Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. NY: Harper Colophon, 1978.
{MB—pages 12-21 examine the judicial process that led to the development of the death camps and mass extermination. Important in this legalistic development was the designation of “apatrides or stateless persons” (12) at the end of WW1. These were people who had been denied any official standing in the nation and thus could be prosecuted or jailed at any time for no reason at all. Also the process of denaturalization or denationalization was increasingly used during and after the 1920s to deal with unwanted minority groups within the European states. This was an effective stripping of any rights whatsoever. Concentration camps first appeared across Europe to deal with apatrides (or refugees).}
The concentration camps for the apatrides served much the same purpose as did the original Nazi camps in 1933 and 1934. In the popular mind, the first Nazi camps conjure up images of wild sadism by brutal brown-shirted storm troopers. The images are, of course, well deserved, but they tend to hinder precise understanding of the development of the camps as a legal and political institution. (Rubenstein, 15)
Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schützhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were whom the regime wished to detain although there were no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazis’ political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’ regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No court would have convicted them. Prison was not the place to detain them. Happily, as bad as were the American concentration camps, they were infinitely better than the German counterparts. (15-16)
One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization.
On the contrary, we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. (Rubenstein, 21)
In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. (Rubenstein, 31)
Men without political acts are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law. Even those who were committed by religious faith to belief in natural law, such as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church, did not see fit to challenge the Nazi actions publicly at the time. (Rubenstein, 33)
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Finch, H.L. Wittgenstein. Rockport, MA: Element, 1995.
The notion that the power that has been discovered and released by modern science and technology is our power, as if it were at our disposal, is itself an example of philosophical naivete since, socially or “civilizationally” speaking, we have no independent life or identity apart from the whole complex which now contains both the powers and us. We are, as it were, inextricably at one with the scientific and technological powers and do not, as we imagine, merely “make use” of them. Socially speaking, apart from them, we have no reality, and this is why, as individuals, far from being in control of these powers, we feel ourselves to be completely at their mercy. The situation, in other words, moves as a whole, and we have no footing either within it or outside it from which to change it. That the whole moves of itself in a benign direction is the illusion of progress. That we are in control of where it is going is an even more pervasive and deadly illusion. (Finch, 17)
To speak of an epochal change is to suggest that the whole reality (ourselves and the world in which we live) is undergoing, or beginning to undergo, a transformation similar to what brought it into being in the first place from a previous epoch. (Finch, 17) {MB—a good historical look at an epochal change from a political/social standpoint is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins ofTotalitarianism. She examines the roots of the “Jewish Question” in Europe, the historical origins of anti-semitism, the Nazi “final solution,” the epochal changes from feudal monarchy to homogenous nation-state identity to expansionist imperialist empires, and the structures of fascist and totalitarian regimes.}
Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War (1998)
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973)
Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1992)
Carolyn Marvin's and David Ingle's Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (1999)
Alexander Laban Hinton's edited collection Annhilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (2002)
Chris Hedges and the Mythology of War
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Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneaplois: U of Minnesota P, 2000.
Here I will deliberately set out in the opposite direction. Rather than deducing the definition of camp from the events that took place there, I will ask instead: What is a camp? What is its political-juridical structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us to look at the camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly that—though admittedly still with us—belongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 39)
The camps, in other words, were not born out of ordinary law, and even less were they the product—as one might have believed—of a transformation and a development of prison law; rather, they were born out of the state of exception and martial law. This is even more evident in the case of the Nazi Lager, whose origin and juridical regime is well documented. It is well known that the juridical foundation of internment was not ordinary law but rather the Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody), which was a juridical institution of Prussian derivation that Nazi jurists sometimes considered a measure of preventive policing inasmuch as it enabled the “taking into custody” of individuals regardless of any relevant criminal behavior and exclusively in order to avoid threats to the security of the state. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 38)
Thus, what is being captured under the rule of law is first of all the very state of exception. In other words, if sovereign power is founded on the ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realized. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 40)
If one does not understand this particular political-juridical structure of the camps, whose vocation is precisely to realize permanently the exception, the incredible events that took place in them remain entirely unintelligible. The people who entered the camp moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which every juridical protection had disappeared; moreover, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by the Nuremberg Laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the “final solution.” Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolutely biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible). (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 40-41)
If this is the case, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we will then have to admit to be facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 41-42)
In all these case, an apparently anodyne place ... delimits instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 42)
There is something that no longer functions in the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order—or, rather, it is the sign of the system’s inability to function without transforming itself into a lethal machine. It is important to note that the camps appeared at the same time that the new laws on citizenship and on the denationalization of citizens were issued (not only the Nuremberg Laws on citizenship in the Reich but also the laws on the denationalization of citizens that were issued by almost all the European states, including France, between 1915 and 1933). The state of exception, which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order, becomes now a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be inscribed into the order. (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”: 43)
We do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what either a people or a language is. (It is well known that linguists can construct a grammar—that is, a unitary system with describable characteristics that could be called language—only by taking the factum loquendi for granted, that is, only by taking for granted the simple fact that human beings speak and understand each other, a fact that is still inaccessible to science.) Nevertheless, all of our political culture is based on the relation between these two notions. Romantic ideology—which consciously created this connection, thereby influencing extensively modern linguistic theory as well as the political theory that is still dominant nowadays—tried to clarify something that was already obscure (the concept of people) with the help of something even more obscure (the concept of language). Thanks to the symbiotic correspondence thus instituted, two contingent and indefinite cultural entities transform themselves into almost natural organisms endowed with their own necessary laws and characteristics. Political theory, in fact, must presuppose, without the ability to explain it, the factum pluralitatis—a term etymologically related to populus, with which I would like to indicate the simple fact that human beings form a community—whereas linguistics must presuppose, without questioning it, the factum loquendi. The simple correspondence between these two facts defines modern political discourse. (Agamben, “Languages and Peoples”: 65-66)
The relation between Gypsies and argot puts this correspondence radically into question in the very instant in which it parodically reenacts it. Gypsies are to a people what argot is to language. And although this analogy can last but for a brief moment, it nonetheless sheds light on that truth which the correspondence between languages and people was secretly intended to conceal: all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot. (Agamben, “Languages and Peoples”: 66-67)
What is at stake here is not to evaluate the scientific accuracy of this thesis but rather not to let its liberating power slip out of our hands. Once our gaze is focused on this matter, the perverse and tenacious machines that govern our political imaginary suddenly lose their power. It should be evident to everybody, after all, that we are talking about an imaginary, especially nowadays when the idea of a people has long lost any substantial reality. Even if we admit that this idea never had any real content other than the insipid catalog of characteristics listed by the old philosophical anthropologies, it was already made meaningless, in any case, by the same modern that presented itself as its keeper and its expression. All well-meaning chatter notwithstanding, the idea of a people today is nothing other than the empty support of state identity and is recognized only as such. For those who might still nurture some doubt on the matter, it would be instructive to take a look at what is happening around us from this point of view: on the one hand, the world powers take up arms to defend a state without a people (Kuwait) and, on the other hand, the peoples without a state (Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Basques, Jews of the Diaspora) can be oppressed and exterminated with impunity, so as to make clear that the destiny of a people can only be a state identity and that the concept of a people makes sense only if recodified within the concept of citizenship. In this regard, it is also important to not the peculiar status of those languages that have no state dignity (Catalan, Basque, Gaelic, etc.), which linguists treat naturally as languages, but which practically operate rather as jargons or dialects and almost always assume an immediately political significance. (Agamben, “Languages and Peoples”: 67-68)
The thesis according to which all peoples are Gypsies and all languages are jargons untangles this knot and enables us to look in a new way at those linguistic experiences that have periodically emerged within our culture only to be misunderstood and led back to dominant conceptions. What else can Dante mean, in fact, when he says—while narrating the myth of Babel in De vulgari eloquentia—that every kind of tower-builder received its own language, which was incomprehensible to the others, and that the languages spoken in his time derived from these Babelic languages? He is presenting all the languages of the Earth as jargons (the language of a trade, in fact, is the figure of jargon par excellence). And against this intimate aptitude for jargon that every language possesses, he does not suggest the remedy of a national language and grammar (as a long-standing falsification of his thought would have it); he suggests, rather, a transformation of the very way of experiencing words, which he called volgare illustre. Such a transformation was to be something like a deliverance of the jargons themselves that would direct them toward the factum loquendi-—nd hence not a grammatical deliverance, but a poetical and a political one. (Agamben, “Languages and Peoples”: 68-69)
Languages are the jargons that hide the pure experience of language just as peoples are the more or less successful masks of the factum pluralitatis. This is why our task cannot possibly be either the construction of these jargons into grammars or the recodification of peoples into state identities. On the contrary, it is only by breaking at any point the nexus between the existence of language, grammar, people, and state that thought and praxis will be equal to the tasks at hand. The forms of this interruption—during which the factum of language and the factum of community come to light for an instant—are manifold and change according to times and circumstances: reactivation of a jargon, trobar clus, pure language, minoritarian practice of a grammatical language, and so on. In any case, it is clear that what is at stake here is not something simply linguistic or literary but, above all, political and philosophical. (Agamben, “Languages and Peoples”: 70)
Only those who will be able to carry it to completion—without allowing that which reveals to be veiled in the nothingness it reveals, but bringing language itself to language—will become the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a state. In this community, the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified ... (Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle”: 85)
Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human beings, on the other hand, separate images from things and give them a name precisely because they want to recognize themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their very own appearance. Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History. (Agamben, “The Face”: 93)
It is happening more and more often that in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem, look into the camera, thereby exhibiting the awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction that is implicit in the consumption of such images, according to which the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter, rather, knowingly challenge the voyeur’s gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise moment, the insubstantial nature of the human face suddenly comes to light. The fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The same procedure is used today in advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice. In both cases, the one who looks is confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the face, the very structure of truth. (Agamben, “The Face”: 93-94)
The face, truth, and exposition are today the objects of a global civil war, whose battlefield is social life in its entirety, whose storm troopers are the media, whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth. Politicians, the media establishment, and the advertising industry have understood the insubstantial character of the face and of the community it opens up, and thus they transform it into a miserable secret that they must make sure to control at all costs. State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence—a monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other nonsoveriegn organizations; rather, it is founded above all on the control of appearance (of doxa). The fact that politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the separation of the face in the world of spectacle—a world in which human communication is being separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a value that is accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of bureaucrats jealously watches over its management. (Agamben, “The Face”: 94)
There are two words in Latin that derive from the Indo-European root meaning “one”: similis, which expresses resemblance, and simul, which means, “at the same time.” Thus, next to similitudo (resemblance) there is simultas, that is the fact of being together (which implies also rivalry, enmity); and next to similare (to be like) there is simulare (to copy, to imitate, which implies also to feign, to simulate). (Agamben, “The Face”: 99)
The face is not a simulacrum, in the sense that it is something dissimulating or hiding the truth: the face is the simultas, the being-together of the manifold visages constituting it, in which none of the visages is truer than any of the others. To grasp the face’s truth means to grasp not the resemblance but rather the simultaneity of the visages, that is, the restless power that keeps them together and constitutes their being-in-common. The face of God, thus, is the simultas of human faces: it is “our effigy” that Dante saw in the “living light” of paradise. (Agamben, “The Face”: 99)
In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as the legal categories of the ancien regime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate—and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about. Consensus and public opinion have no more to do with the general will than the “international police” that today fight wars have to do with the sovereignty of the jus publicum Europaeum. Contemporary politics is the devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities all throughout the planet, so as then to rehash and reinstate their definitively nullified form. (Agamben, “Notes on Politics”: 109-110)
However, the problem that the new politics is facing is precisely this: is it possible to have a political community that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of worldly life? ... Once again Walter Benjamin, in the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” leaves no doubt regarding the fact that “The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness.” The definition of the concept of “happy life” remains one of the essential tasks of the coming thought (and this should be achieved in such a way that this concept is not kept separate from ontology, because: “being: we have no experience of it other than living itself”). (Agamben, “Notes on Politics”: 114)
The second consequence of the experimentum linguae is that, above and beyond the concepts of appropriation and expropriation, we need to think, rather, the possibility and the modalities of a free use. Praxis and political reflection are operating today exclusively within the dialectic of proper and improper—a dialectic in which either the improper extends its own rule everywhere, thanks to an unrestrainable will to falsification and consumption (as it happens in industrialized democracies), or the proper demands the exclusion of and impropriety (as it happens in integralist and totalitarian states). If instead we define the common (or, as others suggest, the same) as a point of indifference between the proper and the improper—that is, as something that can never be grasped in terms of either expropriation or appropriation but that can be grasped, rather, only as use—the essential political problem then becomes: “How does one use a common?” (Agamben, “Notes on Politics”: 117)
The new categories of political thought—inoperative community, compearance, equality, loyalty, mass intellectuality, the coming people, whatever singularity, or however else they might be called—will be able to express the political matter that is facing us only if they are able to articulate the location, the manners, and the meaning of this experience of the event of language intended as free use of the common and as sphere of pure means. (Agamben, “Notes on Politics”: 117-118)
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Jon Swartz: Google, Justice Department Face Off On Search/Privacy Issue
Google, Justice Dept. face off on search/privacy issue
by Jon Swartz
USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google (GOOG) and the Justice Department will square off in federal court Tuesday in a seminal Internet privacy case that could touch millions of Americans.
