Kali Tal

February 27, 2003

Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet, by Lisa Nakamura

There's a story behind my essay on Cybertypes. David Silver, who runs the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, requested that I review Nakamura's book for RCCS. I'd reviewed a couple of books for Silver before, and we were on friendly terms. I agreed, but the review was more negative than he expected. He at first agreed to publish it with a couple of revisions. I made them and resubmitted. Then Silver reversed himself at the last minute. I finally withdrew the essay when he requested yet another revision, with very fuzzy parameters, and no assurance that it would be accepted even then. He doubtless has his own explanation for the rejection, but I think it was a failure of nerve--this is sure to be a controversial piece and not everybody likes to take heat. The result, however, is that RCCS doesn?t feature a single review of Cybertypes by a scholar with credentials in African American studies. It is business as usual, though, since RCCS, and its parent field, "cyberculture" criticism barely acknowledges the existence of African Americans, or the centrality of African American critical theory to any examination of race in the United States. "Eruptions of funk," like this essay, are seen as disruptions of white business as usual. The level of critique that antiracism requires is labelled "too personal," "unkind," and "unprofessional"--all code words for raced exclusion.

You can find the reviews that Silver did accept, by Julian Bleecker and Graham J. Murphy, on the RCCS Book Review page, featured for March 2003. Also posted is a response to these reviews by Nakamura.

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February 20, 2003

Largest archive of slavery lawsuits goes online

From The Nation: "The St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project consists of some 280 legal documents filed between 1814 and 1860. It includes images of original handwritten documents in which black men, women and children petitioned the courts for freedom." It's online now at Washington University, which also houses the Dred Scott online archive.

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Feb 15 protest photos

There's a great compilation of photographs of the protests around the world at www.hyperreal.org/~dana/. Brings home the strength of antiwar sentiment around the world. There's not a lot of "feel good" stuff going on in the world lately, so this is a nice opportunity to be cheered up.

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February 11, 2003

What Are College Students Thinking #2

At the soon-to-be-defunct college where I teach (Arizona International College of The University of Arizona), we have a requirement that all students complete senior "capstone" projects before they graduate. These capstones range from six to twenty-four credit hours, with the size and scope of the undertaking varying accordingly. It's a good idea in theory, but it's been notably disastrous in execution, with the majority of students producing and presenting under-par capstone work. By the mid-point of my office hours today I've already counseled three students who have reacted to the capstone assignment with varying degrees of panic. Their terror stems from the fact that none of them have ever successfully tackled a project that requires sustained research, analysis, and writing or production effort. Training in research methods (at least at AIC) is sadly deficient, or entirely absent, so the capstone looks like an insurmountable obstacle to many of the students who must complete one.

Much of the time I spend with such students is taken up by soothing and reassuring talk to alleviate their fears. After a self-esteem booster, we break the capstone down into a series of manageable steps, to be taken, one after the other, on the path to completion. Often we have to refine and narrow the topic area, so that the student won't be overwhelmed. I'm all for undergraduate research projects, but it's becoming more and more clear to me that certain types of research are most commonly done at the graduate level for a reason. We do want to train undergraduates in research basics, and there are opportunities for incorporating undergraduates into our own research projects. But very few undergrads have the educational foundation, the expertise, or the self-discipline to undertake full-scale solo research projects unless their training in such areas was exceptionally thorough, or unless they are non-traditional students with a great deal of previous training or life experience.

One of the most popular capstone components is administering some sort of survey, with the intent of procuring quantifiable results. I occasionally encourage students to pursue surveys, but only if the instruments they use are already proven in the field. I'm not sure what makes most students (and a lot of other professors) think undergrads should be capable of coming up with their own original instruments without any training in the area, though I suspect that it's because those members of both groups are ignorant of the amount of work and time that goes into developing a suitable survey and administering it under properly controlled conditions. My work as an advisor to undergraduates requires that I frequently and in great detail describe the amount of work it would actually take to create a working instrument. Once they understand, most students drop the survey component, often because they can see that it's neither essential nor ultimately useful to their end product.

