Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

Booknotes: Nation

20 Saturday Jun 2009

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Earlier this week, I came home from work to find Terry Pratchett’s Nation sitting on the kitchen table with firm instructions to “read.” So I did. I admit I was a teeny bit skeptical about the book, entirely based on the fact it’s set on an island following a tidal wave, is about survivors attempting to organize themselves into a successful community, and I have a highly contentious relationship with lord of the flies. But it was Hanna who left me the instructions, and Terry Pratchett who wrote the book, so I was willing to give it a go. And I’m glad I did — ’cause it was charming and funny and the end was even a teeny bit mind-bending.

Nation is set in a universe much like, but not quite, our own. It tells the story of two young people, Mau and Daphne, and the friendship they form in the wake of a natural disaster that ends up altering their lives — and the world — forever. Mau is the sole survivor of his island community when a tidal wave washes through his corner of the ocean; Daphne is the only human survivor of a ship from ‘England’ caught in the same tidal wave and washed up on Nation. The two have just begun to form a cautious friendship when other survivors of the disaster begin to arrive, drawn by the smoke of their campfire and the spiritual significance of Mau’s island home. Eventually, of course, the new community comes back into contact with the larger world and make a place for themselves within it — but not before they have been challenged to re-imagine history and the shape of the world around them.

And of course there’s the parrot. And the tree octopus that can count all the way to fifteen (and loves to eat crabs). And an evil man whose mere presence makes bunnies nibbling at seaweed start to fight one another. And Mrs. Gurgle, who gets a set of gold false teeth that shine like the sun. And Grandmother, who likes to say “Ahem” and is told off, in the end, in the most satisfying way.

LIS488 Current Awareness: mixi and cultural identity

20 Saturday Jun 2009

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For my summer-session library science course, LIS488: Technology for Information Professionals we are required to contribute weekly “current awareness” posts to the course website sharing a news story in the technology world we feel has bearing on our in-class discussions, assignments, and the library and information science profession. I thought I would cross-post my entries here, just for kicks, so ya’ll can get a sense what this grad school thing is all about.

Week 1 – Insider/outsider dynamics in web 2.0 networking

This week, Latoya Peterson, at the blog Racialicious, posted her conference notes from a presentation about the Japanese social networking site mixi. The presentation explored the way the user interface on mixi reinforces concepts of racial and ethnic boundaries in Japan. Like Facebook, mixi’s user interface provides individuals with the opportunity to identify themselves through various tools. However, rather than free-form text boxes, the site provides a series of drop-down menus that limit user options to pre-determined identity categories. As Peterson writes:

Komaki’s conclusion is that mixi, through use of drop downs and choices, reinforces the ideas and boundaries of Japan, and shows a preference to those born within Japan proper. Many people who live in Japan and have done so for their entire lives have their “otherness” reinforced by mixi. In his paper (currently unpublished) Komaki explains how through the choices provided to users, mixi encourages assimilation and rewards users that “fit in” with the established idea of what Japan should be.

Komaki’s presentation reminds us that, while the social networking potential of internet technology — particularly “web 2.0” technology — contains the potential for greater democratization of knowledge creation and information sharing, the human beings who create and share this content bring with them all of the same prejudices of their non-virtual lives.

As a blogger, I have seen first-hand the way in which online social spaces simultaneously open up and constrain interactions and conversations around issues of identity, of belonging and exclusion, of who is an insider, who is an outsider, and how insiders/outsiders are identified and treated in virtual space.

On the one hand, anonymity can be a powerful resource online, where individuals are able to write posts and comment on political issues (for example) without the constraint of being judged by superficial identity markers such as skin color, age, or accent. They are able to connect with individuals who share their experiences or interests, try out new ideas, and speak up about their experiences in ways that could, previously, have jeopardized them socially and materially. Various platforms for researching and discussing human sexuality, for example, can be found online where teenagers can access it without the embarrassment of requesting assistance from an adult or being told their curiosity is inappropriate.

