Manger : mode demploi ?: Entretien avec Monique Nemer (FONDATION NESTL) (French Edition)

Historical Construction of Race and Africa in Iceland. University of Illinois Press. The Icelandic Red Cross. Unpublished report from the Icelandic Redcross. Downloaded July 5 th , , from http: Journal of Anthropological Research , 48 4: The Pan-African was the first publication for and by blacks in Britain and grew out of the first Pan-African Conference in Its creator Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams also organized the conference.

The publication, like those who followed it, tackled several issues of concern to blacks both inside and outside of Britain. Top of the agenda was freedom from British rule, but focus was also given to addressing negative stereotypes of blacks all over the world. It lasted eight years, with its final edition appearing in It too served as an organ for an anti-colonial organization, this time the Society of Peoples of African Origin, created by Taylor.

While it focused primarily on West African issues, the publication also exposed racial tensions in Britain with its reports on race riots in Cardiff Wales and Liverpool. Explaining its goals, the editor said: The Keys , a quarterly journal of the League of Coloured Peoples in London, was published regularly from the summer of until the beginning of the Second World War. The League attracted black professionals and intellectuals. During the late s, The Keys was a watchdog, decrying and publicizing both injustices committed against blacks in Britain and abroad and advancing ideas for the betterment of blacks.

Following an interruption at the beginning of World War II, it was revived as the League of Coloured Peoples Newsletter and focused on issues concerning the new influx of black servicemen and West Indian workers to Britain. It was published well into the s. The parent company, the Gleaner Company Ltd, was established in by Joshua and Jacob De Cordova, white Jamaican planters and publishes the Gleaner , a daily morning broadsheet, a Sunday paper and an evening tabloid, The Star. The monthly newspaper was launched in by Billy Strachan, a Jamaican-born member of the League of Coloured Peoples.

If the British edition of the Jamaican Daily Gleaner was considered to be conservative, then the Caribbean News was considered left wing in its leanings. In , Trinidad-born activist Claudia Jones took over the reigns at the Caribbean News , before leaving to start another newspaper.

It also targeted institutional racism including immigration laws aimed at blacks. The West Indian World first appeared on June 11 th During its year existence, the newspaper reported on key topics including the riots in Notting Hill, London. The newspaper had financial problems within its first six months and Arif Ali, who owned the quarterly West Indian Digest bought out Baynes and took over the paper in its first year. George eventually won control of the paper from Ali and other investors.

Felled by financial problems, it eventually folded in In Britain, the founding of The Voice newspaper by businessman Val McCalla in saw a new era in newspapers targeted towards blacks in Britain. It grew out of the Brixton riots in , with a grant from the Greater London Council and unlike its predecessors, The Voice was produced by those born and raised in the nation. It spoke to the generation of young people like those who had taken part in the riots. Later it abandoned its Audit Bureau of Circulations certification altogether.

By , it was the only remaining black newspaper in the nation. The lifestyle magazine, the brainchild of three young Londoners, launched in It was later acquired by The Voice publisher Val McCalla, who re-launched the magazine in , this time targeting women between 18 and The only black media company of any size that still remains in black British ownership, in it celebrated its 21st year. Former Voice staffers started the New Nation , in Once a competitor of The Voice, the weekly newspaper, at times outpaced its rival as the number one selling black newspaper.

When the New Nation ceased publication in January , its former editor Angela Foster wrote an op-ed explaining that the paper had been felled by declining advertising revenues and competition from the Internet. She began her career at the pioneer West Indian World in London. In , she launched Euromight, www. She heads the journalism program at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a fiction writer and academic. Although a permanent resident in the UK, he does not feel comfortable with the label of British and considers himself as a postcolonial cosmopolitan who has never abandoned his sentimental ties with his native land. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in the island Zanzibar where he received a British education. While many years later this experience would give the author a valuable insight into the discourses of imperialism, the young Gurnah felt that his colonial education came into conflict with other autochthonous knowledges such as his Koranic schooling, or the prevailing oral tradition.

As a teenager, he witnessed the Zanzibari uprising and the subsequent installing of a Marxist revolutionary regime, and this historical event would mark him for the rest of his life. He has never returned to live in Zanzibar. Marginality and the tryst between self-image and how society constructs stereotypical images of the other are his primary concerns.

Are You an Author?

The young Gurnah wrote about his sense of being alien from a position of weakness and, four decades later, this sense of being an outsider has not left him. This prevailing sense of estrangement finds its way into the lives of many of his protagonists who are predominately male and lead half-lives; with one foot in the diasporic present and the other foot in the past. It is perhaps for this reason that the author displays a penchant towards poetic pessimism, which primarily focuses upon how vulnerable mankind is. For Gurnah, writing is also about resistance against dominant discourses; it is a space where his early intuitions about his own difference and the nature of imperialism could mature into a coherent literary discourse.

In his writing, Gurnah makes much use of juxtapositions as a means of creating dynamism; harshness, self-contempt register and sentimental optimism are conflicting narratives he uses to create paradox. The action takes place in an East African coastal city after emancipation from colonial rule and, like Gurnah, its narrator speaks about the restrictions and sense of frustration he suffers within the postcolony. African kleptocracy is also denounced in the novel when the protagonist visits his uncle in Nairobi.

The book employs the trope of the wandering self through the first-person narrative of Hassan who traverses the conflicting emotions of expectation and loss when he abandons his home. On a conceptual level, the narrative examines how slippery the act of recollection can be; the narrator represses, distorts and selects memories so as to construct an identity that may appear coherent yet is not altogether factual. A victim of stereotyping, he develops a self-consciousness that borders upon the paranoiac.

While Daud does not vocalise his psychomachia, the Liberian Karta, on the contrary, reaffirms the validity of his African identity by denouncing of the Atlantic slave trade, or reclaiming icons of white culture such as Pushkin, Saint Augustine, or Alexandre Dumas, for black culture The novel arc looks at the motif of redemption through Catherine who poses him the question: Are you something special? By challenging his hyper-sensitivity, she questions the self-fulfilling prophecies of assigned roles.

Dottie explores similar themes of alienation through the character of Dottie Badoara Fatma Balfour, a woman of mixed origin who is marginalised from society. Set in the politically racially fraught late s, Gurnah channels his own sense of deracination into the narrative and examines how a person like Dottie is doubly stigmatised by race and gender. It is set in the period in German East Africa, and it looks at Tanganyikan colonial society at a moment of its disintegration.

The impulse behind writing Paradise was to challenge the Manichean discourses constructed by colonialism around the issue of ending Arab slavery, the falsification of history, and the crusade against Islam. The central part of the Paradise deals with a trading expedition into the heartland of Tanganyika, and this epic journey commences from the town of Kawa which lies upon the Tanganyika railway.

It is from this strategic trading post that the Arab-Swahili elite freight raw materials and other goods procured from interior to the coast. No trade is conducted, the party is attacked, many are killed and Yusuf escapes with his life. Arrival to the colonial metropolis, however, tempers this admiration. For Gurnah, writing is a way of remembering, and the obsession with the abandoned homeland fuels the need to narrate and recreate it.

Rashid is at first dismayed at how English people perceive him. His image of self becomes disturbed by the hostile looks he receives and he must then go through a process of reconstructing his own previous relationship with the English coloniser in Zanzibar and how this was founded on many carefully constructed fallacies: He finds asylum in the UK, becomes a school teacher, and marries an English woman.

However, below this surface of stability we find a much more fragile scenario where the unnamed narrator must fabricate details of his own past so that he can become palatable to his host family. This sanitising of his family history through the act of fictionalising is in stark juxtaposition with the fact that he has severed all links with his family and that they know nothing about his English bride. The protagonist thus finds himself in the precarious situation of having both to attend to the demands of colonial nostalgia of his political family on one hand, and silence the fact that he has married a white woman on the other.

