Dr. P.K. Pankaj, Senior Scientist, TOT Dr. S.R. Yadav, Asstt. Director (OL) Shri. G. Prabhakar, STO Photo credits : Mr. K. Surender Rao, CTO, TOT देश के वर्षा आधारित क्षेत्र में कृ ों षक आय को दगुनु ा करने की नीतियां भारत में वराषा आधारित कृ षि क्षेत्रफल लगभग 53 प्रतिशत है, जो कि देश के कु ल खाद्यान्न उत्पादन में लगभग 40 प्रतिशत का योगदान देता है। दलहन का लगभग 83 प्रतिशत, मोटे अनाज का लगभग 85 प्रतिशत, तिलहनो का लगभग 70 ं प्रतिशत एवं चावल का लगभग 42 प्रतिशत क्षेत्र वराषा आधारित कृ षि क्षेत्रफल के अंतर्गत आता है। वराषा आधारित क्षेत्रों में लगभग 40 प्र त्रों तिशत मानव एवं 60 प्रतिशत पशु निवास करते हैं। वराषा आधारित कृ षि में अधिक उत्पादन को निरंतर बनाए रखना तथा आय एवं जीविकोपार्जन को प्राप्त करना बड़ा ही जटिल कार्य है। कई वराषा आधारित फसलो की उत ं ्पादकता लगभग 1 टन प्रति हके ्टेयर है। हालांकि, किसानो में प्रमुख वर ं ाषा आधारित प्रौद्योगिकियो को अपनान ं े की प्रक्रिया एवं प्रसार अभी भी काफी धीमा है जिसके परिणामस्वरूप किसानो कं े खेतो एवं ं अनुसं धान कें द्रों क्रों े बीच के उत्पादन में काफी अंतर है। दिन-प्रतिदिन कृषको हं तु े घटता कृ षि क्षेत्रफल निरंतर एवं अक्ण्ण भू षु मि निम्नीकरण, पोषक तत्वों में काफी ्वों अंतर, बढ़ती जलवायु विविधता एवं जलवायु परिवर्तन ने वराषा की कमी, सूखा एवं बाढ़ के रूप में नई चुनौतियां पैदा की हैं, जो उत्पादकता एवं लाभ को प्रभावित करती हैं। इसके अलावा, वराषा आधारित क्षेत्रों में पशुओ त्रों की आबादी अध ं िक होने के कारण पोषकतायुक्त चारे की आवश्यकता होती है लेकिन चारे की मांग एवं आपूर्ति में अंतर बढ़ता ही जा रहा है। अनुमानत: वर्ष 2025 तक, हरे चारे की कमी 65 प्रतिशत एवं सूखे चारे की कमी 25 प्रतिशत तक होने की सं भावना है। मजदूरी एवं निवेश लागतो में वृ ं द्धि के कारण किसानो की वास् ं तविक आय घटती जा रही है। कृिष से आय को दगुना करन ु े के लिए, बढ़ती आबादी की खाद्य एवं पोषक सुरक्षा की मांग को पूरा करने के अलावा, फसलो की उत ं ्पादकता में वृद्धि के साथ-साथ वराषा आधारित क्षेत्रों कत्रों े उप क्षेत्रों में पशु-पालन, मछली पालन एवं बागवानी को त्रों बढ़ावा देने की आवश्यकता है। लघु अवधि की नीति के रूप में उत्पादन अंतर को कम करने के लिए स्थान विशेष के लिए तैयार की गई वराषा आधारित प्रौद्योगिकियों पर आधारित सं साधन सं पन्न प्रक्रिया अपनानी होगी। उपयुक्त जल सं ग्रहण एवं जल के बहतर उपयोग स े े अधिक वराषा वाले क्षेत्रों सत्रों े मध्यम वराषा वाले क्षेत्रों में फसल त्रों सघनता एवं कृ षि विविधता को फार्म स्तर पर पहुंचाने हेतु समन्वयन करना होगा। कृ षि आय बढ़ाने के लिए कृ षि प्रणाली की मजबूती पर ध्यान देना, पशुपालन से आय बढ़ाना, बाजार की मुख्य सूचना का ज्ञान एवं प्रसार करना प्रमुख हैं। विशेषकर छोटे एवं सीमांत किसानो को अध ं िक आय प्राप्त करने में सक्षम करने हेतु विभिन्न उद्यमो कं े साथ िमलकर जलवायु समुत्थान समेकित कृ षि प्रणाली का उन्नयन करना अत्यावश्यक है। ICAR-Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture Santoshnagar, Saidabad PO, Hyderabad - 500 059 Ph: 040-24530157/161/163 Fax: 040-24531802 E-mail: news.crida@icar.gov.in Website: www.crida.in बागवानी, अधिक मूल्य वाली फसलों की संरक्षित कृ षि, वराषा आधारित फसलों के लिए मूल्य श्रंृखला का विकास, बाजार ज्ञान पर समुदायो की ं क्षमता का निर्माण, मूल्य सं वर्धन की दिशा में कौशल विकास, किसान उत्पादक दलो की ं स्थापना करतेहुए लागत में कमी लाना एवं जल तथा फसल बीमा प्रदान करने से जोखिम में कमी लाना आदि को शामिल करके अधिक मूल्य वाली फसलो एवं उत ं ्पादो पर मध् ं यम अवधि की नीति अपनाई जानी चाहिए। लंबी अवधि की टिकाऊ कृ षि के लिए मृदा जैविक कार्बन का निर्माण तथा मृदा स्वास्थ्य सुधार के लिए जैविक खाद के प्रयोग को बढ़ावा देना एवं कम कर्षण सहित फसलावशेषो कं े प्रयोग की नितांत आवश्यकता है। इन नीतियो को सभी सं बं ध ं ित पणधारियो कं े सहयोग से प्रणाली के रूप में कार्यान्वित किया जाना चाहिए ताकि देश में विभिन्न वराषा आधारित कृ षि पारिस्थितिक प्रणालियो में कृ ष ं ि आय को दगुना करन ु े के लिए मांपने योग्य एवं प्रमाणयुक्त मॉडलो की ं स्थापना की जा सके। केंद्र स्तर पर (पीएमकेएसवाई, पीएमपीकेवीवाई, एमजीएनआरईजीए, आरकेवीवाई, पीएमएफबीवाई आदि) एवं राज्य स्तर पर (कर्नाटक की कृ षि भाग्या, आंध्र प्रदेश की पंटसं जीवनी, महाराष्ट्र का पीओसीआरए, ओडिशा का सूखा प्रबं धन कार्यक्रम, तेलंगाना का टीएसएमआईपी आदि) चलाए जा रह का े र्यक्रमो की समाभ ं िरूपता से डीएसी और एफडब्ल्यू एवं राज्य सरकार के सं बं धित विभागो द्ं वारा मिशन मोड पद्धति में कार्य योजना को कार्यान्वित करने की नितांत आवश्यकता है। भाकृ अनुपक्रीडा अपने नेटवर्क भागीदार के रूप में एक्रीपडा, एक्रीपाम, निक्रा एवं राज्य कृ षि विश्वविद्यालयो कं े साथ मिलकर तकनीकी सहयोग द्वारा मिशन मोड कार्यक्रम के कार्यान्वयन के लिए सहयोग देगा। इसके लिए पर्याप्त निधि आबं टन एवं श्रम शक्ति की आवश्यकता हो सकती है। विभिन्न स्तरो पर सभी सं बं ध ं ित पणधारियों केक्षमता निर्माण/कौशल विकास पर भी ध्यान देने की आवश्यकता है। के . सम्मी रेड्डी निदेशक (कार्यकारी), क्रीडा डॉ.के . सम्मी रेड्डी निदेशक की कलम से.