At the same time, there can be enormous pressure to self-identify in virtual communities by the usual social indicators; individual participants in online communities or online discussions are often challenged in their right to speak on certain topics or be vocal in certain online forums based on what is known (or, often, assumed) about their real-world identities. We are socialized to categorize people based on certain characteristics and when this information is lacking (such as on blog post comment threads in which people otherwise unknown to each other are interacting) folks often scramble to fill in the missing pieces of information either through making assumptions about the writer’s personal identity and history or through demanding that the writer’s identity be clarified before they are respected (if an insider) or dismissed (as an outsider) in the context of a given debate.

Those of us in the field of library and information science need to be wary of narratives that paint technology, particularly “web 2.0” social networking technology, as a panacea for fully-participatory, democratic knowledge-sharing. We must pay close attention to the ways in which new technologies re-inscribe existing inequalities and exclusionary patterns of social behavior into the very tools used to migrate human interaction from face-to-face encounters into virtual spaces.

links list: google reader edition

17 Wednesday Jun 2009

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Just moved my RSS feeds from iGoogle to Google Reader this Sunday. So…yeah. Suddenly, it’s a lot easier to skim content as well as headlines on the various blogs I read and find the stuff that catches my interest. Here’s what I’ve tagged so far this week — just thought I’d be friendly and share the overwhelm with ya’ll!

Dina Goldstein’s fallen princess photography series has been posted in various places around the feminist blogosphere.

Lara Williams at the F-word writes about how, regardless of body shape or size, it’s women’s bodies and how they’re enjoyed by others that counts in most media outlets.

PBS held a ‘debate‘ between Christina Page, a pro-choice activist, and Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, which can be explored interactively on the PBS website.

Torie Atkinson at Tor.com writes about sexism in a contest tied in (ironically) with the new science fiction film District 9 which is, at least from what can be discerned from the previews, about the ghettoization of aliens who come to earth.

For more on anti-women sexism in media coverage of the sci-fi world, see here and here.

Oh, and did I forget to mention Hanna also blogged about it?

Joan Walsh, of Slate.com, writes about her experience on the O’Reilly Factor where she tried to confront Bill O’Reilly about the violent rhetoric he used (and later denied using) against Dr. Tiller.

I can’t actually watch O’Reilly for health and sanity reasons, but if you want the clip you can find it here at Media Matters.

Apparently, my home state is going to be grappling once again with same-sex marriage, which was explicitly outlawed there in 2004. Good luck, y’all. I’m a little bit sorry I can’t be registered to vote in two states at once.

Thank you Nina Totenberg for dissecting the rhetoric surrounding Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial affect and pointing out how gender, does in fact, shape expectations of “proper” behavior.

Paul Waldman over at The American Prospect asks what the rise in zombie fiction and film has to say about current psychology and politics.

Feminist Review offers a look a blue cotton gown, a new memoir by nurse-practitioner and one-time midwife, Patricia Harman.

sassymonkey over at blogher reports on the latest adult discovery about the freakish and out-of-control lives of the modern teenager (cue hand-wringing), the genre of YA lit now being labeled trauma porn. Since Katie Roiphe’s weighed in, I might just get irritated enough to blog about it at greater length. I might have to blog about that one at some point. As a feminist, future librarian, not to mention fan of young adult lit and all. ‘Cause there are just so many things wrong with this wailing and gnashing of teeth. But for now, check out sassymonkey’s post, which I think asks entirely legitimately: “I wonder if people live in the same world I do. Teens and trauma porn is so. not. new.”

And her conclusion, which really says it all:

Teens live in the real world and some of them are going through hell and some others think they are going through hell. Sometimes they need to see their world reflected back at them in books. Sometimes they need to see problems that are bigger than their own. And yes, sometimes they need the pink and turquoise backdrops of escapism that authors like Cabot, who have been there themselves, provide. No one part of young adult literature is all good or all bad. Teens are real. Their books should be too.

Until the link backlog threatens to burst again . . .

Quick Hit(s): More on book-burning story

16 Tuesday Jun 2009

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Some further web commentary on the Wisconsin book-burning kerfluffle:

Burning Issue @ shakesville.

