Posts Tagged ‘activism’
26
Jul
2010
Peace Through Music: The Voice Project
Participatory peace, or how cover chains are unshackling an imprisoned community.
A few months ago, we helped nonprofit Invisible Children fight the child soldier epidemic in Uganda — a country plagued by a tragic number of social ills fueled by a decade-long war — through music. Now, another music-driven effort is aiming to empower another one of the country’s severely victimized populations — the many women who live as widows, rape survivors and former abductees.
The Voice Project is an effort to support these brave women, who have come together in groups around the country, singing songs of hope and regeneration. The lyrics of these songs let their sons, former child soldiers, know that they have been forgiven and can now come home. Circulated via radio and word of mouth, these songs are actually working, bringing young men back home and giving a war-torn country a chance at peace for the first time in 24 years.
Inspired by these women’s songs, The Voice Project is bringing well-known artists together into “cover chains,” each covering the music of another. The videos are posted online and all proceeds from donations and sponsorships go towards peace programs and rebuilding efforts in Uganda.
Part Invisible Children, part Record Club, part Levi’s Pioneer Sessions, The Voice Project is a music-lover’s mecca. From indie dreams-come-true like Brett Dennen covering Citizen Cope to iconic intersections like Peter Gabriel covering Tom Waits to unlikely yet priceless pairings like The Submarines covering The Beatles, the effort uses the universal power of music to amplify a critical humanitarian message, allowing artists — and, in turn, their fans — to become a part of a cause best fought for by relinquishing the notion of “the other” and harnessing the power of community, a global community, in reconstructing the broken identity of a nation.
For a taste of The Voice Project’s brilliance, grab a free download of Home by one of our favorite bands, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, featuring the Gulu Women’s Choir.
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19
Jul
2010
7 Must-Read Books by TED Global Speakers
Design imperialism, what gender equality has to do with military spending, and where 185 pig parts go.
Last week, reported from this year’s TEDGlobal — four grueling days of cerebral stimulation and idea orgy spectatorship. Today, we spotlight 7 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, litmus-tested for brilliance in the world’s most reliable quality-control lab: the TED stage.
PIG O5049
Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma set out to explore the increasing difficulty with which we can trace the origin of the products we consume in this age of globalization, labor specialization and outsourcing.
In PIG O5049, she hunts down the astounding number of different products — 185, to be exact — made from parts of a specific pig, owned by a farmer friend and tagged with the identification number 05049.
The book is a photographic anthology of these items — ranging from — complete with infographic charts and diagrams outlining the production destiny of the various pig parts.
Beautifully bound and visually stunning, the book takes an unusual, non-preachy approach to an issue of ever-growing importance, leaving you the reader to draw your own conclusions — a task more challenging than it sounds in an age of information overload and prescriptive ideology.
WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM
We’ve had a longtime brain crush on cultural theorist and author Steven Johnson, one of the sharpest thinkers and most compelling writers in the broader world of creative culture and intellectual property. His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, explores exactly what the title promises — and, based on his instant-hit TED talk, it does so in a brilliant way that treks across anthropology, sociology, philosophy, behavioral psychology, cognitive science and copyright law, breezing through the cross-pollination of these diverse disciplines with an ease and humor that promise a read not fit for putting down.
The book comes out in October and is now available for pre-order.
THE VISUAL MISCELLANEUM
The Visual Miscellaneum, which we reviewed in full last October, is one of our all-time favorite books, so we were delighted to see its author, David McCandless take the TED stage. (And even more delighted to chat with him about infoviz and Britishness over wine.)
If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this visualization gem, a brilliantly curated anthology of infographic whimsy on anything from military spending to the most pleasurable guilty pleasures.
THE ACORN HOUSE COOKBOOK
Chef and entrepreneur Arthur Potts Dawson has set out to revolutionize the restaurant industry, the world’s most wasteful, second only to war. His Waterhouse restaurant, for instance, is the world’s first fully non-carbon eatery, running entirely on hydroelectricity from kitchen to table — a true walk-the-walk manifestation of his principles.
In The Acorn House Cookbook: Good Food from Field to Fork, with a foreword by TEDPrize winner and food activism celebrity Jamie Oliver, Dawson intersects great food with environmental sensibility in a recipe arsenal that makes for the most refined kind of moral and gustatory palate.
HALF THE SKY
At TED, women’s rights crusader Sheryl WuDunn made a convincing case for the idea that gender inequality is the greatest moral challenge of the 21st century.
Her bestselling book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is as much a necessary course in cultural anthropology and gender politics as it is a manifesto for intercepting a vicious cycle of raging abuse and quiet oppression. She points to local women as the most powerful change agents without which it is impossible for a country to raise itself from poverty.
THE FORTY RULES OF LOVE
In The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak weaves a fascinating story-within-a-story involving a Bostonian suburban housewife, literary infatuation, and 13th-century mysticism.
The novel exudes Shafak’s characteristic East-West narrative, a cross-cultural bridge of eloquence and captivating storytelling, and links nicely to her excellent TED talk about how fiction can overcome identity politics.
Stories help us get a glimpse of each other and, sometimes, maybe even like what we see.”
DESIGN REVOLUTION
Last year, we reviewed Emily Pilloton’s fantastic humanitarian design anthology, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. Since then, Pilloton and her partner have moved the Project H Design headquarters to Bernie County, North Carolina — one of rural America’s poorest areas, where 13% of children live below the poverty line. There, Pilloton has set out to revolutionize a broken education system from the ground up, founding the country’s first high school design/building program. She lives and breathes the Project H Design manifesto: There is no design without action; design WITH, not FOR; document, share and measure; start locally and scale globally; design systems, not stuff.
Design Revolution remains a powerful reminder of why humanitarian design matters — not to egos but to communities, not to award committees but to human ecosystems. It’s a particularly interesting read in the context of the recent epic kerfuffle in the design community, initiated by Bruce Nussbaum as he called designers the new imperialists, unleashing a deluge of responses by some of today’s most arduous in-the-field humanitarian designers, including Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair, FrogDesign’s Robert Fabricant, and Pilloton herself.
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