Professor Ivy George is committed to the multi-disciplinary opportunities that sociology offers in her classroom. Her research and teaching since 1983 have focused on gender, religion, race, ethnicity, globalization, and social change. She leads Gordon students in their study abroad program in South Africa, and has recently done research on international adoption. She has contributed to publications on The Future of Feminism in Christian Higher Education, Masculinity and Disability, and Faith and Citizenship in the South Asian Diaspora. She received the Distinguished Senior Faculty Award in 2012.
Posts By This Author
My American Pilgrimage: I Write of What I Cannot Speak
Photo courtesy Ivy George
I have met Silence. The ghostly silence of dust balls and mites, of cobwebs and sunbeam shadows in the cold crumbling cubicles off the Liberian coast where African persons spent their last nights and then lost sight of their land forever. I have felt the stony silence of apartheid era prisons in Johannesburg and Cape Town. I have seen the nostalgic silence of colonial desolation on the Harare Kopje, in Zimbabwe. But this silence at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is like none other. A requiem.
Can Buy Me Love?
The Past Interrupted
I contemplated motherhood well aware that at many points the line between private matters and public affairs was faint and broken.
The Persecuted Body
Christians around the world are being attacked and churches burned to the ground. Is anyone paying attention?
The Propaganda of Prosperity
My people are tired of development, they just want to live" was a sentiment expressed by Mexican author Gustavo Esteva in his remarks at a conference of the Society for International Development in 1985. Today as we are surrounded by the propaganda of prosperity, it is exceedingly difficult to ponder the exhaustion and exasperation contained in that statement. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed expanded investment in countries that have relaxed foreign investment restrictions. The friendly logos of Western corporations are seen all over the world from neon-lit billboards to cars, from electronic items to television programs. In Eastern Europe, Marx is out and Ronald McDonald is in, and in Maoist China, Russian prostitutes are available for services.
The size of the global village is shrinking, the middle classes everywhere are swelling their ranks, the course of capitalism is secure and the "free" market has triumphed once and for all. That the gods of the West have won is the gospel of globalism. While this appears to be the surface
picture in the popular press, there are nagging realities that continue to beleaguer the prosperous world—the ecological crisis and the population "problem." The two issues are closely related; I will take up the subject of population and consider how it fits in the global context.
What of the population question? What is so problematic about human population that we have to "control" it? Is talk of "population control" a semantic subterfuge for control of poor people, women, and other "inferior" peoples (frequently those of color)?