Division of Social Sciences

Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:30:13 +0000

Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/11/2024 - 10:30

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years after the famed ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ Muhammad Ali is remembered not only as the heavyweight champ, but as a champion of civil rights

It is hard to imagine, but coming off of his more than three-year exile from boxing, Muhammad Ali spent four years regaining his position as the top heavyweight in boxing. He lost everything by taking his stance against being drafted into the Vietnam War—not just his boxing career and his promotional business, but also derailing his budding advertising and media career.

Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, winning the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional as a heavyweight. A myth emerged that he threw his gold medal into the Ohio River after returning to his home city as Olympic champion and was still denied service in a restaurant.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

His experiences negotiating racism and segregation as an Olympic hero would inform his outspoken approach to civil rights and make him a hero to millions across generations.

Ali won his first 20 professional matches—and became heavyweight champion—at age 22, defending the championship across nine challenges before he was stripped of his championship and exiled from the sport in 1966. He appealed his draft reclassification, which happened in spite of his dyslexia and his position as a conscientious objector. Other athletes who were draft-eligible were placed with National Guard units or protected by their teams, as in the NFL, so it was particularly curious that the most popular athlete in the country was reclassified and drafted.

Conscientious objector

After winning the heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston in 1964, the boxer then known as Cassius Clay changed his name first to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali. He had befriended Malcolm X and joined the Nation of Islam, but did not reveal his conversion until he was secure in his boxing career after winning the championship. He fell out with Malcolm X after the civil rights leader left the Nation following revelation that leader Elijah Muhammad had children out of wedlock; Malcolm assumed Ali would support him, but Ali remained loyal to the Nation.

In 1966, Ali founded Main Bout Inc. to promote his fights and oversee the closed-circuit broadcasting of his fights. The Nation of Islam held many of the shares in Main Bout Inc., including through Ali’s manager, Jabir Herbert Muhammad, third son of the Nation’s leader; other shareholders included football legend Jim Brown. To help forge relationships, boxing promoter Bob Arum was included and after the company folded due to Ali’s arrest, Arum and Muhammad went on to found Top Rank Boxing.

Ali’s religious conversion and his perspective that America should not be involved in the Vietnam War led to his refusal to be inducted. He was arrested and convicted of breaking Selective Service laws, and he continued to protest the war as he appealed. His conviction was overturned in June 1971, although he returned to boxing in late 1970 as sentiment against him softened and boxing commissions granted Ali licenses to fight again. He fought three matches before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, including the first loss of his career against Joe Frazier.

As Frazier and Ali worked toward a rematch, a young boxer rose up the ranks after winning the heavyweight gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. George Foreman entered the fight against Joe Frazier at 37-0, emerging as champion and disrupting the planned rematch between Frazier and Ali. Ali also lost his second match, this time against Ken Norton, but after Foreman beat Norton, Don King signed contracts with both Ali and Foreman for a superfight promising each boxer a $5 million purse.

Defending world champion George Foreman goes down in the eighth round during his Oct. 30, 1974, bout against Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire. (Photo: Richard Drew/Associated Press)

King did not have the money on hand, and the huge monetary promise to both boxers led other promoters to avoid working with King to organize the event. King, who had been released from jail in 1972 after being convicted of second-degree murder, forged a relationship with Ali after promoting a charity fight, but was unable to come to agreement with any venue in the United States to stage the fight. As a result, he looked at other countries to stage it. Fred Weymar, who was an advisor to Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, convinced Seko that funding and staging the fight would help garner support for his regime, an effort known today as sportwashing. King also pulled in funding from Risnelia Investment, the Hemdale Film Corp. and Video Techniques Inc., with Hemdale and Video Techniques Inc. as official co-promoters. Color commentators included Brown, Frazier and journalist David Frost.

Rumble in the Jungle

Promoted as the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight was an incredible spectacle, even by today’s sporting standards. Originally scheduled for Sept. 25, 1974 (it would have been broadcast Sept. 24 in the United States due to the time difference), it was pushed back to Oct. 30 due to a cut Foreman got while sparring. A three-day music festival called Zaire 74 took place between Sept. 22-24, originally scheduled to precede the match, which included James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, The Spinners and Celia Cruz alongside more than a dozen African artists.

Although Ali arrived in Zaire as a 4-1 betting underdog, he was the overwhelming favorite of the Zairean/Congolese people. Foreman arrived in Zaire with his German shepherd, which was the dog breed used by the Belgian occupying forces against the Congolese people, further cementing his status as the villain. Foreman and Ali were polar opposites, with Ali seen by many as unpatriotic in America, but a hero in Africa. Foreman, on the other hand, represented Cold War nationalism after beating Soviet Jonas Čepulis in the 1968 Olympic gold medal match, leading to the famous image of the very large Foreman waving a tiny American flag after his victory in Mexico.

Fans chanted "Ali boma ye," or “Ali kill him,” throughout his visit and the fight. Although the event itself did not go as planned—King assumed hundreds of high-profile boxing fans would travel to Zaire, but only a few dozen ended up making trip—the fight is seen as one of the greatest. The match earned more than $100 million from closed-circuit broadcasts in U.S. theaters and other broadcasts rights globally, leading to an estimated audience of more than 500 million people worldwide.

The legendary status of the fight was cemented by Ali’s upset win against the younger and stronger Foreman. Ali and his trainers understood that he would be unable to outpunch Foreman, so they relied on Ali’s skill and speed. By the second, round Ali was leaning against the ropes, avoiding and absorbing blows with his arms and body, which did not earn Foreman points with the judges since they were not clear blows against Ali. Eventually, Foreman exhausted himself and Ali took advantage, knocking out the future grill entrepreneur in the eighth round.

In one of the most famous photos of Muhammad Ali ever taken, the boxer stands over Sonny Liston during a May 1965 bout in Lewiston, Maine. (Photo: John Rooney/Associated Press)

Approaching retirement

In his next bout, Ali fought Chuck Wepner and was knocked down in the ninth round, at least partially due to a light training schedule. Ali still won, and the fight would inspire Sylvester Stallone to write Rocky, with the character Apollo Creed based on Muhammad Ali.

Ali retained the heavyweight title for more than three years, a run that included the Thrilla in Manila, the third match in the trilogy between Ali and Frazier that saw the champion employ the “rope-a-dope” again, as both fighters struggled in the heat of Quezon City, near the Philippine capital of Manila. Ali lost to Leon Spinks in February 1978 on a split decision, before beating Spinks in their rematch seven months later.

Ali sent his letter of retirement to the World Boxing Association before returning to the ring to face his former sparring partner Larry Holmes for the vacant World Boxing Commission title, reportedly taking the fight partially due to money issues. Before the fight, he was ordered to undergo examination at the Mayo Clinic because there was a concern as to whether he was fit to return to the ring—he had begun to display symptoms of what would be diagnosed as Parkinson's syndrome in 1984.

The fight was so one-sided that Holmes reportedly voiced concern to the referee, who refused to stop the match. Holmes went on to win after Ali’s long-time trainer finally stepped in to stop the fight. Stallone attended the fight in Las Vegas and compared it to “an autopsy on a man who's still alive.” Ali fought one more time before ultimately retiring.

As time went on, Ali struggled with the impact that Parkinson’s had on his health—a condition related to taking an estimated 200,000 hits over his amateur and professional boxing career. He continued to make public appearances, including his inspiring lighting of the Olympic torch in the 1996 Atlanta Games. He continues to be a revered sports and civil rights legend, considered the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Fifty years after the famed ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ Muhammad Ali is remembered not only as the heavyweight champ, but as a champion of civil rights.