The present study documents a language educator's reflection on two transitions that mirror current curricular changes in undergraduate language programs in the United States. The first chronicles her personal pedagogical transformation from a general-purposes Spanish language professor and her adjustment to teaching as a visiting professor in a Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) language-learning environment at the United States Air Force Academy. The second reports the evolution over several decades of the Spanish language program at University of Alabama at Birmingham from a traditional general Spanish-language program to a multipurpose program. The study suggests that SSP and liberal arts values are not mutually exclusive, and it explores what Spanish for General Purposes (SGP) can learn from SSP. Spanish programs that find common ground and hybridize to respond to multiple demands of today's Spanish learners are likely to be the most successful in the future. ; To cite the digital version, add its Reference URL (found by following the link in the header above the digital file). ; A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 88 The Unexpected Spanish for Specific Purposes Professor: A Tale of Two Institutions Sheri Spaine Long United States Air Force Academy University of Alabama at Birmingham Abstract: The present study documents a language educator's reflection on two transitions that mirror current curricular changes in undergraduate language programs in the United States. The first chronicles her personal pedagogical transformation from a general-purposes Spanish language professor and her adjustment to teaching as a visiting professor in a Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) language-learning environment at the United States Air Force Academy. The second reports the evolution over several decades of the Spanish language program at University of Alabama at Birmingham from a traditional general Spanish-language program to a multipurpose program. The study suggests that SSP and liberal arts values are not mutually exclusive, and it explores what Spanish for General Purposes (SGP) can learn from SSP. Spanish programs that find common ground and hybridize to respond to multiple demands of today's Spanish learners are likely to be the most successful in the future. Keywords: language learning curriculum, liberal arts, medical Spanish, military language learning, Spanish for General Purposes (SGP), Spanish instruction, Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP), United States Air Force Academy, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Introduction This academic year, I dubbed myself the unexpected Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) professor because specialized career-focused instruction became part of my pedagogical repertoire. Working in a SSP language-learning environment has made me take stock of what mainstream language educators can gain from exposure to the philosophy and instructional techniques of languages for specific purposes. I am serving currently as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Spanish at the United States Air Force Academy. I am a permanent Professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). In this reflective paper, I chronicle two transitions. First, I share observations about my transition from general purposes language instruction to the more focused language-learning setting at the United States Air Force Academy. Language learning at the United States Air Force Academy exemplifies the definition of a Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP) program because it is dedicated to the goal of educating future Air Force officer-leaders with a global perspective. Secondly, I narrate from an administrative/ administrator's point of view UAB's evolution from a traditional Spanish curriculum to a dual-purpose program that includes a SSP certificate. I conclude that both the United States Air Force Academy and UAB Spanish language programs provide unique insights into the curricular changes and challenges in language teaching that have emerged during the last several decades in higher education. My experiences in these respective undergraduate Spanish programs show that signature language curricula have been and can be developed to serve diverse missions of learners and institutions and that intellectual and practical needs simultaneously helped mold these A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 89 programs. The United States Air Force Academy and UAB Spanish language programs are traditional and nontraditional at the same time. I posit they will resemble our future hybridized Spanish language programs. For purposes of this paper, I understand hybridized to mean multipurpose programs that have SSP components and a liberal arts foundation. The subfield of SSP can be defined as a practice that gives language learners access to the Spanish that they need to accomplish their own academic or occupational goals (Sánchez-López, 2013). It is necessary to locate SSP within the domain of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in order to recognize that SSP is not a departure from current theory or practices in foreign language education. The counterpoint to SSP is Spanish for General Purposes (SGP). SGP is a broad descriptor for the teaching and learning of Spanish in ways that can be exploratory in nature. It is language teaching and learning that is likely not to have a singular career focus. Along with the concept of language learning for cultural breadth, traditionally SGP has been ensconced within the notion of liberal arts education. After almost 20 years of teaching principally undergraduate SGP at UAB, I relocated to Colorado Springs to experience anew the teaching and learning of Spanish in a different context. The learning environment that I envisioned at the service academy would be focused on the specific Air Force mission within undergraduate higher education. By contrast, I am the product of a liberal arts education that was not singularly focused on a specific career. For the last several decades, I have taught students with a variety of goals, both professional and personal. The teaching and learning environment with which I am the most familiar is rooted in the model of a liberal education that has historically framed SGP programs across the United States over the last 75 years. Goals of the liberal arts education include such attributes as thinking critically, possessing broad analytical skills, learning how to learn, thinking independently, seeing all sides of an issue, communicating clearly (orally and in writing), exercising self-control for the sake of broader loyalties, showing self-assurance in leadership ability, and participating in and enjoying (cross-)cultural experience (Blaich, Bost, Chan, & Lynch, 2010). By reviewing some attributes commonly found in definitions of a liberal arts education, I highlight the cornerstone of numerous undergraduate programs in higher education. My goal is not to produce a comprehensive list of its characteristics. In fact, one finds variations in the definition of the liberal arts education tailored to suit institutional realities and needs. The elements that I emphasize in the present discussion are particular characteristics, such as analytical and critical thinking, leadership development, civic responsibility and cultural breadth, which are especially relevant to how these two Spanish language programs evolved at both the United States Air Force Academy and UAB. Although critical thinking may not be one of the characteristics that spring to mind within military education given the realities of obedience, discipline and hierarchy, critical thinking is an essential characteristic of military officers that must make decisions in complex situations. The teaching/learning of the ability to analyze critically is key in military service academies and in civilian institutions, such as UAB. UAB and arrived at the United States Air Force Academy in summer 2011. Because of the courses that I had been asked to design and teach, I knew that the United States Air Force Academy's curriculum was not about technical instruction as in Spanish for Military Purposes. In fact, my fall courses had mainstream course titles that one might find in any Spanish program: Literature and Film of Spain and Latin American Civilization and Culture. My military supervisors told me that I was invited here to bring a different perspective and pedagogy into the classroom. As my first semester unfolded, I set out to learn from diverse A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 90 pupils and faculty members and to absorb and adapt to the differences before me. The United States Air Force Academy's mission fits neatly on a sign that everyone reads upon entering the military installation: "Developing Leaders of Character." The United States Air Force Academy (2011) is an undergraduate institution, awarding the BS degree as part of its mission to inspire and develop officers with knowledge, character and discipline. Undergraduates are referred to as cadets, and this underscores both the military and academic focus of the learners. After a few weeks at the United States Air Force Academy, I realized that I had landed in a one-of-a-kind educational setting. The institution subscribes to and emphasizes many of the key core values that I associate with a liberal arts education while additionally providing technical training. As Pennington (2012) pointed out in her recent commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, we need to acknowledge that preparing for work and pursuing a liberal arts education are not mutually exclusive. Considering liberal arts principles and professional training as polar opposites is a deeply ingrained notion by many individuals in higher education and in society at large. This belief needs to change because of the type of complex preparation that today's students will need to flourish in the future. Below is the complete list of shared outcomes of the Unites States Air Force Academy. Even with a cursory examination, one finds intertwined traditional liberals arts concepts and elements associated with technical education for engineers, scientists and warriors: Shared United States Air Force Academy Outcomes (2011) Commission leaders of character who embody the Air Force core values. . . . . .committed to Societal, Professional, and Individual Responsibilities Ethical Reasoning and Action Respect for Human Dignity Service to the Nation Lifelong Development and Contributions Intercultural Competence and Involvement . . .empowered by integrated Intellectual and Warrior Skills Quantitative and Information Literacy Oral and Written Communication Critical Thinking Decision Making Stamina Courage Discipline Teamwork . . .grounded in essential Knowledge of the Profession of Arms and the Human & Physical Worlds Heritage and Application of Air, Space, and Cyberspace Power National Security and Full Spectrum of Joint and Coalition Warfare A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 91 Civic, Cultural and International Environments Ethics and the Foundations of Character Principles of Science and the Scientific Method Principles of Engineering and the Application of Technology Source: http://www.usafa.edu/df/usafaoutcomes.cfm?catname=Dean%20of%20Faculty Values such as critical thinking, ethics and ethical reasoning, respect for human dignity, lifelong development and contributions, intercultural competence, and oral and written communication are integral to a liberal arts education and are the foundation of cadet education. The first phrase that frames the entire list—"Commission leaders of character who embody the Air Force core values. . ."