Monthly Archives: August 2017

The upcoming Kinks, Locks & Twists: Environmental and Reproductive Justice Conference may sound like a natural hair symposium but is actually an annual national womens conference that uses Black hair politics as the entry point for discussion on empowerment and activism.

Co-founded in Pittsburgh by West Philadelphia native LaTasha D. Mayes, the conference is organized annually by New Voices, a human rights organization focused on reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, health care access, ending gender-based violence, incarceration, environmental justice and integrated voter engagement.

Mayes explained that the goal of the three-day conference is to engage Black women and girls in community organizing for lasting social change while celebrating intersectionality.

That is why intersectionality is so important to our work, said Mayes, the New Voices founder and executive director. You cant look at a Black woman or a Black person and only talk about one thing. No! These things are impacting me as a Black person and a woman and are impacting me at the same time and in different ways and different times. The intersectionality, to me, gets us to greater, more impactful solutions for the long-term. Its not just a change in policy, but about uprooting systematic race and gender oppression. Thats the difference in our work: we are confronting systems of oppression in our work and creating spaces for those who are vulnerable and marginalized.

The Kinks, Locks & Twists Conference is presented by New Voices for Reproductive Justice, a grass-roots human rights organization founded in 2004 by Mayes, Bekezela Mguni, Lois Toni McClendon and Maria Nicole (Smith) Dautruche. Initially produced in 2010 as a HERStory Month signature event, the Conference began with an analysis of the politics of Black hair, and soon broadened its focus to environmental and reproductive justice.

We are a reproductive justice organization, said Mayes. Our definition of reproductive justice is the right to control your body. When we get into it more deeply, it is about the human right to control your body, sexuality, gender, work, reproduction and ability to form a family.

According to a timeline provided by the organization, it grew steadily and now focuses on several priority issues. The Pittsburgh-based organization has also enlarged its geographic footprint to include offices and programming in both Cleveland and Philadelphia.

Throughout the years the conference has covered regional concerns, such as fracking, as well as topics of concern to all women of color like environmental racism and the reproductive cancers that can be caused by toxic hair, makeup and personal products, said Mayes. This year, we have adopted the theme #LoveSowGrow as a call to embrace our roots as women of color, recognize our potential and invest in ourselves as leaders to shape a self-determined future, she continued.

The conference kicks off with the free, full-day Black Hair Institute at the Philadelphia Center for Architecture (1218 Arch St.) on Aug. 17. Conference activities continue on Aug. 18 and 19 with two full days of events at the Friends Center (1501 Cherry St.), including sessions with social justice advocate Dorothy Roberts; spoken word artist Sonya Renee Taylor; and feminist/activist Denise Oliver-Velez.

Registration for the annual Kinks, Locks & Twists: Environmental and Reproductive Justice Conference is available at eventbrite.com. Conference organizers are committed to accessibility for all attendees, with a sliding scale of registration fees is offered this year. Childcare will be available to conference attendees free of charge. For more information, visit kinkslockstwists.org.

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National women's conference focuses on empowerment - The Philadelphia Tribune

Inner beauty and self-esteem can be your award winning virtues if you are five feet two inches tall, have passed Class 12 and belong to one of the three tribes of Lisu, Nah and Puroik.

It is not a beauteous sentence but the only way to sum up the quota system proposed for the three underprivileged tribes by the Miss Arunachal Beauty Pageant. Ahead of auditions for the 10th edition next month, the organisers of the contest have announced a direct entry by reserved quota for contestants from Lisu, Nah and Puroik minority tribes. The ethnic character of these tribes, their migration and roots in places as far as China or their history of political de-recognition followed by a deprived if restored citizenship in India makes them a very curious anthropological case study. But to offer them affirmative action via a beauty contest is a classic case of cross-wired and complicated social activism.

Arunachal Pradesh has been making a virtue out of positive discrimination. Last year, 59-year-old Hage Tado Nanya from Ziro village was crowned Mrs Arunachal. Married at 13, she participated to raise awareness against domestic violence, gender discrimination and polygamy. Many contestants in that pageant were victims of polygamy and violence.