The Bush administration is demanding the results of millions of searches on Google during a random week to buttress an online child-protection law blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its reasoning: Internet filters don't properly shield kids from viewing pornography.
Google has resisted, citing competitive and privacy concerns, in a dispute that has escalated in a series of legal maneuvers since January. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will urge the court to reject the government's bid at a hearing in San Jose, Calif. A ruling could come on Tuesday.
Privacy advocates are worried Internet search engines could become tools for government snooping and spawn a wave of subpoenas by individuals against search engine companies.
More significantly, the case undercuts the basic Internet tenet of anonymity, says Evan Hendricks, editor of newsletter Privacy Times. If the government has its way, he says, the Internet could be used as a digital microscope to seek out people. A Justice Department spokesman had no comment.
In an 18-page court filing Feb. 24, Justice lawyers argued privacy rights would not be trampled because the information requested would not identify individuals or be traceable.
The brief includes a declaration by Philip Stark, a researcher and statistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who says the government specifically asked that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.
AOL, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) MSN are cooperating with the government. They say that their assistance is limited and that the privacy of their users has not been violated.
But as the largest and most influential search engine, Google has significantly more at stake. "This case will make it clear how much information is collected and stored on Google searches," says Paul Schiff Berman, an expert in cyberlaw at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Berman and other legal experts say the consequences could be far-reaching for U.S. residents on several levels. The government might delve into the vast stores of Web-browsing data to look for individuals who are national security risks or engaged in criminal activity. Divorce lawyers also could subpoena search-engine providers for e-mail and browsing records to investigate the fidelity of a spouse.
"It creates a logistical problem for Google by putting it in the position of being an extension of law enforcement," Berman says. "Of course, because Google is mining data for commercial purposes, it could put an end to its troubles if it stopped collecting data."
by Jon Swartz
USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google (GOOG) and the Justice Department will square off in federal court Tuesday in a seminal Internet privacy case that could touch millions of Americans.
The Bush administration is demanding the results of millions of searches on Google during a random week to buttress an online child-protection law blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its reasoning: Internet filters don't properly shield kids from viewing pornography.
Google has resisted, citing competitive and privacy concerns, in a dispute that has escalated in a series of legal maneuvers since January. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will urge the court to reject the government's bid at a hearing in San Jose, Calif. A ruling could come on Tuesday.
Privacy advocates are worried Internet search engines could become tools for government snooping and spawn a wave of subpoenas by individuals against search engine companies.
More significantly, the case undercuts the basic Internet tenet of anonymity, says Evan Hendricks, editor of newsletter Privacy Times. If the government has its way, he says, the Internet could be used as a digital microscope to seek out people. A Justice Department spokesman had no comment.
In an 18-page court filing Feb. 24, Justice lawyers argued privacy rights would not be trampled because the information requested would not identify individuals or be traceable.
The brief includes a declaration by Philip Stark, a researcher and statistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who says the government specifically asked that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.
AOL, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) MSN are cooperating with the government. They say that their assistance is limited and that the privacy of their users has not been violated.
But as the largest and most influential search engine, Google has significantly more at stake. "This case will make it clear how much information is collected and stored on Google searches," says Paul Schiff Berman, an expert in cyberlaw at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Berman and other legal experts say the consequences could be far-reaching for U.S. residents on several levels. The government might delve into the vast stores of Web-browsing data to look for individuals who are national security risks or engaged in criminal activity. Divorce lawyers also could subpoena search-engine providers for e-mail and browsing records to investigate the fidelity of a spouse.
"It creates a logistical problem for Google by putting it in the position of being an extension of law enforcement," Berman says. "Of course, because Google is mining data for commercial purposes, it could put an end to its troubles if it stopped collecting data."
The Bat Segundo Show: Brett Easton Ellis
Description of the show from the website:
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Approximate Interview Date: Early September 2005 in a locked hotel conference room.
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Cold and impoverished.
Subjects Discussed: The two Brets, finding the voice of Bret the narrator, “ten years on an outline,” metafiction, origins of Lunar Park, Stephen King, the use of brand name description in fiction, the rules of fiction, subtext, B.S. Johnson, the dramaturgy of writing about writers, episodic fiction vs. narrative fiction, pushing boundaries, 9/11, irony, the generation between 1961 and 1971 and the generation after, keeping track of young writers, Stanley Elkin and being cognizant of humor, responsibility within Ellis’ work, on being a wuss, television vs. fiction, BEE’s anger, the Lev Grossman profile, 1941, on being a movie person, the Jayne Dennis website, Jamie Clarke’s Vernon Downs, Ellis’s politics and American Psycho, rich people, corruption, Roger Avary and film adaptations.
Scroll Down to Episode #8
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Approximate Interview Date: Early September 2005 in a locked hotel conference room.
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Cold and impoverished.
Subjects Discussed: The two Brets, finding the voice of Bret the narrator, “ten years on an outline,” metafiction, origins of Lunar Park, Stephen King, the use of brand name description in fiction, the rules of fiction, subtext, B.S. Johnson, the dramaturgy of writing about writers, episodic fiction vs. narrative fiction, pushing boundaries, 9/11, irony, the generation between 1961 and 1971 and the generation after, keeping track of young writers, Stanley Elkin and being cognizant of humor, responsibility within Ellis’ work, on being a wuss, television vs. fiction, BEE’s anger, the Lev Grossman profile, 1941, on being a movie person, the Jayne Dennis website, Jamie Clarke’s Vernon Downs, Ellis’s politics and American Psycho, rich people, corruption, Roger Avary and film adaptations.
Scroll Down to Episode #8
The Litblog Co-Op
Intro:
Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace.
The Litblog Co-Op
Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace.
The Litblog Co-Op
Telling Their Stories
Website Introduction:
High school students at the Urban School of San Francisco conduct and film interviews with Bay Area Holocaust survivors in their homes. Students then transcribe each 2-plus hour interview, create hundreds of movie files associated with each transcript, and then post the full-text, full-video interviews on this public website as a service to a world-wide audience interested in Holocaust studies. See Project Descriptions for a more detailed overview of the course and project.
This is an ongoing, ever-changing, and constantly evolving project involving dozens of students, teachers, and community volunteers. The majority of efforts thus far have been applied to the actual interview process as well as posting interviews on this website. We will continue developing this "About The Project" area as a source to encourage schools, non-profits, museums, libraries, and other interested organizations to adopt and adapt the models from Telling Their Stories. Our current strategy here is to simply provide information on our model. Organizations interested in duplicating this project concept will need to re-work many of the directions to fit their own projects.
Telling Their Stories
High school students at the Urban School of San Francisco conduct and film interviews with Bay Area Holocaust survivors in their homes. Students then transcribe each 2-plus hour interview, create hundreds of movie files associated with each transcript, and then post the full-text, full-video interviews on this public website as a service to a world-wide audience interested in Holocaust studies. See Project Descriptions for a more detailed overview of the course and project.
This is an ongoing, ever-changing, and constantly evolving project involving dozens of students, teachers, and community volunteers. The majority of efforts thus far have been applied to the actual interview process as well as posting interviews on this website. We will continue developing this "About The Project" area as a source to encourage schools, non-profits, museums, libraries, and other interested organizations to adopt and adapt the models from Telling Their Stories. Our current strategy here is to simply provide information on our model. Organizations interested in duplicating this project concept will need to re-work many of the directions to fit their own projects.
Telling Their Stories
University History
A new website devoted to top quality digital links for teachers and students. The aim of the website is to provide a single web portal where people involved in history as a discipline can be sure they'll find the best online material available.
University History
University History
Monday, March 13, 2006
Double Digit Tuition Increases For Kentucky College Students
11% increase in tuition proposed
3/10/2006 Business First Louisville
The board of regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System voted today to recommend an in-state tuition rate increase of 11 percent for the 2006-2007 academic year.
That would boost the rate per credit hour (including fees) to $109 from $98.
The board said the increase is needed to continue to meet mandates under the 1997 Post-secondary Education Improvement Act, and noted that according to a new set of benchmark states that was established by the Council on Post-Secondary Education, the Kentucky system ranks 18th out of 20 in public funding. The ranking, it added, indicates a $79 million gap in state appropriation relative to other states.
The board also recommended a $131 per credit hour tuition rate for out-of-state students from contiguous counties, and a $327 per credit hour rate for all other out-of-state students.
The statewide system consists of 16 colleges and 65 campuses.
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2006-07 tuition for KCTCS rises - Board approves 11% boost for in-state students
Writer: Art Jester
3/11/2006 Lexington Herald-Leader
VERSAILLES - In-state students will pay 11.2 percent more to attend Kentucky's community and technical colleges in the fall.
Tuition per credit hour for in-state students will be $109 in 2006-07, up from $98 in the current academic year.
The average student in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System takes 12 or 13 credit hours, said Ken Walker, KCTCS vice president for finance, facilities and human resources.
KCTCS has 81,082 in-state students out of a total enrollment of 84,931.
The KCTCS Board of Regents approved the increase yesterday in a meeting at KCTCS headquarters in Versailles.
Under reciprocal agreements with five states, KCTCS also charges in-state tuition at some of its community and technical colleges for students from some counties in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee and West Virginia. There are currently 2,219 students in this category.
There will be bigger increases for out-of-state students not covered by reciprocal agreements:
* Out-of-state students from counties contiguous to Kentucky will pay $131 per credit hour in 2006-2007, up from the current $118.
* All other out-of-state students will pay $327 per credit hour next academic year, in contrast with $294 this year.
The board's vice chairman, Joe Wise of Louisville, cast the only dissenting vote on the tuition increase.
Wise said he voted "no" to "send a message to our legislators" that they need to appropriate more money for KCTCS and the state universities so they can avoid double-digit increases in tuition.
Christine Buckner, a student regent from Gateway Community and Technical College in Northern Kentucky, agreed with Wise, saying, "Somewhere, it has got to stop."
Students see that higher tuition pays for faculty and staff raises, she said, but some students question whether more tuition improves the quality of what they get in the classrooms.
"We all wish we didn't have to do this," said KCTCS board chairman Richard Bean of Louisville. "The reason we have to do it is, the state does not want to fund higher education."
"I hope there's a hue and cry not only from KCTCS students" but also from students at the state universities, Bean said.
Financial aid is provided to 52,000 KCTCS students of 71,000 who are eligible, Walker said. The average amount of financial aid is $2,085.
KCTCS in-state students experienced a 6.5 percent tuition increase for 2005-2006.
Last week, the University of Kentucky approved a 12 percent tuition increase for in-state entering freshmen and sophomores.
The University of Louisville is considering raising in-state tuition by 13 percent.
