Insight from San Francisco, U.S.A.

Last week I was in San Francisco to present at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Conference.  I was presenting two papers.  One paper was on my own research about online communities and political mobilization and the other was about a project I work on for the Jackson School called the Knowledge Network of World Events & News (KNOW) project. With the KNOW project, we are trying to create a learning portal contextualizes current international events with historical, political, social, and cultural information. We have been working on this project for more than two years now and have made a lot of progress, although it is not yet live.

Many people associate San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge or with hippies in the 1960s or as one of the brave beginning places of the gay rights movement. But, whenever I’m in San Francisco I think of my father.

From December 1970 to March 1972, my father was in the U.S. Army stationed in San Francisco. The only son of an impoverished single mother, he had done everything he could to avoid being sent to Vietnam—including very seriously considering leaving for Canada as tens of thousands of people did. In the end, he accepted his fate and went to boot camp. At the last minute before being sent to fight in a war he did not believe in and that he was sure would leave him broken, a miracle occurred. As part of his B.S. degree, chosen and dragged out to avoid the draft, he had worked in a lab and an Army lab in San Francisco needed someone with his type of experience.

The army base where my father was sent was at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in such a picturesque spot that it is now an expensive luxury resort. This moment of grace is one that he still talks about with huge gratitude. Not only was he saved from a war that left so many broken, but he was stationed with my mother’s long time on-again off-again boyfriend, setting the stage for what he still says was the most fortunate moment in his life, meeting my mother.

I associate this city—both the imagined and the physical—with my father as a young man, far younger than I am now myself. When he talks about that time he says he was, “just walking around and looking stupid.” But I think about him, saved from Vietnam and unknowingly connected to the man who would change his life by introducing him to my mother in 1972. And the picture that I have in my head when I hear the name San Francisco is of him as a young man riding his motorcycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in the sunshine, laughing.

During this trip to San Francisco to present my work along with hundreds of academics at the ISA conference, I spend my time wondering what is different and the same in this city where his decommissioned army base is now a luxury resort.

By 1970 the war in Vietnam was wildly unpopular in the U.S. Many viewed it as illegitimate and many believed the U.S. involvement there was a mistake. The more democratic nature of the Vietnam draft meant that, as my mother says, by the time my father was drafted 1970 everyone she knew had a friend, family member, or acquaintance who had died in Vietnam. This cruel reach of the war was particularly true for her home state.

(This is not to say that the draft was democratic. Certain socioeconomic and racial groups were far less likely to be able to receive a draft deferment by attending college and there was controversy about the distribution of the numbers. For example, experts in this draft would not be surprised to hear that my father had a low draft number as men born before 1951 in November or December had disproportionately low numbers.)

In addition, contributing directly to this perception of the war was the press. Heroic journalists sent back photos and accounts of what they were seeing—often becoming part of the story themselves. In SIS 201, Joel Migdal often uses the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down the road, her clothing burned off by napalm, as an example of the power of photojournalism and the media in the 20^th Century. Nick Ut, the man who snapped the photograph took her and the other injured children to the hospital, where he continued to visit her while she recovered. More than 63 journalists died in Vietnam, giving their lives to provide a window to the horrors that humans can visit upon each other.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. went through a media revolution in the form of the television. While it is debated whether changes in news coverage mirrored American opinion of the war or helped lead it, through their televisions the U.S. public was given a front row seat on the realities of war and the consequences of American foreign policy choices, both for American soldiers as well as the people in Vietnam—and, unknown to many, to the people in Cambodia and Laos as well.

The valiant reporting done in Vietnam is a story that runs parallel to the release of the Pentagon Papers and the role of major news providers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post in printing the classified documents that revealed systemic lying and corruption at the highest levels of government and across political parties. Between these changes and the brave reporting of the Watergate scandal, many view this as a golden age in reporting. It is often cited as exemplary of the essential role that the media plays in a healthy democracy.

However, my students now think of the media as untrustworthy, corrupt, and partisan. Last quarter in a class on technology and social movements I asked my students how many of them trusted the media. The answer was none.

