Part One: Back to college? the challenge
A conversation with Neta C. Crawford, a professor of Political Science where her teaching focuses on international relations theory, international ethics, and normative change.
Ethical challenges loom over decisions to resume in-personcollege classes
https://theconversation.com/ethical-challenges-loom-over-decisions-to-resume-in-person-college-classes-141346
Her research interests include international relations theory, normative theory, foreign policy decision making, sanctions, peace movements, discourse ethics, post-conflict peacebuilding, research design, utopian science fiction, and emotion. Crawford is also interested in methods for understanding the costs and consequences of war and is co-director of the Eisenhower Study Group “Costs of War” study (www.costsofwar.org).
Dr. Crawford is the author of Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (Oxford University Press, 2013) about and Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a co-winner of the 2003 American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for best book in International History and Politics. She is co-editor of How Sanctions Work: Lessons from South Africa (St. Martin’s, 1999).
It is becoming obvious that online instruction is not for everyone. Parents are worried, and students want to return to on-campus classes, along with the on-campus activities that are perceived as part of the college experience: dormitory living, social gatherings, and other activities. Young people feel invulnerable to the virus, despite evidence to the contrary. This is not only dangerous to them, but also to their families. If they contract the virus, they will bring it home. Wishful thinking does not change the danger. Universities need cash infusions to counter the problem of lost revenue, and increased costs of the virus contagion. Congress and the White House has failed to help adequately. The ICE ruling regarding foreign students returning home if there are no face to face classes is seen as anti-intellectual. We discuss what could be done.
Part Two: migration…it may be who we are.
THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move By Sonia Shah
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/02/867691497/migration-isnt-crisis-it-s-the-solution-science-writer-says
This book – a wandering narrative about why people wander – is likely to prove equally prophetic in the coming months and years, since it asks two questions that are already shaping our geopolitics: what causes human beings to migrate? And is such mass movement beneficial to more settled communities and nations?
If you want to know what Sonia Shah has to say in her new book, all you need really do is have a glance at the back cover. “Politicians and the media,” says the blurb, “present the (current) upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict. But the science and history of migration in plants, animals and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behaviour… migration is a biological imperative as natural as breathing… in other words, migration is not the crisis, it is the solution.”
https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-review-next-great-migration-sonia-shah-2890588
a conversation with author Sonia Shah:Sonia Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived.
After receiving her B.A. from Oberlin College in Ohio, where she studied journalism, philosophy and neuroscience, she took a position as managing editor of the anti-nuclear magazine Nuclear Times, where she wrote about militarism, race and foreign policy.
Sonia Shah is a renowned science journalist and prize-winning author. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and elsewhere. Her work has been featured on RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 900,000 people around the world. Her 2010 book, The Fever, which was called a “tour-de-force history of malaria” (New York Times), “rollicking” (Time), and “brilliant” (Wall Street Journal) was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her 2017 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond has been called “superbly written,” (The Economist) , “bracingly intelligent” (Nature), “provocative” and “chilling,” (New York Times), a “lively, rigorously researched and highly informative read,” (Wall Street Journal) and “absorbing, complex, and ominous,” (Publishers Weekly).
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