<<<EXPERIENCE SET TWO: Change is happening:
What and Who are changed and make change? How do we take on Power?>>>
Tu 27 Sept: Alternate versions of power and change
• Keating, Chap 1 or 6; be prepared to say WHY you chose the one you did!
• Take Back, Chap 4 (be sure you have already read Chaps 1, 2, 5)
• something from your 5th book (either Octavia's Brood or Are You My Mother?) Be prepared to say what you chose and why. Impress us!
• Find out much MORE about the Take Back Collective! Who are they? What assumptions do you find you made about them?
• Continue finding out more about Keating and check your assumptions there too!
• Bring in notes on the following and be ready to discuss!!
How do Keating and the Take Back collective understand what changes are going on in our shared present?
What is the same about their understandings, what is different?
How does analyzing this help you understand your own assumptions about what changes are happening and how do you know?
What sorts of "identities" are involved?
Which countries do they know about and refer to?
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From Mindomo: https://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/two-conceptions-of-power-81d6c44cc6e0c15efbb178411601725e
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Feminist versions of power shift among these horizons of unilateral and relational.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entire article on power worth reading, here is one bit from it:
"Nancy Hartsock refers to the understanding of power “as energy and competence rather than dominance” as “the feminist theory of power” (Hartsock 1983, 224).
Hartsock argues that precursors of this theory can be found in the work of some women who did not consider themselves to be feminists — most notably, Hannah Arendt, whose rejection of the command-obedience model of power and definition of ‘power’ as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” overlaps significantly with the feminist conception of power as empowerment (1970, 44). Arendt’s definition of ‘power’ brings out another aspect of the definition of ‘power’ as empowerment because of her focus on community or collective empowerment (on the relationship between power and community, see Hartsock 1983, 1996).
This aspect of empowerment is evident in Mary Parker Follett’s distinction between power-over and power-with; for Follett, power-with is a collective ability that is a function of relationships of reciprocity between members of a group (Follett 1942). Hartsock finds it significant that the theme of power as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work of women who have written about power.
In her view, this points in the direction of a feminist standpoint that “should allow us to understand why the masculine community constructed…power, as domination, repression, and death, and why women’s accounts of power differ in specific and systematic ways from those put forward by men….such a standpoint might allow us to put forward an understanding of power that points in more liberatory directions” (Hartsock 1983, 226)." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-power/
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Social Justice for Migrants in Ireland: "developing a critical analysis of power is key": http://www.mrci.ie/our-work/community-work/empowerment-2/
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• Find out much MORE about the Take Back Collective! Who are they? What assumptions do you find you made about them?
http://www.critical-theory.com/20-must-read-queer-theory-books/2/
http://takebackeconomy.net/?page_id=48
• Continue finding out more about Keating and check your assumptions there too!
http://myecdysis.blogspot.com/2007/06/nwsa_9779.html
"Gems from AnaLouise Keating:
Spiritual Activism is not religion, it is a holistic approach to plitics and transformation. It is the belief that there is more to existence than the embodied world and the spirit infuses it. We are all connected and are accountable for the people down the street, across the border, across the seas.
It is not based on sameness, not about walking in a straight line.
Feminism must stretch to an unseen place."
• something from your 5th book (either Octavia's Brood or Are You My Mother?) Be prepared to say what you chose and why. Impress us!
Octavia Butler herself:
http://www.winnovating.com/octaviabutlerwinnovatingsciencefiction/
Octavia's Brood: the book comes into being:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/octavia-s-brood-science-fiction-stories-from-social-justice-movements#/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUz3jql9m0w
And Alison Bechdel? http://www.azquotes.com/author/1107-Alison_Bechdel
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FREEWRITING:
• where are you in your process for your paper & handout or poster & digital pics for Workshop 1?
• how you do understand the objectives of Workshop 1?
• what plans have you made already for working with your class partner for Workshop 1?
PROTOTYPING:
• draw a picture of the most curious element of your paper or poster
• draw pictures that show how what we read today is affecting your ideas for poster or paper
• draw pictures that illustrate a research process for Workshop 1.