He sustains this half life through fabrication, a seemingly innocent pursuit that is shattered upon a return visit to Zanzibar where he finds the family home in decay and his old friends now complicit in a suppressive regime of kleptocratic governance. This and other revealed truths such as the real circumstances under which his mother was given to his father, wake him up from his self-delusionary narratives spun in exile.

However, on his return to the UK he finds his wife has left him, and the comfort of his assimilated life is shattered. Alone and confused, he is cut adrift in his adopted island and left to swim amongst the incommensurable seas of cultural difference. The book looks at self-reproach and contradictory emotions that this produces through a narrative crossing back and forth from the past in Zanzibar to a present in the UK. Yet memories of his homeland are integral to who he is, and being ill and bedridden wake him up to the fact that he can no longer camouflage the past through fable.

Maryam, a foundling, also suffers from identity crises through her troublesome relationship with her foster parents, and similarly initiates a search into her past. Hanna is defensive about her ethnical background and struggles to block out the casual racists remarks of her upper-middle class white boyfriend, a theme Gurnah previously explored in Admiring Silence. World Literature Today Member of the Wasafiri advisory board, the UK-based journal for international contemporary writing.

A Narrative of un Belonging. The Transnational Journal of International Writing,46 The Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah. The African Diaspora in Finland consists of people with various countries of origin and diverse cultural backgrounds. Migrants from Africa and other Finns of African descent form a small and relatively recent but rapidly growing visible minority. In a predominantly white society, they challenge the earlier imaginations of Finnishness and nationhood and their presence has influenced the social and cultural life of Finnish society in various ways.

In their families there are already thousands of children born in Finland.

Claude Fischler

Even though the African Diaspora in Finland mainly consists of first-generation immigrants, the rapid growth in the number of Black children of mixed parentage can also be seen in the street scene and in every school yard. Until the s, Finland was a country of emigration rather than immigration. The share of people with a foreign background is still smaller than five percent of the population of approximately 5. Before becoming an independent state in , Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia. Already during the 19th century, there were some Africans and Black people from the Americas, usually working as servants for wealthy Russians, in the few Finnish cities that now belong to Russia.

The first Africans in what is now known as Finland were children who were brought to Finland by Finnish missionaries who had been working in Ovamboland in the northern part of the present Namibia. As far as we know, the first African who was granted a Finnish passport was Rosa Emilia Clay later Lemberg , born in in the present Namibia as a child of a local woman and a white British man. She was still a child when she arrived in Finland with a Finnish missionary couple in They wanted her to study in Finland to become a teacher and then return to Africa to work at the Finnish missionary station.

However, after finishing her studies she decided to stay in Finland. She made friends with many Finns, worked as a teacher in the City of Tampere and in some smaller towns, and she also led an active social life as a singer in local choirs. Even though she loved her work as a teacher, and was liked and respected by many of her students and colleagues, she also faced prejudices and cruel racism.

In , she moved to the US, like many Finns those days, and never returned to Finland. Only a small number of Africans and other Black people from the Diaspora were living in Finland between the s and the s. Their experiences and reminiscences are documented in two radio documentaries and a three-part TV documentary, both of which were broadcast in by the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE.

During those years, the few Africans and Black people from the Americas in Finland were either students e. Unlike many other European countries, Finland remained largely unaffected by immigration flows until the s, when the number of immigrants started to grow rapidly. Due to the civil war that started in Somalia in the early s, thousands of Somalis moved to Finland as asylum seekers.

Some of them had been living in Russia, others flew from Somalia to Russia and soon found themselves to be asylum seekers in a country that they knew nothing about. Today, Somalis constitute the biggest group of Africans in Finland. There are over 10, Somali-speaking people and in their families there are thousands of Finnish-born children. The number of people with a Somali background will grow also in the near future due to family reunifications and because the majority of Finnish Somalis are either children or young adults. Today there are Finns with a Somali background in all bigger cities in the country.

When Somali communities in Finland started to increase, strong clan divisions continued to exist. Nevertheless, nowadays numerous Somali associations collaborate a lot locally as well as nationally to value and maintain the Somali culture, especially the Somali language, and to assist their countrymen and -women in their integration into a new society and culture. In public schools all immigrant children are entitled to study their own language. Teaching of the mother tongue is organized by the cities and financially supported by the state.

Many Somalis have found work as Somali-language teachers in public schools or as interpreters in public services. However, like many migrants from Africa, most Somalis are doing lower paid jobs, for example as bus drivers or as cleaners. The Somali population is highly diverse with regard to their educational background. Especially among women there are many illiterate individuals, but even highly educated Somalis have found it very difficult to enter the labour market, not only due to their insufficient skills in the Finnish language but also because of racism and discrimination.

Therefore, young educated Somalis are more likely than other Finns with an immigrant background to abandon Finland. Although 50 percent of the Somalis were still unemployed in , their position in the labour market is slowly improving. Africans in general have faced a lot of discrimination and racism in Finland. Somalis constitute the largest group of Africans in Finland, and as Muslims and as refugees they especially have become victims of stereotyping and overt racism. Many Somali organizations have become active in speaking in public, trying to change the predominantly negative images and discourses concerning their presence in Finland.

Some individuals with a Somali background have tried to bring about change as active members of Finnish political parties. As Muslims, Somalis have contacts with other Muslims, for example with people from Northern Africa, but otherwise their contacts with other people of the African Diaspora in Finland are fewer, especially in the case of older people and the first generation. Since the other African communities in Finland are considerably smaller, they are more likely to have contacts and collaboration also with each other despite their countries of origin.

Immigration also from other African countries to Finland has grown markedly since There are communities of over 1, immigrants with a refugee background from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo former Zaire , and hundreds of other people with a refugee background have arrived also from many other Sub-Saharan African countries. Some North African migrants, for example Algerians, also have a refugee background, but many of them have moved to Finland because they have married a Finn.

This can be explained especially by tourism from Finland to Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. In Finnish families there are also hundreds of transnational adoptees from Ethiopia and South Africa, some of whom are already adults and parents themselves. The purpose of the Immigration Policy Programme Government Migration Policy Programme is to promote work-related immigration, to develop the immigrant integration system and to improve ethnic relations.

However, immigration policies as well as administrative practices regarding the implementation of legislation have always been relatively strict in Finland. Furthermore, in Finland, like in many other European countries, the current political environment has become more anti-immigrant and even hostile towards immigrants and racialized minorities. Openly anti-immigrant politicians who claim that the immigration and integration policies are too liberal have gained a lot of supporters in local and national elections in the s.

In public discussions, refugees are often categorized as unwanted immigrants. Therefore, especially Africans and their descendants have found it very difficult to have a voice and to create a feeling of belonging in Finnish society. Throughout the history of Finland various ethnic minorities, like the Finnish Roma and the Sami people, have faced racism, but as a topic of discussion racism has been avoided.

The fact that there are no established words in the Finnish language that people could use when referring to their identifications with the African Diaspora, or for any collective racialized identities, is only one manifestation of the absence of discussion concerning racialized relations in Finnish society.

The presence of Africans and other Black people in Finland has changed Finnish society dramatically: Racist discourses and discriminative practices have become a topic of discussion not only in the media and among some politicians, but also in schools and public services. In the case of first-generation immigrants, questions of racism are often turned into questions of cultural differences, but the second generation, as well as children of mixed parentage and transnational adoptees, can better speak for their rights as Finnish nationals.

