Martha Nussbaum and capabilities

In Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of capabilities,* she provides an interesting list of things we all need. I thought this was a valid interpretation of basic human rights – something we can use to assess someone’s quality of life. I especially like that she says this list can be adapted depending on your culture. She takes a stance that says we can reach a “cross-cultural consensus.” And that’s just… nice.

What do you think?

Central Human Functional Capabilities

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

2. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; be adequately nourished; and have adequate shelter.

3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and choice in matters of reproduction.

4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses to imagine, think, and reason; and to do these things in a “truly human” way—a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice: religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-necessary pain.

5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence. In general to love, grieve, experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.

6. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience.)

7. Affiliation.

A. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in another and to have compassion for that situation; to have the capability for both justice and friendship. Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and protecting freedom of assembly and political speech.

B. Having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails protections against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, caste, ethnicity, or national origin.

8. Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

9. Play. Being able to laugh, play, and enjoy recreational activities.

10. Control Over One’s Environment.

A. Political. Being able to effectively participate in political choices that govern one’s life; having protections of free speech and association.

B. Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason, and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

* Titled “Promoting women’s capabilities,” in 2003′s Global tensions: Challenges and opportunities in the world economy by Lourdes Beneria and Savitri Bisnath.

ASB Mexico mini-reunion

I’m lucky that Carleton’s campus is fairly small – small enough to help me bump into many of my Mexico travel buddies quite often. Still, I can’t believe it has been over seven months since we went south… and I miss being together in a big group.

That’s why this week I was so excited to get an email from Tessa, one of our ASB Mexico team members. She and Erin planned a Saturday-night reunion dinner at Mexicali Rosa’s on Dow’s Lake for all of us. Not everyone could make it (a few have graduated and some others are even taking big trips), but we had a wonderful time catching up and being nostalgic.

Left to right: Holly, Evan, Erin, me, Tessa, Lauren, Nicole, Rebecca

Evan and his Big-As-Your-Head Burrito. (He finished it.)

It’s absolutely wonderful to see how crew members are building upon their Mexico experiences.

• Some of the group came to Mexi’s straight from Carleton Serves, a giant day of community-service learning across the city. Several ASB members were group leaders, and our Lauren helped organize the whole thing.
• Erin has the travel bug! She went to Europe this summer and hopes to get to Africa with her mom soon.
• So many of us are taking classes related to development and culture, and a few of us have even changed our career goals and program elements based on our Mexico experiences. But it’s too bad not all of our learning can be as hands-on as it was in Cuernavaca. Personally, I’d take a trip to the People’s Market over a trip to the lecture halls any day.
• Tessa is getting ideas for the mosaic she plans to make using the ceramic pieces she found at La Estacion.
• We’ve all realized how “Mexican food” in Canada differs from Mexican food in Mexico. As we chowed down on our burritos and tacos in the restaurant, we asked ourselves: “Where were the burritos and tacos in Cuernavaca?!” We wholeheartedly agreed that we could go for a home-cooked Mexican meal or even just a piece of fresh, fresh pineapple.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re back in the sun and that can happen… but more than that, I hope we can all be together as much as possible this year. There’s something about that group that just gives me the warm fuzzies and helps satisfy the optimist in me.

Public relations and MATCH International – A new way to think about development

If my 17-year-old self saw the timetable I made for my fourth year of journalism school, she would laugh.

Public relations? Really?

It’s quite often seen as “the dark side” of journalism.

But I’m pretty excited, and the mission for this class is definitely not borrowing anything from the movie Thank You For Smoking.

Our fourth-year seminars are very practical at Carleton University, and this class will actually let me work with five other people to plan a real PR campaign for a non-profit organization in Ottawa. I jumped at the chance to study MATCH International, a group that seeks (with feminist leanings) sustainable development in the global south by empowering its women.

I was astounded that this was one of my options. I’m in the middle of putting together applications for gender/international development graduate programs, so this was right up my alley. I can’t wait to learn more about it and see how communications and development can collide.

