Extra Credit Opportunity

Students:

I will not be able to make it to my office hours tomorrow, and they are cancelled. If anyone has questions about the readings or 2nd essay assignment, please email me.

I also want to alert everyone that there is an extra credit opportunity this Wednesday at 7pm, in room 101 of the Social Sciences Building.

I have been organizing a roundtable on the San Diego Wildfires Crises of last October. There will be 4 short presentations by local activists--the ACLU, Border Angels, the American Friends Service Committee--and an area city planner, who will all address the fires and their impact on the county. We will be especially concerned with 2 issues: media distortion of the fires [i.e. a lot of the coverage was about Rancho Santa Fe and Rancho Bernardo, while much of the Harris Fire was not discussed; or the inappropriate comparisons to New Orleans after Katrina] and the role of suburbanization and urban sprawl and the fires.

The discussion will be really interesting on its own, but if you come and write a one-page, double-spaced essay about the experience you can earn 2 extra credit points toward your participation grade. Given how uneven participation in section has been, this is an excellent opportunity to learn, and improve your grade for the course.

I hope to see many of you there--below is the full flyer, which you are hopefully seeing if you go by the SSB building.
AC

Wed. May 14th, 7pm-9pm
The San Diego Wildfires Crisis: Hidden Consequences of Urban Sprawl and
Unequal Media Representation
A Roundtable follow up to the 2008 Culture Conference: Crisis, Emergency, Global Processes

Join us for this special roundtable on the SD Wildfires that will bring together a distinguished and diverse panel of speakers ranging from urban planners, researchers, lawyers to journalists.

Refreshments will be provided | RSVP or questions: wildfire_roundtable@gmail.com

It was only last fall that San Diego County experienced its own crisis, the county-wide fires. The wildfires were truly emphasized for their out-of-control "wildness," while the real reasons of urban sprawl were downplayed or flat-out ignored. This crisis, like many others crisis around the world, such as famines, was framed as a case of "natural disaster," instead of a case of mismanaged urban planning, ill-led concepts of fire "prevention." Therefore the causes fell on to nature, instead of socio-political reasons.

For many around the world who watched the news coverage of our local crisis, it appeared that only middle- to upper-class, Causcasian home-owners were affected by this disaster.
Newscasters biasedly compared the state-of-emergency disaster to New Orlean’s Hurricane Katrina in a fashion that portrayed San Diegans as wealthy, coordinated, charitable and peaceful in contrast to New Orleaneans who were portrayed as poor, disorganized, and violent. Essentially, San Diego "citizens" were framed as united, while New Orlean "refugees" were portrayed as lacking in unity. Just like Hurricane Katrina, the media coverage and the treatment of the San Diego fires were embedded in long-standing issues of class, race and ethnicity.

This roundtable aims to bring out many the socio-political reasons that contributed to the fire and the politics of who's stories were represented in the media and which ones remained untold. For example, many of the fires’ human victims were migrant workers living in canyons who, largely because of their extreme marginalization, were not able to be reached and informed about the fires. In stark contrast to the mainstream coverage of property owners (like the TV reporter standing outside his own house for hours of coverage). The human toll of the fires was largely ignored, or even blamed on these victims for consuming UCSD Regional Burn Center resources for instance.


We hope you will join us for this special roundtable that will follow up on the global and theoretical themes of the 2008 Culture Conference.

Sncerely,

Andrew Cheyne, Geoffrey Fojtasek, Raquel Jacob-Almeida, Tricia Wang, and the Culture Conference Committee