loops, tangles, double binds and other ways of thinking, being, altering

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<<<SECTION I: movements entangled & entangling, intentional & historical 

Dixon. 2014. Another Politics. California. 978-0520279025. ASIN: B00KOLR378.

Paoletti. 2013. Pink and Blue. Indiana. 978-0253009852. ASIN: B007A0PHL0.

Reed. 2005. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minnesota. 9780816637713

Sandoval. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota. 9780816627370 

Thursday 29 January – Intro: Dixon, (Reed), Sandoval, (double bind, trans-waters) 

Thursday 5 February – Reed, Paoletti 

Thursday 12 February – Dixon, Sandoval 

Thursday 19 February – Sandoval, Paoletti <PAOLETTI AT CLASS> 

Thursday 5 February – Entangled contexts, political timelines, historical loops and their non-linearities 

• READ: everyone read Reed, Chs1&2, on Civil Rights and the Black Panthers through the frame of "arts of protest." Then pick other parts of the book as you are interested, equaling approx. 1/3 of the whole thing. Everyone read Paoletti, Intro&Ch4, on the shape of the whole book, and the muliplicities made visible when "a boy is not a girl." For this book too, also chose other parts to read to equal approx. 1/3 of book altogether with these. 

•RECOMMENDED: Burgett & Mendler, eds. 2014 (2nd ed). Keywords for American Cultural Studies. TERMS: Johnson, "Black" (30-34); MacLeod, "Copyright" (60-63); Halberstam, "Gender" (116-118).

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Paoletti appeared on The World, from Public Radio International, this week: Listen to the interview and see the article online: http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-30/forget-mens-and-womens-clothing-one-department-store-going-unisex

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• SIGNUPS: directors and presenter teams 

Gregory Bateson (who is he and why might we care?) famously said, in “the pronoun we, I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States.” (1979:98, 174) “Us” gathers sympoietically too all these boundary objects storing details and affects as we work to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. How do we understand our times (endtimes?) and movements (intentional and historical).

Double binds and double consciousness are both terms that tangle, have multiple and different origins but also inter-connections and meanings. There is a reason ideas are not property: they and their words are alive, show up and re-originate unevenly, circulate within and between knowledge worlds, and track current attempts to manage knowledge through property relations (one of the possible meanings of "neoliberal" perhaps). Bateson used both of these terms for specific reasons, and so did, differently, with alternative histories, Kimberlé Crenshaw and W.E.B. duBois. Let's pay attention to their transcontextual tangles and knots of meaning and possibility!

You have quite a lot to get to by next Thursday: 1/3 of each of two books and a set of video and audio clips. I would also like you to check out the links on the class website post for this week as well.

Reminders of what to read and links and embedded audio and video are on the website now. Please take a moment to look at them as soon as possible and prepare your time to complete all of them by Thursday.

Help each other out in sharing books perhaps: they are also on reserve at McKeldin and also available in about 10 mins as ebooks, readable with an electronic app if you do not have a dedicated e-reader.

Notice tangles: words that look the same but point to different communities of practice, uses, knowledge worlds. Take note of these.

Reflect and remember: what memories do you have, your own or those of family, friends, teachers, from TV, or anywhere that tie you to these timespots and care-abouts!

Think perhaps about systems justice, what it could mean in these transcontextual entanglements, and about double binds. How do they help us understand our distributed being and sufferings, for example, those of triggers and microagressions?

Come to class with clues, guesses, bits of memory, feelings on the edge of consciousness, wonderings and affinities. historical knowledge we can share.

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Uploaded on Feb 11, 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhafyI6-Bp0  

The Freedom Singers perform "(Ain't Gonna let Nobody) Turn me Around" at the White House Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.

• Category

  • News & Politics

• License

  • Standard YouTube License
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Published on Jul 14, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsziXdKfOsE  

From the Evening Concerts At Newport, Vol. 1...Vanguard/Orizzonte ORL 8197 (1964)

http://www.wirz.de/music/newpofrm.htm

Recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival, on July 26, 1963; The Freedom Singers: Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt

No folk-song trend of the last few years aroused so much attention as the use of "freedom songs" in the Negro civil rights movement. This is probably the greatest peacetime functional use of folk music since the labor movement organizing drive in the 1930's. There "freedom songs" are old spirituals with renewed meaning for today, either in their original form or with new words. They are heard in jails, and at sit-ins, demonstrations, rallies and all tension points where morale needs a boost.
Four young activist in this struggle make up The Freedom Singers - Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt. The group formed in the winter of 1962 during the extended civil rights battles at Albany, Georgia, where music played a vital role in buoying up the spirits of the demonstrators. This is probably the only musical quartet all members of which have served time in jail. "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Set On Freedom" is a popular modern gospel song with revised words and one of the most popular of the new "freedom songs." ~ Stacey Williams (from the liner notes)

