Jano Justice Systems and Jury Selection
I was recently on jury duty and did some informal inquiry and observation about the current ways in which Champaign County (IL) finds jurors. On a Monday morning, about 35 of us showed up at the courthouse in downtown Urbana and had a brief orientation. The staff handed us badges with bar codes and our juror number on them along with a brochure about petit juries. The brochure said that my name “was drawn by lot from the combined lists of registered voters, licensed drivers, holders of Illinois Identification Cards, and Illinois Disabled Person Identification Cards who reside in this county.” The county uses Jano Justice Systems software to generate the jury pool. Apparently since 2003, the county has been using Jano in tandem with New World Systems to integrate the record-keeping and data management of the courts, according to this one article I found. “Together, Jano and New World will integrate multiple agencies, including the Sheriff’s Office, Correctional Facility, State’s Attorney, Juvenile Detention Center, Circuit Court and Clerk, Adult Probation, Juvenile Probation and Public Defender so each entity has access to critical information stored on a single system.” New World indeed.
Of the 35 people I saw that first morning in the jury assembly room, I saw two African Americans and one woman who was reading a Spanish language newspaper. Otherwise, everyone looked white. That’s about 8 percent non-white. There is a Champaign County Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Jury Selection that formed in 2008 to look at the racial disparities among jurors. According to Brian Dolinar, writing on the Independent Media Center’s website: “For several years the Courtwatch study conducted by the League of Women Voters has shown that while African Americans make up 60% of defendants, they represent 5%-6% of the jury pool.”
I was called back for the afternoon and sat through the voire dire phase, without being called. It was fascinating to watch the 13 jurors being questioned and selected. The person on trial was a white male. The next day, I was told not to come in. The third day I was told to report at 9am. I did so and was called to the jury box. There was another white man on trial. I was dismissed by the judge shortly thereafter, and thus ended my jury duty for this round.
While I was waiting at various times this week, I read a really good article in Communication Theory from February 2003 (13:1, pp. 5-38) called “The Racial Foundaiton of Organizational Communication.” Authors Karen Lee Ashcraft and Brenda J. Allen noted that “the field’s most common ways of framing race ironically preserve its racial foundation.” They argued, rightly I think, that “the valuing difference approach ignores a … power problem. If corporate America is built around Whiteness–and if Whiteness is socially constructed as separate from and superior to darkness–how can we genuinely speak of valuing difference as a possibility?” (p. 16)
Digital Humanities 2010
Unfortunately I am not at the Digital Humanities conference in London right now. But I am following bits and pieces of it on Twitter #dh2010. Melissa Terra of University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities gave the plenary today, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon.” One comment of hers that gave me pause was:
It’s not enough just to whack up a website and say “that’ll do, now back to writing books”. If we are going to be in the business of producing digital resources, we have to be able to excel at producing digital resources, and be conscious of our digital identity and digital presence.
She stressed that not only do we need to add to the digital collection, but we also have to archive things that are already digital but in danger of being lost due to outmoded software or platforms. YIKES! I have been toying with the idea of writing about the University of Local Knowledge using Sophie 2.0. My friend Brett Bloom, though, reminded me that perhaps this software would be hard to read in two years. Hmmm. So now I have signed up to follow Digital Humanities Now, a “fully automated” publication…”created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow.”
Another quote from Terra about the hazards of multimedia and online publishing in terms of the ever-so-slow-to-adapt academic culture:
It’s not enough to make something that is successful and interesting and well used: you have to write a paper about it that gets published in the Journal of Successful Academic Stuff to make that line on your CV count, and to justify your time spent on the project.
Yep. She concluded with a few suggestions for tackling present crises, including:
We’re bad at knowing our own history, as a discipline, and having examples listed off the top of our heads of why our research community is required in today’s academe.
Speaking of which, my interview with Wendy Plotkin about the early days of H-Net and H-Urban should be coming out in a couple of weeks in the Digital Humanities Quarterly. I will definitely tweet about it.
