Challenging the adage that ‘In India, unionism starts at forty,’ a new generation of Indian workers are taking the reins of union leadership in their workplaces. With some 600 million people under the age of twenty-five, young Indian workers have the potential to transform the way Indian unions look and organise. Continue reading “With “Vivacity and Energy”, Young Workers are Rejuvenating India’s Trade Unions”
When Marklen Maojo Maga was playing basketball with some friends, plain-clothes security agents seized the thirty-nine year old union organiser and forced him into an unmarked van, accusing him of possessing firearms and hand-grenades. Maga has just dropped off his son to school, he protested; and why, his union asked, would he be carrying explosives while playing basketball? Continue reading “Australia Urged to Condemn Human Rights Horror in the Philippines”
In the city of Chennai, the images of deities carved in stone, moulded in bronze, adored in temples, are given life in dance and find their voice in song through the Bharatanatyam, the millennia-old classical dance of Tamil Nadu. Continue reading “The Living Deities of the Bharatanatyam: A Photo & Audio Essay”
Off the shores of Thailand, a seafood industry flourishes; feeding the world’s multi-billion-dollar appetite for tuna, prawns, and squid. Here, at the ground-zero of the global supply chain for seafood, exploitation, debt-bondage, and slavery are standard workplace practices. Continue reading “In the Thai Fishing Industry, Fishers are Organising Against Exploitation”
“I am of the generation of the Tienanmen Square movement,” Lee Cheuk-Yan tells his audience, “We had the hope of having democracy in Hong Kong because China would have democracy. But that hope only lasted for one month before it was crushed.” Continue reading “Lee Cheuk-Yan’s Lifetime Struggle for Democracy”
For forty years, the Saharawi people have been exiled from their lands, cast out into what is known as the “desert of deserts”, where they live in hope of one day embarking upon the long-awaited return to their promised land: their homeland of Western Sahara. Continue reading “An Exiled Nation: Saharawi advocates call on the world to support self-determination for Western Sahara”
“In my childhood I was a really peaceful person,” Tecber Ahmed Saleh remembers. “I was thinking that the refugee camp was the world to me.” Continue reading “Tecber Ahmed Saleh: “Education is the key for our struggle””
To call for peace amidst perpetual war, to stand for equality against the deeply embedded norms of a patriarchal society, and to campaign for diversity within a homogenising nationalist state, these are the great causes for which Naw K’nyaw Paw has chosen to live. Continue reading “The “Karen Flower”: Naw K’nyaw Paw’s dream of peace and equality”
Unsure on the oceans, unrivalled on land, humankind is by nature a terra-centric species. For primates, the seas are more than a physical boundary, but a psychological finisterre, an end of the earth. Blue is a film that sends us back into the sea from which we came, a film that creates an oceanic consciousness unbounded by illusions of species primacy. Continue reading “‘Blue’: Sending Us Back to the Sea”