Beauty contests have always had discrimination and commercial gain wired into their plumbing. The Miss Universe contest launched in 1952 a year after Miss World was a marketing stunt by Pacific Knitting Mills, a California clothing company after the winner of another rival pageant Miss America refused to wear one of its swimsuits. The point was to sell a swimsuit, not crown a woman for beings gods blue-eyed kid.

Such contests have long been debated as hotbeds of female objectification and commercial opportunism. They confuse the psychological self esteem of a person with her body attributes. But despite loud protests and sloganeering across the world, they have never really faded away from popular culture.

Even in these last two years when persuasive new arguments of colour, race, plus size and body positivism got added to fundamental feminist concerns, no society or country has weaned away entirely from beauty pageants.

Whats happened instead, including in India, is an improvisation of the beauty contest model. Beauty has not only become accepting of diversity but it is now outraged and activist like. The old contest model of dressing up, lining up, walking out before a jury to be judged for a set of agreed upon virtues, should have been scrapped to wipe out its inherent flaws. Instead it has been made bigger with room for the violated, the ostracised, the downtrodden, the gay, the married (thats a separate category of contests), the physically challenged and now the tribal. There are beauty contests for incarcerated women across the world. Bom Paston Womens Prison in Brazil holds a contest ironically titled Miss Jail whereas Lithuanias Penal Labour Colony calls it Miss Captivity.

In India too what we now have is an alternative culture of contests that still in some form worship the body positivism or whatever. Indias first transgender pageant Indian Super Queen was launched in 2010 by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the Mumbai-based transgender activist to reiterate the beauty and esteem of an otherwise ridiculed community. Mr Gay India, Nepals Ms Dalit Queen (launched in 2013) and a contest organised for visually challenged girls by Mumbais National Association for the Blind last year add to the list. What exactly are such contestants contesting for though is hard to define if it is not dressed up beauty?

Back to Miss Arunachal Pradesh.

The three tribes chosen via quota entry to the pageant come with a defensive explanation, which says it is to celebrate inner beauty and raise self confidence and self esteem. Whether self esteem is directly proportional to winning or participating in a beauty pageant has still not been proved by any scientifically designed anthropological study done with beauty queens across the world. But what is worse is creating reservation for an ideological and existential talent as vague as like inner beauty for which there are no barometers of measurement on a scale of 1 to 10.

The question we may need to address as a society is why in the first place do we need beauty contests to address societal issues like LGBT rights, or rehabilitate downtrodden tribes like the Lisu, Nah and Puroik?

Perhaps it is easier to find sponsors for events that glamourise anything victimhood, violence, natural and cosmetic beauty or physical handicaps but hard to raise a hue and cry on personal empowerment programmes that dont parade the dressed up body posturing to seek notice.

Shefalee Vasudev is a fashion journalist and author

The views expressed are personal

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Quota for three tribes in Arunachal pageant: Case of cross-wired activism - Hindustan Times

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Claire Saenz is a SMART Recovery Facilitator for SMART Recovery. It is an addiction recovery service without a necessary reference to a higher power or incorporation of a faith, or some faith-based system into it by necessity. Those can be used it, but they are not necessities. The system is about options. In this series, we look at her story, views, and expertise regarding addiction, having been an addict herself. This is session 1.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen:When it comes to the experience of addiction, what were your addiction and particular substance of choice?

Claire Saenz: My substance of choice was alcohol, which was coupled with an eating disorder and an anxiety disorder.

Jacobsen: What were the thoughts that ran through your mind as you were working to combat the addiction, to stop using the substance(s)?

Saenz: I was highly motivated when I decided to stop drinking, so my primary thought, initially, was that I was going to quit or die trying. I felt determined, but also extremely vulnerable because giving up alcohol meant that in many essential ways, I was giving up my sole coping mechanism.

