Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations

December 21, 2011 By 5 Comments

The very existence of my research site is unethical.  It is a place of poverty and death—a mountaintop tuberculosis sanatorium in Romania where many patients are incurable. They know their situation is hopeless. Dozens of patients I have personally known died during the course of my research. Some have told me that because they are dying, they want to tell me their stories and to help those who still might live.  I enter into every interview knowing that I may not have the opportunity for follow-up questions.  My months living there were filled with ethically tricky situations, from patients (and nurses) asking for my medical opinions to being propositioned sexually by patients. The worst was when Florin a chubby-faced 20 year old patient committed suicide the same day I interviewed him. His doctor gave him the bad news that he had the same highly resistant strain of TB as his father and he would have to stay at the sanatorium much longer. He was so scared, that evening he left and hung himself. I didn’t find out until months later when I asked his father, now also dead of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) how his son was. I didn’t know what despair looked like until I saw that man, cheeks sunken in, wearing his dead son’s brightly colored hooded sweatshirt. When he finally died, I was disgusted with myself for thinking it was merciful–that maybe death was better than constantly being tortured for infecting his son with a deadly disease.   My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this—in fact nothing did. Here I was worrying about protecting my participants from my research, but who was protecting them from their own lives?

© Jonathan Stillo This couch, where crying relatives sit waiting for the patient to be admitted is the saddest place in the sanatorium. Sometimes, the goodbyes said here are final ones.

The most important “ethics review” I ever received did not come my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the Romanian medical ethics board which both approved my anthropological research on tuberculosis in Romania. Rather, it came from Mr. Gheorghe, a fifty year- old Roma man dying of MDR-TB,   when he stepped out on the sanatorium balcony and told anyone within earshot something close to the following: “Jonathan is a good person. He wants to know about your lives and your families. You should talk to him.” I could feel myself blushing as he said this. His opinion mattered to the other patients, especially because he was the one selling them cigarettes out of his nightstand. Suddenly, other patients seemed eager to speak with me when they had been aloof and skeptical only days before.  Gheorghe didn’t live long enough for me to thank him, he died of a “massive hemoptysis” a technical way of saying he coughed up a massive amount of blood. This is how TB patients often die and it is terrifying.

©Jonathan Stillo Hemoptysis- As patients grow sicker, they cough up blood, sometimes pints at a time.

It took years for me to obtain the official permissions required to live at a Romanian TB sanatorium. I even had to sign a waiver for the U.S. National Science Foundation that they were not liable if I caught the disease. But just having the permission of my university and the Romanian government were not enough. I had to actually ask patients for their permission to ask them about sensitive issues, sometimes asking dying patients about their regrets and about how their families will survive without them.  Part of my initial problem was I didn’t know how to ask the patients to let me interview and survey them. Following my IRB protocol, I showed them my stamped informed consent, a full page of Romanian legalese with talk of risks and benefits. I would read sections out loud and the more “informed” the patients became the more uncomfortable they became. This level of formality does not exist in most aspects of their lives. They could not understand that if I only wanted to talk with them, why I needed such involved paperwork with multiple signatures, dates and stamps.  In fact, when I submitted my original protocol to the Romanian medical ethics board, I was laughed at and told that this research did not need approval because it was not “clinical”.

What did patients care about? That I would protect their identities and that the process was voluntary. Everything else, including talk of risks and benefits, names and numbers of people to contact, made them uncomfortable.  They just wanted my assurance that I would maintain their confidentiality by not publishing their names.  Many patients did not even have an expectation of privacy and did not feel qualified to make the decision as to whether or not they should participate in my research. They did not want to hear about protocols. Rather, they wanted someone that they trusted to tell them it was ok and that they could trust me. A document from my IRB could not accomplish this, only someone else vouching for me could.

I gained the endorsement of Mr. Gheorghe by accident.  There was no plan, he just seemed willing to talk so I sat on his bed with him and asked about photographs on his wall, one of a handsome young man in a military uniform (him during socialism), another of a strikingly beautiful woman on a motorcycle (his 18 year old daughter) and my favorite, him and his wife proudly standing with their eight children in front of their rural home. He told me that doctors never sit on patient’s beds and they never ask about things like this. Visiting doctors and researchers only care about numbers and information on the patient charts. They are not interested in patient’s lives, only their disease.

In my last post, The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook,  I suggested that the reason for the existence of IRBs is not primarily the protection of research participants. Rather, it is to provide legal protection to institutions such as hospitals and universities which despite their non-profit status, operate more like businesses every day. Every researcher connected with the CUNY system must undergo an online ethics training course where they are without fail, asked questions about the Tuskegee syphilis study and the importance of informed consent. The problem is that researchers in any time are operating under the ethical norms of their particular time and place. Withholding antibiotics from those men long after their syphilis could have been cured is ethically unconscionable now, but then, it was not, at least to enough of the people involved. Today, it is still the medical industry (specifically pharmaceutical companies) that is pushing (and in my opinion far exceeding ethical boundaries, in spite of the presence of IRBs in virtually every medical and educational institution.