3/10/2006 Business First Louisville
The board of regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System voted today to recommend an in-state tuition rate increase of 11 percent for the 2006-2007 academic year.
That would boost the rate per credit hour (including fees) to $109 from $98.
The board said the increase is needed to continue to meet mandates under the 1997 Post-secondary Education Improvement Act, and noted that according to a new set of benchmark states that was established by the Council on Post-Secondary Education, the Kentucky system ranks 18th out of 20 in public funding. The ranking, it added, indicates a $79 million gap in state appropriation relative to other states.
The board also recommended a $131 per credit hour tuition rate for out-of-state students from contiguous counties, and a $327 per credit hour rate for all other out-of-state students.
The statewide system consists of 16 colleges and 65 campuses.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2006-07 tuition for KCTCS rises - Board approves 11% boost for in-state students
Writer: Art Jester
3/11/2006 Lexington Herald-Leader
VERSAILLES - In-state students will pay 11.2 percent more to attend Kentucky's community and technical colleges in the fall.
Tuition per credit hour for in-state students will be $109 in 2006-07, up from $98 in the current academic year.
The average student in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System takes 12 or 13 credit hours, said Ken Walker, KCTCS vice president for finance, facilities and human resources.
KCTCS has 81,082 in-state students out of a total enrollment of 84,931.
The KCTCS Board of Regents approved the increase yesterday in a meeting at KCTCS headquarters in Versailles.
Under reciprocal agreements with five states, KCTCS also charges in-state tuition at some of its community and technical colleges for students from some counties in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee and West Virginia. There are currently 2,219 students in this category.
There will be bigger increases for out-of-state students not covered by reciprocal agreements:
* Out-of-state students from counties contiguous to Kentucky will pay $131 per credit hour in 2006-2007, up from the current $118.
* All other out-of-state students will pay $327 per credit hour next academic year, in contrast with $294 this year.
The board's vice chairman, Joe Wise of Louisville, cast the only dissenting vote on the tuition increase.
Wise said he voted "no" to "send a message to our legislators" that they need to appropriate more money for KCTCS and the state universities so they can avoid double-digit increases in tuition.
Christine Buckner, a student regent from Gateway Community and Technical College in Northern Kentucky, agreed with Wise, saying, "Somewhere, it has got to stop."
Students see that higher tuition pays for faculty and staff raises, she said, but some students question whether more tuition improves the quality of what they get in the classrooms.
"We all wish we didn't have to do this," said KCTCS board chairman Richard Bean of Louisville. "The reason we have to do it is, the state does not want to fund higher education."
"I hope there's a hue and cry not only from KCTCS students" but also from students at the state universities, Bean said.
Financial aid is provided to 52,000 KCTCS students of 71,000 who are eligible, Walker said. The average amount of financial aid is $2,085.
KCTCS in-state students experienced a 6.5 percent tuition increase for 2005-2006.
Last week, the University of Kentucky approved a 12 percent tuition increase for in-state entering freshmen and sophomores.
The University of Louisville is considering raising in-state tuition by 13 percent.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
What Would You Show in a Film Festival About "Calls to Conscience and Action"
(Courtesy of Long Pauses)
What would you show in a film festival about "Calls to Conscience and Action"
What would you show in a film festival about "Calls to Conscience and Action"
Friday, March 10, 2006
Thinking About Radical Democracy: Pt. 4
(Radical in reflective reworking involving going back to the origins of the concept and pushing our supposed democracy to live up to its founding concepts. For my students working on social/collective memory projects--the links are all updated. Suggestions for this list are appreciated and needed--please help me to keep up-to-date and to catch up on newly uncovered/ignored histories.)
U.S. Section of Women's International League for Peace
Orion: Environmental Discourse and Dissent
Green Social Thought
Radical Democracy: A Contested Terrain
Rules for Radicals
The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy
Fast Food Nation and McDonaldization
History of Radicalism in the U.S.
Abolitionist Movement
Civil Rights Movement
Marxist Internet Archive
Eugene Debs, Labor Organizer
Feminist Movement
Marcus Garvey, Black Nationalist Leader
Labor Movement
Abbie Hoffman
Populism
Socialism
Utopian Communities
The Student as Nigger
John Taylor Gatto: Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling
Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution of Everyday Life
Resources for Studying Propaganda
The Memory Hole: Freeing of Information in Action
On the Poverty of Student Life
Language of the War on Terror
Independent Media in a Time of War
Indy Media
Nancy Snow: Rebranding of America
Poet/Performer Saul Williams
Politics of University Teaching in Post 9/11 America
Socialist Equality Party Presidential Candidate Bill Van Auken: "An American Tragedy"
Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy
Chris Hedges: The Meaning of War
Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath
Wikipedia: Stonewall Riots
Stonewall Riots, 1969
Nickle and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
Crucial Texts of Radical Democracy
Thomas Frank: Architecture of a New Consensus
Culture-Trafficking for the 21st Century
Terry Tempest Williams: Open Spaces of Democracy
Terry Tempest Williams: Ground Truthing
BBC Documentary: The Power of Nightmares
Paul Kivel: Are You Mentoring For Social Justice
Skidmark Bob, Musical Activist
Stokely Carmichael: Architect of Black Power
George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy
Race and Collective Memory Bibliography
Without Sanctuary: America's Dark History of Racialized Violence (caution)
Ron Strickland's Marxist Cultural Theory
Tony Kushner: Radical Pragmatist
Race: The Power of an Illusion
Ubu Web: Freedom as Creativity
Martin Luther King's Radical Message
Michael Moore: White Frights
Remembering Johnny Cash
U.S. Prison Boom
How the Other Half Banks
Hakim Bey: Poetic Terrorism
Situationist International: Resisting the Society of the Spectacle
Bureau of Publis Secrets
Howard Zinn: Our War on Terrorism
The Nation: Our Debt to Bill Moyers
Arundhati Roy: Instant Mix, Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)
Project Censored Annual Reports of Year's Top Censored News Stories
Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle
Slavoj Zizek: The Passion
Raymond Federman: The Real Begins Where the Spectacle Ends
Emma Goldman: Minorities vs. Majorities
Emma Goldman Archives
Anarchist Archives
Mary Wolstoncraft: Vindication of the Rights of Women
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Solitude of Self
National Women's History Project
Gloria Steinem
Angela Davis: Radical Activist/Black Feminist
Combahee River Collective Statement: Genesis of Black Feminism
Feminist Writing Space
bell hooks: writing and resistance
The Beautiful Enigma of Radical Democracy
Women's International League for Peace
Peace Women
Extreme Democracy
American Indian Movement
Alcatraz Is Not an Island: Reclaiming Native Land
Alice Paul
Iron Jawed Angels (Katjia von Garnier) Warner, 2004: 125 minutes.
Alice Paul
We discussed the Seneca Falls 1848 Convention as a landmark event in the women's movement.
Seneca Falls Declaration
I mentioned Ida B. Wells the African American activist in the movie who refuses to get in the back of the parade--for more on this important democratic civil rights activist:
Ida B. Wells
Wikipedia: Ida B. Wells
Think about Ida B. Wells argument in the film and then read this important statement from Black Feminists:
Excerpts from the Combahee River Collective Statement
Other women activists of the time that are not featured in the movie, but are very important to know (they are often ignored because they fought for the rights of workers--something a capitalist society rarely honors). These women were as courageous and passionate as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns (have you heard of them?):
Mother Jones: the Angel of the Mines
Wikipedia: Mother Jones
Emma Goldman
Wikipedia: Emma Goldman
Helen Keller is also mentioned many times during the movie. How many of you knew that Helen Keller was an civil rights activist who was pursued by the FBI?
Helen Keller and the FBI
Helen Keller
I mentioned stereotypes about "feminism" and just wanted to post other opinions on the issue:
North Carolina College Student: Stereotypes About Feminism Are Unfounded and Damaging (also click on the only comment at the end of the essay)
The Guerilla Girls a performative activist group has long been fighting stereotypes of women and for equal representation in the arts (if you have taken an art history class you will understand the disparity between the representation of male and female artists):
University of North Texas website on feminism:
What is Feminism?
Public displays, marches and protests are an effective non-violent method for bringing attention to political issues (that are being ignored by mainstream society):
NOW: History of Marches and Mass Actions
Wikipedia: Social Movements
Wikipedia: Protests
Also check out the imagistic critiques of the conceptual artist Barbara Krueger--who questions how stereotypes and behaviors are reproduced through visual media:
Barbara Krueger
And courtesy of Melissa Purdue, an English Studies and Women Studies instructor at the University of Kentucky, an outline of the three waves of feminism (I added the links):
First Wave Feminism-
This term refers to the first concerted movement working for the reform of women's social and legal inequalities in the nineteenth century. Although individual feminist such as Mary Wollstonecraft had already argued against the injustices suffered by women, it was not until the 1850's that something like an organized feminist movement evolved in Britain. Its headquarters was at Langham Place in London, where a group of middle-class women, led by Barbara Bodichon (1827-91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), met to discuss topical issues and publish the English Woman's Journal (1858-64).
The key concerns of First Wave Feminists were education, employment, the marriage laws, and the plight of intelligent middle-class single women. They were not primarily concerned with the problems of working-class women, nor did they necessarily see themselves as feminists in the modern sense (the term was not coined until 1895). First Wave Feminists largely responded to specific injustices they had themselves experienced.
Their major achievements were the opening of higher education for women; reform of the girls' secondary-school system, including participation in formal national examinations: the widening of access to the professions, especially medicine; married women's property rights, recognized in the Married Women's Property Act of 1870; and some improvement in divorced and separated women's child custody rights.
Second Wave Feminism-
The term 'Second Wave' was coined by Marsha Lear, and refers to the increase in feminist activity which occurred in America, Britain, and Europe from the late sixties onwards. In America, second wave feminism rose out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which women, disillusioned with their second-class status even in the activist environment of student politics, began to band together to contend against discrimination. The second wave was concerned with reproductive rights and the fight against sexual and domestic violence.
The tactics employed by Second Wave Feminists varied from highly-published activism, such as the protest against the Miss America beauty contest in 1968, to the establishment of small consciousness-raising groups. However, it was obvious early on that the movement was not a unified one, with differences emerging between black feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, and social feminism.
Second Wave Feminism in Britain was similarly multiple in focus, although it was based more strongly in working-class socialism, as demonstrated by the strike of women workers at the Ford car plant for equal pay in 1968. The slogan 'the personal is political' sums up the way in which Second Wave Feminism did not just strive to extend the range of social opportunities open to women, but also, through intervention within the spheres of reproduction, sexuality and cultural representation, to change their domestic and private lives. Second Wave Feminism did not just make an impact upon western societies, but has also continued to inspire the struggle for women's rights across the world.
Third Wave Feminism -
Loosely defined movement starting around late 1990’s with texts like Manifesta, Listen Up, To Be Real, and Body Outlaws. Third Wave Feminism, the movement of feminism beyond the sexual revolution of the 1960's, is focused on young women and men perpetuating and improving upon those rights gained in the past. It is hard to define because the Third Wave is characterized by individualism and a lack of desire to conform to a definition. Third Wavers have never lived in a world without the women's movement.
The front page of the Third Wave Foundation web site explains that the organization strives to combat inequalities that [women] face as a result of [their] age, gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status or level of education. By empowering young women, Third Wave is building a lasting foundation for social activism around the country.
Wikipedia: Feminism
Wikipedia: Suffrage Movement
Wikipedia: Alice Paul
Wikipedia: Lucy Burns
U.S. Section of Women's International League for Peace
Orion: Environmental Discourse and Dissent
Green Social Thought
Radical Democracy: A Contested Terrain
Rules for Radicals
The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy
Fast Food Nation and McDonaldization
History of Radicalism in the U.S.