Jacobsen: How did SMART Recovery compare to other services?

Saenz: Other services I used in my recovery were AA, individual therapy, and pharmaceutical treatment of my anxiety. I found SMART similar to AA in that it is also a peer support group. I found the social support aspect of both programs helpful. SMART was drastically different from AA in almost all other respects, however, and much more like the individual therapy I received.

SMARTs philosophy is one of personal empowerment rather than reliance on a higher power. The use of stigmatizing labels such as alcoholic or addict is discouraged. Direct discussion (cross-talk) among group participants is encouraged. Sponsorship is not part of the program. Group facilitators are not professionals, but they are trained in the SMART tools and meeting facilitation skills, and they are expected to adhere to a code of ethics.

Finally, SMART recognizes that recovery, while a process, is not necessarily a permanent one. While participants are encouraged to attend meetings for a significant time period and to become facilitators to pay it forward, we do not view recovery as being a permanent state. Instead, we achieve a new normal.

Jacobsen: What were some of the more drastic stories that you have heard of in your time as an addict, as a recovering addict, and now as a SMART Recovery facilitator?

Saenz: For the reasons mentioned above, I dont refer to myself as an addict or alcoholic, recovering or otherwise. If a label must be applied to my state, call me a person who has recovered from an addiction to alcohol.

As far as drastic stories, they fall into two categories: the carnage of addiction itself, and the carnage of one-size-fits-all addiction treatment where the one size is the twelve- step approach.

The carnage of addiction is simply limitless. I have lost dozens of friends and acquaintances to addiction-related causes, from organ failure to overdose, to suicide.

At one of my first AA meetings, I spent a few minutes talking to a nice young man who went home that night and hung himself. I know multiple people who have lost spouses and children to addiction. It is a dreadful condition that takes the lives of fine people, and the solutions we currently offer, as a society, are breathtakingly inadequate.

In terms of the consequences of one-size-fits-all treatment, it should come as no surprise that in a world of individuals, there will never be an approach to any physical or mental condition that will work the same way, or as well, for everyone. And yet for years, we have prescribed the exact same treatment to everyone with an addictive disorder.

Worse, what passes for treatment is often nothing more than expensive indoctrination into a free support group (12 step programs, themselves, are free)and if the patient fails to improve, the prescription ismore 12 step. Of course, this isnt working. The shocking thing is that we would ever expect it to work.

Jacobsen: How has religion infiltrated the recovery and addiction services world? Is this good or bad? How so?

Saenz: Twelve-step programs, which form the basis of most traditional treatment, are religious in nature. Adherents sometimes claim otherwise, but courts in the U.S. have nearly universally disagreed on that point.

As one jurist put it, The emphasis placed on God, spirituality, and faith in a higher power by twelve-step programs such as A.A. or N.A. clearly supports a determination that the underlying basis of these programs is religious and that participation in such programs constitutes a religious exercise. It is an inescapable conclusion that coerced attendance at such programs, therefore, violates the Establishment Clause.Warburton v. Underwood, 2 F.Supp.2d 306, 318 (W.D.N.Y.1998).

Because they are religious in nature, such programs may not be the best choice for, and certainly should not the only option given to, atheists or individuals with an internal locus of control.

Beyond that, the religious atmosphere of the programs can, and sometimes does breed an environment where seasoned members of the program become almost like gurus, given an almost clergy-like status and an inordinate amount of power over newer and more vulnerable members. Sometimes this power is used to exploit. The classic exploitation is sexual13th stepping is a common euphemism used to describe the practice of veteran members manipulating newcomers into engaging in sexual relationshipsbut emotional and financial exploitation can happen as well.

But the most tragic consequence of the infiltration of religion into addiction treatment is not, in my view, the religious aspect per se but the fact that the focus on that approach excludes all others. The real tragedy is that people are dying because they are never even told of other approaches that might help them.

