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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