Autobiography through My Hair

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An entirely frivolous post: a visual history of my hair.

On the left is the reason why I cut my hair in the mid-eighties: it was so appealing for babies to yank on. I have had short hair ever since. Now that my children are grown up, I am going to try and grow my hair out. It may put me over the edge! Just like a baby, though, I may enjoy playing with it, if I ever have enough patience to let it grow out.

“All that We Let In”

Metaphorically speaking, I agree with the lyrics of The Indigo Girls’ song when they sing “we’re better off for all that we let in.” The song reminds me to be open to challenges and growth, but of course sometimes “all” the suffering of the world is too much and needs to be balanced by celebration and laughter. It is a never-ending calibration of the self.

I have been thinking about these lyrics in terms of whiteness and racism, prompted by a small reading and discussion group that I attended this past week. I am always struck by how complicated racism is, because systems and people are so complex, obviously.  But what is not as obvious is how the complexity can offer a dodge for dealing with real oppressions. How tempting it is to throw up my hands and say, “it is so complicated!” Conversations among us shift quickly from race to issues of class, academic hierarchies, gender, ableism, and sexual orientation. What is avoidance, what is recognition of multidimensional exclusions? I come back to the idea of an imperfect balance: sometimes I fall, committing a microaggression or even a major aggression in some thoughtless way; other times I sway, righting myself at the last minute and reflecting on a “near miss;” perhaps I occasionally get it. I assiduously avoid confrontation, failing to call out others’ behaviors that are offensive or problematic. I can rationalize my behavior as that of a “nice girl” who doesn’t want to publicly shame others, but in the end, I am ducking the job I need to do.

I believe that I am racist because I live in a racist society, full of injustices to so many people, and that we are all hobbled and seriously out of whack by the way the systems in which we live scar all of us, killing so many, too soon. Perhaps by blaming “the system” I am also ducking the challenge to heal myself. So, let me (re)commit to trying to love my imperfect self, which includes healing the fear of anger and the stuckness of habit. Also in the song by the Indigo Girls quoted above is the line: “The greatest gift of life is to know love.” It’s a powerful, but difficult, gift.

The Resilience of Meaning

Stephen Willats is interested in both information networks and networks of meaning, each connected to real people in real locations. In Willats’ art, these networks intersect and overlap in complex ways; words, pauses, gestures, posture, and spaces between, all contribute both information and meaning to exchanges that are captured as “Data Stream: A Portrait of New York” (2011). For Willats’ one man exhibition at Reena Spaulings on East Broadway in New York’s Chinatown (The Strange Attractor, Sept 17- October 23, 2011), he created a long, two-sided wall for us to scan, or crane or squat to study. Ten rows of 57 images and texts of specific individuals make up a grid on this wall, recording parts of Delancey Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City in March 2011.

How does one relate to these images and data? Willats invites us to join him and co-create our own ontology; we perform our becoming in the gallery as we engage with the installation. Information as images and text is mounted down low, in the middle and up high; we parse it for ourselves, connecting to some bits and not to others. We study the photographs, rubbings, and words, seeing aspects of our lives captured visually, but only partially. We make our own meanings in relation to the complexity of a “strange attractor.” As time moves on, and/or new visitors and objects are juxtaposed, our constructed meanings shift again and again.

While my title above comes from Tiziana Terranova’s 2004 essay examining the cultural politics of information, Willats takes his title from the mathematical concept that cybernetician Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) adapted to his concerns. A strange attractor is both a geometrical pattern characterizing a complex, chaotic system, and a dynamic object that is dissipating into chaos. The tension inherent in this dynamic pattern sustains a tenuous convergence akin to learning. For von Foerster, a “strange attractor” was one way to understand mid-century modern life, helping to define what is humanly knowable or not. Second-order cyberneticians like von Foerster aimed to generalize the feedback and control mechanisms from engineering and science to focus on the unpredictable, open relationships in society. Similarly, Willats’ colleague and mentor, Gordon Pask (1928-1996) and other scientists such as W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972), used the “black box” problem as a means of understanding not only what we know (epistemology), but also how we know it (ontology).

Scholar of science studies Andrew Pickering noted that “Black Box ontology is a performative image of the world. A Black Box is something that does something, that one does something to, and that does something back—a partner in, as I would say, a dance of agency.” Willats and his collaborators, with recording devices, still and video cameras, performed together up and down New York streets on two cold and wet days last March, creating multiple views of the city that, in turn, help us see and understand the give-and-take between objects and people in new ways.

Prairie Alert: Act NOW!