In my own experience, 19 years ago when I sought treatment for my addiction to alcohol, I was told that the only option for survival was to become an active AA member. Being the rule follower I am, I did exactly that. I spent the next nine years of my life going to AA meetings and attempting to fit my fundamentally humanist worldview within the confines of that program.

I eventually found this impossible and left the program. In the aftermath of that, I had to re-examine every thought and belief I had developed in the time I had been abstinent to determine whether those thoughts and beliefs were my own or had been implanted during my AA years. I found this an extraordinarily painful process, in many ways as painful as quitting in the first place.

When I found SMART Recovery and realized that it had been possible, all along, for me to have received social support in a manner that honored who I was a person, I cried. I thought not only of myself and all the pain Id gone through because I wasnt told of other options besides AA but of all the others who had experienced the same thing.

This would be equally true regardless of the specifics of the treatment being offered because there is no one approach that is right for everyone. The real tragedy is the pain that has been caused, and the lives that have been lost, because one approach has become too dominant.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. He works as an Associate Editor and Contributor for Conatus News, Editor and Contributor to The Good Men Project, a Board Member, Executive International Committee (International Research and Project Management) Member, and as the Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Executive Administrator and Writer for Trusted Clothes, and Councillor in the Athabasca University Students Union. He contributes to the Basic Income Earth Network, The Beam, Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Check Your Head, Conatus News, Humanist Voices, The Voice Magazine, and Trusted Clothes. If you want to contact Scott: [emailprotected]; website: http://www.in-sightjournal.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/InSight_Journal.

Originally posted here:

Claire Saenz, Looking in the 'Mirror' and Seeing the Self - The Good Men Project (blog)

LAHORE:Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif has said that more than 60 percent population of Pakistan consists of the youth and added that they are our precious asset and provision of resources for youth empowerment is a beneficial investment to secure the bright future of the country. The youth are a symbol of bright future and the nation has attached high hopes with its brilliant and talented youth.

In his message on the occasion of International Day of the Youth, Shehbaz Sharif said that the Punjab government has taken revolutionary steps for youth empowerment and welfare. He said that the purpose of the celebration of this day is to highlight the adoption of steps so that the youth can fully utilise their potential along with ensuring the solution of their problems.

He said that the talented youth of Pakistan has proved its mettle in every field and the government is giving special attention to improving their skills. Serious efforts are being made for the solution of problems of the youth at every level, he added. He said that educational stipends have been given to thousands of low-income families from Punjab Educational Endowment Fund so that their children could study without being burdened. Similarly, soft loans worth billions of rupees have been distributed to the jobless youth to economically empower them.

He vowed to change the destiny of the nation by giving latest knowledge to the youth and said that the dream of national development will be materialised by their empowerment.

COUNTRY PROSPEROUS BECAUSE OF NS:

In a statement issued on Friday, Shehbaz Sharif commenting on the Lahore-bound rally of Nawaz Sharif and his supporters, saying that the reception of Nawaz Sharif is proof of peoples tremendous love for him and it also shows that the masses want national development. He added that Nawaz Sharif and the people are inseparable.

The people have always reposed their full confidence over the policies of PML-N and the party has also adopted practical steps for national development, instead of indulging in any lip service, he said. Due to the wonderful policies of Nawaz Sharif, the country is fast moving towards prosperity and development, he added.

Shehbaz Sharif said that national development and public welfare are our prime targets, while the claimants of so-called change have wasted their time on roads during the last four years; instead of indulging in public service, negative politics has been their agenda, he said. He said the credit for setting up energy projects for getting rid of the darkness goes to the PML-N and Pakistan is also economically stronger than ever before.

He said that vibrant, prosperous and bright Pakistan is our destination and the defeated political cabal obstructing this journey are an enemy of the nation who has obstructed this public welfare program just for their personal gains. These are those elements which have been rejected by the people in general as well as in by-elections. These elements will face historic defeat in the General Elections of 2018, he added. He said that the popularity of the PML-N has diminished the politics of the opponents.

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Govt has taken revolutionary steps for youth empowerment: CM - Pakistan Today