But the most important thing that I do is explain, again and again, to students that education is an ongoing process, and that it takes active time and effort on their part. The goal, I underline, is not to complete a capstone project in order to fulfill the capstone requirement: the goal is to acquire enough knowledge (through research) to make the leap from being an absorber of knowledge to becoming a producer of knowledge. That's what expertise is all about. Properly handled, a capstone, or senior thesis, can give a student a taste of what it means to be an expert.

It's the proper handling that gets to be the problem. The panic my students feel isn't because they understand what they're getting into, but because they don't. They don't understand that research is an incremental process, and knowledge is accrued little by little over a period of time. (After all, they've written few papers that couldn't be pounded out overnight or, worse yet, purchased over the internet.) They don't understand that the eureka moment is that moment at which one's accumulated knowledge reaches critical mass, and one spontaneously generates an original idea or insight. They don't know how to generate bibliographies, or create outlines, or extract the relevant quotations from their readings. They lack the tools that can take them to the point of that eureka, and they don't even have a way to describe what they don't have.

And that's usually the last part of our talk: a discussion of the missing pieces that they must find and internalize before they'll be able to make progress on their capstones. Missing piece #1: a sense of agency; the belief that they are undertaking this project of their own free will, and out of a personal interest and stake in its success. Missing piece #2: an understanding that even the biggest project can be broken down into discrete tasks that can be accomplished, one after another. Missing piece #3: the acceptance that insight depends on a solid foundation of knowledge and research, and that there are no shortcuts to the eureka; but, on the other hand, the eureka is inevitable once critical mass has been reached.

This strategy seems to work, and, historically, I've been quite pleased with the capstone projects completed by the students I advise. But it makes me sad that college students can reach their senior year before making meaningful connections between their own lives and their educations, between knowledge and growth, and between hard work and sudden insight. If such connections could be made earlier, I think that there would be more joy in learning, and more sense that education has the capacity to be empowering and liberating.

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What are college students thinking? #1

Today I had some car trouble that made me twenty minutes late for a class that I'm teaching. This is a once-a-week, three hour class. When I got there (at twenty minutes past the hour) I saw a sign on the whiteboard: Class left at 1:17. No students in sight. At The University of Arizona, there's a student tradition of "the 5-minute rule": if a prof isn't there by five minutes after the class start time, the students all feel justified in walking out. Setting aside the fact that students trickle into my classes late as a matter of course, and would be shocked if I locked the door at five minutes after the hour and denied late students entrance, this rule of waiting a limited time for the professor and then ditching indicates a really poor attitude towards learning, generally.

I teach at a big state school, and maybe that's part of the problem. Because the tuition is (relatively) inexpensive and entrance requirements are so low (especially for in-state residents), UA is a dumping ground for a lot of kids who are going to college because they don't know what else to do with their lives. These students are not likely to take much responsibility for their education, and have probably never been encouraged to think about education in empowered terms. It hasn't helped much that the consumer model for higher-education is well-entrenched at UA, and that students regard themselves as paying to be educated, rather than as paying for the opportunity to be actively engaged in educating themselves, with the assistance and facilitation of faculty mentors.

This incident has made me decide to add a new section to my already overburdened syllabus: What To Do If The Professor Isn't There On Time. Since there's obviously no way they're going to think of it themselves, I guess I'll have to spell out the fact that they, and only they, are responsible for reaping the benefits that college offers. Just a paragraph should do it: If the professor is late, do one of the following: a) nominate a discussion leader and discuss the week's reading or assignment; b) use the period to catch up on your course reading or assignments; c) discuss the ways in which the work and readings for this class relate to work and readings in your other classes; d) try out a new idea or exercise related to the subject of the course, and take notes so that you can tell the professor about it when she arrives.

