Sharing that learning is sweet!

Passing some sweetness around....

Today we begin for everyone with some exercises, to help us focus and make it a bit easier to share what we have done in the learning analysis. Today each person will speak and offer their own unique sense of traveling through the argument or story of the course. Our personal feelings are, of course, a special part of this. But do think of this primarily as an intellectual sharing of analysis as well as of any careful personal details. Celebrating each others' work and our own, and especially thinking together today about the knowledge we each bring into being is the collective project here, our feminist reconceptualization. So listen as carefully as you speak, because active listening is as necessary to collective thought. If someone else says something you intended to say, then -- thinking on your feet -- find another something to say that is a unique bit of your own work instead. 

Focusing exercises for presenting: 

EVERYONE:

1) find your favorite paragraph in the paper. Put a star next to it.

2) write down what you are most proud of in this paper.

3) put an arrow next to the place you think best describes the argument of the course.

4) write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what element of its ANALYSIS made it special for you.

PICK ONE OF THESE TOO:

=write about a moment in the course where everything seemed to come together for you.

=write about a moment outside the course where you realized you were using something you had learned in the class.

=write about a moment when you discovered something new about how you were included in the argument of the class. 

WHEN IT IS YOUR TURN TO SPEAK:

pick out four of these to share. Focus on analysis -- of the course, readings, experiences, realizations -- especially, although feelings and politics have important places too. Be mindful of the time -- we want to allow time for everyone in the class to speak today -- give some real details: don't be too general. Do show off the hard thinking you are capable of. Make sure what you say is special and unique.

And may we keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship and connection and intellectual community and joyful living!

Time Machines & Boundary Objects

REFLEXIVITY IN WOMEN’S STUDIES: SOLIDARITY IN RESISTANCE, FLEXIBILITY IN BUILDING 

Tuesday 4 Dec – Share Feminism/s, how? with whom? with what care? how to use the notion of an epistemological project 

• rereading Davis as lens on all the other books 

• rereading Zandt as lens on all the other books

• HOW TO DO LEARNING ANALYSIS 

What does Zandt have to teach us about the issues raised in the other books that we might have missed if we hadn’t read her work? So how well does Davis’ notion of epistemological project travel? Can we use it to think about these books, ideas, activisms, methods, disciplines, feminisms? 

1. what would you not have noticed about everything if we had not read Zandt?
2. what would Zandt say about Berger and Hewitt? what makes you think so?
3. what would Davis say about Berger and Hewitt? what makes you think so?

• what is an epistemological project as you understand it now?
• what is the argument of the class? what makes you think so?
• what moment during the semester did it all come together for you?
• how will you demonstrate that you read everything by the last day?

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Thursday 6 Dec – Time Machines & Boundary Objects: experiencing what’s alive! 

• finishing up and rereading Berger as lens on all the other books

• finishing up and rereading Hewitt as lens on all the other books 

How do different feminisms use intersectionality to share their urgent projects and their hopes for feminism? Read stuff you missed or reread the stuff that has become a touchstone for you; be able to say why and how. Why do feminists want to be able to historicize? How is that a kind of sharing? a kind of traveling in space and time? 

Collectives & Coalitions! Women's Studies keeps changing!

from Emergent Culture, click for link

Tuesday 27 Oct – WORKSHOP #2 – Dynamics in Our Field of Women’s Studies

Today we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time.  

Thursday 29 Oct – WORKSHOP #2 – Talking about it all  

• LOGBOOK 3 DUE along with either paper and handout or digital picture of poster, after presentations 

Today we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from the last class presentations. 

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Learning Analysis 300 2012 Fall


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Coming up next!


REFLEXIVITY IN WOMEN’S STUDIES: SOLIDARITY IN RESISTANCE, FLEXIBILITY IN BUILDING 

• Tuesday 4 Dec – Share Feminism/s, how? with whom? with what care? how to use the notion of an epistemological project 
• Thursday 6 Dec – Time Machines & Boundary Objects: experiencing what’s alive! 
• Tuesday 11 Dec – LAST DAY! Learning, sharing, making, doing, thinking, acting 

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Collectives and their epistemological projects

We can look at feminist histories through the eyes of different ways of understanding intersectionality; and we can look at how and why intersectionalities might differ through the eyes of feminist histories, generations, political agendas, and assumptions about what is better than what else.... 