Abolitionist Movement
Civil Rights Movement
Marxist Internet Archive
Eugene Debs, Labor Organizer
Feminist Movement
Marcus Garvey, Black Nationalist Leader
Labor Movement
Abbie Hoffman
Populism
Socialism
Utopian Communities
The Student as Nigger
John Taylor Gatto: Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling
Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution of Everyday Life
Resources for Studying Propaganda
The Memory Hole: Freeing of Information in Action
On the Poverty of Student Life
Language of the War on Terror
Independent Media in a Time of War
Indy Media
Nancy Snow: Rebranding of America
Poet/Performer Saul Williams
Politics of University Teaching in Post 9/11 America
Socialist Equality Party Presidential Candidate Bill Van Auken: "An American Tragedy"
Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy
Chris Hedges: The Meaning of War
Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath
Wikipedia: Stonewall Riots
Stonewall Riots, 1969
Nickle and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
Crucial Texts of Radical Democracy
Thomas Frank: Architecture of a New Consensus
Culture-Trafficking for the 21st Century
Terry Tempest Williams: Open Spaces of Democracy
Terry Tempest Williams: Ground Truthing
BBC Documentary: The Power of Nightmares
Paul Kivel: Are You Mentoring For Social Justice
Skidmark Bob, Musical Activist
Stokely Carmichael: Architect of Black Power
George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy
Race and Collective Memory Bibliography
Without Sanctuary: America's Dark History of Racialized Violence (caution)
Ron Strickland's Marxist Cultural Theory
Tony Kushner: Radical Pragmatist
Race: The Power of an Illusion
Ubu Web: Freedom as Creativity
Martin Luther King's Radical Message
Michael Moore: White Frights
Remembering Johnny Cash
U.S. Prison Boom
How the Other Half Banks
Hakim Bey: Poetic Terrorism
Situationist International: Resisting the Society of the Spectacle
Bureau of Publis Secrets
Howard Zinn: Our War on Terrorism
The Nation: Our Debt to Bill Moyers
Arundhati Roy: Instant Mix, Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)
Project Censored Annual Reports of Year's Top Censored News Stories
Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle
Slavoj Zizek: The Passion
Raymond Federman: The Real Begins Where the Spectacle Ends
Emma Goldman: Minorities vs. Majorities
Emma Goldman Archives
Anarchist Archives
Mary Wolstoncraft: Vindication of the Rights of Women
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Solitude of Self
National Women's History Project
Gloria Steinem
Angela Davis: Radical Activist/Black Feminist
Combahee River Collective Statement: Genesis of Black Feminism
Feminist Writing Space
bell hooks: writing and resistance
The Beautiful Enigma of Radical Democracy
Women's International League for Peace
Peace Women
Extreme Democracy
American Indian Movement
Alcatraz Is Not an Island: Reclaiming Native Land
Alice Paul
Iron Jawed Angels (Katjia von Garnier) Warner, 2004: 125 minutes.
Alice Paul
We discussed the Seneca Falls 1848 Convention as a landmark event in the women's movement.
Seneca Falls Declaration
I mentioned Ida B. Wells the African American activist in the movie who refuses to get in the back of the parade--for more on this important democratic civil rights activist:
Ida B. Wells
Wikipedia: Ida B. Wells
Think about Ida B. Wells argument in the film and then read this important statement from Black Feminists:
Excerpts from the Combahee River Collective Statement
Other women activists of the time that are not featured in the movie, but are very important to know (they are often ignored because they fought for the rights of workers--something a capitalist society rarely honors). These women were as courageous and passionate as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns (have you heard of them?):
Mother Jones: the Angel of the Mines
Wikipedia: Mother Jones
Emma Goldman
Wikipedia: Emma Goldman
Helen Keller is also mentioned many times during the movie. How many of you knew that Helen Keller was an civil rights activist who was pursued by the FBI?
Helen Keller and the FBI
Helen Keller
I mentioned stereotypes about "feminism" and just wanted to post other opinions on the issue:
North Carolina College Student: Stereotypes About Feminism Are Unfounded and Damaging (also click on the only comment at the end of the essay)
The Guerilla Girls a performative activist group has long been fighting stereotypes of women and for equal representation in the arts (if you have taken an art history class you will understand the disparity between the representation of male and female artists):
University of North Texas website on feminism:
What is Feminism?
Public displays, marches and protests are an effective non-violent method for bringing attention to political issues (that are being ignored by mainstream society):
NOW: History of Marches and Mass Actions
Wikipedia: Social Movements
Wikipedia: Protests
Also check out the imagistic critiques of the conceptual artist Barbara Krueger--who questions how stereotypes and behaviors are reproduced through visual media:
Barbara Krueger
And courtesy of Melissa Purdue, an English Studies and Women Studies instructor at the University of Kentucky, an outline of the three waves of feminism (I added the links):
First Wave Feminism-
This term refers to the first concerted movement working for the reform of women's social and legal inequalities in the nineteenth century. Although individual feminist such as Mary Wollstonecraft had already argued against the injustices suffered by women, it was not until the 1850's that something like an organized feminist movement evolved in Britain. Its headquarters was at Langham Place in London, where a group of middle-class women, led by Barbara Bodichon (1827-91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), met to discuss topical issues and publish the English Woman's Journal (1858-64).
The key concerns of First Wave Feminists were education, employment, the marriage laws, and the plight of intelligent middle-class single women. They were not primarily concerned with the problems of working-class women, nor did they necessarily see themselves as feminists in the modern sense (the term was not coined until 1895). First Wave Feminists largely responded to specific injustices they had themselves experienced.
Their major achievements were the opening of higher education for women; reform of the girls' secondary-school system, including participation in formal national examinations: the widening of access to the professions, especially medicine; married women's property rights, recognized in the Married Women's Property Act of 1870; and some improvement in divorced and separated women's child custody rights.
Second Wave Feminism-
The term 'Second Wave' was coined by Marsha Lear, and refers to the increase in feminist activity which occurred in America, Britain, and Europe from the late sixties onwards. In America, second wave feminism rose out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which women, disillusioned with their second-class status even in the activist environment of student politics, began to band together to contend against discrimination. The second wave was concerned with reproductive rights and the fight against sexual and domestic violence.
The tactics employed by Second Wave Feminists varied from highly-published activism, such as the protest against the Miss America beauty contest in 1968, to the establishment of small consciousness-raising groups. However, it was obvious early on that the movement was not a unified one, with differences emerging between black feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, and social feminism.
Second Wave Feminism in Britain was similarly multiple in focus, although it was based more strongly in working-class socialism, as demonstrated by the strike of women workers at the Ford car plant for equal pay in 1968. The slogan 'the personal is political' sums up the way in which Second Wave Feminism did not just strive to extend the range of social opportunities open to women, but also, through intervention within the spheres of reproduction, sexuality and cultural representation, to change their domestic and private lives. Second Wave Feminism did not just make an impact upon western societies, but has also continued to inspire the struggle for women's rights across the world.
Third Wave Feminism -
Loosely defined movement starting around late 1990’s with texts like Manifesta, Listen Up, To Be Real, and Body Outlaws. Third Wave Feminism, the movement of feminism beyond the sexual revolution of the 1960's, is focused on young women and men perpetuating and improving upon those rights gained in the past. It is hard to define because the Third Wave is characterized by individualism and a lack of desire to conform to a definition. Third Wavers have never lived in a world without the women's movement.
The front page of the Third Wave Foundation web site explains that the organization strives to combat inequalities that [women] face as a result of [their] age, gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status or level of education. By empowering young women, Third Wave is building a lasting foundation for social activism around the country.
Wikipedia: Feminism
Wikipedia: Suffrage Movement
Wikipedia: Alice Paul
Wikipedia: Lucy Burns
Cartoons by Mr. Fish
Who is Mr Fish?
The Cartoons of Mr Fish: A Selection
Mr Fish is regularly published in Harper's Magazine
Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action
Website intro:
Project Censored is a media research group out of Sonoma State University which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major national news media.
Between 700 and 1000 stories are submitted to Project Censored each year from journalists, scholars, librarians, and concerned citizens around the world. With the help of more than 200 Sonoma State University faculty, students, and community members, Project Censored reviews the story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The university community selects 25 stories to submit to the Project Censored panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current or previous national judges include: Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally , Frances Moore Lappe, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, Mike Wallace and Howard Zinn. All 25 stories are featured in the yearbook, Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News.
In 1996 and 1997, the yearbook won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, celebrating the best in alternative publishing. The release of Project Censored's yearbook has developed into a national alternative press event. In 2003, along with several independent national magazines, over 40 alternative newsweeklies carried the Top 10 Censored stories in metropolitan areas throughout the country, and Project Censored was featured on more than 125 independent talk radio and television shows. Throughout the next year and into the next decade, Project Censored will continue to inform the public, advocate for independent journalism, and strive to spark debate on current issues involving media monopoly.
Project Censored is a national research effort launched in 1976 by Dr. Carl Jensen, professor emeritus of Communications Studies at Sonoma State University . Upon Jensen's retirement in 1996, leadership of the project was passed to associate professor of sociology and media research specialist, Dr. Peter Phillips.
Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2006
Archive of Top 25 Censored News Stories from Past Years
Real News Wire
Check out their amazing resources links
Visit the homepage of Project Censored for important reports you never see in mainstream media, including dangerous problems regarding the increasing consolidation of the mainstream media giants.
Project Censored is a media research group out of Sonoma State University which tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major national news media.
Between 700 and 1000 stories are submitted to Project Censored each year from journalists, scholars, librarians, and concerned citizens around the world. With the help of more than 200 Sonoma State University faculty, students, and community members, Project Censored reviews the story submissions for coverage, content, reliability of sources and national significance. The university community selects 25 stories to submit to the Project Censored panel of judges who then rank them in order of importance. Current or previous national judges include: Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally , Frances Moore Lappe, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, Mike Wallace and Howard Zinn. All 25 stories are featured in the yearbook, Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News.
In 1996 and 1997, the yearbook won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, celebrating the best in alternative publishing. The release of Project Censored's yearbook has developed into a national alternative press event. In 2003, along with several independent national magazines, over 40 alternative newsweeklies carried the Top 10 Censored stories in metropolitan areas throughout the country, and Project Censored was featured on more than 125 independent talk radio and television shows. Throughout the next year and into the next decade, Project Censored will continue to inform the public, advocate for independent journalism, and strive to spark debate on current issues involving media monopoly.
Project Censored is a national research effort launched in 1976 by Dr. Carl Jensen, professor emeritus of Communications Studies at Sonoma State University . Upon Jensen's retirement in 1996, leadership of the project was passed to associate professor of sociology and media research specialist, Dr. Peter Phillips.
Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2006
Archive of Top 25 Censored News Stories from Past Years
Real News Wire
Check out their amazing resources links
Visit the homepage of Project Censored for important reports you never see in mainstream media, including dangerous problems regarding the increasing consolidation of the mainstream media giants.
Boston Research Center for the 21st Center
I came across the BRC through their publication of the Nel Noddings edited Educating Citizens for Global Awareness. They have many more resources for teachers and students on their website:
Boston Research Center for the 21st Century
Boston Research Center for the 21st Century
Remembering Anne Braden
Anne Braden, rights activist, left mark on NKU - Her life was 'inspirational'
Kentucky Post (Covington, KY)
Anne Braden, a longtime civil rights activist from Louisville who died Monday at the age of 81, had a longstanding connection to Northern Kentucky University.
Braden became a part-time instructor at NKU in 1997 and for the past 10 years drove once a week from Louisville to teach a class. She was teaching an honors history course this semester.
"As a student, I loved her," said Terry Lewis, an NKU senior from Florence, who received an A in an honors history course, "Social Justice and Civil Rights," that she took from Braden last year.
"She spent her life fighting for a cause, and it was just inspirational. Her entire life was inspirational."
Braden, who was white, and her late husband, Carl, came to prominence in 1954 when they helped a black family buy a home in an all-white neighborhood near Louisville.
After the black family's efforts to purchase the house had been spurned, the Bradens used the family's money to buy the home and then gave the family the deed.
Through the years, the Bradens continued to champion civil rights. After Carl Braden's death in 1975, Anne Braden remained active in civil rights and other causes. The Bradens are enshrined in the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
At NKU, Braden insisted that her students call her "Anne."
