Bridge Mills Debates

Water Rights & Wrongs

This month’s topic concerns one of the most urgent problems facing global society - ensuring access to safe drinking water. Although water is absolutely fundamental for life to exist, over 1 billion people in the world lack safe access to clean water and 25 million people in the world die every year as a result of contaminated waters. Last year's cryptosporidium crisis in Galway highlighted that water supply is an issue with universal effects.

At this months debate Nick Jones from the Latin American Solidarity Centre and Meave Kelly organiser of the Galway Water Crisis protest group will discuss some of these issues. The discussion will focus on similar issues in diverse geographical locations from the river Corrib to the Orinoco. Nick Jones will focus on the current campaign by his organisation to keep water resources out of international trade agreements. All are welcome to attend and contribute to this discussion and light refreshments will be served.

Note:
This month we will also be using our debate as an occasion to launch the programme of events for Latin American Week, which takes place from April 7th – 11th in Galway and will be organised by Ecology Society NUI Galway, the One World Centre, Amnesty International and the Latin America Solidarity Centre.

Tuesday, March 11th at 6.30pm - Galway One World Centre, 1st Floor, Bridge Mills, Galway

Entrance to the debates is free - but be there in time to make sure you get a seat as admission is on a 'first come - first served' basis.

Ruby Room - Past Debates

Are Human Rights Just a Western Invention?

This topic is very contentious - criticising Human Rights doctrines could seem to be counter-productive when seeking social justice. However, there are many aspects of Human Rights Law that are open to question. The Debate considered whether International Human Rights laws and norms fail to take into account the diversity of cultural traditions and practices that exist throughout the world.

'We still want you but ...' - the pros & cons of volunteering overseas

Starting up our 2008 series of debates, 'The pros & cons of Volunteering Overseas' will take a closer look at the impact of volunteers spending time and money to help communities in countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. But what is the long-term effect of these endeavours? How do we view people we go to help and how do they view us? Is volunteering the best way to do good?

Listen to Maryanne Wangari Mullen of Harambee Charity Shop (in favour) and Titus Glavee of the African Exchange and Internship Programme (against) debating the issue!

Space is tight at our debates - come early!

International Adoption - who benefits?

International adoption has recently been under the spotlight in the world media as more and more celebrities adopt in foreign countries. But is international adoption really servicing the needs of children ... or the needs of prospective parents?

Just? How fair is media representation?

Media 'Neutrality' most often involves 'impartially' reporting dominant establishment views, while ignoring all non-establishment views. In reality it is not possible for journalists to be neutral - regardless of whether we do or do not overtly give our personal opinion, that opinion is always reflected in the facts we choose to highlight or ignore.
Medialens

"Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall."
Howard Zinn, historian

Migration: Brain Drain vs Cheap Labour

Son Gyoh, training and consultancy on migrant inclusion and development education. His interests in migration and social integration were crystalised during his post-graduate studies in development management with the UK Open University. He has presented papers at conferences and workshops on institutional persperctives of migrant integration in Ireland and has produced resource papers for network groups on migrant issues.
David Keane, lecturer in law at Brunel University in West London. His research lies chiefly in the area of minority rights. He is a member of the NGO Human Rights for Change and has worked on the issue of Migrant Workers Rights in the united Arab Emirates in this capacity.

Climate Change or Climate Chaos?

Speakers:
Andrew Brock, Prof. of Applied Geophysics, retired. Main research interest: solid earth geophysics including global warming. Has followed the arguments since the first IPCC report in 1990, and especially since the 2001 report which made the matter quite a bit more urgent. Considers the issue to be an important scientific one in its own right, but a strong contrarian view mainly from commercial energy interests has made it all the more important to present the issues as clearly as possible.

Listen to his speech here!

Sarah Knight, Communications and Outreach Officer for the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at NUI Galway. Main focus at the ECI involves visiting primary schools and discussing different aspects of the environment - from insects to marine pollution to climate change - with children of all ages. In addition, she is an environmental educator at a non-profit environmental education centre in Roscahill, Co. Galway.

Listen to her speech here!

Globalisation - Homogenity or Diversity?

Does globalisation mean just a proliferation of multinationals and corporate control or does it also offer opportunity for more voices to be heard?

Heading South
GOWC sponsored a film in partnership with the Galway Film Society. Provided below are resources & suggested readings about general themes from the film.

Heading South (Vers Le Sud) 2005
French director Laurent Cantet has based the 2005 film Heading South (Vers Le Sud) on three short stories written by the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferriere. It relates the stories of three middle aged women who travel to post-colonial Haiti for the purpose of sexual tourism. Their experiences take place with the backdrop of the deteriorating political climate of Haiti in the late 1970’s.
The film explores issues of class, race and sex within a post-colonial country. The traditional sterotypes associated with prostitution are challenged, but the power dynamics of class and race are re-enforced.