US CDC Venereal Disease Branch (1970-73) Tuskegee syphilis study doctor injects subject with placebo

In Romania, people generally don’t sue each other, especially the impoverished patients I work with. They live on a mountain “beyond the sight of God” as one patient put it. They don’t have access to lawyers and cannot even call or email the contact info on my informed consent because they lack internet access and money for international calls. When these patients give me their informed consent, it is informed by the personal relationship I have with them and those they know. They do so with the knowledge that they would have little recourse if I did behave unethically. It makes their consent all the more meaningful. Ultimately consent, at least in my research site, has little to do with my protocols and institutional approvals. For the patients informed consent is not something I read out loud to them, it is earned over the course of months through drinking coffee, staring off the balcony and exchanging stories of our families. It is something I take seriously not because of the IRB, but because I know that the people sharing their lives with me trust me on a personal level. I owe it to them to behave in a way that is ethically appropriate and respects their humanity and dignity. I think at this point we have a system of ethics approval which is designed by clinicians and enforced by lawyers for the protection of hospital and university endowments in a litigious society. It is the worst of possible worlds and despite best intentions 20 years from now, future researchers will read of all of the unethical research that took place even in this age of IRBs.

I think part of the issue is that ethical research means different things to different people and institutions. In the technical, clinical and legal language of U.S. IRBs, it means limiting “risk” to the study participants. This definition of ethics was inadequate for one of my Romanian transcribers who did not want to work on my project unless there was an actual benefit to Romanian TB patients—that I am not simply studying their “biosociality” or some other nebulous academic nonsense, but rather trying to use my research to improve people’s lives. I told her that is the only reason why I research. This is the same concern that many patients had. However, it never comes up in my U.S. ethics reviews.  I wish it did.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, CUNY, To Ponder

The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook

November 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

It used to be that the anthropologist traveled far from his/her home, conducted research in a foreign culture, and wrote up findings which never made it back to those who were studied . Globalization and now social media have changed this paradigm (as well as debates over who research actually belongs to and what moral responsibilities a researcher has to those he/she studies). Now, the “natives” are your Facebook friends. This a positive development, we should be in conversation with our research participants, but what does this mean for their confidentiality and privacy?

Trobriand Islanders never friended Bronislaw Malinowski on Facebook. Judging by his posthumously published diaries, he didn't like them enough to accept the request anyway.

This post is more of a question than a statement. It is about research ethics, confidentiality and social media. When I began my research on tuberculosis (TB) in Romania, I did not have a Facebook account. I never imagined that TB patients I work with would be among my Facebook friends and that they would actively share my writings using social media in which they or their loved ones appear.

First, much of my PhD research was conducted at a mountaintop TB sanatorium, that one patient described as “beyond the sight of God.” I spent over two years studying TB and much of that was spent talking to dying people and sometimes even holding their hands while they died.  The field site was amazing—visually stunning, but tragic. It was a place of abandonment where many patients would go to die, not just of TB, but also of its complicating factors: poverty and hopelessness.  Dozens of patients I interviewed are now dead, but a few of those who survived keep in touch via social media.

I first met Mariana (all names are pseudonyms) in 2009  when I attended a Multi-Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB)  patients’  group therapy session. I had agreed  to have a question and answer session about my research and TB in general. The patients sat in a semi-circle across from me. I was nervous. My Romanian is very good, but in 2009 it wasn’t.  Worse still, I am terrible at translating when multiple people speak at once. There I was, nervous and awkward; wearing a mask that covered most of my face, trying to talk with patients about what it is like having TB and answering questions TB in America.

© Jonathan Stillo. "Hi, I'd like to ask you a few questions!" Me in my hospital robe and mask.

I was struck by the diversity of ages in the room. There were many young people.  Looking towards a group of patients I joked that this looked more like high school than a hospital. One young woman  fascinated me from the beginning. She was in her mid 20s, and looked like a skeleton floating in a fluffy pink robe.  Mariana is beautiful and despite being one of the sickest people in the ward, filled the room with laughter and jokes. Then,  after I mentioned how I wanted to improve TB treatment in Romania by working with policy makers and the government, she locked eyes with me and asked “Do you really think the government and the people in charge will listen to you?” I told her I did, because TB is a major health problem.” She replied “Then you tell them this: TB is an economic problem and patients need support.”  I would interview Mariana many times over the course of my research in Romania. I learned how she had become ill with the disease by caring for her father who died of TB, that she had a little boy and she was very poor. I have close relationships with a number of people I met over the course of my research 2006-2011, but Mariana is the only patient I really think of as a friend.  I have written about her in publications in Romanian and English. However, I faced an ethical dilemma when I received her Facebook friend request. I thought, of course I should accept, she IS my friend.  I am happy that she can actively consume the things I write about her, and that she even shares them with others (some of whom know the articles are about her and others who do not). While this added an ethically complicated layer to our relationship, I think it is a positive one. We can keep in touch more easily and she is able to read what I write about her and other patients.

