Fiction that Matters

penamerican:

South African visual artist Zanele Muholi wins Index Award for free expression for work presenting positive images of lesbians and transgendered persons.

Image credit: Mail & Guardian

penamerican:

PEN Launches Interactive Timeline to press for release of new Honorary Member Enoh Meyomesse.

Click here to learn the story of Enoh Meyomesse and take action.

Justice Talking: Stories about Crime, Punishment, and Life (and Death) in the Legal System

This event will feature seven storytellers telling seven-minute true, personal, tales about their experiences with the criminal justice system.

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Grandmother Power!

penamerican:

Paola Gianturco’s book Grandmother Power, a moving collection of essays and photographs from powerHouse Books, profiles grandmother activists from 15 countries on five continents around the world who are agitating for change and for the rights of their grandchildren. Below is an excerpt from the chapter entitled “Justice: Argentina.”

Argentine grandmothers began searching for their grandchildren as soon as they learned the youngsters had been stolen by the military, an event that set the agenda for the rest of their lives.At the beginning, their investigations were greeted with silence. The public was too afraid to acknowledge that between 1976 and 1983 the junta “disappeared” 30,000 people, forcing them into secret detention camps where they were tortured for information, then murdered.Explaining the government’s strategy to eliminate leftist dissent, General Iberico Saint-Jean promised,“First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then those who remain indifferent and finally, we will kill the weak.”

The “Disappeared,” as they are called, ranged from innocents to intellectuals to guerrillas many were blue-collar workers and students.

lareviewofbooks:

Marjorie Heins raises important but troubling questions about academic freedom in her new book Priests of our Democracy. From Stephen Rohde’s review:

Heins juxtaposes her compelling and distressing account of the anticommunist purges [during the 1940s and 50s] that reached into the ivory towers of our colleges and universities with a chilling cautionary tale that asks whether history is repeating itself through the repressive reactions to 9/11. Have the earlier witch hunts that targeted alleged communists (with a disturbing and disproportionate focus on Jews) been replaced with an obsessive targeting of alleged terrorists (with a disturbing and disproportionate focus on Muslims)? Have we learned anything from the excesses of McCarthyism, or are we condemned to repeat them?

Read more over here.

The Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice
http://srilankacampaign.org

Uzbekistan's Cotton Slaves: Videogame Highlights Forced Labour and Human Rights Abuse

photo: Reuters

A British company has launched a videogame to put players in the shoes of the more than one million Uzbekistan citizens and children who are forced to harvest cotton in abusive conditions.

My Cotton Picking Day, by Game the News, challenges gamers to fill the cotton bag of an emaciated picker with the daily 50kg quota Tashkent authorities impose.

The game allows just two options: pick cotton with the right hand or pick cotton with the left. Each click gains about 1.5 cotton grams, making the road to 50kg hours long. Fatigued players are threatened by a taskmaster who says: “Get on with it or you are in for a beating!”

My article: Open Source Design Tools for Human Rights Activists

The world’s premier human rights organizations often have entire communications teams with dedicated graphic designers to celebrate their work. But not every organization can afford to have a designer. Even those organizations that do have design gurus may decide, for strategic reasons, to keep tight control over their workflow so that they are not bombarded with too many requests. Not to worry! There are several open source design tools that allow anyone to create killer flyers, posters, icons, or campaign — the only limit is your imagination. More importantly, learning basic design allows you to approach your human rights work more creatively and reach audiences with more diverse forms of storytelling.

Read more