Dawoud Bey at CAA
After a really crazy spring semester, I am finally cleaning my home office, finding tidbits here and there that I intended to blog about, but never did. Dawoud Bey was the keynote speaker at this year’s College Art Association conference. He teaches photography at Columbia College in Chicago, and runs a speaker series there. Bey spoke about “authoring the culture of our time.” He quoted a nurse and activist from his childhood growing up in Harlem: “If you know, teach; if you don’t know, learn.” He encouraged those of us at the CAA conference to move beyond our isolated academic circles and engage with the world, noting that “this larger community is key to sustaining and deepening our work.” If memory serves (this was in February 2010, after all!), he also mentioned Walter Hood’s Phillips Lifeways Plan in Charleston, South Carolina, from 2004-09 as an example of artistic engagement. Also during that evening, we discussed a project in Puerto Rico by Chemi Rosado-Seijo. With volunteers and residents of El Cerro, a former coffee plantation near Naranjito, Rosado-Seijo painted a group of houses in Proyecto El Cerro (El Cerro Project), 2002. The documentation of this project was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, and written about in Literature and Art of the Americas v. 37 issue 1(2004). That article mentioned that Rosado-Seijo wanted the houses to be painted green to match the mountains; there was hesitation by residents of El Cerro because green is associated with the independistas, and most residents are pro-statehood (color, blue), according to this review. So the artist had the residents pick their color and sometimes the colors were combined. The interactions around donated paint and an artist’s ideas mixed with local residents’ responses created more than a colorful hillside.
iCollege and Educational Consumerism
Book Sales Strong!
The University of Minnesota Press just wrote on their blog:
Our top 3 most popular books at this very busy, well-attended conference [College Art Association in Chicago] were: Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between, by Sharon Irish; String, Felt, Thread, by Elissa Auther; and Modernism after Wagner by Juliet Koss.
Go here for more:
http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/02/caa-in-nutshell.html
HOORAY!
What’s at Stake for Community Informatics?
Walter Brown just posted on the ciresearchers listserv (for people working in community informatics), run by Michael Gurstein. He echoed a provocative question from Mike’s blog: “So What Do We Lose if We Don’t Have the Internet?” He continued,
The burning question for CI Researchers in my opinion is “How can policy makers, business and economic leaders, academic and related research institutions and organizations, and the whole development community, refocus their attention on finding solutions to providing high quality affordable information directly to individuals in marginalized communities?” and “How can marginalized communities and individuals be made aware of the power of ICT4D and begin to demand affordable high quality information services?” And the emphasis on finding answers to these questions must focus on “doing” more than just knowing the underlying theories of how to or why it does not get done.
Brown recommended an article from a 2005 issue of The Information Society (1: 41-51) that I will try and locate: Govindan Parayil, “The Digital Divide and Increasing Returns: Contradictions of Information Capitalism.” I am in the midst of writing proposals to the state and feds for stimulus funding related to broadband access and find I am hobbled by similar questions to those posed by Walter Brown.
Images from College Art Association 2010
The College Art Association’s annual conference met this year in Chicago. Apparently there were 4000 registrants, but many were unable to get there because of bad weather. Suzanne Lacy was awarded the CAA Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award, Griselda Pollock received the Distinguished Feminist Award, Holland Cotter received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and Dawoud Bey was the convocation speaker. A terrific start to the conference, in my book. The conference ended with an all-day series of panels organized by the Feminist Art Project, open to the public.
Artists Heather Ault and Bonnie Fortune at Feminist Art Project, Chicago
Sharon Irish and Suzanne Lacy at Minnesota Press booth
The Cover Controversy
In September of 2009, the graphic designer at the University of Minnesota Press presented an idea for the cover of my book on Suzanne Lacy. Suzanne and I had both agreed that one image from her “Anatomy Lessons” series might be a good choice. The designer chose one that was a close-up of her in a pool, from the mid-70s, and then also flipped the image. I loved it, but Suzanne understandably had reservations. She objected to the manipulation of her work by placing it upside down as a double. She also (again rightly) felt that this one work was not representative of her entire oeuvre and that it was removed from the context of her lengthy visual consideration of violence against women. While I agreed with her on all counts, I also felt strongly that the cover worked powerfully and that its effectiveness made it worth the distortions. I am still not sure that I did the right thing pushing for this cover, but here is what I wrote several months ago, in support of the cover.
September 29, 2009
My relationship with Suzanne Lacy has been one of the most important of my life. (Did I say thank you?) One of the basic points of my book is that art exists in the relationships among people, who are anything but easy and straightforward. So this conversation is both “only about a cover” and about “everything” at once. Given the time crunch, the anxiety levels on all sides, and the importance of the issues, I think it helps to say that this is challenging work!
Here’s why I want to proceed with the current cover (beyond my own personal response of “I love it”):
This book is for an art audience. Using this work makes sense because it is beautiful and repulsive and not well known. Suzanne’s work is not merely pretty or gentle, and often edgy. This work is beautiful and repulsive, calm and alarming, and difficult, one reason why it is so powerful. Film historian Bruce Elder noted that Stan Brakhage [and Lacy in turn] set up a “tension between responding with horror at the images [in his film], and responding to the real beauty of the images (for they are astoundingly beautiful); that this is the character of the film’s central tension [and] suggests that beauty and horror lie close to one another, an idea that has long been a key to radical aspiration in the arts.” This is radical art. I don’t use “radical” lightly—by “radical art” I mean that art challenges glib assumptions and damaging values that have otherwise been normalized and are invisible.