Film Notes
One prespective about sex tourism is that not all sex tourism is exploitative. It is argued that if viewed contextually, it can be justified by the fact that sex tourism adds to the economy like any other industry, and it is engaged by consenting adults who has a slowly growing sex worker’s rights movement.

Colonisation
The above perspective does not deny that social and economic power is unbalanced, but its proposed solution of addressing the imbalance relies on the kindness of strangers. Individualised and/or institutionalised acts of charity will not change the structures that create and reproduce relationships that are based on exploitation. In order to equalize economic and social relationships, we need to understand how the global imbalance of power between “North & South”, the “developed & undeveloped” or the “minority & majority” world as been fed by the history of colonialism, as well as its growth nurtured by neo-colonialism/imperialism.

It must be recognised that colonisation of a particular country and/or culture has its own specific historical context and there isn’t an identical process in the different parts of the world that it was experienced, but everywhere it was it locks the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history.
Colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism have many ideologies that were and are manifested in 100’s of institutional structures as well as in our daily social and cultural practices.

Colonisation & Ideology
This film addresses the issues of colonialisation and the embodiment of racial myths about Black male bodies and Western affluence. Sex and sexuality within this context is about the dynamics of how western forms of understanding and living are privileged at the cost of the ‘local’, the ‘other’ or the ‘native’ forms.
Sexuality is a platform upon which ideologies are enacted.

Colonisation & Gender
White men and women go to the Caribbean and other parts of the world for sex. For many it is a quest for or escape from ‘gender equality’ they experience at home, the irony is that their new found status in these holiday resort, is spurred on by ‘racialized power’.
Some male sex tourist travel to reclaim traditional roles.
Some women sex tourist travel to challenge their own men’s traditional roles or to live out their sexual fantasies.
Racialised power – racist ideas about black men being hypersexual and unable to control their sexuality enables them (western women) to explain to themselves why such young and desirable men would be eager for sex with older and/or overweight women, without having to think that their partners are interested in them only for economic reasons.
Western feminism tends to privilege the self representation of western women as educated, modern, in control of own bodies and sexualities, by facilitating the double colonisation of 3rd world women as ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domesticated, family-oriented, & victimised.

“A re-reading of women’s history show that the ‘historical movement of feminism in the West was defined in terms of female access to individualism” (Spivak, 1985).
“The female imperialist – critics and historians have argued that the feminist battle for individual rights was considerably more successful in the colonies than ‘at home’. European civil society remained undecided whether women were capable of attributes of individuals – its colonial counterparts – like India – was more amenable to white female subjects …a full citizen based on racial privileges” (Spivak, 1985).
There is always a tension and conflict between feminist and cultural emancipation, because the imperial project is informed by hierarchies. So while many female sex tourists believe they are ‘helping’ the men and the local economy by giving money and gifts

Colonisation & the Construction of the Other
The Construction of Difference/the Other takes place around ideas such as ‘natural’ vs. civilised, leisure vs. work, exotic vs. mundane, rich vs. poor, sexual vs. repressive, powerful vs. powerless. The creation of a dichotomy between Europe and its “Others” was a dichotomy that was central to the creation of European culture as well as to the maintenance and extension of European control over other lands. The polarization of distinctions makes the Western culture more “western” and the “Other” culture more “Other”.
Edward Said shows in Orientalism that this opposition is crucial to European/Western self conception: if colonised people are irrational, Europeans/Westerns are rational; if the former are barbaric, sensual and lazy, Europe/West is civilisation itself, with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic that of hard work, etc.
This dialectic between self and other can be traced to informing attitudes towards Africans, Native Americans and other non-European peoples. A wide range of cultural texts and practices such as maps, media, science, education, ideas of beauty, clothing – re-enforces these ideas
In each specific countries and contexts, the above constructs need to be unravelled and complexities, such as hierarchy of colour, class and gender so that they can be recognized and understood.
The representation of the ‘Other’ varies according to the type of colonial rule. Racial ideologies reflect economic & material factors. Relationship between racial ideologies and exploitation arises out of and by structures of economic exploitation. (Miles, 1989).
Racial ideologies:
Sexuality – “highly sexed and well-endowed black men” myth was invented by the West and is re-enforced by western sexual tourism. Sex tourism: a product of slavery, not new to Caribbean. The sampling of the exotic.
Economic and material factors (poor, lazy, in countries a juxtaposition of paradoxes – beautiful exotic beaches with trendy hotels and resorts within close proximity of shanty towns and impoverishment and other realities of a struggling nation.)

Bridge Mills Debates

Water Rights & Wrongs

Other upcoming topics:

Ruby Room - Past Debates