What does prototyping have in common with drafting? when is a draft a prototype?
only one way to think about this, both applicable and not, yet curiously interesting: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Rapid_Prototyping_Techniques
How collectives, in this case a museum, can use design processes to create changing action and projects:
http://www.slideshare.net/dmitroff/design-thinking-at-museum-next-2014-for-slideshare
=working with class partner and perhaps with collaborator identify surprises and insights, problems and opportunities, be careful not to jump to conclusions, open to what you don't yet know: DEFINE
=generate ideas withOUT pre-judgments so you have more to test and wonder about: IDEATE
=make stuff: drawings, poster drafts, flow charts, outlines, journaling, thingies: PROTOTYPE
=TEST AT OUR WORKSHOP, get responses, make connections, learn what got left out
THEN BEGIN AGAIN FOR WORKSHOP 2 adding more readings, observations, insights....
REPEAT!
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From Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1999 & (online) 2010. "Queer(y)ing Capitalism in and out of the Classroom," Journal of Geography in Higher Education 23/1: 80-85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03098269985623
"I [REMEMBER THIS IS ACTUALLY A COLLECTIVE AUTHOR!] was still trying to capture `what was happening out there’, like the researchers at the conference. Students were drawn to the certainty and urgency of tracing the `emergence of global capitalism’ in particular industrial sectors and regions, and the classroom became a site where the new world order was critically `pinned down’. At that point I was not thinking about the social representation my students and I were creating as constitutive of the world in which we would have to live. Yet the image of global capitalism that we were producing was actively participating in consolidating a new phase of capitalist hegemony [3]. Through my pedagogy and other forms of communication, I was representing an entity called the `global capitalist economy’, and that representation was becoming common sense to a generation of students and activists. Over a period of years this became increasingly clear to me and increasingly distressing.
My situation resembled that of the many other teachers and social theorists for whom the `object of critique’ has become a perennial and consequential theoretical issue. When theorists depict patriarchy, or racism, or compulsory heterosexuality, or capitalist hegemony they are not only delineating a formation they hope to see destabilised or replaced. They are also generating a representation of the social world and endowing it with performative force. To the extent that this representation becomes infuential it may contribute to the hegemony of a `hegemonic formation’; and it will undoubtedly infuence students, and other people’s ideas about the possibilities of difference and change, including the potential for successful political interventions. In the classroom the excitement of `identifying’ global capitalism was increasingly tempered by the seeming futility of any form of resistance to it, and some students became exasperated and disillusioned by the project.
A feeling of hopelessness is perhaps the most extreme and at the same time most familiar political sentiment in the face of a massive or monolithic patriarchy, racism, or capitalism. Perhaps it is partly for this reason that many social theorists have taken to theorising a hegemonic formation in the field of discourse (heteronormativity, for instance, or a binary gender hierarchy) while representing the social field as unruly and diverse [4]. A good example can be found in Sedgwick’s opening chapter to Epistemology of the Closet where she counterposes to a heteronormative discourse of sexuality the `obviousness’ [5] of the great and existing diversity of people’s relations to sex. In a similar fashion, bell hooks (1992) sets a dominant phallocentric discourse of black masculinity (and black racial identity) against the diverse social field of black masculinities and gender relations [6].
Like many political economists I had heretofore theorised the US social formation and `the global economy’ as sites of capitalist dominance, a dominance located squarely in the social (or economic) field. But a theoretical and pedagogical option now presented itself, one that could make a powerful difference: to depict economic discourse as hegemonised while rendering the social world as economically differentiated and complex. It is possible, I realised, and potentially productive to understand capitalist hegemony as a (dominant) discourse rather than as a social articulation or structure. Thus, one might represent economic practice as comprising a rich diversity of capitalist and non-capitalist activities and argue that the non-capitalist ones had until now been relatively `invisible’ because the concepts and discourses that could make them `visible’ have themselves been marginalised and suppressed.
In this project of discursive destabilisation, the first task is to undermine familiar representations of capitalism as the hegemonic form of economy, as necessarily and naturally dominant. This opens up a space for alternative economic representations.... (82)
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