LEARNING, UNLEARNING, ANALYSIS

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Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.

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We will be taking two classes for sharing our insights from the course. Everyone will turn in their analysis on Thursday, but everyone should be ready to SPEAK Tuesday regardless.

You could imagine this as a quilting bee -- a reality and metaphor of importance in women's studies. The people who talk each day depend on the careful and interested listenings of everyone else.

Each person will offer a piece for the quilt -- make it as uniquely yours as you can. Imagine yourself in our Theories of Feminism knowledge quilting society, coming together to share our understandings of theories and meanings as we have pieced them together for our intellectual community this term.

Look over your paper and makes notes of the following. If for any reason you don't have your paper with you today, you still must make these notes and speak from them. We don't even need you to say whether you have your paper with you at this point....

You will speak from something you've put down in these notes:

1. Find your favorite paragraph in the paper. Put a star next to it.
2. Write down what you are most proud of in this paper.
3. Put an arrow next to the place you think best describe the argument of the course.
4. Write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what made it special for you.

Add one of these:

• Write down the moment in the course when things started to come together for you.
• Write down a note about a moment outside the course when you found yourself using what you had learned.
• Write down a note about how you found yourself included in the argument of the course

When it is your turn to speak, pick out four of these pieces to share in our quilt of the class. We want to give time for half the class today, so be mindful of the the time, but make sure your piece is special and unique.

And may we all keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship, connection, intellectual community, and joyful living!

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"Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, died Tuesday Dec. 2, 2008. She was 77." (from the AP).

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Thursday, 4 December—Theories of feminism, why theories in the plural?
• Reread & review: everything. Read parts of books we didn't get to. Reread your favorite stuff. Be prepared to say what you have read and reread and why.
What has the course been put together the way it has? How has that shaping contributed to the arguments of the course? What elements of the course have meant the most to you? What will you take away from the class?

Tuesday, 9 December—Analyzing Learning I
• DUE: Grp. 1 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and consider the learning community we have built.

Thursday, 11 December—Analyzing Learning II
• DUE: Grp. 2 Learning Analysis & final logbooks.
We will share learning analyses in the class and celebrate our final day.


Alison Bechtel -- the comic book as feminist theory -- see her website -- and new book

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LEARNING ANALYSIS for Feminist Theory

This is a synthetic reflection on the course and your place in it.
DUE Tuesday, 9 December: learning analysis / 6-8 pgs printed out; compact is good!
Credit given after presentation in class either Tuesday or Thursday. Make plans to be in class on all the presentation days, no matter what.

SUMMARY OF GRADED MATERIALS:
• grps and preps: 1/3 grade: 7 summary sheets, 4 submissions logbooks, 1 learning analysis
• paper: 1/3 grade
• presentation: 1/3 grade

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES MAJORS, MINORS AND CERTIFICATE STUDENTS! IN ADDITION you should turn in a hard copy of all graded written assignments for ALL women's studies courses to Laura Nichols, your women's studies advisor. RECORD THIS IN YOUR LOGBOOK! After verifying whether you are a major, minor or certificate student, all identifying information will be removed. These papers are collected so that our department can assess how we are doing in getting across concepts, skills, and approaches from this field of women's studies to our students. This is not an assessment of students, but another way to assess our department's work. YOUR COOPERATION IS ESSENTIAL. Please take this need seriously and help us collect this data. All departments are required to conduct these assessments now and in our department we want to make ours as women's studies friendly as possible!
FOR THIS CLASS TURN IN YOUR PAPER AND YOUR LEARNING ANALYSIS.

The learning analysis gives you an opportunity to talk about what the course has meant to you. It includes:

(1) your description of the argument or story of the course.
Examine the syllabus (course descriptions and requirements, the reading and writing assignments), WWW sites and blog spaces, notes from class, any freewrites, lists and preps for class, imagining this information as elements in an argument about feminist theory and its relationships to social movements. How have we put together our understandings of how thinking and action interconnect?

What is the argument of the course? What are the parts of this argument, and how do they connect together? You will be trying to imagine how the course was constructed, and why it was put together in this particular way. Pay special attention to titles for days in the Reading and Writing Assignment outline. Imagine them as titles in a Table of Contents to parts of a book and try to understand the argument of the "book" of the course.

(2) put yourself into this story.
What have we created together, considering kinds of feminisms, formats of theory, and histories of women and social movements? How are you a part of the argument of the course as you understand it? What was happening with you at different points in the unfolding and building of this argument? What kind of knowledge did you make yourself in your analysis of readings, in your presentation, in your responses to others' work, in your investigations on the Web and using our blog, and how do the insights you developed connect? Use the lists you did for class, contributions to the blog and your class notes to remember your thoughts, questions, ideas. How did these change? What changed them? What were your contributions to the class? What effects did you have on the course, on your partners? How did your responses to other people's work include you in the argument of the class? What worked for you? What didn't work for you? Be sure to account for your absences from class, and talk about what you did to keep up and how you know that you got the stuff you missed.

(3) discuss 4 readings and 1 or 2 web sites from the course connecting you to the class.
Choose readings which meant a lot to you, and web sites of substance that helped you think and connect. Demonstrate that you've kept up with the reading by showing how widely you've read in the course materials. How do these readings connect to the argument of the class? How did they affect you? What was meaningful and important about them? What did you learn from them? How did they change your relationship to the course, to ideas, issues, politics, feelings? You can talk about how your life was connected to these ideas and feelings. You can suggest relationships with other readings, other courses, other experiences.

This is an exercise in synthesizing--putting things together in new relationships, making a whole shape. It requires imagination. Have fun with it. Good luck!

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Conferencing II

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From Tuesday, 18 November to 2 December

everyone will finish the class having done both a paper and a presentation. Each is 1/3 of your grade. Both will require additional research as well as keeping up with class readings. Much of the research will emerge out of lectures and their resources, so attending lectures faithfully and taking good notes will make this work a lot easier.

The second set of conferences are built around
• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or in a paper.

Tuesday, 18 November—Presentation Grp. 1
Thursday, 20 November—Presentation Grp. 2

Tuesday, 25 November—NO CLASS; KATIE IN SWEDEN
Thursday, 27 November—NO CLASS; HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Tuesday, 2 December—All papers due & all logbooks.

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Companion Species Among Worldly Processes

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Surprise Surprise! The Surprised Feminist --

"I have come to think that the capacity to be surprised -- and to admit it -- is an undervalued feminist attribute. To be surprised is to have one's current explanatory notions, and thus one's predictive assumptions, thrown into confusion. In both academic life and in activist public life in most cultures, one is socialized to deny surprise. It is as if admitting surprise jeopardized one's hard-earned credibility.... Being open to surprise, being ready to publicly acknowledge surprise, may be among the most useful attitudes to adopt to prepare one's feminist self for what now lies ahead." (Cynthia Enloe 2004, 13-14)

Donna Haraway's work often comes as a surprise to feminists. "Dogs?" they say. "What do dogs have to do with feminist theory? Is it some kind of metaphor? Is it a joke? And where are the women?"

Well, there are lots of jokes in Haraway's work, lots of fun too, but it is also all very serious and literal as well. Why should feminists care about dogs, about co-evolutionary planetary processes, about arguing against human exceptionalism? Haraway wants to tell us some stories that communicate why we need to understand collectivities that matter, and why these collectivities can never be only human ones....

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Donna Haraway talks about Companion Species at the Open University in the U.K.

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Training Stories

"'Marco... Cayenne is not a cyborg truck; she is your partner in a martial art called obedience. You are the older partner and the master here. You have learned how to perform respect with your body and your eyes. Your job is to teach the form to Cayenne.' ...First, these two youngsters had to learn to notice each other. They had to be in the same game. It is my belief that Marco... as he learned to show her the corporeal posture of cross-species respect, she and he became significant others to each other." Haraway 2003 (41-2) See also Haraway 2008.

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As you can see from this, HOW you do something matters to Haraway: it matters in her agility training and it matters in her feminist theory.

"When 'pure-bred' Cayenne, 'mixed-breed Roland, and I touch, we embody in the flesh the connections of the dogs and the people who made us possible.... Inhabiting that legacy without the pose of innocence, we might hope for the creative grace of play." (98)

"Without the pose of innocence" -- without projecting away from oneself all the difficult ambiguities of power, the uneven forms of interconnection as they shift among dominations. The point is not to say that forms of domination are okay somehow, but to increase the possibilities for accountability -- to acknowledge rather than deny the complexities of power and responsibility.

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Similarly, Haraway doesn't pretend that what she writes is accessible to everyone, even while she works very hard to make her writing as clear and moving and of importance as she can.

She knows that attention to words is only one part of getting ideas across -- especially as you are in the middle of thinking something new.

Here is an exchange between Donna Haraway and a former student now a journalist interviewing her:

(from How Like a Leaf, 108):

"DH: ...I think my contribution is precisely this sensibility that people are forced to inhabit by virtue of their encounter with my writing or speaking. Actually, a lot of people get my stuff through the public performance first and only then find the writing more accessible. I've had this experience frequently because in public speaking all kinds of issues are possible to perform physically. It is such an intermedia event where voice, gesture, slides, enthusiasm all shape the density of the words. Oddly, I think people can handle the density better in a performance than on the page."


"TNG [Thyrza Goodeve]: ...There are tones and gradations and nuances available that are not as readily availalbe in a written text. I think of your use of irony, which is such a large part of you as a person. Humor, laughter, joking is a constant and it's a form of theorizing for you...."

