Latitude Adjustment

Adrien Lawyer is the founder and director of the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico , an organization that "provides support, community, and connection to transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and gender variant people and their families through advocacy, education, and direct services." For this conversation I wanted to avoid the trap of playing it safe by asking easy questions and...

What comes to mind when you think of Zimbabwe? Perhaps a generic collection of images from the African continent? Wildlife, poverty, and despotism? Perhaps the rule of revolutionary icon and then dictator, Robert Mugabe, or the astronomical rates of inflation and illness and out-migration that have captured the scant bit of international publicity that the country has received in recent years? Whe...

The Kafala or "sponsorship" system is used throughout the Gulf countries (as well as in Jordan and Lebanon) to monitor and organize migrant laborers, from recruitment abroad to their management upon arrival, and particularly in the construction and domestic work sectors. Under the Kafala system a migrant worker's presence in a host country is linked entirely to their employer, with the effect that...

In this second of a two-part conversation I talk to Major Joe Womack (USMC-retired) about AfricaTown. Now part of Mobile, Alabama, AfricaTown was founded by survivors of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the US. And the shipwreck was just discovered in 2019. Joe Womack was born and raised there and now he is leading a fight to prevent its ongoing exploitation and pollution by toxic industri...

In this first of a two-part conversation I talk to Major Joe Womack   (USMC-retired) about AfricaTown. Now part of Mobile, Alabama, AfricaTown was founded by survivors of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the US. And the shipwreck was just discovered in 2019. Joe Womack was born and raised there and now he is leading a fight to prevent its ongoing exploitation and pollution by toxic industr...

Dalia Shurrab is the Communication and Social Media Coordinator at Gaza Sky Geeks . We talk about the challenges of running the first tech hub in the Gaza Strip and the status of women's rights in Palestine.

In this second half of our two-part conversation with Nareg Seferian we speak about the Armenian Genocide, the modern state of Armenia, the Armenian diaspora, and Armenian identity.   Nareg Seferian received his education in India, Armenia, the United States, and Austria. Nareg served on the faculty at the American University of Armenia for three years, and he is currently pursuing his PhD at Virg...

In this first half of our two-part conversation with Nareg Seferian we speak about the Armenian Genocide, the modern state of Armenia, the Armenian diaspora, and Armenian identity.   Nareg Seferian received his education in India, Armenia, the United States, and Austria. Nareg served on the faculty at the American University of Armenia for three years, and he is currently pursuing his PhD at Virgi...

Our guest this week is a young Kashmiri woman currently living in Mumbai. Situated in a mountainous region between India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been a nominal part of India since shortly after India and Pakistan both gained independence from the British in 1947. It's also India's only Muslim majority state and was the battleground in two separate wars between India and Pakistan and several arme...

In 1982 the Myanmar (Burmese) military government passed a citizenship law that effectively stripped the Rohingya community of their nationality overnight. They've been stateless ever since, and subject to institutionalized discrimination and coordinated persecution that has greatly restricted their movement and their access to jobs and education. In August of 2017 Myanmar's military began an offe...

For this second half of our conversation we discuss the ongoing inter-communal violence in Central Mali, the features of Jihadist movements in the region, the prospects and barriers to peace, and the regional and geopolitical implications of these factors and why you should take notice of what's happening in the Sahel.  Dougoukolo Ba-Konare is a clinical psychologist and teacher of Fula Language a...

The Fulani are an ethnic group of around 40 million people who inhabit Africa's Sahel region, the transitional biozone that spans the African continent from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and where the sands of the Sahara gradually give way to the savanna of central Africa. Traditionally a pastoral nomadic culture, they have long experienced tensions in some of the communities they call home, and are...

Basir Bita spent his childhood as a refugee in Iran and moved back to Afghanistan in 2003, which means he has spent his entire adult life living under the US occupation. He currently lives in Kabul where he works as a peace activist and as a consultant monitoring and evaluating risk factors for corruption. We discuss the current peace talks between the US and the Taliban, and what he has learned t...

