Posts

Structuration Theory

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Safety Rest Areas and Welcome Centers in Virginia (VDOT) My daily routine involves getting up at 5:30 in the morning, taking my partner to his job (school bus driver) at 6:30, and then driving down I-81 and I-64 from Harrisonburg to  my job as a first grade teacher in Waynesboro. At 7:30, the kids start rolling in, and at 2:35 they go home; I typically stay after for about an hour, and at 3:30 I drive back to Harrisonburg, pick up my partner from work, then go home.  After working several really horrible jobs, I consider teaching to be very freeing and enjoyable. However, this is just psychological, an effect of being surrounded by really great people and having two wonderful principals as my bosses - because in reality, my job is actually very closely regulated. While I do get some choice in what I do - what books to read to the kids, what movies to show them, what worksheets and activities to do - the content and amount of time I spend on that content is very rigid. Regulations and
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Green Buses in Bogota

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  TransMilenio bus in Bogota A good example of a city tackling climate change can be seen in Bogota, the capital of Colombia. In Bogota, nearly 70% of the population uses bus system on a daily basis in order to travel (SmartCities, 2022). The buses ran on deisel fuel, so as a result of the heavy usage, they were a large source of pollution in Bogota and indeed Colombia as a whole. In 2021, Bogota's mayor, Claudia Lopez, instituted what she called the "Green Corridor Septima," a plan to decrease Bogota's carbon emissions, while strengthening public infrastructure . Part of this plan involved shifting away from the use of diesel fuel and converting all the public transit buses in the city to hybrid power or fully electric systems. The city has also expanded the use of bike lanes and pedestrian paths, in addition to "extending the reach of electric cable cars," many of which are solar-powered (Moloney, 2021). According to SmartCities, these changes have alrea
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Democracy in Costa Rica vs the United States

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2020 Democracy Index (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021) What I found interesting about this chapter from Flint and Taylor was the assumption implicit in the text that core countries are flourishing liberal democracies, while periphery and semi-periphery nations struggle to support democracies (Flint & Taylor, 2018). What I found even more bizarre was their discussion of the history of Latin American coups and military juntas; the implication in this text was that liberal democracy fails in Latin America due to poverty and an inability to reconcile the needs of the populace with the goals of the state, leading to ineffective populist leaders such as Peron in Argentina who are overthrown and replaced by military juntas, or in other cases have led to the election of autocratic strongmen/the establishment of one-party rule. These contentions, are not only ridiculous but also completely ahistorical. Latin America does not have a strong history of flourishing, stable democracy not b
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American vs European Immigration

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  Syrian refugees rest onboard a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel after being rescued in the Mediterranean sea, off the coast of Lesvos, Greece. (McConnell, 2016) There are many similarities and differences between immigration patterns in the EU and the US.  The biggest difference lies in demographics and the causation of immigration. In the European Union, the majority of immigrants are fleeing wars in areas that neighbor Europe - namely the Middle East (ie. Iraq and Syria) and Muslim South Asia (ie. Afghanistan), the locus of the now decades long "War on Terror" and subsequent occupations of these countries (Burnett, 2018). More recently, Ukrainian and Belarusian migrants have been added to this list, with the recent Russian incursions into these two countries. In the United States, however, immigrants are largely fleeing internal problems in their home countries such as gang violence or governmental corruption, or poverty , as seen in asylum-seekers from Central America (Burne
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The Shrinking Borders of Palestine

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Ramadan lanterns in Gaza (Arab News, 2021) Palestine is probably the most drastic example in contemporary times of changing borders. Palestine was an administrative region linked to Syria in the Ottoman Empire from 1517 until the end of World War I in 1918 (Britannica). After that, it became a mandatory region of Great Britain, and after World War II, in 1947, Great Britain ceded the Palestine to the burgeoning zionist movement there, which would come to form the state of Israel, which was officially founded in 1948. Initially, Palestine and Israel were partitioned by the United Nations, with each nation getting approximately half of the territory of the mandatory region. However, over the years, Israel has encroached on Palestine's borders, creating settlements and waging wars with the Arabs to gain more land for Israel (ie. Six Day War) (Britannica).  As of 2022, Palestine is only in control of 6,220 square kilometers of land, compared to Israel's 22,072 square kilometers (CI
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Guantánamo Bay Naval Base

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Cuba with the location of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base highlighted in red (Lindsay, 2017) The US Naval base of Guantánamo Bay was first established in 1903; Spain ceded Cuba to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in the Treaty of Paris. Cuba never became a formal territory of the United States , unlike Puerto Rico, however there remained a strong military presence on the island after the war (Britannica). In the subsequent years, the US government passed several pieces of legislation such as the Platt Amendment which asserted the US’s right to intervene in Cuban politics and establish bases there (National Archives, 1903). This right of the US was incorporated into the constitution of the new Cuban Republic , thus leading to the construction of Guantánamo Bay. The establishment of Guantánamo Bay as a naval base, along with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, was indicative of the US’s increasing power internationally. The United States is not considered to h
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Women's Role in the Military

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For this blog post, I examined recent reports by the US Department of Defense on the current administration's goal to further integrate women into the armed forces. These two articles largely focused on ways the DoD hopes to increase female participation in the military, in addition to reasons why women belong there; they contend that diversity is necessary for the future of the US military , saying: "She said supervisors — including males and females — should look to find the best talent available and they need to embrace diversity, including age, experience, race and gender as absolutely key to developing the workforce we need to face the challenges of tomorrow." (Vergun, 2022) These articles encapsulate the things that frustrates me the most about feminism: how vague and malleable the term is. The word "feminist" represents a myriad of different, and completely disparate schools of philosophy; for instance, materialist feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir pri
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