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In a bout called "Rumble in the Jungle," Muhammad Ali, left, and George Foreman, right, fight on Oct. 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

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In a bout called Rumble in the Jungle, Muhammad Ali, left, and George Foreman, right, fight on Oct. 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Remembering the player behind ‘Fernandomania’

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:44:00 +0000

Remembering the player behind ‘Fernandomania’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2024 - 12:44

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fernando Valenzuela, who died Tuesday, was more than just the first Mexican superstar in Major League Baseball; he helped soothe longstanding resentments in a displaced community

The Los Angeles Dodgers announced Wednesday that Fernando Valenzuela passed away late Tuesday night at the age of 63. The legendary pitcher debuted late in the 1980 season as a 19-year-old, but it would not be until his first full season when the rookie would initiate “Fernandomania,” fascinating not only Dodgers and baseball fans, but people throughout the United States and Latin America.

Valenzuela helped the Dodgers beat the Yankees to win the World Series in 1981, the last time the two teams met. At a time when the Dodgers struggled to soothe their relationship with Mexican American fans, Valenzuela was not only the balm, but also initiated a wave of players from Mexico that continues today.

The Dodgers’ relationship with the large Chicanx community in Los Angeles had long been fraught after the building of Dodger Stadium. Following passage of the Federal Housing Act in 1949, then-Mayor Norris Poulson chose Chavez Ravine, a shallow canyon in Los Angeles, as the location to build 10,000 housing units, promising the Mexican American community living there that they would have their first choice of housing.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Yet after most of the neighborhood was razed, the project was delayed, and when the Dodgers decided to move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, the area was chosen to build the new Dodger Stadium. The broken promises led to decades of resentment between the team and the Mexican American community in the city, as the remaining residents were forced out of the neighborhood.

Selling out stadiums

Valenzuela was scouted by several teams, but when legendary Cuban-American scout Mike Brito went to evaluate him in Silao, Mexico, he convinced the Dodgers to buy out Valenzuela’s contract in the summer of 1979, just beating out the Yankees. He worked his way up from the minor leagues, debuting with the Dodgers in September 1980 after learning what became his signature pitch, the screwball, which breaks the opposite direction of a curveball or slider.

He spent the final month of the season as a reliever, helping the team contend for the West Division before they lost to the Houston Astros in a one-game playoff.

The following season, the 20-year-old Valenzuela was tapped to be the Dodgers’ opening-day starter after pitcher Jerry Reuss was injured the day before the game. This set off Fernandomania, as he went 8-0 with five shutouts and an earned run average of 0.50. The 1981 season was cut short due to a strike in June, but when the season resumed in August, Valenzuela helped the team win the World Series, becoming the first pitcher to win both the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards in the same season.

Valenzuela sold out stadiums both at home and away, becoming a phenomenon only a few years after first signing to the Mexican league from his small, rural hometown in Sonora. An international Horatio Alger story, Valenzuela’s rise is one of the most unbelievable in modern sports history.

Valenzuela spoke very little English and struggled to communicate with many of his teammates; however, team manager Tommy Lasorda spent time in the Caribbean winter leagues and helped Valenzuela’s transition to the major leagues, while Mike Scioscia learned enough Spanish to become the young pitcher’s personal catcher. Valenzuela would go on to make six straight All-Star games before shoulder issues related to overuse and the strain of throwing the screwball derailed his career. He ultimately played 17 seasons and threw a no-hitter for the Dodgers in 1990, but his legacy goes far beyond his phenomenal rise.

The first Mexican superstar

Walter O’Malley had owned at least a minority stake in the Dodgers since 1944, accumulating a larger stake in the team and eventually becoming its president in 1950. He was part of the ownership group that signed Jackie Robinson and led the move to Los Angeles in 1958. O’Malley was tired of the Brooklyn Dodgers living in the Yankees’ shadow—their Ebbets Field had less than half the capacity of Yankee Stadium (32,000 vs. 67,000) and the Dodgers lost six of the seven World Series matchups with the Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s. O’Malley saw a business opportunity in moving to the West Coast and building his own stadium in spite of the displacement of the Mexican American community there.

Fernando Valenzuela, known for his signature 'screwball' pitch, winds up during the Dodgers' April 8, 1986, home opener. (Photo: Tony Barnard/Los Angeles Times)

Much like Robinson brought Black fans to the Dodgers, and baseball more generally, O’Malley sought a Mexican player to draw Latine fans who refused to watch the Dodgers not only because of resentment over the displacement, but also because the Dodgers were seen as a team for the white community in Los Angeles. Walter O’Malley died a month after the organization signed Valenzuela, so he never saw the impact of the first Mexican superstar in baseball.

Though famous, Valenzuela still faced many of the same issues other Mexican immigrants faced coming to America. The language barrier led to isolation early in his career, and after his historic rookie season, he was threatened with deportation as he held out for a new contract in 1982, since he was in the United States on a work visa. It was said that Ronald Reagan pushed for immigration reform partly due to meeting Valenzuela in 1981.

Despite the disappointment of being cut by the Dodgers during 1991 spring training, Valenzuela maintained his legendary status with the team, becoming their color commentator in 2003 and having his number, 34, retired in 2023.

His jersey is still one of the most popular, with Valenzuela jerseys seen throughout Dodgers stadium 34 years after he threw his last pitch for the team. In spite of his status as the greatest player from Mexico to play in the Major Leagues, he has not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, although many artifacts from Fernandomania sit in the museum in Cooperstown.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Top image: Fernando Valenzuela pitches a two-hit, 4-0 victory over the Montreal Expos at Dodger Stadium May 21, 1986. (Photo: Marsha Traeger/Los Angeles Times)

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Fernando Valenzuela, who died Tuesday, was more than just the first Mexican superstar in Major League Baseball; he helped soothe longstanding resentments in a displaced community.

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Balancing opportunity and exploitation as the NBA forges new ground in Africa

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:19:39 +0000

Balancing opportunity and exploitation as the NBA forges new ground in Africa Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/22/2024 - 12:19

Jared Bahir Browsh

The recent death of Dikembe Mutombo and the start of the NBA regular season today highlight the fraught realities of building a talent pipeline between lower-income countries and the NBA

On Sept. 30, Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo passed away after a two-year battle with brain cancer. As a young NBA fan, I looked at Mutombo as someone both figuratively and literally larger than life.

Even as a fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, one of my favorite basketball memories was when Mutombo helped lead the Denver Nuggets to an upset of the No. 1-seed Seattle Supersonics, which featured an iconic highlight of Mutombo holding the final rebound as he celebrated on the ground. I later had the joy of watching him as a Sixer when the team made a run to the NBA Finals in 2001.

Mutombo’s legend went beyond his size, with an incredible backstory that might seem too unbelievable for a Hollywood script. He enrolled in Georgetown University on a USAID academic scholarship at 21, originally intending to pursue a career in medicine. But after being recruited to play basketball, and knowing very little English, he majored in linguistics and diplomacy, earning internships with U.S. Rep. Robert Matsui and the World Bank.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

My sister attended Georgetown, and Mutombo stories were common—with his intelligence, gregarious nature and success on the court making him a legend at the university. He was drafted by the Nuggets on the day after his 25th birthday and played 18 years with several teams, including the Houston Rockets, where he was a mentor to another international player, Yao Ming.

During his playing career, Mutombo began participating in humanitarian work, started his own foundation to support his native Congo and served as the first youth emissary for the United Nations Development Program. He also began working with Basketball without Borders, a program started by the NBA to encourage friendship and tolerance through basketball camps run globally.