"She didn't consider herself special," said Lewis. "She was just doing what she believed in."
Braden received an honorary degree from NKU in 1999 and NKU President James Votruba said she will be missed.
"Anne was a force in helping us to think more deeply about the role of the university in advancing justice and opportunity for all," according to Votruba.
"She was in the vanguard of the civil rights movement and repeatedly demonstrated her own courage and commitment as she called both her hometown of Louisville and the nation to a new level of commitment to equal rights and justice for all.
"She was an extraordinary person who contributed so much to NKU through her interaction with our faculty, staff and students. She was, in so many ways, a voice of conscience and an eloquent spokesperson for those values that define America and its promise."
Lewis said Braden "literally spent her life trying to do the right thing."
"If we all had that kind of passion about our cause - whatever our cause is - I think this world would be a better place," said Lewis.
Braden wasn't content to be known as a civil rights pioneer; she wanted to remedy today's injustices, according to Lewis.
"Last spring, right before the Kentucky Derby, someone in our class asked her if she was going to the derby and she said, 'I hope I don't have to go, but if things get out of hand because people aren't treating other people nicely, I will,'" recalled Lewis.
"She didn't want to talk about what she did in 1954.
"She wanted to talk about what she was doing today."
Kentucky Post (Covington, KY)
Anne Braden, a longtime civil rights activist from Louisville who died Monday at the age of 81, had a longstanding connection to Northern Kentucky University.
Braden became a part-time instructor at NKU in 1997 and for the past 10 years drove once a week from Louisville to teach a class. She was teaching an honors history course this semester.
"As a student, I loved her," said Terry Lewis, an NKU senior from Florence, who received an A in an honors history course, "Social Justice and Civil Rights," that she took from Braden last year.
"She spent her life fighting for a cause, and it was just inspirational. Her entire life was inspirational."
Braden, who was white, and her late husband, Carl, came to prominence in 1954 when they helped a black family buy a home in an all-white neighborhood near Louisville.
After the black family's efforts to purchase the house had been spurned, the Bradens used the family's money to buy the home and then gave the family the deed.
Through the years, the Bradens continued to champion civil rights. After Carl Braden's death in 1975, Anne Braden remained active in civil rights and other causes. The Bradens are enshrined in the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
At NKU, Braden insisted that her students call her "Anne."
"She didn't consider herself special," said Lewis. "She was just doing what she believed in."
Braden received an honorary degree from NKU in 1999 and NKU President James Votruba said she will be missed.
"Anne was a force in helping us to think more deeply about the role of the university in advancing justice and opportunity for all," according to Votruba.
"She was in the vanguard of the civil rights movement and repeatedly demonstrated her own courage and commitment as she called both her hometown of Louisville and the nation to a new level of commitment to equal rights and justice for all.
"She was an extraordinary person who contributed so much to NKU through her interaction with our faculty, staff and students. She was, in so many ways, a voice of conscience and an eloquent spokesperson for those values that define America and its promise."
Lewis said Braden "literally spent her life trying to do the right thing."
"If we all had that kind of passion about our cause - whatever our cause is - I think this world would be a better place," said Lewis.
Braden wasn't content to be known as a civil rights pioneer; she wanted to remedy today's injustices, according to Lewis.
"Last spring, right before the Kentucky Derby, someone in our class asked her if she was going to the derby and she said, 'I hope I don't have to go, but if things get out of hand because people aren't treating other people nicely, I will,'" recalled Lewis.
"She didn't want to talk about what she did in 1954.
"She wanted to talk about what she was doing today."
Thursday, March 09, 2006
ASK YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO SIGN LETTER SUPPORTING PERKINS FUNDING
ASK YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO SIGN LETTER SUPPORTING PERKINS FUNDING
WHAT: We have another opportunity to encourage Members of Congress to demonstrate their support for career and technical education (CTE). Reps. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), and John Spratt (D-SC) are circulating a bi-partisan “Dear Colleague” letter to their fellow Representatives urging their colleagues to join them on a letter in support of preserving funds for Perkins programs. This letter will be sent to Representatives Ralph Regula (R-OH) and David Obey (D-WI) who are Chairman and Ranking Member, respectively, of the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
The deadline for signatures is the end of the day on Tuesday, March 14th.
A copy of the “Dear Colleague” letter to the Appropriations Committee can be viewed in this PDF copy
The Congressional budget and appropriations process is underway, and FY 2007 promises to be a tight budget year for discretionary programs like Perkins. With the President’s proposed elimination of the program, it is more important than ever that this kind of bi-partisan support for Perkins be demonstrated by Congress.
ACTION NEEDED: Call your Representative starting TODAY, and Urge him or her to sign the Velazquez/Boehlert/Spratt “Dear Colleague” letter supporting funding for Perkins. Let them know that Perkins is working well in your community, and that CTE makes positive investments in America’s future by providing relevant learning experiences for students at both the secondary and postsecondary levels, effective and proven links to skills-building and enhanced academic opportunities and improved employment outcomes; and that employers in your local area continue to need well-trained workers with good skills to compete in the 21st century economy.
If your Representative wishes to sign on to the letter, have him or her contact the legislative assistant handling education issues in Rep. Velazquez’s office or Rep. Boehlert’s office.
To find contact information for your Representative, please visit ACTE’s Legislative Action Center
Please note that members of the Appropriations Committee often will not sign on to letters that are addressed to the Appropriations Committee. Therefore, if your Representative sits on the committee and is not willing to sign on, it does not necessarily mean they do not support funding for CTE. Encourage them to support funding for Perkins as the appropriations bill moves through their committee. The letter is addressed to Representatives Regula (R-OH) and Obey (D-WI), so they will be unlikely to sign on, but if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin, we encourage you to continue to work with these Representatives to demonstrate the value of CTE in your states and to thank them for their continued support. To view a list of members of the House Appropriations Committee, please visit This Website
We encourage you to also forward this alert to others who are concerned about funding for CTE.
For more information on federal funding for CTE, and on the recent Senate “Dear Colleague” please visit This Website
WHAT: We have another opportunity to encourage Members of Congress to demonstrate their support for career and technical education (CTE). Reps. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), and John Spratt (D-SC) are circulating a bi-partisan “Dear Colleague” letter to their fellow Representatives urging their colleagues to join them on a letter in support of preserving funds for Perkins programs. This letter will be sent to Representatives Ralph Regula (R-OH) and David Obey (D-WI) who are Chairman and Ranking Member, respectively, of the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
The deadline for signatures is the end of the day on Tuesday, March 14th.
A copy of the “Dear Colleague” letter to the Appropriations Committee can be viewed in this PDF copy
The Congressional budget and appropriations process is underway, and FY 2007 promises to be a tight budget year for discretionary programs like Perkins. With the President’s proposed elimination of the program, it is more important than ever that this kind of bi-partisan support for Perkins be demonstrated by Congress.
ACTION NEEDED: Call your Representative starting TODAY, and Urge him or her to sign the Velazquez/Boehlert/Spratt “Dear Colleague” letter supporting funding for Perkins. Let them know that Perkins is working well in your community, and that CTE makes positive investments in America’s future by providing relevant learning experiences for students at both the secondary and postsecondary levels, effective and proven links to skills-building and enhanced academic opportunities and improved employment outcomes; and that employers in your local area continue to need well-trained workers with good skills to compete in the 21st century economy.
If your Representative wishes to sign on to the letter, have him or her contact the legislative assistant handling education issues in Rep. Velazquez’s office or Rep. Boehlert’s office.
To find contact information for your Representative, please visit ACTE’s Legislative Action Center
Please note that members of the Appropriations Committee often will not sign on to letters that are addressed to the Appropriations Committee. Therefore, if your Representative sits on the committee and is not willing to sign on, it does not necessarily mean they do not support funding for CTE. Encourage them to support funding for Perkins as the appropriations bill moves through their committee. The letter is addressed to Representatives Regula (R-OH) and Obey (D-WI), so they will be unlikely to sign on, but if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin, we encourage you to continue to work with these Representatives to demonstrate the value of CTE in your states and to thank them for their continued support. To view a list of members of the House Appropriations Committee, please visit This Website
We encourage you to also forward this alert to others who are concerned about funding for CTE.
For more information on federal funding for CTE, and on the recent Senate “Dear Colleague” please visit This Website
Anne Lamont: On God
(Courtesy of Brainwise at Prophet or Madman)
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
--Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
--Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
The Kentucky Theatre: The Passenger
(Announcement courtesy of Rob Sica We have been waiting for this for a long time--I will be there!)
For three days only – 3/10-3/12 – the Kentucky Theatre is screening the restored version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s little-seen 1975 film The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider (“Last Tango in Paris”). Nicholson has for many years jealously protected the distribution rights to the film for a proper release. Don Delillo presented it at last year’s Telluride Film Festival. It ends with a famous seven minute-long tracking shot which required a crane because the camera moves from the interior of a hotel room, through the bars of a window, meanders in a courtyard, and returns to the room.
Though Antonioni’s influence is scarcely discernable in American films (Todd Haynes’ “Safe," Eric Mendelsohn’s “Judy Berlin,” and Jon Jost's films are notable exceptions), his influence pervades the work of many leading contemporary international film-makers -- such as Wong Kar Wai (Hong Kong), Tsai Ming Liang (Taiwan), Bruno Dumont (France), Lucretia Martel (Argentina), Jia Zhanke (China), Michael Haneke (Austria), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Hong Sang-soo (Korea), Nuri Ceylan (Turkey), and Carlos Reygadas (Mexico).
My hope is that if enough folks show up to see this film, it might encourage the Kentucky Theatre to be more ambitious in its selection of international fare.
Reviews
Cinemascope Article
For three days only – 3/10-3/12 – the Kentucky Theatre is screening the restored version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s little-seen 1975 film The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider (“Last Tango in Paris”). Nicholson has for many years jealously protected the distribution rights to the film for a proper release. Don Delillo presented it at last year’s Telluride Film Festival. It ends with a famous seven minute-long tracking shot which required a crane because the camera moves from the interior of a hotel room, through the bars of a window, meanders in a courtyard, and returns to the room.
Though Antonioni’s influence is scarcely discernable in American films (Todd Haynes’ “Safe," Eric Mendelsohn’s “Judy Berlin,” and Jon Jost's films are notable exceptions), his influence pervades the work of many leading contemporary international film-makers -- such as Wong Kar Wai (Hong Kong), Tsai Ming Liang (Taiwan), Bruno Dumont (France), Lucretia Martel (Argentina), Jia Zhanke (China), Michael Haneke (Austria), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Hong Sang-soo (Korea), Nuri Ceylan (Turkey), and Carlos Reygadas (Mexico).
My hope is that if enough folks show up to see this film, it might encourage the Kentucky Theatre to be more ambitious in its selection of international fare.
Reviews
Cinemascope Article
Howard Karger: Throwing Consumers to the Wolves
Throwing Consumers to the Wolves
By Howard Karger
AlterNet
Frank Monroe is one pissed-off federal bankruptcy judge. Just before Christmas, Judge Monroe was forced to deny Guillermo Sosa, an Austin, Texas, house painter, and his wife, Melba Nelly Sosa, emergency bankruptcy protection to avoid foreclosure on their mobile home. While sympathetic to the Sosas, Judge Monroe's hands were tied by the new bankruptcy law. The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) required that the Sosas receive consumer credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy. Unaware of this stipulation, they had failed to do so, making them ineligible.
In his angry ruling [PDF], Monroe wrote that "the parties pushing the passage of the Act had their own agenda … to make more money off the backs of the consumers in this country. … To call BAPCPA a 'consumer protection' act is the grossest of misnomers."
The BAPCPA went into effect on Oct. 17, 2005. Banks and other lenders promised it would stop deadbeats from abusing the bankruptcy system, save billions, and lower interest rates for responsible borrowers. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., predicted the bill would recoup "billions … in losses associated with profligate and abusive bankruptcy filings."
