[Xmca-l] Re: keeping eyes open

Sat Nov 28 11:54:14 PST 2020

Hello, dear xmca friends,

I intend this as a pivot from changing the voices on this list to passing on that change to the transformed institutions of higher ed that will emerge out of the pandemic. 

I’ll begin with a funny story: A long time ago (late 1990’s - 1998?) the issue of women’s voices on xmca came up. This happens fairly regularly, because of the historic white male composition of the academic workforce. The women among us — Eva Ekblad was one of our leaders — seceded to form our own group and engaged in an intense discussion that shifted back and forth from the women’s movement to left politics and, ultimately, ran smack into a disagreement about whether Marx said X or Y about something we didn’t know. So…we invited Andy Blunden, who even then appeared to know a lot, into our group to answer the question, which he did quickly and thoroughly, with a chain of quotes. At that point, feeling that I had been hit by a hammer from Mr. Know-it-all, quit the group. I was so embarassed to find out  that he had simply done a search on the Marxist archives! 

Looking back more than 20 years — a generation! — I realize that I am responding to Diana’s comment,  "Who gets to be the knower, and who is relegated to making mistakes or missing intentions?”

So I am still here, Andy is still here, he's much better in 2020 about answering questions, and I am less defensive about what I don’t know. There are others of my generation around, too, probably wondering how to contribute without seeming to dominate, but the pool of collective knowledge is big; the ripples keep going a long time, which is good. It recovers without healing!

But around us, the world is changing fast, especially the material world of higher ed. I am glad to see us  talking openly about jobs and how respect and status on this list not only buys us the right to be listened to and learn, but can translate into practical things like getting an interview for an academic position or a promotion which may lead to a publication or funding for doing research to say nothing of buying groceries and paying rent. I am glad to see this laid out there. 

The pandemic has shaken up the higher ed institutions where academic jobs are situated; hiring is frozen everywhere I know (CUNY has laid off thousands of adjuncts — Beth?) and students are taking semesters off because they doubt what kind of learning is really taking place in the zoom classroom that they’re paying for. Small non-profit institutions are going bankrupt. Public budgets are bottoming out. I think reconstituted higher ed will will have to answer to the question, what kind of learning do we really need?  What is the essential work of higher ed? In the old classroom? With credits, certifications and degrees? If not, where? How?

Who answers these questions is very important.

On this list, we can answer those questions with assertions about not just the content of Education (yes, capital E) but also  what the minimum requirements are to get that done — just like the way healthcare workers are doing, and other workforces that didn’t seem so essential a year ago — warehouse workers, farmers, etc. Oh, police, come to think of it, after their own fashion.

I realize this post may seem to be coming out of nowhere. My academic position at the U of Illinois was in a field equally as marginal as ethnic studies — labor education, where people take classes in how to organize a union and protect workers, believe it or not.  Like ethnic studies, labor ed programs are low-hanging fruit to get eliminated in budget cuts and are hard to advocate for. But their base is in the community, not in tuition-paying traditional students, so they may actually do better now.

Since I retired, I have been looking for ways to continue teaching outside US academia. It’s not easy. But this explains our semesters in Vietnam, a lot of writing, leading some reading groups, etc. - not in the classroom.

So what does learning look like if it is not taking place in traditional institutions of higher ed? Institutions that may look very different once (and if) we get past this pandemic and its restrictions on wet social interaction? (Wet meaning in-person, right? As in hardware, software, wetware….)

I think that one place to look to answer that question is on this list.What individuals earn (status, respect, recongition, opportunities) by their participation in this list may not pay off in traditional ways because the industry is changing.  But it may actually pay off better under the new conditions, what ever they are.

What do others think? (Do others recognize this as a salute to Eugene Matusov?)

Helena 

Helena Worthen
hworthen@illinois.edu retired
21 San Mateo Road
Berkeley, CA 94707
510-828-2745

> On Nov 28, 2020, at 10:11 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
> 
> Perhaps helpful? (If the attachment gets through…)
> 
> Martin
> 
> "I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)
> 
> 
> 
>> On Nov 28, 2020, at 12:56 PM, Diana Arya <darya@education.ucsb.edu <mailto:darya@education.ucsb.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello all, 
>> 
>> Acknowledging the emergence of multiple threads from the original ("why generations"), I selected this particular thread to build on Antti's encouragement to invite other voices in reimagining the purposes and practices of this listserv. I'm currently working on a manuscript that relates to what we can learn, how we can grow as scholars, when/if we view reality as the known unknown. We need diverse voices/insights/experiences to understand what's happening to whom, for what purposes and under what conditions. James Baldwin is a central voice in my piece; the following excerpt from the 1980 landmark essay Dark Days may be relevant to our discussion:
>> 
>> Every human being born begins to be civilized the moment he or she is born. Since we all arrive here absolutely helpless, with no way of getting a decent meal or of moving from one place to another without human help (and human help exacts a human price), there is no way around that. But this is civilization with a small c. Civilization with a large C is something else again. So is education with a small e different from Education with a large E. In the lowercase, education refers to the relations that actually obtain among human beings. In the uppercase, it refers to power.      –James Baldwin, Dark Days, p.44
>>  <>
>> 
>> Perhaps we can use Baldwin's linguistic marker in making visible the power distinction of R/research practices. I find that the work of philosopher Kristie Dotson on what she calls epistemic oppression is also relevant. Who gets to be the knower, and who is relegated to making mistakes or missing intentions? Obviously power plays a role here.
>> 
>> And now that some time has passed, I want to celebrate Arturo's intrepid engagement with this listserv. We have got to be willing to see HOW (not if) racism is instantiated in our discourse. We have been socialized in a world that values some groups of others, and such inequities seep into our languages, discourses, etc. And academia is not immune to racist ideologies. I believe that the real risk is acknowledging one's blind spots, and learning to see the world as it is.
>> 
>> What do others think?
>> 
>> Best, 
>> D
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 3:33 AM Antti Rajala <ajrajala@gmail.com <mailto:ajrajala@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> David and all,
>> 
>> In my reading, the issue at stake is that over a long time, many people experience the XMCA list as unwelcoming. Instead of refocusing the issue to something else, I believe we all have a responsibility to recognize it as a problem, carefully listen to these voices and be open to a change in the power dynamics of this list. Zaza, Beth, and others have made a good start in suggesting concrete principles of where to start.
>> 
>> Antti
>> 
>> On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 at 12:56, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> Zaza--
>> 
>> Dude, I don't really speak Russian either, as Nikolai and Anna will tell you (we only speak English). In my translation work I spend a lot more time on Google Translate than I would like, and that's why I burden the list with the queries you mention from time to time.. But I bet you speak Shona, or at least understand a little. 
>> 
>> So maybe you can help. I'm using this tune from the late great Tuku (Oliver Mtukudzi) in a class I am giving on sex education in Korea. I've been told that it doesn't really mention AIDS/HIV explicitly, and I get that--in fact, that's one of the reasons why I think it's useful for making certain parallels between pandemics and also discussing HPV and other issues I want to talk about. But I don't quite understand THIS verse--maybe you can help me?
>>   
>> Zvinorwadza sei kubhinywa newaugere naye
>> (Kana uinahwo utachiwana)
>> Zvinorwadza sei kubhinywa neakabvisa pfuma
>> (Kana uinahwo utachiwana)
>> Achiziva unahwo hutachiwana
>> (Kana uinahwo utachiwana)
>> Ende uchiziva unahwo hutachiwana
>> (Kana uinahwo utachiwana)
>> 
>> So "Kana uinahwo utachiwana" means something like "If you get infected". But what is the reference to being raped by your roommate?
>> 
>> On the subject of this thread. Like voter fraud, racism is a very serious charge, and the right has successfully made hay out of its seriousness. But as with voter fraud they have made even more hay out of rendering the charge unproveable, by removing its class content and rendering it a purely subjective inclination. This is why, I think (I hope), Arturo and others tend to raise this sort of thing in private off-list material that is so much at variance with their public writings that it fairly attracts the charge of hypocrisy or at least political timidity. After all, if you really suspect your interlocutor of racism, it's incumbent on you to keep your mouth and not just your eyes open. But you've got to put money where your mouth is: you have to provide some evidence (e.g. the paper that Harshad circulated on the list not too long ago). There are important scientific issues we need to discuss which are actually not unrelated to the one that Arturo was reacting to: whether you can accurately judge the language proficiency of a person by their race or national origin (as I have done in the second paragraph above). Not unrelated. But not identical to either, else I would not have written that paragraph. 
>> 
>> Here's an example. A dear colleague of mine, who like the vast majority of people in this country is not white and wouldn't know deficit linguistics from a surplus, has just written a paper on why Korean children tend to drop articles (i.e. "a" and "the"). He begins with the Chomskyan premise that all nouns must, according to universal human grammars which are hardwired at birth, be realized by "determiner phrases". What that means is that a noun phrase like "the cat" is not really about a cat--it's about "the", and the "the" is modified by "cat" (What kind of "the-ness" do you mean? The cat kind!)
>> 
>> But it's THIS, and not Vygotskyan, Hallidayan, or Bernsteinian developmentalism, that is deficit linguistics. I won't say it is racist, because unfortunately that term has lost its scientific content and become nothing but a thought crime. But I will say that people who speak languages without articles or languages that emphasize nouns over determiners (e.g. Korean, Chinese, Russian) are not born with a birth defect (or "null spell out", as the Chomskyans say).
>> 
>> Does Shona have articles or not? Do you know?
>>  
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY0JssD8Hzc__;!!Mih3wA!TLGCMbzodKYAh5mU_IFvccPPotiOHcGs3vSR-R5icWL2pOzDCWuuWitrveQumSx3d3Q3AQ$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY0JssD8Hzc__;!!Mih3wA!QePX9kKiZVk8QmwFWMwYJblxjbu3_Pd2XeZXyOV1YZVr6VOrUaRfbuTZlUpgqPtWWiBSSw$>
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>> 
>> New Book with Nikolai Veresov
>> L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Vol. I: The Foundations of Pedology
>> Translated with Prefatory Notes and Outlines by David Kellogg and Nikolai Veresov
>> See free downloadable pdf at:
>> 
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007*2F978-981-15-0528-7__;JQ!!Mih3wA!TLGCMbzodKYAh5mU_IFvccPPotiOHcGs3vSR-R5icWL2pOzDCWuuWitrveQumSysysnzxQ$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007*2F978-981-15-0528-7__;JQ!!Mih3wA!QePX9kKiZVk8QmwFWMwYJblxjbu3_Pd2XeZXyOV1YZVr6VOrUaRfbuTZlUpgqPuZA6tlEA$>
>> 
>> Forthcoming in 2020:
>> L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Vol. II: The Problem of Age.
>> Translated with Prefatory Notes and Outlines by Nikolai Veresov and David Kellogg
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 6:02 PM Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com <mailto:huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> P.S. To my best understanding (very minimal, no doubt), the subject matter of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory is the development of human higher psychological functions. (How that is "left," "right," or otherwise is beyond me.) 
>> 
>> Political propensities can be discerned across some (adult) developmental stages.
>> 
>> Huw
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Nothing can be changed until it is faced. (James Baldwin)
>> 
>> Diana J. Arya, PhD
>> she/her/hers/they/them/theirs
>> Associate Professor and Graduate Diversity Officer, Education
>> Faculty Director, McEnroe Reading and Language Arts Clinic
>> Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
>> University of California, Santa Barbara
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.cbleducation.org__;!!Mih3wA!TLGCMbzodKYAh5mU_IFvccPPotiOHcGs3vSR-R5icWL2pOzDCWuuWitrveQumSz3I9wCPg$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.cbleducation.org__;!!Mih3wA!SWP2ZnqgUqryJOnGljQ0m8RjinrQROanrP4GpZ_iIiLzaHb7yDYK93TPCNTgFzaPiElt7A$>
>> 
> 

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