Unlike the first-generation migrants from Africa and the other parts of the Diaspora, who are forced to pour their energy into learning a new language and surviving in a new society and culture, people born in Finland have more possibilities to talk back and fight against racism. Furthermore, first-generation migrants from Africa usually have strong social, cultural, economic and emotional links to their countries of origin, whereas for the second generation and for children of mixed parentage the international Black Diaspora is more likely to be an important source of identification.

Various manifestations of diasporic Africanness, strongly rooted in anti-racism struggles, can be found in youth subcultures among young Black Finns. Somalis alone have founded dozens of associations, and many of them have become active agents both in Finland and abroad. Across the country the Somali culture is presented by local Somali associations, and Somali Book Fairs are arranged in the biggest cities. These events are often organized together with Finnish authorities and NGOs.

• Looking for a Woman to Watch Me.
• Early Reader: Tulsa and the Frog.
• Full text of "San Francisco Bay Guardian Issue "!
• Enciclopedia de Estudios Afroeuropeos.
• Dog Eat Dog!
• !
• Customers Also Bought Items By!

The multi-local lives of Finnish Somali communities are also shaped by transnationalism. The literature produced in the Somali Diaspora is brought to Finland, and young people communicate with other young Europeans with a Somali background through their networks on the Internet. Various Finnish Somali associations and individuals have started development co-operation projects in Somalia, and they also have contributed to peace-building projects in the Horn of Africa.

In , when the presidential election was held in Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state in the northern region of Somalia, one of the candidates, Faisal Ali Warabe b. Ethiopians, Nigerians have also founded their own churches, mainly in Helsinki.

Many communities, like refugees from Sudan, also have their local associations across the country. African immigrant associations and churches help them to strengthen their own communities in Finland and to maintain their ties to their countries of origin. People from Finnish African communities meet each other and other Finns with an immigrant background also in local community centres. Until recently, studies on Finnish Africans have focused only on Somalis and their integration into Finnish society.

The national network for researchers studying the African Diaspora in Finland and in Europe was founded in to promote research on the history and presence of Africans and their descendents in Finland. New research projects have been launched, and in the network there are also young scholars with an African background. Africans and their descendants have become active agents also in the political life. In the s, many political parties have nominated Finnish Africans as candidates both in the municipal and national elections.

There are Finnish Africans in many city councils; in , Jani Toivola b. Literary contributions of the African Diaspora in Finland are still to come. Only a few people of African descent have written and published on their experiences in Finland. Most of their texts are based on interviews and published in what are called immigrant anthologies, usually edited by Finns with a majority background. The first autobiographic novel was written by Kenyan-born Joseph Owindi, who was the first African student at the University of Tampere in the s. His experiences as a Black student in a Finland in the s and s are summed up in the title of his book Kato, kato nekru!

In , a collection of his essays, Messages from Finland. The exiting experiences of a foreign student , were published in Finland in English. He has written and published widely on ethnic relations, onthology, power and cultural identification and alienation of the intellectuals in the Arab and Mediterranean societies, but his areas of expertise include also cultural and economic globalisation and knowledge economy.

Kirwa, well-known in Finland also for winning the , , and 1,metre runs in the same Finnish Championships in Athletics, has also written fairy tales for children, and nowadays he travels across the country visiting schools and day-care centres, reading African stories and telling about his childhood in Africa and about his life in Finland. There are only few visual artists of African descent in Finland. The most famous of them is Sasha Huber , a Swiss-born artist of European and Haitian heritage, who has lived in Finland for many years.

Of all the artists with an African background in Finland, especially African musicians have contributed to the exchange and cross-pollination of cultures. From the end of the s there has been quite a lot of African music on offer in Finland. As a result of co-operation between Senegalese and Finnish musicians, many recognized musicians from Senegal moved to Finland. In , the Finnish Minister of Culture rewarded Galaxy with the Finland Prize, the highest governmental prize annually given in the field of art.

After moving to Finland in he has played in various bands with both African and Finnish musicians. They have not only enriched the Finnish cultural life with their own performances of African music and dance and paved the way and created job opportunities for other African musicians, but also worked as teachers and trainers for both Finnish professionals and hundreds of other Finns inspired by their work.

Special Issue on African and other immigrant music in Finland. Government Migration Policy Programme Kulttuurintutkimus [Finnish Journal of Cultural Studies] All the autobiographical texts written by Africans and their descendents in Finland and published before , including short texts in anthologies, are listed in this article, on pp. In McEachrane, Michael ed. Engaging Blackness in Northern Europe. The early twenty-first century marks the beginning of a substantial African Diaspora community in Ireland however individuals of African descent have been notably present in Dublin, Ireland and throughout the country at other periods.

In addition to the more well-known presence of Olaudah Equiano, who toured Ireland in , eighteenth century documentation reveals an estimated Blacks living in Ireland, primarily in Dublin, at various times Hart The eighteenth century Black population mostly consisted of enslaved and free servants, seafarers, and entertainers Hart Allen, and Frederick Douglass, who passed through the nation to advance the cause of Black freedom in the Americas. The twentieth century, a period of a newly independent Republic of Ireland after , mostly saw in-migration of Africans arriving to study at the Royal College of Surgeons and other Irish institutions.

This small transient population, as a result of relationships between African men and Irish women, also produced children; many of whom were placed in orphanages. The children were often stigmatized in their communities and experienced race-based discrimination, as represented in the stories of Irish footballer, Paul McGrath, who discusses his navigation of anti-Black sentiments and a difficult quest for identity in his memoir, Back from the Brink McGrath , and the racism experienced as a youth by Irish rock star, Phil Lynott Putterford Overall, until the more recent in-migration of the early twentieth-first century, individuals of African descent in Ireland have been a rare presence and mostly considered in the contexts of charity and missionary work abroad.

The in-migration of the African Diaspora to Ireland is reflective of a changing Irish nation, as the formerly impoverished Republic of Ireland is historically known for its out-migration and global Irish Diaspora. As a result, Ireland became a destination for immigrants, which included Black migrants already present on the European continent including EU and European Economic Area nationals and individuals from continental Africa.

While there were African migrants that arrived with work permits, student visas, business permissions, and travel visas, such modes of migration were mostly inaccessible for African nationals. However, businesses did not aggressively recruit from African nations, except for South Africa which offered a potentially majority White workforce White Africans who desired to migrate to Ireland found their primary option in the realm of asylum seeking and, therefore, significant increases in the Black population occurred in the context of asylum procedures. Between and , there was an increase from an overall 39 new asylum applicants in to 11, applicants in ORAC The African Diaspora community is nationally, linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and socio-economically diverse.

Within each national origin, various regions and ethnic groups are also represented, such as the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria. Early data on work permit allocation between the years reflect the diversity of the African Diaspora community at the end of the twentieth century, with permits granted to individuals from twenty-five African and six Caribbean nations Dept.

Even after the asylum-related Dispersal Scheme discussed below , Dublin still served as a locus of the African community because the north city centre areas of Parnell Street and Moore Street contained African shops, restaurants, beauty salons and other businesses that served the diverse community White ; White Additionally, Africans transplanted methods of worship practiced in the homeland to storefronts and church spaces in Dublin and eventually elsewhere in the nation, particularly in forms of Christian Pentecostalism prevalent in contemporary African nations Ugba The presence of the African Diaspora community was not efficiently documented until the Irish Census of , which included questions about ethnic and national background and racial self-identification for the first time in the Republic of Ireland.

In , 16, individuals noted their nationality as Nigerian and 16, individuals stated Nigeria as their place of birth Irish Census a. A total of 35, individuals noted an African nationality and 33, declared an African nation as their place of birth Irish Census a. At the EU-level, it is notable that the Dublin Regulation II [which replaced the Dublin Convention I and II ] is so named because the initial provision, now EU law, was written in Dublin, and fundamentally requires that individuals seek asylum in the first nation of arrival.