Not too hard. Really a no-brainer, if you've got it in your head that you're in college to actually learn something. There's all this prattle about "learner-centered education" at UA, but the truth is that the students are all so fixated on jumping through the hoops they believe professors set ("Do I need to know this for the test?") that education is wholly and hopelessly faculty-centered here. Getting students to think for themselves is like pulling teeth. Getting them to take responsibility for educating themselves and each other is a nightmare.

Just another installment of AMERICA MAKES YOU STUPID.

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February 8, 2003

America Makes You Stupid #1

The problem with ignorance and stupidity is that it's damned hard to get away with when the whole world is watching. The U.S. and British government's commitment to aggressive ignorance has once again been demonstrated by the fact that these world powers are using the equivalent of "Buy a Term Paper" services to assemble the documents used to justify their hawkish international policy. Turns out that Colin Powell's argument to the U.N. that we ought to invade Iraq was bolstered by a British dossier cobbled together out of apparently random position papers and articles by variously credentialed Middle East experts. You can read about it in the UK Guardian's Feb 7 article, "UK war dossier a sham, say experts." Riddled with plagiarism and inaccuracies, and supported by years-old data, this dossier would be a joke, if the punchline weren't a rain of bombs on innocent civilians.

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Patriot II: Kicking us when we're down

The news has recently broken that the White House has a sequel to the Patriot Act waiting in the wings: apparently American citizens still have too many civil rights to please this administration. You can read the full text of the "secret draft" at TomPaine.common sense. There's a full-length report on it at The Center for Public Integrity. I'm not surprised by anything this administration tries to pull anymore. As a nation, we've tumbled off the deep end of rationality and are awash in a sea of lunacy. I guess what strikes me as odd is that so few people seem to notice or, if they notice, to be troubled by it. I wish I could care less; as it is I wake up every morning thinking that America has gone mad, and I have to get out of here before I lose my mind, too.

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February 1, 2003

Dollars & Sense

Dollars & Sense, "The Magazine of Economic Justic," was this morning's Resource find. The magazine is published in hard-copy, but a number of articles are featured and archived at their web site. An article on "Immigrant Workers in the Crosshairs" immediately caught my attention, since I live in a border town and, like other Tucson residents, have noted the increased presence of both la migra and right-wing vigilante groups every time I venture out for a hike in the desert or the mountains. Looks like a good source for progressive articles on economic issues.

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Take Back the Media

An email about Take Back the Media described that group's call for a boycott of the companies that advertise during the Rush Limbaugh Show. There's a full article on CBS MarketWatch. You have to sign up as a member of MarketWatch to read the article, which is annoying. But the contents of the article are interesting, and suggest that the boycott strategy might be a good one if we want to erode corporate support for heinous media figures like Limbaugh.

The MarketWatch story commented that boycotts are thought of as a right-wing tactic, which surprised me since I'm old enough to remember the boycott of grapes called for by Cesar Chavez and the union of migrant farm workers. I also remember the boycott of Nestle's because they promoted powdered baby formula over breast-feeding in countries where mothers lacked access to sanitary water supplies and often over-diluted the powdered formula because it was so expensive. Then there was the boycott of canned tuna, because the methods used to catch the tuna also killed dolphins. When I thought about it, though, I couldn't really remember a popular leftist boycott in the 1980s-1990s. Americans have no sense of history, so I suppose it makes sense that in twenty years a leftist tactic could be revised into a right-wing tactic.

It is always good to see progressives organizing and taking action against the right. There's been all too little of it lately (although there's more of it than we see, given the pretty much total right-wing control of the media). While the right in the U.S. has grown more cohesive, organized and powerful, the left has almost disappeared. The few remaining progressives lack visibility, not to mention organization and a compelling vision of what a free and democratic United States would look like. It may be that the pending U.S. war against Iraq brings more progressives out of the woodwork, but that remains to be seen. One thing is for sure--ranged against the wealth, political power, and resources of the American right-wing, progressives are going to find even publicizing our existence an uphill battle. It's important that we not cede effective tactics like boycotts to the right, and it is good to see that Take Back the Media is reclaiming a potentially powerful strategy.

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