All day, everyday, we do it without really thinking about it. Pull that coffee filter full of spent grounds out of the machine after your morning cuppa, and toss it into the kitchen trash. Grab a paper towel from the office pantry to serve as a napkin for your lunch break, wipe your mouth and [...]

When students took to the streets in Rome last November to demonstrate against proposed budget cuts to the university system, they introduced something new to the vocabulary of protest. To defend themselves from police truncheons they carried improvised shields made of polystyrene, painted, on the front, with the names of classic works of literature and [...]

A memorial for the victims of the Bhopal disaster. photo: Luca Frediani/Creative Commons Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press 2011) explores the slow, steady, and often ignored violence of socio-environmental degradation around the globe, and the writer-activists trying to bring it to light. By Christine Shearer August/September 2011 Conducive [...]

Kari Marie Norgaard helps us understand how and why societies fail to act on climate change in Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011) By Christine Shearer Conducive June/July 2011 Don’t be fooled by the title of Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial – this is not a book about people [...]

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway uncover the history of a small group of Cold War scientists and advisers who battled anything, including scientific research, that might threaten their vision of American free enterprise in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, [...]

In 1999, Jancee Dunn followed the lives of twelve teenage girls for Rolling Stone magazine. All of the girls were from Connecticut, with parents firmly in the middle class. All of the girls aged between fourteen and sixteen. They lived typical suburban lives. They attended school regularly, after school they hung out in their rooms [...]

Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People was written during the Bush administration, when author Dana Nelson, like so many somewhere on the left of the political spectrum, was alarmed by the expansion of executive power and its arbitrary exercise. Yet as a new preface written just after the election [...]

Karen Ho’s Liquidated should be the envy of any academic seeking to make a political intervention. It is simultaneously an unusual and well thought out ‘looking up’ ethnography (a trend in anthropology to examine the thinking and culture of more powerful groups rather than more ‘traditional’ subjects of research) and a theoretical critique of the [...]

The yearly ritualistic killing of a bull in South Africa brings up the age-old and pervasive issue of human mistreatment of nonhuman animals. A problem more acute and widespread in so-called “advanced societies” like the United States, where pigs, chickens, cows, and other factory-farmed animals are herded into confined areas so small they cannot sit, [...]

Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we got into non-profits; the long hours, budget cuts, donors that are increasingly harder to find and have less to give. But following these simple tips for a happier, more productive non-profit will allow your organization to spend less time on administration and more on pursuing its mission, and [...]

The whole Tea Party thing bothers me, as does any angry mob that operates under half-formed assumptions with an undertone of racism. The old adage, “Empty barrels make the most noise,” certainly applies here. Do any of the Tea Partiers actually study the issues against which they rebel, or are they merely reacting to the half-thought-out comments of politicians who [...]

Wall Street dominates the national news. Is there any limit to the avarice? Not much surprises us anymore. We cannot and should not allow ourselves to be jaded into accepting this level of corruption, now or in the future. What can we do about it? How can individual citizens support Congressional reform efforts and force Wall [...]

1.02 billion people in the world go hungry every day according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. That’s 1,020,000,000 people.  I was tempted to round down and write 1 billion people in the world go hungry every day.  It dawned on me that I would be doing a monumental disservice to [...]

Arrested by Haitian authorities for trying to cross illegally into the Dominican Republic with 33 so-called orphaned children, whose parents were later found to be alive, U.S. citizens and Idaho Baptist missionaries Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter remain imprisoned in Port-au-Prince pending investigation of alleged child trafficking. Seeking to save the children in the wake [...]

Although barely recognizable in the wake of the earthquake and aftershocks that rattled the country on January 12, 2010, Haiti holds remnants of one of the most historically and culturally rich countries of the world. While statistics bring Haiti in as the economically poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, accounts of Haiti’s once lush natural [...]

If your conception of social change does not involve mapping the wandering of little white mice or estimating the correlation of beliefs and values of college students between the ages of 18 and 24, you may find evaluation research of interest and of use. Read Conducive’s “Your Thoughts for Mai Thoughts” columunist, Dr. Mai Kieu-Loan’s take [...]

Much of the debate over same-sex marriage centers around the question of whether or not the issue is one of same-sex couples receiving the full rights and benefits of citizenship, or is an affront to the “sanctity” of marriage. Activists for gay marriage argue that their relationships are not fully protected without legal recognition. This [...]

Cornell University announced in 2006 that 13 of the 21 students at Cornell who had committed suicide since 1996 were Asian or Asian American. What was even more disconcerting was that Asian Americans only represented 14 percent of the entire student body. Among women aged 65 and above, Asian and Pacific Islanders have the highest [...]