Where does this leave us? Most who study democracy agree that for a democracy to function a free press is necessary to serve as a counterweight to power. But today, people do not trust the media and the media itself is going through a time of incredible disruption and change.

While the internet means that we can access unprecedented amounts of information, we live in an age in which major news providers are unable to sustain old commercial models. The gatekeepers of information find themselves going bankrupt and the number of foreign bureaus supported by news organizations has been in strict decline. Out of financial necessity, news providers are using the same correspondents, stories, and accounts of stories as a way to cut costs—homogenizing news coverage. Single reporters based out of cities thousands of miles away from “the action” are now the “on the ground” journalist for major events. And, many international events are never even covered.

Meanwhile, internet technology is leading to a democratization of news provision. Anyone who can get online and can make a free blog can become a reporter. Anyone with a cell phone can now record events in real time. As Zeynep Tufekci reports, within an hour of any important thing happening in the world, a new video of it is uploaded to YouTube. This perhaps makes it the largest news provider in the world. Sites such as YouTube and WikiLeaks give us countless amounts of information at our fingertips, but it is an explosion of information without editing, filtering, or structures to provide meaning. Certainly, this has its own power and virtues, but it also presents a new set of challenges. We continue to try to understand what all of this means—and, in a “post Arab Spring” world, what it means for democratization, in particular. What does it mean for democracy?

When our students read about what is happening in Syria, they often come to their instructors and ask us to explain to them what is happening. They ask us because they trust us to give them the full sweep of history behind an event and they know that most of us will try to present the information with as little bias as we can. I have had students ask me about topics such as Middle East politics or WikiLeaks and tell me that they don’t know if they can trust what they find in online searches. They don’t trust the news providers and they feel overwhelmed by the firehose of information—and it’s not just our students, we all feel this way to some extent.

As I mentioned at the start of the post, this is what I was presenting about in San Francisco. The KNOW project is intended to step into the space created by the decline in foreign coverage and the sea of uncontextualized and unedited information available about the world online. As we work on building this tool, we have been using undergraduate students in the continual process of building resources so as to provide an information source that educates, but that also educates as it is produced.

In fact, this blog is part of that effort and the stories shared here will one day serve to contextualize events that are happening on the ground in the moment. Our hope is that drawing on the personal experiences of our community members will give people a tactile feel for the grit and beauty of the places all over the world where people just like you and me are living, loving, and riding a motorcycle, laughing at the glory of being young and having cheated death for just a moment.

If you are interested in the project, please feel free to monitor our project blog.

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Jessica L. Beyer is a postdoc in the Center for Global Studies in the Jackson School where she works with Sara Curran on the KNOW project. She is also an alumnus of the B.A. program (International Political Economy track!). She studies online communities and political mobilization and maintains a research blog on her website.

The photo at the start of this post is of her father, Richard Beyer, in his uniform.

Insight from Bangkok, Thailand.

A peaceful, weekday morning in the heart of Bangkok and I am actually cool and refreshed with the windows wide open, in spite of the 32°C mid morning temperature. Outside the proximity of birds chirping, the clinks and clangs of pots being washed in the downstairs apartment, the splash of water as someone hoses down a car or cleans a driveway, and the murmurs of voices between neighbors conveys a feeling of routine peacefulness. The tuk-tuks, motorcycles and bustle of Pahol Yothin Road are a very distant sound and hardly disturbing. I am back in Thailand after a three-year hiatus due to my own administrative responsibilities and time constraints (and not due to any diminished desire to remain engaged with colleagues and friends in Thailand).

On this first morning, with some trepidation (bred by memories of the overwhelming, chaotic energy of Bangkok), I ventured out to the main road in search of coffee. In years past, walking out to the main road of any Bangkok neighborhood meant steeling oneself for the onslaught of sidewalk vendors, motorcycle cabbies’ entreaties, and speeding cars that brushed so close to the walkways that pedestrians sucked in their breath with each passing car in the hopes that would buy them a bit more space and avoid injury. This time, while I had geared myself up for the onslaught as I approached the main road, I was surprised at how easy it was to time my street-crossing without fear, how each passing car moved by slowly (and quietly), and how the pace of a weekday morning seemed slower and quieter. Almost peaceful!

