A few months ago I contacted Voice of Witness because I was interested in their work using storytelling to highlight the voices of human rights victims. I started collaborating in a small way by proofreading the Spanish versions of some of the stories compiled in the book “Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives“. The book is a collection of oral histories from men and women struggling to carve a life in the United States.
All the stories were touching and inspiring in their own way. I was humbled by the struggle and the determination of the people who shared their stories for this book. As a recent immigrant going through the complicated legal process to remain in this country, I can only begin to imagine the difficulties and uncertainties that illegal immigrants are facing under the current social and economic climate. The human rights of this always growing population are under constant threat.
The Spanish version, named “En las Sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de Inmigrantes de Indocumentados“, will be presented at the San Francisco public library on November 19, 2009.
The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, technology and new media, was a conference organized by the Human Rights center of the University of California at Berkeley. The conference, held on May 4 and 5th, touched on two aspects of this topic: evidence gathering and documentation, and advocacy and outreach. I attended as a volunteer, live-blogging and providing Spanish translation for some of the sessions and plenaries.
The blog posts and interactions generated during the conference were placed at a Ning site. One of my favorite plenaries was the opening talk by Trevor Paglen author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. I transcribed and translated his talk as best as I could at the time. A lot of the session’s video can be seen on the conference website. I have to say I was disappointed by the “Corporate Responsibility and Complicity” panel, because, well, there were a lot of corporations talking without opposition.
I recommend checking out all the winners of the Mobile Challenge prize. These were truly innovative projects and I wish there had been more time during the event to talk about their applications.
*Photo by Maneno.org
A partir de Noviembre estaré trabajando con Corpwatch.org coordinando el proyecto Crocodyl.org. Crocodyl es un sitio wiki para la investigación colaborativa sobre corporaciones. Colaboradores en diferentes partes del mundo escriben sobre temas de Derechos Humanos, corrupción, impacto ambiental y prácticas laborales de las corporaciones. En el próximo año, Crocodyl incluirá nuevos elementos tales como datos de empresas subsidiarias, un proyecto que fue presentado en Netsquared 2008.
Since November 2008 I’ve been working with Corpwatch.org as a Project Coordinator for Crocodyl.org. Crocodyl is a wiki site for collaborative research on corporations. A group of researchers and collaborators around the world writes about human rights, corruption cases, labor and environmental practices of corporations. Next year, Crocodyl will go through a re-design and the implementation of new elements, such as subsidiary data extracted from government databases. This project was presented during Netsquared in 2008.
