Latitude Adjustment

Support us on Patreon!   According to an update on the World Health Organization website from July 27th: "Nearly one in five children under five in Gaza city is now acutely malnourished." Additionally: "It is not only hunger that is killing people, but also the desperate search for food. Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditio...

Latitude Adjustment Podcast is back, after a 20-month hiatus!  As always, you can support our work on Patreon with one click! Where have I been? Well, I'll be piecing that together for you over the next three episodes, but in short, after nearly 12 years of nonstop international travel and work I needed to take a pause and return to the US for about a year and a half, just to have a little more fi...

We have been wanting to bring you voices from inside Gaza since the very start of the current atrocities, but for what are obvious reasons this has proven to be extremely difficult, especially after Israel cut all communication lines and mobile phone networks in Gaza, in the prelude to their ground invasion. However, a student from our Palestine Podcast Academy, Shahd Safi, has managed to send me...

Why don't we see more African researchers presenting at global Public Health conferences and in US and European research journals? Who determines which public health issues are prioritized in Africa? What is Public Health and "Vaccine Apartheid"? What do these insights reveal about the current state of our Public Health discourse on the global scale?  It's impossible to isolate the conversation ar...

While the global arms industry may only account for about one percent of global trade, it's important to note what that one percent actually buys. Beyond the price tags on the weapons themselves, arms and arms sales have a tremendous impact on all other aspects of global trade, and on relations between trade partners and competitors. This week's episode is a collaboration between journalist  Paul...

In 1975 Spain formally ended its colonization of "Spanish Sahara", but instead of ceding control to the indigenous Sahrawi population Spain instead handed the keys to its former colony to the Moroccan regime. For nearly 50 years the Sahrawi people of illegally occupied Western Sahara have been subjected to a brutal regime of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, resource-theft, and the violent su...

Where is Western Sahara? What is Western Sahara? Is it a country? Who lives there? If you find yourself unable to answer any of these questions, or if you want a resource that will help you to quickly explain the history and the current political realities around Africa's last colony to your friends and to your community, this short episode was created for you.  Latitude Adjustment Podcast is also...

What we are seeing now in the US, with the rollback of so many progressive victories, and with the passage of bigoted legislation towards sexual minorities, is in many ways the final stage of a decades-long strategy by violent strains of American Christian Evangelism. That strategy has seen Africa used as a testing ground in an ideological war against sexual minorities. And that war has returned h...

Omar Alshogre is currently 28 years old. He was first arrested at 15 for attending a protest against the Al Assad regime, and was arrested a total of 11 times between 2011 and 2013. His last arrest, in 2012, along with the arrests of two of his cousins, led to his incarceration in the Branch 215 military intelligence detention center for 21 months, where he experienced torture on a daily basis. In...

On April 15th war broke out in Sudan. The fighting between the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group and the Sudanese army has devastated Khartoum, spread across the country, and an estimated 1,800 people have lost their lives, with hundreds of thousands displaced. Dalia AbdelMoniem joins us from the UK, where she has been living since fleeing the war in April, after a missile struck her home. D...

This is the second of a two-part series about Basir Bita's escape from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal in August, 2021. In this second half of his story, Basir shares his experiences getting from Pakistan to Canada, the challenges of adjusting to a new culture, the double-standards in Western moralizing, and navigating the prejudices and stereotypes that refugees often face. Be sure to listen...

On August 30th 2021, the US and its coalition partners ended their nearly twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Two weeks before they left, the Taliban swept across the country taking major urban centers, including Kabul. As embassies were abandoned, and as Afghans government officials fled the country, those Afghan citizens who had worked with the occupying forces faced the very real prospect of...

On September 13th of last year 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was visiting Tehran with her family, having traveled from Irans' Kurdish region. While in Tehran she was stopped by Iran's morality police for improperly wearing her hijab, or head covering. Three days after her arrest she was dead. In the days, weeks, and months following her death Iran has seen nationwide protests, and while protests are not...