Photos: Jim Marshall; Joe Alper Photo Collection

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  • Music

• License

  • Standard YouTube License

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Published on Jun 30, 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSJK4gdFH8U  

SNCC Freedom Singers performing "Woke Up This Morning (with My Mind Stayed on Freedom)" at the SNCC archive opening at the DuSable Museum in Chicago. October 2011. Sponsored by the Friends of SNCC. (SNCC = Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)

• Category

  • Music

• License

  • Standard YouTube License

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Uploaded on Jan 19, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn7MOR1zpgw  

From a performance on 10 Nov 2007 at Woodson Regional Library, Chicago, IL

Presented by Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the SNCC History Project

• Category

  • Nonprofits & Activism

• License

  • Standard YouTube License

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KPIX Eyewitness news report from May 3rd, 1967 by reporter Don McGaffin taken outside the Sacramento Municipal Court featuring a report on the arrest of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, on charges of conspiracy one day after members of the Black Panthers carried guns into the California State Capitol in Sacramento. Also features an interview with Black Panther legal counselor Larry Carlton(?) in which he clarifies the charges againt his clients. This news report may relate to KPIX footage of guns being processed by a Police Department Property Clerk in KPIX 31176 and 31203. Remastered, edited and catalogued for the web by Shira Peltzman.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/206879

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KPIX Eyewitness News report by Mike Lee from December 25th 1970 in San Rafael, featuring brief views of Angela Davis in court, an artist's impression of the court proceedings and an interview with a spokeswoman, who explains the legal situation with regard to Davis's treatment by authorities. Davis stands accused of plotting and conspiring to help organize the escape attempt and shootout between Black Panthers, San Quentin prisoners and local Sheriff deputies on August 7th 1970 (in San Rafael).

https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/190206

The Davis video is full of clips, the beginning is silent, and there is audio toward the end....

Both from the Black Panthers Collection of the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, online at: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/3005

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Creating our course

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We begin here. diving into paradox: systems justice

I share with you my description for this course, as a variation on a description of a recent talk too.... there are many allusions here that ask you to plunge into knowledges of all sorts. We don't know what we don't know and that is the condition of our work and care in and for worlds. Being willing to plunge into what we don't know is essential for good politics, for feminist living, for wise academic action. 

Systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, what Chela Sandoval called “differential consciousness,” calls out to various politics of attachment.

[Sandoval, C. 2002. Foreword: AfterBridge: Technologies of Crossing. In G. E. Anzaldua & A. Keating (Eds.), this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (pp. 21-26): Routledge.]

Belief and disbelief, really perhaps memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled, stagger between climate change, social change publics, amid money behind global restructurings, and even, say, together with feminist juggling acts and territories, amid objects, new materialisms, and communities of justice and practice. Register such intensities and traumas: when do they become ends in themselves? All too crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths?

Eschatology, the study of end-times, companions a paradoxically long history in human attention. And humans are often precariously enduring on the planet, and have threatened its existence before. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis myself, and we might well have ended then. This fear of nuclear endings motivated much of my teacher Gregory Bateson’s work for example.

I am increasingly sharing Bateson's work on systems and double binds, which I consider to be vital and entangled with feminist thought today too. Bateson was very vocal and concerned about unanticipated movements the complexities of systems take on when urgencies become too predictive. Then our urgencies result in less sensitivity to the unanticipated, result in too narrow a focus, as all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions are inadvertently escalated.

Systems justice requires something much more complicated. It means, for example, we have to work with our extended being as well as find out new things about it. Another of my teachers, Donna Haraway, has worked hard to open such questions up in terms that feminists care about most: bodies, beings, suffering, companionships of many kinds (technological, species, environmental). In this class you become students of her student, me, too.... (grand-students?)

What do we each see as the crises of the moment? how will we use this class to take these up and share our concerns, from climate change to new horizons of social justice amid intensifications and perceptions of injustice: racial, multiply gendered, trans national, economic, and much more....

To go with and beyond human intention and systems of control we need many ways to gather now to minimize damage and maximize flourishing. What do we need to gather? “Us” gathers sympoietically among boundary objects and affects (about which we will learn much more!)

Sympoiesis is that "making with" that complexities open out and among....

Sometimes people say if it’s about everything it is about nothing. Not today. Dive into the paradox: systems justice means sharpening focus without narrowing it.

This course is required for WMST PhD & graduate certificate students. It is taught once a year in a faculty rotation among specializations. This version is a transdisciplinary course that takes up your feminist knowledges as you have them now, across interests and disciplines and political experiences. It is a seminar, but an unusual one in which you will experiment with new scholarly practices, perhaps prepare for your exams, and figure out how to learn in contact zones, at the edge of what we, individually and collectively, know. What you DON'T know will be a resource to the class, as well as what you do!