Today, David Monk asked help spreading the word about this state of affairs:

“Heartland Pathways has received very late notification from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) that an important relocated remnant prairie at the I-57 rest stop near Pesotum is about to be destroyed to make way for expanding sewage facilities. This prairie has genetic and ambient value in a region that has virtually no original prairie left.

The job has been scheduled; the bulldozers come in on Tuesday, September 6.

The adjacent farmer is willing to consider selling land which would allow the proposed facilities to be located farther south, so that the prairie could be saved. This prairie is a prime location for visitors and education.

We are requesting that the project be put on hold for a week so the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) and local natural history experts can discuss the possibility of re-locating the new sewer facilities to the proposed farmland site.

There is possibly both federal and state money involved in this million dollar project. We have contacted both Party’s representatives and senators and Department of Transportation jurisdictions.

That we have not been notified in this and other situations is of concern for this and future projects involving natural history concerns.

Please email, requesting a hold on the project, to:

Ann Schneider, Secretary, IDOT c/o lisa.kavanagh@illinois.gov (subject Urgent: attn: Secretary Ann Schneider)

Marc Miller, Director of IDNR marc.miller@illinois.gov

PROPOSED TEXT OF EMAIL:

“I have become aware of the scheduled destruction of important prairie at the rest stop on I-57 north of Pesotum in order to expand sanitary treatment plant facilities. This work is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, September 6, so the matter is urgent.

I am adding my voice to others to request a hold on this project until IDOT, IDNR and local prairie experts can consider the possibility of re-locating the sewer expansion to a site that would save an irreplaceable piece of prairie. An adjacent farmer is willing to discuss selling land for this purpose.

Thanks for your last minute support.”

Kudos to David Monk for his persistent, energetic efforts to restore and save the prairie!

In Need of Some Sociological Imagination

I spent much of my week distracted and distraught by the demonstrations and confrontations in London, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool, to name some of the locations of unrest this August. Perhaps I was particularly tuned in to that part of the world because in June I was working in London and Bristol, and in September I will be in Liverpool at the ReWire conference. In Bristol, I was working with the Knowle West Media Centre on the University of Local Knowledge; in London, I was working with Stephen Willats, researching his artworks co-created with residents of housing estates, such as Peckham in south London, where some of the violence occurred.

I was grateful to find a few posts on the Internet that helped me situate the events a bit: first was HarpyMarx’s post, “When Will We Get Justice?” from August 7, 2011.  He has since posted more reflections and some photos of damage in Brixton (London).

Mute Magazine compiled videos–called “Riot Round-up”–that filled in some blanks for me:  Mute also linked to a lengthy post by Evan Calder Williams, “An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting (In Two Parts),” which I haven’t had time to read but seems to be an effort to establish common ground, with some irony.

Then Hipmama’s thoughtful commentary, “Letter from London” by Bee Lavender, an ex-pat woman from the United States, reflected on “the shattering rage”: “In a time of economic instability and high unemployment children have lost on every level, specifically around education. University is a complicated, fraught goal for kids who grow up in poverty, but at least it was a goal until a few months ago. Now they can’t afford the fees, and they know it.”

Christian Fuchs’ post on “Social Media and the UK Riots,” noted: “Focusing on technology (as cause of or solution for riots) is the ideological search for control, simplicity and predictability in a situation of high complexity, unpredictability and uncertainty. It is also an expression of fear. It projects society’s guilt and shame into objects. Explanations are not sought in complex social relations, but in the fetishism of things.”

And today’s find was “Is a social media-fuelled uprising the worst case scenario? Elements for a sociology of UK riots” by Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro, jointly posted on Tubaro’s blog and Casilli’s blog. These two social scientists model civil violence, adapting the 2002 work of Josh Epstein.

Most of these links came from friends on Facebook, for those of you tracking social networks.

In 1959, C. Wright Mills published his book, The Sociological Imagination, in which he wrote about social problems as “troubles” or “issues.” As Susan Nall Bales recently noted, citing Mills: “Issues are public matters; troubles are private matters.” (Mills 1961, 8-9; Bales 2009, 17) What I have taken away so far from the mass media coverage as well as politicians’ statements, is that we are in need of “sociological imagination” that would reframe the tragic murders, injuries, and brutality from individual acts (which indeed they are) and single episodes (which they also are) as themes, as issues of societal structures. Not only do I think this is important because of the need to understand the contexts of the UK violence, but also I think it matters because it might allow us to direct attention to policies, policies that we can help to change through debate, discussion, and action in the streets. In other words, I think focusing on a young person in a hoodie looting a lute (I kid you not) or on thuggery does little to support a discussion about social safety nets, educational access, poverty and racism.

