Anthony Bourdain might have been a celebrity chef, but viewers of his Emmy Award-winning travel show, “Parts Unknown,” didn’t tune in for curry and noodle recipes. Cooking was simply the conceit Bourdain used to have a conversation about the culture, politics, struggles and triumphs of people around the world. As a human geographer, I was...
Myanmar recently claimed to have repatriated its first Rohingya refugee family. But, as an official from the United Nations noted, the country is still not safe for the return of its estimated 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees, who fled to Bangladesh in 2017 to escape an ongoing state-sponsored military campaign and persecution from Buddhist neighbors. Indeed,...
Brazil is still mourning the death of Marielle Franco, a black woman raised in a Rio favela and a sociologist whose academic work mirrored her radical politics. Elected to a seat on Rio’s city council in 2017, she was a member of the left-wing Socialism and Liberty Party, and had the potential to achieve national...
When Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman, was shot to death in downtown Rio on March 14, her killing moved the world. Protesters took to the streets in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires and elsewhere, pledging to continue Franco’s fight against racism, poverty, inequality and violence. Elected in 2016 after serving 10 years...
United States President Donald Trump is not the first to complain about intellectual property (IP) theft by Chinese companies but ironically it was US companies’ use of China’s resources that led to the development of its powerhouse of patents. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, western firms like Apple and Intel made large...
With colorful rhetoric about dotards and nuclear buttons, North Korean propaganda is attracting attention around the world. Outside observers can now easily access some of this propaganda by visiting regime-sponsored websites. These have, in turn, spawned foreign feeds like the excellent KCNA Watch media aggregator and satirical sites such as “Kim Jong Un Looking at...
Ray was born in Mexico and moved to the United States with family members at age 10. He told me in an interview in 2014, “I’m just a regular American like everyone else.” In middle school, Ray (a pseudonym to protect his identity) learned the Declaration of Independence and memorized all the presidents in order....
North and South Korean athletes will march under one flag during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea. The “Korean Unification Flag” is both a highly symbolic marker of reconciliation and a reminder of a divided Korea, a condition that has lasted since 1945. As a scholar of East Asian...
So far, the new year has not gone well for Venezuela. Neither did 2017 or 2016, of course, but it turns out a bad crisis can always get worse. January 2018 began with riots and looting of grocery stores across the country, a sign of pervasive hunger. Then, on Jan. 12, a crowd stormed a...
Women’s empowerment recently got a big boost at the Golden Globes, but the United States isn’t the only place having a feminist revival. In 2015, two years before the #MeToo campaign got Americans talking about sexual harassment, Brazilian feminists launched #MeuPrimeiroAssedio, or #MyFirstHarrassment. In its first five days, the hashtag racked up 82,000 tweets detailing...