—is key to my contention that the United States Air Force Academy's type of SSP is the teaching and learning of languages in the broader context of leadership education. The direct relationship between what one associates with well-informed leaders and liberal arts values emphasizes the importance of nurturing future leaders (whether cadets or college students) that are civically and globally astute. Leadership development clearly underpins both liberal arts values and those of the United States Air Force Academy. Like many undergraduate institutions in the United States, Spanish is widely taught at the United States Air Force Academy. According to Diane K. Johnson, an institutional statistician, there are a total of more than 500 cadets (out of a total cadet enrollment of over 4,000) that are in Spanish classes (introductory through advanced) in spring semester 2012. There are also cadets enrolled in 7 other languages that are labeled strategic or enduring. Notably, there is no language major at the United States Air Force Academy. However, there is a Foreign Area Studies major. Also, cadets can declare a minor in a language. There were 327 cadets with minor in languages at the time of this spring semester 2012 snapshot. The specific mission statement of the United States Air Force Academy's Department of Foreign Languages is: "To develop leaders of character with a global perspective through world-class language and culture education." Language and culture are embedded in the concept of the kind of global perspective that a 21st-century leader must possess. From Washington DC to Wall Street, there is agreement that future leaders internationally—both military and civilian—need to be multilingual and culturally adept to be able to navigate and lead in the 21st century (Education for global leadership, 2006). According to Lt. Col. Western (2011), it is imperative that our military comprehend that maintaining world leadership and security requires a broad understanding of other languages, cultures and thought processes. Although the Department of Defense's report (2012) on "Sustaining United States Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense" does not directly address language and cultural expertise, many of theses priorities rely on knowledge from military leaders with considerable language and cultural acumen. Historically, the language department has always had a dual purpose that has consisted of SSP focusing on developing future Air Force officers, while providing many elements of a liberal arts education. From the following list, you will see a sampling of the generic course titles. They are not a departure from what one might find at other institutions: Basic Spanish I & Basic Spanish II (Spanish 131–132), Intermediate Spanish A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 92 I & Intermediate Spanish II (Spanish 221–222), Advanced Spanish I & Advanced Spanish II (Spanish 321–322), Civilization and Culture (Spanish 365), Current Events in the Spanish-Speaking World (Spanish 371), Introduction to Peninsular Literature (Spanish 376), Introduction to Latin American Literature (Spanish 377), Advanced Spanish Readings (Spanish 491), and Special Topics (Spanish 495). The course titles do not offer clues as to how these classes might differ from the average civilian college or university classes with similar names. In my experience teaching and/or observing these classes, differences do stand out because language learners at the United States Air Force Academy focus on application of language as a skill combined with cultural and historical knowledge. The cadets also seek intellectual breadth through the analysis of multiple perspectives particularly found in intermediate- to upper-level Spanish language classes. In the first six months in residence at the United States Air Force Academy, I observed that cadets are more intellectually broad than I assumed at the outset. Cadets read about literature and culture, analyzed film, and even wrote poetry in Spanish with gusto. They do perform in the classroom with a defined career in mind. The focus on the military profession and leadership changes the daily routine in the language classroom. By emphasizing deliberate leadership and language teaching and/or learning opportunities, crosspollination enhances the classroom exper-ience and improves institutional learning outcomes. Form cannot be divorced from function in language learning, so the synthesis of leadership development and language/cultural learning occurs. Recent studies from interdisciplinary research with the neurosciences and education show that fusion between disciplines can provide effective pathways to learning (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). Teaching Spanish at the United States Air Force Academy altered my preparations and delivery. Because of SSP, I adapted to differences that are administrative, operational, pedagogical, experiential and conceptual. First, I experienced the surface-level administrative transformations from SGP to the special brand of SSP at this institution. I learned about: Classroom rituals that include military protocols, such as calling the class to attention in Spanish, inspecting students' regulation dress and upholding other classroom standards in the target language; References to Air Force traditions and military rank in the target language; And, lock down, active shooter and natural disaster drills that might happen during class time in the target language. Additionally, there were different details in course design that reshaped my pedagogical filter. During an examination of all Spanish language course syllabi at the United States Air Force Academy, I noticed that the communities standard from the 5Cs in the Standards for Foreign Language Learning (1999) is often replaced with a different C that stands for Careers. The focus on the professional use of Spanish is starkly emphasized through this substitution. On an operational level in the classroom, staying abreast of current events in the Spanish-speaking world and being able to interpret them—such as changes in government officials, political and economic transitions in the target culture—take on greater importance while teaching at the United States Air Force Academy. For example, when A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 93 learners know that they might be assigned to carry out tasks in any Latin American country in the future, the learners understandably pay more attention to geographical details, how economic conditions impact political situations, how longstanding historical realities affect the current mood, and so on. The language-learning environment carries with it a cachet of practical information, and it also supplies complex situations and problem-solving scenarios on which future Air Force decision makers can cut their teeth. Language practice includes creating a number of hypothetical SSP situations in which cadets participate in order to foreshadow their leadership roles, such as role-play opportunities that are relevant to Air Force operations. For example, cadets might be asked what they would do and say as a United States Air Attaché or an intelligence officer stationed in Latin America. On the conceptual level, I am currently organizing and creating a seminar that is titled War in the Arts, Literature and Film in Spain and Latin America. It is a themed-humanities seminar that offers a rich lexical environment and an opportunity to focus on the profession of war, ethics, conflict and peacekeeping in the context of film, art and print texts of the Spanish-speaking world. Considering, for example, the representation of the warrior in a literary work provides an opportunity to discuss ethics and strategies and to analyze the representation of leaders across cultures. At the United States Air Force Academy, I have participated in preparing cadets to go on semester-long exchanges to foreign military academies. Some of this is done through wayside teaching at our Spanish conversation table, emphasizing the type of current and relevant social, linguistic, and cultural information that a cadet might need to function abroad in a variety of contexts and represent the United States. One way to prepare for going abroad has been to encourage and mentor cadets to volunteer for selection to host visiting military dignitaries, such as ranking delegations from the Colombian and Mexican Air Force. To prepare cadets, instructors share with them tips about how to interact appropriately and to display leadership through social intelligence and knowledge of protocol in the target language and culture. As a follow up, debriefing after these events is essential to discuss perceptions and observations and to develop cross-cultural competence. Much like teaching and interacting with SGP students, there are immediate needs, and then, there is the important long-range goal of encouraging life-long learning in Spanish. In the context of the United States Air Force, there are programs that make this objective more concrete than what is generally experienced by students in civilian colleges and universities. To take advantage of what the Air Force has to offer, I have also learned about LEAP (Language Enabled Airman Program), which provides for structured life-long language learning for specific purposes in the Air Force. According to the Air Force Culture and Language Center ("Air force culture," 2012), LEAP is designed to sustain, enhance and utilize the existing language skills and talents of Airmen in the program. The stated goal of LEAP is to develop a core group of Airmen across specialties and careers possessing the capability to communicate in one or more foreign languages. To become a participant in LEAP, Airmen must already possess moderate to high levels of proficiency in a foreign language. Individuals that apply and are accepted into the LEAP program receive regular training both face to face and online in the target language as well as have immersion opportunities at intervals during their careers. Working to encourage and help cadets apply for LEAP is another SSP goal at the United States