“The mother of all the rabbits”

Elena was barely twenty when she died. I didn’t know what to do when her mother found me on Facebook.  I knew I was treading ethically problematic ground.  She friended me after reading an article I wrote in the Romanian popular press. She told me she knew I had interviewed her daughter before she died. I wanted to say yes, I knew her daughter well, and give her the recording so she could hear her daughter’s voice again, or at least tell her what we talked about—how even though she was dying, she dreamed of being an actress.  Finally, I wrote to her, but kept all those details to myself. I told her that I did know her daughter well, that she loved her very much, and I was very sorry for what happened. I tried to comfort her. I felt I had that responsibility.  I am a human first and always an anthropologist second. It is hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are so deeply woven into the lives of those you research.  When family members come to you asking for information about their loved ones final days what does humanity require you to divulge. I always feel terribly inadequate in these situations. Certainly not everything is sensitive information. Elena told me of how one of her happiest memories in a life full of sickness and suffering was when she played the role of “mother of all the rabbits” in a kindergarten play. Her mother might have liked to know this. She might have liked to know that I cried when I listed to the interview again thinking how her life was so full of suffering that she had to go deep into her childhood to find a happy memory to share with me.

So my question is: how do we as researchers and citizens in this new world of social media balance ethics and privacy concerns with our responsibilities to our informants (which do not end after we leave our field sites)?  What might the future look like as more of our informants also become consumers of our research through social media? How can we balance our deceased informants privacy with their loved ones desires to know what their final days were like? What about participants who choose to reveal their identities and take on advocacy roles? Is it not their choice to do this, even though it violates IRB protocol? And finally, do our informants really understand how their activities on Facebook might lead to a breach in confidentiality?

Filed Under: Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology, To Ponder

The Politics of Specialized Knowledge

October 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

What are the possible relations between knowledge and power?

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

  • How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
  • Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
  • For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

Filed Under: Art, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Education, edupunk, Gender, Higher Education, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Pedagogy, Politics, Social Media, To Ponder

Occupying the Brooklyn Bridge

October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Normally, after I teach a four-hour class on Staten Island, which takes me two hours to get to and two hours to get back from, I go straight home and take a nap. But there’s no denying that something special is in the air these days, and since the Express Bus passes by Wall Street in any case, I thought I would go and have a look at the most exciting potential social movement since the 2003 anti-war protests.

The iconic image of Seattle '99. All other photos (below) were taken today with my little phone camera.

I had only been living in New York City for a couple of years when the Bush government began a palpable build-up towards the war in Iraq. The 2003 protests were much larger, perhaps because there was a single clear and urgent demand uniting us and bringing us into the streets: Do not invade Iraq. But the urgency and poignancy of this demand was matched by a sense of inevitability as it became apparent that our country could and would start a war in Iraq despite our attempts to stop it.

Protesters and cops on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Despite the fact that I believe profoundly in a politics of social protest and radical democracy, I’ve always found it hard to participate on more than an occasional basis. On a personal level, I’ve often found the act of protest unsatisfying. It’s not precise, well-crafted, or efficient. I believe in it, but I’ve always want to be part of something more clearly defined, something within which I could have a clear role and a clear set of responsibilities. As a result I have pursued an artistic practice and eventually academic studies: areas where I could set long-term goals for myself and feel I had some chance of achieving them.

But I think I may have been wrong. Maybe social movements are, in their own way, precise and well-crafted and efficient. Maybe it is possible to find or make a clear role for oneself in a social movement. Maybe it is possible to set long-term goals. Maybe the problem for me in 2003 wasn’t that protest didn’t make sense to me but that it couldn’t provide me with a living. Now that I have a more stable income, at least for the time being, and now that my artistic practice is also more secure, I wonder again how my life and my work could be made to serve more directly political ends.

The police begin a long process of peaceful arrests.

I had barely arrived in Zuccotti Park when the 3:00pm march began. The crowd flowed uptown as a line of police kept our chanting and placards confined to the sidewalk. “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK! OCCUPY WALL STREET!” Not one but several double decker tour buses passed alongside the protesters. We cheered at them and sometimes they cheered back. The mood was festive. “BANKS GOT BAILED OUT! WE GOT SOLD OUT!” A woman with a tape recorder briefly interviewed me: “Do you feel proud of these people?” Yes.