These folks have a lot to learn about civil liberties, not to mention a lot about Christianity, too.

Stamps, Bookburning, and Depth of Field @ Neil Gaiman’s Journal.

The sad thing is that these twerps are wasting the time and money of a town and its librarians with a nuisance suit. Well, that and giving sane Christians a bad name while doing their best to widdle all over the first amendment. You don’t burn books. And, well, you don’t sue for your right to burn a library book you don’t like. (And that’s not just because if you win, that means that people you don’t like now have the right to burn your books.)

. . . As I said on twitter, whatever side the “Christian Civil Liberties Union” is on, I’m now on the other one.

I’ll add more links to commentary here as I run across it and time and inclination allow, so check back if you’re interested.

UPDATE: More from Neil Gaiman @ More on Stamps and Bookburning:

And these two [emails] follow up from the Wisconsin would-be librarybookburners who feel that the existence of Francesa Lia Block books threatens their health and safety…

UPDATE: YALSA (young adult library services association) offers suggestions for Unburning Baby Be-Bop.

In praise of context

14 Sunday Jun 2009

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So far this month, two articles on a Milwaukee-area book-banning (and potential book-burning) kerfluffle have come across my virtual desk — a piece from the ALA website, and a more recent article from the books page of the Guardian. Particular points should be awarded to the Guardian, I feel, for their deadpan quotation of some of the more hyperbolic charges made by the Christian Civil Liberties Union about the threat certain young adult novels pose to the good citizens of West Bend, Wisconsin, simply by remaining accessible in the public library (more below). As the ALA reports:

Milwaukee-area citizen Robert C. Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) distributed at the meeting copies of a claim for damages he and three other plaintiffs filed April 28 with the city; the complainants seek the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means the library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. The claim also demands $120,000 in compensatory damages ($30,000 per plaintiff) for being exposed to the book in a library display, and the resignation of West Bend Mayor Kristine Deiss for “allow[ing] this book to be viewed by the public.”

This claim follows unsuccessful attempts by area citizens to get the library trustees to remove the offending material from the library: in a June 2 vote of 9-0, the trustees decided to “maintain the young-adult collection as is ‘without removing, relocating, labeling, or otherwise restricting access’ to any titles.”

As Allison Flood at the Guardian reports in more detail, the offending title which the CCLU wishes to publically burn (publically burn!!!) is a young adult novel that deals with issues of nonstraight sexuality and violence inspired by homophobia and racism:

The offending book is Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (£72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.

Their suit says that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” and that it contains derogatory language that could “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”

“The word ‘faggot’ is very derogatory and slanderous to all males,” the suit continues. “Using the word ‘Nigger’ is dangerously offensive, disrespectful to all people. These words can permeate violence.” The suit also claims that the book “constitutes a hate crime, and that it degrades the community”.

While I haven’t read this particular work by Francesca Lia Block, I have read others and Block’s characters are often struggling in very messy ways with marginalization, poverty, their own complicated sexualities, and histories as perpetrators or victims of violence in one form or another. Her work, while often lyrical, is not for the faint-of-heart. It has never particularly spoken to me, but as an author she commands a wide audience of teens and adults who find her characters compelling.

What I find interesting about this lawsuit — based, at least, on these two news stories — is the way in which the CCLU has (1) adopted the language of the political left to frame their complaint and (2) the way in which they conflate hateful actions with descriptions of hateful actions. While I suspect that what traumatizes the offended parties is Block’s affirmative depiction of characters with nonstraight sexual identities, and possibly (knowing her other works) instances of drug use, sex scenes, and the old standby, vulgar language, instead they claim to be concerned about the use of words such as “faggot” and “nigger.” This isn’t necessarily a surprising tactic, since the radical right has increasingly adopted leftist rhetoric in their effort to shift the culture wars in their favor.

What I find more stunning is their apparently inability to understand (or, possibly, their tactical decision to ignore) the difference between an actual, material act of violence or an act of speech that supports that violence and a work of fiction that depicts the reality of bigotry and violence in the lives of marginalized youth. Children face daily abuse at the hands of bullies for perceived or actual gender and sexual nonconformity; a novelist like Block, who depicts that violence in her work of fiction, is describing the reality of our children’s lives rather than advocating such abuse. If uttering the word “faggot” actually constituted a hate crime regardless of context, we would be incapable of speaking out against the use of that language by individuals who actually seek to do harm.

