Schlagwort: english

Links

finns taken their cat for a walk in the park...
finns taken their cat for a walk in the park…

„To call that hypocritical would be to do a disservice to the word. Mindfucking obscenely hypocritical starts to approach it a little bit.“ Football players response on the issue of gay marriage.

Freiburg one of the cities best for wellbeeing, the guardian, at least that is something I Like to hear!

The guardian (again) is doing a pretty comprehensive series on Germany: The accidental empire.

Is their such a thing as the moral case for the current drone war, again Sebastian has read the guardian and finds the arguments not pretty convincing.

Auf Deutsch

Buchempfehlung: Unsichtbares Politikprogramm?
Politikfern, wenig interessiert und engagiert: So lautet häufig das Urteil, wenn es um Jugendliche aus „bildungsfernen“ Milieus geht. Doch viele Themen der politischen Bildung sind anschlussfähig, wenn sie einen Bezug zu deren Lebenswelten herstellen. Politisches Interesse schlummert in dieser Gruppe – wenn auch häufig „unsichtbar“.
Schriftenreihe (Bd. 1138)

Mutti in der BZ Emmendingen über die 50km Diät: „Das Problem waren immer die Details: Schokolade, Zitrusfrüchte“BZ-INTERVIEW mit Gerti Müller, die heute, Donnerstag, über ihre Erfahrungen mit der Aktion „50-Kilometer-Diät“ im Alten Rathaus von Emmendingen berichtet.

Zwergenaufstand und Ökodiktatur im Deutschen Südwesten: Karrikaturen über Winnie und seine Freunde aus der Kontext Wochenzeitung.

Armenia

Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous? – National Geographic reports.

Pardoning of Azeri axe murderer raises tensions in the Caucasus | Simon Tisdall – of the guardian (maybe I should start reading the torygraph)

Blogs

And finally two more blogs to watch: http://chansensei.wordpress.com/ The writer comes from Singapore, the went to northern Finland, studied at the University of Oulu and writes about the World and teaching from Buddhist perspective. Right now I try to understand his thesis.
An indian who blogs as well about the world and who I met in Helsinki: http://thejinxedone.blogspot.fi/

Links

Blick aus dem fahrenden KTW irgendwo vor Staufen
Blick aus dem fahrenden KTW irgendwo vor Staufen

Hollywood makes cryptofascist movies like GI Joe in order to support the american war agenda. The Guardian

Obama, Romney and the Dog Wars:

What are the borders of our state, what is a nation and how is it defined? Academic paper, very interesting.

The only real thing is science fiction, why the future has begun

Participation and so on

Soccer Player collapses with cardiac arrest on the field, recovers later a CPR story – the guardian.

If you need a word cloud use wordle.

Deutsche Links

Warum FDP und Piraten fusionieren sollten.

Die Stufen des Süddeutschen nicht aus der Süddeutschen sondern der Stuttgarter Zeitung.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science has devoted its entire issue No. 633 form November 2011 to the topic of youth participation.

Some of the articles I found very interesting and I wish to summarize them here a little bit:

Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins: „American Sixteen- and Seventeen-Year-Olds Are Ready to Vote“ To quote from the abstract: „American 16- and 17-year-olds ought to be allowed to vote in state and national elections. This claim rests upon a line of argument that begins with an exegesis of legal and philosophical notions of citizenship that identify core qualities of citizenship: membership, concern for rights, and participation in society. Each of these qualities is present in rudimentary form in childhood and adolescence. Analyses of national survey data demonstrate that by 16 years of age—but not before— American adolescents manifest levels of development in each quality of citizenship that are approximately the same as those apparent in young American adults who are allowed to vote. The lack of relevant differences in capacities for citizenship between 16- and 17-year-olds and those legally enfranchised makes current laws arbitrary, …“

They argue that by the age of 16 most indicators that stand we use to look on to judge that someone is ready to be a citizen like knowledge about politics, the feeling of political efficacy, the skills needed for political action, the interest in politics and tolerance are comparable to adults or even exceeding some adult groups. Therefore this youth should be given the right to vote. The study is based on a survey conducted by the authors.