Air Force. A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 94 These are an overview of my unexpected SSP experiences at the Air Force Academy. My transformation from SGP to SSP started with learning and applying new vocabulary that focuses on cadets' professional needs. Later, I began to think of my learners as future leaders that will need to perform and apply knowledge to make judgments about the Spanish-speaking individuals and groups. This motivated me to reorganize courses and reconceive of them with a keener eye toward performance and to explore ways to get cadets to think beyond their immediate milieu. With the overlay of leadership development and military culture, this teaching experience has driven me to operate in a more interdisciplinary fashion than before. I experienced first hand a teaching and learning climate that offers a unique hybrid of liberal arts and technical education in a military context. Perhaps the best lesson that SSP teaches is to constantly question the relevance of what you are doing in the classroom: to whom is it relevant and for what purpose? Within the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Air Force Academy, the SSP focus on career preparation in language instruction and the liberal arts connection with leadership evolved simultaneously. This dual focus of the curriculum contrasts the reality in most civilian language departments where there was one general focus and departments are being (or have been retrofitted) to include new curricula and/or tracks. Many civilian language departments are currently transitioning from SGP programs and integrating more SSP language options. In the late 1980s and on into the 1990s, Spanish for Business and Medical Spanish courses appeared. The integration of professional courses happened in response to societal needs (Doyle, 2010). The Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Air Force Academy offers a rare, fully integrated model of the curricular common ground of career-focused language learning with an underpinning of liberal arts breadth. Conversely, civilian language programs have transitioned to dual-purpose or multipurpose programs for different reasons. In many cases, motives for transitioning programs have been to maintain relevance and enrollments. The latter was clearly the case with the Spanish language program at UAB in the 1990s. This two-fold reality raises the palpable issue of how best to organize these dual-purpose programs from both a curricular and an administrative point of view. Undergraduate language departments and programs have to meet the needs of both their general and specific constituencies. There is a general consensus in the language discipline that multiple paths to the language major, as advocated by the Modern Language Association in the report "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (2007), will be a necessity for the future survival of undergraduate language programs. With curricular reform underway, how do traditional language programs best transition from general purposes programs to hybridized programs that also house languages for specific purposes? Another obvious driver of dual-purpose Spanish language programs is the limited support for language teaching and learning. As programs transform, we need to be mindful of the realities that face most undergraduate language programs: 1) limited financial resources to support language programs, 2) staffing limitations because of faculty back-ground and adaptability, 3) reward systems that favor faculty members who work in the more established subdisciplines in the language field, and 4) multifoci and/or shifting interests of undergraduate students. Because of these conditions, exploring ways that resources can be shared intentionally and constructively will be essential to benefit general A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 95 and specific purposes language programs at the same time. The UAB Spanish language program learned to share resources and evolved into a multipurpose program. The UAB Spanish language program transitioned from SGP to include SSP gradually over several decades. This transformation aligns the department with the institution's vision and mission, which is outlined below: The UAB Vision UAB's vision is to be an internationally renowned research university—a first choice for education and health care. The UAB Mission UAB's mission is to be a research university and academic health center that dis- covers, teaches and applies knowledge for the intellectual, cultural, social and eco- nomic benefit of Birmingham, the state and beyond. Source: http://www.uab.edu/plan/ Reflecting the mission and vision at UAB, these statements clearly present the dual role of the institution: it is both medical and educational. When I joined the faculty 20 years ago, we spoke of the medical side and the academic side of campus in a way that implied a scant relationship between the two. Therefore, the undergraduate curriculum in the language department in the early years of my appointment had no relationship with the health sciences. This separation slowly eroded over the years. When I was hired in 1992, the curriculum for the UAB undergraduate language major would best be described as traditional: language and literature. UAB students studied languages for a variety of reasons, ranging from enrichment to the fulfillment of the compulsory language requirement. We had a multiquarter language requirement that was rescinded in the mid-1990s as a result of the politics between the state's community colleges and the universities. Currently, UAB has no foreign language requirement. Almost 650 students were enrolled in Spanish in spring 2012 out of an undergraduate population of close to 12,000 students ("UAB student profile," 2011). Ironically, the lack of a language requirement in the undergraduate curriculum set the department on a path toward popularizing SSP. At that time, the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures began to turn its attention to providing courses that the students demanded. As a result in the mid-1990s, UAB offered its first medical Spanish classes for undergraduate students. From that time on, I became interested increasingly in SSP for reasons that had to do with the institution's human capital both faculty and student. Also from 2002–2009, I served as chairperson of the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. I took an administrator's interest in growing and integrating a SSP program into the existing general Spanish program. The medical Spanish courses were a good match for the interests of our student body. Approximately 40% of the freshmen that enroll at UAB declare that they are on the premedicine track. Many students are attracted to our campus because UAB houses an internationally known School of Medicine, although many freshmen abandon the premedicine track for other health-related fields. A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 96 Student interest grew in professionally focused language courses and key faculty members invested in SSP as well. In 2001, our first applied linguist in Spanish was hired in the language department. She shared her vision of starting a SSP program by offering a few courses to appeal to pre-professionals. She became the director of the nascent SSP program. Over the years, the SSP program became so popular that it evolved into a more defined and elaborate SSP certificate program ("UAB Spanish for specific purposes program," 2012) that had 62 students enrolled in the program in spring 2012. It was the first undergraduate certificate program on the UAB campus. As the program grew, the SSP Director was successful in convincing existing junior faculty to take professional development seminars in SSP and develop additional SSP courses, such as Intermediate Spanish for the Professions, Advanced Business Spanish and Advanced Spanish for Health Professionals. In 2007, we hired a Spanish instructor to develop and expand the medical Spanish courses in the undergraduate curriculum under the umbrella of SSP. She began to collaborate with the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Dentistry to provide short courses to their graduate students. Over time, signs of curricular integration increased between the medical and academic sides of campus. Also, there was a confluence of external events in the state of Alabama and internal events on the UAB campus that occurred in the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century that promoted the success of the SSP program. Prior to the 2007 recession, a rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population in Alabama had health professionals in a reactive mode because they were not prepared to handle patients that spoke limited English ("Demographic profile of Hispanics in Alabama," 2012). In 2005, UAB hosted campus-wide events around its first freshmen discussion book The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down: A Hmong Child, her American Doctors and the Collision of two Cultures by Ann Fadiman (1997). The book was widely read across campus, especially in the School of Medicine. Fadiman's volume chronicled Hmong (not Spanish) speakers. Nevertheless, the book captured the timely problem of the critical need for communication with the foreign born in the health professions. From that year on, the importance of cross-cultural communication became part of the UAB campus dialogue. Also around this time, UAB's prominent, grant-funded Minority Health and Research Center unofficially broadened its definition of minority to include Latinos. Meanwhile, within the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures we were able to offer our first scholarship award for a Spanish major on the premedicine track in 2003. Beginning in 2003, I recall anecdotally receiving periodic inquiries from ranking individuals in the School of Medicine that wanted to collaborate. Typically, they requested the assistance of Spanish-speaking faculty with informed-consent forms. There were repeated requests for help with interpretation until the UAB clinics developed protocols to deal with Spanish-language only patients. In January 2010, we piloted a short course in Spanish (Davidson & Long, 2012) that was offered as part of the medical school elective curriculum. In 2002, the staff of the language department informally observed a trend in the increase of undergraduate students who declared a double major in Spanish and Biology/Chemistry. I procured a modest donation from a local physician for the aforementioned scholarship. All of these events fueled the popularity of the UAB SSP program and clearly defined the need for it. The current SSP program and certificate houses a number of preprofessional courses that are not limited exclusively to SSP students. The full program description can A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 97 be viewed at http://www.uab.edu/languages/languages-programs/ssp. The