That did not happen. On the contrary, Bankrate data found that the average credit card interest rate actually rose 1 percent in the six months following the passage of the Bankruptcy Act.
Panicked debtors trying to beat the Oct. 17 deadline filed more than 2 million bankruptcy petitions in 2005, 32 percent more than in 2004. Some 500,000 people filed for bankruptcy in the two weeks alone before the Act took effect. This uptick in filings cost Bank of America $320 million, JP Morgan Chase predicted their credit card defaults would top $2.3 billion and Discover Card lost $180 million. On the other hand, credit card companies will undoubtedly make up this loss, and more, in the long run.
Who are the "deadbeats" Congress is trying to weed out?
Leslie Linfield of the Institute for Financial Literacy says, "Almost half [of bankruptcy filers] have incomes below $20,000 a year, and almost 40 percent indicate that their indebtedness is due to illness or injury." The other half may be workers pushed into an economic corner. A 2006 Federal Reserve study found that real median income dropped 6 percent from 2001 to 2004, while average family income fell by 2.3 percent. The gap between stagnant or declining wages and the rising cost of living is partly being made up by debt. For example, Americans who roll over credit card balances owe anywhere from $5,100 to $14,000, depending upon whose numbers are used. High debt levels are fueled by easy credit that helps lessen the pressures on business to increase wages.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By Howard Karger
AlterNet
Frank Monroe is one pissed-off federal bankruptcy judge. Just before Christmas, Judge Monroe was forced to deny Guillermo Sosa, an Austin, Texas, house painter, and his wife, Melba Nelly Sosa, emergency bankruptcy protection to avoid foreclosure on their mobile home. While sympathetic to the Sosas, Judge Monroe's hands were tied by the new bankruptcy law. The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) required that the Sosas receive consumer credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy. Unaware of this stipulation, they had failed to do so, making them ineligible.
In his angry ruling [PDF], Monroe wrote that "the parties pushing the passage of the Act had their own agenda … to make more money off the backs of the consumers in this country. … To call BAPCPA a 'consumer protection' act is the grossest of misnomers."
The BAPCPA went into effect on Oct. 17, 2005. Banks and other lenders promised it would stop deadbeats from abusing the bankruptcy system, save billions, and lower interest rates for responsible borrowers. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., predicted the bill would recoup "billions … in losses associated with profligate and abusive bankruptcy filings."
That did not happen. On the contrary, Bankrate data found that the average credit card interest rate actually rose 1 percent in the six months following the passage of the Bankruptcy Act.
Panicked debtors trying to beat the Oct. 17 deadline filed more than 2 million bankruptcy petitions in 2005, 32 percent more than in 2004. Some 500,000 people filed for bankruptcy in the two weeks alone before the Act took effect. This uptick in filings cost Bank of America $320 million, JP Morgan Chase predicted their credit card defaults would top $2.3 billion and Discover Card lost $180 million. On the other hand, credit card companies will undoubtedly make up this loss, and more, in the long run.
Who are the "deadbeats" Congress is trying to weed out?
Leslie Linfield of the Institute for Financial Literacy says, "Almost half [of bankruptcy filers] have incomes below $20,000 a year, and almost 40 percent indicate that their indebtedness is due to illness or injury." The other half may be workers pushed into an economic corner. A 2006 Federal Reserve study found that real median income dropped 6 percent from 2001 to 2004, while average family income fell by 2.3 percent. The gap between stagnant or declining wages and the rising cost of living is partly being made up by debt. For example, Americans who roll over credit card balances owe anywhere from $5,100 to $14,000, depending upon whose numbers are used. High debt levels are fueled by easy credit that helps lessen the pressures on business to increase wages.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Monday, March 06, 2006
Ricia: Double Expresso #2--State Concern for Women
Ricia, of Impetus Java House, our passionate neighbor to the North, has posted one of the best commentaries I have seen on the new South Dakota law stripping women of the right to an abortion (my phrasing is intentional, their basic rights are being denied by an unjust governor and state). Thanks Ricia... as a male I appreciate your insights into the gender politics of this decision (I recommend everyone check out the original post as it is loaded with important insights and sources)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from Double Expresso #2 - State concern for Women
Interesting that economics and social status, do not entire the fray when speaking to the "interests of the pregnant mother". Men and father are not mentioned either. It is the duty of the state to protect a woman's fundamental role as a Mother, is what they mean. But men are on their own I guess. Family and parenthood and all that women-stuff.
The assumption that the state has insight on any individual's relationship with potential parenthood, is absurd. The state is a political thing & concept. Soon to be parents are individual people. The typical focus on womens role as Mother (not as a Person) surrounding reproductive rights, is deliberate and in keeping with the popularized anti-abortionist profile. This particular strain of 'Mother' has a desirable moral status in society, a Woman does not. Therefore women need someone elses moral compass to keep them properly informed and gallantly protected from making their own choices.
As for the duty of the state? As usual, there is no mention of replacing current options and creating more options. No mention of state support, programs, community initiatives. Let alone that of repairing social-economic potholes, pay equity, implementing paternity and maternity leave policies, improving childcare or health services. And, how will this dutiful state manage the stark increase in orphans (that already crowd into foster homes and adoption agencies), how will they deal with the resulting maternal deaths, suicides, etc ...?
No. The explicit focus here is only upon revoking what choice there is for women whom are already pregnant, to ensure that they remain pregnant (regardless of their circumstances). Not before they are pregnant, not after they give birth. Just upon conception. And the state wants the j-u-s-t-i-c-e system to rule on their behalf (not on the behalf of individual women).
Isn't it possible to assess the needs and possible solutions surrounding reproductive rights and issues that isn't about how-to-control women? Is the state willing to force men into parenthood too? Let us imagine them speaking to men of their reproductive rights and responsibilities... Or, is that just too messy...?
--------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from Double Expresso #2 - State concern for Women
Interesting that economics and social status, do not entire the fray when speaking to the "interests of the pregnant mother". Men and father are not mentioned either. It is the duty of the state to protect a woman's fundamental role as a Mother, is what they mean. But men are on their own I guess. Family and parenthood and all that women-stuff.
The assumption that the state has insight on any individual's relationship with potential parenthood, is absurd. The state is a political thing & concept. Soon to be parents are individual people. The typical focus on womens role as Mother (not as a Person) surrounding reproductive rights, is deliberate and in keeping with the popularized anti-abortionist profile. This particular strain of 'Mother' has a desirable moral status in society, a Woman does not. Therefore women need someone elses moral compass to keep them properly informed and gallantly protected from making their own choices.
As for the duty of the state? As usual, there is no mention of replacing current options and creating more options. No mention of state support, programs, community initiatives. Let alone that of repairing social-economic potholes, pay equity, implementing paternity and maternity leave policies, improving childcare or health services. And, how will this dutiful state manage the stark increase in orphans (that already crowd into foster homes and adoption agencies), how will they deal with the resulting maternal deaths, suicides, etc ...?
No. The explicit focus here is only upon revoking what choice there is for women whom are already pregnant, to ensure that they remain pregnant (regardless of their circumstances). Not before they are pregnant, not after they give birth. Just upon conception. And the state wants the j-u-s-t-i-c-e system to rule on their behalf (not on the behalf of individual women).
Isn't it possible to assess the needs and possible solutions surrounding reproductive rights and issues that isn't about how-to-control women? Is the state willing to force men into parenthood too? Let us imagine them speaking to men of their reproductive rights and responsibilities... Or, is that just too messy...?
Barry Lopez: American Geographies; A Literature of Place
(Lopez is an environmentalist who writes fiction, memoirs and essays. I have always admired his sense of place as an axis of individual/communal meaning, and, just as importantly, broader social/national meanings)
Lopez, Barry. “The American Geographies.” About This Life. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
---. “A Literature of Place.” Portland Magazine (Summer 1997: reposted at Envirolink)
Lopez, Barry. “The American Geographies.” About This Life. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
---. “A Literature of Place.” Portland Magazine (Summer 1997: reposted at Envirolink)
University of Kentucky's Women's Place: Stories of Victimization
(Too much attention by our lawmakers on controlling women's bodies and too little focus on how they are victimized--Thivai)
UK Women's Place is seeking individuals to share their stories of victimization, abuse, and/or violence at the 2006 Take Back the Night event. 36.5% of female students are victims of sexual assault, physical assault, and/or stalking while attending the University of Kentucky. Similarly, 1 in 3 women in Kentucky experience some form of violence in their lifetime. UK Women’s Place is organizing Take Back the Night 2006 on March 29th beginning at 6 pm at Memorial Coliseum. Take Back the Night will include a campus wide march that will conclude with a speak out to shine light on victims of violence and a vigil to raise awareness about the issue of violence against women at Memorial Hall.
If you know an individual who may be interested in speaking out about their personal experience with violence against women, please forward them this information and encourage her or him to contact Dorothy Edwards at Women's Place to discuss the opportunity. We anticipate each individual to speak for 2-5 minutes with the use of a microphone.
Dorothy J. Edwards, Ph.D.
UK Women's Place, Director
153 Bowman Hall
email: dedwa3@email.uky.edu
UK Women's Place is seeking individuals to share their stories of victimization, abuse, and/or violence at the 2006 Take Back the Night event. 36.5% of female students are victims of sexual assault, physical assault, and/or stalking while attending the University of Kentucky. Similarly, 1 in 3 women in Kentucky experience some form of violence in their lifetime. UK Women’s Place is organizing Take Back the Night 2006 on March 29th beginning at 6 pm at Memorial Coliseum. Take Back the Night will include a campus wide march that will conclude with a speak out to shine light on victims of violence and a vigil to raise awareness about the issue of violence against women at Memorial Hall.
If you know an individual who may be interested in speaking out about their personal experience with violence against women, please forward them this information and encourage her or him to contact Dorothy Edwards at Women's Place to discuss the opportunity. We anticipate each individual to speak for 2-5 minutes with the use of a microphone.
Dorothy J. Edwards, Ph.D.
UK Women's Place, Director
153 Bowman Hall
email: dedwa3@email.uky.edu
Manuel Valenzuela: Of the Evil Empire
Of The Evil Empire: Imperialist Devastation of Peoples and the Evils Done in
our Names
By Manuel Valenzuela
Alternative Press Review
Let us for a few moments put aside our lavish lifestyles of fortuitous endowment and providence that have made us blind to the realities of billions of our fellow humans. Let us ignore our plasma televisions, our DVDs, our two-story cookie cutter homes and gas-guzzling SUVs. Let us promise to not open our overstocked pantries and refrigerators, or to go out and eat at one of many corporate controlled franchise restaurants offering vast assortments of gargantuan meals. We should ignore the opulence of our society that dwells permanently in our minds that makes us forget the severe indigence and suffering that transpires beyond our shores and borders. In
short, we should come out of our luxurious bubble that has shielded us from the evils inflicted on billions of humans that have not been as privy to a life of safety and security. Let us traverse the road of reality, sojourning through history and through mirages of hidden truths.
To Read the Entire Essay
our Names
By Manuel Valenzuela
Alternative Press Review
Let us for a few moments put aside our lavish lifestyles of fortuitous endowment and providence that have made us blind to the realities of billions of our fellow humans. Let us ignore our plasma televisions, our DVDs, our two-story cookie cutter homes and gas-guzzling SUVs. Let us promise to not open our overstocked pantries and refrigerators, or to go out and eat at one of many corporate controlled franchise restaurants offering vast assortments of gargantuan meals. We should ignore the opulence of our society that dwells permanently in our minds that makes us forget the severe indigence and suffering that transpires beyond our shores and borders. In
short, we should come out of our luxurious bubble that has shielded us from the evils inflicted on billions of humans that have not been as privy to a life of safety and security. Let us traverse the road of reality, sojourning through history and through mirages of hidden truths.
