Prepping for CAR 2: Studying up

With this post I want to share some of the stuff I've been learning about Central African Republic (CAR), but I also want to use the space to present my strategies for learning about a new country or situation, and also to explore a bit the nature of what we know and think we know about a place. 1) I like to start any examination of a place with: "What the fuck is going on?" For CAR, the indisputable best source of WTF-is-up news is Twitter. On Twitter, you can follow analysts who are reading in multiple languages from many more sources than you'd ever have time to skim and so get presented with a limited but still diverse set of articles about a topic. You can also follow actors who are tweeting their real-time opinions, decisions, and movements; from this pool of standpoints you can begin to form your own analysis. I'd include journalists and human rights reporters engaged in information finding as "actors," and I'd lend similar weight + critical skepticism to witnesses as to the narratives of those we think of as biased 'participants,' the protesters, politicians, activists, organizations, and survivors. Journalists and observers have angles, bias, and blinders as much as ideological actors, especially in the heat of the reactive, unreflective moments as one can find on Twitter. Check the #CARcrisis and #Centrafrique hashtags. Recommended Twitter feeds on CAR (view a longer list on Twitter):

• @bouckap - Human Rights Watch observer tweeting live reports from Bangui and rural areas
• @louisalombard - Anthropologist using her knowledge of CAR to write & tweet with nuance and depth
• @drovera - Amnesty International human rights observer
• @marcusbleasdale - Photographer who often works alongside human rights observers
• @theprojectcar - Lots of aggregated news and articles on CAR news and the humanitarian situation
• @jgmariner - Amnesty International, often updating on CAR
• @astroehlein - Human Rights Watch director posting articles & updates frequently on CAR

Another kind of care to take when reading Twitter is of your heart. Twitter feeds anxiety: constant, endless, context-free updates stream in while the only action available is to follow the rabbit holes of hashtags and clicking through to new feeds. In my studying of trauma, one thing that stands out is the healing power of narrative and action. Twitter is bereft of both these things. It gives you instant and constant interjections of "what is" with no room to connect this moment's photo to the larger picture of "what was" and "why." You can gain some of that by following a subject over time, but you can also gain a false sense of narrative, as users speaking to each other create useful shorthands that further erase context-- the use of "Christians" vs "Muslims" in the CAR crisis is a good example of this (more on that below). And Twitter can leave readers plugged in to the moment but utterly helpless to partake in it, on edge but isolated and incapacitated. Use Twitter but be conscientious about how you do so; get deeper reads and get offline; connect, contextualize, act. Here, I would also like to link to some CAR-specific local news sites, but I haven't found those yet. I've gotten the best news articles from clicking links on Twitter. 2) Why??? After some gruesome human rights Twitter time, my head starts spinning with a plaintive, whyyyyyyy??? This is when I put Twitter away and start reading reports. Read more...

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