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”
On 18 May, Australians will cast their votes in an election that has workers’ rights at centre-stage. In what has been declared by the social-democratic opposition Labor Party as a “referendum on wages”, the proposed policies on workplace relations have not been more divergent in over a decade. Continue reading “Australian unions seek to “balance the power of the powerful” in historic election”
Faced with a construction boom in the 1970’s, front-line neighbourhoods and unionised construction workers in Sydney formed a radical coalition to protect their communities. Continue reading “Sydney’s Green Bans: the worker boycotts that saved the city”
Lives and Times 