Atlas of Weak Signals Class 1
I remember the first day of the Atlas of weak signals course very well. It was Thursday February 24th, and I had just said goodbye to my boyfriend, who was going back to Italy and I wouldn’t see him for another month. On my way to university, I learned the news that Russia was invading Ukraine, which later on would turn out to be only the start of bombs, invasions and many deaths. It was not a very uplifting day, to say the least.
However, the Atlas of Weak signals course did not improve my mood. Although we discussed important topics which I hold dearly to my heart, it felt incredibly heavy and hopeless. It had nothing to do with the course structure or professor’s skills, but rather the facts themselves. With the way the world currently is, it feels like we keep getting bad news after bad news.
Throughout the course, we investigated the world’s weak signals at different scales and looked at various perspectives, considering not only causes but also reactions and possible solutions. We started with “the elephant in the room”, the climate crisis.
The first example we looked at was Olafur Eliasson’ 12 blocks of ice coming from a glacier in Greenland. The “art work” or “protest” was called the Ice Watch, and took place in several cities, including London, Paris and Copenhagen. I had never seen the work before, and I had conflicting feelings towards it. Part of me understood the activism behind it, yet I also saw it as a big waste. I thought about how much ice is already melting in Greenland and how we should try to keep it there rather than bring it over to Europe only to speed up the melting process.
Another topic that impacted me was Multiscalarity. The professor assumed that 90% of the objects in class had likely arrived to us via a cargo ship. Almost everything we buy comes in containers on these cargo ships. Without containers, we would never have been as globalised as we are right now. What impact does this have, not only on our terrestrial environment (through pollution, boats taking up space, ports expanding etc.) but also on oceans and marine life? Climate change is everywhere and everything.
My observation from connecting the dots about these various events is that human activity is heavily changing the state of the Earth. Every crisis is intertwined, from our cargo ships to Putin invading Ukraine. Scientists have been talking about carbon emissions since the 1970s yet we have done nothing about it, and every day we continue to do so is another day closer to our extinction. Extractionism and anthropomorphism are no longer an option for the future.
Once the seminar was over, I left the building with Pippa and we started crying. We were both going through similar emotional difficulties trying to absorb all the information over the past few hours. I remember her voice cracking as she said “I won’t ever be able to have kids”.
Atlas of Weak Signals Class 2
I did not manage to attend this class in person because I was in Bulgaria visiting my dad for his birthday. We had some friends and family members in Ukraine so we were discussing their situation and how to get help. His partner’s grandma is living there and was unaware about the war going on at the time because she was deaf and didn’t have access to news media. It made us all very sad to think of her in that situation, and they ended up choosing not to tell her about everything that was going on, fearing that she would not handle it well.
Atlas of Weak Signals Class 3
During this seminar we started by questioning what a job actually is. We came up with the following categories:
Exchange of labour for value,
Sense of purpose,
Promise of stability,
Access to resources and institutions
We questioned the role of unpaid work, including motherhood and elderly care, two jobs often taken by women and undervalued. Without those jobs, we wouldn’t be able to have a functional and thriving society. We also brought up the topic of labour and capital, and how inequality is rising because of rich people getting richer simply because they’re already rich.
Neoliberalism, shipping containers, fast fashion, and the gig economy were all mentioned before arriving to the topic of externalities. These are outcomes from economic practices, such as smoke from coal factories or dyes produced by textile factories. If the cost of these were factored in the price of goods, we wouldn’t have 5 euro t-shirts.
We also discussed work after Artificial Intelligence and life after work, evaluating which jobs would be erased. Although there is a large discussion about robots taking over our jobs, these arguments have been around since the industrial revolution, and we are still working. Yoga instructors and Youtubers did not exist for previous generations, and since human desire is infinite, we can create new professions that we’ve never imagined before. I wonder what the yoga teachers of the future will look like.
Today's topics related very closely to A History Of The World In 7 Cheap Things, by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, which we had to read during the Making Sense & Meaning seminar. Spoiler alert, the seven cheap things were cheap nature, cheap work, cheap food, cheap care, cheap energy, cheap money and cheap lives.
We ended up on a funny note, discussing a world where robots would take over and we would never have to work again. The prof named this utopia (or dystopia?) “Fully automated Luxury Communism”. We were critical about this ideal, and came up with a series of possible problems that came along with it:
Existential Questions,
Overpopulation,
Material overconsumption,
Education system breaking down,
Couch potatoes.
Atlas of Weak Signals Class 4
The final class was the one with the most dialogue: we spent most of it talking about our personal stories related to identity and nationality with the goal of understanding how complex the world has become when we think of borders.
We began with the concept of the “Nation State”. Why the two words together? What is the difference between nation and state? A nation is a group of people recognising themselves as similar, whereas a state is composed of a group of people governed by the same rules. Surprisingly, in practice, these two terms more often than not are in conflict with each other, due to complex historical, geopolitical and social issues.
With the war in Ukraine, the concept of nation versus state becomes quite evident. Also, during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realised how easy it has become to travel, when suddenly borders close and become as important as the pre-globalised past.
We spent the rest of the class answering the following questions:
Where were you born? Where were your parents born? What passport(s) do you have? How do you identify? What are the important issues in your country?
Everybody answered these questions in a very personal way and highlighted how mixed we really are. I rethink back to my answers and I feel like I could have given a better picture if I had answered it a bit differently:
I was born in the French part of Canada, in Montreal. My father was born in the English part, on the islands of Nova Scotia, in a small town called Glace Bay to a Ukrainian* mother and Irish father. My mother was born in Bratislava, in a country that no longer exists, Czechoslovakia. Her parents were from the Czech part, whereas she was raised in the Slovak part, which created language barriers and bureaucratic issues for both of us down the line, once Czechoslovakia disintegrated following the fall of the Berlin wall and she emigrated to Canada.
I only lived in Montreal for the first two years of my life, then moved to Budapest (Hungary), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Parma (Italy), following my parents’ careers. Despite this, they insisted on putting me in French school to “keep my Quebec roots” but that only meant that 1) I learned French with a European accent, sounding completely different from Canadian French and 2) they couldn’t help me with homework past the third grade.
I have a Canadian passport, a Czech passport and a diplomatic Italian ID, which makes me feel like a secret agent, even though it is nothing but a substitute for a “real” Italian ID that is taking me many years to get.
My response to questions about my identity/nationality depends on who is asking and how much time I am willing to spend answering, but recently I have been more prone to giving the long(ish) story because I think it deserves to be heard.
*She says she was Ukrainian, but her immigration papers said Czechoslovakia, but if you look at her hometown on a map today, it now lies on Polish territory.
I wish I would’ve had a clearer response to the biggest issues in my country. I talked about the fear of the European Union that many Italians have, but I know there are bigger problems, most of which surround the mafia, from a small scale to a big scale. More broadly, I think the most important issue that is bound by no border is climate change and I want to work hard towards fighting against it.
The responses from my peers were similar, and often surprising, because I hadn’t realised how much diversity there truly was in the class. The conversations were so interesting and I wish we could have spent even more time discussing them in depth.