Right now our job is to research the non-profit, the political climate, and so on, to get an idea of what we’re working with. I stumbled upon these statistics on the organization’s website and I just wanted to share them so you could get an idea of how desperately women need this assistance. Hopefully with time the facts and figures will be less startling and MATCH can fully realize its goal.

Did you know…

70% of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world are women.(1)

Women do about 66% of the world’s work in return for less than 5% of its income. (2)

2/3 of the children denied primary education are girls while 75% of the 876 million illiterate adults in the world are women. (3)

Women log 2/3 of the world’s working hours and produce half of the world’s food, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. (4)

90% of casualties of armed conflicts since 1945 have been civilians, 3/4 of which are women and children – there are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.

60 million are people displaced by conflict and disaster worldwide, 75% of whom are women and children who often face hardships like sexual violence and abuse. (5)

1 in 4 women worldwide will experience rape or sexual violence in her lifetime while 25-75% of women are beaten regularly at home, depending on the country. (6)

Over 120 million women have endured female genital mutilation. (7)

More than half a million women die every year while giving birth – one per minute – mostly in developing countries.

Women hold only 12% of parliamentary seats worldwide.
_________________________
(1) source: World Revolution
(2) source: Women’s International Network
(3) source: AskWoman
(4) source: World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind Worldwide
(5) source: UN WomenWatch
(6) source: 2006 UN Report on Violence Against Women

Moyo and dead aid

I’m really curious about Dambisa Moyo. 

Here she is in a CBC News piece: 

I’m barely a quarter of the way through Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa and she has this way about her that makes me want to believe everything she says. Her writing is clear, refreshing and easy to follow. It’s the kind of writing that makes me turn off the critical part of my brain. And that’s dangerous. 

I’m not saying I’m on the Moyo bandwagon yet. My development courses have made me borderline idealist (and definitely opposed to the prescriptions of the neoliberal doctrine) and that makes it hard to jump at her ideas. Let me get through the remaining three quarters of this tome before I make up my mind about what she has to say. 

Here’s what Niall Ferguson calls her crucial insight: “That the receipt of concessional (non-emergency) loans and grants has much the same effect in Africa as the posession of a valuable natural resource: it’s a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict, while at the same time discouraging free enterprise.”

Okay, I understand. And then there comes four recommendations:

1. Africa should follow Asian emerging markets by getting bonds and “taking advantage of the falling yields paid by sovereign borrowers over the past decade.”

2. These countries should promote large-scale direct investment in infrastructure.

3. They should also promote free trade in agriculture.

4. They should encourage financial intermediation modeled after the successful microcredit initiatives that have blossomed in Asia and Latin America.

And then she suggests benevolent dictators “push through the reforms required to get the economy moving” and asks what would happen if African countries each got a phone call telling them aid taps would be turned off in five years. 

Bottom line: Moyo wants business, not wasted aid. 

Africa – 60 years after the independence movements began – is still in a sorry state. I get that African leadership should take a larger responsibility for their economies instead of lining their coffers with aid dollars. I get that celebrity culture has done some bad, bad things for aid (Moyo is not pro-Bono). I also get that shock tactics are often called for. But add in recommendations for renewed capitalist energy and foreign investment and my head starts to get a little fuzzy. It’s like her ideas get my train leaving the station but something in the fuel she’s supplying refuses to let these wheels go full speed. 

I’ll keep reading for now, but I have a feeling once I get past Moyo’s history lesson and into the finer points of her recommendations for African economies I’ll be writing a completely different blog entry.

My j-cation

I haven’t been able to push ‘Publish’ on anything lately. That is, I couldn’t until I got this comment on my lonely blog: “post one picture of where you are right now… right now.” Even half a country away, my friend Audrey can put a smile on my face. Here you go – me and my white flag. Read on.

 

——-

 

It’s nearly August – and I’m a terrible journalism student.

 

I’m not reading the papers.

I’m not anyone’s intern.

I’m not filing copy from a scrum.

 

If you’re keeping score, take note: for the last month, there’s been more celebrity gossip than Canadian politics in my Twitter feed.