number of general versus pre-professional students varies from course to course, but courses such as Spanish Translation and Interpretation tend to enroll students from both cohorts, whereas Spanish for the Health Professionals enrolls few general-purposes students. Of course, the faculty members have noticed over time that our student clientele had slowly changed: two very different types of students were sitting in the same classroom. Professionally focused Spanish students and general Spanish students enrolled in the some of the same courses. This presented new pedagogical challenges for our faculty members and raised the issue: how does one meet the needs of both groups (SSP and SGP) in the context of our institution's student body? To date, this matter has not been systematically dealt with in the UAB Spanish Division. Individual professors have developed strategies, like individualizing projects, and yet, other faculty members teach to one group to the exclusion of the other. The curricular changes discussed by the Modern Language Association have come about in many language departments, and they have been welcomed by some faculty members but not by all. Embracing the notion that the traditional liberal arts language learner can cohabitate with the interdisciplinary and/or career-focused language learner (as demonstrated at the United States Air Force Academy) is key. Highlighting the philo-sophical common ground rooted in a liberal arts education is what may be perceived by some individuals as strictly technical training may help ease the transition. The next phase will be to articulate relevant practices for educators and administrators, as well as shared values and outcomes, and to provide models that show transitional programs how to achieve what I would like to call 'constructive hybridity.' I define constructive hybridity as a positive and collective effort to sort out and integrate the best of traditional Spanish language programs with different SSP practices evidencing more focused professional goals. The next task is to define the 'shared canon' between the various tracks in any given Spanish program. Obviously, this is not a one-size-fits-all charge due to different student, societal and institutional needs, but there is foundational work to be done in order to come up with more consensuses. Given my administrative experiences as a faculty member at UAB and my teaching experience at the United States Air Force Academy, I have come to realize that both general and specific missions in Spanish-language learning are not mutually exclusive. In June 2011, I marched off to Colorado to teach and to learn. I have learned that there is a place for time-tested liberal arts values within SSP programs and that hybridized programs (liberal arts and SSP) can be successful and beneficial to the learner. As suggested by the United States Air Force Academy and UAB programs, future programs in Spanish-language instruction will need to focus on our common ground to serve multiple purposes. Thus, I return to the concept that I mentioned at the outset: it is time to think hybrid. Our future undergraduate language programs will have multiple tracks/purposes. This hybridization can be as positive and enriching for both faculty members and language learners as it has been for me during this phase of my career as a language educator. Returning to my own narrative as a committed, career Spanish professor, I have no doubt that, in the future, my newfound SSP instructional acumen and orientation will inform my future general purposes classes and improve them. A TALE OF TWO INSTITUTIONS Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes (2013) 98 Disclaimer The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Air Force Academy, the United States Air Force, The Depart-ment of Defense or the United States Government. References Air force culture and language center. (2012, May). Retrieved from http://www.culture.af.mil/leap/index.aspx Blaich, C., Bost, A., Chan, E., & Lynch, R. (2010). Defining liberal arts education. Retrieved from http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/storage Coyle, D., Hood, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). Content and language integrated learning (p. 25). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, L., & Long, S. S. (2012). Medical Spanish for US medical students: A pilot case study. Dimension, 1–13. Retrieved from http://scolt.webnode.com/ Demographic profile of Hispanics in Alabama. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/al/ Doyle, M. S. (2010). A responsive, integrative Spanish curriculum at UNC Charlotte. Hispania, 93(1), 80–84. Education for global leadership: The importance of international studies and foreign language education for US economic and national security. (2006). Washington, DC: Committee for Economic Development. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Foreign languages and higher education: new structures for a changed world. (2007) MLA ad hoc committee on foreign languages. Profession published by the Modern Language Association, 2007 (May), 1–11. Pennington, H. (2012, April 13). For student success, stop debating and start improving. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A33–A34. Sánchez-López, L. (2013). Spanish for specific purposes. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Standards for foreign language learning in the 21st century. (1999) Lawrence, KS: National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project, Allen Press. Sustaining US global leadership: Priorities for 21st century defense. (2012) Washington DC: Department of Defense. UAB Spanish for specific purposes program. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.uab.edu/languages/ssp UAB Student profile. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.uab.edu/home/about/student-profile-accomplishments United States Air Force Academy curriculum handbook 2011–2012. (2011). USAF Academy, CO: Academy Board. Western, D. J. (2011). How to say 'national security' in 1,100 languages. Air & Space Power Journal, 48–61. Retrieved from http://www.airpower.au.af.mil
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Karen Litfin on Gaia Theory, Global Ecovillages, and Embedding IR in the Earth System
This is the third in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
Many debates in International Relations concern struggles regarding what should be the autonomous limits and focus of the discipline itself. However, increasing environmental and climate concerns challenge the self-contained nature of IR on discrete political phenomena, because what IR considers it's exogenous context is threatening to destabilize the premises of the content of international political practice itself. While such concerns often lead to a securitization and politicization of the environment and climate in IR, some scholars argue we should work towards the exact opposite. In this Talk, Karen Litfin—among others—elaborates on the kind of theory in which IR is embedded in, rather than applied to, natural systems; discusses examples of social arrangements that try to translate that theoretical insight into practice; and engages with questions of secularism and mysticism that irrevocably accompany those efforts.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The fact that we can today truly speak of something of a global economy, the central problem now is to formulate the political institutions that are commensurate to these globalized economic institutions. We have far to go on that project. It also means doing so within the carrying capacity of the earth—that is, politically configuring that global economy in such a way that it doesn't exhaust ecological resources. So I would say that the challenge, in terms of actual politics, is to find those institutions.
The challenge for the discipline of International Relations is to do the necessary thinking to facilitate that institutional transition, but few IR scholars even acknowledge that political institutions must attend to the carrying capacity of the earth. In general, the discipline of International Relations, Political Science and even most of social sciences more generally behave as if there are no natural constraints to our behavior. Yet our freedom to even be able to theorize about the international system is completely dependent upon a vast web of life, other people growing our food, and a whole technological infrastructure that we had nothing to do with creating. International Relations talks a lot about interdependence, but do we really take it seriously?
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I've always been interested in science and technology. As an undergraduate, I studied physics and astronomy, but I didn't finish those majors because I realized, that if I graduated with those degrees I would most likely be working indirectly or directly for the military. I got politicized and I began to see that the political agenda drives the scientific agenda. This was in the 1970s and it was possible at that time that we were going to have an all-out nuclear war. I did not want to be a part of that.
I began to see that there is a dialectical relationship between science and politics. Because science facilitates the technological changes, which make the basic backdrop for politics, it's very important. For instance, the defense department was funding DARPA, which led—without them fathoming that at the time—to the development of the Internet—now a key site where global politics plays out.
Science also provides metaphors through which we understand politics. I did my Masters thesis on the mechanistic worldview and the devitalization of nature in the 17th century—that is, taking living nature out of our systematic theorizing. While others had written on this, I traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophy. A reductionist and mechanistic worldview underpins a lot of IR theory, as well most of our political institutions. We need to really start questioning that. Another way this plays out is that the notion of the global really had a huge jump when we got the image of Earth fromspace. The idea of Earth Day was really closely aligned to the fact that the image of the earth from space just had come out. Gaia Theory came about because James Lovelock was looking for signs of life on Mars. We were interested in extra-planetary life, but weren't looking at our own system or planet. So basically it turned all that science back on the Earth and said 'Oh my Gosh, we do have this kind of atmosphere that has the telltale science of life in it', which tells us that life is hoping to create the atmosphere. Then to have the human mind to conceptualize that is really huge. The idea that we are the Earth becoming conscious of itself is basically what science is telling us. These monitoring systems are one means by which we have the possibility of becoming conscious of that fact.