To Read the Entire Essay
Think About These Two Rulings
South Dakota governor signs abortion ban: Nearly all operations outlawed in direct challenge to Roe v. Wade
MSNBC Hosted Report
Top court backs college military recruiting law: Colleges will lose federal funds if they don’t allow recruiters on campus
MSNBC Hosted Report
MSNBC Hosted Report
Top court backs college military recruiting law: Colleges will lose federal funds if they don’t allow recruiters on campus
MSNBC Hosted Report
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Roy Wagner: The Invention of Culture
Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975.
The idea that man invents his own realities is not a new one ... Nevertheless, the prospect of introducing this idea to ... a culture that wants very much to control its own realities (as all cultures do) is a difficult one. (vii)
“Absolute” objectivity would require that the anthropologist have no biases, and hence no culture at all. (2)
We might actually say that an anthropologist “invents” the culture he believes himself to be studying ... Yet this explanation is only justified if we understand the invention to take place objectively, along the lines of observing and learning, and not as a kind of free fantasy. ... It is only through “invention” of this kind that the abstract significance of culture (and of many another concept) can be grasped, and only through the experienced contrast that his own culture becomes “visible.” In the act of inventing another culture, the anthropologist invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself. (4)
This feeling is known to anthropologists as “culture shock.” In it the local “culture” first manifests itself to the anthropologist through his own inadequacy; against the backdrop of his new surroundings it is he who has become “visible.” The situation has some parallels within our own society: the freshman first entering college, the new army recruit, and anyone else who is compelled to live in “new” or alien surroundings, all have had some taste of this kind of “shock.” Typically the sufferer is depressed and anxious, he may withdraw into himself, or grasp at any chance to communicate with others. To a degree that we seldom realize, we depend on the participation of others in our lives, and upon our own participation in the lives of others. Our success and effectiveness as persons is based upon this participation, and upon an ability to maintain a controlling competence in communicating with others. Culture shock is a loss of the self through the loss of these supports. (6-7)
His efforts to understand the subjects of his research, to make them and their ways meaningful, and to communicate this meaningfulness to others, will grow out of his abilities to make meaning within his own culture. Whatever he “learns” from his subjects will therefore take the form of an extension or superstructure, built upon that which he already knows, and built of that which he already knows. He will “participate” in the subject culture, not in the way a native does, but as someone who is simultaneously enveloped in his own world of meanings, and these meanings will also participate. If we recall what was said earlier about relative objectivity, we remember it is the set of cultural predispositions that an outsider brings with him that make all the difference in his understanding of what is “there.” (8)
If culture were an absolute, objective “thing,” then “learning” it would be the same for all people, native as well as outsider, adult as well as child. But people have all sorts of predispositions and biases, and the notion of culture as an objective, inflexible entity can only be useful as a sort of “prop” to aid the anthropologist in his invention and understanding. For this, and for many other purposes in anthropology, it is necessary to proceed as if culture existed as some monolithic “thing,” but for the purpose of demonstrating how it is that an anthropologist attains his comprehension of another, it is necessary to realize the culture is a “prop.” (8-9)
More:
Nowhere Now Here
Teaching Pictorial Lives
Taking Identity Politics Seriously
Kids in a Phishing Community
Education and the Creative Workforce
The idea that man invents his own realities is not a new one ... Nevertheless, the prospect of introducing this idea to ... a culture that wants very much to control its own realities (as all cultures do) is a difficult one. (vii)
“Absolute” objectivity would require that the anthropologist have no biases, and hence no culture at all. (2)
We might actually say that an anthropologist “invents” the culture he believes himself to be studying ... Yet this explanation is only justified if we understand the invention to take place objectively, along the lines of observing and learning, and not as a kind of free fantasy. ... It is only through “invention” of this kind that the abstract significance of culture (and of many another concept) can be grasped, and only through the experienced contrast that his own culture becomes “visible.” In the act of inventing another culture, the anthropologist invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself. (4)
This feeling is known to anthropologists as “culture shock.” In it the local “culture” first manifests itself to the anthropologist through his own inadequacy; against the backdrop of his new surroundings it is he who has become “visible.” The situation has some parallels within our own society: the freshman first entering college, the new army recruit, and anyone else who is compelled to live in “new” or alien surroundings, all have had some taste of this kind of “shock.” Typically the sufferer is depressed and anxious, he may withdraw into himself, or grasp at any chance to communicate with others. To a degree that we seldom realize, we depend on the participation of others in our lives, and upon our own participation in the lives of others. Our success and effectiveness as persons is based upon this participation, and upon an ability to maintain a controlling competence in communicating with others. Culture shock is a loss of the self through the loss of these supports. (6-7)
His efforts to understand the subjects of his research, to make them and their ways meaningful, and to communicate this meaningfulness to others, will grow out of his abilities to make meaning within his own culture. Whatever he “learns” from his subjects will therefore take the form of an extension or superstructure, built upon that which he already knows, and built of that which he already knows. He will “participate” in the subject culture, not in the way a native does, but as someone who is simultaneously enveloped in his own world of meanings, and these meanings will also participate. If we recall what was said earlier about relative objectivity, we remember it is the set of cultural predispositions that an outsider brings with him that make all the difference in his understanding of what is “there.” (8)
If culture were an absolute, objective “thing,” then “learning” it would be the same for all people, native as well as outsider, adult as well as child. But people have all sorts of predispositions and biases, and the notion of culture as an objective, inflexible entity can only be useful as a sort of “prop” to aid the anthropologist in his invention and understanding. For this, and for many other purposes in anthropology, it is necessary to proceed as if culture existed as some monolithic “thing,” but for the purpose of demonstrating how it is that an anthropologist attains his comprehension of another, it is necessary to realize the culture is a “prop.” (8-9)
More:
Nowhere Now Here
Teaching Pictorial Lives
Taking Identity Politics Seriously
Kids in a Phishing Community
Education and the Creative Workforce
Defining Community/Self; Conceptual Awareness; Textual Positions; H.L. Goodall
(reflective-teaching notes--regular repost when I work with my students on this subject)
We had some great questions about the term "community" when discussing Lippard's essay (and in your responses) and I thought I would just throw in an 'official' definition from Webster's online dictionary(which should be considered as just one of many definitions) of "community" ... we will be contesting and exploring this term throughout the semester (especially in the 3rd unit) ... thanks to those who attempted to tackle/discuss Lippard's challenging and problematic text.
Remember a word like community, democracy, home, love, place, freedom, identity, etc... does not have just 'one' meaning and there are continuous struggles over what they do mean... this is why, in your writing, you want to define and contextualize complex (problematic/contested) words/concepts/ideas.
------------------------------------------------------
Main Entry: com·mu·ni·ty
Pronunciation: k&-'myü-n&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English comunete, from Middle French comuneté, from Latin communitat-, communitas, from communis
Date: 14th century
1 : a unified body of individuals: as a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself (the problems of a large community) c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society (a community of retired persons) e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests (the international community) g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society (the academic community)
2 : society at large
3 a : joint ownership or participation (community of goods) b : common character : LIKENESS (community of interests) c : social activity : FELLOWSHIP d : a social state or condition
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.
According to H.L. Goodall our "textual positions”—“language choices you make to represent what you see” (134)--the selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors. Provides clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. How you use adjectives, adverbs and the level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Goodall, H.L. Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Furthermore, these words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts.
Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt in their essay Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet state that:
"Dialogue in Bakhtin's view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word's meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin's words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. 'Every word,' Bakhtin wrote, 'gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life'"
Goodall, H.L. “Voice, Reflexivity, and Character: The Construction of Identities in Texts.” Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2000: 131-141.
The main questions of this text are laid out in the first paragraph of the excerpt:
The rest of the excerpt is then a response to these beginning questions. What are some of the conclusions that Goodall comes to in this essay?
Read the second chapter out loud—powerful, loaded, confusing... needs to be explained and unpacked ... bring definitions of major terms in the first sentence in that second paragraph.
Definitions:
Persona: (1909, Latin) 1: a character assumed by an author in a written work 2a: an individual’s social facade or front that [esp. psychoanalytic theory] reflects the role in life that the individual is playing. 2b: the personality that a person (as an actor or politician) projects in public.
Ethnography: (1834, French) the study and systematic recording of human cultures; also: a descriptive work produced from such research.
Self: (13th century) noun: 1a: the entire person of an individual. 1b: the realization or embodiment of an abstraction. 2: an individual’s typical character or behavior. 3: the union of elements (as body, emotions, thoughts and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person. 4: personal interest or advantage. 5: material that is part of an individual organism.
Voice: (14th century) 4a: wish, choice, or opinion openly or formally expressed. 4b: right of expression; also, influential power (she has a voice in the matter)
Narrative: (1566) noun: 3: the representation in art of an event or story; also: an example of such a representation. [see story] Story: (Latin, 13c, historia) 1. archaic: history. 2a: an account of incidents or events. 2b: a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question. 4: a widely circulated rumor. 5: LIE; FALSEHOOD.
Character: (14 century) [1: the word character originally refers to the process of engraving, writing, symbol-making. 2: then the meaning of the word shifts to that of representing or portraying, especially in an imagistic sense 3: a feature used to separate distinguishable things into categories 4: the complex of mental and ethical traits marking and often individualizing a person, group, or nation 5 REPUTATION]
Rhetoric: (14th century): 1: the art of speaking or writing effectively [2: the principles and rules of composition] also see, discourse. Discourse: (14th century): 1: archaic the capacity of orderly thought or procedure 2: verbal interchange of ideas, CONVERSATION 3a: a formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject 3b: connected speech or writing 4: social familiarity [relates to the rules of ~ ]
Ethos: (1851, Greek) the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.
(dictionary source: Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition)
Now go through the rest of the second paragraph.
Writerly and Readerly Construct?
Writerly Construct—pages 132-134
... character emerges from the prose intersection of three “positionings” or ways of discovering—and revealing—the influences that shape who you are and what you think about, value, and are prone to believe and do (Goodall, 132).
1) Fixed positions
2) Subjective positions
3) Textual Positions
Page 132—“fixed positions”—personal facts that might influence how you see things, e.g. age, gender, class, race, nationality—factors that don’t change during your writing—often taken for granted.
Page 133—“subjective positions”—“life history and personal experiences” that also have an effect on our research. Usually derived from deeply felt lived experiences because they recall self-defining moments, decisions or turning points in the development of identity/persona. Example, Birth, death, divorce, natural disasters, war, violence, love or illness.
Page 134—“textual positions”—“language choices you make to represent what you see” … selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors. Provides clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. How you use adjectives, adverbs and the level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Page 134—“reflexivity”—begins with asking yourself the same questions that guide your own analysis.
Page 134—reader/writer dialogue—The writer tells the story, the reader interprets it, they communicate back and forth and the story is co-constructed by the reader and the writer. The reader basically compares themselves with the story and the characters/writers experiences/views.
Readerly Construct:
On page 134: “texts don’t belong to writers, they belong to readers”
Need of writers to be aware of possible interpretations of their words—careful construction of sentences, paragraphs—contextualization of information, mappings of broader connections and references—development of dialogic and dialectic relationships with the reader—awareness of intended audience’s experience/worldview.
“And that doesn’t even get close to the influence that you, the reader, have on what is happening between us, on this page, now (Goodall, 141).”
Stuart Hall’s Three Ways of Reading an Encoded Textual Message:
• dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: the reader fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the result of any conscious intention on the part of the author(s)) - in such a stance the code seems 'natural' and 'transparent';
• negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests (local and personal conditions may be seen as exceptions to the general rule) - this position involves contradictions;
• oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast produced on behalf of a political party they normally vote against).
Take a look at Mikhail Bakhtin’s quote on page 140 ... what does this say about our notion of the individual construction of meaning and gathering of knowledge—especially in the sense of creating a writerly persona. What do you think of Goodall’s statement that “Voice, like consciousness, is derivative”?