The program was first introduced in 2001 in the Balkan states after the Yugoslav Wars, before entering Africa in 2003. It has become a pipeline for future all-stars like Pascal Siakam and Joel Embiid to earn college scholarships and be drafted into the NBA.

In 2023, the NBA had a record 125 international players on team rosters, with 19 of those players from African nations. The last six MVP awards have been won by three international players, two of whom, Embiid (Cameroon) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (born in Greece to Nigerian parents) have deep ties to Africa. Mutombo followed Hakeem Olajuwon (drafted from Nigeria in 1984) and Manute Bol (drafted from Sudan in 1985) as a part of the first wave of African players to enter the NBA. There was a dramatic increase of international players entering the NBA that began with the fall of the Soviet Union and accelerated after the success of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.

Still-rare success

The success of players like Olajuwon, Mutombo and Embiid is still fairly rare in spite of the internationalization of basketball. Of the 125 international players on rosters last year, 72% were from Canada or Europe, representative of the strong basketball pipeline within the Global North and evidence of the developmental resources maintained by these Western nations with strong youth programs and professional leagues.

Players who emerge from outside of these pipelines are often exceptional in skills and physical attributes, overcoming a lack of developmental support. Recent evidence of the wide gap in resources was the relative success of the South Sudan men’s national team at the Paris Olympics, which challenged top teams in spite of there being no indoor basketball courts in the nation. South Sudan’s basketball federation president is Luol Deng, whose family escaped the war-torn country and settled in Great Britain before Deng enrolled at Duke for a year, becoming a two-time All-Star during his 15-year NBA career.

For every Deng, Antetokounmpo or Mutombo who make it to the NBA or other professional leagues around the world, like the English Premier League, there are thousands of others who don’t. It is a lottery that creates competition domestically among lower-income groups, including members of the African diaspora in the United States, where social mobility only seems accessible through sports and entertainment.

The now-iconic image of then-Denver Nugget Dikembe Mutombo celebrating an overtime win against the Seattle Supersonics May 7, 1994. (Photo: Bill Chan/Associated Press)

The desire to leverage sports to achieve social mobility is not new, but it has become increasingly international as domestic sports leagues continue to globalize, driven by access through digital media and growing their fan and revenue bases.

Earlier efforts to globalize were focused on wealthier nations in Europe and Asia, with the NBA and NFL holding exhibitions in countries like Germany and Japan and leveraging the rivalry with the USSR. Since the 1970s, the NFL has attempted to expand beyond the United States, eventually creating the World League of American Football that would evolve into NFL Europe, which officially launched in 1991. After NFL Europe folded in 2007, the league looked toward expanding beyond U.S. borders—self-tasked with expanding not only the NFL brand but American football in general.

The NBA, on the other hand, has focused on expanding as the top basketball league in the world, leveraging the international popularity of the sport. This growth was supported by the fall of the Iron Curtain and growth of professional basketball globally, driven both by television and the popularity of players like Michael Jordan. The NBA’s agreement with the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) to allow their professionals into the Olympics led to the 1992 Dream Team, which only accelerated this growth.

Big in China

Understanding of how international players can expand the game, and brand, was further evidenced by the success of Yao Ming in popularizing the NBA in China. Yao’s success also shows the geopolitical complications that can arise, considering the Chinese government’s requirement that Yao hand over half his earnings to the government, and later conflicts ignited when Daryl Morey made comments related to repression in Hong Kong.

The growth of basketball in Europe and wealthier nations like Israel has opened opportunities for American players to continue their professional basketball careers outside the United States and for top European athletes to play in the NBA. The stability of this pipeline, and the success of players like Olajuwon and Mutombo, led to Basketball without Borders. The NFL has run several international development and scouting programs since 2007, leading to the current International Player Pathway Program. Dozens of international NFL players have entered the NFL through this program, creating a strong pipeline in countries like Nigeria, and supported by Osi Umenyiora, a Nigerian-British former NFL All-Pro.

However, the high cost of entry and potential for injury has limited this growth, leading the NFL to strongly support the growth of flag football, which will make its Olympic debut in the Summer 2028 Games in Los Angeles. NFL officials have mentioned hopes that it will have the same impact as the Dream Team had for NBA basketball. In a similar vein, FIBA has also been working to leverage 3x3 basketball to expand participation and success to other nations.

Several NBA players participated in the 2017 NBA Africa Game, including then-Dallas Maverick Dirk Nowitzki, center. (Photo: U.S. Embassy South Africa)

This growth is not without complications. Along with walking a fine line between free speech, politics and growth—as evidenced by the conflict between the NBA and China during the 2019-2020 season over Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters, as well as 2024 exhibition games between the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics in the United Arab Emirates—there are also claims of cultural and economic imperialism as leagues and their sponsorship partners leverage the sport and operate in other nations.

One of the clearest examples of this imperialism and cultural disconnect is represented in the Basketball Africa League (BAL), which is overseen by NBA Africa and FIBA. Early investors included Mutombo, with Barack Obama and Grant Hill, and corporations like Pepsi and Nike, becoming the primary investors. These corporations are looking to leverage the league to expand their brand recognition, which furthers criticism regarding exploitation of labor and resources, including water privatization by beverage companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

There is clearly a disconnect between expectations and realities on the African continent, with fans unable to afford tickets, a lack of facilities and the talent drain to the NBA and European leagues. Unsurprisingly, the BAL and NBA Africa are headquartered in South Africa, in the shadow of apartheid and colonialism.

Ethically fraught global expansion

In spite of these issues, NBA Africa is reportedly valued at over $1 billion, and similar to NBA China, much of the value, and investment, is based on access to potential consumers on the continent, whose population is nearing 1.4 billion. Also, similar to NBA China, there have been issues with the relationships formed to create these subsidiaries. Leaders in nations like Rwanda, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been accused of investing in sport to distract from human rights violations and improve their reputation on the world stage.

The NBA and NFL are far from the only corporations engaging in ethically fraught global expansion; however, the long Western history of exploiting of groups of color, particularly African Americans, only exacerbates concerns regarding globalization of North American sports leagues. Programs like Basketball without Borders present themselves as philanthropic but are actually investments to help expand corporate footprints and open pipelines to talent that removes players from their communities—mirroring similar pipelines between lower-income communities in the United States and major college athletics programs.

Mutombo’s passing reminds us of the positive and negative potential of global sports: the opportunity for social mobility, philanthropy and community, and the risk of widespread exploitation.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Top image: Men play basketball in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Photo: Rohan Reddy/Unsplash)

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The recent death of Dikembe Mutombo and the start of the NBA regular season today highlight the fraught realities of building a talent pipeline between lower-income countries and the NBA.

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He will, he will rock you

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:11:59 +0000

He will, he will rock you Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 07:11

Rachel Sauer

Pursuing a passion for music, �� Boulder economist Murat Iyigun transforms from recognized expert on economics of the family and economic history to regional rock star with a growing musical reputation

In a low-key pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, Colorado, it’s about 10 minutes to 8 on a Saturday night, and the renowned economist seems to be in six places at once.

He’s sound checking his guitar and finalizing plans with the light technician and joking with the singers and ticking through the set list with the drummer and donning a dusky green bomber jacket and wraparound shades.

The dance floor in front of the stage is empty for now, but it won’t be for long. At a little after 8, members of the steadily growing audience put down their forks and drinks to welcome—as they’d been invited, as the musicians had been introduced—the Custom Shop Band.

Murat Iyigun is a professor of economics focusing on the economics of the family and economic history.

A kaleidoscope of colored lights flashes from the rafters toward the stage as lead singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar begin an iconic refrain: stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap.

“Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise, playin' in the street, gonna be a big man someday,” Gray sings, achieving the stratospheric, Mercurian growl and grandeur of the original. “You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kickin' your can all over the place. Singin'…”

The renowned economist leans toward his mic and joins the immortal chorus: “We will, we will rock you.”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. For the next four hours, minus breaks between sets, the band founded by Murat Iyigun, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of economics and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., would rock everyone there.

And they would rock hard.

‘You should listen to Queen’

The question, then, is how does a scholar and economist widely known for his research on the economics of the family and economic history come to be on a pub-and-grill stage on a Saturday night, slaying licks originally conceived by Brian May?

“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Iyigun admits.

The story starts, as not many rock stories do, in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a Turkish father and a Turkish-American mother, Iyigun grew up during a tumultuous time in Turkey, when older kids might stop him on the street to ask whether he was a leftist or a rightist. Still, he says, he was lucky and maybe even a little sheltered, while some of his older sisters’ friends became victims of the left/right violence.

It was that violence, in fact, that caused his older sister’s university to be shut down for seven months. To continue her chemistry studies, she transferred to The Ohio State University, but not before leaving her LP collection to her younger brother.

“I was about 13, and I was counting the days to when she left in July because I was going to be getting all the LPs,” Iyigun recalls with a laugh. “‘Hotel California’ was huge that summer, and then there was Cat Stevens, ELO. I was totally captivated even though, compared to now, things were so closed for us. Going to the U.S. was like going to Mars. But in terms of music and Western culture, especially among urban secular Turks, we followed everything.

Murat Iyigun was inspired to learn to play the guitar after hearing Queen's album Live Killers. (Photos: The Custom Shop Band)

“Now you can get all the vinyls and they’re easy to come by, but at that time people basically made tapes that everyone shared around. There was all this bootleg stuff that would come from Europe, and someone in Istanbul would press some vinyls, but I was never sure if they had an agreement (with the record labels) or if those were counterfeit.”

At the tender age of 13, Iyigun was more into the mellow side of rock n’ roll. A few years deeper into his teens, however, and he discovered KISS. Visiting family in the United States during the summer of ’78—a time that might be considered the fever-pitch apex of the band’s makeup years—Iyigun acquired all things KISS: T-shirts, posters, tapes, you name it.

It might have been the following summer, he doesn’t remember exactly, that he went camping with friends and met one of the great platonic loves of his teenage years—an older girl who inadvertently changed his life.

“She said, ‘You should listen to Queen, they’re a great band,’” Iyigun recalls. “So, I asked someone to make me a tape of the Live Killers album, and that was it.”

It says something about what happened to him, listening to that album, that he currently has—in a glass case in his Boulder home—a replica of May’s immortal Red Special guitar, signed by May. Iyigun also bought Red Special replicas for both of his daughters.

He heard Live Killers and had to learn to play guitar, is the point. Then he and some of his friends, including an ambassador’s son whose presence allowed them to practice at the Swiss embassy in Ankara, formed a band. Iyigun absolutely loved it, but making it as a rock musician in a Muslim country in the 1980s started to strike him as increasingly impossible.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get my act together,’” Iyigun says, so he came to the United States to earn an MBA at Boston University and then a master’s and PhD in economics at Brown University.

His parents had given him a Les Paul guitar when he graduated high school and began studying business administration at Hacettepe University—“in Turkey back then you just didn’t have these instruments, so for my parents I know this was very costly,” he explains—and as a graduate student at Brown he bought an amp and noodled around at home.

The Custom Shop Band includes, left to right, lead guitarist Murat Iyigun; singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar; drummer Kevin Thomas; bassist Elliot Elder; and keyboardist Tone Show. Steve Johnson (not pictured) also is a member of the band. (Photo: The Custom Shop Band)

But then life happened. He was beginning his career, he had a wife and young children, he was working toward tenure, and he just didn’t have time to play, for more than a decade.

Then, about 15 or so years ago, at a time he was hardly ever playing guitar, his daughters and wife gave him the game Guitar Hero for Father’s Day. He played it a bit and realized the game console was an instrument in its own way, so with typical focus “I thought, ‘I need to learn to play it well,’” he says. “It’s nothing like guitar playing, but I thought I could learn to do this, and then I was thinking about how I used to play. And that’s when I brought out my guitar.”

Learning through blues jams

“Once I started to come back to it, I realized some of my fundamentals had gone,” Iyigun says. “So, I started by taking these baby steps. I immediately hooked up with a great music teacher, Jeff Sollohub, a Berklee (College of Music) graduate and super nice guy, and every two weeks I’d work with him on a new song, on composition and things like that.

“Within a year or two, I realized I’m only going to get so good if I don’t actually go out and play. By the time I came back to it, there were so many more resources online, YouTube and things like that, and I still got a lot of joy out of playing at home. But I quickly realized there’s a limit to how much I can improve unless I get out and play. That’s when I discovered blues jams, which are the easiest way to go play live even though blues is super difficult to play well.”

He went to multiple blues jams a month around metro Denver and endured the “painful, painful learning process.” A significant moment of clarity and focus came when he saw the parallels between being onstage playing and lecturing in front of a full classroom or at an economics conference.

“I had a lot of embarrassing days where the ride home would be miserable, and I did that for a couple of years, and I was discovering other jams and just kept playing,” he says. “The limitation of blues jams, though, is you pack all the gear, get in the car, drive 40 minutes, get on the list, then the person running the jam will put these bands together and you play for 20 minutes. So, I drove there an hour, waited an hour, spent this time to play 20 minutes—and 18 minutes of that was painful.

“But after doing that a couple years, this blues band of three guys needed a guitar player, and they’d seen me play, so they said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I joined for about a year, and there was this point where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want.’”

Inside, though, he was still the kid obsessed with KISS and Queen who knew all the guitar greats, not just the blues ones. He was treasurer for Mile High Blues Society, but he wanted to play rock.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GsmjeOjVPs]

Joining the band

The Custom Shop Band—the name is a reference to the custom guitars Iyigun plays—came together in a way that could be interpreted as either patchwork or destiny: friends of friends, acquaintances who know a guy, calls and emails that began with, “Hey, are you interested in being in a band?”

Elliot Elder, the Custom Shop Band bass player and a 2022 �� Boulder graduate in jazz bass performance, was recommended by a mutual friend. Amy Gray, the original in what is now a trio of lead singers, was recommended to Iyigun by another mutual friend:

“I was singing with another band and had recently left them when I got a message from Murat,” Gray says. “He saw me in a video from that band, and he said they were looking for someone to do backups and fill in when their lead at the time was not available.

“So, I looked them up, I went to a show to see what they sounded like and saw that they played some fun songs, that they as instrumentalists all sounded good, so I thought, ‘Why not, let’s give it a chance, they all seem very nice’ and I jumped in and went with it.”

Murat Iyigun joins in on harmony during the Custom Shop Band's set list of "hits, with a twist."

Gray recruited Kochevar, whom she knew from performing with her in theater, and Lee, who had recently moved to Colorado from California and whom she knew through mutual friends. And that’s how the Custom Shop Band has worked: Iyigun founded it and continues to act as band leader and manager, but in every other way it’s a democracy.

“Murat is an awesome band leader,” Elder says. “One of the reasons why a lot of bands don’t get past a certain point, in my opinion, is the band leader doesn’t have the flexibility and communication skills to manage situations where lineups change, things change on short notice, people have different ideas about how a song should be played. Murat’s emailing venues, scheduling gigs, managing lineups and all the while teaching at ��. He puts a lot of work into it. You meet a lot of people in the music scene who don’t communicate, who don’t get details to people on time, but Murat is definitely an exception.”