In June more than 2 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to protest a proposed law that could see residents of the global financial center subject to extradition and criminal prosecution in China, undercutting the delicate "one country, two systems" policy that was to remain in place for 50 years after the 1997 handover from the British. Today, on the anniversary of the handover, the pr...

Sally-Alice Thompson is a World War 2 veteran, a peace activist, a New Mexico resident, and at 95 years old she just started her first hunger strike to bring an end to US sanctions and for US support for sieges that are pushing children into starvation and depriving populations of their basic needs. Sign the Petition and Learn More. 

This segment of our two-part interview with Dahlia Al Roubi was recorded on Tuesday, June 4th, the day after the current government crackdown began against protestors in Khartoum. As of this episode roughly 100 people have been killed by government forces, with reports that scores of bodies have been dumped into the Nile. As of June 6th, Sudan's membership in the African Union has been revoked. Su...

For this first part of a two-part conversation, we talk to Sudanese activist Dahlia Al Roubi about the what it was like growing up under the regime of recently deposed dictator Omar Al Bashir, how the current revolution swept Sudan, starting in December of last year, the challenges of weighing the purity of revolutionary principles against the practical constraints of time and competing interests,...

Have you ever watched a humanitarian crisis unfolding on the news and witnessed the subsequent failure of leaders to lead, and thought to yourself, "I wish I could get some friends together and just do something to make this better?"  That's what Milena Zajović and a few of her friends in Croatia did when the largest refugee crisis to hit Europe since World War 2 came to their borders in the Summe...

Faisel Saleh was born the 11th of 11 children in the West Bank town of El Bireh after his parents fled from their home near Jaffa (near Tel Aviv) during the 1948 war. Those events created the state of Israel and what 700,000 Palestinians and their millions of descendants refer to as "The Nakba", or the catastrophe. Faisal come to the US in 1969 to pursue his education, later becoming a successful...

We hear very little about the war that is taking place in Yemen, which is now in its fifth year. And we hear even less about this war in the words of Yemeni's themselves, and far less still from those who are still in Yemen. This episode represents a small effort to address this disparity. Adel Hashem is the director of Human Needs Development in Sana'a, and organization that is working on the gro...

While much has been written about the "refugee crisis" coming to Western shores, we rarely hear about the long standing crises across the Global South, where 85% of the world's forcibly displaced people's have been forced to seek refuge. Hashed had to flee Yemen after his father was killed, and what followed was an odyssey that has taken him from Djibouti, to India, to Malaysia, where his struggle...

Fatma Naib won a Peabody Award in 2017 for her film, "The Cut" , which she and her team completed for Al Jazeera English on the subject of Female Genital Mutilation. FGM is a non-medical procedure that involves partial or radical removal of young women's genitalia, and while widely practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East, is neither limited to these regions nor defined by theology or reli...

Maria Pisani PhD is a Maltese citizen, lecturer, former head of office for the International Organization for Migration on Malta, and co-founder and director of Integra Foundation . As the EU's smallest and southern-most member state Malta has long been on the front lines of one of the busiest and the deadliest migratory path on earth, where more than 14,000 people have lost their lives since 2014...

The DRC remains an enigma to many in the West, and for a variety of reasons. Whether it's the lack of coverage, the singular focus on violence and poverty, or the silent bigotry that informs many Western attitudes towards the fortunes of Africans more generally, many of the roots causes of the people's suffering continues to go ignored while aid money pours in, resources pour out, and little chang...

This month marks the 8th anniversary of the popular demonstrations in Syria that ultimately led to the war. Assil Alnaser's story takes us from the early days of those protests to her harrowing experiences as a prisoner, and then her escape and her struggles to find a home and a future in Jordan and Turkey, and later in the US, where she was subjected to the "Muslim Ban" twice after winning a scho...