Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Aug 07, 2009, 01:03 PM
This week I was honored to be a speaker at the inaugural Ignite Raleigh. This event gave 15 people the chance to pitch an interesting idea to the crowd at Raleigh's Lincoln Theater. The catch: you have 5 minutes and 20 slides in which to do it. In other words: "enlighten us, but make it quick." Some of you (including Cathy and Steve) will notice a very strong resemblance between this format and the Japanese Pecha Kucha.

Submitted by Katbaloo on Feb 09, 2009, 12:00 AM

Young social entrepreneurs are not just creating Facebook pages, collecting friends and/or followers, and circulating petitions. They are also crafting business plans, forming partnerships with the private & public sectors, raising funds, redirecting profits back into their projects, and aggressively trying to educate and advocate around their issues. For the most part, they lack ego around their own accomplishments and spend much of their time seeking to learn from their peers and other professionals about how to do things better, smarter, and more sustainably. They are, without exception, changing lives.

Submitted by admin on Dec 01, 2008, 12:00 AM

Global Fund for Children's Sohini Chakraborty of Kolkata Sanved discusses dance therapy for social change.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Nov 11, 2008, 07:36 AM
If cultural criticism is rooted in critique, in what is critique rooted? That is far too big a topic for any one person so I'm just going to throw out some extravagant generalizations about historicity, critique, and agency and I would love to hear what others think. If the Frankfurt School's idea of critique is rooted in a horrific historical moment, one in which intellectuals were not just derided but jailed and killed, if the major theorists of the late twentieth century, virtually all of whom consider critique to be foundational to their method, came of age in the 1960s in the midst of struggles, riots, assassinations, unjust wars, and radicalism generated by a sense of political urgency and agentive hopelessness, what will the cultural criticism of the future look like for eighteen year-olds who voted for the first time for an utterly improbable and historically unlikely president who won. In other words, in the gross world of power politics and partisan politics in the U.S., what happens if what no one could have predicted was even possible a year ago could, through concerted collective effort, become possible? If you believe you have agency in democracy, what is the affective, critical imperative borne of that agency? What is the relationship between theoretical critique and collective action? What is the continuity between success in one improbably arena and the sense that you can change other arenas as well? What form of critique, evaluation, and analysis emerges when you believe that you have the collective power to change and succeed against all predictions, against the assumptions of history? These are all interesting questions that do NOT presume a utopic world but, rather, a rooted sense of power to enact certain forms of collective action and change within a deeply flawed world where constant intervention is required.