Individuals arriving from locations without direct flights to Ireland, such as Nigeria, must go through the UK or continental Europe before arriving in Ireland and should ostensibly be ineligible to have an asylum claim considered in the Irish state. The support for a constitutional amendment particularly resulted from a widely expressed, yet erroneous, perception that pregnant African women were arriving in Ireland to give birth in order to receive leave to remain due to parentage of an Irish child Lentin ; White The Dispersal Scheme began in and reflects an attempt to forestall the concentration of African immigrants in the Dublin city centre see Brady a.

Dundalk, Kilkenny, Waterford, Sligo , often in towns and villages that previously had very little to no Black presence. Asylum seekers do not have the right to work and must remain under the Direct Provision scheme until their status is determined either via refugee status, leave to remain, or a manifestly unfounded asylum application resulting in deportation. During times of a backlog in the asylum process particularly between and , which peaked in with 11, unresolved cases asylum seekers have been placed in an extended legal limbo Brady b; Irish Refugee Council ; INIS The policies have resulted in extreme isolation and, in prolonged cases, African descendent children growing up with parents who have never been permitted to work or cook a meal for the family.

The inability to obtain employment also stokes migrant participation in the underground economy. Deportations have a significant impact upon the African Diaspora community. There have been several high profile deportation cases, such as that of Olukunle Elukanlo, a nineteen year old deported to Lagos in his school uniform in , the experiences of Iyabo Nwanze and Elizabeth Odunsi, two Nigerian women living in Athlone, County Westmeath, who were deported in a nationwide roundup in , leaving three of their children behind, and from , the case of Pamela Izevbhekhai, a Nigerian businesswoman residing in Sligo, who feared her daughters would face female genital mutilation if deported see White ; White For example, out of a sub-group of African Diaspora immigrants, At the state level, the Equality Authority was established in and the Irish Institute for Human Rights, in , to address related violations, compile data and research solutions in an effort to enforce corresponding Irish Constitutional acts and EU directives.

In , the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland MRCI reported violations of United Nations Human Rights stipulations in the context of ethnic and migrant profiling — particularly of Blacks — crossing the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland and at police, immigration and security checkpoints throughout the Republic of Ireland, including train stations, bus depots, and airports MRCI Various media representations of the African Diaspora in Ireland emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from within and outside of the community see White b; Other publications have included Africans Magazine, developed as a community resource in , Heritage, also founded in , and Xclusive, founded in , with the latter two directed towards middle-class African Diaspora communities and the broader Irish community and, among other areas, covering social news, popular culture, and political achievements.

Additionally, other media emerged, which included a website related to Africans Magazine entitled Africans. Several projects related to the African Diaspora community have emerged in the realm of theatre. While Phil Lynott, leader of the rock band Thin Lizzy, was a successful performer of African and Irish descent in the s and early s, a more global engagement with Blackness and Irishness emerged on the music scene at the top of the twenty-first century.

In , the band, De Jimbe, a multi-ethnic group that combined traditional African and Irish musical instruments and styles, performed at a St. In and , Samantha Mumba b. Simon Wells and, through various media discussions, represented a new face of Irishness. By , Laura Izibor b.

The presence of both Mumba and, later, Izibor in the global music arena also underlined the presence of culturally Irish individuals who are racialized as Black and the solid reality of African Irish identities. In refugees and asylum seekers were granted the right to vote in local elections. In Rotimi Adebari, a former asylum seeker originally from Nigeria, became the first Black mayor in Ireland when he was elected mayor of Portlaoise in Co.

By the elections, Black candidates represented a generation of former asylum seekers who were now residents and Irish nationals, with fifteen men and women of African descent running in local elections across the nation. The candidates, running with major political parties or as independents, notably included three Nigerian candidates competing in a County Council election in Mulhuddart, a Dublin suburb see Anny-Nzekwue The outcome was not successful for most of the Black candidates, with the exception of Rotimi Adebari who won seats on his Town and County Councils in The American president, who has both Kenyan and Irish ancestry, was embraced by Ireland.

Numerous individuals of African descent in Ireland celebrated his visit, which was both an important moment amidst a country in economic crisis and a representation of the nation embracing an individual of African descent as one of their own, a circumstance that many Blacks in Ireland continue to anticipate for their own future. Diversity Strategy and Implementation Plan Carty, Ed and Sarah Stack. Assessing the Experienceof Racism in Ireland. Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Department of Justice, Immigration and Citizenship Division.

Annual Returnof Registered Aliens for the Year Annual Return of Registered Aliens for the Year The Economic and Social Research Institute. Back from the Brink. Migrant Rights Centre Ireland. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery,— Manchester University Press , Minority Making in a New Global City.

Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 6. Media, Representations and Racialized Identities. Beyond the Pale Publications. The Deportation of Nigerians in Ireland. An International Journal 2. Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris. Africans in Russia Further reading. The encounter between Africans and people of African ancestry and Russia was reflective of the ambivalence with which Russians viewed their place in the Eurocentric world during the Age of Imperialism. Their own identity as a European nation has been often the subject of heated internal debates and a wide-spread suspicion on the part of other Europeans.

Imperial Russia did not take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and never established colonies in Africa. The last European nation to emancipate its own serfs Russia had a small but vocal educated class, or intelligentsia , whose prominent representatives routinely condemned the depravity of American slavery.

After , the new Communist rulers of Soviet Russia continued to advocate racial tolerance and acceptance as essential elements of their Marxist ideology. Africans and African Russians residing in late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia had to bear the brunt of Russian chauvinism, much of it born out of the society-wide disillusionment with Soviet ideals and values. Adopted by the tsar, who also served as his godfather, Hannibal entered Russian nobility and made an illustrious career in the Russian military, distinguishing himself as a talented engineer and reaching the rank of general-major.

Pushkin himself did not shy away from his African ancestry and proudly acknowledged it in verse and prose, celebrating the life of his famous progenitor in an unfinished biography Arap Petra Velikogo The Negro of Peter the Great. That a person of African descent could be embraced by Russians as the most important cultural symbol underscores how differently they viewed race from the majority of other 19 th century Europeans.

While few black people ever visited Imperial Russia, those who did reported encountering generally benign attitudes, in stark contrast to the racism prevalent elsewhere in Europe and North America. One such traveler, an African-American woman Nancy Prince, spent more than a decade at the Russian imperial court in St. Petersburg during the early decades of the s. Her memoir contains a perceptive analysis of the early 19 th century Russian society, which she deemed welcoming to blacks.

Black American tragedian Ira Aldridge found fame on the Russian stage. A close friend of the great Ukrainian bard Taras Schevchenko, Aldridge toured Russia extensively and attained a cult-like status with the theater goers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and in the provinces. His popularity with the Russian public had little to do with his race and a lot with his acting talents. It is worth noting that the two institutions of slavery, Russian and American, were abolished at about the same time — and respectively.

Not surprisingly, a trickle of African-American adventurers, performers, musicians, and entrepreneurs began to reach Russia towards the end of the 19 th century. With the enormous Eurasian landmass open to its imperialist expansion Russia took no part in the European Scramble for Africa during the last two decades of the 19 th century. While not immune to the standard Victorian images of Africa that depicted the continent and its people as savage and in need of civilization, Russians felt no obvious need to civilize Africans.

Towards the end of the 19 th century the country experienced a period of close and intensely emotional contacts with Christian Ethiopia, an independent African nation that many Russians considered fraternal on account of its Orthodox faith. Russian military advisors, medics, and volunteers were reportedly in the ranks of the Ethiopian army of Menelik II which inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Italian colonial army at Adwa in Subsequently, Russians founded a hospital in Addis Ababa that for decades to come would become a fixture of Ethiopian capital.