We filled up the entire sidewalk, making it difficult for non-protesters to get through. There were cameras everywhere. One man spoke into his own tape recorder, calling the crowd “inspired and eclectic.” He was right. Although there was a substantial portion of visibly punk-influenced protesters, they were not the majority. There were plenty of older folk and a range of dress styles including a few people in suits. “TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” From where I stood the group seemed predominantly white, but by no means entirely.

Protesters stopped traffic on the bridge.

I was surprised when I saw in front of me that the protest was headed up onto the Brooklyn Bridge. I had thought we would circle back to the park or perhaps head up towards Union Square as I knew happened recently. What was the plan here? Were we going to walk to Brooklyn? What would we do once we got there? But it didn’t really matter. A point was being made. We were walking. We were appearing. I wanted to be part of this appearance. As I told the woman with the tape recorder, I don’t have any expectations, but I do have a hope. I hope this is the beginning of a new social movement.

I followed the line of protesters onto the pedestrian walkway and we began to cross over the bridge. Then, slowly, I began to realize that there was another group of protesters below us on the other level. They were down there with the cars. And the cars were stopping. At first traffic was reduced to two lanes, then one. Finally it came to a halt. “WE ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! YOU ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT!” At least two hundred protesters jammed the bridge, making it impassable. It was an electric moment, one that seemed not to have been anticipated either by the protesters or by police.

Detained protesters are lined up on the side of the bridge, separated from the rest.

We were taking over the bridge.

From the pedestrian walkway, I watched the other group below. Those of us above were protesters, but we were not breaking the law. They were. It was our job to witness whatever happened to them.

Police vehicles line up on the bridge for mass arrests.

After several minutes the police began to arrive from both sides on the lower level. No one was in any hurry. I heard someone ask: “How do you de-escalate a situation like this?” The answer: You don’t. The protesters wanted to walk to Brooklyn. They were not going to turn back. And at a certain point the police would no longer let them. “WHOSE BRIDGE? OUR BRIDGE!” Soon the police had set up barriers around the protesting group. Cops and protesters faced off. From above, we watched.

The police began to arrest the protesters on the lower level of the bridge. It was unceremonious and simple. They didn’t need any cause beyond the fact that the protesters were blocking traffic. Yet how could this end? Surely they were not going to arrest hundreds of people? Then I began to understand that this is exactly what they were going to do.

“THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH! THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH!”

Traffic was completely blocked on the outbound side of the bridge.

Or perhaps they would not be officially arrested, but merely detained. Separated. Hands bound behind their backs with white plastic zip-ties. Lined up sitting against the side of the bridge. Trucks and buses called in to bring them away. The bridge cleared for business as usual.

It was obvious that this was going to take hours. Hours in which outgoing traffic would be halted, causing jams throughout lower Manhattan as everyone leaving the city had to take an alternate route.

From above, we watched.

Police escort protesters off the pedestrian walkway.

Some protesters were very angry at the cops for doing this. Some of them were yelling that it was our right to be on the bridge because the bridge is a public space. A few were screaming at the cops and calling them Nazis.

I didn’t feel any anger at the cops. I don’t consider the police force to be entirely aligned with the interests of the rich. We do not live in a police state. From what I saw today, the cops behaved respectfully, even if their attitudes were verbally and physically aggressive.

I understand why there is a law that says you can’t block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not a bad law, as laws go. The point isn’t that protesters should be allowed to do whatever they want with impunity. The point is that protesters can choose to break the law peacefully but firmly in order to draw attention to their cause.

But what is the cause?

Organizer hands an activist newspaper to the driver of an inbound car.

No single demand is being made by the protest movement that has become known as Occupy Wall Street. I think that’s a good thing. The demands of this seedling movement are too broad and fundamental to be captured in a single demand or even a list of demands, at least so far. The Tea Party did not begin with a single demand. It’s a party, a group, a community. It has pulled the Republican party to the right. Can this new movement pull the Democratic party to the left?

It would not be hard to describe the basic politics of the people gathered at Wall Street. They are against corporate globalization and the ever-increasing, unjustifiable gap between rich and poor. Surely most of those gathered there also support environmental sustainability, green technologies, feminism and anti-racist politics. But there’s plenty of room for disagreement as well. And when it comes to putting these values into practice through specific social policies — that’s a whole different question.

I wonder if an action that clearly breaks the law, such as stopping traffic on a Brooklyn Bridge, does imply the need for a clearer demand. To peacefully occupy Wall Street is one thing. Such an occupation could go on indefinitely. It could last for days, months, even years. It could become the epicenter of a new social movement in the United States, something that hasn’t been seen for decades. A city within a city. A beating heart for a new body politic.