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WITH A PARTNER: look through Haraway's pamphlet and find a "joke" that is a form of theorizing in The Companion Species Manifesto. What is the serious point of this joke? Why does it need to be in a joke form?

What does it take to read this kind of feminist theory and not be intimidated by it? How does it teach you to read other kinds of academic theory? How does it help you make writing accessible to yourself?

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Here is an interview with Haraway on the Prickly Paradigm site: Catalog

Here is Donna Haraway's agility website: Doggery.org

Here is a website also created by Haraway's partner Rusten Hogness, for a joint project on the stories of activists for sustainable agriculture, Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

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Genomics & Justice: A forum to bridge the historic divide between communities engaged in science and in social justice: How can we ensure that our expanding stores of genomic information benefit rather than harm people?
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How does Social Change Happen?

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BRAINSTORMING: list as quickly as you can as many ways social change occurs as you can think of. With a person sitting next to you, expand the list as far as the two of you can. With the next pair near you and your partner, continue your list expansion. Among the four of you, notice which ways are most often listed. Choose two or three you four consider most effective. Choose two or three you have personally engaged in.

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Thinking ahead to our second set of conferences, before and after Thanksgiving:

The second set of conferences are built around
• A project in making or using feminist theory with attention to histories of feminist movements.
How did second wave feminists produce theory in CR groups? What happens when you work in a similar group? How did the separate routes to feminism taken by some identity groups affect what counts as theory and how we understand social change? What does globalization have to do with feminist practices? These and similar projects with attention to histories of feminist movements will focus this assignment. Katie and Renee will help you figure out which issues you want to think and know more about in either a presentation for the class, or in a paper.

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We are using INCITE's book as an incentive to consider the crucial question "How Does Social Change Happen?"

The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex

By Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence

Published by South End Press, 2007

This book emerged from a 2005 conference at UC-Santa Barbara as described online by Andrea del Moral: http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featdelmoral_nonprofit.htm/


Incite's website: http://www.incite-national.org/

Look at the introduction to the book:

• Notice that not all the articles in this book agree with each other: what does this mean?
• Pay attention to the mini-history of charities and foundations since the Civil War (3-8)
• What is the difference between radical change or social reform? what theories of change are engaged and promoted in the introduction? What forms of social change do you advocate?
• Why does managing "revolution" matter, and to whom?

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Some theories of social movements discuss the mobilization of resources:

from the Wikipedia on Social Movements:

"Resource Mobilization:

"Social movements need organizations first and foremost. Organizations can acquire and then deploy resources to achieve their well-defined goals. Some versions of this theory see movements operate similar to a capitalist enterprises that make efficient use of available resources. Scholars have suggested a typology of five types of resources:

1. Material (money and physical capital);
2. Moral (solidarity, support for the movement's goals);
3. Social-Organizational (organizational strategies, social networks, bloc recruitment);
4. Human (volunteers, staff, leaders);
5. Cultural (prior activist experience, understanding of the issues, collective action know-how)

"Political opportunity/Political process:

"Certain political contexts should be conducive (or representative) for potential social movement activity. These climates may [dis]favor specific social movements or general social movement activity; the climate may be signaled to potential activists and/or structurally allowing for the possibility of social movement activity (matters of legality); and the political opportunities may be realized through political concessions, social movement participation, or social movement organizational founding. Opportunities may include:

1. increased access to political decision making power
2. instability in the alignment of ruling elites (or conflict between elites)
3. access to elite allies (who can then help a movement in its struggle)
4. declining capacity and propensity of the state to repress dissent

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Some theories of social change:
see these websites too:
http://stmarys.ca/~evanderveen/wvdv/social_change/social_change_theories.htm
http://www.ptc.nsw.edu.au/scansw/preston.html

Evolutionary: social structures become more complex over time. Some evolutionary theories assume sociocultural change is progressive; others point out how multi-linear it is instead, and how uneven in development.

Functionalist: social structures work interdependently to keep cultural processes in equilibrium. Order and stability are maintained when new institutions are integrated into existing interrelations.

Conflictual: change is inevitable and revolutionary. Periodic crises arise in relations of power and explosively reorganize in new terms. Vested interests hold onto power through education, socialization and ideology until conflict increases to a revolutionary crisis.

Symbolic interactionist: social realities are constructed among the interactions of people and the making of meanings. How people interpret the world affects their understandings and mobilizations of power and social change.

Postmodern: power is dispersed and localized, fluidly shifting. Political strategies of coercion attempt to manage and stabilize these shifting powers, but their actions always produce reactions and resistance.

Resource Mobilization in social movements: collectivities of people create change. Social movements manipulate and manage discontent through the redistribution of resources.

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