By turning the image upside down, while it is not what Suzanne did, in a way brings out another aspect of the original: that floating can be like flying, disorienting, that bodies turn in water and air, that shadows in water alter forms. That bodies exist in space.
This is a work from early in Suzanne’s career—one of a series that is aesthetically very strong. On the cover, it provides a jumpstart to the beginning of the book. On the cover it supports the themes of the book: body, feminism, space.
I think this is an award-winning cover. If it won a design award, of course that wouldn’t hurt me or Suzanne that I can conceive of, but more importantly, I think it would be a small triumph for art of the seventies that was informed by feminism. Now of course it doesn’t represent all of that decade and certainly not all of Suzanne’s work. I don’t think there is one image that can do that, particularly because Suzanne has worked across scales, media and issues.
If feminism is a political position that analyzes power relations among people in order to foster social justice, how does this cover support that? I think it works more like a tactic than anything else. It is a beginning. People pick up the book to find out what that image is about, and look at the color plates in the middle. (Libraries will bind the book so the cover won’t show, so that eliminates some readers from this cover discussion.) They might even read some of the text!
Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between
Book on artist Suzanne Lacy
At long last, my book on Suzanne Lacy is coming out next month from the University of Minnesota Press. I will be tweaking my website over the next month to feature it more prominently, because this project was a very long haul and I am delighted to have it completed. I first corresponded with Suzanne in 1991 and worked with her a bit in Chicago in 1993. By 2000, I had made sufficient space in my life to start research on her work in earnest. From 2000 until 2008, then, I was immersed in archives, travel, article-writing, and generally trailing around after Suzanne, which was an intense, exhilarating endeavor.
I had long wanted to connect myself to someone whom I admired and learn their process from the inside. Because Suzanne is a most generous and amazing soul, I was able to be a participant-observer for a number of activities, as well as visit sites of many of her projects. I was able to fund Suzanne’s ten-day residency here in Urbana in 2001, and I visited her in Oakland and Los Angeles a lot.
Suzanne has just been awarded the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association and will come to Chicago to receive it in February 2010. Congratulations to her and many thanks to Jerri Allyn for spearheading the nomination process.
Ubuntu
Last Thursday (December 11), I attended a panel organized by a working group at the University of Illinois called Ubuntu. Computer scientists kind of colonized the word by using it to describe a Debian-based Linux distribution. But in any case, Ubuntu is a Xhosa and Zulu word describing a philosophy of community and sharing. And the UI Ubuntu has come together in the aftermath of the shooting death of 15-year-old Kiwane Carrington of Champaign. Kiwane died after being shot by a police officer in October 2009 at close range, as he was trying to enter a house where he had been staying. His friend who was with him, Jeshaun Manning-Carter, has been charged with aggravated resisting arrest (a felony) for trying to avoid the police. Jeshaun just turned 16, and will be on trial in early 2010. There has been a lot of news coverage (in several publications and online), so I won’t repeat what is covered elsewhere.
Ubuntu participants want to reclaim the Black Studies tradition of scholar-activism, and I applaud them! Historian Clarence Lang talked about the continuum between academic excellence and social responsibility; campus and community; study and struggle. Historian Sundiata Cha-Jua spoke about reviving a Black United Front that would bring about an annual report issued on the police use of force; a petition to Congress to make the police use of excessive force a federal crime; and a citizen’s police review board in Champaign, among other ideas. Imani Bazzell, who wears many hats, mentioned her program, “At Promise…of Success,” which sees youth as promising success rather than “at risk” of failure. She advocated for workshops for public school teachers to increase their knowledge of the black intellectual tradition. Sociologist Ruby Mendenhall spoke about the oral histories that she has been gathering with her students. County Board member Carol Ammons spoke movingly about her anguish and her frustration with teen-police relationships. I cannot even begin to do justice to the powerful words she voiced. Other speakers included Brendeesha Tynes, Ken Salo, Kerry Pimblott, Barbara Kessel, William Kyles and Pastor Nash. Barbara Kessel spoke about her research into “domestic rendition,” the removal of prisoners from Cook County Jail to Kankakee in order to use tasers on these men. Taser use in Cook County is illegal.
The room was packed. There is such a need for coordinated effort and continued conversation. Thanks to Ubuntu for taking up the challenge. I hope we can build a strong wall, with varied bricks and stones, that will collectively support each other and resist disunity in the face of inevitable differences.