Finding my way to a coffee shop, a sweet and pleasant exchange with the coffee shop’s barista ensued – [in Thai] “Oh! You speak a little bit of Thai!” Me – “Not really, just a little bit.”  Barista – “Why?  Do you live here?” Me – “No, no.  I am just one of those people that comes and goes frequently.” — Then, I made my way back to my apartment with a cup of iced coffee in hand and settled down to read the Bangkok Post. The sense of changed atmosphere from my morning walk was reinforced when I read the story under the headline – ‘Top cop enters Thai PBS fray.’ Despite the seemingly aggressive headline, the news story struck me as a markedly thoughtful and comprehensive account of a major shift in public, political discourse that would have been unimaginable six years ago during the Thaksin administration or even 20 years ago, when I first arrived in Thailand in 1993. In brief, Tob Jote Prathet Thai (Answering Thai Questions) is a talk show and documentary that is intended to present balanced perspectives on a wide array of challenging issues. In a five-part series broadcast on the Thai Public Broadcasting Station (Thai PBS), the show examined the “Monarchy Under the Constitution.”

The ‘fray’, mentioned in the news headline, emerged as a result of the abrupt cancellation and then re-broadcasting of the last segment of the series. The segment was dedicated to a debate about the role of the monarchy in Thailand and the airing of the segment fed a furor that swirled around the legal concerns codified in section 112 of the Thai constitution, often referred to as Lese Majeste. Coinciding with the front-page story was a back page guest columnist essay by Songkran Grachangnetara that describes clearly the multi-sided standpoints and the possibilities of a continued monarchy that might be held above the political fray and thereby allow for balanced debates about the role of the monarchy. It’s a remarkable claim.

What surprises me about these front and back page stories are the thoughtful, frank, but careful ways that Thais are searching for and trying to create discursive space that allows them to continue to honor their monarchy, celebrate traditions, move towards less divisive politics and political turmoil, maintain hard won ground for progressive and transparent governance, and address human rights concerns. However, I am cautiously optimistic and imagine a uniquely Thai solution in the near future.  It remains to be seen whether my optimism about a Thai solution that overcomes divisions is well founded, especially as the monarchy faces an imminent transition. However, my optimism is rooted in what I discovered as I dug beneath the surface to see where else these debates were occurring. It doesn’t take much research to see that these particular news items were not momentary blips on the media screen, but represent ever-widening circles of thoughtful discussion across many sectors of Thai society.
Links that might be of interest.

1. Council on Foreign Relations, Asia Unbound

2. Kevin Hewison for New Mandala

3. Global Voices Online

4. Prachatai’s blog

5. The ‘Tob Jote Prathet Thai’ series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

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Sara R. Curran is a Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. She is also the Chair of the International Studies Program, the Director of the Center for Global Studies, and the Associate Director for the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

Insight from Amman, Jordan.

I smiled hesitantly at the petite girl, her arm extended expectantly, offering me a piece of cherry gum. Only her eyes were visible behind voluminous folds of thin black cloth that shielded her entire form, from her toes to the top of her head. She even wore fitted black gloves. The girl had plopped down next to me at a coffee shop I sometimes worked at, despite the copious empty cushions surrounding me. It was hard to tell if she was smiling, but her sweet, musical voice seemed the epitome of cheerfulness.

In this moment I appreciated the special privilege afforded to Western women in the Middle East, basking in the glow Jordanian hospitality in public, unexpectedly, from a woman who would almost certainly never have addressed my male friends.  She barely spoke to me after, busily typing on her laptop, frequently interrupted by her constantly ringing cellphone, blasting Rihanna’s latest single.

I had learned during my first few weeks in Amman, Jordan to stop being surprised by the frequent bursts of garish Western culture nestled comfortably amidst the sea of colorful hijabs, black and white abayas, niqabs and floor-length trench coats that dominated the visual landscape. Those hot-pink stilettos! That popped-collar Ralph Lauren polo! Coral nail polish and This Fall’s asymmetrical haircut! From tiny roadside stands to the many towering, high-end, air-conditioned malls dotting the cityscape, passersby were unceremoniously berated by a steady stream of Western material culture assaulting several senses simultaneously. The way that Jordanian women navigated this maze continuously confounded and impressed me.