The article by Susan Nall Bales that I mentioned is “The Trouble with Issues: The Case for Intentional Framing,” New Directions for Youth Development no. 124, Winter 2009, 13-27.

Engaged vs. Entrepreneurial Universities

One keynote address at the recent Erasing Boundaries symposium was by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., from the University of Buffalo Center for Urban Studies; it was entitled “The Engaged versus the Entrepreneurial University: How Neighborhoods Matter.” (See earlier posts for descriptions of the symposium.) Taylor posited these types of universities as two distinct, indeed opposing, models. Arguing that “distressed neighborhoods” are the single most important domestic problem of our era, Taylor compellingly and passionately argued for the engaged university—a people-centered, egalitarian, institution–to be on the ground and ever-present in the effort to ameliorate this distress and radically transform these spaces. He acknowledged that the distress is tangled and iterative, and also a question of exploitation and oppression. Currently these neighborhoods are “urban factories that produce wasted lives.” Taylor quoted historian Ira Harkavy’s 2007 book (co-authored with Lee Benson and John Puckett), Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform, suggesting that the university is in the third stage of revolution toward an engaged, democratic and egalitarian system. (The first stage began in 1876 with Johns Hopkins and the first research university; the second, in 1945, with Vannevar Bush pushing BIG science to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the resultant federal-university partnerships, the Cold War entrepreneurial university.) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder started the third revolution, according to this analysis, with urban uprisings and student unrest pushing for historically-white universities to open their doors to the previously excluded. Sometimes these efforts differed from past “ivory towers” in that they emphasized addressing urgent problems through community collaboration. Taylor mentioned Campus Compact and the Carnegie Civic Engagement classification as evidence of this trend. The Anchor Institutions Task Force, coordinated by Marga Consulting, was launched in 1992, to support academic units in tackling community issues.

Threatening these efforts, though, is the pull toward the entrepreneurial university model, given a manifesto-like framework in Burton Clark’s 1998 book, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation, based on a business creed. Faced with dire financial conditions, universities are shifting toward a growth model and commercialized activities such as consultancies and R&D. This encourages the emphasis on STEM education, and de-emphasizes humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the university is retreating from higher education’s commitment to social justice. Business and economic impacts seem to guide decision-making. (I took copious notes, but apologies to Dr. Taylor if this summary is a bit off-the-mark.)

Taylor then presented three conceptual issues related to distressed neighborhoods.

1. In terms of place, these sites are not neutral. There is a synergy between people, physical and social environments. People are connected to their neighborhoods and each other, so these connections must be acknowledged and taken into account.

2. The aggregate of socio-economic problems and hopelessness must be addressed in a relational context. Schools, families, violence, obesity have wicked, reinforcing aspects.

3. Neighborhoods must be viewed through a lens of social and spatial injustice, and in terms of larger freedoms, to promote human flourishing.

Distress is a result of policies and practices that reinforce and exacerbate the distress. Now these neighborhoods are profit-making sites, where the misery of the residents is integral to profit. (Taylor noted an article by Eric Schlosser in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1998 about the prison-industrial complex.) We must transform these neighborhoods in collaboration with the residents. This is a good point to plug George Lipsitz’s latest book, How Racism Takes Place (Temple University Press, 2011), and Ed Soja’s book, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minnesota, 2010).

Taylor ended with a brief slide show on his work with the Fruit Belt neighborhood near downtown Buffalo, using the neighborhood as the classroom, and linking school experiences with the lives of the students. The aim of the Futures Academy K-8 public school was to create a mini-educational pipeline married to comprehensive redevelopment, using urban planning simulations, urban agriculture, art, and other approaches. The key is synergy: do what you do, but do it in a highly coordinated, strategic way.

Case Studies of Engagement

At the recent Erasing Boundaries symposium, there were so many sessions with fascinating case studies of people’s engagements. (See “Spaces of Connection” post below for more information on this symposium.)

