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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