Kumi Naidoo – The heterogeneity of global civil society and the prospects for global change
August 27th, 2010
Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace International Executive Director, discusses the challenges that global civil society faces in the wake of the convergence of a set of global crises. He argues that “this moment in history can be likened to a perfect storm. This term denotes a convergence of a range of crises coming together in a very short space of time: the fuel price crisis; the food price crisis; the ongoing poverty crisis which takes the lives of 50.000 men, women and children daily from preventable causes in the developing world; the climate crisis; and then the financial crisis. It’s only when the financial broke out that those who are in power finally recognised that we are in the midst of a crisis”.
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Ava Caradonna – Sex work without apology
June 6th, 2008
Ava Caradonna, a collective identity used by sex worker activists and allies rather than an individual person, focuses on the conceptualisation and organisation of the x:talk project – a project that seeks to explore and expand the ideas and confidence developed in criticising the mainstream human trafficking discourse, drawing on insights gained from sex workers’, migrant and feminist struggles.
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Dimitrios Zachariadis – Public information belongs to the public
May 19th, 2008
Collective blogs, Tilaphos and Tilaphos-reforest are two of the few cases in the Greek web where it becomes obvious that the collective intelligence of the users might put a remedy to some of the lingering deficiencies of the central state. Dimitrios Zachariadis, the driving force behind the two projects, explains that their aim is to disperse, through the Greek web, reliable public information regarding the loss of forest land, so that it becomes clear and substantiated with evidence, that the decline of forests in this land is an everyday issue so close to us all.
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Luke Heemsbergen – From utopia to eutopia via the social web of new media
May 19th, 2008
The term dystopia first appeared in a speech before the British Parliament by Greg Webber and John Stuart Mill in 1868. Mill’s knowledge of Greek suggests that he was referring to a bad place, rather than simply the opposite of Utopia, or non place, making a pun out of eutopia: a region of happiness, or appropriate to this study, region of emancipation. Through the exploration of 3 new media projects, Luke Heemsbergen analyses the possibilities of the social web to bring utopian dreams of digital democracy, to an eutopian place of emancipation.
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Henrik Ingo – Ethics, freedom, and trust
January 29th, 2008
The great achievement of the Web 2.0 phenomenon lies, for Henrik Ingo, in that it has significantly grown the mass of users who are at least instinctively coming to appreciate the joys of sharing (Youtube), communication (forums, Facebook) or access to information (blogs). The time has not (yet) arrived when everyone would be an active Linux user, but through Web 2.0 the same value system is penetrating into a larger crowd.
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