Tamara Herman is a Victoria-based researcher and activist who has spent months in Mexico investigating social conflict around a mine currently operated by Canadian company NewGold.

I interviewed Tamara for the purposes of this application, and the interview forms a follow-on to an opinion piece about Canadian mining and the Honduran coup which recently appeared in The Tyee.

Howard French is author of A Continent for the Taking, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, and former Senior Writer for the New York Times.

This is an edit of an It’s Hot in Here interview from November of 2008, which I conducted when Howard was in Ann Arbor to lecture based on his book. We talked about the state of African infrastructure and institutions, the accelerating trajectory of Chinese industrial development on the continent, and what good and what bad might come of it.