Latitude Adjustment

UPDATE: you can now support the growth and sustainability of the Latitude Adjustment Podcast Academy by contributing to our GoFundMe campaign . Help to elevate the voices of displaced peoples by making them podcast producers! Latitude Adjustment returns to Lesvos to launch a new phase of our programming, a podcast academy. Over the next several weeks Latitude Adjustment Podcast work with students...

This episode is the second of a two-part conversation with Tity Agbahey . Tity is an attorney and a staffer at Amnesty International. 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 types of listeners, those who know wha...

This episode is the first of a two-part conversation with Tity Agbahey . Tity is an attorney and a staffer at Amnesty International. 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 types of listeners, those who know what...

This re-release episode closes with a short update interview with Abdul, completed in November, 2020. It starts at 59:18. The original show was published in December, 2018. Abdul Saboor worked with the US military in Afghanistan before having to flee the country after receiving death threats and having several friends and family members killed by the Taliban. What followed was an overland odyssey...

Being at a loss as to how to manage the political conflicts within my own social circle I reached out to my old professor, Tatsushi Arai , to learn how Americans might apply the principles of Conflict Transformation to our interactions at the personal, professional, and community levels, whatever the outcome of the US election.  But it should be noted that this discussion is not specific to Americ...

For all of the movies, books, and policy debates on the topic, and given that the largest, most expensive, and longest hot war in US history is being waged in its name, why don't we have a coherent and consistent definition for Terrorism? Get ready to rethink everything you think you know about this word and its application. Our guest is visual anthropologist Amanda Rogers , an expert on the propa...

Since September 27th there has been a resurgence of armed conflict in the Caucasus between the small nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno Karbabakh, or Artsakh as it's known in Armenian. The backstory to this decades-old conflict is complex, so be sure to check the documentary films linked to on our website if you would like to do a deeper dive into the historical...

For our first ever re-released episode we decided to commemorate Indigenous People's Day with an audience favorite and one of our earliest shows. Yaari Walker is a member of the Yupik tribe, and originally from the town of Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. She now resides in Anchorage, Alaska, where, in addition to being an activist, author, and entrepreneur, she works at the Alaska Native...

David Shanks is the Chief Censor for New Zealand. As his title implies he is responsible for determining what is and what is not fit for public consumption, what ratings should be applied to various media, as well as other less obvious details that highlight the elusive line between protected speech and speech that constitutes a danger to public safety. We first reached out to David's office after...

This episode is the audio version of a live video broadcast that aired on Friday, August 7th, featuring guests on the ground in Beirut, Lebanon. Our guests are Mohammad Hamoud, a Lebanese activist and humanitarian relief worker, and Rita Kabalan, a Lebanese-American photojournalist based in Beirut.  On Tuesday, August 4th, a massive explosion rocked Beirut's port when tons of improperly stored amm...

Ralph Nader is a five-time candidate for US president and a public servant who has improved the lives of Americans and of many people around the world through his 6 decades of work as a consumer advocate and civil liberties defender. We speak about the current status of civil rights protests, coronavirus, Palestine, corporate corruption, and about his new cookbook and the connection between our ki...

Idlib, in northern Syria, is one of the few parts of the country that have not been recaptured by the Assad regime but nearly a decade of war has taken an extreme toll on its inhabitants, with Coronavirus, continued fighting, and economic collapse creating a perfect humanitarian storm that has left Idlib in its most desperate circumstances of the war, with millions facing imminent risk of starvati...

This show is the audio-only version of a live chat hosted on July 10th, featuring guests Milena Zajović from Are You Syrious? , Douglas Herman from ReFocus Media Labs , and Carmen Dupont from Lesvos Solidarity - Pikpa . You can catch our weekly-(ish) live chat discussions most Fridays on the Latitude Adjustment FB page, or you can check our Live Video Chats archive to watch and share them later. A...

