I like showing campaign ads in my Latin American politics courses. This is a Frente Amplio campaign ad from the 2009 presidential election. The ad features (among other things) one of the OLPC laptops. Uruguay recently became the first country to provide every public school student a laptop.
teaching (comparative) politics
I’m assigning the “Mexico/US” episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations in my first-year seminar (“Travel as a Method of Inquiry”). If you’ve never seen it, it’s a great way to spark a conversation about border issues in an interesting, new way. I also recommend a number of Bourdain’s other episodes. A lot of documentaries about places are either too boring or too ideologically driven; Bourdain’s cynicism, honesty, and genuine desire to learn about new places (and taste “real” local foods) cuts through that, even while delivering some interesting places for class discussions. I also highly recommend the Lebanon episode. You’ll see why.
The fans of Red Star Belgrade are some of the most notorious in the world, best known for the role of the Delije (Ultra Bad Boys) in the Bosnian civil war. We’re reading about them in Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World.
The World of 100
It’s a bit cliche (perhaps) to consider how the world would look like if it had only 100 people in it. But these charts make that more interesting.
"Divergence, Big Time"
I’ve been using Gapminder a lot lately in my classes. Here is a chart that looks at changes in GDP per capita in the US & Congo from 1800 to 2007. It’s meant to go along w/ today’s reading: Lant Pritchet, “Divergence, Big Time” (originally published in 1997 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives; an edited version appears in the class reader, Essential Readings in Comparative Politics, edited by Patrick O’Neil & Ronald Rogowski).
The article basically demonstrates that while the US & Europe were wealthier than Africa as early as the 1870s, the gap between the two regions increased exponentially by the 1980s. He then discusses the relationship between economic “takeoff” and “stagnation” in different regions, and how they construct a “poverty trap” for countries that can never catch up. The graph I constructed tells that story (though I have the good luck of being able to go back to 1800 and forward to 2007): In 1800, the per capita income in the US was $1,488 and in the Congo was $304 (a ratio of about 5:1). In 2007, the per capita income in the US was $42,952 and in the Congo was $278 (a ratio of about 155:1). Not only did the distance between the US and Congo increase, the Congo actually went backwards economically, ending up poorer in 2007 than it was in 1800.
Who owns the means of production?
Years ago, I remember reading an article in Wired magazine claiming that capitalism effectively ended in 1997. Why? Because the personal computer became cheap enough & powerful enough to allow virtually anyone to “own the means of production” in the postmodern age. This recent story from NPR’s Marketplace seems to support such a conclusion. It’s the story of a musician who, after leaving a record label, raised $85,000 entirely online to record, release, and promote her new album.
Democracy as function of income per person (PPP$)
A look at the relationship between democracy (Polity IV measures) and per capita income (as fixed PPP$) using a Gapminder chart. Press play and watch Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Nigeria, Somalia, and Ivory Coast move (the African countries pop up later, since they weren’t independent in 1945). Just one of the things you can do w/ Gapminder.
Polity IV
Discussions about “measures” of democracy often focus on Freedom House (which is still the basic standard). But I also like exposing students to the Polity IV dataset. Polity IV is nice because it’s included in the Gapminder data (look under the indicators for the “For advanced users” submenu and then select “Democracy indicators”).
Race, gender, class and Caribbean tourism
My Latin American politics students are reading Gregory Smith’s excellent ethnography of tourism in the Dominican Republic (The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic, 2007). I wanted to find some images of Caribbean luxury resorts to go along w/ our first class discussion.
I’m sure you’ve all seen some surprisingly offensive adds in magazines (a white couple lounging in a pool while a black waiter stands, stiffly, w/ a drink tray). I found a few. But then I just turned to the Sandals and Beaches resort websites. I’m curious to see what they think of them, after reading about race, gender, and class inequalities in the globalized Caribbean tourism industry.
I showed clips of ¿Quién Mató a la Llamita Blanca? (2006) to my Latin American politics class on Friday. If you get a chance, check out this little gem of a film. Besides being a hilarious caper/roadtrip/buddy movie, it also has a great deal of interesting sociopolitical commentary on Bolivia. Most interestingly, unlike more ideologically doctrinaire Bolivian filmmakers (e.g. Sanjínes), this film doesn’t romanticize Bolivia’s lower classes (it doesn’t demonize them, either), but instead wrestles w/ some important social, political, and economic divisions that have recently polarized the country.
To be fair, this isn’t Rodrigo Bellot’s finest film. That was Dependencia Sexual (2003), a daring & cinematically brilliant exploration of the gendered, racial, and class dimensions of our globalized youth culture.