• Jocelyn Zanzot (Auburn) spoke about the Rural Landscape Studio in Macon County, Alabama, in which she and her students worked with the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church to represent painful and deep histories. Shiloh was one location where people were selected for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; there is also a cemetery from the 1860s and a school that was created out of the partnership of Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington.
• Sujata Shetty (University of Toledo) spoke about her challenging inter-institutional work with Bowling Green State’s architecture students and her own planning students to address Toledo’s “shrinking.” Others spoke about the ways in which federal regulations limit what can be done with residents of public housing, but pointed to alternative management and ownership that is being tried in the Bronx, and participatory budgeting that has some legs in Chicago.
• Irma Ramirez (CalPoly-Pomona) spoke about “Transnational Borders and their Role in Architectural Education.” She sought out non-profit organizations in Tijuana, and challenged students to collaborate across cultures and languages over the past six years. Tijuana has 1.5 million people! She stressed looking for assets, such as incredible resourcefulness. Cal Poly-Familia Corazon developed a sustainable housing prototype, working across campus, and also built a model on campus. She noted that her work gained respect from her colleagues after it was co-awarded the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards’ Grand Prize for sustainable housing in Tijuana, Mexico. New project types are now in progress. Another project was to address deteriorating neighborhood announcement boards. Students designed and built twenty Infostructures; these have become multi-functional artifacts.
• Abby Harmon closed out the last session of the second day with a thoughtful reflection on teaching a course five times at the University of Illinois that is intended to “engage” students in the College of Fine and Applied Arts with issues of social justice. Abby quoted powerful writers, such as Patricia Collins Hill, and spoke about her efforts with the students to break down a “static sense of self” and critique the “helping” idea harbored by a number of us.

Local, Global and Digital Engagements

As noted in the previous post, I was able to attend the Erasing Boundaries Project symposium in April 2011 in New York City. The project is a collaboration among landscape architecture, architecture, and planning faculties, students and community partners. The two days in New York were packed with stimulating presentations and lectures. Kudos to the organizers: Peter Aeschbacher and Mallika Bose at Penn State, Cheryl Doble at SUNY-Environmental Science and Forestry, Sigmund Shipp at Hunter College, and Paula Horrigan from Cornell. This was a huge undertaking and they filled it with two keynotes and twelve sessions over two days. Just to give a taste and overview of some presentations:

• Deborah Georg from Ohio State presented “A Proposal for Assessment of Community Impacts from Studio-Based Service-Learning Work.” She provided a visualization of the problematic timelines of academic calendars and community needs. Just seeing the disconnected schedules among faculty, student and community efforts underscored the importance of evaluating whether service-learning actually does any good. What she described as “Community-Centered Investment Assessment Scoring” (CCIAS) ranks and evaluates how communities fare over time, quantitatively. I hope she publishes this work.

• Kofi Boone, who wasn’t able to attend, provided a video of his work at North Carolina State on “Cellphone Diaries.” AT&T donated phones and students were “tech buddies” on walks with elders in historically-layered Chavis Park in Raleigh. Fifty-eight digital videos were made, with the observation that being in the place itself encouraged longer narratives and richer memories.

• David Scobey, now executive dean of The New School, gave a keynote, “The Place of Engaged Learning in a Glocal and Virtual University.” He made the point that collaboration is intellectually generative and crucial, but not enough. He told the story of Broadway Park in Ann Arbor and the effort to get the University of Michigan to be an institutional citizen, a steward of the place in which the university resides, but also how the local is at the same time global, with new immigrants and digital interactions. Another example that resonated with a recent conversation that I had with the Krannert Center’s Engagement Director, Sam Smith, about his work in Mali, New York City, and Urbana, was Scobey’s involvement with the Center for Community Partnership at Bates College. There he worked with Somali immigrants who have moved into the area on a project called Rivers of Immigration, with digital storytelling as a component. Bates College students then started going to Somali refugee camps to amplify the stories from Maine. These are networks of close and faraway that collapse into each other. Scobey’s work reminded me of Faranak Miraftab’s multi-dimensional work in Beardstown, IL, with Mexican, West African and white folks, and their complicated connections to the Cargill plant and the prison in the area.

Spaces of Connection

The Erasing Boundaries Project hosted a national symposium in April 2011 in New York City called “Educating at the Boundaries: Community Matters.” The project is a collaboration among landscape architecture, architecture and planning faculties, students and community partners. This was the second symposium; the first was held in 2008. The goals include examining the pedagogy of service-learning and supporting each other to make interactions as effective and as powerful as possible. The group has already assembled an edited volume due out in August 2011, Service-Learning in Design and Planning, edited by Tom Angotti, Cheryl Doble and Paula Horrigan (New Village Press). They also have three projects for which they are recruiting participants: the Case Study Framework, which aims to be a tool for developing and structuring service-learning courses; the Evaluation Project, which would provide a better understanding of impacts; and the Awards Program to raise visibility of excellent approaches.