While this conflation of thought or depiction with actual illegal violent crime is not unique to the Right (Exhibit A: the campaign by some feminist activists during the 1980s to have pornography treated as violence against women, whether or not actual individuals had been harmed in the making of the piece), it seems to me that it displays a legalistic, overly-simplistic, atomized way of thinking that is more prevalent among conservatives than it is among those on the left. Another example that comes to mind is the approach of the MPAA rating board in assigning ratings to American films (see This Film is Not Yet Rated), and the members’ obsession with individual words or acts of sexual contact, rather than overall message conveyed. I find myself wondering if this is strategic blindness or an actual belief that a word or activity, devoid of its overall context, has a constant and unwavering effect (whether positive or negative).

As an historian (among other things) I have to cry foul and point out that context, while certainly not everything counts for a hell of a lot — and as a librarian-in-training (among other things) I have to point out that words themselves are never, ever “hate crimes.” Words are just words: it’s what we do with them that makes all the difference in the world. Francesca Lia Block has done many beautiful things with the words available to her, and in my opinion her work is the opposite of a hate crime: it has made the world a better place.

Photo credit: “Mercy! Books Burning” (c) Catherine Jamieson @ flickr.

"Did You Know?": Am I crazy or is this xenophobic?

13 Saturday Jun 2009

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This web video pops up in my Simmons library science courses at least once a semester and, predictably, it turned up again today in the first session of my technology course.

Reactions in class were divided between, well, me and everyone else who spoke up.

Watching the video this time around, in the context of other reading I’ve been doing about conservative fears of a European “demographic winter” and non-Western population growth, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the way this data was presented had a certain element of xenophobia — specifically fear about the U.S. being overtaken intellectually and economically by Asian countries like India and China.

I was also struck by the way it frames achievement by conventional educational terms (for example, IQ scores and the concept of education as job training). The fear of non-American young people “out performing” American students has a long history in the American discourse about education (think of Cold War anxieties about Soviet students with higher test scores than American students). Watching the video in light of these two contexts (fearmongering demographic debates and anxiety about academic performance on the international stage) makes me distinctly uncomfortable about the way this data is presented and the way it is offered, for the most part uncritically, in our library science classes as a wake-up call for the future of information organization.

The other students in class seemed to think I was reading the film too negatively, and offered an alternative reading to the effect of, “look how much human potential we have in the world — let’s make the most of it!” Yet at the same time, they, too, were voicing competitive anxieties about how Americans can’t afford to rest easy in the assumption they have the technological advantage — an anxiety that I feel buys into an “us vs. them” framework that can slide into, well, xenophobia and isolationism. Particularly in a period of economic constraint.

Thoughts?

stuff I’ve been reading: weekend links

13 Saturday Jun 2009

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I’m off to the first of my all-day Saturday summer session class (LIS488: Technology for Information Professionals). I leave you with a short list of some of the stuff I’ve been reading online the last couple of weeks.

Back at the end of May, Hanna sent me this column by William Zinsser at the Powells’ Book Blog. “the national epidemic that’s most on my mind right now,” Zinsser writes, “isn’t swine flu. It’s the slow death of sequential thinking. My students, especially younger ones, go out on a story and come back with a million notes and a million quotes and absolutely no idea what the story is.” Having just finished a year’s stint as a teaching assistant with undergraduate students, I definitely sympathize with his sense that students are very reluctant to make an original argument (or, as Zinsser puts it, tell a coherent story). Yet in unoriginal contrarian fashion, Zinsser locates the cause of this “epidemic” in new technology — a model of causality that seems to me simplistic and potentially even entirely wrong. Online environments, for example, can be sites for quick-hit, disconnected thoughts and responses that have little or no through-line. They can also provide platforms for the rich interlinking of ideas and dialogue in a way that sustains dynamic, thoughtful conversation. Check out his post and see what you think.