The soul of good writing:
... the “soul” of good writing is the deployment of a writer’s “coming to know” perspective on selves, contexts, and others. It is the substance—both argumentative and poetic—out of which we create, constitute, and live meaningfully within the stories of our lives. (Goodall, 137)
REFLEXIVITY:
... the process of personally and academically reflecting on lived experiences in ways that reveal the deep connections between the writer and her or his subject. To be “reflexive” means to turn back on our self the lens through which we are interpreting the world. It “implies a shift in our understanding of data and its collection—something that is accomplished through detachment, internal dialogue, and constant (and intensive) scrutiny of ‘what I know’ and ‘how I know it’” (Goodall, 137)
“Reflexivity begins with asking yourself the same questions that guide your analysis and interpretation of others. These questions should be though of as navigation instruments, because asking them puts you on a particular language highway wherein the route itself is defined by words that otherwise might not have ever been spoken. (Goodall, 141-142)
ORIGINALITY:
A very important statement by Goodall is when he says that “there are no truly original voices” (141). What is disturbing about that statement? What is encouraging? So then, what does it mean when someone says that a writer has an original voice?
“When says ‘hers is an original voice,” what they usually mean is ‘here is someone who is writing in—filling in—a vital gap between all that I have read and lived through, and the result is something that speaks to me in a way that no other voice ever has.’ In many ways, this sentiment is very much like meeting someone you are suddenly and strongly attracted to, in whose shared conversation you find new meaning, in whose voice, in whose questions, you find a path to answers you are searching for. The voice of the other in this relationship is “original” because it speaks to your heart, because you haven’t heard it before, and because you closely identify with it. (141)
“Originality in writing, as in all relationships, is never a solo act (Goodall, 141)”
You might have your students approach their course readings by analyzing how authors' construct their authorial character/rhetorical ethos (writerly construct, using Goodall's hints). Also encourage them to be reflective about how they are responding to the readings—what in their experience/background shapes the way they respond to the essays (readerly construct).
We had some great questions about the term "community" when discussing Lippard's essay (and in your responses) and I thought I would just throw in an 'official' definition from Webster's online dictionary(which should be considered as just one of many definitions) of "community" ... we will be contesting and exploring this term throughout the semester (especially in the 3rd unit) ... thanks to those who attempted to tackle/discuss Lippard's challenging and problematic text.
Remember a word like community, democracy, home, love, place, freedom, identity, etc... does not have just 'one' meaning and there are continuous struggles over what they do mean... this is why, in your writing, you want to define and contextualize complex (problematic/contested) words/concepts/ideas.
------------------------------------------------------
Main Entry: com·mu·ni·ty
Pronunciation: k&-'myü-n&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English comunete, from Middle French comuneté, from Latin communitat-, communitas, from communis
Date: 14th century
1 : a unified body of individuals: as a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself (the problems of a large community) c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society (a community of retired persons) e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests (the international community) g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society (the academic community)
2 : society at large
3 a : joint ownership or participation (community of goods) b : common character : LIKENESS (community of interests) c : social activity : FELLOWSHIP d : a social state or condition
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.
According to H.L. Goodall our "textual positions”—“language choices you make to represent what you see” (134)--the selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors. Provides clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. How you use adjectives, adverbs and the level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Goodall, H.L. Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Furthermore, these words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts.
Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt in their essay Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet state that:
"Dialogue in Bakhtin's view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word's meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin's words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. 'Every word,' Bakhtin wrote, 'gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life'"
Goodall, H.L. “Voice, Reflexivity, and Character: The Construction of Identities in Texts.” Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2000: 131-141.
The main questions of this text are laid out in the first paragraph of the excerpt:
Who are you?
Who are you when you write?
Who are you in your writing? What are the differences, if any? If there are differences, are they ones that matter? To the work? To your audience? To those whom you’ve studied? To you? (Goodall, 131)
The rest of the excerpt is then a response to these beginning questions. What are some of the conclusions that Goodall comes to in this essay?
Read the second chapter out loud—powerful, loaded, confusing... needs to be explained and unpacked ... bring definitions of major terms in the first sentence in that second paragraph.
Definitions:
Persona: (1909, Latin) 1: a character assumed by an author in a written work 2a: an individual’s social facade or front that [esp. psychoanalytic theory] reflects the role in life that the individual is playing. 2b: the personality that a person (as an actor or politician) projects in public.
Ethnography: (1834, French) the study and systematic recording of human cultures; also: a descriptive work produced from such research.
Self: (13th century) noun: 1a: the entire person of an individual. 1b: the realization or embodiment of an abstraction. 2: an individual’s typical character or behavior. 3: the union of elements (as body, emotions, thoughts and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person. 4: personal interest or advantage. 5: material that is part of an individual organism.
Voice: (14th century) 4a: wish, choice, or opinion openly or formally expressed. 4b: right of expression; also, influential power (she has a voice in the matter)
Narrative: (1566) noun: 3: the representation in art of an event or story; also: an example of such a representation. [see story] Story: (Latin, 13c, historia) 1. archaic: history. 2a: an account of incidents or events. 2b: a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question. 4: a widely circulated rumor. 5: LIE; FALSEHOOD.
Character: (14 century) [1: the word character originally refers to the process of engraving, writing, symbol-making. 2: then the meaning of the word shifts to that of representing or portraying, especially in an imagistic sense 3: a feature used to separate distinguishable things into categories 4: the complex of mental and ethical traits marking and often individualizing a person, group, or nation 5 REPUTATION]
Rhetoric: (14th century): 1: the art of speaking or writing effectively [2: the principles and rules of composition] also see, discourse. Discourse: (14th century): 1: archaic the capacity of orderly thought or procedure 2: verbal interchange of ideas, CONVERSATION 3a: a formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject 3b: connected speech or writing 4: social familiarity [relates to the rules of ~ ]
Ethos: (1851, Greek) the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.
(dictionary source: Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition)
Now go through the rest of the second paragraph.
Writerly and Readerly Construct?
Writerly Construct—pages 132-134
... character emerges from the prose intersection of three “positionings” or ways of discovering—and revealing—the influences that shape who you are and what you think about, value, and are prone to believe and do (Goodall, 132).
1) Fixed positions
2) Subjective positions
3) Textual Positions
Page 132—“fixed positions”—personal facts that might influence how you see things, e.g. age, gender, class, race, nationality—factors that don’t change during your writing—often taken for granted.
Page 133—“subjective positions”—“life history and personal experiences” that also have an effect on our research. Usually derived from deeply felt lived experiences because they recall self-defining moments, decisions or turning points in the development of identity/persona. Example, Birth, death, divorce, natural disasters, war, violence, love or illness.
Page 134—“textual positions”—“language choices you make to represent what you see” … selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors. Provides clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. How you use adjectives, adverbs and the level of emotional intensity are all signs of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Page 134—“reflexivity”—begins with asking yourself the same questions that guide your own analysis.
Page 134—reader/writer dialogue—The writer tells the story, the reader interprets it, they communicate back and forth and the story is co-constructed by the reader and the writer. The reader basically compares themselves with the story and the characters/writers experiences/views.
Readerly Construct:
On page 134: “texts don’t belong to writers, they belong to readers”
Need of writers to be aware of possible interpretations of their words—careful construction of sentences, paragraphs—contextualization of information, mappings of broader connections and references—development of dialogic and dialectic relationships with the reader—awareness of intended audience’s experience/worldview.
“And that doesn’t even get close to the influence that you, the reader, have on what is happening between us, on this page, now (Goodall, 141).”
Stuart Hall’s Three Ways of Reading an Encoded Textual Message:
• dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: the reader fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the result of any conscious intention on the part of the author(s)) - in such a stance the code seems 'natural' and 'transparent';
• negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests (local and personal conditions may be seen as exceptions to the general rule) - this position involves contradictions;
• oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast produced on behalf of a political party they normally vote against).
Take a look at Mikhail Bakhtin’s quote on page 140 ... what does this say about our notion of the individual construction of meaning and gathering of knowledge—especially in the sense of creating a writerly persona. What do you think of Goodall’s statement that “Voice, like consciousness, is derivative”?
The soul of good writing:
... the “soul” of good writing is the deployment of a writer’s “coming to know” perspective on selves, contexts, and others. It is the substance—both argumentative and poetic—out of which we create, constitute, and live meaningfully within the stories of our lives. (Goodall, 137)
REFLEXIVITY:
... the process of personally and academically reflecting on lived experiences in ways that reveal the deep connections between the writer and her or his subject. To be “reflexive” means to turn back on our self the lens through which we are interpreting the world. It “implies a shift in our understanding of data and its collection—something that is accomplished through detachment, internal dialogue, and constant (and intensive) scrutiny of ‘what I know’ and ‘how I know it’” (Goodall, 137)
“Reflexivity begins with asking yourself the same questions that guide your analysis and interpretation of others. These questions should be though of as navigation instruments, because asking them puts you on a particular language highway wherein the route itself is defined by words that otherwise might not have ever been spoken. (Goodall, 141-142)
ORIGINALITY:
A very important statement by Goodall is when he says that “there are no truly original voices” (141). What is disturbing about that statement? What is encouraging? So then, what does it mean when someone says that a writer has an original voice?
“When says ‘hers is an original voice,” what they usually mean is ‘here is someone who is writing in—filling in—a vital gap between all that I have read and lived through, and the result is something that speaks to me in a way that no other voice ever has.’ In many ways, this sentiment is very much like meeting someone you are suddenly and strongly attracted to, in whose shared conversation you find new meaning, in whose voice, in whose questions, you find a path to answers you are searching for. The voice of the other in this relationship is “original” because it speaks to your heart, because you haven’t heard it before, and because you closely identify with it. (141)
“Originality in writing, as in all relationships, is never a solo act (Goodall, 141)”
You might have your students approach their course readings by analyzing how authors' construct their authorial character/rhetorical ethos (writerly construct, using Goodall's hints). Also encourage them to be reflective about how they are responding to the readings—what in their experience/background shapes the way they respond to the essays (readerly construct).
A Quote Collection Derived from Michel Foucault's "The Minimalist Self"
(Thanks to Brainy Heart who sent me off searching with her citing of the first quote in her profile...)
From Michel Foucault, "The Minimalist Self":
"For me intellectual work is related to what you would call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself. I believe my problem is the strange relationship between knowledge, scholarship, theory and real history. I know very well, and I think I knew it from the moment when I was a child, that knowledge can do nothing for transforming the world. Maybe I am wrong. And I am sure I am wrong from a theoretical point of view for I know very well that knowledge has transformed the world. ... I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. That's the reason also why, when people say, 'Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,' my answer is [laughter] 'Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?' This transformation of one's self by one's own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?"
From Foucault, The Use of Pleasure—v. 2 History of Sexuality, pp 8-9:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple: I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The “essay”—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication—is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.
From Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, pp. 207-208.
[T]here exists ... a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire social network. Intellectuals are themselves part of this system of power—the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that would transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse.”
Ivan Illich from Deschooling Society, p. 58:
People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the ... ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits.
From B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948 utopian novel by behaviorist psychologist):
All that happens is contained in an original plan, yet at every stage the individual seems to be making choices and determining the outcome.... Our members are practically always doing what they want to do—what they “choose” to do—but we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community. Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.
From Michel Foucault, "The Minimalist Self":
"For me intellectual work is related to what you would call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself. I believe my problem is the strange relationship between knowledge, scholarship, theory and real history. I know very well, and I think I knew it from the moment when I was a child, that knowledge can do nothing for transforming the world. Maybe I am wrong. And I am sure I am wrong from a theoretical point of view for I know very well that knowledge has transformed the world. ... I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. That's the reason also why, when people say, 'Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,' my answer is [laughter] 'Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?' This transformation of one's self by one's own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?"
From Foucault, The Use of Pleasure—v. 2 History of Sexuality, pp 8-9:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple: I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The “essay”—which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication—is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.
From Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, pp. 207-208.
[T]here exists ... a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire social network. Intellectuals are themselves part of this system of power—the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that would transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse.”
Ivan Illich from Deschooling Society, p. 58:
People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the ... ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits.
From B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948 utopian novel by behaviorist psychologist):
All that happens is contained in an original plan, yet at every stage the individual seems to be making choices and determining the outcome.... Our members are practically always doing what they want to do—what they “choose” to do—but we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community. Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.
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