The band, which also includes Kevin Thomas on drums and either Tone Show or Steve Johnson on guitar and keyboards, practices in-person when adding a new song to the set list or a new musician, but otherwise its members practice at home with versions of the songs that Iyigun sends to everyone. In keeping with the band’s democratic ethos, every member brings song suggestions to the table.

At any given show, the Custom Shop Band may open with Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and soon thereafter play “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which might be followed by a mashup of Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

On a Saturday night in September, at a pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, “So What” by P!nk gets booties to the dance floor in a joyful melee. A dude to the left is lost in his own world of intricate air guitar and a lady on the right has divested herself of shoes. A little later, as the band plays Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the air guitarist to the left reaches a fever pitch as the band’s lead guitarist, who also happens to be a renowned economist, absolutely wails on the solo.

And transitioning smoothly into Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the dancefloor still throbbing, the economist is grinning wide.

He will rock you.

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Talking politics with a side of pizza

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 12:08:46 +0000

Talking politics with a side of pizza Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 06:08

New Politics & Pizza sessions give students and experts and space for productive and lively discussion of timely political topics

Today’s elections bear little resemblance to elections 50 or even 20 years ago. One key change: Digital and social media have become more central to how voters receive information—or misinformation—about candidates and issues.

For example, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that of those ages 18 to 29 surveyed, 48% use TikTok to keep up with politics or political news and 52% use TikTok to get news. Another recent Pew survey found that 54% of U.S. adults surveyed often or sometimes get local political news from social media.

If you go

What: Politics & Pizza, “The Role of Digital/Social Media in U.S. Elections”

When: 5:30-6:45 p.m., Monday, Oct.14

Where: Bruce Curtis Building (MCOL), W100 – CC

Free Cosmo’s pizza!

Learn more

The role of these new media will be the focus of the inaugural Politics & Pizza session, set for 5:30-6:45 p.m. Oct. 14. The aim of Pizza & Politics—which is being initiated by Glen Krutz, a professor of political science—is to “encourage productive, substantive deliberation of specific topics, rather than rancorous and ideological macro-thoughts.”

“These events are meant to help �� students sink their minds into key, specific political issues while they are sinking their teeth into delicious pizza!” Krutz says. “The other main goal is to have experts get the discussion started, but then to very much have a discussion between the students and one another and the students and the experts. The interaction piece is central, rather than a one-way information flow that sometimes we see at talks on university campuses.”

Politics & Pizza, which includes free Cosmo’s pizza, is modeled on similar sessions offered in Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Each session will feature expert speakers who give a few introductory thoughts about the session’s topic, and then open the session to a question-and-answer with students.

The theme of the first Pizza & Politics event Oct. 14 is “The Role of Digital/Social Media in U.S. Elections” with speakers Stephen Frost, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information Department of Media Studies; Vivek Krishnamurthy, an associate professor in the �� Law School and director of the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law and Policy Clinic; and Alexandra Siegel, an associate professor of political science.

The second Politics & Pizza is scheduled for Oct. 28 and will focus on the Electoral College and institutional reform. A third date is set for Nov. 18 and will offer an analysis of the election outcome and the upcoming transition.

Spring 2025 sessions will focus on the new U.S. Congress, business and politics, and state universities in America.

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New Politics & Pizza sessions give students and experts and space for productive and lively discussion of timely political topics.

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Uncovering the surprising similarities between sports and politics

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:31:43 +0000

Uncovering the surprising similarities between sports and politics Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 04:31

Jared Bahir Browsh

In just a few decades, Fox went from being ‘the fourth network’ airing The Simpsons and baseball to being a leading voice in U.S. politics

Every four years, Americans oscillate between sports and coverage of the presidential election, and outside of trash talk between competitors, many overlook the commonalities between the two.

The media corporations responsible for covering both sports and politics are the same, and as we experience increasing polarization, it’s important to highlight the direct link between the partisan media and sports media rights—which has existed for 30 years, since Fox first aired NFL football after outbidding CBS for the broadcast rights. That winning bid helped legitimize the nascent broadcast network and establish the partisan cable news environment we are familiar with today.

Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is now known for overseeing one of the largest media empires in the world, but through the early 1980s he was known as a publisher of newspapers, specifically tabloids. He inherited a news publication after his father’s death in 1952, The News in Adelaide.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

He expanded his news empire to New Zealand and the United Kingdom through the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although he became known for his ownership of tabloids, his corporation also oversaw more traditional broadsheet newspapers, including Australia’s first national newspaper, The Australian.

By the 1980s, Murdoch had set his eyes on electronic media, particularly television. He struggled to break into the British broadcast market, so he focused his energy on pay TV, buying a controlling stake in Satellite Television Limited, later renamed Sky. After being excluded from the consortium overseeing British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), he launched his own satellite-based service, circumventing British ownership laws by using the Astra satellite operating in Luxembourg.

Sky launched in 1989, 13 months before BSB’s launch in March 1990. The two competed for the rights to the FA Premier League, with Sky’s bid, nearly double that of any competitor, seen as overpaying. However, Murdoch saw sports as a “battering ram” for pay television, helping to attract viewers who might otherwise balk at spending money for scripted shows and news.

During this time, Murdoch and News Corporation set their sights on the United States, purchasing Marc Rich’s stake in 20th Century Fox after Rich became a fugitive for tax evasion and selling oil to Iran during the hostage crisis. He bought the stake from oil magnate and investor Marvin Davis, and 20th Century Fox was considering buying Metromedia, which owned broadcast stations. Davis opposed the purchase while Murdoch and executive Barry Diller pushed to expand the media reach of the troubled studio. Davis sold his stake in 20th Century Fox in 1985, incorporating Davis Petroleum in Denver the next year. Murdoch gained American citizenship, since legally he could not own a broadcast network as a foreign citizen, and in fall of 1986 the Fox Broadcasting Company launched with Diller as chairman and CEO.

The six original stations purchased from Metromedia were in major markets including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Fox Broadcasting Company, or FBC, was renamed Fox to leverage the media legacy of 20th Century Fox, and it officially launched on April 5, 1987.

The fourth network

Fox was considered the fourth network, if people had access to its programming at all. Network programmers purposely scheduled just below the minimum number of hours required for network status to avoid federal regulatory restrictions, including Financial Interest and Syndication Rules.

As it built its affiliate base, Fox took lessons from ABC to boost its visibility, building a young audience through its Fox Kids programming, prime-time teenage and young adult soaps like Beverly Hills 90210 and MelrosePlace and reality television, most notably COPS. However, following the precedent of BSkyB leveraging sports to accelerate growth, Fox made a bid for Monday Night Football in 1987, after ABC hesitated in renewing its contract with the NFL. Fox met the NFL’s asking price, but ABC came back and matched, due to ABC’s more extensive reach. The NFL renewed with ABC.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball. (Photo: Ryosuke Yagi/Wikimedia Commons)

At the end of the 1993 season, however, both the NFC and AFC contracts were up for renegotiation, and Fox ultimately outbid CBS for the NFC rights. As a result, Fox executives made a major push to gain affiliates with stronger broadcast signals in major markets, since the network was still using lower-quality UHF frequencies in many markets. This led to a major realignment of affiliations, with stations in markets like Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Detroit and Cleveland switching from CBS to Fox.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball, airing 16 Saturday games as well as the 1996 World Series. By the end of the decade, Fox would also agree to air the Cotton Bowl and NASCAR.

