Mark Dawson commented on his Facebook page about attending the International Studies Association meetings in New Orleans this year, and promises to write something for this blog later this week. This brought back memories to me. I attended the ISA meetings about ten years ago in the hope that they would be interested in my research about the nature of NGOs and refugee assistance in Africa. I was interested in what were the best ways to deliver refugee aid in a fashion which was efficient, effective, and culturally appropriate. …
Month: February 2010
The Case of the Stung Ducks: A Study of Law from Sukumaland in Tanzania
This is a story about the nature of law, what is like to feel like an outsider in court. It is about laws of liability which are rational, reasonable, and legtimate by local standards. However, as I think that the following example shows, such assumptions about liability and law are always embedded in the unspoken culture that is the epistemology which gives cultural life meaning.
The encounter discussed below took place in Tanzania in 1986 when I was working for the Lutheran World Federation’s refugee development programs. …
How to Get Deported for Christmas
File this one under…I don’t know what. My story begins with the desire to get cheap airplane tickets to visit our family in Germany this winter. Simple: Leave at an uncomfortable hour, fly Christmas Eve, save $200 per ticket, and still arrive at Grandma’s in time for Christmas breakfast. Anyway, we arrived at the Sacramento airport, produced tickets, passports, and so forth, and off we were to Chicago. In Chicago, out came the boarding pass, our passports were scanned again, and last flight was off to Frankfurt am Main. …
Learning Foreign Languages
I was reminded of the importance of foreign language learning twice in the last week or so. This morning I read a commentary in the New York Times about how poorly Americans do at foreign languages. Several of the authors remind us that Americans have long done poorly at foreign language learning, and that demands for foreign language learning are declining in the United States, despite attempts by the Chinese government (and others) to get Americans into language classes.…
The Connection between Crime and Immigration: A Complicated but not Conflicted Issue
My first book was based on my Ph.D. dissertation, and called Crime and Immigrant Youth (Sage 1999). I of course really like it when people read it, even though it is becoming dated. In this context, I read the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) new “Backgrounder” called Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue by Steven Camarota and Jessica Vaughan in November 2009 with interest. This paper has since received wide exposure in the popular press. …
Is a single currency for all the world a good idea?
A buddy of mine and I were talking about our favorite conspiracy theories. Of course, the “one world government” deal is the biggest and bestest of them all.
But it led to an economics questions neither of us are skilled enough to answer: Would a single currency worldwide be good or bad? Just imagine a worldwide EURO. How would that work. OR, does the vary disparity of currency values due to all the different financial systems act like a shock absorber for the extremes in the global econmy as we have seen in the last 24 months?…