[Xmca-l] Shut Down STEM/Academia?

[David Kellogg]

(Anthony--are you sure you are really a white male? You seem rather Latinx
to me.)

I am curious about the call for papers currently up on MCA. Here's what it
says:

"The recent global pandemic lays bare the ongoing disparities in health and
economic well-being amongst racialized communities in North America (Poteat
et al., 2020). Amplified by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,
and Ahmaud Arbery, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement
brought to global awareness and provoked dialogue about ongoing antiblack
racism in the United States and global colonial and settler-colonial
contexts. In academia the hashtags #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia
brought similar attention to racisms within academic and scientific
communities. This movement corresponds to recent emphasis on the
sociopolitical nature of teaching and learning in fields broadly construed
as STEM, which continuously construct (sic) racialized assumptions based on
deficit views about learners from nondominant communities (Adams, in
press). Racialized and deficit-based discourses have been detrimental to
Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities whose potential
for flourishing has been stifled by the imposition of “solutions” from
“experts” who claim to know what is “best” for them (Kayumova et al.,
2019).  Studies rooted in deficit discourses determines (sic) the
orientation a researcher may take towards communities of learners from
BIPOC backgrounds which often fails to show the richness, variation, and
ingenuities inherent in diverse communities."


Here are my questions:


a) What are the grammatical subjects of the verb "construct" and the verb
"determines" (marked [sic] above)?


b) Was the resurgence of Black Lives Matter "amplified" by police murders?
How did that happen?


c) Is the USA a settler-colonial context or not? If so, why single it out?
If not, when and how did it stop being one?


d) Is support for affirmative action, for hiring quotas, for busing and
integration of schools, academia and STEM a "deficit" view? Isn't
displaying the richness, variation, and ingenuity of racialized groups in
an undiluted form what Jim Crow, Plessy vs. Ferguson, and the Bakke
Decision of 1975 purported to do?


(By the way, the Vygotsky presentation in Russian that Anthony is directing
our attention to has some important points to make about systemic racism in
the USA, written by a prominent intellectual from a viciously oppressed
minority group whose access to STEM/academia was directly enabled by the
revolutionary integrationism of the early Soviet Union. Vygotsky often uses
American events to comment on developments that are closer to home....)


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday,
Hasan, and Vygotsky

Some free e-prints today available at:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!VmhEdjjecAAspGG0cG_d-vMQShzhAxHh7KGJEMIC5XSxcNudrMHTOmObxW9PD8x0D-Bwqg$ 

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VmhEdjjecAAspGG0cG_d-vMQShzhAxHh7KGJEMIC5XSxcNudrMHTOmObxW9PD8zkYMJYOQ$ 
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