Taking risks

Sports and risk-taking in its entertainment programming boosted Fox’s profile, and the network entered the cable market with FX (stylized fX at launch) in 1994 as an interactive network embracing the then-emerging Internet. FX rebranded in 1997 as the network dedicated to Fox’s largest demographic, men 18-49, while also serving as a platform for its expanding sport portfolio and a place to rerun popular Fox series.

Throughout Fox’s early years, several other segments of the media were also quickly expanding. CNN had launched as the first 24-hour news network in 1980, but coverage of the Gulf War in 1990-1991 helped Fox grow into a major news source on par with other national outlets. In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was officially repealed, leading to an explosion of conservative radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Lastly, the continued deregulation of the media—which was further formalized through the Telecommunications Act of 1996—consolidated the radio market, allowing for more nationally syndicated shows like Limbaugh’s and motivating the major media corporations to further expand, including into cable.

In 1994, NBC spun the news network America’s Talking off from CNBC; it was created by former Republican strategist Roger Ailes, who was president of the financial network at the time. Ailes left America’s Talking under controversy, after allegedly making antisemitic comments to NBC executive David Zaslav, who is now the CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Fox News launched Oct. 7, 1996, and has become a significant voice in U.S. politics. (Photo: Steve Bott/Wikimedia Commons)

Ailes was hired by News Corp as founding CEO of Fox News, which launched on Oct. 7, 1996. Three months earlier, NBC had replaced America’s Talking with MSNBC, a collaboration between NBC and technology company Microsoft. MSNBC sought its approach through programming with several conservative commentators, including Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. MSNBC would not find its identity until after Microsoft divested, becoming the left-leaning alternative to Fox News and abandoning the balance it previously tried to find along the political spectrum.

Unsurprisingly, Murdoch and News Corporation took a more heavy-handed approach, paying cable companies to carry the network. Three days after Fox News launched, Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, which owned CNN. Because of an antitrust consent decree (in which the government sues a company and the defendant agrees to stop alleged illegal conduct), Time Warner Cable was forced to carry a second news station and selected MSNBC, with News Corp claiming that this broke an agreement to carry Fox News.

Citing the fact that its U.S. headquarters were in New York, and leveraging connections, News Corp convinced Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration to pressure Time Warner to carry Fox News. Although Time Warner ultimately won the initial battle, Fox News won the war when Time Warner began carrying Fox News. The ordeal displayed Murdoch’s willingness to leverage his close relationships with the Republican Party to support his media empire.

This relationship is at the core of the seemingly real-life Succession episode currently playing out in Nevada, as Murdoch attempts to rewrite his trust to ensure his more conservative son Lochlan takes over Fox Corporation upon his death and maintains the network’s current place on the political spectrum. Even as the media giant sold off some of its assets in the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019, Murdoch retained Fox’s national sports and news entities—including Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, along with its cable and broadcast networks—as he continues to leverage sports as a battering ram to protect his international media empire.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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In just a few decades, Fox went from being ‘the fourth network’ airing The Simpsons and baseball to being a leading voice in U.S. politics.

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Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War'

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:59:39 +0000

Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War' Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/20/2024 - 11:59

Tracy Fehr

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims

Nepal’s attempt to deliver justice and accountability following the country’s decade-long civil war froze more than two years ago with little progress—but a recent development has raised hopes that it could soon be revived and revamped.

In August 2024, the country’s parliament passed a long-awaited bill that sets the stage for appointing a third —and hopefully final—round of truth commissions to carry out investigations into the more than 66,000 conflict victim cases that have been collecting dust since the last commissions ended in July 2022.

The two main bodies involved—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons—were created by Nepal’s government in 2015 to deal with crimes that were committed during Nepal’s conflict, commonly known as “The People’s War.”

Tracy Fehr (right, with a woman living in Gorkha, Nepal) is a PhD student in the �� Boulder Department of Sociology who researches Nepal's transitional justice process. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

In 1996, Maoist rebels began an insurgency against the Nepali government in western Nepal that escalated into a 10-year civil war across the country. According to United Nations estimates, the conflict resulted in the deaths of 13,000, with 1,300 people still missing and an unknown number of torture and conflict-related sexual violence victims.

The People’s War ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord that, among other obligations, required the Nepal government to create a high-level truth commission.

To date, the commissions have completed two rounds. The first, which collected the majority of the victim cases, began with a two-year mandate in 2015 that the government extended by an additional year three times. The second round, mandated from 2020 to 2022, was shut down for months due to COVID-19.

The commissions were tasked with three main objectives: to reveal the truth about gross human rights violations; to create an environment of peace, trust and reconciliation; and to make legal recommendations for victim reparations and perpetrators from the conflict.

However, despite seven years of work, little progress toward any of these objectives has been made. No case investigations have been completed, no perpetrators have been held accountable, and no victim reparations have been distributed. Reconciliation in a country that still bears the scars of conflict remains a distant thought.

From 2022 to 2023, I conducted research in Nepal about the country’s transitional justice process. During my research, I heard people refer to Nepal’s prolonged process as “a judicial merry-go-round,” “Groundhog Day” and “transitional injustice.”

Many Nepali people I spoke to believe that the government has strategically prolonged the transitional justice process to avoid accountability, hoping that people will eventually tire of the process and forget. Indeed, a heavy cloud of hopelessness and frustration had settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases plagued the first two rounds, severely slowing progress and impairing the commissions’ functionality and local trust.

Justice ‘adjourned’

In 2022, I interviewed a conflict victim in the rolling hills of Rolpa, in the country’s west, where the conflict began. She had submitted her case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seven years before but had heard nothing since. “In a way, our complaints are in adjournment,” she said. “They have not ended, yet they are not being forwarded either.”

She was one of approximately 300 women who officially submitted a case of conflict-related sexual violence to the TRC.

A woman looks over the village of Thabang, Rolpa, Nepal. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

However, a former truth commissioner told me that this number may be as high as 1,000 because some victims of sexual violence submitted their case as “torture” to distance themselves from the stigma and shame often associated with sexual violence in Nepal.

I also met leaders at several women’s organizations who have documented thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Nepal, but they have not yet submitted these cases to the TRC due to ongoing concerns of confidentiality and trust.

The lack of progress by Nepal’s truth commissions suggests that they are being used to carry out what I refer to as “transitional justice ritualism”—the act of a state creating hollow institutions designed without the support to produce actual consequences.

As part of this transitional justice ritualism, I believe that Nepal’s post-conflict coalition government has, up to this point, been using the truth commissions as a political tool to show the international community that it is upholding its obligations under the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord and to avoid universal jurisdiction—that is, the international legal principal that allows other nations to prosecute individuals for serious human rights violations regardless of where the crimes took place.

The threat of universal jurisdiction has been a particular concern for alleged perpetrators in Nepal since 2013 when Colonel Kumar Lama, a former Royal Nepal Army commander during Nepal’s conflict, was apprehended in the United Kingdom on charges of torture and war crimes. While Lama was acquitted there due to a lack of evidence, the threat of universal jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrators in Nepal still looms for those in positions of power during the civil war.

A contested step forward

But a recent change in the political leadership of Nepal and the passing of the new law, which amended the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, mark an opportunity for the government to move beyond transitional justice lip service.

Under the amended law, a third round of appointed commissioners will operate for a period of four years – hopefully enough time to complete their unaccomplished mandates. A government committee is working to appoint new truth commissioners before the country’s major holiday Dashain in October 2024. The amended act also provides for creating specialized subunits within the TRC—concerning truth-seeking and investigations, reparations, sexual violence and rape, and victims coordination—that could potentially improve the streamlining of resources and move some of these stalled parts of the commissions forward.