In terms of personal trajectory, when I started teaching International Relations back in the early 1990s, I started realizing that petroleum holds the whole thing together, the whole global system was held together by petroleum. (You could also say fossil fuels, but coal and natural gas don't power that much transnationally; it's really the petroleum.) Yet hardly anybody in IR talks seriously about petroleum—or energy or biodiversity or soil or the atmosphere. That's what I mean about getting to the material basis. But having said that, I think how we interact with the material basis is a reflection of our consciousness. So I'm not a material reductionist. Rather, I'm looking for a wholeness that understands our approach to material reality as being a reflection of our consciousness.
So this was why I have become interested in biological metaphors. I still think the leaning edge of human thought is understanding human systems as living systems. From this vantage point, we can begin to reshape our institutions in ways that mimic, sustain, and regenerate living systems. There's a long history of natural law and I don't exactly put myself in that camp, but I think there are ways that we need to understand ourselves as thoroughly embedded in natural systems and then move consciously from that place.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
To my mind, these are very different questions because, at least at many universities, becoming an IR specialist often entails ignoring some fundamental global realities. For one, even though most of humanity lives in so-called developing countries, most IR theory pays attention only to the Global North. Likewise, IR is fairly blind to the fact that the lifestyles of the Global North, if globalized, would require between three and six Earths, depending upon whether you are looking at Europeans or North Americans. Again, there is only one Earth! Fortunately, an important subfield has emerged with IR—global environmental politics—that is helping to rectify the situation.
The question I would prefer to answer is: what would a student need to know in order to understand the most pressing challenges facing the world system? To this, I would advise three things. The first would be to dive deeply into a broad and critical reading of the history of modernity, including the interpenetrating scientific, political, commercial, theological and industrial revolutions that characterize the modern era. The second would be to learn about the primary international institutions (the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, UN Security Council, etc.), and ask what is working, what isn't, and why? The third would be to do all of this learning while simultaneously learning to think systemically. Take at least one good course on systems theory; one that specifically offers a strong grounding in living systems, and start making connections. Why, for instance, do 'ecology' and 'economics' share the same root (oikos, Greek for household)? What would it mean to consider the international system as a living system and a subset of the Earth system? If we think this world system that we've created of a globalized economy and rudimentary international law is not a part of a living system, we are living in a big delusion. So to actually understand how living systems function, we need the literature on system theory that of course has been used in biology and ecology, but has also been applied a lot in the business world and organizational development. I think it's making its way into IR.
The world is full of technologies and technological systems (and getting more so each day). Could you elaborate on how this is relevant for IR?
I think that's a huge gap: IR doesn't pay nearly enough attention to technological systems—and when they do, it's generally from an uncritical and mechanical perspective. Even though much of the constructivist critique of liberal institutionalism is that the latter is overly materialistic, it actually isn't as if institutionalists talk about economics as if that were a material reality. Economics is a secondary human system overlaid on, but abstracted from, material systems. I think that IR needs to get really serious about understanding the actual material basis for politics. Climate change will probably be the issue that drives that.
So what kinds of technologies and institutions are we going to have to facilitate a global civilization? Now that's a worthwhile question! As I indicated, we now have a more or less globalized economy, but we don't have a global polis; we don't have the institutions that are commensurate to the economy that we have got. So the question is: can we sustain current civilization on the energy budget that is available to us and not wreck the climate?
Technological systems are driven by energy; energy is the master resource. Some energy analysts say that in order to have a global civilization, we need to have an energy return on energy investments of something like 5 to 1—meaning, for instance, that for each barrel of oil we put into getting more oil, we need to get five back. Right now petroleum is getting—depending on where you find it and how it's getting to you—somewhere between 15 and 25 to 1. That's the Middle East. It used to be 100 to 1 at the beginning of the 19th century. And now we are getting, say, 20:1. I've seen analyses of tar sands that put that energy source at somewhere between 3 and 5 to 1. Solar panels, if they work well, they are maybe getting 5:1. So the trend is worsening and we are starting to push that envelope of 5:1 energy return on investment. And if we exploit some of the new unconventional hydrocarbons—like fracking and, worse, methane hydrates—to their maximum potential, we'll fry the planet.
My question is how we can leverage existing technological, economic, financial and political resources to sustain a global civilization. I dearly wish more people were putting their attention on that question. The underlying assumption for most people is that business as usual can continue. Maybe, but not for long.
I'd like to throw in one little term coined by Stephen Quilley, an environmental sociologist: 'low energy cosmopolitanism' (read the paper here). I think this is a huge challenge for us. If it's possible to have a global civilization on the energy budget that we have available, it's going to be some form of a low energy cosmopolitanism, where we make some very conscious choices about what we are going to globalize. For instance, Germany probably wouldn't be importing grapes from Africa and none of us would be going on luxury vacations. We would be making a lot of conscious choices, but if we want to have a global civilization we have to be globalizing something, so what is it that we are globalizing?
How do you see the question of technological determinism when studying technologies?
This is really important to note, because if you just look at human systems as living systems there can be a kind of materialistic reductionism there. People who think like William Connolly, the new materialism understands that we should not be materialistic reductionists and that there is this wildcard of human consciousness. The fact of the matter is, we can assemble all the data we want but we don't know where we are going. But what we do know is that we've created a tremendously complex and complicated world that nobody can actually understand!
I think we need to address that question in a very specific way with respect of specific technologies, but if we stick to one example—satellites—I think the technologies do have certain properties embedded in them. I have written a feminist theoretical critique of earth observing satellites, where I argued that this kind of gaze from space actually does downplay or preclude certain perspectives. But as I thought about it more deeply, I saw very concretely that a lot of people are using those technologies to do what they want—not what the centralized political and scientific institutions that gave rise to the satellites wanted. So I would say the wildcard here is consciousness and human inventiveness, because that's what will shape how people deploy the technologies once there are on the ground.
For example, satellites were devised for spying and are certainly still being used for spying, but they are being used for so much else, such as Google Maps. I think some people might have been able to foresee that kind of development, but most of us didn't have a clue that this sort of thing could come about. Or that you could have indigenous people mapping their traditional lands in order to make land rights claims. So the wildcard really is human consciousness and that's why nothing really is deterministic. The greater the complexity in a living system, the more surprising its emergent properties. Seven billion human brains linked together in global technological and ecological systems are bound to yield surprises!
You indicated that you use biology and living systems as a reservoir for metaphors. Could you elaborate on that?
If I speak about living systems I usually do so through work called Gaia Theory. Looking through the lens of Gaia Theory, we would first understand that we exist within certain spheres such as biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. We have taken geological time and inserted it into human time by digging up fossil fuels. As a consequence, we have kind of checkmated ourselves and are now forced into having to think in geological terms. We have to start thinking in geological time scales, which was never the case before. If we are going to find a way of inhabiting this planet sustainably, particularly if we are going to have anything approaching a global civilization, we have to understand that we live within a living system and then go about the rather daunting but exciting project of developing international law and institutions that reflect that reality.
There is a whole subfield of earth system governance in which Earth system scientists, IR theorists and international legal experts are coming together to think through these questions. The literature on earth system governance starts from the premise that the Earth is a living system and draws heavily on earth system science, which draws heavily from Gaia theory. You cannot separate atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere: they are all intertwined as one big living system—and now humanity is functioning as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That's the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it will require an entirely new way of going about politics and economics.