An ethnographic expedition to the Abkhasian coast of the Black Sea had come across several villages whose residents had black skin and distinctly African features. Their numbers were small but their very presence on the territory of Russian Empire connected it to the general history of global exchanges. In the aftermath of the Great October Socialist Revolution of , the new Bolshevik regime sought to forge a new Soviet identity, rooted in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Since class distinctions were the only meaningful differences between humans recognized by the Communists, the new Soviet rulers decried racism as a harmful vestige of capitalism — the system they had set out to destroy.

From that point on until the very end of the Soviet Union the Soviets, at least in their official pronouncements, would continue to make use of the rhetoric of antiracism and anticolonialism. Needless to say, for African-Americans living under the Jim Crow laws and the fear of arbitrary lynchings as well as for the African subjects of European colonial administrations the Soviet Union represented a refreshing alternative to the routine of racial humiliation and colonial domination.

Among those enchanted with the promise of the Soviet Union were some of the most prominent African-American intellectuals and cultural figures of the day. Besides these celebrities there were numerous lesser known individuals who came to the Soviet Union in pursuit of their colorblind dream but also in search of employment opportunities and the opportunities to contribute to the new socialist experiment in Russia.

In , for example, a group of agricultural engineers, most of them the graduates of the historically black Tuskegee University and Hampton Institute, arrived in Soviet Central Asia to help it develop new cotton production techniques. Oliver Golden, the leader of the group, and George Tynes, one of the experts, would permanently settle in the USSR, and in doing so lay the foundations for a small but culturally and politically significant black diaspora in the Soviet Union. The romance between black radicals and Soviet Russia began to wither away towards the end of the s as the Soviet Union proceeded to assert itself more as a nation-state than a revolutionary force in world affairs.

In , it established diplomatic relations with the United States and subsequently toned down its antiracist propaganda. The Soviets lost some of their earlier clout among black sympathizers when it came to the surface that they had been secretly supplying Italian troops during their invasion of Ethiopia. George Padmore, a prominent Caribbean communist, broke with the Soviets over what he saw as their heavy-handed approach to the issue of race. Padmore would eventually trade his communist convictions for pan-Africanist beliefs. In the aftermath of the Second World War much of the former colonial world, including Africa, gained independence from the former colonial masters.

The process of decolonization coincided with the rise of the Cold War — the historical circumstance that left an indelible mark on the relations betweens the Soviet Union and the newly independent nations of Africa. The Soviets cultivated friendships with the young African states, seeking to present the Soviet development model as a viable alternative to Western capitalism. They also extended material and political support and military training to several liberation movements, especially in Southern Africa.

Gradually Africa moved from the periphery of Soviet foreign policy concerns to the center stage of cold war politics. In the course of cold war decades the Soviets involved themselves in the Congo crisis of the early s, in the Nigerian Civil War of , in the Angolan Civil War, in the Ethiopian-Somali war of the late s, and in a number of other African conflicts.

However, increasingly its approach to African combined ideology and pragmatism. For example, during the Nigerian civil war, the Soviets opted to support the pro-Western federalist camp against the secessionist Republic of Biafra. In response to demands of the increasingly global foreign policy but also as a reflection of a greater openness after the death of Stalin the USSR began to pay more attention to the academic study of Africa and its people.

In , a special institution for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary research on Africa Africa Institute was founded in Moscow under the aegis of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Simultaneously the Soviet Union made a concerted effort to enhance its image in Africa by extending generous educational scholarships to African students.

After the Youth Festival in Moscow thousands of third world students started arriving in the Soviet institutions of higher learning. Many of them would enter a new Moscow Friendship University, also known as Lumumba University, specially created to cater to the needs of third world students. The appearance of these young, exotic looking foreigners in the midst of a society, largely isolated from the rest of the world, had some unintended social and cultural consequences for the Soviet Union. However, they had failed to foresee the impact of African students on the Soviet society.

Instead of serving as symbolic ideological allies of the regime, once in the Soviet Union, Africans often functioned as its opponents. In , for example, hundreds of African students participated in an unsanctioned demonstration in the Red Square, protesting a suspicious death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow.

Africans routinely petitioned university and state authorities for better living conditions, demanding more freedom of movement and expression, and challenging the Soviets to clamp down on the instances of everyday racism. African students presented yet another headache for the regime because they often practiced lifestyles and embraced cultural aesthetics in stark contrast to official Soviet values.

Funded by generous state stipends, usually speaking several languages, and having more opportunities for foreign travel than an average Soviet citizen, young Africans in the USSR became the conduits of Westernization. They introduced their Soviet friends, spouses, and fellow students to Western fashions, jazz and rock-n-roll records, and the view of the world that was often cosmopolitan and devoid of the ideological rigidity inherent in Soviet education.

It is not a coincidence that African themes would come to feature prominently in some of the countercultural production in the late Soviet Union. The ideas of freedom and liberation that in the course of the decades of vociferous anticolonial and antiracist propaganda had become intrinsically linked to the idea of Africa challenged the Soviets to think critically about their own condition.

During the period of reforms, generally known as perestroika and glasnost , ushered in by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet press commentary on Africa grew increasingly negative. At the time black Russians and African residents in the Soviet Union found themselves targets of racial slurs and even physical attacks, an unfortunate socio-cultural phenomenon that has persisted into the post-Soviet era.

In the past decade, on more than one occasion international media has been alerted to an alarming increase in the number of racially-motivated attacks in Russia. At the same time African students continue to arrive in Russia in search of affordable education and a growing number of African expatriates and Russians of African descent have achieved prominence as educators, journalists, TV personalities, musicians, and athletes. Hopefully, the country with such a unique history of friendly encounters with black people will be able to overcome the humiliating handicap of widespread racism.

Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought. Howard University Press, Fikes, Kesha and Alaina Lemon. I Wonder as I Wander: A Black Russian American Family, Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Africa World Press, In the Shadows of the Kremlin and the White House: University Press of America, A Preliminary Sketch Bibliography. According to Statistics Sweden, Sweden had 9,, inhabitants by the end of Although, about half of them have a background in another European country.

Instead one has to try to make a rough estimate based on countries of origin. A relatively simple way of doing this based on data from Statistics Sweden is to include mainland African countries excluding North African countries , the Caribbean island nations, and Of course, this will exclude countries with significant populations of African descendants throughout the Americas. According to such a rough and conservative estimate of first and second generation immigrants from Africa and its diaspora i.

It is safe to say that of the Nordic countries Sweden has the highest percentage of black inhabitants and that it has among the highest percentage of black inhabitants in Europe. First and second generation immigrants from the Horn of Africa amount to , persons or 1. Most Afro-Swedes have not been immediately shaped by the New World experience of being descendants of transatlantic African slaves.

For instance, the Horn of Africa was never extensively involved in the transatlantic slave trade. To this group the pronounced racialization of Africans and African descendants in the West, at the expense of other identities, is often a novel experience. However, to young first generation and second generation African immigrants being black is likely to play a greater role in shaping their self-identity than to first generation African immigrants who came to Sweden as adults. Second, contrary to being, say, Black British or Black American, there is no such thing—at least not yet—as a collective Afro-Swedish identity.

Amongst Afro-Swedes in general black identity is not something that is culturally inherited from a pre-existing black diasporic community, but something which ranges from being of marginal importance to self-identity to being central but largely improvised. Afro-Swedes are a diverse group that do not share any common history of, say, slavery or being subjected to Swedish rule. Being black in Sweden is therefore more open-ended, indeterminate and various than in many other locales of African diasporas.

