Development Studies in Macquarie Park, New South Wales | College & University

Development Studies

Locality: Macquarie Park, New South Wales

Phone: +61 2 9850 8077

Address: Macquarie University, Department of Anthropology NSW 2109 Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia

Website: http://courses.mq.edu.au/international/postgraduate/master/master-of-development-studies-and-global-health

Likes: 33974

Add/Update information

Reviews

Tags

• College & University

21.01.2022 "As irony would have it, Rio Tintos actions overlapped with the National Reconciliation Week and the third Anniversary of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The reassertion of settler-colonial arrogance in the form of Rio Tintos actions has now cast a shadow on the reconciliation process and any attempt to remedy past injustices. The decimation of the caves was carried out with the blessings of the law, and consequently the State. While this moment reflects poorly on the a...rchaic laws, which have been perpetuating structural injustices against the First Nations, this is neither a one-off instance nor an exceptional moment in the history of the settler-colonial state. Rio Tintos actions speak of a continuing and systematic erasure of Indigenous identities that lie at the heart of the settler-colonialism and the capitalist logic on which the State has been founded." See more

19.01.2022 Womens involvement in peace processes is vital for sustainable peace. But, in peace processes between 1992 and 2018, women represented only 3% of mediators, 4% of signatories and 12% of negotiators. Women Mediators across the Commonwealth (WMC) is a network that brings together women from different backgrounds and with different experiences of mediating conflict to learn from each other. The network advocates for greater recognition of the crucial work done by women mediators at all levels - from the local to the global.

19.01.2022 Deep listening is what we are asking for and its about having that space to constantly engage

18.01.2022 "Nitya Rao, professor of gender and development at University of East Anglia has been studying gender and development for decades; with the recent attention on the profound impact that global temperature changes are having on local and national economies, she decided to analyze the impact of climate change on women specifically. She and her team studied data collected from 25 case studies in 11 hot spot countries in Asia and Africa to document how climate change is influencing womens statusmeasured by their ability to make strategic decisions about their livelihoods, take agency over their financial situations, and work to improve their social and economic positions, among other things."

17.01.2022 Australia’s relations with Asia appear to be stuck in a time machine that is moving backwardswhether it be our mainstream media, our politicians, our public servants, our arts sector, or our universitiesmany leaders appear to labour under the misconception that Australians are white and hail from Liverpool, Limerick or London. In an apparent inability to actually see the population of this country in all its full glory of languages, religions, colours and classes they nod o...ccasionally to ‘our ethnic communities’ with multilingual adverts at times of crisisthe ethnics are presented as ‘problems’they need special language or cultural attention and sometimes we grudgingly comply. Australia’s overall vision of the Asia-Pacific region is similarly dismal. We’re part of the Five Eyes intelligence gathering groupUS, UK, Canada, NZ, and Australia. But the Australian eyes are stricken with a resurgence of the post-war amblyopia commonly known as wandering eyea infant ailment that usually corrects by adolescence. We know this amblyopia because many of our bosses continue to lead us with one eye on London and another on LA.

17.01.2022 "Whilst much of the world has focused on the ongoing battle against COVID-19 in the US, Europe and Asia, we at Policy Forum have also been paying close attention to the specific, and often underreported, challenges facing the Pacific in these uncertain times. The Pacific has long faced security issues related to climate change, inequality and food insecurity, which have been made worse in the wake of COVID-19. The variety in each nations response has been as diverse as the region itself."

16.01.2022 If there is any financial crisis in the West, it will draw away financing from Africa, plunge the region into another major debt crisis, and set millions of people in search of better earning opportunities. Families and countries in Africa have come to rely upon these remittances. They are part of the structural fabric of finances. Racism against the migrant is an enormous problem, and it must be tackled in itself. But deeper than that is another problem that has grown as a r...esult of no effective post-colonial policythe structural problem of the ongoing theft of resources from Africa, and of the lack of financing for the continent to develop its own potential. Allowing multinational firms to steal African resources, and allowing foreign banks to lend to Africa at virtually usurious conditions, simply creates a cycle of crisis that results in migration and remittances as the band-aids. See more

16.01.2022 Bangladesh, Cuba, Iran, Mali and Turkmenistan share an unexpected connection to Australia, and it isn't membership of a tourist destination hot list.

15.01.2022 "So the key, if Europe is really keen to contribute positively to resolving the great issue of our century, which is the question of human mobility the key is not for Europe to spend money building camps and prisons in Libya and in its own midst. Europe should put money into, for instance, the harmonisation of identity registers in the continent, the gradual dismantling of thousands of internal borders in the continent, the rational intensification of movements in the continent, massive investments in upgrading roads, building transcontinental railways and highways, consolidating water and river navigation. Thats how the future will be brought back. Nobody will want to leave or end in a place where they know nobody and they are not welcome."

