Staff Recommend: 2 April - 9 April 2020
This week, CRIN staff recommend: Looking at surveillance after coronavirus, Fridays for Futures online, re-imagining security, revolutionary woman making sanitary pads in India and more.
Read:
Article on digital contact tracing
A demystifying, non-techy guide to how digital contact tracing actually works, the limitations of the technology and what issues there are with data and privacy.
More from Ali Alkhati.
Article on surveillance post-coronavirus
Yuval Noah Harari writes about the world after coronavirus:
This storm will pass. But the choices we make now could change our lives for years to come.
Read the full article here.
Covid, technology and education
Our friends at DefendDigitalMe offer insights on using technology in education and why it might not be that simple:
Rebooting the state education system after this crisis will need to be based on trust. Whether that will be a point in time, or a gradual process towards a new normal, trying to go back to how it was before is unlikely to work. edTech has a role to play in state education but what that should look like needs a complete strategic rethink.”
Read the full piece here.
Article on what the world should do next
Novelist Arundhati Roy shares insights on the coronavirus in India, and how we should move forward:
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Read the full article from the FT.
Watch:
Videos from Fridays For Future
Fridays For Future, the youth-led school strike for climate movement started by Greta Thunberg, is now hosting weekly conversations with special guests online. Catch Greta Thuberg and Ariadne Papatheodoru in conversation with Naomi Klein and Diarmid Campbell Lendrum, discussing the relationship between the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis.
The second in-conversation is with George Monbiot, Dr Emma Naluyima and Mark Lynas, exploring our relationship with food and farming, and how this impacts on climate breakdown.
You can keep up with the latest Talks For Future videos here.
TEDx Talk: Reimagining Security
Celia McKeon, former coordinator of Rethinking Security, questions what really makes us feel secure - the ‘clenched fist’ approach of most defence and security policy, or the ‘outstretched hand’ of dialogue and efforts to tackle the root causes of insecurity.
Watch the talk below.
'Period. END of Sentence' - 2018 Documentary
This Netflix documentary by The Pad Project, directed by Rayka Zehtabchi, follows a group of local women in Hapur, India, as they learn how to operate a machine that makes low-cost, biodegradable sanitary pads, which they sell to other women at affordable prices.
Watch the trailer below.
Listen:
A podcast on disasters, hope and humanity
An inspiring conversation with writer, activist and historian Rebecca Solnit on what disasters reveal about hope and humanity, and what we can walk towards during this current crisis.
My vision of hope is a sense of radical uncertainty, with the possibility of intervention, to shape the future. And in disasters, there's always a power struggle.
Listen here or click the box below.
Podcasts on human rights and coronavirus
With a range of interesting human rights and coronavirus discussions going on, we’ve noted a few to start diving into. The Better Human podcast is running a two-part special on human rights and coronavirus. The Bunker has dedicated a shorter edition to the UK's coronavirus bill.