So how can we bring the concept of Gaia Theory into practical reality? Besides the emerging field of Earth system governance, we can also do this in a very personal way by beginning to really internalize what it means being a human being at this time. A few years back, I came to the point where I decided that I did not want to theorize about anything I could not live. That turned out to be a huge challenge. After I wrote the 'integral politics' piece (see links below)—and I really do love that piece!—I saw that I couldn't fully live it. It was so big. For me, one of the most important implications of Gaia Theory is that we are the Earth becoming aware of itself. That's a huge implication. If you merely think of it conceptually, it is wonderful mind candy; but if you actually take it to the heart and try to live it, it changes your life. I challenged myself to do this and, at some point, it occurred to me that there must be other people who have traveled farther down that road than I had—in other words, people who had radically changed their lives to reflect their growing awareness that human beings are the Earth becoming conscious of itself. So I found myself traveling around the world to ecovillages which, for me, helped to tie it all together. Why is somebody who's teaching international environmental law and politics wandering around the world visiting these little tiny micro-communities? Because these people are taking the radical implications of Gaia Theory to heart (even if they've never read about it) and collectively changing their material, economic and social lives. That's why I spent a year on the road living in ecovillages. It's a strange thing to be an IR theorist who doesn't want to theorize about anything that she can't live!
Bringing up the issue of how to live your research, could you elaborate on what kind of outlook is necessary to live in accordance to Gaia Theory?
So this leads to the importance of humility for me. The value of humility is that it comes naturally as a consequence of understanding. You do not have to value it in advance; it comes automatically from understanding ourselves as part of this larger living system. In my experience at least, as soon as you grasp that, you automatically have an enormous sense of humility and gratitude. Those two qualities just spontaneously arise from truly grasping that reality. Going back to ecovillages, I asked myself who is living in ways that can actually work for the long run. The result became the eponymous book. I wanted to see collective efforts and particularly larger communities that were generally at least a hundred people, because you can do a lot more collectively, than you can on your own. Some of these communities are reducing their ecological footprint radically. In some cases, we are talking about per capita reductions in material consumption and waste production of 80-90% as compared to their home country averages.
This is very big news—especially given that these communities are still tied to the larger system. They are not tiny isolated enclaves. For instance, they're still using the mass transit of the larger society; most of them have Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet. They're not living in caves and many of them are very much globally engaged. On a material level, they're much closer to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. So in that way, I was very interested in just seeing what are their physical systems. But I began to see that their physical systems were only made possible because of the degree of trust and reciprocity that they have created.
That entails doing a lot of personal work. Diana Leafe-Christian, who has written a number of books on communities, says that 'community life is the longest and most expensive personal growth workshop you'll ever take'. It's true! If you're willing to do the personal work and hang in there through the difficult times and conflicts, you can develop the kind of self that's willing to do some very deep sharing. I would add, though, that this level of sharing is done best when it is respectful of the individualism that we have developed. I don't think that communities should be running roughshod over individualism. There needs to be some balance of privacy and communal life. The communities that work well have figured out a way to do this. To my mind, the communities that work really well are the ones who are working on developing collective forms of consciousness. Which means actually I think going beyond the separative rational mind: it doesn't mean demeaning those qualities, it means using them, but using them in the service of something larger. As I said earlier, progressive change entails transcending and including. Individualism, for all its negative consequences, is a genuine historical achievement.
And I would say on a very practical level, one of the ways that they reduce their footprint is by withdrawing to some extent from the global economy. Having very low consumption and being fairly energy efficient and self-reliant, reliance on food self-sufficiency, but withdrawing from global society. To me, they are answering the question I raised earlier: What would a low-energy cosmopolitanism look like? And they are doing this not just because they consume less and live more simply but because by and large ecovillagers actually have a cosmopolitan identity. They might be growing their own food and composting their shit, but they're also tied into the global system. They're actively engaged in the Internet, sometimes attending global conferences and many of them are politically active on issues such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear waste disposal and human rights.
They are little nodes of positive examples, but they're very small. In fact, hardly anybody lives in an ecovillage, which is why the last chapter of my book is called 'Scaling it up'. I basically look at the underlying principles of ecovillages and talk about how these principles could be scaled up to the level of cities, regions, national government and international norms. I realize this is a big stretch, but I felt that as an International Relations scholar, I at least need to try it. The important misconception you run into that moment is the idea that sustainability needs to be expensive—the idea that somehow we can consume our way into sustainability. Actually, the most sustainable form of consumption is no consumption! Yet this is not what all ecovillages do. There is one community that I visited in up-state New York, in Ithaca, this is the same city that Cornell University is in, where two thirds of the residents have masters degrees or PhDs and their homes are worth more than the average in the area. They have a pretty middle class lifestyle, yet their average ecological footprint is about half the American norm. So they're not sustainable, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. They hired architects and have nice homes, which is a very different approach than that of most rural ecovillages.
In the Global North, the smallest footprints that I saw tended to be in the rural off-grid ecovillages that were more or less self-sufficient in food, energy, and water. In some of these communities, residents were living on as little as 25% of their average national incomes. This is impressive because it tells us that people in affluent countries can live well on far less money and with far less environmental damage than is considered normal in those countries.
Yet the fact of the matter is that most people today live in cities, so it was important for me to also look at urban ecovillages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, has a very small footprint because it is high-density and automobile use is discouraged. If you lower your transportation footprint by not driving or sharing vehicles, and if you grow your own food or rely upon locally produced food and have and passive solar construction and renewable energy for your buildings, you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption. You can have a much smaller footprint and still have a very comfortable life. People think that you need money in order to live. It seems that we need money in order to live, but actually what we need is food and shelter and transportation and relationships. So if you figure out ways of getting those things without money, you've made a huge step to getting out of the global economy. In a nutshell, that's what ecovillages are doing.
So are ecovillages all the same across the globe? Is it a new 'social form' emerging?
It is different in the developing countries and in the affluent countries, and I think it's important to clarify that at the outset. I visited a number of ecovillages and ecovillage networks in both developing countries and affluent countries. In the latter, there is a greater possibility for what I consider 'post-individualist' that both transcends and includes individualism. A very simple 'post-individualistic' approach to property rights, for instance, would be co-housing, where the land is owned in common and people own their own homes. But their private homes would be a lot smaller because so many amenities are shared. The common house would have a community kitchen, so that, depending upon how much people are willing to share, private kitchens can be very small. If there's a collectively owned guest space, then you don't need a guest room in your house. And if you do a lot of your socializing together, then you can do that in the common house. So your own house could be quite small but you would still have access to all the comforts of a private existence and more. The more people are willing to share, the more will be collectively owned. And that really does require trust, because it's a big problem if the relationships blow up and you have your finances entangled with those people! This is just one example of how property rights can coexist with the softening of boundaries between individuals.
The flipside of this is occurring in developing countries, where the post-individualistic arrangement that I've been making doesn't really apply. And this is important because that's where most people in the world live. There you have cultures where people already have much more of a collective orientation. So we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. Actually, in many cases, their developmental task is to become more individuals. And the question is: how do they become more highly-individualized rather than being subsumed by traditional moral codes—how do they that without over-consuming. In the west, we had a fossil fuel subsidy that enabled us to become highly individualized, as I said before, the only reason we can be having this interview is because somebody else is growing our food.
In developing countries, the real task is to find a way for people to become more individualistic without over consuming. And so this is why I was impressed by the model I saw in Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan participatory development network that belongs to the Global Ecovillage Network. There, fifteen thousand villages are trying to apply ecovillage principles to create what they call a "no-poverty/no-affluence society." Their programs in micro-finance and women's literacy, for instance, give villagers—especially women—an incentive to stay in the village because they have a livelihood. And when people stay in their villages, they tend to live a lot more sustainably. As the women becoming literate, they begin making choices for themselves and therefore becoming more individualized. So it's a way of hopefully leap-frogging urbanization in order to sustain rural village life.