However, it is still meaningful to speak of Afro-Swedes as a group. To this end, it is also meaningful to refer to mixed-race persons in Sweden with one black parent as Afro-Swedish since they are unlikely to be perceived as white and will tend to be associated if not always identified with being black cf. There are many ways in which one could write a history of Afro-Swedes. Here I am going to focus on black inhabitants who have contributed to public discourse about black people in Sweden.

Following the same reasoning as above I will include Afro-Swedes who themselves are, or have one or two black parents who are, from Africa or any of its diasporas. Badin was according to his own estimate born in —probably as a slave on the Danish island of St Croix in the Caribbean. Despite becoming an esteemed member of the royal court of Sweden and married twice to women of the Swedish aristocracy, Badin had to withstand racial insult and strife until the end of his life in —which he wrote about and reflected on in notebooks and letters Pred, Although Polite never published a book during his lifetime , he was, before he moved to Stockholm, still an important figure in the black bohemian New York City artist milieu that preceded the Black Arts Movement and influenced the artistic development of his friend Amiri Baraka.

It spread information about the Black Panthers, African American resistance to the war in Vietnam, experiences of discrimination in Sweden and was sold in both Sweden and to G. Newton, to do a speaking tour in Sweden, but due to illness he only gave one talk at the Academic Association at Lund University AF on February 2, During the s until his death in the African American journalist and activist, Sherman Adams, wrote articles for such publications as the largest eveningpaper in Sweden, Aftonbladet , and the Danish morningpaper, Politiken.

Adams wrote about his views on the politics of the US in his book, Mitt Amerika: The Memoirs of a Black Deserter] Prisma, Born in Harlem and having spent his teenage years in Nigeria, Madubuko A. He later went on to earn an LL. In one of his independantly produced films about the impact of Malcolm X on a youth in Harlem, For Personal Reasons , was aired on Swedish television.

That same year his documentary about the discrimination of people of color in the university town of Lund, Det osynliga folket [The Invisible People] was aired on Swedish Television. Kitimbwa Sabuni has become a household name in Sweden as a frequent commentator on issues of anti-black racism and Islamophobia. During the s and s the Afro-Swedish journalist Oivvio Polite wrote several articles in newspapers and periodicals pertaining to race and racism. One of the early scholars of African descent to write about issues pertaining to black people is the Ethiopian born associate professor in human geography, Mekonnen Tesfahuney.

Since the early s he has published widely on topics of racism, multiculturalism and migration. His doctoral dissertation from , Imag in ing The Others: During the latter half of the s and early s, Louis Faye a son of Senegal , played an important role in establishing postcolonial studies in Sweden. Bhabha and Paul Gilroy. He was also the co-editor together with Michael McEachrane of the first book to apply postcolonial theory on Swedish matters, Sverige och de Andra: About half of the contributions were on black issues. Since her doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan in , Black and Swedish: Racialization and the Cultural Politics of Belonging in Stockholm , Lena Sawyer has published numerous academic articles and book chapters on Afro-Swedish diasporic identity and also co-edited the governmental report, Utbildningens dilemma: Demokratiska ideal och Andrafierande praxis [The Dilemma of Education: Democratic Ideals and Othering Praxis] Fritzes, A frequent commentator in the Swedish public arena on black related matters is the Afro-Swedish film studies scholar Ylva Habel.

Remixed], and is now being tuned into a feature film. One of the most lauded wordsmiths of the younger generation in Sweden in recent years is the Afro-Swedish poet, novelist, playwriter and essayist, Johannes Anyuru. Several prominent Afro-Swedish rappers have released tracks that give voice to the discrimination against people of color in Sweden. Nyamko Sabuni, a politician for the Liberal Party, became the first black person in a Swedish cabinet with her appointment in as the Swedish Minister of Integration and Gender Equality.

On April 15, , an event took place at the Modern Museum of Art in Stockholm where the Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, laughingly, and in front of a laughing and applauding white audience, cut a piece of the nether parts of a cake depicting a racist caricature of an African woman and fed it to her. The cake installation was created by the Afro-Swedish artist Makode Linde who also lent his black painted face to the head of the woman. The day after the National Association of Afro-Swedes asked the minister to resign. A discussion about the matter, with several of the Afro-Swedes who were involved in the debate, will be published in the forthcoming anthology, Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe Routledge, Modernity and Double Consciouness.

London and New York: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Black Europe and the African Diaspora.

Several high-profile incidents involving entire communities cut off from broadband access—the result of natural disasters such as Superstorm Sandy in the Northeastern United States in , to totalitarian governments in Egypt and Tunisia shutting down infrastructure in —have raised awareness of the vulnerabilities inherent in a centralized internet.

Policymakers are increasingly interested in the potential of community mesh networks Harvard University, , which use a decentralized architecture. Still, government agencies rarely fund community WiFi initiatives in U. Three grassroots mesh networks in Los Angeles are distinct, however, as both local and state agencies subsidized their efforts. By comparing a public goods framework with theory of the commons, this study examines how government support impacted L. By examining public investments in peer-to-peer networking initiatives, this study aims to better understand how substantial cash infusions influenced network design and implementation.

Stronger community ties, self-reliance and opportunities for democratic deliberation potentially emerge when neighbors share bandwidth. Typically, one joins, as opposed to subscribes to, the services.

« wifi » - SeenThis

As Lippman and Reed , p. The value of this commons is derived from the fact that no one owns or controls it—not people, not corporations, not the government Benkler ; Lessig, The peer-to-peer architecture comprising community wireless networks provides ideal conditions for fostering civic engagement and eliminating the need to rely on telecommunications companies for connectivity. By contrast, in a peer-to-peer architecture, components are both independent and scalable. Wireless mesh network design includes at least one access point with a direct connection to the internet—via fiber, cable or satellite link—and nodes that hop from one device to the next.

The increasing prevalence of smartphones meant more mobile devices accessing Little Tokyo Unplugged. This required the LTSC to deploy additional access points, leading to signal interference. Network users overwhelmed LTSC staff with complaints about everything from lost connections to computer viruses. Despite its popularity, the center shut down the WiFi network in In a commons, it is imperative that a fair relationship exists between contributions made and benefits received Commons Sommerschule, However, the LTSC neither expected nor asked network users to contribute to Little Tokyo Unplugged in exchange for free broadband access.

As a result, individual network users did not feel they had a stake in ensuring the stability of the network. These comments exemplify how the pursuit of public funding began to usurp social-production principles associated with a networked commons. While closing the digital divide and informing the public about community issues are laudable goals, they are clearly institutional ones.

For instance, an informant stressed that community WiFi would enable neighborhood councils to send email blasts and post information online. The proposal is void of references to concepts associated with the commons, even though this ideological space can transform broadband infrastructure from a conduit to the internet into a technology for empowering participants.

It seems that, ultimately, the pursuit of public funding supplanted initial goals of creating a WiFi network that fostered inclusivity and collaboration. Specifically, a successful community WiFi initiative cannot be predicated on a state mandate to strengthen digital literacy skills and increase broadband adoption. Local businesses and residents typically share bandwidth as part of a broader effort to create an alternative communications infrastructure, beyond the reach of government—not dictated by government. Grassroots broadband initiatives run smoothly when participants are committed to the success of a common enterprise and share a common purpose.

The approach taken by Manchester Community Technologies does not reflect these principles. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front. Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents.

Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen.

She signed up immediately. A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes. She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog.

Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back. Jim named his dog Pony. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. About 1, miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds.

Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks.

I am so happy. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan.

As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.

In , when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?

Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between and , the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy.

The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition. CareCoach found its first customer in December , and in Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer.

Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel. CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs.

Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. The company gave her a reduced rate.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable.

The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from to Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.

But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call. Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad.

The same went for her dad. Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines.

Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check.

He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally. Space Photos of the Week: Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse. The score was tied at , she recalls; her dad won the tiebreaker. Courtesy Arlyn Anderson Related Galleries. As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer.

When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:.

Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart.

Did Pony really care about me and my dad? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things? Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. In early March , Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires.

That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family.

That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in. A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.

Plaintiff also discovered corruption in a national class-action case Fogel v. Farmers whereas Girardi — who represented the class of plaintiffs — never disclosed that the attorney who represented defendant Farmers was concurrently representing Girardi in a separate legal matter. Very shortly after Plaintiff exposed the corruption, attorneys for Farmers approached, sought and obtained from the court a supplemental notice to the class of plaintiffs consisting of 14 million Americans indicating that if they cashed their settlement checks, they agreed to not sue Farmers or Girardi because of the undisclosed relationship.

In connection with the above discoveries, Plaintiff informed various law-enforcement agencies of these facts, as well as filed ethics complaints against some of the above named attorneys with the State Bar of California. Plaintiff also discovered that Lea Rosenberg — as the wife of a judge — was energetically raising funds from various businesses. Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Lea Rosenberg is an individual residing in Yolo County. On April 4, — consistent with the statutory framework put into place by 26 U.

A tax-exempt organization must make available for public inspection its application for tax exemption, three most recent annual information returns, and schedules and attachments available, pursuant to 26 U. The request described in subparagraph B must be made in person or in writing.

• Black Dagger;
• Finding Love Again.
• ?

If such request is made in person, such copy shall be provided immediately and, if made in writing, shall be provided within 30 days. Specifically, on April 4, Plaintiff delivered to Lea Rosenberg at learose jps. This request is for all documents submitted to the IRS within the past three years, which generally means the three most recent returns. Said regulations require that these documents be produced within 30 days. Soroptimist International of Davis , Davis Rebekah Lodge, Davis Odd Fellows are entitled to charge reasonable costs for any copying and mailing costs incurred in relation to this request.

Alternatively, you can email the documents to me as PDF attachments. I prefer the latter method. However, if for some reason, you prefer to copy and mail the documents, please send them to the following address: In addition, I ask that you please produce the following: A detailed and complete list of all other non-profit entities you were involved beginning in to the present.

A detailed and complete list of all sums which were transferred amongst any and all organizations you were involved, beginning in to the present. For example, if in Soroptimist International of Davis transferred money to Davis Odd Fellows either as donation or rent, I ask that such transaction be disclosed.

Thank you for your time and anticipated cooperation. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. On April 24, , Plaintiff delivered to Lea Rosenberg a notice of change of address. Plaintiff is further informed and believes that Defendants have directly performed, or aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, procured, encouraged, promoted, instigated, advised, willfully caused, participated in, enabled, contributed to, facilitated, directed, controlled, assisted in, or conspired in the commission of the above-described acts.

Plaintiff asked his paid research-clerk to conduct further research on the Internet in hope of locating a complete set of the desired documents, also to no avail. Still seeking a complete set of the requested documents, on September 24, Plaintiff sent Lea Rosenberg the following email: The purpose of this communication is to address the following matters: I am therefore reiterating my request that you comply with the request for these tax returns and produce them to me within the next 5 days.

Tim Fall and Dan Maguire. Hence, I would like to get to the bottom of things, and need the requested tax forms to do so. Thus, in addition to inspecting and copying the documents authorized by the IRS, I request copies of detailed financial statements i. I am looking forward to hearing from you and receiving the requested documents.

Later that day, Plaintiff received an email response from Lea Rosenberg stating only the following: Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 24 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff is informed and believes that Defendants have directly performed, or aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, procured, encouraged, promoted, instigated, advised, willfully caused, participated in, enabled, contributed to, facilitated, directed, controlled, assisted in, or conspired in the commission of the above-described acts.

As a proximate result of the unfair and unlawful acts of Defendants, as alleged above, Plaintiff suffered injury in fact and has lost money or property in an amount to be proven at trial. Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 - 28 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and thereon alleges that Defendants were under a duty to ensure compliance, yet chose to breach a duty prescribed in 26 U.

This failure to comply with the statutory requirements constitutes negligence per se. Plaintiff suffered injury in fact and has lost money or property in an amount to be proven at trial. The Davis Lodge Hall is available to rent by the general public for receptions, fund-raisers, dinners, conferences, trade shows, meetings, and other events. Upon reviewing partial copies of the above-described IRS forms from and , Plaintiff noted that false information had been submitted to the IRS on two occasions that he was able to identify from the incomplete forms. Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Reed and Cambron are married to each other.

However, this was not the information provided to the IRS. In , Yolo Lodge officers submitted false information to the IRS again, this time involving a different set of actors — Lea and David Rosenberg, who are married to each other. Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Virgil Smith is a CPA a member of Davis Odd Fellows, and a co-conspirator in the submission of these fraudulent tax-returns.

Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that the fraudulent tax-returns were submitted because David Rosenberg, Lea Rosenberg, David Reed, Sheryl Cambron, Barbara Geisler, Virgil Smith and Robert Bockwinkel did not want the IRS and the public to become aware that Sheryl Cambron is married to David Reed, and because they were concerned that if such relationships i. Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 - 45 as though fully set forth herein.

Some of the overt acts both lawful and unlawful that gave rise to this conspiracy, committed by one or more of the conspirators pursuant to their common design, were: Plaintiff is further informed and believes and thereon alleges that Defendants have directly performed, or aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, procured, encouraged, promoted, instigated, advised, willfully caused, participated in, enabled, contributed to, facilitated, directed, controlled, assisted in, or conspired in the commission of the above-described acts.

A typical event, for example, was described on May 23, in the Davis Enterprise: We wish to thank the fine restaurants, wineries and breweries that treated our guests to delightful food and drink: We thank our sponsors who helped make this event so successful. And we also appreciate our other sponsors: Dath, and Cache Creek Resort Casino. Thank you to many individual sponsors: Arun Sen and Bob Schelen. Special thanks to Stewart Savage of Abaton Consulting, who put together a terrific slide show that was shown on a continuous loop at the event.

Finally, we offer a big thank you to the committee that worked with us to plan and execute this successful event: What a great, hard-working group. Reisig, In Re Garcia, and Yilma v. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and thereon alleges that as a further overt act by which to advance the objective of said conspiracy, Sheryl Cambron conceals from the public her association with Yolo County Counsel by causing numerous legal web-sites to misrepresent her employment status. Most, if not all, of those web-sites state that Sheryl Cambron is in fact in private practice representing litigants in matters dealing with bankruptcies, family law, and criminal law.

Plaintiff further alleges that private actors Rosenberg, Reed, Raven, and Zuvela conspired to fraudulently conceal the fact that Zuvela is an Odd Fellow by intentionally removing her name from the web-site davislodge. Additionally, Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that David Rosenberg, David Reed, and Allison Zuvela conspired to further delete from the web-site davislodge. These conspiratorial acts were substantial factors in causing Plaintiff monetary losses and damages in an amount to be established at trial. Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 - 57 as though fully set forth herein.

Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Defendants committed the above described acts and omissions with intent to defraud the public and Plaintiff and deprive him of other interests he was entitled to. In particular, Defendants affirmatively concealed the existence of a marital relationship between Reed and Cambron, the fact that Cambron is an employee of Yolo County Counsel, and the fact that Allison Zuvela is an Odd Fellow member by affirmatively deleting her name from Odd Fellow web-site. Plaintiff reasonably relied upon the statements, acts, and omissions of Defendants to his detriment.

Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 - 62 as though fully set forth herein. For general and special damages under all causes of action where available by law; 2. For costs of suit; 3. For prejudgment interest; 4. For an injunction directing Defendants to comply with 26 U. For such other and further relief as the Court may deem just and proper. Plaintiff also demands a jury trial in this matter.

Farmers in which Girardi - who represented the class of plaintiffs - never disclosed that the attorneys who represented defendant Farmers Skadden Arps, Thomas Nolan, Raoul Kennedy were concurrently representing Girardi himself in a separate legal matter. Venue in this case is proper in Yolo County because the acts and omissions of which Plaintiffs complain occurred in Yolo County.

Plaintiff is unaware of the true names and capacities of the Defendants sued as Does 1 through , inclusive, and therefore sues these Defendants by such fictitious names. Plaintiff is informed and believes, and therefore alleges, that the Defendants herein designated as Does are legally responsible in some manner for the events and happenings referred to which caused the injuries to Plaintiff for which he now seeks damages. Plaintiff will amend this Complaint to allege their true names and capacities when ascertained.

Plaintiff is further informed and believes and, therefore alleges, that each of the Defendants consented to, ratified, participated in, or authorized the acts of the remaining Defendants. Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that Lea and David Rosenberg are individuals residing in Yolo County. Later on, Plaintiff also discovered a pattern by which Lea Rosenberg and Sheryl Cambron — as the wives of two judges - were energetically raising funds from various businesses for an entity known as Progress Ranch headed by the foreperson of the Yolo County Grand Jury, Barbara Sommer.

However, if for some reason, you prefer to copy and mail the documents, please send them to the following address:. I ask that you draw no conclusion or develop any concern from the mere fact that this request is being made about you, Soroptimist International of Davis , Davis Rebekah Lodge, Davis Odd Fellows or any other individual or entity. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and therefore alleges that Defendants have directly performed, or aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, procured, encouraged, promoted, instigated, advised, willfully caused, participated in, enabled, contributed to, facilitated, directed, controlled, assisted in, or conspired in the commission of the above-described acts.

Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 27 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 31 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and therefore alleges that Defendants were under a duty to ensure compliance, yet chose to breach a duty prescribed in 26 U.

In the alternative, Plaintiff further alleges that the failure to comply with the statutory requirements of 26 U. Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that Reed and Cambron are married to each other. Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that Virgil Smith is a CPA, a member of Davis Odd Fellows, and a co-conspirator in the submission of these fraudulent tax-returns. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and therefore alleges that also responsible for submitting these fraudulent tax-returns were Davis Odd Fellows officers and directors David Rosenberg, Lea Rosenberg, David Reed, Sheryl Cambron, Barbara Geisler, and Robert Bockwinkel.

Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that the fraudulent tax-returns were submitted because David Rosenberg, Lea Rosenberg, David Reed, Sheryl Cambron, Barbara Geisler, Virgil Smith and Robert Bockwinkel did not want the IRS and the public to become aware that Sheryl Cambron is married to David Reed, and because they were concerned that if such relationships i. Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 47 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff is further informed and believes and therefore alleges that as further overt acts both lawful and unlawful by which to advance the objective of said conspiracy, committed by one or more of the conspirators pursuant to their common design, were: Around the same time, renowned criminal defense attorney Doron Weinberg opined in the media as follows on the matter of In Re Girardi: Within days of Mr.

Towery to appoint Mr. Falk given the close personal relationship between Howard Miller and Douglas Winthrop. In your email message to Mr. As we have previously advised your colleague Leslie Brodie, we provide status reports on pending matters involving OCTC only to individuals who provide verifiable identification information, including an address.

I assume that your written complaint provides this information. If not, we will not be able to provide you with further status information on the subject of your email messages. At or about that time, Plaintiff was unaware of the fact that several other Board members had business relationships with Girardi or other conflicts of interest which they were required to disclose pursuant to a statute. After several months, Mr. Hawley wrote Plaintiff, informing him the investigation was closed. Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that said conspiracy was motivated in part by Democratic Party operatives such as Joe Dunn and Jeannine English to protect Thomas Girardi because of financial contributions to the Democratic Party, because Girardi arranged close to one million in cy pres awards to California AARP where Jeannine English served as president , and because several BOG member had similar conflicts of interest, such as Alec Chang of Skadden Arps.

As such, on December 7, , out of the blue, Falk - Plaintiff alleges in an attempt to mislead Plaintiff —- wrote to Plaintiff: Girardi and other attorneys. It is filled with disparaging characterizations, all of which seem to stem from your allegations that I or my firm have represented Mr.

Your allegations are false. I have never represented either person, or their firms. Neither has Douglas Winthrop. Nor has my firm ever represented Mr. The public records of that litigation show that neither Mr. Winthrop nor I had nothing to do with that representation; in fact, I was unaware of it. The public records also show that my firm represented the law firms, but did not represent Mr. The attorney responsible for that representation had left Howard Rice and taken the files with him before I was asked to serve as Special Deputy Trial Counsel in the State Bar matter.

You are on notice that your allegations are false. The falsity of those allegations can be determined from the public records of the litigation in question. Do not make them again. The court rejected the request, noting that redaction was not merited. Shortly after Plaintiff filed this ethics complaint, Skadden Arps moved ex parte which, not surprisingly, was unopposed to amend the settlement agreement in the Fogel matter and the notice to the class of 14 million Americans throughout the country to include a proviso by which members of the class would be prohibited from suing anyone due to the concurrent representation described above.

Nevertheless, the State Bar of California decided not to take any action on this ethics complaint. In or around August of , Plaintiff submitted an informal objection to the proposed Fogel v. Farmers settlement based on the reasoning described above and contemplated filing an appeal if possible or informally alerting the Court of Appeal of the collusive arrangement. Plaintiff further alleges that repeated claims by CaliforniaALL, including the following, were knowingly false, misleading, and fraudulent: Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 78 as though fully set forth herein.

Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that Defendants have directly performed, or aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, procured, encouraged, promoted, instigated, advised, willfully caused, participated in, enabled, contributed to, facilitated, directed, controlled, assisted in, or conspired in the commission of the above-described acts.

On February 28, , Plaintiff informed the State Bar Board of Governors and officially requested an investigation into alleged fraudulent transactions, financial irregularities, and unlawful conduct in connection with circumstances surrounding CaliforniaALL. The author of the email is herewith put on notice that I will pursue legal action if he persists in a claim that I have anything to do with illegal activity. He is further on notice that I am in no way connected with the recipient named in the article.

A collaboration between the California Public Employment Retirement System, the California Public Utilities Commission, the California Department of Insurance, and the State Bar of California, CaliforniaALL was created in an effort to close the achievement gap among California students from preschool to the profession and, specifically, to bolster the pipeline of young people of diverse backgrounds headed for careers in law, financial services, and technology.

We thank the following corporations for their gifts in support of CaliforniaALL: Plaintiff incorporates paragraph by reference paragraphs 1 — 85 as though fully set forth herein. Plaintiff is informed and believes and therefore alleges that CaliforniaALL was also misused to finance the election campaigns of Kevin Johnson, Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, and Barack Obama, specifically by the following actors: In May , U.

Davis School of Law quadriplegic law student Sara Granda graduated from and hoped to sit for the July bar exam. Granda filed a suit in federal court seeking an injunction directing the State Bar of California to allow her to sit for the bar exam. The action was titled Sara Granda v. The matter was adjudicated by Judge England of the Eastern District of California, who promptly dismissed it. Plaintiff alleges the entire complaint filed by him was factually accurate, truthful, and was brought in good faith. Accompanying the complaint dated May 31 were 11 exhibits in support.