With funding from the Youth Community Informatics grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, I was able to attend Erasing Boundaries as part of a Community Informatics Initiative (CII) team to present a poster with Deven Gibbs, School of Architecture, and Debarah McFarland, Program Coordinator of the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club in Champaign. Martin Wolske, CII Senior Research Scientist, also contributed to the poster, “Spaces of Connection: Designing a High-Tech Active Learning Space for Youth.” A very brief summary of Deven’s design for the Club, in consultation with Ms. McFarland, is that she used research conducted during an independent study with me, and then in Martin’s Community Informatics Studio last summer to create a space at the Club for connectedness online and in person. Deven made a YouTube video to promote the idea. Martin’s class was able to realize one redesign in East St. Louis. The next steps for Champaign include working with Club youth to build several FlexiDesks that enable collaborative or individual work on computers, because the desks can be configured in a variety of ways. We need to find a contractor who can help with electrical and carpentry tasks; we may work with Parkland on some of the construction, and Martin’s class in Fall 2011 will probably work with the Club to identify tech needs. Ms. McFarland and Deven were fantastic presenters in New York, making a strong case for “community matters.” If the Club can become a hub for “everything high tech” in its neighborhood—it is near downtown Champaign–as Ms. McFarland said, it will draw in not only youth, but also adults and become an area center for community development. This would be a huge contribution because the area needs a “center.”

Of Rockets and Humanities

Speaking a year ago at the 50 Years of Public Computing at UI symposium (April 15, 2010), Professor Marc Snir noted that technologists at times have been uninterested in the outcomes of their inventions: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” Of Community Informatics (CI), Snir noted: “CI cares where the IT [information technology] rockets come down. That concern is an integral part of IT research.” Snir went on to argue that IT can, is and must be a force for good, contributing to the democratization of knowledge, challenging power relations in the process. Technologies change society, he noted, with changes in the way we process information. Handmade items now become precious; likewise, “brain thought” will be rarer and more valuable than machine thought.

Universities are information organizations, as Snir put it. IT should be affecting them, but teaching, research and organization are remarkably the same these days. A fundamental assumption is that a professor is in a position of authority, but knowledge workers (such as university professors) will be increasingly obsolete. We are not really able to see what is needed, but much education happens outside of the classroom. Prof. Richard J. Light’s study at Harvard, The College Experience: Blueprint for Success, showed that collaborative environments help all of us integrate knowledge, and that teaching by doing contributes to success. (See also, Making the Most of College: Students Speak their Minds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)

Other points Snir made:

· Information flows are lateral, meaning decision processes are less hierarchical

· Virtual ad-hoc processes will continuously change geographically distributed organizations

· Data is cheap; a key skill is knowing how to find or create data

· Self-service is cheaper

· Online education needs to increase to optimize education when and where needed

· Citizen and community science needs assessment measures

I came across these notes while cleaning my office, and they resonate with another talk I attended recently, that by David Theo Goldberg, “The Afterlife of the Humanities.” With Cathy N. Davidson, Goldberg is author of The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The MIT Press, 2010). Goldberg spoke of state-located institutions rather than state-supported institutions these days. Asking “what are universities for and for whom?” Goldberg noted that they used to help transform class structures. He argued that in some ways the blogosphere has sidelined universities as a place for public comment. Then he listed a number of venues where exciting exchanges are taking place, at DIY universities:

· P2PU (partially funded by Mozilla)

· Singularity University

· Free/Slow University of Warsaw

· Center for Possible Studies

· Public Schools Brussels

· Copenhagen Free University

· University of the People

· EduFactory

· Factory of Ideas

And I would add our own local School for Designing a Society.

Goldberg went on to mention Chris Newfield’s blog, “Remaking the University”  in his outline of the usual defensive arguments in favor of the humanities:

-they are intrinsically valuable (Stanley Fish is associated with this idea)

-they make economic sense by providing transferable skills and supporting science

-they emphasize civics and make good citizens (Martha Nussbaum argues this, especially in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities)

-they can dramatically shape the public sphere by creating counterpublics

Goldberg spoke of the “greater humanities” and the condition of “living in a critical condition.” He suggested that it’s time to take the networks of ideas as networks seriously, offering some examples:

-Making Publics

-Poor Theory manifesto suggests revisions and remixes, as in compost

-Public Reason, a blog for political philosophers

Then he asked, “what is the university we are for?” He argued for the capacity to make wise judgments together, in conversation. Humanities are consequential: they speak truth in relation to power, as both trouble-shooter and trouble-maker. They provide much more than negative critiques; they serve as compasses and help imagine what is possible. Goldberg proposed dramatically reconceived humanities that are germane to our working lives, with institutional humanities disappearing.

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