I should say that you can apply these principles anywhere you live, in cities as well as rural areas. I visited quite a few ecovillages in cities. One of the most important things that the Global Ecovillage Network is doing is training people, wherever they live, to apply ecovillage principles in their urban neighborhoods or wherever they find themselves. There have been some amazing projects coming up in the Brazilian favelas and in China. GEN has developed a course called 'Gaia Education' that's being offered all over the world and especially in developing countries. There's now a Global Ecovillage Network for Africa. There are basic principles of sustainability that, if you live in an ecovillage, you can apply more intentionally, but they are applicable everywhere.
In a way, 'Gaia theory' sounds very spiritual—and for that reason the Gaia concept was initially very much opposed by many physicists and climate scientists. In a way, Gaia theory entails a critique of modernist secularism and faith in technology; how do you see that in your work?
I have mentioned the critique of mechanization in the early modern era, but in fact the early modern scientists, such as Newton, were all looking for God. Now many of the hard sciences are moving in the direction of mysticism—I would speak of mysticism rather than spirituality—but it's not a mysticism that is simply a projection of the human psyche onto the cosmos; rather, it is empirically derived. I think that's a kind of postmodern development that would have been impossible in the pre-modern era. That's what I was saying about transcending and including, that the ideas that we have of who we are in the cosmos are so different as a consequence of modern science. We can transcend those ideas but also include them. From the Big Bang and the evolution of species, we came out of all of that! And implicit within this fact, if you take it deeper, is that there is a secret oneness to it all. I think that the lessons we have to learn politically and economically now are about interdependence. But if you take interdependence to its depths, it too implies a secret oneness. Most importantly for the current evolutionary crisis: that oneness is embedded in our consciousness and we can access that. That is the reason why I don't want to theorize about anything that I can't live; I'm working at that level as well.
It's interesting, because that also has implications for my teaching. I teach in a fairly direct way when I have living bodies and inquiring minds right in front of me and can engage them at a personal level. I give them my big picture view of politics as a subset of living systems and also being a kind of living system. I get them to inhabit that in themselves through doing contemplative and reflective exercises in the classroom. For instance, I'm teaching a class called political ecology of the world food system and we talked about the globalization of different food commodities and where chocolate comes from for instance, where it originally came from, who processes it, how much do the farmers get from all of that. I brought in raw cacao nibs, which most of the students had never tasted before. We talked about where these came from and how expensive they were even though cacao is not processed, because raw cacao is a something of a delicacy. Then I gave them this very highly processed chocolate without sugar and with alternative sweeteners in it. I invited them to really be present to tasting each of these things as I talked about them and I left some significant gaps of silence, they could actually be present to experience of themselves inhabiting the living system and now being the beneficiary of a world food system. How did we come to have cacao from West Africa and stevia from Paraguay in our mouths? What are sociopolitical and biotic networks that have made this possible? And can we allow ourselves to truly experience what it means to be the beneficiary of these living systems? And what of our own as living system? When I am in the classroom it is actually quite easy to teach what I call person/planet politics. I never teach anything as if it is just 'out there'. Whenever I teach anything, I want the students to inhabit it in their bodies, in their experience. And I try to do that as best as I can by living what I teach as best I can.
It is a little embarrassing, but I don't know how all of this applies to IR; I am just trying to do it as best I can in my own life, as it is presented to me. And I write about it and I publish things—I have a piece coming out on localism that basically makes the case for what I call organic globalism, which is a globalization that is premised upon the earth as a living system and international institutions being designed very consciously on that basis. I don't quite know what it looks like but I have a sense of its rightness. To be honest with you, I am better with that in the classroom that I am at the level of large-scale institutions. Because I am beginning to inhabit this in my own being and I can communicate it to students. Maybe the next challenge is to be able to communicate it at a larger level.
So isn't there a tension between living sustainably and participating in a globalized world that is hard-wired in terms of technology?
Consciousness does not at all preclude technology. For example, I think us having this dialogue is on some level contributing to a certain kind of consciousness and it's completely facilitated by technology. Without Skype we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's helpful to me, about what I call E2C2 (ecology, economics, community and consciousness) is that these are four lenses through which to view any phenomenon—and that includes technology. For instance, we can view our Skype conversation through the lens of ecology in terms of the amount of energy that's used. Economically, we might consider what is being produced and what its value is. It's probably a pretty good economic deal since you and I are virtually paying nothing for it! So economically it's a good deal. In terms of the communitarian lens, we are developing a dialogue that will hopefully be in a relational field with many other people, perhaps thereby also contributing to a certain growth of consciousness.
E2C2 offers four lenses through which we can look at technology; they are not mutually exclusive. For me, the question is: to what extent are our technologies beneficial in terms of each of the lenses. Denis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day, said the basic principle of sustainability is that you leave your molecules at home and export your photons. This brings us back to the concept of low energy cosmopolitanism. It's a huge question: what are we going to globalize? If we are going to have a global civilization we need to have global communication. The Internet is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and could to function as a kind of global brain, though its roots are in its military applications and today it is primarily dominated by commerce. (And I understand that pornography is a big part of it as well.) Despite its limitations, the Internet provides an infrastructure that could enable us to be in communication globally, which is very important if you want to develop a global consciousness and a global civilization. But we need to understand that our technologies must operate within the limits of the Earth system. In other words, technologies—like all human systems—are also living systems.
Last question. So how can we relate this back to IR?
I think one of the ways this is happening is that some pockets of IR are actually returning to foundational concepts. For instance, Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) has started this Journal International Theory. People are seriously looking at the bigger and deeper questions, so uniting more with political theorists for instance. This idea that we are coming up against real limits is a very frightening idea from the perspective of a certain idea of freedom rooted in liberal politics. We really need to rethink the meaning of freedom in an era of limits. My own feeling is that human beings are kind of hard-wired towards unlimitedness—but the world is now pressing us to interrogate this impulse. We don't do well with limits. But the fact of the matter is, we are not evolutionarily adapted to abundance, we don't even know what to do with abundance. We are squandering resources in the most absurd ways. So we really need to rethink what freedom is in a world of limits.
It's not all together a bad thing that we are facing these limits. Those of us who have at least the privilege of being well fed and reasonably comfortable, can actually turn our attention to this question of consciousness. Because this question of 'what is freedom' is a problem of human consciousness. Rather than turning our desire towards mastery—I think as human beings we have an innate desire towards mastery – rather than turning that desire onto the external world, we've pretty well mastered it; except turns out that we live in it so it's coming back to bite us and we are facing huge climate change most likely. When we shift the focus of this desire for mastery to our own psyches, then lots of things open up. And I don't think only people who live in industrialized countries need to do this or are doing this. One of the things I saw in my ecovillage book is that people living in developing countries are also quite aware of it and are doing it at the places they live as well. There is a global awakening, at least in small pockets, to the fact that we live within a limited Earth system and a serious inquiry into what it means to be a human being at this juncture between modernity and the Anthropocene.
Karen Litfin (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls "person/planet politics." Her first book, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in International Environmental Cooperation (Columbia University Press, 1994), looks at the discursive framing of science in the ozone treaties. Her second book, The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (MIT Press, 1998), explores how state sovereignty is being reconfigured as a consequence of global environmental politics. Some of the topics of her recently publications include: the politics of earth remote sensing; the political implications of Gaia Theory; the relationship between scientific and political authority in the climate change negotiations; the politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world; and holistic thinking in the global ecovillage movement.
Related links
Faculty profile at the University of Washington Read Litfin's Thinking like a planet: Gaian politics and the transformation of the world food system (2011 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Litfin's Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecoloy (Millennium, 2003) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty (Global Society, 1999) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Gendered Eye in the Sky: Feminist Perspectives on Earth Observation Satellites (Frontiers 1997) here (pdf)