Marla ~ Activist Scholarship

I struggle with how to conceptualize my project as activist scholarship. I do have a social justice agenda—uncovering the oppressive nature of programs for “potentially delinquent” girls and young women (delivered with War on Poverty funds, through Hull House neighborhood centers, in 1960s Chicago). What sort of change can I support when writing about programs that no longer exist? Must activist scholarship have a contemporary component/implications, and if so, how do I pitch that as history?

Kopit- Scholar Activism

I'm interested in the accessibility of our work. It often seems like the more "prestigious" ways to put scholarship into the world is through publishing in academic journals, etc., that are almost impossible to access if you're not connected to a university. This seems counter-intuitive for activist scholarship. What are some other avenues for making our work accessible-- to marginalized folks, to people who have been excluded from the education system, to grassroots organizations, to young activists-- and how do we advocate for more of this in academia?

Collier- Scholar Activism

I’d like to discuss some strategies for teaching and activism.  What are some strategies for building in activism into our courses?  How do we help students feel empowered and called to action when reading heavy material in the classroom that often does not have easy answers?

Scholar-Activism

My question about scholar-activism is:

How do we balance concerns about making the most advocacy/activist impact in the community, with concerns about making sure we meet expectations of academia? E.g. we were recently discouraged from writing about our research for a grey literature publication, told to publish in scholarly journals only. How can we justify (to the department) time spent writing for less-academic publications that will be more widely read?

Feminism & War (Mohanty)

This reading was complicated for me as a passionately anti-war feminist (working in healthcare with people forced by US wars to flee their countries as refugees), who is also the child of two military parents. I felt this reading did a good job of highlighting the challenging complexities of US militarism and how US militarism affects women both abroad and within US borders. From a methodological standpoint, this reading's methodology reminded me of 'Imperial Blues' - a project that takes the lens of transnational feminism and applies it within the US as well.

My mother and father were both in the military (and my mother is still in the military), so my personal relationship to this topic is deeply conflicted. My mother is a passionate feminist who introduced me to feminism early in my childhood. I think her military service (she was among the first women allowed in her branch of military) is what radicalized her as a feminist - the experiences of surviving in a male-dominated environment her whole adult life made women's oppression very salient to her. I grew up with stories about colleagues' negative assumptions about her, outright discrimination, disrespect, sexual harassment and witnessing subjugation of other women up close and personal (especially during her service in Korea where the men in her unit treated local women, especially sex workers, in alarming ways). She told me about sexual-assault 'scandals' throughout her career - which I now see as deeply connected to queer-phobia. Just as bi and lesbian women face higher rates of sexual violence than hetero women, military women face alarming sexual violence as 'repurcussions suffered for acting outside the accepted boundaries of femininity operating within particular spaces'(Mohanty). They are forced to 'act masculine' to survive the military culture, and then are often punished for doing so.

My mother now works in admissions for a military academy, specifically in the diversity department. She originally joined the military because it was her only option for a college education (as a poor teenager from a working-class enlisted family), and now she reaches out to other minority students who might see the military as their only option for educational advancement. The ethical concerns about this kind of recruitment are not lost on me. But US over-spending on military and under-spending on public higher education has (probably not by accident) left many poor teenagers in a bind where military academies are all too appealing.

My questions are: Are there ways that we can engage feminists within the US military in order to reform the institution from the inside-out? I agree with the need for revolution against US imperialism and capitalism, but I also believe there are many powerful women in the military and wonder what their role could be in revolution or reform. What is an anti-war feminist to make of women in the military? Is there a place for military women in anti-war feminist coalitions?

Imperial Blues-Carpio

Imperial Blues: Geographies of Race and Sex in Jazz Age New York written by Fiona I. B. Ngô is an interdisciplinary approach that employs urban studies, queer studies, cultural history, literary and cultural analysis that provides a comprehensive perspective on Jazz Age New York.  “Revisiting the Jazz Age through the lens of imperialism renders visible (as well as audible) previously underaknowledged connections and collaborations between domestic and imperial discourses of race and empire.” (5)

In chapter 1 Ngô attempts to truly stage a scene of imperial logic, offering us a broad glimpse of Harlem's and jazz music's racial and sexual stakes and how they combine with imperial discourse. She peruses questions that “reconfigure the meaning and management of race and sex in through differential knowledge that bringing empire home places before us.”(32)

In Ngô‘s book histories of intimacy and distance are crucial for understanding and reconsidering what “political stories inform the categories of race and sex and what other stories we might tell from the confusion of those categories.” (32) This interest for the intimate is crucial for my own research and for understanding, rearranging and intertwining images, politics, literature, art, life. The figuration and creation of spaces, these “contact zones”. 

Imperial Blues - Aditi

In this book, Ngo offers a study of Empire at home (the United States), as a way to critically rearticulate urban histry and possible stories about race, gender, and sexuality in the United States in early 20th century (Ngo 2014, 3).  She suggests that without a consideration of how empire circulated in everyday life to inform and transform national subjects and their daily understandings, we cannot comprehend the complexities of how race and sexuality in the US were lived in the interwar years (3). Imperial logic manifests itself through the complex workings of referentiality, and that the space, objects, bodies that act as signs of empire are mutable. Thus, it is seen to circulate in the imagery and spaces of everyday life in New York city, and understanding how it labors through a sometimes contradictory flow of signs, can expand on the object of urban studies.

Imperialism is way to understand pleasure, consumption, and sexuality. The mutability of imperial signs also means that imperially derived meanings could be transferred from one type of body to another (Ngo 2014, 5)  At stake in the mobility of meaning is the way that power structures people’s life chances, and access to subjectivity as well as the way it valuates difference, whether it is racial, spatial, gendered, national or sexual (5). As imperial logic is domesticated at home through aesthetic production, it provides the justification for continued imperial control abroad (6). Ngo focusses on jazz cultures, specifically on the spaces of musical performance to examine the circulation of signs, and unfolding of an imperial system of thought across distance and time.   This book thus calls attention to the continuities and discontinuities between imperial and domestic categories of modern selfhood and subjection through spatial narratives of movement, intimacy, and distance (17). 

I find this methodology of studying urban space and its history through these images to be extremely useful to my project. Expanding on the spaces I am studying through the ways in which images, intimacy, movement, and distance are narrated, configured and shared, can help to examine mobilities and labour in new ways. Exploring what kinds of logics circulate in particular spaces like the market of gendered labour in a women-only compartment, to order it and connect it to other spaces through creations of an “other” open up the boundaries of the space. I have one question in relation to the methodology outlined in this work:

1.     What might be the archive and the methodology for writing a study that explores circulations of an imperial logic? What might be the many forms of such logic that shape and produce spaces and the differently racialized and sexualized bodies associated with them?