FOR EACH BOOK-COLLECTIVE! KNOW CAREFULLY: INTROS AND CONCLUSIONS, TABLES OF CONTENTS AND DATES FOR ALL ITEMS, WHERE THINGS MAY HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED, AND HAVE READ 2/3 OF EACH BOOK, CHOOSING ITEMS THAT SPEAK TO YOUR OWN COALITIONS AND CAREABOUTS. 

If you want to talk to Katie before Thanksgiving and were not able to make it last Friday, it is your responsibility to make an alternate arrangement with her in person after class. If you signed up for Friday and did not come, please understand that you may have to wait longer as a result. 

Tuesday 13 Nov – Agendas, Activisms, Relocations 

• Hewitt: Part III: pick 3 of 5 

Look through all of these enough to compare them all somewhat, then become an expert on the ones you choose. How do these projects each in their own specific way contribute to the epistemological project of the whole book? How can you tell? Why does it matter TO YOU?


On Tuesday we had some good discussion about different kinds of intersectionality. 

HOW MANY WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING WAVES CAN YOU COME UP WITH?


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Uploaded by kleokriesel on Sep 7, 2009 to YouTube  --
Could the rising gender movement be the Fourth Wave of feminism?


=Garrison: waves as technology driven = 12 yrs ago
=Peoples: waves as race coalitions = 4 yrs ago
=kleokriesel: 4th wave genderqueer = 3 yrs ago
=Hewitt: intersectionality and waves = 2 yrs ago

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Which chapters did you choose? Why? How can you let the authors alter your historical imagination? Can you let them turn it in-side out? Change how you think rather than justify how you think? What does that mean for feminists and feminisms?

I picked Ednie Garrison's framing of "Third Wave" as one of my readings (originally in Feminist Studies 2000). In some ways it justified my assumptions about the histories involved, but in other ways it altered them, opened up areas I hadn't thought about in those terms before.

For example, I already did not consider these feminisms strictly age related, but I didn't anticipate how Garrison would reframe them -- not generational but differentially oppositional, an analysis inspired by   Chela Sandoval and attentive to culture and technology as historical agencies:

394: "The refusal to claim ownership of feminism allow these third wavers to maintain a sense of their own and other feminist-identified individuals' tactical subjectivity. When we understand that feminism is not about fitting into a mold but about expanding our ability to be revolutionary from within the worlds and communities and scenes we move around and through, then collective action becomes possible across the differences that affect people differently."

Notice this language: "the differences that affect people differently." 

Another one I picked was originally in Meridians 2008, so almost a decade later, Whitney Peoples' discussion of hip hop feminisms and the solidarity of black feminists across generations. She takes as her definition of "third wave" a specific history that defines it pivotally as a collective critique by women of color. (See her ftnote 3.) What alternate histories of the term exist at the same time? How can that be the case? How much does it matter and to whom? Is the "true origin" important? What does it mean to claim the origin of such a term?

And what does critique entail? If you critique something do you throw it out? Peoples' takes up this issue as she explores how hip-hop critique could divide black feminists but doesn't have to, and how it needn't be thrown out even if interrogated....

424: "Just as other black American feminists have chosen to engage other modes of cultural production that are inimical to the development of  black women's subjectivity, hip-hop feminists refuse to turn away from difficult and volatile engagements with hip-hop. Bell hooks, for example, argues that the mainstream American film industry has long produced images of women, people of color, that have negated the humanity and subjectivity of black women. Hooks, however, does not advocate the black women abandon film. On the contrary she, like Pough in the case of hip-hop, says that they value of mainstream cinema lies not in the images it produces but in the critique of those images. [she quotes hooks on "the pleasure of interrogation."]...The hip-hop feminist agenda is one that takes its cue from hooks and others by using the  critique to fashion an individual, social, and political agenda of inquiry and action for the contemporary moment.... It's the legacy of unmasking the specificity of women's experiences at the intersections of race and sex that continue to make black American feminism an indispensable mode of analysis and activism for many women today. Hip-hop feminists draw on the strength of that legacy while simultaneously drawing on the strength of movements of the contemporary moment such as hip-hop."

click for Black Youth project website

Note how hip-hop then becomes an agency of intersectionality here, and actually allows for a continuity of political analysis across age-generations of black feminists.

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Thursday 15 Nov – Comparing epistemological projects 

• Berger: Part IV: choose 2 of the 5 and everyone should read the epilogue 

How might each of these chapters work to help us envision the future of intersectionality and to see what is at stake? 

=Brainstorming all the differences we can grasp. What contexts do they respond to? What constituencies are addressed? What political goals are assumed? How do they compare with your care-abouts?

=What questions and concerns are coming up as you prepare for next week's workshop? 

=What is at stake for you in different intersectional approaches, in different ways of conceptualizing waves? 

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Make it all alive!

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click image for source

DYNAMICS IN OUR FIELD OF WOMEN’S STUDIES: NOTHING STAYS STILL

Tuesday 6 Nov – Coming together and pulling apart, which is which? Why care? 

• Hewitt: Part II: pick 4 of 7 

Coalitions happen on the ground with activists, how do activists work with other activisms? What are the difficulties involved? 

Thursday 8 Nov – What is connected and how? Think complexly about people and our worlds 

• Berger: Part III: pick 2 of 5 from the section on methodological innovations

Come with ideas and questions that look ahead to our workshop. 

HOW DO WE THINK OF EACH OF THESE COLLECTIONS AS A "COLLECTIVE"? IN WHAT WAYS ARE THEY LIKE AND UNLIKE THE BWHC? How do they use, understand, take for granted, or demonstrate "feminist generations"? Why could this matter? 

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EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROJECT OF EACH COLLECTIVE, HEWITT & BERGER?
how does each essay enter into this project as a member of this collective?
how do you enter into coalition yourself with this project?

from Davis:


"As a feminist epistemological project, the aim of OBOS is to create critical knowledge and knowledge practices that can empower women individually and collectively" (Davis, p. 142.)

"How does OBOS--which is, after all, just a book--produce readers who are prepared to become embodied, critical, epistemic agents able to participate in a feminist politics of health? In other words, how does OBOS transform its readers into feminist subjects?" (Davis, p. 142.)

"OBOS creates readers who are prepared to use their embodied experiences as a knowledge resource in the process of gathering and critically assess information about their bodies and health. . . .this politics of knowledge, mutually enacted in the interactions between the text and its readers that accounts not only for the broad appeal of OBOS but also for its capacity to transform its readers into critical feminist subjects" (Davis, p. 165.)

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Browse Feminist Studies  journal home  history  editors  
=Volume 28 > Issue 2 (Summer 2002) 
=Volume 35 > Issue 2 (Summer 2009)  
=Volume 25 > Issue 1 (Spring 1999)  
=Volume 26 > Issue 1 (Spring 2000) 

=BWA 2002 
=W&SM 13/1 2009 (links to Vol 16) 
=Meridians 8/1 2008  journal home  editorial collectives  

=FS: Volume 9 > Issue 1 (Spring 1983)  
=EJWS: 13/3 2006  

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Tuesday 30 Oct – Make it all alive! These are people! How do you come to care about them?
• Hewitt: Part I: pick 3 of the 5 chapters in this section to read, be prepared to discuss why you chose the ones you did

How does Hewitt talk about traveling knowledges? How does travel across time compare to travel across space and geopolitical location? How can you compare what Hewitt does with what Davis does? With what Berger and Guidroz do? How are these epistemological projects similar and different?

Thursday 1 Nov – Not just words on a page! People live in worlds! Connect yours here too!
• Berger: Part II: pick 2 of the 4 chapters in this section to read, be prepared to discuss why you chose the ones you did

Although you pick only 2 of these, look at all of them enough to compare the approaches they take, and to consider the disciplines they come from. How might that matter? 

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4: "Activists thus highlight their distinctiveness from -- and often superiority to -- previous feminist movements in the process of constituting themselves as the next wave." 

[KK: yes, but it should also be said that generational hierarchies of supposedly knowing things better exist as well!] 

How do "waves" and "generations" compare, converge, or divide? 

Look at Wikipedia's timeline of key events in the second wave (scroll down to see it). 

Wikipedia on the third wave.  

Wikipedia on the first wave. 

Which parts of the world are centered in these?

Wikipedia's Portal: Feminism  

Wikipedia's Feminism by country   

What about feminist generations? 

From Young Feminist Wire 

Symposium on inter- and transgenerational feminisms 

Call for papers by Feminist Memory    

Nancy Whittier's book & KK's handout on generations  

All six volumes of Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage are available free as ebooks online. See Google books and Project Gutenberg. 

Hewitt, Thompson, Taylor, Chávez, Fernandes

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Recall Yuval-Davis' point: (54): “social divisions, such as those relating to membership in particular castes or status as indigenous or refugee  people, tend to affect fewer people globally. At the same time, for those who are affected by these and other social divisions not mentioned here, such social  divisions are crucial and necessitate struggle to render them visible. This is, therefore, a case where recognition - of social power axes, not of social identities - is of crucial political importance.”

power: macro-, meso-, micro-political (fr structure to interpersonal interaction) [Foucault, biopower]

structure: longer term, more stable, affect most, mostly at macro-political levels and layers [Marx, social structure]

Keating, Luft, Caldwell, Sherwood 

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University Open on Wednesday, October 31, 2012

DETAILS ON OPENING HERE.

The University was closed on Monday & Tuesday, October 29 & 30, 2012.

BE UP TO DATE WITH SYLLABUS BY THURSDAY! READ AND PREPARE BOTH TUESDAY AND THURSDAY, READY TO DISCUSS ALL OF IT! 

TerpWeather on facebook said DURING THE STORM: "We may all be happy because we don't have classes tomorrow BUT it emphasizes how severe this will be. DO NOT go outside tomorrow unless absolutely necessary. We will be experiencing sustained tropical storm conditions tomorrow escalating potentially to hurricane force gusts by nightfall."

Metro will restore bus and rail service Tuesday afternoon on modified schedules, and expects to resume normal service levels (i.e. rush hour service) for Wednesday morning's commute. Metro service was suspended on Monday and part of Tuesday, details HERE.

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Hi Folks! You should also have gotten an email with this same information! 

Noting that next week's classes and events could be affected by storms and weather? How will this affect our class?

What if the campus is closed? What if you cannot make it to class just yourself? What if your power goes out and you cannot do various internet related things? 

FIRST! CARE FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS! Do not do anything dangerous, AND do do what work you can, PLEASE! 

It is not a vacation, but one can only do what it is possible to do! 

Continue with the work on the syllabus! Do all the reading even if we do not meet and no matter how long we do not meet! Keep up with the syllabus, and we do on the day we return every thing we missed as well as what is due that day! We will smoosh it together! WE WILL KEEP UP WITH THE SYLLABUS AS IT IS NOW.

Doing it this way will mean we will not be required by the state to "make up" missed time -- extend our semester, or otherwise have to add more time and work into our syllabus. I assure you that this way is easier in the end. YOU WILL BE GLAD!

And actually it can be good to continue on even if you have to use a local library or whatever. Keeping to a routine can be very important when events have disruptive aspects. I have experienced doing this during hurricanes, 9/11, tornadoes, blizzards, and other big things, with and without power for as long (for me) as 10 days. It gets old really fast and the second round of disruptions trying to get back on track can be worse than the first round. 

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND OTHERS!! This matters the most! Keep on track as much as is humanly possible. Do everything on our syllabus WHETHER WE MEET OR NOT! Check our class website if possible. Help class buddies. 

Be well! Best wishes to us all!

WeatherBug forecasts here.

UMD Campus weather emergency information here.

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Click pic for link to washingtonpost.com article
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Workshop 1

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COME EARLY! IF LATE YOU MAY BE UNABLE TO SHARE YOUR WORK! 

SIGN IN FIRST THING!!! -- EITHER FOR POSTERS OR PAPERS!

Posters go first: when you first come in, set up your poster station. Bring tape to put on walls or sit on desks along the walls or prep a laptop for showing an electronic slide (no powerpoint presentations: one slide at most). Bring any cables you need for laptops. 

We start at 11:05 exactly. If you are late you may have to recreate the entire event with class buddies later on. It is possible but will be harder on you and everyone else.

GO FOR INTERACTION – COMMUNICATE BACK AND FORTH, NOT IN PRESENTATION MODE!

Use posters and handouts for quick appreciation of what a person is doing. Ask them questions, and do brief back and forth conversations and comparisons with your own project.

After the class make notes on the most exciting things that came up and be prepared to continue those discussions on thursday. You will need to be active and create that conversation too. 

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Tuesday 23 Oct – WORKSHOP #1 – Power, Movements, Worlds 
Today we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time.  

Thursday 25 Oct – WORKSHOP #1 – Talking about it all 
• LOGBOOK 2 DUE along with either paper and handout or digital picture of poster, after presentations
Today we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from the last class presentations. 

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what happens with traveling knowledges?

Tuesday 16 Oct – Transnational Body/Politics 

• Davis Part III, read all of it (ch 6, reread 7); also read Davis’ essay on intersectionality (link for pdf online) 

How is Davis’ analysis of OBOS similar to her analysis of intersectionality? (Don’t get sidetracked by the term “buzzword” in her title for the intersectionality article, or at least not at first. Consider it AFTER you have made your comparisons, and think about what other terms might have been better? boundary object, buzzword, traveling theory) 

• acquiring new body understandings: Davis, p. 173: after translations of OBOS required inventing new words to express emotional care for one's body, one translator said: "I have developed a much greater love for my own body. It is not merely that I have to know it better but that I feel that I have learned new ways of experiencing the world differently."   

individualism from • POV Spanish translation (177, 180); • POV Bulgarian translation (189) :: different contexts, different oppositions; one expresses isolation from community resources & support, different from consumer health care commodified individually. the other expresses resistance to totalitarian structures, impersonal and collectivist in the worst sense, different from self-care and self-assertion needed both personally and socially. THINK NECKER CUBE: first one face, then another

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Thursday 18 Oct – Making Intersectionality Transnational? 

identity
identity politics 

myth? buzzword?

why might popular versions of these terms differ?

why might academic uses of such terms differ?

are such ambiguities to be avoided, understood, assumed, examined? how and why? recall the notion of individualism and make what comparisons seem proper to you here. 

what is a boundary object? 

what is traveling theory? 

•    Foundations Intersectionality, Berger Part I: read Yuval-Davis’ essay carefully. 

Why does Yuval-Davis start off with a little history of intersectionality? “All-inclusive”? Transversal? What can you learn about feminism in 2006 that will help you understand why she is approaching these issues the way she does? What other kinds of articles were being published in the journal European Journal of Women’s Studies in 2006? In other feminist journals in countries other than the US? What other feminist journals were big internationally in 2006? 

sedentism from Wikipedia  

sedentarism in Nomadic Studies 

Wikipedia versions "intersectionality": 

2005; 2007; 2010; 2011 

By 2007: includes line: "Collins' theory is one of particular interest because it represents the sociological crossroads between modern and post-modern feminist thought."  

By 2010: added: "Theories of intersectionality increasingly also address the more than human. Examples of posthuman intersectionality include ecofeminism and are under development in the field of animal studies."

=another line of argument, some including critique of multiculturalism, others centered around legal issues, others around academic disciplinary and other methodologies:

Gordon and Newfield, 1996, Mapping Multiculturalism 

critical race theory from Wikipedia  

Crenshaw on intersectionality, google scholar  1989, 1991, 1994 

Dill essay in FS 1983

Yuval-Davis essay in EJWS 2006 (23 yrs later) 

Davis on intersectionality 2008, bk OBOS 2007

Berger book beginning with Dill, 2009 

=& non-centering critiques of white women's movement from postcolonial, postmodernisms, Chicana feminisms: 

Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000

postcolonial feminism from Wikipedia  

oppositional consciousness in Sandoval 2000

differential consciousness in Sandoval 2000  

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Collins book first published 1991. Then it was substantially revised in 2000. 

Patricia Hill Collins: Black Feminist Thought (2000):

p. 228: putting black women at the center without privileging their consciousness

• transversal politics: both/and thinking: varying expressions of power, distinctive forms of participation in domination and resistance

• US black women could be both penalized and privileged. So could others be.

boundary object III: some use intersectionality for this "transversal politics"

or even matrix of domination

p. 247: groups only have partial perspective on their own experiences

• and thus need critical self-reflection (think: violated assumptions?)

• groups police each other, making coalition difficulty

p. 248: no absolute oppressors or victims

• groups find some oppression more salient than others

p. 268: Elsa Barkley Brown: everyone can learn to pivot their "center. 

• everyone can learn to center in another experience, and, in this case, to engage "black feminist thought"

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