Maoist victims protest in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2023. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

Nonetheless, hope has been tempered by apprehension and uncertainty. Some victim groups support the legislation, while others protest provisions they argue could undermine justice, especially by protecting perpetrators with decreased sentencing.

International human rights groups have recognized positive and long-awaited amendments to the existing law, but also warn of serious accountability gaps that could undermine the transitional justice process.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the revised law was “an important step forward” but added: “It is imperative that the legislation is interpreted and implemented in a manner that upholds victims’ rights, including to truth, justice and reparations, and that guarantees accountability in full compliance with international human rights standards.”

Potential for international support

Although it seems the transitional justice process will still be Nepali-led, doors may be opening for international support in the form of financial or technical assistance—marking a significant shift in the process.

The amended act provides for a “fund” to finance the investigations process and victim reparations that will be supported by the Nepali government and is open to contributions from other national and international organizations.

Sushil Pyakurel, a former member of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, is among a group of human rights defenders, lawyers and victims establishing a civil monitoring committee to serve as a watchdog for the revived process. Pyakurel stressed the need for Nepali civil society, alongside the international community, to pressure the government to fulfill its promises of a victim-centric implementation.

“You can make whatever law you want, but it is how you implement it that really matters,” Pyakurel told me. “Although the law is different, if the mentality remains the same, then nothing will change.”

The revival of Nepal’s truth commissions provides the government a chance to demonstrate a commitment to a transparent and legitimate process. But I believe it must move beyond the transitional justice ritualism of the previous two commissions to actually provide justice and acknowledgment for the country’s civil war victims.

Top image: A Nepali man looks at photographs of people 'disappeared' during Nepal's civil war in Kathmandu Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Tracy Fehr is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims.

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Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:21:58 +0000

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 10:21

Rachel Sauer

�� scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program

In some of Rai Farrelly’s first meetings with her new colleagues, they warned her that the air raid sirens might go off while she’s observing their classes.

If that happens, she recalls them telling her, they’ll run down to the bunker in the basement and hope that a nationwide effort to increase internet capacity in subterranean locations has reached their schools and universities. And then they’ll pick up where they left off, because students are still eager to learn, and her colleagues’ job is to teach them.

Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) director in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

Rai Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and TESOL director in the �� Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

The Ukrainian educators are part of the State Department’s Access Program and work with either teenagers in after-school programs or undergraduate students training to be teachers in any subject because “Ukraine has a plan to start teaching all their content in English coming up very soon,” Farrelly explains.

In her role as an English Language Specialist (ELS), Farrelly will observe classes and partner with teachers in Ukraine on strategies and methods for teaching large, mixed-level English classes. Farrelly’s TESOL students at �� Boulder also will partner with English language students in Ukraine via virtual conversation sessions.

“Our realities are worlds apart,” Farrelly says, “yet we'll be connected online and building community together.”

Educational collaboration

Farrelly, whose teaching experience has taken her around the world—from Armenia to Tanzania, where she co-founded Project Wezesha to help support students from rural areas who are pursuing post-secondary education—qualified as a State Department ELS several years ago.

To qualify as an ELS, an educator must have a master’s or PhD in TESOL or applied linguistics and the ability to partner with teachers and students around the world either in person or virtually. The program, which is organized through U.S. embassies and regional language officers around the world, focuses on “delivering and maintaining quality English language programs overseas and promoting mutual understanding between the U.S. and other countries.”

During the COVID pandemic, Farrelly accepted virtual ELS positions in South Korea and then Panama. Last semester, her pedagogical grammar class at �� taught English through a virtual cross-cultural exchange with learners at a language school in Arequipa, Peru.

“I have a really nice relationship with colleagues at this school, and they were like, ‘Rai, send your teachers,’” Farrelly says. “Because of that, we have had three �� students teach there, so this program really opens up doors, and I’m going to be working with them again this semester.”

The teachers in Ukraine with whom Farrelly is collaborating this semester have mentioned many of the challenges that English language teachers worldwide face: how to scaffold instruction in classes that contain everything from absolute beginners to intermediate-level speakers; when and how to correct pronunciation and grammar; how to group students during oral exercises; how to invite participation in a way that helps students feel excited to speak.

To help her support the teachers in Ukraine, Farrelly is even arranging a Zoom session with the 14-year-old daughters of three of her friends “so I can do a playful interview on the gender dynamics in class and what their teachers do in a U.S. class to make it comfortable for them,” she says. “That’s one of the concerns that my colleagues in Ukraine have expressed, that 14-year-old boys won’t work with girls and how can they get them to work in groups.”

Seeing people as people

Farrelly says her experiences working with English-teaching colleagues around the world—including in Indonesia and Russia—have taught her the vital importance of a “community of practice and what it means to work closely with teachers who ‘speak your language,’” she says.

I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

One of the biggest and most pervasive challenges in the TESOL field is the incorrect notion that anybody who speaks English can teach it. “Decades ago, anyone could step off a plane, and if you looked like me and talked like me, you could get a job,” Farrelly says. “Meanwhile, teachers in those countries who go through pedagogical training, who get degrees in teaching English, weren’t getting jobs.

“Even now, there are a lot of short TEFL or TESOL certificates you can get online. Meanwhile, I’m the director of the TESOL program at ��, and my students are taking five or six courses with me to earn a TESOL certificate. There’s a depth and breadth of proper preparation that goes beyond how to teach a language. It’s about understanding individual differences, personalities, motivations, culture, how your (first language) influences acquisition, classroom management, curriculum design. There’s so much that goes into it that’s beyond simply speaking English.”

In her ELS role, Farrelly says a significant focus is teacher mentoring and teacher development: “I’m such a huge fan of collaboration, especially among teachers,” she says. “So much of what I’ve done is grounded in working with teachers, and I never want teachers to see me as this expert outsider who’s coming in and telling them what to do. I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

The fact that Ukraine is a country at war and that geopolitics add a complicated layer to Farrelly’s collaboration with teachers there—in fact, she doesn’t mention her previous experience with teachers and students in Vladimir, Russia—underscores the importance of global partnerships, she says.

“It helps you see people as people and humanizes everyone,” she says. “That’s one of the main aims of State Department programs. It’s access for learners and mentoring for professionals, but it’s about bridging those gaps and promoting cross-cultural understanding. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, at the end of day we can all find so many commonalities.”

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�� scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program.

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Scholar learns that ‘language links us all’

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 16:46:45 +0000

Scholar learns that ‘language links us all’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 10:46

Doug McPherson

Political science undergrad Cooper Baldwin wins prestigious U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to learn ‘one of the most critical languages for future United States policy’

Cooper Baldwin, a junior from San Antonio, Texas, majoring in political science and journalism, has been named a recipient of the 2024 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. Department of State.

The scholarship allows American college and university students to learn languages that are key to America's engagement with the world.

Baldwin is the only �� Boulder student to receive the CLS in the last two years. Just 500 undergraduate and graduate students in the United States are chosen each year from an application pool of more than 5,000 students, according to the Department of State.

Cooper Baldwin, a junior majoring in political science and journalism, received a 2024 Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State and studied Russian over the summer.

As a CLS recipient, Baldwin chose to study Russian (over Arabic and Chinese) and spent the summer learning the basics of the language online from what he calls “an awesome instructional team” based in Chișinău, Moldova. Russian was the language he’s most interested in learning, he says, and he wanted to get the basics down before he applied to go to a Russian-speaking country next summer and study the language in more detail.

“In my opinion, Russian is one of the most critical languages for future United States policy facilitators, executors and diplomats to learn,” Baldwin says. “Not only is it primarily spoken in many Eastern European countries, it’s the cornerstone of many languages and dialects worldwide. So, with such a broad reach, the choice seemed obvious to me.”