15.01.2022 "The immense force of Western institutions capitalism, democracy, Christianity stamped itself on other parts of the globe, creating independent democratic nations committed to freedom, end of story. Or is it the end of the story? If 21st-century world trends are any indication, we might have badly overstated Westernisation’s influence and achievement. The success of the non-Western response to COVID-19, especially in East Asia, where countries have remained open while containing the virus, shows the strength of regions outside the West. Along with the appearance of authoritarianism and crony capitalism in some parts of the West, it brings up questions about the dominance and the capability of the region."

15.01.2022 The scramble for Africa is so fierce that the worlds fastest-growing continent now stands at a unique crossroads: it has the chance to gain control over its own political development. Rather than passively getting caught in the age-old game of great powers, African countries could now leverage this renewed global interest to their strategic advantages.

15.01.2022 "This is not a propitious time to proclaim to the world that Australians are not interested in India, Japan, Korea and all the nations of mainland Southeast Asia. That, however, is what the National Library of Australia has done by announcing it will stop its systematic collecting of materials about all these nations, because usage of these collections was low and financial restraints forced the library to prioritise. Henceforth, the focus of its Asian collecting will be on China, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Even with respect to these nations, future collecting will be more limited."

14.01.2022 Australia ranks 160th, while Cuba is at 1 in the current Sustainable Development Index (SDI). SDI starts with each nations human development score (life expectancy, education and income) and divides it by their ecological overshoot: the extent to which consumption-based CO2 emissions and material footprint exceed per-capita shares of planetary boundaries.

14.01.2022 "In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. ...Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weaponsthese are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it." See more

13.01.2022 Christian missionaries are causing a fresh wave of upset in outback Australia, promising to bring people back from the dead, and promoting the idea traditional Aboriginal culture is a type of devil worship.

12.01.2022 The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner has used a speech to the UN in Geneva to demand the federal government take action on the rising rates of Aboriginal women in jail. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women represent 2% of Australias female population but make up 34% of all women in prison, June Oscar told the Human Rights Council on Friday. The root cause is that Indigenous women continue to experience disproportionate levels of trauma and intersecting forms of discrimination which cut across lines of race, gender and socioeconomic status, Oscar said.

12.01.2022 Kwame Anthony Appiahs contemplation is a reminder that identities are multifaceted, malleable, and manipulable; the individual is a product of yesterdays labels, but no label is written in permanent marker. As technological and demographic change challenges our understanding of what it means to be human, it will be up to use to create the identities of tomorrow. We should do so with humility and bravery, in constant conversation with our past, and on our way, we might shine a light on those labels that were always written in invisible ink.

12.01.2022 What is the virus pandemic? Christophers says that: from time to time such things happen in the world. [] our belief in Vodu is that if we dont wrong Nature, Nature will not attack us. So in Vodu it is usually believed that maybe man has crossed the path of Nature, of other things in Nature. Because the corona virus has always been around with human beings. This particular kind is not very known but there is nothing new in Nature. [] This corona virus has been there longer than we can ever think about, but it has not really attacked people the way it is attacking people today. Why is it attacking us now? Something surely might have shaken it. And now it is spreading. This is what has happened from my own understanding. [] so we, as humans, probably have done something to strike it and now it is invading us.

11.01.2022 Some really good points on guaranteed basic income in the TED talk, especially when seen in relation to the way the Australian government managed to get rid of poverty in 2020 which in turn kick-started the economic recovery in 2021 - after which that same government introduced poverty again.

11.01.2022 "The burning of the Amazon and the darkening of skies from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, have captured the worlds conscience. Much of the blame for the fires has rightly fallen on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for directly encouraging the burning of forests and the seizure of Indigenous Peoples lands. But the incentive for the destruction comes from large-scale international meat and soy animal feed companies like JBS and Cargill, and the global brands like Stop & Shop, Costco, McDonalds, Walmart/Asda, and Sysco that buy from them and sell to the public. It is these companies that are creating the international demand that finances the fires and deforestation."

11.01.2022 "Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of th...e world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds." See more

10.01.2022 The barter system is experiencing a resurgence across the Pacific now facilitated through Facebook pages as the island nations are beginning to face economic difficulties due to Covid-19.