My friend Maryam* had over 500 photos on Facebook, though only two of them were actually of her. One pictured her with a school group, neat rows of smiling faces without much detail. The other was a rather coy portrait featuring Maryam in a superbly arranged hijab in a deep burgundy, smiling shyly, the picture of Muslim modesty. She also displays a large number of trending Islamic memes, with Quronic quotes or adages about Ramadan. With the obligation for Islamic modesty met, the rest of the pictures covering her timeline show an assortment of Western style fashion pictures. Sultry blond women lounge on beaches in bathing suits, a brunette with a sweeping side-braid sits on a picturesque rock, the hem of her baby-doll yellow dress a full meter shorted than a Jordanian girl would dare. Maryam had selected as her profile picture a portrait of an angelic, cherub like blonde girl with tumbling Shirley Temple curls.

Maryam’s apparent infatuation with quintessentially Western fashion and internet trends seemed unfitting at first glance of the fully veiled, ostensibly well-behaved Muslim girl. During our first lunch together, however, Mayram quickly revealed that there was plenty of excitement beneath the veneer of proper Islamic etiquette. She had a secret boyfriend of more than a year, and she confided that many of her friends did, too. She had a rebellious streak, to be certain. To the horror of her friends, while watching some friends play basketball one afternoon, in a fit of hysterical giggles, she tore her hijab from her head for a brief second, simultaneously exhilarated by her boldness while quickly re-wrapping her hair. The Golden Rule of proper Jordanian behavior, she informed me, is to never, ever, ever mention taboo topics such as premarital sex or dating. Interestingly, though few would openly discuss it, the university campus was littered with young couples sitting discretely under trees or behind buildings, sitting a little too close and chatting a little too animatedly to plausibly appear as siblings (the only appropriate way that unmarried teenagers would be seen together in public).

Maryam confided that her commitment to education, and waiting to get married, are things her father understands. In this she is luckier than most, and plans to pursue marriage only after finishing her studies in Italian and English. Maryam is thus able to take advantage of the best of both worlds, maintaining her all-important honor and social standing within her family and tribe while still enjoying the guilty pleasure of trends and fashion blogs.

Jordan to me often appeared as a blurry mix between Bedouin traditions, modern pan-Islamism, and imported Western commercialism. In the women I came to know, these seemingly contradictory tendencies were displayed simultaneously, dizzyingly, and comfortably. Maryam was pleased to pick and choose the visual aspects of Western cultures that appealed to her, while willingly keeping in line with the Jordanian, Islamic social ideals and traditions that were expected of her. Was this a country in turmoil, with Western media, fashion and internet sites infiltrating and threatening the very foundations of Jordanian society?

Not at all, I decided. Jordan had long been an oasis of calm in a desert rife with conflict on nearly all sides, with a population of roughly three million Jordanians of Bedouin descent, over two million Palestinians, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and increasingly Syrian refugees who had flooded across its borders for half a century. The capital was itself in flux, with entire neighborhoods filling with Iraqis and the annual flood of several million Saudi and Emirati tourists who spend their summers basking in Amman’s relative cool. With the swirling social, political and economic turmoil that undergirds everything in Jordanian society, my two months in Amman gave me a brief glimpse of young women with every confidence in their ability to navigate this seemingly labyrinthine social and cultural landscape. I still have so much to learn.

* Names have been changed

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Lisa Lester graduated in the summer of 2012 with degrees in International Studies (Middle East track) and Spanish. She also studied Arabic for three years outside of her major requirements, studying abroad in Morocco in during the summer of 2011 with a Near Eastern Languages & Civilization program.

Lisa wrote this blog post while spending the summer of 2012 in Amman, Jordan with a CIEE program approved by the UW study abroad office, and funded by a Jackson School FLAS Fellowship. She is currently living in Seattle and plans to attend Medical School in fall 2013.