He says his initial curiosity about Russian stems, in part, from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: “The invasion … stoked a connection to that part of the world. To be honest, the invasion seemed entirely surreal to me, and the onset of a full, unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country rattled the conceptions I had about the relative peaceful nature of nations worldwide. I’ve never lived in a world without Russian aggression and a tense atmosphere from the Kremlin toward the United States.”

'A patriot above all'

Baldwin—who is interested in international relations, geopolitical relations, history and national security—calls himself “a patriot above all” who wants to give back to the United States.

“I believe the CLS program is the perfect way to do that. To learn a language critical to the U.S.'s national security and economic interests nationwide will allow me to pursue this commitment and philosophy fervently, which I intend to do.”

He calls his career goals “big and numerous” and says that working on political campaigns boosted his interest in politics and government.

“To those who know me, it's no secret that I’m thoroughly committed to entering the field of politics, campaigns or government when I graduate from ��. I intend on using my studies and experiences to seek a role in the federal government.”

He hopes to work in the Department of State, Homeland Security, intelligence services, civil military service or policy administration.

I want to live a life of service to the country that has given me so much. I know it is my birthright to be an American, but I see it as an incredible and awe-inspiring privilege to say I am.”

“I want to live a life of service to the country that has given me so much. I know it is my birthright to be an American, but I see it as an incredible and awe-inspiring privilege to say I am.”

Baldwin says that for as long as he can remember, he’s had a “deep interest” in language and linguistics.

“They’ve been an intellectual love of mine,” he says. “I taught myself to read at age 4 because I was so deeply invested in language and its capability for beautiful, complex expression. I find it incredibly interesting that people worldwide have such different ways of expressing themselves. Language links us all.”

He credits his middle school Spanish teacher in San Antonio for bolstering his interest in languages, and adds that she encouraged him to excel in class.

“My teacher never told me to slow down, to stay on pace with the class, to stop answering all the questions she asked,” he says. “She always gave me more material to push my studies further and took time … to give me additional practice with the language. The CLS program was the perfect opportunity to pursue language at the rapid pace I’m capable of, and it challenged me every day. I absolutely loved that.”

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Political science undergrad Cooper Baldwin wins prestigious U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to learn ‘one of the most critical languages for future United States policy.'

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Does that player in the video game look familiar?

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 23:31:50 +0000

Does that player in the video game look familiar? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 17:31

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifteen years after Ed O’Bannon’s groundbreaking lawsuit, college athletes continue to benefit from greater control of their name, image and likeness

As an elder Millennial, I remember waiting each year for the announcement of the cover athlete for EA Sports’ collection of college sports video games. As �� celebrates Travis Hunter’s inclusion on this year’s cover, it’s a good time to look back at the fight for student-athlete compensation that led to the reintroduction of the NCAA College Football video game series.

On July 19, thousands of video game players fired up their consoles and, for the first time in 11 years, could build a dynasty as their favorite college football program. However, the lawsuit that led EA Sports and other video game developers to abandon development of college sports video games to avoid further lawsuits helped college athletes gain control of their name, image and likeness (NIL) and further compensation, altering the financial power structure in college sports.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor and director of the Critical Sports Studies Program in the Department of Ethnic Studies.

In 2009, Ed, O’Bannon—a former UCLA standout named Most Outstanding Player in the 1995 NCAA basketball tournament, which UCLA won—was playing EA Sports’ NCAA Basketball 09 when he noticed a starting forward on the team had his same attributes, looks and number, even though he was not named in the game. It was common for sports video games to mirror classic teams—including, in this instance, the 1995 UCLA Bruins.

Sonny Vaccaro, a legendary basketball marketer, convinced O’Bannon to file a lawsuit alongside 19 other former college basketball players, including athlete labor and civil rights advocates Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell. In 1970, Robertson, then-president of the NBA players’ association, filed an antitrust suit against the NBA to bring free agency to the NBA, while Russell led a boycott during a 1961 preseason game after several teammates were denied service in segregated Lexington, Kentucky. Both Hall of Famers were part of the boycott of the 1964 NBA All-Star Game that led to the NBA recognizing the player’s union.

Along with signing Michael Jordan to Nike, and being played by Matt Damon in the film Air, Vaccaro has long been an advocate for amateur athletes. O’Bannon was an ideal lead plaintiff given that the image in the game was undeniably him, not only matching his height, weight, shaved head and skin tone, but also his left-handedness. O’Bannon was no longer in basketball, so he didn’t risk the retribution that Robertson and Curt Flood, the legendary baseball player who challenged the Reserve clause and helped bring free agency to professional sports, both faced.

The case went to trial in June 2014, and on Aug. 8, Judge Claudia Ann Wilken of the Northern District of California ruled that withholding compensation to student athletes was a violation of antitrust laws. She cited NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which ended the NCAA’s exclusive control of college football television rights 30 years earlier. Immediately before the trial, EA Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company settled for $40 million, while the NCAA was ordered to pay more than $42 million before appeal—but more importantly, this set the stage for a radical change in college athlete compensation and the structure of college athletics.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2016 that NCAA rules were an unfair restraint on compensation, but amateurism was an important concept to uphold and all compensation needed to be educationally related. As O’Bannon and the other plaintiffs waited for the trial, decision and results of the NCAA appeal, a number of other current and former student athletes also filed suit. Eventually, those lawsuits were combined into a class action suit, NCAA v. Alston, with Judge Wilken ruling against the NCAA and confirming that the organization placed an unfair restraint on compensation.

In 2019, California passed the first state law that permitted athletes to be compensated for NIL; the NCAA began allowing such compensation in 2021, although laws related to NIL still vary by state.

Ed O'Bannon as a UCLA player (left) and in video game likeness in EA Sports' NCAA Basketball 09. (Photos: Al Bello/Getty Images, left, and EA Sports, right)

In 2021, the Alston case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, whose majority decision stated that blocking compensation beyond educational benefits was an antitrust violation, ultimately ending the O’Bannon case seven years after Wilken’s original decision. Wilken also heard the recent case House v. NCAA, in which the defendants—including the power conferences ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12 and Pac 12—agreed to a settlement allowing revenue sharing between schools, conferences and student athletes. The House case also ended scholarship limits, instead instituting roster caps and potentially opening up to nearly 800 more scholarships for Division-I schools.

Several cases are still undecided, including the Dartmouth College Basketball players’ lawsuit, Johnson v. NCAA, which is another effort for college athletes to be recognized as employees of the school, which is supported by the National Labor Relations Board. There is another lawsuit that was filed by former University of Kansas guard Mario Chalmers and other former players immediately after the House settlement. Chalmers and his co-claimants allege that the NCAA and media partners utilize the images of former athletes without permission to market college sports and March Madness.

No single lawsuit can untangle the web of NCAA control that schools and athletes have been challenging for nearly half a century. It is also important to note much of this has been driven by the growth of media money, first through television rights and now branding and expanded access through digital media, which includes video games, streaming and social media platforms.

The NCAA still remains one of the most influential sporting organizations in the world, as evidenced by the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, in which hundreds of athletes earned medals in Paris after training at NCAA-affiliated universities. As these successful athletes bring attention—and money—to their schools, they deserve a fair share of the revenue. It is important not to forget Ed O’Bannon’s role in facilitating a more equitable compensation system for student-athletes.

Top image: The cover of EA Sports' College Football 25, featuring Travis Hunter in the center. (Photo: EA Sports)

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Fifteen years after Ed O’Bannon’s groundbreaking lawsuit, college athletes continue to benefit from greater control of their name, image and likeness.

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