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This is the website we will use all semester, so BOOKMARK it now!
We won't be using ELMS or Canvas except just to reserve books for the course at McKeldin.

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books ordered at the University Book Store.
everything will also be on hard copy 24 hr reserve at McKeldin Library.

We may all read some of these, parcel some out in bits, and choose between some, so that collectively we will "know" them all, while individually we will focus our "care-abouts" with sensitivity to what is at stake for each of us, all of us. NOTHING IS CARVED IN STONE! inquire about what you would like! WORRIED? talk to Katie about what you hope for in this class, what you want to know, what you want to focus on. We can work with all of it! Shoot your suggestions and interests to Katie at katking@umd.edu.

CLICK YEARS FOR LINKS TO AMAZON in case you find that useful. ASIN indicates an ebook.

Everything will be on reserve at McKeldin in hard copy.

* Paoletti. 2013. Pink and Blue. Indiana. 978-0253009852. ASIN: B007A0PHL0.
** Gessen & Huff-Hannon, eds. 2014. Gay Propaganda. OR Books. 978-1939293350. ASIN: B00J7XJBWO.
** Rodríguez. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. NYU. 978-0814764923. ASIN: B00L8BUIES.

Sandoval. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota. 978-0816627370. ASIN: B004A16LHQ.
Reed. 2005. The Art of Protest. Minnesota. 978-0816637713. ASIN: B0043XYNGW.

Povinelli. 2011. Economies of Abandonment. 978-0822350842. ASIN: B0068JZCAK.
Anker. 2014. Orgies of Feeling. Duke. 978-0822356974. ASIN: B00NCU8PWA.
Dixon. 2014. Another Politics. California. 978-0520279025. ASIN: B00KOLR378.
Kirksey, ed. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Duke. 978-0822356257. ASIN: B00PIKKE1C.

RECOMMENDED: Burgett & Mendler, eds. 2014 (2nd ed). Keywords for American Cultural Studies. NYU. 978-0814708019. ASIN: B00PSKHO1.

* Faculty member at UMD.
** Speakers coming to campus this term. Gessen will visit our class, Rodríguez will keynote the LGBT Lecture Series and Symposium this year.

And a wonderful resource! The Zinn Education Project! Let's use it! http://zinnedproject.org

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<<<SECTION I: movements entangled & entangling, intentional & historical

Dixon. 2014. Another Politics. California. 978-0520279025. ASIN: B00KOLR378.

Paoletti. 2013. Pink and Blue. Indiana. 978-0253009852. ASIN: B007A0PHL0.

Reed. 2005. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minnesota. 9780816637713

Sandoval. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota. 9780816627370

Thursday 29 January – Intro: Dixon, (Reed), Sandoval, (double bind, trans-waters)

Thursday 5 February – Reed, Paoletti

Thursday 12 February – Dixon, Sandoval

Thursday 19 February – Sandoval, Paoletti <PAOLETTI AT CLASS>

Thursday 29 January – Welcome to our class! Coalitions, consciousness, double binds

• WE BEGIN CLASS BY examining the books we will gather together with, considering our intensive and extensive “belongings,” enabling various of such “us” to “learn” as agential things, beings, animals, processes, distributed cognitions, ecologies of affect and more. INTRODUCTIONS of all the “us” we can figure out how to name and share!

• HANDOUTS: syllabus with readings at a glance, Sandoval bit, Trans-Waters bit, Dixon lessons, Bateson double bind, systems justice handout from Umeå.

• SIGNUPS: directors and presenter teams

Gregory Bateson (who is he and why might we care?) famously said, in “the pronoun we, I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States.” (1979:98, 174) “Us” gathers sympoietically too all these boundary objects storing details and affects as we work to minimize suffering and maximize flourishing. How do we understand our times (endtimes?) and movements (intentional and historical).

• We start with Dixon’s six lessons (226-9), connecting them to Sandoval’s oppositional and differential consciousness and to Bateson’s description of double binds, creating our first class discussion together and in the process introducing ourselves to each other as resources, to the class, readings and procedures, and to gathering strategies.

1) against-and-beyond (oppositional consciousness) 
2) being in the world but not of it: another world is possible 
3) purism has got to go 
4) cultivate intentionality and refuse absolutism 
5) experiments: no single organizing mode, type of organization, or strategic model works across all circumstances (differential consciousness) 
6) how to treat each other so that people can partially manifest a different relational vision

• Think-Pair-Share: what do we understand to be the crises of the moment? 

• Our first prototyping session: collectively make, pairs or grps or all: visualizing crises of the moment.

• We connect these to brief encounters with Trans-Waters online essay, pondering us/them affinities, coalitions, privilege and knowledge worlds, the politics of attachment, membership, intensity, affects.

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http://environment.arizona.edu/proximities/trans-waters-coalitional-thinking-art-environment-adela-c-licona-and-eva-s-hayward

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