10.01.2022 "As irony would have it, Rio Tinto’s actions overlapped with the National Reconciliation Week and the third Anniversary of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The reassertion of settler-colonial arrogance in the form of Rio Tinto’s actions has now cast a shadow on the reconciliation process and any attempt to remedy past injustices. The decimation of the caves was carried out with the blessings of the law, and consequently the State. While this moment reflects poorly on the a...rchaic laws, which have been perpetuating structural injustices against the First Nations, this is neither a one-off instance nor an exceptional moment in the history of the settler-colonial state. Rio Tinto’s actions speak of a continuing and systematic erasure of Indigenous identities that lie at the heart of the settler-colonialism and the capitalist logic on which the State has been founded." See more

09.01.2022 The climate crisis is not just an environmental crisis. It is also a governance crisis. Climate change threatens to undermine sustainable development, poverty eradication programs, and rights. Resilience to climate change depends first and foremost on adaptive capacity (or social learning). This is a matter for the whole society, and particularly for governments. A flood of reports advises authorities what they should do. The recommendations are clear. Societies must reduce t...heir emissions and at the same time strengthen their capacity to adapt to new realities and mitigate the risk of disaster. But recommendations are not much use if we do not know if and how well they will be implemented. Southeast Asia and the Caribbean are archipelagic regions with low to medium income levels and governance indicators. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They show the need for empirical data and theoretical approaches that illuminate how both vulnerability and adaptation measures may actually be determined in such fragile, complex settings. Adaptation, here, is taken as a broad category that includes concrete policies as well as the social changes and epistemological turns needed to achieve sustainable climate change adaptation. See more

09.01.2022 Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergency of new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

08.01.2022 "I opened the throttle and tore down the tarmac, pushing the rusty motor scooter as fast as it could go. The warm night air, thick with salt, flowed around me as the scooter cranked out its top speed and I headed for the edge of the island, to the sea. The atoll narrowed and the houses thinned. Within a few minutes of what seemed like flight, I had arrived at the isthmus of the Funafuti lagoon; a metre-wide strip of land separating the moonlit mercury of the lagoon from the c...rashing waves of the great Pacific Ocean. Tuvalu was one of the smallest countries on earth, and the trip from end to end of its largest atoll took just twenty minutes on a clapped-out motor scooter. But that short journey into the vast night of sky and ocean, sand and stars a unity of the elements made Tuvalu much greater than the sum of its minute islands. During the day, there was the risk of island fever a sense of being trapped forever on this tiny coral atoll. But at night, as every one went to bed, the country seemed to expand with space and freedom and I urged my scooter faster into the encroaching dusk, past the parliament buildings and the shanties at the edge of town, and on into the roar of the ocean and the sonorous grunting of the local pigs." See more

07.01.2022 "For [Indonesia] impacting and impacted by the worlds ballooning carbon emissions, flooding will get worse, according to dozens of reports on the climate crisis. Rainfall on New Years Eve was the highest in more than 20 years, maybe even in 150 years, according to the meteorology body, BMKG. Jakartas plunge into the sea will do it no favors, and neither will the rest of the countrys increasing climate disasters, which will likely fuel a urban migration, as people seek apparently false promises of secure livelihoods. Jakartas more than 30 million people arent going to be picked up and moved to the new capital in Borneo, if the proposed city is even built."

06.01.2022 "The circulation of misinformation about Covid-19 is yet another challenge throughout the [Pacific] region, given the widespread reliance on Facebook and other social media for news. Pacific media organisations are valiantly trying to support public education efforts while continuing to critique government preparations and messaging. The same challenge faces the Australian media, which normally reports only briefly on crises in neighbouring Pacific countries, but is now likely to focus even more closely on domestic coverage. This will be exacerbated by the Coalition governments constant funding cuts to international broadcasting in recent years."

05.01.2022 "What do people living in poverty need most? Food? Education? Healthcare? No. The answer is simple and surprising. What people need most can be found in grey, fluorescent-lit offices."

03.01.2022 "The city of Kabul is often associated with conflict and misery, but recently a group of kids has used its war-torn ruins as the backdrop for a new obsession: skateboarding. This film follows the Skateistan project, an NGO that runs a skate park in Kabul, and offers lessons to local kids that want to learn how to skate. Remarkably, in a country where women are generally excluded from participating in sports, nearly 40 per cent of the skaters are girls, and they more than hold their own on the citys ramps and rails."

03.01.2022 How to manage the spread of COVID-19 in regions where people's earn only a few dollars a day?

03.01.2022 "Remote areas of PNG may be sufficiently isolated that the risk of COVID-19 arriving is low. But customary practices with respect to physical distance within communities, and inadequate health facilities, means that they will be far from ideal places if the virus does arrive. Far from ideal because in an emergency of this nature, and in places such as this, the state is not equipped to provide any assistance."

02.01.2022 Um fruchtbares Land für Palmöl-Plantagen zu gewinnen, werden die Regenwälder Indonesiens massiv abgeholzt. Das hat fatale Folgen: Außer in Brasilien stehen nun auch in dem südostasiatischen Land Zehntausende Hektar Regenwald in Flammen.

02.01.2022 A documentary film shows the challenges faced by Soli children as they learn in a language that is not their own. But does the future have to be in English? What if the children learned in Soli ? You mean only in Soli? Without learning through these other languages? Could it happen? Is it possible? We would love that, but can it be?