Jesse, over at Pandagon, blogged about the conservative outrage that apparently erupted online when Google decided, on June 6th, to use their logo to commemorate the 25th birthday of the computer game Tetris instead of the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Aside from being an amusing opportunity to snark about conspiracy-minded conservatives, I think it’s a really good example of a way of thinking that seems much more prevalent on the right than the left (although, to be fair, I’ve spent much more time, geographically, around hard-right conservatives than I have around hard-left liberals): the inability to separate out their own personal preferences or ethical decisions from the preferences or decisions of the society at large. So much conservative social policy seems aimed at protecting themselves from people who have different priorities and preferences from their own — as if the mere existence of different-thinking and differently-acting people threatens their own survival. As Jesse writes, “If these fine Americans find themselves unable to handle the fact that Google may not at all times reflect their particular preferences in logo design, may I recommend using the power of the market to use any of the other dozen search engines available.” Instead, conservative folks seem to feel so besieged by non-conservative values that they’ve forgotten they have the power to “just say no,” get up and walk away.

Thanks to my mother, Janet, for passing along Ellen Goodman’s editorial about Dr. Tiller’s murder (and for being unequivocally pro-choice; I don’t take it for granted Mom!). I haven’t been able to formulate a coherent response to William Saletan’s column kinda-sorta supporting abortion access in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s assassination, while at the same time drawing moral parallels between Tiller’s medical practice and the convictions that drove his killer to murder — but Amanda Marcotte’s latest edition of the RhRealityCheck podcast helped clarify some of what I found so problematic about his language. It’s a really strong episode of the series, and includes not only a round-up of evidence of the broad anti-choice vendetta against Dr. Tiller, but also a kick-ass interview with sex educator Heather Corinna about post-abstinence-only sexuality education that provides a nice counterpoint to extremist violence and bigotry.

Rebecca Traister’s husband, Aaron, offers a witty reflection on his adjustment to stay-at-home parenting, and what it felt like to shift from parenting as a “break” from “real life” as an employed adult to realizing parenting was his life for the foreseeable future, and a necessary contribution to his family’s economic survival. I, selfishly perhaps, haven’t been able to spare a lot of emotional energy for digesting economic news lately, but the women’s studies scholar and feminist in me is really interested by the way in which material economic circumstances seem to be prompting critical re-evaluation of concepts like masculinity and work in pro-feminist ways. Also: points for describing the pregnant Rebecca (with, I can only assume, her blessing) a “giant breadwinning turtle woman.”

On the question of children and our cultural conceptions of children and childhood, yesterday morning Hanna sent me Ann Billson’s column from the Guardian online about the meaning of children in horror/thriller films:

For us non-parents, children in real life are frequently “just there” like that, buzzing around just below our radar, occasionally getting our attention by screaming, whereas children in science fiction or action movies tend to be vital narrative devices, not so much characters in their own right . . . In thriller terms, children are shorthand for something to be preserved at all costs, and we’re expected to take it on trust that one sprog is worth a hundred adults.

I would argue that, in real life, there is a huge and meaningful middle ground between seeing children as “just there” unless they hit the radar in negative terms, and seeing them as worth one hundred adults put together . . . but Billson’s analysis of the way young people are used as characters in certain genre films is certainly thought-provoking. As Hanna pointed out, Billson collapses together the treatment of children from infants to teenagers with little differentiation, a move that seems problematic for her purpose of character analysis since obviously a fourteen-year-old teen means very different things to us, culturally, than a newborn infant or toddler.

Hanna also passed on a Guardian op-ed about the murder of a museum guard at Washington, D.C.’s holocaust museum this past Wednesday. It’s a thoughtful piece that is much more articulate than I feel I could be about the need to reject both hatred and reactionary violence against those who hate — and seek a broader, more humanistic response to acts of terrorism that affirm the essential interdependence of the worlds’ human beings.