In Participatory Niches for Emergent Citizenship in Early Adolescence: An International Perspective Judith Torney-Purta and Jo-Ann Amadeo write about different perspectives and argue that rather then lowering the voting age, campaigns to involve children and youth should be focused on every day participatory niches and that those niches should be expanded: „we argue for promoting “emergent participatory citizenship” during the adolescent years. Directing serious attention to enhancing the politically and civically relevant niches that those between ages 10 and 18 occupy in their everyday lives, in our view, has greater potential for positive effects than does a campaign to lower the voting age worldwide.“ (All the quotes in this section are taken from the article)

The Authors conceptualize the terms as you can see her and try to give us an overview of the factors that help to built citizenship. „The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science“ weiterlesen

Studying for the English Exam

The written English exam is over – yeah! I have mostly good feeling although I mixed up the Miliband Brothers and said that David was the leader of the opposition – of course it is Ed. Unlike other people in my study group I had read all the books in the reading list. Some  were interesting and very insightful, and I wish to highlight those here:

Marr, A. (2009) A History of Modern Britain, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Andrew Marr is a very accomplished journalist and he writes well. Of course that is his job. I enjoyed reading the book which I got as an ebook for my kindle. You need some general previous knowledge about British history and current events to understand it, but the black series of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung is a good starting point for that.

His book has been serialized for the BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/

Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lurGssKn7PA „Studying for the English Exam“ weiterlesen

Thinking global, eating local

For one week now, my parents and I have been trying to eat only stuff that is made within 50 km of Freiburg, where we live. The pictures shows both of them getting interviewed by our local radio station SWR. The project has generated some media attention already. Note the rabbit collection in the background.

That sounds funny but has a very serious background: We produce a lot of CO2 not only by driving around in our cars or by travelling, but also by the stuff we eat. Lots of our foodstuff is grown or processed in distant places. And that does not only extend to the obvious stuff like coffee or chocolate, bananas or Kiwis, but by a lot of other food like pasta or bread.

You get into talking with other people a lot, nothing is such a good topic then food. When you go into shopping places and ask around for stuff that is grown here in the region. Farmers markets, such as the one in Stühlinger or at Freiburgs Cathedral square work very well, but supermarkets are awful for getting local stuff. Despite getting to talk with lots of people, you are  thinking more about what you eat and where you get it from. „Thinking global, eating local“ weiterlesen

From Tampere for Europe

The international youth council seminar in Tampere is over for more then an week now and for me it is time to write down a little bit what I experienced. There are some things I mentioned on previous blog posts as well, but this should be the last one.

From here a big thanks to the organisers at nuva ry. It is always difficult to organise such an europe spanning event, involving participants from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Finnland, Lithuania and bring them all togehter to do something. a total of about 40 young people. The participants were between 15-30 years old and work in the local youth local councils or similar democratically elected bodies. Already youth councils have a very strong foothold in several countries or regions in Europe exist umbrella organisations and other bodies.

Of course we didn’t only work, we had a lot of fun as well, the following video, which the finns all love is a testament to that:

Funding

We had a very interesting presentation by a lady from CIMO, which is the Finish organisation with distributes the funding for European Youth in Action Programmes. „From Tampere for Europe“ weiterlesen

Interview with Sunaina Maira on teaching 9/11

Sunaina Maira is a professor at the University of California in Davis for Asian American studies.

Sunaina Maira - Professor of Asian American Studies
Sunaina Maira - Professor of Asian American StudiesAmerican studies.

She gave a lecture at this years NYRIS 11 Conference in Turku, which I attended. After the lecture I had the opportunity to ask her about teaching 9/11. Since she is one of the foremost critical thinkers on that aera and her work deals a lot with the impact of 9/11 on American minority youth it was very interesting to listen to her views.

NYRIS 11 Presentation

And here is the abstract and the slides to my presentation. I gave it at Mon 13 of June at NYRIS 11 in Turku in the stream 1 „active youth participation“

Youth councils in the German State of Baden-Württemberg (BW) and Finland

By: Sebastian Müller (University of Education Freiburg) June 14, 2011

Keywords: youth political attitudes, political participation, political behavior, democracy

What was the study about?

In both Finland and the German state of Baden-Württemberg, there are youth councils. Youth council was defined for the study as: “Elected bodies composed of people between the ages of 12 and 22, that are instituted by the local authority and deal with public policy.”

In recent years, the amount of youth councils has increased in both areas to more than 80 in BW and more than 90 in Finland. In BW, the spread of youth councils began around the mid 1990s, in Finland it began around the turn of the century. Both umbrella organizations have a working relationship since 2006, delegations visit each other annually and they participate in joint action.

There are very few scientific enquiries dealing specifically with youth councils, and up to now there was none dealing with them in both areas.

In both regions I sent out two kinds of questionnaires: one dealing with the structures and the other with attitudes of youth councilors. This questionnaire was based on the work done by Michael C. Hermann, who investigated youth councils in BW in 1995.

„NYRIS 11 Presentation“ weiterlesen