The global arms industry may only account for about one percent of global trade, but it's important to note what that one percent is buying and the role that arms sales play in influencing other aspects of global trade and political relations. We speak with Frank Slijper in Groningen, The Netherlands, where Frank leads a project on the global arms trade for Pax , a global peace research and advoca...

On May 25th George Floyd was detained and murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, making him only the most recent high profile case of an unarmed African American dying at the hands of law enforcement in the United States. The killing was captured on camera by witnesses and massive protests erupted almost immediately, starting in Minneapolis and quickly spreading to dozens of cities across t...

We speak with Dr. Sadi Nkhala about the implications of a coronavirus outbreak in the Gaza Strip. Gaza has presently been spared from the worst case scenario, but like many poor communities, and like many communities containing large numbers of refugees, it is uniquely vulnerable. Like the rest of Gaza's 2 million inhabitants, Sadi has been living under the Israeli-imposed siege on the coastal ter...

This is the final episode of a four-part series on the refugee crisis in Greece, undertaken in collaboration with Croation NGO, Are You Syrious . This episode features a range of perspectives from locals, internationals, volunteers, and founders on Lesvos and in Athens, including:  Douglas Herman from Refocus Media Labs ; Lesvos (7:14) Eric Kempson from the Hope Project ; Lesvos (1:10:51) Salam Al...

Originally from Athens, Efi Latsoudi studied psychology and worked with a range of vulnerable communities before moving to Lesvos in 2001. Efi's experiences and her story provide a historical perspective on the refugee crisis in Greece that we almost never get from traditional media. For starters, refugees didn't start coming to Greece in 2015. That story starts much earlier, and many of the probl...

These are the personal testimonies of refugees from Moria Refugee Camp on the Greek Island of Lesvos and in Athens. These interviews were recorded in January and February as part of our collaboration with Are You Syrious . Much has transpired in Greece and in the world since we spoke, but their stories remain current and are in many ways timeless examples of what many of our parents, grandparents...

Much has changed in recent weeks since we left Greece, and before bringing you the personal testimonies and field interviews that we gathered from refugees, volunteers, Greek citizens, and stakeholders during our time in Lesvos and Athens in January and February, we wanted to touch base with some people on the ground in Greece and Turkey to get up to speed on the fast-changing situation in and bet...

While it might seem like an obscure topic due to scant coverage in the Western press, a quick review of the facts makes it clear that we ignore Algeria at our peril. First of all, it's Africa's biggest country by land mass, and home to a population larger than Canada's. It's also home to Africa's largest company, state owned oil giant Sonatrach, a major exporter of fuel to Western Europe. We dive...

In May of 2019, Pittsburgh resident Bethany Hallam defeated a nearly 20-year incumbent to become Allegheny County Councilor at Large. She takes her seat in January, 2020. What's truly remarkable about her victory is the story that precedes it. Bethany watched the 2016 US presidential election from the Allegheny County Jail as an inmate and recovering heroin addict. She shares her journey from addi...

In mid-October, 2019 protests broke out in Santiago, and spread across the nation in what quickly became the largest display of civil unrest in Chile since the Pinochet dictatorship.  On October 25th an estimated 1.2 million people took to the streets of Santiago demanding Sebastián Piñera's resignation. Hundreds of human rights abuse cases have been reported by individuals, human rights organizat...

The current protests in Iraq began at the start of October. Much like the ongoing protests in Lebanon, the protests in Iraq have largely been mobilized by youth, with no clear leadership, and with a decidedly anti-sectarian focus, with demands to address chronic unemployment, and to reform entrenched corruption and rule by political elites. They are also the largest protest in Iraq since the end o...

Since mid October Lebanon has seen some of its largest protests in years, and in this a country where sectarianism has been institutionalized since the end of the 15-year-long civil war, it's noteworthy that one of the issues that protestors are rallying against is sectarianism itself. We talk to activist and development professional Jad Sakr in Beirut to get more context on the causes and aspirat...