While there have been different strains of Christian Zionism dating back to the Sixteenth Century, the most politicized, powerful, and violent iteration of the movement has its roots in the contemporary Christian Evangelical Church. Modern Christian Zionists hold that the ethnic cleansing of roughly 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in historic Palestine in 1948, by Jewish Zionists, was the fu...

The US military industrial complex describes the relationship between the US armed forces, weapons and military systems corporations and, though they are often omitted from the phrasing, the Legislative and Executive branches of the US government.  This episode is dedicated to examining the interests at play in maintaining the US military budget as an unquestionable and sacred burden on the US tax...

For this episode we cover a wide range of issues related to Palestinian human rights and political autonomy, including the recent Israeli elections, the current state of Palestinian resistance, parallels and distinctions between Apartheid in South Africa and Palestine, and the aims of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in Palestine . Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcoloni...

It's episode 100 of Latitude Adjustment Podcast, and what better way to celebrate the occasion than to bring back our guest from Episode 1? We catch up with Andrius Mažeika in Lithuania, and in the spirit of our very first episode we cover a wide range of topics, from the war in Ukraine to being a Leftist in a post-Soviet context, to lessons learned from photography, and addressing mental health w...

On September 13th, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was visiting Tehran with her family, having traveled from Irans' Kurdish region. While in Tehran she was stopped by Iran's morality police for improperly wearing her hijab, or head covering. Three days after her arrest she was dead. In the days and weeks following her death Iran has seen nationwide protests, and while protests are not a particularly new t...

Yaari Toolie-Walker is a member of the Alaska-Native Yupik community, an activist, an educator, and a healer. Yaari is also a returning guest, and we highly encourage you to listen to our first conversation with her about the Yupik community, in episode 16 of Latitude Adjustment. The topic of today's conversation is shamanism, or spiritually-guided healing practices. It might surprise you to learn...

Russia's relationship with the African continent dates back to the Soviet era and Cold War proxy battles between Russia and the US. These days the Russian presence in Africa might be lighter, but it's also growing and the dynamics are changing. From the deployment of Russian mercenaries like the Wagner Group, to the politics of soft power and investment, we focus on Russia's past and present relat...

The recent Israeli assault on Gaza lasted three days, from August 5 through August 7th. Before a ceasefire was concluded on the 7th of August, 49 Palestinians lay dead, including 17 children, with more than 360 injured. Israeli occupation raids in the West Bank, in particular in Jenin, coincided with the attacks. And now, in all too predictable pattern, we see that the Western media has once again...

Rosine Hounakey is from Togo but she was trafficked to the US at 13 years old. Forced to work for free on both coasts of the US, she was later coerced into an abusive marriage until she was freed with her two young sons as the result of an ICE raid when she was just 17 years old. She then had to go through foster care in various American cities, waking up at 5am every day to take her kids to schoo...

Santa Muerte (or "Saint Death") is far more than a popular saint, she's a framework for understanding Mexican history, Mexican politics (in particular the legacies of corruption, and the marginalization of women, the poor, the incarcerated, and those living on the fringes of "legitimate" society), and finally Santa Muerte is an entry point for examining the ongoing power and influence of Catholici...

This is a re-broadcast of an episode first published November 25th, 2020. This episode is the second of a two-part conversation with Tity Agbahey . Tity is an attorney based in Senegal, her current work focuses on central Africa, though her previous work has focused elsewhere on the continent, and her life and travels have taken her to points beyond. This pair of episodes should appeal to two type...

This is a re-broadcast of a two-part series first published November 25th, 2020.  This episode is the first of a two-part conversation with Tity Agbahey . Tity is an attorney based in Senegal, her current work focuses on central Africa, though her previous work has focused elsewhere on the continent, and her life and travels have taken her to points beyond. This pair of episodes should appeal to t...