The Virtual Peace Garden

I'm struck by Cushman's call for activist research.

Last semester, Aaron and I took Action Research, which is essentially activist research. Reason and Bradbury (2006) define action research as “a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview” (p. 1). Essentially you are working with people to help them help themselves. The researcher works with people to help them learn information and help each other. I think it is the ideal of what academe is supposed to be.

Actually, I think I am now obsessed with two things: activism via the web and the emblems activists are using. Today's pick: "Change the Web 2009."

http://www.socialactions.com/changetheweb

I love the fingerprint as "globe" (unless some of you think that isn't a fingerprint). I am less excited about the slogan or motto: "Social Actions: you make a difference, we make it easy."

Really? Social change is going to be easy because of some web application? When are people going to give up on the "rhetoric of ease?"

I posted my reading notes about Giroux here: http://virtualpeacegarden.com/?q=node/283

My notes for Cushman are here: http://virtualpeacegarden.com/?q=node/276

I also picked out a couple of noteworthy passages I thought I would share.

1. Giroux quotes from an article by Stuart Tannock that is available online.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=407

It’s interesting to me that Henry A. Giroux views the university as being in trouble (i.e. “in peril”). Nonetheless I understand his reasoning and draw upon its meaning in my own life. I know for me personally there was a time where I questioned the importance of college and academia; I definitely have thought time and again that universities don’t do enough in terms of providing students with jobs upon graduation.

But never in my own life, though, have I ever said or thought that college is not important and not something that I wouldn’t value. Therefore I responded particularly positively to this passage in the final chapter by Giroux regarding the importance of universities:

While higher education is only one site, it is one of the most crucial institutional and political spaces where democratic subjects can be shaped, democratic relations can be experienced, and anti-democratic forms of power can be identified and critically engaged. It is also one of the few spaces left where young people can think critically about the knowledge they gain, learn values that refuse to reduce the obligations of citizenship to either consumerism or the dictates of the national security state, and develop the language and skills necessary to defend those institutions and social relations that are vital to a substantive democracy. As Arendt insisted, a meaningful conception of politics appears only when concrete spaces exist for people to come together to talk, think critically, and act on their capacities for empathy, judgment, and social responsibility. (210)

To me, these three sentences reinforced everything I have myself come to know about education and the university setting. Furthermore, these three sentences have captured the heart of all education so perfectly for me that I would say that they could not have been worded any better. The truths of those sentences have surfaced for me especially since I have spent five years out of college and can remember so well struggling to find some sort of creative outlet (prior to this semester) for my writing and artistic endeavors equivalent to the one which my old university had once afforded me. Overall, reading Giroux then has made me especially appreciative of all universities. I would therefore lead any group in helping to free “the university” from its “chains.”

It seems to me Cushman's article offers Giroux a way of responding to some of the complaints about higher eduction. The accusation being that what good does it do if it's just a bunch of intellectuals sitting around debating theories that impact no one? Her suggestion of engaging the community and impacting it for the good supplies a ready defense to that charge. It's not just about creating knowledge for knowledge sake, but it has a point- to improve our surroundings and our society.

This weblog entry has an emblem, slogan and motto for the "Invisible Children" project. The emblem is a scratched up drawing of Africa, presumably with blood dripping from it, but a heart placed right about Uganda, the site of the mourning. The slogan is "My heart is beeping . . . for the invisible children" and the motto is from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

http://www.thisisaaronslife.com/one-day-for-human-rights/

This Roadmap to Peace project has a very simple but clever emblem: the US interstate logo + world map.

http://www.roadmapforpeace.org/

They also emphasize very simple principles. Write less? Maybe Ulmer is onto something.

In reading the preface and close to Giroux's University in Chains it seems to me that sometimes his arguments seem contradictory. He supports a free-thinking exchange of ideas at a university setting, but seems troubled when there are those who may have differering ideolgical beliefs and are willing to vocalize them.

Kevin asked me to get a head start on these questions this week. (Sort of a pennance for my inability to attend in person, I think!)

1. the process.
The process of writing a MEmorial is certainly intellectually stimulating and challenging-- as much or more than any traditional academic essay I have written. While I am tempted to say the project guidelines were too open-ended and I would have liked to be told exactly what I would be composing, that claim would not be exactly correct. Ulmer not only lays out a process, but also lists the essential components of the end project.