AWAKEN! Protesters coming off the bridge.

Blocking traffic is something else. We are the people. Ultimately, when united, we hold all the power because we are everyone. We can shut down the city. We can redistribute the wealth. We can create a federal works program. We can rebuild infrastructure. We can regulate the banks. We can pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We can release nonviolent offenders. We can forgive student debt. Because if “we” is everyone, there’s no one else to stop us. But “we” do not agree on all these things. We have different perspectives, different values, different ideas.

Who occupied the bridge? I’m not asking for the names of individuals who were there. I’m asking who these individuals represent. The idea that a small group can represent a larger one is tricky, dicey, delicate, but absolutely essential. We will not have pure consensus among three hundred thousand people, let alone seven billion. Some form of representation is essential.

So who was it that occupied Brooklyn Bridge today? Was it a bunch of left-wing New Yorkers? Was it the NYC branch of a global anti-tyranny movement that started Tahrir Square? Was it the face of democracy? Was it the people of the United States of America? Was it you?

Eventually the police came and cleared us off the pedestrian walkway as well. By the time I left perhaps a quarter of those on the lower level had been arrested. I wonder if they are still there now, as I write this, in the process of being arrested. More importantly, I wonder how many people will be back tomorrow and the next day. Increasing numbers, I hope. More every day. Until we find out what this moment really means for this city, this country, this world.

(More details and photos here.)

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, edupunk, New York, Politics, Process, Social Media, Social Networking, To Ponder, Uncategorized, What if . . .

The Collective Mind: How did we get from an Acheulian axe to iPhone

September 15, 2011 By 3 Comments

Consider two tools, one is a stone tool, an Acheulian axe, that has been around for at least a million years. Another is a communication tool, an iPhone, which has been around for about 5 years. Both tools have similarities – they are hand sized, fit in our palm perfectly, and are considered among the most important technologies of their days. The differences are more dramatic. The axe is made of stone and can be used for shaping, cutting, and hunting. The phone is an elaborate combination of plastics, metals, silicon and sophisticated software that allows us to take and share pictures and videos, communicate in real time, listen to music, transfer money and purchase products, check weather forecasts, play games, send texts, and place international phone calls. The possibilities of a smartphone are endless.

iX-ray
Creative Commons License photo credit: slowburn♪

How did we achieve such progress? Not easily. According to Matt Ridley, the author of “The Rational Optimist”, the stone tool was the only technology for more than a thousand millennia and the bodies and brains of prehistoric men changed faster than their tools. Only later in our history did people begin developing newer and better technologies such as the fishing rod, the wheel and agricultural tools. The rate of invention has accelerated rapidly during the past two centuries.

The development of communication technologies was central to this change.  For centuries the fastest way to deliver information was on a horseback. Still, people would wait for their mail for days, weeks and even months. The materials needed for such information dissemination were scarce too: horses were expensive, paper and ink were not readily available for everyone, and people overall had less than desired literacy levels.

The invention of Gutenberg printing press changed the way information was produced, however the dissemination of information was still relatively slow. The optical telegraph was invented in France in the 18th century. Multiple towers were built around the country. Messages were delivered by conveying visual signals: a sender would send the message; a recipient of the next tower would get the message while looking at a telescope and transfer it to a person sitting on the top of another tower and so on. On a good clear day, a message could reach from Paris to the South of France in one day, on a gloomy day it would take longer. The quality of messages was below optimal as a lot of errors were made along the way. Soon enough, optical telegraphs were replaced with electric telegraphs, and the first transatlantic message was sent in the 19th century. After that, the speed of transmitting information became faster and cheaper almost every decade. The radio, telephones, television and finally the Internet lowered the cost of communication, and made information fast and pervasive. Later, mobile technologies connected people around the world including countries that previously did not have even land lines. Faster means of communication allowed people to share ideas more easily, further accelerating the rate of technological innovation.

Ridley explores the notion of “collective intelligence” as a driver of innovation. The stone tool required the creativity and skills of one person and was made of one material – the rock. The smartphone tool needs the creativity and skills of thousands of people. Phones are made mainly of plastics, metals, ceramics and glass. To produce these materials copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, tantalum, lithium, cadmium, crude oil, limestone and various liquid crystalline substances are required. These materials are mined, combined with other materials in a processing plant and shipped to the manufacturer. Software developers write various applications using computers and servers that are produced by others who use a range of materials in their work. Nano technologists, quantum physicists, inventors, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and countless other people contribute to the creation of a single device.

Natural curiosity forces us to come up with better communication solutions and the advancements in communication technologies has allowed us to use our minds collectively to produce a wider range of goods. With advancements in technology we are able to create elaborate and complicated tools in a short period of time because we draw upon the knowledge of multiple people. Although no one person can recreate these tools on her own due to their complexity, the collective knowledge generated by people enables creativity and innovation. Non-experts with great ideas now find it easier to collaborate with experienced specialists, and to contribute greatly to the emergence of new technologies that may enrich people’s lives, while helping us progress even further from the Acheulian axe.

Filed Under: Technology, To Ponder, Tools Tagged With: , , , ,

The Qydz are alright

May 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

I suppose after Linell’s, John’s, and David’s timely and thoughtful responses to Grant McCracken’s Symposium keynote talk, it might be overkill or overdue to pitch in my inflation-adjusted 

But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

McCracken is right to suggest that capitalism has been increasingly dependent on the desires of consumers as a resource to mine and extract value. (Actually, he never said this outright, but it seems central to his research agenda.) Is this a fair assessment of capitalism, Linell seems to ask in the previous post? I would add, is this a fair assessment of desire?

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

Filed Under: Baruch College, BLSCI, Conferences, Culture, edupunk, Fun, Politics, Resources, Symposium, To Ponder, Tools, What if . . .

Burying the earth

April 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which, in the catastrophe subgenre pantheon, was a rather strange one. The explosion of reaction #4 and resulting fallout provided few media-ready images that persist today.Not that the Soviet television would have broadcast it. As a child in the US I remember only news graphics of a vague ‘toxic cloud’ spreading across Eastern Europe. It was something to fear, but it was over there. Nuclear radiation is, of course, invisible, and its effects are not immediately evident. There will be no Hollywood version. So what we have instead are enduring legacies and hauntings.

It’s baffling why nuclear power continues to be touted as a safe energy alternative in the face of its history of accidents. Along with environmental and health risks, the technology is a political failure: it is difficult to establish democratic rule over an industry that so few understand and even less know how to manage. I do not know of any historical account that makes this argument, but it seems plausible that Chernobyl was a nail in the coffin, so to speak, to a USSR already disintegrating. Experts and authorities could claim to contain the radiation, but not the claims around this ongoing calamity.

Paul Fusco, "Chernobyl Legacies"

Ordinary people are left to put together claims from the evidence that emerges, or that is allowed to emerge. Photographer Paul Fusco put together this harrowing account of Belarussian children with an array of birth defects and mental disease, calling them, with grim irony, “a different race of people.” It’s just about the saddest thing you will ever see, yes. And it is still debated whether these kinds of cases are attributable directly to Chernobyl. It is depressing to consider that the same debate will emerge around Japan in the coming years.

The effects on future generations go beyond deformed bodies, however. In a startling book of interviews with survivors and “liquidator” volunteers, Svetlana Alexievich reports of firemen digging up the poisoned topsoil around Chernobyl in order to bury it deep in the earth: plants, animals (which were indiscriminately killed), everything had to be buried, sometimes in lead containers or rolled up in plastic sheets.  ”We buried the forest… One of the poets says that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them, buried them” (p. 89).

Greenpeace, in its role as our better conscience, mentions 76 cities and villages were abandoned.

What has happened in the void? Tourism and hunting. Vice Magazine, in its gonzo reporting way, took cameras into Chernobyl in search of big game: as humans evacuated the region around the reactor, animals thrived. Nature has begun to reclaim this ruined land over the last 25 years, but it’s not the same as before. So hunters now enter the zone, looking to shoot mutant bear and dear.

 

It may be difficult to commemorate something like Chernobyl, it seems Chernobyl has its ways of reminding us.

 

Filed Under: Politics, Technology, To Ponder

Seeing double

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department conference room.

We will talk about sources, citations, designing plagiarism-resistant assignments, using technology in research, turnitin.com, and more.

The subject has me reflecting on a book that I read months ago but has yet to release me of its coiling grip. It seems absurd to say this, but The Culture of the Copy, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone Books, 1996), is utterly original. It’s hard to imagine a more kaleidoscopically visionary 565 pages. Maybe I exaggerate, for irony’s sake, but this is essentially a cultural history of copies, fakes, forgeries, doubles, twins, reproductions, and the like. The focus is a sidelong view of our obsession (and ambiguity) vis-a-vis originality, authenticity, singularity, and identity. Its central argument is, I think, that our human nature, the making of ourselves, has always been the making of doubles and likenesses. Schwartz is keenly interested in moments when facsimiles stand in for originals, when duplicates dupe, when samples take on their own lives. The book’s introduction (cleverly titled “Refrain”) is the story of the man known as the Real McCoy, and this biographical story itself also functions as a recapitulation of the rest of the book. It’s an entertaining read, letting the myriad curiosities and strange tales speak for themselves, and yet the back of the book contains more than 150 pages of endnotes to satisfy the scholar.

I will stop short of a book review here. There are some very provocative insights throughout, but I will stick to the several pages Schwartz discusses plagiarism, which comes on the heels of this conclusion about sampling: “Sampling is what imperialists did when they colonized ‘undeveloped’ lands, calling theft ‘development’; sampling is what ghettoized colonies do in revolt against property laws wired around them” (310).

Schwartz traces complaints of plagiarism back into antiquity, suggesting that it is not a feature solely of literate societies. There are audacious examples galore: “Samuel Taylor Coleridge rabidly charged others with theft, but his own perpetual plagiary he considered a form of spirit possession: ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed…” I doubt many Baruch students can claim the right to rip off with such transcendental air, perhaps underlining how plagiarism is defined morally as a debased form of copying. Appropriating in the name of poetry is not quite plagiarism?

Plenty of ironic cases in the history of plagiarism:

  • A passage on seeing double was stolen repeatedly by 18th-century scientists.
  • The first book on photography published in the US retouched an English book.
  • Victorian ministers hand copied sermons on honesty from printed books to make them look like originally penned texts.
  • The Boston Globe ran a story on a plagiarized 1991 commencement speech that was published in the New York Times.
  • Lexicographers responsible for defining plagiarism were accused of plagiarizing definitions.
  • A University of Oregon booklet plagiarized its section on plagiarism. (312-13)

Schwartz is gloomy about defending against plagiarism: “our culture of the copy tends to make plagiarism a necessity, and the more we look for replays to be superior to originals, the more we will embrace plagiarism as elemental.” (313)

The radical left has offered solutions: “the 1988 Festivals of Plagiarism in Glasgow, London, San Francisco, and Berlin exalted plagiarism as a defiance of capitalism, whose commodification of the world and of art proceeds upon the pretense of originality and the projection of uniqueness… plagiarism must be a thoughtful assault upon privilege, retaking that which should belong to everyone” (314).

After more citations of students and scholars caught plagiarizing papers and exasperatedly insisting they thought it was their own words, Schwartz concludes: “Plagiarism in our culture of the copy is sticky with feelings of originality-through-repetition, revelation-through-simulation. That plagiarism should be taken up on all sides–as a means for subverting the System and as a means for getting an edge in business, science, or politics–is proof of its centrality and the reason why plagiarism is treated so gingerly, defended so boldly, resumed so intemperately. Like forgery, plagiarism is a personal addiction… Plagiarism is, moreover, a cultural addiction, and I use that word with malice, for the ubiquity of the metaphor of addiction is itself a clue to our embrace of the rhetoric of replay despite a professional anxiety about disorders of repetition” (315).

Do you think plagiarism is not an epidemic but endemic not only to the academic world but also scientific, political, business, and cultural life? If so, do we need a new paradigm to deal with the matter of intellectual and cultural property in an age of mass duplication and duplicity?

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Baruch College, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Internet, Literacy, Media, Plagiarism, Politics, Scholarship, Search Engines, teaching, Technology, To Ponder, What if . . .

Japan

March 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I can’t get Japan out of my head.  A strangely compact little bundle of news images, inchoate anxiety, and deep grief seems to be lodged somewhere just behind my right ear, pulsing with a dull ache while I go about each day’s business.  I sat down to write a blog post on one of several other matters, smaller spheres I could actually speak to, but my brain just keeps saying Japan, earthquake, tsunami, radiation, food-water-shelter, Japan, Japan.

I don’t want to get these things out of my head, but I don’t feel like writing about them either.  What makes me balk is not just that I am profoundly unqualified to say anything precise or revelatory about the still-unfolding crisis, it’s that I don’t really know what to say at all, much less what to do (here are a few ideas, by the way).

I’ve been thinking about the roles that information and communication play (and might play) in how we “witness” massive crises from often great distances.  In the current case of Japan, the information is abundant and ubiquitous, most of it in the form of images (photos and video clips, many of them shown over and over); succinct fact- or update-bites (“The Fourth Reactor Is Now Leaking Radiation”); and spin-off stories (“Iodine Tablets Flying Off Shelves in the U.S.”).  All of these things are packaged, inevitably, in the form of a running current-events-news-spectacle, a carefully chosen title signaling the “story”: “Disaster in Japan” or simply “Japan Quake”—we now turn once more to the devastation overseas…etc.

Less frantic, perhaps, than streaming news are the sort of interactive maps and satellite photos on the New York Times website.  These at least provide some crucial, basic facts that can stabilize and focus one’s awareness.  But what real communication is going on in the midst of this torrent that we passively field or manipulate at our leisure?  To what degree is each of us able to sift meaningful (that is, clear, bracing) facts from the turbulence?

The net effect of merely receiving this sort of “knowledge” often seems to be a low-level bewilderment, which the brain responds to by bundling the news item and holding it close-by but off to the side, somewhat as I tried to describe at the top of this post.  For reasons that include but also go beyond the very real emergencies in Japan right now, news-of-it-all tends to render one stunned, speechless.  In the past week, I have observed and participated in several exchanges like the one below:

“This Japan stuff is crazy, huh?”

“Yeah, terrible…”  [Beat]

And then, after this beat—an impasse-indicating pause—the conversants are likely to steer themselves abruptly to a new topic, something lighter or closer at hand.  Terrible natural disasters—or “Acts of God” in the pseudo-pious language of the actuary—have been rampant in the past 7 years or so: the cataclysmic 2004 tsunami in the Pacific, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti and recently New Zealand, to name some of the most destructive. (Of course there are always unnatural disasters going on, too, wars and oppressive regimes and terrible exploitations of people and the environment.)  This is all overwhelming.  So what do we really know about these catastrophes elsewhere, and how are we already—or how do we become, functionally—implicated in them?

I’m hung up on the question of responsibility here, something I’ve often asked my students to think and write about.  They tend to hear this word as “duty,” and squirm or bristle at the suggestion that they might be responsible to anything outside of conventional spheres of obligation, like family and close friendships.  I ask them to rethink the term as hinging not on binding rules but on responsiveness, habits of possible response that could be shaped in various ways and that would thus inhere certain valuations.  With regard to the current situation in Japan as well as other such disasters, the potential for realizing some working sense of this responsibility seems to arise less from passively receiving information than from actively reflecting, speaking, and even writing, of or through this information.

There’s no shaking that back-of-the-mind awareness of Japan right now, and there shouldn’t be.  But at best, such awareness would be more than a vague, shelved anxiety.  Maybe venturing into language can begin to draw it toward the front of the mind, catalyze our capacity to absorb, translate, convey, and maybe act on what we know.  Silence has its place here, but too often it is just a mark of the dislocated bystander’s numbness.  What has happened and what is still happening in Japan is perhaps impossible to comprehend, in the sense of compassing something, though it would be woefully glib to dismiss the situation as “too awful for words.”  Disasters might be inherently unfathomable but they’re not unspeakable.

Filed Under: To Ponder

What would Krishna say?

March 18, 2011 By 1 Comment

When I get to the classroom where I teach Great Works, usually about 10 minutes early, I commence my usual routine: put the chairs in a circle, gingerly clear the day’s accumulation of food garbage from the floor (I teach at 7:40 PM so the accumulation is immense and often baffling), take my piles of papers out of my bag, chat with students as they walk in. But mostly I watch them as they check their phones for what must feel like the last time ever but is really just the last time ever for 100 minutes. Some have even begun to come early and jockey for the outlets in order to plug their various devices in – this way at least they’re charging and not lying dormant, completely unused.

Last week we read selections from the Bhagavad Gita. Near the end of the period I asked my students whether they found the way of life that Krishna advocated at all tempting, in particular the idea that one should avoid acting with passion. Most of them found this idea repellant. “What is a life without passion?” they asked. “Sure, you might be less likely to get hurt if you don’t put yourself out there, if you don’t try, if you don’t care about things, but what kind of life is that?”  I tried to push it further by asking them whether part of what Krishna was telling Arjuna was to stop desiring insubstantial things and instead, to  remove himself a little from the world, or the worldly. “Why is it appealing to so many people,” I asked, “to dream about leaving New York and moving to the country? Why do I always hear people tell each other that they’re sick of working at jobs, even ones they like, that they’re tired of always being reachable on their smart phones,  that they need to take time out of their fast-paced lives to relax or vacation? What if instead of making it a vacation you turned it into a life?” They were much more receptive to this idea. “We need to simplify our lives and care about less” one of them said. Then time ran out, and I hadn’t gotten to my final point about Krishna, which was that he was bridging the gap for Arjuna, offering him a way to live in this world (fight your battle) while also living for another world (focus your attention on the tip of your nose and stay that way for hours). It wasn’t all “fight” and it wasn’t all “resist desire.”

As I walked to the subway after class, frustrated that I hadn’t gotten to talk about what this amalgam life might look like, I began to wonder about my students and their phones. And about myself and my addiction to the internet (my phone lasts for 7 minutes of talk time, at best, so an addiction is simply not possible). Is being plugged in a way of living in the world or living out of it? Are we fighting our fight on our phones and our various devices or are we using them to live without passion, to remain disconnected? Should our worry be that we are living too passionately or not living passionately enough? What would Krishna say?

Filed Under: teaching, Technology, To Ponder
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