Deborah Esch
RSS feed for Deborah Esch 
Professor at University of Toronto, with previous appointments at Princeton and Stanford Universities. Author of ‘The Brevity of Life' (2010) and ‘In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory' (1999). Currently blogs at besovereign.wordpress.com and microblogs @bsovereign.
Latest posts by Deborah Esch
13 October 2011
Mexico: U.S. Alleges Iranian Assassination Plot Involving Los Zetas
Reports that the U.S. Justice Department charged two men with conspiring with "factions of the Iranian government" to assassinate Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador and to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington - allegedly with assistance from the Los Zetas drug cartel - provoked strong reactions from netizens in Mexico and around the globe.
8 August 2011
4 May 2011
Mexico: Netizens Put Death of Osama Bin Laden in Context
As news of United States Special Forces' targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden was broadcast around the world, netizens in Mexico tweeted and blogged their responses to this signal event in the “war on terror.” Tellingly, in the vast majority of cases their language invoked the “war on drugs” that has been imposed on them by their own government since 2006.
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19 April 2011
Mexico: Felipe Calderon's Cabinet on Twitter
In mid-April, the government headed by Felipe Calderon announced with much fanfare that every member of the cabinet was now registered on Twitter, and prepared to deal more directly with the public via social media. The initiative, however, is shadowed by a concurrent report ranking Mexico just 78th out of 133 countries in terms of its effective use of information technology.
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13 April 2011
Mexico: Netizens Deploy the “Failed State” Meme
The idea of Mexico as an actual or potential "failed state," pending since its introduction into public discourse in 2008 following news of a report to this effect by the U.S. Joint Forces, has become a popular meme in its own right on the Internet, as bloggers and other netizens deploy the parlance (signaled on Twitter by the ubiquitous hashtag #estadofallido) for their own critical purposes.
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8 April 2011
Mexico: News of US Clandestine Operation Draws “Fast and Furious” Response
Mexican netizens take to their blogs and Twitter accounts as an interview with a former head of the ATF (the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) in Mexico makes public "Operation Fast and Furious," under which ATF officers secretly monitored - without intervening - as more than 2,000 weapons were purchased at outlets in Arizona and transported over the border into Mexico.
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I guess this story is supposed to make us Haitians proud of something , just...