ICED Video Game

Take a look at this educational video game online called ICED (I CAN END DEPORTATION), a wordplay on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acronym.  In this game, you put yourself in the position of an immigrant youth (with a choice of five diverse youth) without immigration documents and therefore trying to stay as invisible as possible. The game shows how since 1996 immigration policies harshly impact immigrants. Playing the game also dispels myths such as immigrants do not pay taxes.  Some of the exact details of immigrants and political economy may not be included, but the game is thought-provoking.  In the game, you make decisions that can advance your situation or decisions that draw attention to your character/yourself, despite either path you still are in danger of getting arrested and then you can choose to play another layer of the game in a detention center.   You can download the game on your computer and take a pre-game survey and a post-game survey. I find that moving the character around is challenging and disorienting, but this is also probably a lot like the actual experience of being in this position, as an undocumented youth.  

http://www.icedgame.com/

News Item from the Week

"U.S. Apologizes for 'Reprehensible' 1940s Syphilis Study in Guatemala" 

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/10/us-apologizes-for-60-year-old-unethical-syphilis-study-in-guatemala.html

Enforcement versus Contributions

This Marketplace American Public Media story reminds me of the power of what Massey and Sànchez (2010) call "framing" (the collective attitude  that undocumented immigrants are "illegal"and a threat to national security) or anti-immigrant discourse in comparison to the contributions that undocumented immigrants provide to the country. In their 2010 book, Brokered Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-immigrant Times, Massey and Sànchez point to how immigrants are received in the U.S. (a rise in anti-immigrant times in the current day) plays a tremendous role in how they eventually come to view their own identity as part of or apart from the United States and how they view the United States, itself.  To see and listen to this show go to:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/27/am-impact-of-undocumented-on-local-biz/

                                                                           Reference

Massey, D. S., &  Sànchez R, M. (2010). Brokered boundaries: Creating immigrant identity in anti-immigrant times. NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Interesting News Articles

These articles and opinion columns pulled from or linked to some recent New York Times online issues provide some information on how to think about current nation-wide attitudes to Muslim American communities in the U.S. and on newer cognitive research on learning and studying.

September 18, 2010 OP-ED column “Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry” By Nicholas Kristof

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19kristof.html?ref=todayspaper

Newer Cognitive Research September 6, 2010 “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits” by Benedict Carey

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?scp=1&sq=Forget%20what%20you%20know%20about%20good%20study%20habits&st=cse



Religious Intolerance

The PBS News Hour examined religious intolerance in the United States and in the too short time frame that the conversation took place, it became clear to me that the meaning of religious intolerance was not  shared among the panelists. The conversation can be read and watched on this link:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july-dec10/911_09-10.html

One of the ideas that I emphasize in my introductory classes is to examine everyday definitions for terms and then examine academic definitions for those same terms to show the differences or convergences in contextual uses of terminology and nomenclature. One of the panelists, Nick Gillespie insinuated that religious intolerance only included hate crimes, while another panelist, Reza Aslan, referred to the phenomenon of the mainstreaming of religious intolerance toward Muslims. More insights could have been offered if this panel had included into the discussion an academic whose research focus was religious intolerance. Religious intolerance as with other forms of discrimination reveals itself in a myriad of ways not only with hate crimes.  Even the term “hate crime” could be flexibly defined so that an open discriminatory act (such as that it is acceptable for one religious group to build a community center, but not for a Muslim community) could be construed as a hate crime.  This website provides clear definitions of religious intolerance and “religiously motivated intolerance”: http://www.religioustolerance.org/relintol1.htm#rel and this website put together by a class in Wake Forest University provides a historical and present-day context to religious intolerance:

http://fightingreligiousintolerance.org/

This website also adds clearer definitions: This also means that “tolerance” or even what does it mean to go beyond just “tolerance” requires shared definitions as well.  Some scholars and cultural competency trainers reject “tolerance” as a meaningful sign of progress. The following books would be two good sources to begin to explore the meanings of religious discrimination and experiences behind those meanings: Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (2010) edited By Lynn S. Neal and John Corrigan (this is a link to uncorrected proofs of the first chapter: http://uncpress.unc.edu/pdfs/SampleChapters/9780807833896_Corrigan_Religious_Intro_uncorrectedpdf-2.pdf  and The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (2003) by Michael Anthony Sells and Emran Qureshi. In fact one of Edward Said’s essays in the above text is called, “A Clash of Definitions.”