Author Archives: scott

Weekend Reading

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A spoonful of reading:

In some mixed-income developments, the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority] renters cannot have grills on their balconies, while the homeowners can. They cannot use exercise facilities built in the condo buildings; they cannot have friends and family visit them freely; the property managers check their units for good upkeep. They can’t have parties. They report palpable surveillance at all times.

Again and again, former residents of Chicago’s public housing projects tell stories of the community they built there. Some narratives are recurrent: going door-to-door to collect ingredients for dinner during hard times, knowing one’s neighbors, the process of surviving together.

The flipped classroom, a learning technique that requires students to watch lectures as homework rather than in class, is another trend Powers applauded. Unfortunately, it has the potential to be equally problematic. Instructors can record their own lectures for students to play back at their leisure. Yet secondary school teachers, who tend not to have academic freedom or necessary resources, often rely on outside content providers like Khan Academy to flip their classrooms.

What happens if your administrators want to flip your classroom for you? A contract to license MOOC content from a major provider like Coursera or Udacity would certainly be the most efficient way to make use of that content. What if some professors are not familiar with or do not want to teach the content the administration licensed? At the very least, the quality of education that students receive will suffer and the traditional prerogative of the professors whose classrooms get flipped for them will effectively disappear.

Content Notes on Course Syllabi

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A lot of people have been writing about (not) including content notes/trigger warnings on their class syllabi. An inordinately large number of writers have come out against the idea, and the issue has reached headlines as student groups have pushed for their use and administrations grapple with whether or not to implement such guidelines. This hubbub, and the pushback, was surprising to me – especially given how small the request is. I’m amenable to their use, and I see no reason to not use them – they don’t have to impinge on academic freedom, change course material, or feature prominently – but they could help students deal with sensitive material.

That’s why I was very happy to see Angus Johnston’s piece in Inside Higher Ed address how he plans to use content notes in his courses from now on. I appreciated not only his direct demonstration of how he planned to use them, but his effort to move beyond merely avoiding triggering post-traumatic episodes and towards creating a safer space for learning – something all educators should want to do. He writes:

These warnings prepare the reader for what’s coming, so their attention isn’t hijacked when it arrives. Even a pleasant surprise can be distracting, and if the surprise is unpleasant the distraction will be that much more severe.

Shortly after reading this, I wrote on social media about my own miniature experience with this type of warning. When I was student teaching a few years ago, I showed my students Atomic Cafe, a documentary about the nuclear age. It includes a scene showing footage of victims of the atomic bombings in Japan, and I had forgotten how graphic it was. Some students in my first class were caught off-guard by the footage, and I don’t think they got much out of the rest of the film. I gave my subsequent classes notice, both at the beginning of the video and right before the scene, and I think that helped prepare them.

This is a small example, but is exactly the kind of thing that can help make students aware of the course material without constraining the curriculum at all. Be sure to read all of Johnston’s piece, as I think it’s a good contribution to the ongoing debate, as well this follow-up post from his friend on disability and access in education.

Weekend Reading

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The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we pictureColored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

Trustee boards are an opening for universities to sink their claws into the ranks of the elite; naturally it’s also an opening for the elite sink their claws into universities. University presidents gain access to new high-dollar donors, increasingly complicated endowment investments, and firm allies in the quest for increased administration size and control. Board members gain the social prestige that all charitable efforts by the 1% engender and an outlet for one of the favorite pastimes of the business class: dispensing advice for which their only qualification is their wealth. Even more important, they also get privileged access to the financial decisions of multi-million (sometimes multi-billion) dollar organizations. An investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that one out of every four private colleges directly do business with their trustees, which can take the form of noncompetitive contracts for construction, financial investment of endowment funds.

It’s important to note that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same gender may only be possible because feminists broke out marriage from the hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship between equals. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of birds coming home to roost.

Homophobia, like misogyny, is still terrible, just not as terrible as it was in, say, 1970. Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don’t need to or can’t go down it. You can. We have.

Coates on Reparations

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The latest issue of The Atlantic features an important piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the issue of reparations for the U.S.’s racist history. It went live on Thursday to a lot of hubbub, but I wanted to dedicate a short post to tell you all to read the whole thing in full.

Coates uses housing as his framework for viewing America’s history, focusing on the long plunder of the 20th century. He spends much of the rest of the article arguing for reparations by showing how the repercussions of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration continue to punish black people. He also criticizes efforts to help the disadvantaged without taking race into account.

Coates also wrote here about tracing his line of thinking from opposing reparations four years ago. It includes links to several interesting pieces, all factors in his thought process. Coates also penned this short footnote to the article, highlighting why it is an important issue to tackle. Both are worth perusing if you’re interested.

In response, Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote this piece about education’s role in inequality and the (lack of) potential it has for being the channel through which we can attain a more equitable future. She brings numbers to the game, for those who like them, from a recent economic policy paper. Summarizing the findings, she states: “No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees.” She closes by arguing that “[w]hen we allow education to be sold as a fix for wealth inequality, we set a public good up to fail and black folks that do everything “right” to take the blame when it goes “wrong”.”

Alyssa Rosenberg also wrote this piece reflecting on how culture would have to change in order for such reparations to occur. She sheds some light on American media and how much attention has been paid to slavery and racism through what we watch. There’s also an interesting piece on the recent Caribbean effort to gain reparations from European countries for 400 years of slavery and colonization, and this piece outlining ways to actually see reparations through.

(If you know of other good pieces on Coates’ article, leave them in the comments.)

Weekend Reading

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Weekend Reading, categorized (kind of) for your convenience.

Africa:

Education:

Since 2000, the average cost of tuition and fees has more than doubled, while student loan debt has grown at double-digit rates and well-paying jobs have all but vanished. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. The most popular industries pay poorly: According to the April 2014 jobs report, four of the top six industries that saw job creation were in the lowest paying fields. Meanwhile, in prestigious professions entry-level jobs have been replaced with full-time, unpaid internships.

Today’s youth are the best educated generation in US history. But opportunities are reserved only for those who can buy them. Young US citizens have inherited an entrenched meritocracy that combines the baby boomers’ emphasis on education with the class rigidity of the WASP aristocracy it allegedly undermined.

Everything Else:

Jezebel’s is a feminism that seeks its scapegoat in altered images. To refrain from Photoshop is girl-positive marketing gold. Dove Campaign for Real Beauty delights itself by putting out fake filters that chide retouchers. Magazines sign “No Photoshop” pledges. Clothing companies crow that they’ve never taken a clone stamp to their models’ thighs.

To these feminists, Photoshop is to blame to unrealistic body standards, poor self-esteem, and anorexia in teenage girls. The campaign against Photoshop is the perfect cause for white, middle-class women whose primary problem is feeling their bodies do not match an increasingly surreal media ideal.

[…]

Anyone who’s been at a photo shoot knows that even untouched photos bear only the scantest resemblance to a subject. A photo is frozen. A model sweats and bloats, ages, and dies. Framing is a lie. Lighting is a lie. Cropping is a lie. When you suck in your stomach, or turn your head so the light washes out your laugh lines, you’re lying as much as any liquefy tool. Untruth is baked into the process: Photographer Syreeta McFadden writes how the chemical makeup of some films is biased against dark skin tones. Even snapshots often don’t look like you, because you are not static. You are a three-dimensional being, torn by time. Photos are pixel ghosts.

Photos are lies because art is a lie. Art is artifice. Art makes things as they are not—occasionally in the service of greater truths.

AFRICOM is Everywhere

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Nick Turse wrote up a report last month detailing some of the U.S. Africa Command’s presence in Africa, some of which is widely known, much of which is more opaque. The whole thing is worth a read, but here is a snippet:

Here, however, is the reality as we know it today.  Over the last several years, the U.S. has been building a constellation of drone bases across Africa, flying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions out of not only Niger, but also Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the island nation of the Seychelles.  Meanwhile, an airbase in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, serves as the home of a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment, as well as of the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative.  According to military documents, that “initiative” supports “high-risk activities” carried out by elite forces from Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara.  U.S. Army Africa documents obtained by TomDispatch also mention the deployment to Chad of an ISR liaison team.  And according to Sam Cooks, a liaison officer with the Defense Logistics Agency, the U.S. military has 29 agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers. 

AFRICOM is also engaging in a lot of humanitarian-like activity, leaving USAID and the State Department in its wake as it launches numerous programs across the continent. More from Turse:

When I spoke with Chris Gatz of the Army Corps of Engineers, the first projects he mentioned and the only ones he seemed eager to talk about were those for African nations.  This year, $6.5 million in projects had been funded when we spoke and of that, the majority were for “humanitarian assistance” or HA construction projects, mostly in Togo and Tunisia, and “peacekeeping” operations in Ghana and Djibouti.

[Wayne] Uhl [chief of the International Engineering Center for the Europe District of the Army Corps of Engineers] talked about humanitarian projects, too.  “HA projects are small, difficult, challenging for the Corps of Engineers to accomplish at a low, in-house cost… but despite all this, HA projects are extremely rewarding,” he said.  “The appreciation expressed by the locals is fantastic.”  He then drew attention to another added benefit: “Each successful project is a photo opportunity.”

All this reminds me of is this money-quote from Adam Branch’s book on humanitarian intervention in northern Uganda. Citing correspondence with an anthropologist working in Kitgum, Branch discusses a U.S. Army training exercise in that town. I won’t add commentary, because it really speaks for itself:

As a public relations officer at the American camp set up during the operation put it, “We want people to see the military as something other than soldiers. In the U.S. soldiers are seen as heroes. In Uganda they have much more fear, so we are trying to change that image. The intention is to blur the demarcations between civilian and military.” This is a frightening testament to the militarization of U.S. society, in which exporting American values now becomes equated with exporting the U.S. military.

To the Future

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I have a horrible sleep schedule. I have a really, very horribly sleep  schedule, and it often results in me lying in bed thinking about my life. These thoughts often go in one of two directions: working in Africa, and high school teaching. If you’ve ever looked at my About page above, you’ll notice that both of these feature as Things I Want to Do with My Life.

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Weekend Reading

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Weekend reading is back with a vengeance:

The BLS monthly report doesn’t say which jobs come with dignity and fair pay and which are degrading, but no matter how you measure it, a wedge has been growing for decades between worker output and compensation. A 2012 report from the Economic Policy Institute describes the situation in clear terms: “This divergence of pay and productivity has meant that many workers are not benefiting from productivity growth — the economy can afford higher pay but is not providing it.” Increases in employment and productivity — America’s two dearest metrics — provide only the possibility of shared higher living standards; they do not and have not guaranteed them. Economists keep muddling through their data tea leaves, but who needs them when the writing is on the wall?

The mayoral and council class of 2013 is one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history. In one major city after another, newly elected officials are planning to raise the minimum wage or enact ordinances boosting wages in developments that have received city assistance. They are drafting legislation to require inner-city hiring on major projects and foster unionization in hotels, stores, and trucking. They are seeking the funds to establish universal pre-K and other programs for infants and toddlers. They are sketching the layout of new transit lines that will bring jobs and denser development to neighborhoods both poor and middle-class and reduce traffic and pollution in the bargain. They are—if they haven’t done so already—forbidding their police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in the deportation of undocumented immigrants not convicted of felonies and requiring their police to have video or audio records of their encounters with the public. They are, in short, enacting at the municipal level many of the major policy changes that progressives have found themselves unable to enact at the federal and state levels. They also may be charting a new course for American liberalism.

Thesis: Complete

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Dear readers, the time has come.

Yesterday, I handed in the final draft of my M.A. thesis in accordance with my degree requirements. I then promptly went home and fiddled with the headers and added an acknowledgements section, so really it’s doubly finished.

I didn’t have a senior thesis in college, just a slightly longer class paper. I also spent all of my senior spring in a high school classroom student teaching. Therefore, this is the first time I’ve had the just-finished-a-giant-project-and-am-about-to-graduate-what-do-I-do feeling. It’s kind of weird.

I first drafted grant proposals for my thesis in October/November 2012. I went to Uganda and the Congo in June 2013. I read a lot for my project between then and now, and talked about it a lot too. And here I am, May 2014, handing in a 150 page declaration that I think I know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t decided what to do with it just yet. I’ve spent the last six months stitching a bunch of disparate parts together, but I will inevitably crack it like an egg and try to make some scholarly omelettes out of it.

As for now, I have some papers to grade, and then I will busy myself with other kinds of tinkering since thesis-tinkering is a now fruitless hobby. But, I leave you with one common artifacts: the abstract. Hopefully it’ll pique your interest for things to come.

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#433rds: 4/27/14

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This is part of a month-ish-long blog/Instagram project. For more, go here.

4333

It’s reading week.Wrapping up my semester (and my time here at Yale), I’ve been spending time working on my thesis, grading papers, and reviewing language study.

Obviously, this is pouring into my letter tiles. Although I don’t know where geology came from, as I have pretty much interest there. My interests lie on the left side of the image: war, rebels, language. So, pardon me while I get all thesis-y again in this blog project:

I think the language of the LRA conflict is an interesting thing to delve into, a thing I only mention in passing in my current project. The way that people are labeled, the way that actions are identified, they mean a lot of things in war. Perhaps the most important is the term “rebel” and how it is used (or not used) in the context of the LRA. Existing as a rebel group since 1986, for many years the government labeled them “bandits.” In the post-9/11 era, “bandits” was dropped as the LRA became “terrorists” in the discourse. This was just one part of the government’s effort to get in on the GWOT funding/training pie, and painting the LRA as terrorists placed the government, as the one fighting terrorism, in more exalted status.

But sometimes the rebels aren’t even rebels. For instance, when 11 LRA were recently captured by the UPDF, it was reported as 1 rebel commander and 10 captives. Everyone reports it this way, ignoring the fact that the commander himself was likely abducted in the past, and without mentioning if any of the captives were actively engaged in the fire fight. In the LRA, the labels of rebel, abductee, commander, and captive are very fluid. Many commanders are also captives, and victims of abduction and conscription have also perpetrated acts of violence. It’s a messy thing, trying to decipher the language of war, but it’s a necessary part of trying to understand it.