[Xmca-l] Re: Nakesha

Sat Mar 3 23:39:05 PST 2018

Thanks Helena!!!

Στις Κυρ, 4 Μαρ 2018 στις 06:39 ο χρήστης Helena Worthen <
helenaworthen@gmail.com> έγραψε:

> Hello —
> I read the whole NYTimes article posted by Annalisa about the woman who
> died on the streets in NY — a young woman, 45, Black, mother of two
> children born while she was homeless.  The story is upsetting for many
> reasons.
>
> One, because living in the Bay Area, I see whole homeless encampments —
> tent villages, under the freeway overpasses, along the grassy medians of
> streets lined with nice restaurants, and beside bike paths. At night the
> door ways of downtown shops become occupied with bodies in sleeping bags.
>
> Reason number two is that the article focuses on the help that was offered
> to Nakesha and mostly refused. Not only old friends from college (she
> graduated from Williams), but also people who walked past her and talked
> with her and gave her things,  and then city social service workers who
> reached out to her. One NYC worker recorded visiting her and speaking with
> her over 300 times. She was well enough known to be interviewed on TV about
> whether people on the street should be moved to shelters or not when the
> temperature dropped. Two men who ran food trucks fed her, sometimes for
> free. Psychiatrists talked with her.
>
> So the overall impact of the article to me seems to say, “Here is a woman
> with talent and potential who refuses the help that would have allowed her
> to lead a more normal life: she is schizophrenic but won’t accept
> medication or shelters.” The article, it seems to me, puts all the blame on
> her.  It also unfortunately notes that what ultimately kills her is a
> complication of obesity: she is only 5 feet tall but weighs over 250 pounds
> at the time of her death.
>
> I really don’t want to hear someone say, “I read an article in the NYTimes
> about this homeless woman who refused help 300 times!” - and suggest that
> this is typical.
>
> So  although this article tells a terribly sad story, it undercuts the
> brutal fact of homelessness in the US by seeming to say homelessness is a
> matter of individual choice (you can choose to accept medication for
> schizophrenia or not), not a social problem for all of us.
>
> Should I, based on this story, decide to think that the crowds living on
> the street are all there because they refuse social services, won’t go into
> a shelter, won’t take their medications? That’s what the story would lead
> me to think.
>
> The loss of good jobs in academia is part of the homelessness story; maybe
> I sit in a place in the discourse where stories of adjuncts losing their
> jobs, trying to live on one class per semester, losing their healthcare
> when their assignments drops below 50%, art teachers sleeping in their
> studios, others in their cars are heard more often than elsewhere, but I
> don’t think so. I’m sure people on this list are aware of the overall
> deterioration of academic labor, if not experiencing it themselves.
>
> But organizers would say, “It’s not what they do to you; it’s what we do
> for ourselves.”
>
> Mike asked a while ago if xmca had a collective response to the challenge
> of being able to do academic work, given the changes in higher ed — loss
> of  funding, anti-intellectualism in our government, loss of tenure track
> lines, explosion of student debt, cost of tuition, grant-dependent research
> where the tail wags the dog, etc etc.  I think xmcc is a collective
> response. Add in the journal, Mind Culture and Activity, and the ISCAR
> conferences, and the partcipants from all over the world, including some
> with historical memory!!! — that’s a response. Not that it pays for
> groceries.
>
> Kind regards (I love the way Annalisa signs off…)
>
> Helena
>
>
>
>
> Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
> Berkeley, CA 94707 510-828-2745
> Blog US/ Viet Nam:
> helenaworthen.wordpress.com
> skype: helena.worthen1
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Mar 3, 2018, at 9:25 AM, Jessica Kindred <kindred.jessica@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I also remember my shock at the homelessness in San Francisco. I think
> part of it, coming from New York, was that so much of it was actually on
> the street. In New York, it tends to be underground in the subway us or in
> shelters, and of course, sometimes on the actual street as well.  I
> recently was in Denver Colorado, and was shocked at the number of people
> lining sidewalks and I asking for money at crosswalks.
> > That is to say, American homelessness is shocking even from an inside
> the US point of view.
> > Jessie K.
> >
> > On Mar 3, 2018, at 12:05 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for sharing, Annalisa. Really nice case story a la Oliver Sacks.
> I have yet to read the whole, but, 3900 unsheltered homeless people just in
> New York City???
> >
> > I had never been in the US until I moved to live a couple of years in
> BC, Canada, and the first time I got the chance to visit the US was San
> Francisco, for a conference. I was there only the time strictly needed to
> go to bed, wake up, walk to the conference venue in SF downtown, and back
> to the hotel in the evening to leave early next morning. In my brief walk,
> I got to see more homeless people that I had never seen before, and I
> remember thinking that, if that scene I saw would suddenly occur in a city
> in Spain (where I am from) or Norway, there would be a social alarm and
> everyone would be talking about that all the time. Of course, I also
> thought that letting down the thousands of Syria refugees that the Spanish
> government had committed to host but never did would also cause a huge
> alarm and revolt... but nothing has happened. Yet, the issue in the US
> cities looks totally bizarre for an outsider's sight.
> >
> > Alfredo
> > ________________________________________
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
> > Sent: 03 March 2018 17:34
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: [Xmca-l]   Nakesha
> >
> > Hello fellow Xmcars,
> >
> >
> > I wish there were technology that didn't send us to the moon, but
> instead refused to let anyone be homeless while fervently advocating for
> anyone to contribute their best gifts and insights.
> >
> >
> > I noticed this today in the NYT and the sentence below stood out to me
> in particular. I thought it was a wonderful activity for children. Or maybe
> adults?
> >
> >
> > "Once, she said, Nakesha had each student invent a holiday and write
> about how it would be celebrated, the values it promoted and what artifacts
> would be involved."
> >
> >
> >
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/nyregion/nyc-homeless-nakesha-mental-illness.html
> >
> >
> >
> > kind regards,
> >
> >
> > Annalisa
> >
>
>
> --
............................................................
Katerina Plakitsi
*ISCAR President*
*Professor of Science Education*
*Head of the Dept. of E**arly Childhood Education*
*School of Education *
*University of Ioannina, Greece*
*tel. +302651005771*
*fax. +302651005842*
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*Skype name: katerina.plakitsi3*

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