And finally, because all good things come in threes, another Guardian article — this time, hilarious columnist Stuart Jeffries on how the rich pretend they’re toughing out the recession: “Are you seriously telling me that you aren’t worrying about how your Jerusalem artichokes are faring in the new vegetable plot dug by your Lithuanian au pair at the back of your five-figure designer minimalist garden? (Don’t pretend you aren’t.)”

"What do you mean by counterculture?"

12 Friday Jun 2009

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One of the first tasks on my list at the end of the spring semester was to draft a proposal for an independent study in the fall that is designed to lay the groundwork for my history thesis (gulp!). The thesis is an oral history-based project documenting the early years of the Oregon Extension program, from 1975-1980, and placing the learning environment that faculty and students created there in a broader cultural context. One of my goals for this project is to incorporate some of my work into the writing I do for this blog, so that y’all can get a sense of what I do in my day job (or at least one of them) as an historian-in-training. With that in mind, here’s a blog post to get the ball rolling: a personal reflection on the language I use to describe what I research, and why I’ve settled on the terms I have.

Since starting graduate school, I’ve been asked far more often than I used to be to define my scholarly interests in ten-second, sound-bite terms (a task which, as those of you who know me well can attest, has never come easily to me). As an undergraduate, I always chafed against trying to encapsulate what I do as a thinker and writer in terms of a single academic discipline or area of interest. I am a historian by training, a feminist by political persuasion, with background in women’s studies, and a passion for thinking about how people make sense of the world. In the past, I have variously described this focus as an interest in intentional community, feminist activism, experiments in living, radical pedagogy, unschooling, radical, progressive, experimental education, and a number of other phrases.

More recently, when asked to give a short-hand version of my thesis research, I’ve been using the phrase “countercultural education” as the broad, umbrella term for where my academic interests lie. I used it just this week in an email to a researcher who contacted the Massachusetts Historical Society interested in the [[papers of nineteenth-century education reformer Horace Mann]]. The researcher wrote back and asked me, out of personal interest, to clarify what I meant when I used this term “countercultural.” Her question forced me to back up and reflect on why “counterculture” feels like the most appropriate, useful shorthand to me — and whether it serves me well in conversations with my colleagues, mentors, and friends.

What appeals to me about the term “counterculture” is that, in a single compound word, it identifies my interest in radical worldviews — worldviews that are fundamentally different from those espoused by the dominant educational culture — while also not limiting my focus to a single movement or ideological persuasion. Historian Ron Miller, in Free Schools, Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s, describes countercultural pedagogy as educational practices that seek to “educate children and young adults according to a set of attitudes, values, and beliefs in direct opposition to those of the predominant culture” (3). That’s a definition that goes beyond concepts of “left” or “right” political views, or particular historically-situated movements or schools of thought, like mid-twentieth-century home education, the early-twentieth-century progressive educators, or (to use Miller’s example) the short-lived free school movement of the 1960s.

While some of these historical movements represent countercultural values I strongly identify with on a personal and political level, my interest in educational practice goes beyond interest in a particular set of countercultural values. I am fascinated with the way in which education as an activity and the spaces in which educational activities take place are used as tools for training young people in different ways of being in the world, and in different ways of making sense of that world and their place within it. I am particularly interested in the instances in which the activities and spaces that individuals or groups of people find useful for this making-sense activity are different from the mainstream values and practices of their own context. What prompts them to seek alternatives? What methods do they choose? What vision for human growth and community do they see their educational practices resulting in, and why does that vision make sense to them? As I have written before, these critiques of mainstream culture can come from any point on the political spectrum, and the diversity of both educational practice and the expected results of those practices are dizzying in their variety.

The one reservation I have with identifying my work as the study of “countercultural education” is that it defines my research subject in terms of what it is not: predominant educational norms. The trap of defining oneself (or one’s topic of research) as “not thing X,” and forgetting what the subject is standing for, rather than against, is one I do not wish to fall into. However, thinking of what I am embarking upon as one chapter in the history of countercultural education in American history is, for now, a useful starting point. A starting point out of which, I hope, I can begin to discern what it is the specific individuals I am studying valued and believed important to share with following generations.

*Photo of school children Library of Congress flickr stream.