‘‘HAMILTON,’’ the new musical biography of Alexander Hamilton created by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, kicks off with a doozy of a question. The houselights rise on Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States and, infamously, the killer of Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Burr steps to center stage and reels off several lines of verse:
a picture is worth... provides youth with the opportunity to find their voice, surface their values and connect with others in creative and affirming ways. The project integrates academic skills such as literacy, the development of critical thinking, communications, community engagement, photography and technology with values of integrity, self-awareness, empathy and leadership.
This week, I got to make history. At 18 years of age, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of London for my work in climate justice, making me the current youngest holder of the award globally.
The federal DREAM Act is back. This week Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the longtime champion of the bill, chaired the first ever Senate hearing on the narrow legalization effort that would allow a select population of undocumented youth a pathway toward citizenship.
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that partners with top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Coursera envisions a future where the top universities are educating millions of students. The technology enables the best professors to teach hundreds of thousands of students.
Mine is not Arts for the sake of Arts. It is a revolutionary INSGINA carved into the artistic plaque of my DNA to speak FREEDOM of expression and then freedom after EXPRESSION. The footprints of my revolutionary walk are dipped in the paths of RESISTANCE. My Ideological Swag -word is CREATIVITY. My spiritual birth mark is RESILIENCE. My revolutionary slogan is a nonviolent but a poetic fist of MASS INSTRUCTION. I am non-selfish believer.
During 2011, students around Colombia decided to create a National Student organization that would organize thousands of them to reject a harmful educational reform (Reforma a la ley 30). Before this year, student organizations were characterized by their segmentarity and old fashion yet violent ways to protest.
School Girls Unite started as a community-based pilot program in the Washington, D.C. area in 2004. An intergenerational team included 12-year-old girls and young African women who joined together with the Youth Activism Project. A natural link existed with Mali because two of the founding members of School Girls Unite are from this West African country.
For a class project at Northern Illinois University, we were tasked with performing an act of artistic activism on campus. We choose to raise awareness about the student health insurance policy. The policy at NIU states that if you do not have your own form of insurance, you are automatically charged for the university’s insurance plan, which costs $1,224 per semester.
If you're a bibliophile you'll get a kick out of the car-turned-library that can be found in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Artist Raul Lemesoff took an old 1979 Ford Falcon, a popular mode of transport amongst the military forces of its time, and transformed it into a mobile library shaped like a tank.
ARTS/CULTURE
FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
After winning the parliamentary elections of 2014 Gruevski was accused by the opposition of rigging the elections, which led the latter to boycott the sessions of the legislative. Mass protests followed with the government – though nominally pro-EU and pro-NATO – making innuendo about ‘foreign influence’ prompting similar concerns from Russia.
"Make a Wave" is a song sung by Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas for Disney's Friends for Change, a charity group formed by Disney for their "Friends for Change" campaign. The song was written by Scott Krippayne and Jeff Peabody, the same team that penned Jordin Sparks' song "This Is My Now" for American Idol. "Make a Wave" was introduced and performed at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
Chilean students ran for 1,800 consecutive hours around Chile's presidential palace, La Moneda, from June 13 to August 27, 2011 to protest the cost of education. The 1,800 hours stand for the 1,800,000,000 Chilean pesos, or approximately US$4 million which would cover the cost of higher education for 300,000 students. They carried Chilean flags and signs with "Free Education Now" written on them.
IMAPCT are youth activists who view the creative arts and leadership training as a way to develop ourselves and change the world in a positive way. They believe that they must be the message that bring through hardwork, focus, discipline, unity and the principles of S.O.S. safe space, outstanding effort and service to their family friends and community.
A Nasa scientist who went viral over his tearful protest on the climate crisis has told The Independent that his activism comes from a sense of desperation to “find something that actually has an impact and moves the needle”.
Peter Kalmus was among a group of scientists arrested last week after they chained themselves to a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles in protest of the bank’s financing of fossil fuels.
Following on from Ruben Shanchez's mural on the Syrain boader, we head back to the same subject with Awareness & Prevention Through Art (AptART) is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to give vulnerable children an artistic experience with an opportunity to express themselves as well as an outlet to build awareness and promote prevention about the issues that affect their lives.
The signature angst of our time was profoundly expressed in the poems submitted for WOMAWORDS Literary Press June 2020 edition, Imaging Life After COVID-19, offering women poets an opportunity to write about their experience of the pandemic and their vision of or for the future. The universal trauma wrought by this virus, invisible and silent and pouncing with madness and mendacity, brings us to a place we’d like to forget but never will.
ArtistsActivists is a youth empowerment and advocacy organization started in 2011 by graduate students at Yale University. Through the various ArtistsActivists programs, artists and designers share their skills with young people around the world. Since more people are joining our team bringing with them certain skills and project ideas, the Artists Activists mission is constantly evolving.
The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time human rights activist, author and lecturer Cleve Jones. Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS.