Communicating Awareness

February 28, 2012 By 1 Comment

Krista Tippett, the sharp and empathetic host of NPR’s On Being, recently interviewed the singer and composer Meredith Monk. While Monk isn’t one of the artists included in my dissertation, she’s of the place and of the period– 1970s, downtown New York– and it feels appropriate to have her compositions as my soundscape as I churn out the pages. If you’re not familiar with her work, she’s a dynamic artist who has worked in a range of forms over the past decades, best known for recording haunting melodies encased in vocal experimentation. Here is a video of her performing “Gotham Lullaby”:

Back to the interview: there’s much to love about this wonderful exchange (listen here), which delves deeply into Monk’s philosophies and development as an interdisciplinary artist. Early on the conversation, Tippet asks Monk about her notion of the audience as a kind of congregation:

Ms. Tippett: You’ve even talked about the audience as a congregation, which is interesting.

Ms. Monk: Yeah. I mean, I feel like a dinosaur holding out: “A live performance, live performance. Not the screen, live performance,” because I think that there is something about it that’s so unique and it’s so necessary to remember again.

Ms. Tippett: I always see you also insisting that music is about waking up. I mean, I don’t know if those two things have to be in tension, but I sense that, if you had to choose between transcendence and waking up and being right there in that moment, you would choose the latter. Just saying, I mean, live performance is as direct and awake and experience one hopes as anything we do.

Ms. Monk: That’s also, again, so interesting because actually I don’t see those two things as opposites. I actually think that, when you are that present and you are that awake and the audience actually experiences themselves, you know, the deepest part of themselves, then the whole situation becomes transcendent because we’re not — the way we live our lives is not necessarily with that level of presence.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Monk: And also certainly in this society, we’re taught to actually be distracted and diverted all the time from feeling, in a sense, you could say the pain — the good pain, you know, the pain as in openheartedness and rawness of the moment, the pain as well as the pleasure, everything in one in that moment.

The idea that we’d prefer waking up in the moment to transcendence is an appealing one; most of us who have had experiences in the classroom probably recognize the hope of the live performer: we are not necessarily seeking to deliver our students to transcendence, but just a few moments of awake. More relevant to those of us who think about communicating (and teaching) with our “audience” on a daily basis, is Monk’s articulation of a phenomenon of teaching people to be distracted and diverted from the moment. Just a few days ago, I was in a yoga class where the voice of the teacher was nearly drowned out by the songs of Kanye West blaring from the apartment upstairs; we could hear Kanye’s every syllable as the music pulsed throughout the building, making our Krishna Das seem like a mild sigh in comparison. As the teacher remarked, the “distraction” was like a taunting provocation: you actually think all you need to do to focus is to show up? The external elements stand in the wings, waiting.

A yoga class is one thing, and a college campus is another. On a morning in the first week of Spring semester, 25th Street had been blocked off, and DJ tables and speakers were set up. There were balloons, free hot chocolate, and Rhianna songs playing so loudly that the police horses at the end of the block were vibrating. As the deep bass ricocheted throughout the street, I commented to an acquaintance– a security guard at the college– that it seemed like a strange reason to block the street to traffic. Winter break had just ended, and students were milling around near a food truck. Someone had set up a basketball net, even though it was about 40 degrees outside. The thud-thud of the bass continued. The security guard answered me with weary tone: “I guess they had extra money.” I guess so, I concurred. “It seems strange,” he continued, “that they would do this right after break. Shouldn’t the students be focusing?”

It was a good question. When do we teach students to be distracted? And when do we create even further obstacles to communication? Baruch students are a scattered breed; the ones I come into contact with are rushing from jobs as far away as LaGuardia airport, some are juggling childcare needs, others just haven’t yet figured out how to organize their time post-high school. One of my students works all weekend at a hair salon in Astoria (eleven-hour shifts) and has the work of six classes to contend with Tuesday through Friday. I wondered about her– when arriving on campus, what might help this student excel and make meaningful connections with those around her?

Some days, in the lobby of the Vertical Campus, club hours at Baruch literally become “club” hours. There is a cacophony of distractions– a DJ surrounded by cake-selling student groups, with the dance music turned up to blast-off. Some students might enjoy the rush of it all, but it seems to actively repel faculty and administrators, who race towards the elevators like it’s an old-school game of tag and they see base. A shy student who might want to actually talk to a peer is left to do the awkward bend-close-to-the-ear move that’s normally perfected in frat basements and rock concerts. Just last week, as I hopped off the escalators, a row of male students awaited me, stacks of flyers in their hands. I took one. A blond in a Hooters tank top holding a pitcher of beer smiled back at me from the flyer. “Come join the brothers of Alpha Phi Delta for HOOTERS: Eat, Drink, and Meet the Brothers.” The thud-thud of the bass continued; I could hear the music even from my destination on the seventh floor.

I mention these two incidences not to be a curmudgeonly grouch, but to question some of the elements shoved into the frame of our every day communication. Do we create the environment for a whole range of interactions, or do we just create innumerable moments of distraction? Many of us profess to be on the hunt for increased calm and time for breathing; how do we model this for our students? As is frequently remarked upon, communication boundaries are changing. Our students don’t see an email to a professor as being qualitatively different from a text message to a friend. Students check facebook in class, and they remain so plugged in to other things at all times that it’s hard to get a refuge. Does the university have a responsibility to teach them how to find one? The VC provides them with one big building where everything happens; they need to learn to shift the rules of propriety everywhere they go, between a mid-day club to mid-day clubbing to economics class to the weight room. While this hopefully builds great fluency and flexibility, it also might be downright dizzying.

There’s no one-size-fits-all picture of academic focus and rigor. And I’m not suggesting that “play” should be absent from the daily equation of student life– certainly college experience operates on multiple planes. But we also need to recognize the carelessness with which we load distractions into the sightlines of our students. And “playfulness” comes in many guises, including being focused moment to moment. As Monk explained:

Ms. Monk: …I think that sense of playfulness is the sense of being alive; that’s another aspect of being awake and the fluidity. It’s really about fluidity, about being so in the moment that you are in pinpoint focus, but at the same time, you’re completely open to what the moment has to give you or to tell you. And I think that has to do with the playfulness and people can feel that. You know, I think that that’s what you’re giving an audience is that spirit of the give and take that playfulness implies.

I can’t end on a prescription or a conclusion here– 20 minutes of enforced meditation a day in the VC?– since these questions are all open for debate, from the concern about our own inattentiveness to the distractions that we facilitate (and even in the relativity of how we each perceive different kinds of music). Maybe one path to continue thinking about this is a merging and a meshing.  If you’re interested in further collisions between Meredith Monk and club music, check out this track from “Monk Mix,” remixed and interpretations of Meredith Monk’s music by folks like DJ Spooky, Arto Lindsay, and Ghostlover:

Postscript: I was excited to see that a former colleague of mine in the public school system, writer Diana Senechal, has a new book, The Republic of Noise, that tackles this very topic. My next post will take a look at some of the ideas in her book. Find out more here.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Education, Fun, Interpersonal Communication, Media Tagged With: , ,

What are the Principles of Communication Across the Curriculum?

February 27, 2012 By 2 Comments

The philosophy of Writing Across the Curriculum is well-established. Key concepts include writing to learn, scaffolding assignments, low stakes v. high stakes writing, and addressing high-level issues before low-level issues. I think that the principles of Communication Across the Curriculum are not as clearly laid out–perhaps because communication encompasses written, oral, and electronic forms, and is thus harder to essentialize into pedagogical concepts. CAC is the child of WAC, but at the same time CAC incorporates WAC.

I don’t think that WAC principles can be translated into CAC principles, though there is a great overlap. However, it is an interesting idea to consider what “low stakes speaking” or “speaking to learn” might mean.

I wonder whether the practical guidelines for speaking and electronic communication simply take precedence over the notion of a teaching philosophy for CAC. There are so many guides out there on public speaking, many of which offer excellent pointers for students. Actually, one of my favorite pieces on public speaking is Michael Ellsberg’s dissection of what makes Bill Clinton so much more charismatic than Bush in this debate:

I also like Tim Ferriss’ no-nonsense discussion of how to prepare for public speaking (the short answer is it takes a lot of work to do it right).

But aside from classic tips on public speaking, what are the pedagogical principles of CAC? What kind of guidelines should teachers go by? When I was teaching, I often assigned presentations, but I generally didn’t give my students the time or space in class to practice.

I’d like to challenge anyone reading this to respond with a suggested principle or two for CAC. These should be pedagogical concepts, as opposed to mere “tips” on speaking, writing, or electronic communication. Here are my ideas:

1. Students should be asked to speak in a variety of modes–giving prepared answers to discussion questions, creatively responding to an immediate question, or giving a formal presentation.

2. Preparation should be emphasized as a part of oral presentations, and if possible should be incorporated into the grade. For example, time might be given in class for students to practice presenting in small groups, grading one another based on a set rubric.

3. Students should be given assignments that ask them to address a variety of audiences from a variety of mediums.

4. Models of effective communication should be given to students and discussed in class. Strategies for addressing common problems, such as anxiety surrounding speaking or writing, should also be presented and discussed.

5. Electronic tools should be utilized in the service of best communication practices. For example, blogs can be used for low or medium-stakes writing, and software such as GoogleDocs and wikis can be used to improve collaborative efforts.

Coming up with CAC-specific principles makes me realize that in many classrooms there are a number of  different and perhaps contradictory elements in play. WAC believes in “writing to learn,” but then, Writing in the Disciplines teaches that students must “learn to write” in the form and language of their disciplines. Similarly, students need to be able to discern the difference between CAC and CID…communicating across the disciplines and communicating in the disciplines. This makes me think that number 6 on my list should be “Specify the communicative norms of each discipline.”

 

Filed Under: cac, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum

An Audience for Shenzhen: part one

February 24, 2012 By 1 Comment

“Shenzhen is a city of fourteen million people. It is larger than New York City, it is the third largest city in all of China, and it is the place where almost all of your shit comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name.

Isn’t that remarkable? ” -Mike Daisey, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs 

Night view of one of Shenzhen's six "Special Economic Zones"

Over the winter break, I finally got around to listening to a podcast of Mike Daisey’s This American Life episode.  The piece is an excerpt from his stage monologue entitled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which Daisey has been performing for over a year—long before the sudden interest in Steve Jobs following the Apple founder’s death. Daisey has toured the country with his investigative storytelling (he would be the first to tell you this is not “journalism” in the professional sense).

The broadcast on Public Radio International was not particularly timely in other ways, too. Stories about the conditions at Foxconn (and other similar factories in Shenzhen) had been circulating the internet for years on technology news sites. “Which,” as Daisey remarks in his monologue, “I should specify, have no actual news in them. They’re instead filled with rumors about what Apple will do next, written exclusively by people who have no fucking idea what Apple will do next.”

Usually these stories are reviews or marketing, and are dropped when newer, faster, more exciting technology comes along. However, in this instance, stories of suicides at Shenzhen was a recurring theme, since it didn’t entail one specific device, but assembly plants for the whole industry. These stories were not being covered by major news outlets—or if they were, they were only a minor blip relegated to a few seconds during an already abbreviated “tech beat” segment.

 

Frequency of US Google searches (above) and news stories (below) on "Foxconn"

 

Then, all of a sudden, I started hearing about Foxconn from non-technology websites, looking at the story from a labor and international trade perspective. There was a spike every couple of months in the number of outlets paying attention to Shenzhen factories. Of course, when Steve Jobs died, very few people dared to write anything negative about Apple for a few weeks, but then Mike Daisey’s piece aired on This American Life.

The New York Times, who had sporadic references to Foxconn before January, started publishing articles and web pieces multiple times a week on this company.

Even Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, that bellwether of news important enough to satire, covered Apple’s problems with labor relations in Shenzhen.

After all of this publicity, Daisey released a script of his monologue for free. This is strange, and not for the open-source-inspired royalty-free conditions Daisey attaches to the script, but because Daisey does not usually work with a fully written script. His monologues are outlines, which he fills at the moment of performance, in front of an audience.

The sudden surge in coverage of Shenzhen coincided with Daisey’s appearance on public radio, despite the fact that this story had been in circulation for years. In my next blog entry, I will examine the shifting audience for the story. Where was Daisey’s monologue performed, which news outlets were covering Shenzhen, and how—to use French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations—class tastes might operate during shifts in this monologue’s multiple media. How does the audience for this story change in the telling and hearing?

Filed Under: Audience, Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media, Technology, Uncategorized

Saving Lives or just Documenting Suffering?

February 23, 2012 By 3 Comments

© Jonathan Stillo - Stefan reflected in a mirror staring off the balcony. He would do this for hours when he especially missed his wife and 13 year old son. He died a few months later at the age of 37.

Last week, the New York Times Lens Blog highlighted the work of Misha Friedman, a Moldovan-born photographer who has documented tuberculosis patients in the Former Soviet Union.  Friedman questions whether he has done any good for the patients, in the post “Saving Lives or Photographing Them?” “Most of the people you see here are dead,” Friedman tells the interviewer.  “My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help.”

What Friedman is feeling is the same thing that I have been troubled by—that after two years of anthropological fieldwork which included living at a TB sanatorium [click here to read more about what I am doing in Romania], did I do anything for the patients whose heartbreaking stories I collected? It is easy to say in the abstract that one’s photographs or research will help hypothetical future patients, but what about the person in front of our lens or talking into our voice recorder?

It’s like a collapse. Since I caught this disease, I lost friendships, social circles, acquaintances. They marginalized me, bit by bit. You’re no longer seen with good eyes, no longer welcomed. You’re not in the position of satisfying your needs, because you can’t work for a period of time, especially if you don’t recover to restart your work you slowly crumble as a whole. And you end up alone. - Stefan age 37 a Romanian MDR-TB patient shortly before he died.

We are losers in society. And when you see yourself, the way you are now, and you know what you used to be, when you mattered, and worked… it’s hard for you. This is why we say we are embarrassed, because you don’t matter anymore, to anybody. Mircea 55, dying of XDR-TB.

Mircea’s bright blue eyes well up with tears as he tells me about is life before he contracted tuberculosis in 2005. He is a tall man with large hands who used to be a coal miner. Now, he looks much older than his years and he always looks sad. He hasn’t seen his family in a very long time. No one comes to visit him at this mountaintop Romanian TB sanatorium. Most of all, he wishes he could see his little grandchild. He doesn’t have any pictures, he says it hurts for him to remember those better times. The drugs that Mircea is taking are not going to cure him. XDR-TB or Extensively Drug Resistant TB  is resistant to most common treatments. Before I left in August, I took some portraits of Mircea on his bed, and had them printed for him. He didn’t remember the last time someone took his picture. Now at least his family will have something to remember him by. When I return to Romania next month, I don’t expect to find him alive.

© Jonathan Stillo- The long hall leading to Mircea's room. Many of the patients are too ill to reach the staircase at the end.

Before I left for Romania in 2009, my department chair pulled me aside and gave me some advice. He told me he was worried about me–that as mentally tough as I thought I was, conducting this research was going to be so much harder on me than I thought. He asked me to please take care of myself.  At the time, I dismissed what he said. I have always worked with marginalized and sick people, homeless people, sex-workers, crack and heroin users.

I think I realized that I was in over my head when Mr. Popa died. I remember sitting on his bed watching his sunken-in chest moving up and down with each strained breath. He told me he was afraid to go to sleep for fear of dying. I held his hand and could only focus on how cold it was. He died crying, waiting for his son who would never arrive. He wasn’t an old man at 52, like many patients he didn’t even  make it to retirement age.

© Jonathan Stillo "The Last Garden of Mr. Popa" published in "Tuberculosis: Voices in the Fight Against the European Epidemic" by the TB Europe Coalition and Results.UK

I remember meeting with master’s student who was transcribing some of my interviews and warning her that the content is heartbreaking and that she would have to be able to handle that. To this she asked, “so how are you handling it?” She caught me off guard and I replied with complete honesty, “I’m not handling it well at all. I’m a mess.”

Living at the sanatorium, listening day after day to people who had lost hope I soon began to realize that for many of these patients, there would be no happy ending, no recovery and no beautiful reunion with their family. Many of their families had moved on without them. Their lungs were riddled with holes and in some cases, the medicines simply were not working. They would tell me “yes, TB is curable, but not for me.  All too often they were right. They would die even before I was able to get the interviews transcribed. I never told my research assistants when they were transcribing a dead person’s words, but I think sometimes they knew. It always left me wishing I could have done something, for them while they were alive, besides just the gifts of coffee, chocolate, crossword puzzles and an empathetic ear.

© Jonathan Stillo- One lung X-ray. A now deceased patient was momentarily entertained when I told him a tree had grown where his lung once was.

At my best, I feel optimistic. I’m glad that people are finally paying attention to the problem of  TB in Romania, and I am happy to have become an advocate for this cause. Unfortunately comes at the expense of more scholarly pursuits (such as completing my dissertation after nine years).  I don’t know what will ultimately come out of my efforts to help the patients. Since 2011, I have worked in partnership with the US Embassy and the Romanian National TB Control Program on new anti-TB advocacy and education campaign. NGOs have used my photographs and patient stories in their publications and one of my favorite patients is even quoted in a World Health Organization brochure.  I’m working with NGOs to develop funding proposals. Lately, I have been writing things to inform and influence (hopefully) policy. The worst part though, is I’m haunted by the ghosts of dead patients who wanted me to give them a voice.  I still have nightmares about them, but not as many as I used to. When I returned to America, a colleague told me that my “fieldwork had traumatized me and I need to come to terms with that.” I had never thought of it that way. As difficult as this research was for me, it does not compare to what the patients are going through. Now that I have at least a partial understanding of what they are going through, all I can think of is how to improve their situation improved. How can I help to reduce the suffering and death that this curable bacterial disease causes? I know these are activist and advocate questions and many will say my objectivity has been compromised, but at the end of the day, objectively documenting suffering does not feel like enough.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Politics, To Ponder

Ethics and Politics in the Classroom

February 22, 2012 By 5 Comments

Last year I walked to class one day with a student. He told me that where he comes from professors are highly respected and that for him it was an honor to be walking to class with me. He also expressed surprise and curiosity about my being a professor at such a young age, since in his country the title of professor is usually attached to much older people. Finally, with no prompting from me, he began to explain to me why he is a proud Republican.

an honor to be walking

He told me that, as a devout Christian, he would like abortion to be completely outlawed. Furthermore, as an immigrant to this country, he would like all forms of governmental safety net to be abolished, forcing people to work harder and making things “more fair.” Finally he suggested that U.S. society can basically be understood as a conflict between white people and black people in which black people are responsible for most of the problems.

I was rendered nearly speechless by this analysis of American culture. At the same time, I had the distinct sensation that the young man was trying to be provocative—not in order to get a rise out of me but in order to test some ideas that were not fully his own. I suspected, in other words, that he was indirectly asking me, as his teacher, to prove him wrong. It was like an implicit challenge: Explain to me why this is not so.

explain to me why this is not so

It’s one thing to hear rich, white politicians make racist comments and espouse patriarchal, capitalist ideas. It’s another thing to speak with a dark-skinned African immigrant and find out that he holds the same views. But more than this, what caught me by surprise was the confusion I felt about my role as teacher in this liminal moment. Class had not yet begun, so I was not yet teaching. But I was still the teacher, and the student’s earlier comments made me even more aware of this. I felt the pressure of responsibility in two directions: to intervene clearly and directly in the content of what he had said; but also to do so in a pedagogical way, by questioning his premises rather than simply telling him he was wrong.

What sticks with me from that moment is the intersection of ethics and politics. As a teacher, I think of my responsibility to students as primarily ethical. It is based on personal, embodied relationships and to a certain extent it is independent of (protected from) contemporary political debate. Of course I know that politics are always at work in the classroom. Ethics is simply politics on a smaller scale, and I think about the politics of my teaching all the time. But for the most part, this politics remains implicit.

to intervene clearly and directly

That day in class, I had students working on short plays by William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. Both one-acts take place in single-room dwellings hemmed in by a natural environment that is as awesome as it is deadly. In Yeats, this is the forest of pre-Christian magic with its deadly temptations. In Synge, it is the violent sea where young men go to drown, generation after generation. My questions for the students were: How will you make this sense of the natural enviroment appear in our classroom? How will you invoke the terror and beauty of nature pressing in upon us? And what does this power mean to you?

As an adjunct, I sometimes experience my classroom this way: as a small, isolated space hemmed in by larger forces on every side. Perhaps if I felt more integrated within a larger teaching context—department, school, or university—I might find a different balance between ethics and politics. As it stands, the appearance of raw political debate at the edge of my classroom feels more like the wind knocking at the door, rattling the windows and sending a shiver through this small ethical terrain.

this small ethical terrain

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Asides, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Debating, Education, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Liberal Arts, New York, Pedagogy, Politics, teaching, Uncategorized

Generation Y

February 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

Last week, I paid a visit to my doctor for a routine physical exam. Having gone to this doctor for years, he asked me about my research, hobbies, and other such things. When I somehow brought up the topic of teaching undergrads, the doctor looked at me with complete and utter revulsion. “These kids today,” he said quite angrily, “are nothing like they used to be when I was their age. All they care about is Facebook.” Not in the mood for a confrontation, I hesitatingly nodded and quickly changed the topic while he went about taking my blood pressure.

After I left the doctor’s office, I began thinking. Was this generation of individuals, these so-called Generation Y young adults, really that bad? Curious, I decided to google the issue to see what other, more official (i.e., more research-based) sources had to say about it. Quickly, I noticed a slew of news articles in some of the most respected journals and magazines, the overwhelming majority of which cast a very negative shadow on any hope for Generation Y. As one article on USAToday.com put it, these “pampered, nurtured, and programmed” individuals who have a speak-your-mind philosophy often stand in contrast to older generations, especially when it comes to the workplace.

Ironically, around the same time, I came across a newspaper article in AMNY which also proclaimed that college graduates these days are just not as ready for the workplace as they used to be. These individuals are failing to impress their bosses, and that they lack the skills needed to succeed in fields like business. Even worse, as one article on NY Post’s website claimed, is even if these Gen Y-ers are doing a horrible job, they still think they are doing great.

According to these (and many other) articles, much of the problem with these individuals today is rooted in their childhood, in the rather privileged, entitled ways they were raised in our society, and exacerbated by the failure of educators to properly prepare these individuals for the real world. As an educator of lots of Generation Y students, I began thinking about what the real problem was. Maybe it wasn’t what we were teaching in the classroom, but how. I began analyzing my own teaching methods, which include things like group projects to teach collaboration skills, debates to hear both sides of an issue, and individualized presentations to bestow critical thinking. But is this enough to not only prepare students for the workplace, but also make them better, more mindful individuals in society? I invite discussion to hear what other educators think about these Generation Y-ers, and how they can best be “taught” in the classroom. Lastly, I leave you with one, rather positive article I found, commending Gen Y for their innovativeness, something others can most definitely learn from. So are we in fact moving them in a better direction? In the end, maybe my doctor was right in that this generation is not unlike its predecessors. But maybe it’s also for the better. And besides, last time I checked, social media skills were at the top of anyone’s list.

 

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Internet, Jobs, Social Media, Uncategorized

Thinking Through Animals at the Westminster Dog Show

February 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

The emerging food movement, which has gained so much prominence in the past few years, is, surprisingly, entering the canon of composition curricula.  At Queens College, the new topics-focused first-year composition curriculum has an entire course devoted to “food.”  Last semester, following the layout of the composition reader I was using, I taught a unit of my first-year writing class on “the culture of food.”  We read essays on agricultural overproduction, the obesity epidemic, and vegetarianism.  But I have found, through my own experience and through listening to colleagues discuss their classes covering food, that it’s a difficult topic for the writing classroom.  Analyzing one’s political relationship to food requires a level of self-awareness beyond analyzing advertisements, mass-media, and education, all of which are cultural modes often explored in general composition courses.

It seems to me that at the heart of the food movement is a reconsideration of how we eat animals.  That is, we need to eat less meat and pay closer attention to how we treat the animals raised for slaughter. I hesitate to use the term “animal rights” because it sounds controversial, as though I am suggesting animals deserve the same rights as humans. Obviously, they don’t: they don’t get to vote or access public schools. But “animal rights” really refers to an idea that animals deserve to live out their lives in dignity, protected from abuse or exploitation. The question, then, is what constitutes abuse or exploitation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have very leftist views on this topic. I stopped eating meat twenty years ago, when I was twelve and when vegetarianism was still uncommon. I am also the kind of insufferable consumer, recently skewered on an episode of “Portlandia”, who grills the egg vendor at the farmers market on just how “free range” the free ranging chickens are. Are they pastured eggs, or just cage-free? Because I only eat pastured eggs.

On Monday, I attended the 136th Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden.  I had never been to a dog show before, but my interest was sparked a few months ago when the New York Times Magazine published an article on the bulldog. Apparently, the bulldog’s breed standards, set in this country by the American Kennel Club, have led to questionable breeding practices, which produce a good-looking specimen beset with health problems and a reduced life span.  I was shocked to learn that a society devoted to dogs would sponsor, even demand, unhealthy practices.

I went to the dog show to explore this seeming paradox: that those who care most about dogs might not, in fact, care about their health and well being.  I had an image of the dog show as a place devoted to animal welfare, with booths set up supporting adoption or distributing information on canine care.  I was mistaken. While I don’tdoubt that everybody in attendance cared about their dogs, they clearly did not share my definition of “love” for animals. I saw more than one owner standing next to their show dog wearing a full-length fur coat.  To me, this seemed the essence of irony; at an animal-focused event, a participant was sporting a clear signifier of animal cruelty.

But according to a friend’s mother who was in town just to attend the show, the participants are only concerned with status, which explains the fur coats. My friend’s mother is a dog lover who regularly goes to dog shows, not as a participant but as a spectator.  Because I was new to this world, I had a million questions for her, the main one being, “why does anybody participate in this?” Her answer was simple: ego. She explained that that the animals’ wins are “power trips” for the owners. I asked her if she’d ever want to get involved. “I think it seems like a bad life for the dog,” she said. “They are treated like objects. I just like to go to watch.”

I, too, liked to watch. Mostly, I liked to look at cute dogs and discuss with my friend which ones we would most like to own, if we ever lived in apartments big enough for dogs. But it felt weird to admit that, though we recognized the animals were being treated like objects, we could take pleasure in the proceedings. The level of objectification seemed in some ways harmless, since these dogs were clearly healthy and cared for. On the other hand, pedigree breeding, which breeds for extreme traits, does lead to health problems. This leads us back to the question of what constitutes animal abuse and exploitation. According to PETA protestors, the answer is: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But for most of us, it is something less clear-cut.

Negotiating just how sensitive we should be to the objectification or improper “use” of animals is no easy task. The complexity of the issue runs to the heart of the human ego, which might be a touch too heady for a freshman seminar oriented more towards organization and clarity of writing. On the other hand, composition courses often aim to unsettle students’ world-views just a little, at least enough to get them thinking critically. And it would do us all well to think critically about how we share this world with the millions of other species on it, including the more adorable ones.

Filed Under: Culture, New York, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

Will Crowdsourcing Solve All Our Problems?

February 10, 2012 By 2 Comments

James Surowiecki, in his book “Wisdom of Crowds”, builds upon an idea that under certain conditions, groups of people make better decisions than any single  individual could expect to make. According to Surowiecki, crowds are collectively smarter than any single person under four conditions: 1) diversity of opinion: when each person has his/her own view and the interpretation of the event; 2) independence: when the opinions of individuals are not influenced by other individuals; 3) decentralization: when people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge; 4) aggregation: when it is possible to turn individual judgments into collective decisions.

Surowiecki proposes that a large group of amateurs can make good guesses based on the fact that every individual judgement may be wrong, but the sum of all wrong judgements collectively can produce a correct outcome because all wrong answers effectively cancel out. However, not all problems can be solved by amateurs, some challenges require a pool of well-trained experts.
Working Together
Jeff Howe defines crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” As the cost of collaboration is falling dramatically due to low communication costs, businesses explore opportunities to source ideas externally.

Recently, turning to crowds to improve existing algorithms has become a trend. One of the famous examples is Netflix Prize. To make their recommendation system better, Netflix launched a crowdsourcing effort. The goal was to improve the existing recommendation system accuracy by 10%. The prize was $1 million dollars. 51051 contestants on 41305 teams from 186 different countries responded to the challenge. As a result, a team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” was able to improve the existing algorithm by 10.6%.

Inspired by Netflix’s success Overstock.com offers $1 million to anyone who can improve their product recommendation system.  To get $1 million, a team is required to improve the existing algorithm by 10%.

Heritage Health Prize offers $3 million to anyone who will help resolve the problem of predicting how many days a patient will spend in a hospital. According to Heritage Provider Network, so far $30 billion has been spent on unnecessary hospital admissions. The new algorithm will be instrumental in designing new healthcare plans. As of today, 1342 players entered the competition.

Searching for a better algorithm requires enormous computing power. The most powerful computer nowadays is the K-computer manufactured by a Japanese company Fujitsu. It employs 68,544 CPUs, has 548,352 cores and performs 8 quadrillion calculations per second (8 petaflops). Not many researchers and even large research organizations can afford it.

Grid computing can help solve a problem of limited computer power. This technology allows creating a super computer by combining the power of multiple, geographically dispersed computers in the network. Grid computing has been successfully used by major universities to crunch large amounts of data. For example, a project of the University of California, Berkeley uses grids to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. The Scripps Research Institute uses grids to get assistance in the development of new medicines, and Stanford University for fighting Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases.

If crowdsourcing and the combined power of millions of computers are used together, the opportunities can be unlimited for both commercial and academic use, and hopefully more practical solutions will be found to address existing challenges.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

My stress response to oppositional, religious language in the political interweb

February 8, 2012 By 2 Comments

The Slavoj Zizek, “Actual Politics” essay went around Facebook and several sites linked to it this past December. Zizek’s use of religious language got my attention right away, and as I continued to read, I was upset by the way its religious language exalted the Occupy Wall street movement (“we”) and condemned “them”: “We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.” By upset, I mean I had the kind of stress reaction I’ve had when witnessing the sort of reductive us/them discourse practiced by Fox/MSNBC during the heyday of Keith Oberman and Bill O’Reilly. Or, more recently, the kind of broad, oppositional categorizations made by David Brooks and Maureen Dowd (for example, her description of Callista Gingrich as a “Transformational Wife” versus Michelle Obama as a “Let’s Get Real” wife).

Zizek’s “Actual Politics” was published in December, as part of a special, open access issue of the scholarly journal Theory & Event dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In general, the journal focuses on the use of political theory and political science towards the interpretation of the “surprise of current events” and “the politics of representation as it appears in protests, elections, commodities, and high and popular culture.” For example, they’ve published essays on how theories of sovereignty and the state of exception relate to anti-global capitalism movements, Thatcherism and the Bush war on terror. So, it wasn’t just Zizek’s use of religious language, but its appearance in the context of a footnote-y, peer-reviewed journal that baffled me.

So, I asked and Googled around, and found a few people who’ve spent more time than I have thinking about the use of religious language in the public sphere, and asked their opinion of Zizek’s essay.

I asked Elizabeth Sifton, a former editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux, and author of The Serenity Prayer, a book about her father Reinhold Neibuhr, a theologian who wrote about democracy, liberalism, ethics, and politics. “I used to be quite taken with (Zizek’s) work,” Sifton wrote, saying that he is “arrestingly free of inhibitions and outmoded nonsense,” but also “contrarian,” and lacking substance—not the “politics of protest” that we need.

Fritz Stern, a professor emeritus of European history at Columbia, has written about the tendency to level the charge of fascism and to make Nazi comparisons for various political ends. (He wrote Five Germanys I Have Known and The Politics of Cultural Despair, both considered pretty major works). At first Stern didn’t find much to grab ahold of in Zizek’s essay. Then he wrote, “For serious people to talk that way about selves and opponents is abominable. It destroys argument which is essential to democracy.”

But John Merz, priest at the Greenpoint Church of the Ascension, saw it differently:

There is nothing in there that troubles me. The one line you mention gives me pause about the Holy Spirit and the pagans on Wall Street. However he is using the term Holy Spirit in a way ultimately that does not trouble me. His sense of the Spirit which accords with the orthodox sense is that it is that sustaining spirit that leads to new vital life (…)
I think the way he is portraying pagans on “wall street” is in the classic Christian way it was used in that the pagans were seen to be worshipping false Gods or simulated Gods or idols at so many altars. The Christian concept I think is that the worship or remembrance at the altar when people share the bread and the wine is a “real symbol” in that it actually reflects or accesses a truth about reality that cannot be enacted in another way. The truth being that we are connected to one in other and into God in a kind of interdependence best experienced or revealed in love, service, forgiveness etc….Therefore one could imagine an action whereby people could go to wall street in order to ”throw over the tables of the money changers” not because the stock exchange is in fact a house of prayer but because on the sacramental life of everything things, that market, that altar to the false God of hyper capital, has polluted our common space and metastasizes throughout the social and political body.

And I asked Kristin Dombek, who has written about performance, rhetoric, belief, and, as she puts it, “the secular aspects of evangelicalism and the religious aspects of secularism.” (I recommend her essay on the musical, The Book of Mormon in n+1). Kristin said the article moved her, and that she shared this reaction with other people who had heard Zizek’s speech in Zucotti Park. Dombek wrote:

(Zizek posits that) With the help of the Holy Spirit, Christianity could transcend national boundaries, as the Occupy movement was beginning to do. But he revoked the notion of a divine visitation, implying instead that pragmatic, collaborative action can create a sense of revolutionary international transcendence, that we make something better than god this way, together.  He was flirting with totalitarianism, as usual, with the erasure of difference.  But doesn’t any revolutionary rhetoric?

One question I have is, does revolutionary rhetoric have to flirt with totalitarianism, or instead does it often tend to? And, why? Stern’s work addresses this rigorously, and deeply. But, to be cursory, in order for a radical ethical claim to gain traction in a democracy, must it speak in oppositional tones? What would Gandhi, MLK, or Vaclav Havel say?

Ed Koren, from The New Yorker. Jan 31, 2011

I realized that one of the reasons Zizek’s religious language bothered me is because I personally associate these Christian concepts with a practice that can help undo the psychic loggerhead of us/them, and instead elicit a sense of the partialness of one’s own perspective. So to see these terms used to inscribe us/them more forcefully seemed as if one more possible escape from the dynamic of MSN/Fox, Dem/Rep, Red/Blue had been marshaled for the special occasion of a scholarly journal now calling the political moment too pressing for footnotes and peer review.

In contrast, though, McKenzie Wark’s essay in the same issue of Theory & Event describes a political identity of solidarity that isn’t based upon opposition.

Most people don’t really care all that much about what the 1% has. They are not concerned about someone else’s wealth, they are concerned about everyone else’s impoverishment. They are concerned about going hungry.

Maybe the mistake was mine in the first place, to separate “religious” from “secular” language. William E. Connolly writes of the oversimplification and misrecognitions involved in this opposition: “stark definitions on the outside contain the range and reach of diversity on the inside, and vice versa.” Both categories, religion and secularism, define themselves by the relative subtly, complexity, and inclusion of difference they include as opposed to the simplicity and rigidity of the other.[1] Secularism, then, becomes a kind of false category, built upon an opposition between liberalism as part of positivism, modernity, science and the rational, and the irrational and religious.

I will leave the last word to Craig Calhoun, author of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, (taken from a post on the blog “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere”).

To say that religion has power in the public sphere is not to say that it can be easily absorbed or that it should be. It is a basis for radical challenges and radical questions; it brings enthusiasm, passion, indignation, outrage, and love. If enthusiasm is sometimes harnessed to unreflective conviction, passion is also vital to critical engagement with existing institutions and dangerous trends. The public sphere and the practice of public reason have power too. And they not only take from religion but also offer it opportunities to advance by reflection and critical argument.

[1]  William E. Connolly, “Introduction: The Pluralist Imagination,” in The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xiv.

Filed Under: Audience, Internet, Language, Politics, Scholarship, Uncategorized

The gender of revolution

February 7, 2012 By 1 Comment

Despite women’s widespread participation in the “Arab Spring”, perhaps most notably in Egypt, many activists point out that women have been sidelined by the new political systems. The new governments created after the fall of regimes rarely feature prominent women and their agendas almost never champion women’s concerns. Women have been left out of the political dialogue since Mubarak was ousted and the committee to redraft the constitution excluded women, even female legal experts. Many Arab feminists express concern over the situation of women in Iraq, where after the overthrow of a secular tyrant four-fifths of all female pupils and students have discontinued their education.

The exclusion of women in the post-revolution state-building efforts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is partly a result of political and social factors and the speed at which these transitions are happening, which tends to favor groups that are already organized and seasoned in politics—mostly men. Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, the founder and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership, an international NGO working on women’s leadership and empowerment issues across much of the Muslim world. “They often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and aggressive policy.”
Human Rights Watch researcher Nadya Khalife argues that the political culture in many regions across the Middle East had yet to prioritize women’s rights, or take women’s voices seriously.

But it would be a mistake to put too much weight on the difficulties that Arab women face on their cultural background. It seems that all revolutions leave women behind. The peaceful transitions in Eastern Europe in the 1990ties hardly created more egalitarian societies. In fact, arguably, the generous provisions of the paternalistic state, such as free child care facilities, long and paid maternity leaves, free health care, have all been replaced with the market driven, capitalist policies. Even more dramatically, the right to abortion have been replaced by much stricter regulations and in some countries, like Poland, it was outlawed. The new leaders like Walesa or Havel certainly did not fight to implement gender equality provisions in the newly democratizing states. Notably, Walesa openly called for the return of traditional roles for women.

http://wolnemedia.net/wierzenia/matka-boska-nie-ubiera-sie-u-prady/

Preferred model of femininity...

The impact of Catholicism on the new society was overwhelming in Poland, where the old dogmas were replaced by growing power of religious fundamentalism. The public space in these new democracies excluded many groups, namely women and sexual minorities. Finally, the public/private divisions continue to endure and the roles of women continue to be prescribed according to old, gendered scenarios.

The cultural wars in Poland intensified with the prospects of EU accession, perceived by some as a threat to existing social relations. But for a long time before the 2004 accession, one of the main characteristics of polarized Polish politics, particularly after 1989’s political opening, was the clash between conservatives promoting family values and defending tradition on one side, and emerging new social movements claiming citizenship rights and legal protection on the other. Gender roles played a special part in these conflicts, because they were perceived as constitutive to the character of the Polish nation. The earlier socialist state’s insistence on freeing women from home confinement and domesticity (albeit limited in scope, and often in name only) is now contrasted with a Catholic ideology that emphasizes women’s roles as mothers and caretakers. Religion took on a political role and dictates acceptable social norms, and has a big impact not just on public sphere but is reflected in legislation. Hitchens was definitely not a feminist but his assertions about the harmful effects of religious dogma played out in rather tragic ways for Polish women.

The accession to the EU in 2004 of a number of post-Soviet states, was a double edged sword for women’s rights advocated in countries like Poland. The EU economic policies in many cases forced the government to yield significant social policies to the EU demands, while forcing the respective governments to start taking seriously the EU’s demands for gender mainstreaming, and various equality measures already present in other member states.

The news from the EU has been gloomy lately, filled with reports of the euro crisis, debt burden, undisciplined spending. Many predict that to solve the growing financial crisis, the countries need to make drastic cuts in spending, curb social services, limit generous pensions and public employees’ entitlements. While the economic model of the EU is being questioned, the liberal democratic model that governs it seems safely entrenched, and the inequalities of the political system persist. The political identity of the EU is closely tied with the economic system. Some of the feminist critics if the EU have long warned that the punitive austerity measures will not affect male and female citizens of the in EU in the same way. For women, who lost much ground since 1989, further cuts in domestic spending and the dismantling of the welfare state, will have disastrous effects.

And so revolutions everywhere have a way to bypass women, and until we insist that women’s rights are a priority in every context and in every culture, it will continue to be so.

 

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Gender, Interpersonal Communication, Politics, Uncategorized
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