 

I’m j-laxing. I’ve . . . j-lapsed.

 

I’m a little sorry – it’ll be hard to retrieve my newshound habits in September – but I’m mostly relieved. The bottom line? Not fitting journalism into my present is helping me understand how journalism is bound to fit into our futures.

 

This was a sticky year. Like my classmates I was hauling around television equipment that tested my upper-body strength. I was constantly willing my cell phone to ring with a call from a missing source, and often ignoring making plans with people I’d labeled friends. Related: I’ll respond to your voicemails soon, Grandma.

 

When exams ended and a bus took me up to northern Quebec I didn’t know what to do with myself. So when I wasn’t sleeping like a housecat, I was dancing until I could barely walk, or blissfully collecting freckles. I was too busy trying to keep new French verbs in my brain to refine my interviewing skills.

 

Then back in Ontario, reality hit mercilessly. My [rediscovered] Carleton friends and I exchanged a novella worth of messages, all with the same two themes:

 

How are we going to refill our sad, sad bank accounts?

 

and

 

Why are we living like housewives?

 

It took a long time, but somewhere between honing my obsessive-compulsive exercise habits and elevating my domestic-diva levels, I found three (three!) jobs. Thankfully, the only reporting-related hours of my days don’t involve the words: “Hi there, my name is Carly Pender and I’m a journalism student. Can I ask y–- no? Really? Okay. Bye.”

 

Along with my cell phone I’ve turned off certain parts of my journalist brain – the obvious ones, I guess. I’m not constantly on the hunt for a story. I don’t think up ledes when I’m in the shower, and I’ve almost completely stopped stalking people at their offices.

 

Still, being listless, penniless, and all those other great adjectives left me with a lot of time to think about what I will be taking with me from this program, besides a lot of random electronics. Journaling (and the predictable thinking in circles that comes with journaling) has made me realize two nice things:

 

1. I can come to a lot of swell conclusions if I just keep writing, writing, writing.
2. Most of these conclusions are ones we’d already come to in a reporting class. Oops.

 

I know we’ve all had them: Moments in the field or in sweet, sweet St. Pat’s that have made us see why people would bother asking questions and writing news. I still swear Dave Tait changed my life in 10 minutes when we explained that we do journalism to help people understand each other. I guess I’ve spent the last three months trying to understand myself.

 

I’m so confused when school lessons creep into my personal life. You planned that all along, didn’t you Dave?

 

As I plan new adventures, I can still see the sexiness of a byline, but chasing empathy, compassion and undying curiosity before I hit the big ole world as a working girl is one of those side projects that is worth some attention.

 

This j-cation is getting me ready for the last eight months of Carleton life. I’m relaxing, comforted by the fact that I can now laugh at many of this year’s most hectic times.

 

More comforting still? I know I’m not the only one who hasn’t been tuning into NewsNet.

 

See you in September, journalism.

ASB Mexico Video

One of our fabulous Alternative Spring Break (Mexico) leaders, Sarah, put together a video/slideshow for Carleton University’s YouTube channel. The piece wonderfully showcases our personal experiences and Mexican culture – so if you’ve been thinking about taking part in ASB 2010, taking 11 (or even 5.5) minutes out of your life to watch this will definitely help you understand what Cuernavaca is all about. 

Click here for your visual treat.

The face of hunger

I’ve heard the term “severely malnourished” before, but couldn’t really imagine what “severely malnourished” looked like.

It is easy to build a thick skin when it comes to world issues — sometimes coping with big issues means forcing them, unconsciously, to be small issues. We’ve all seen knobby knees and distended bellies before, but we need to be careful when those images no longer evoke emotion or reaction.

I watched this (on mute, mind you) during a lull in my busy newsroom day yesterday. As the photos rolled across the screen everything went quiet around me — no panic or stress, just a dull buzz. I think the juxtaposition of my loud morning’s almost-panic with this silent, unexpected reminder of “the bigger picture” was a little rough for me.

If anyone ever asks a journalist why he or she is a journalist, I think showing THIS AUDIO SLIDESHOW would send a pretty decent hint.