Pedagogies of crossing/presentation notes

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Contents 1 Presentation 2 Chelea 3 Mohante 4 Plan 4.1 Hour 1 4.2 Hour 2 4.3 Hour 3 5 Questions 5.1 Alexander 5.1.1 Rihanna example 5.1.2 Inheritance 5.1.3 Spiritual closet 5.1.4 Reading law 5.1.5 Writing style 5.1.6 More on method 5.1.7 Spiritual selection 5.1.8 Assumed spirital work 5.1.9 Travel and tourism 6 Critical pedagogy 7 Email to Celeste

Presentation

Chelea

• Need a closer read

Mohante

• Pedagogies of dissent
• Academy in particular
• "Cultural pluralism"
• Knowledge not limited to scholarship
  • Connected to teaching and learning in the classroom
  • Relationship of pedagogical practices to scholarship
• Conflicts between individual experience and institutional structures (203)
  • How do pedagogical conventions enable this?
  • Can pedagogy challenge?

Connecting to UCSD/Compton Cookout?

• Solutions, redress, response
• Memory, pedagogy
  • see: Chapter 5: palimpsestic time
  • Erase histories but traces remain

Plan

Hour 1

• Questions, open discussion

Hour 2

Hour 3

Questions

Alexander

Rihanna example

• How does Alexander's understanding of domestic abuse narratives in Bahamian law reflect popular readings of the public battering of Rihanna?
  • How is she made suspect?
  • Ruining his career?
  • Comparing their degrees of fame, success
  • Casting her as wild, antisocial, abberant
    • Racial, ethnic stereotyping

Inheritance

• Primogeniture (37)
• Property / marriage conflation
• Property requirement for legal representation, suffrage

Spiritual closet

• What is your experience of the "spiritual closet"? (15)
  • How is the closet constructed and sustained?
  • What is at stake in secularizing feminist scholarship, inquiry?
  • How and what does secular research and theory exclude or obscure?

Reading law

• Textual analysis of law, legislation
• Especially in law that is positioned as the victorious result of a successful women's mobilization
• "Imperial masculine subject" as "the invisible subject of the legal text" (61)
• Law a unique kind of social text
  • Code and "codification"
  • Governance
  • Always already

Writing style

Contrasting Chp 1, Chp 7

• Narrative accounts in Kitsimba's voice
  • Compare to radical faeries in Povinelli

More on method

• "Reading against the grain to fill in the spaces of an absent biography was simply not sufficient" (294)

Spiritual selection

• Alexander makes a somewhat unlikely comparison of Vodou and Santería
• Specifically names Christianity as a component to domination, colonization (incontrovertable?)
• But one of my big takeaways from Pedagogies is the importance of taking seriously everyday spiritual practice
  • She mentions Bush's support for faith-based initiatives
  • What would a similar project be like if it investigated the everyday spiritual practices of a fundamentalist Christian family?

Assumed spirital work

• Did she begin to practice Vodou later in life?
  • Red flag of being a "priestess" in both Vodou and Santería
• Not an invalidation of her practice, or individual subjectivity
  • But is it comparable to the subjectivity of Thisbe, an enslaved woman whose body is buried in Diego Martin?

Explicitly assumed traditions:

• Born-again Christian

Tacitly assumed traditions:

• White 20-something Buddhist

Role of crisis in assuming spiritual work

• 12 step programs require relationship with god

Travel and tourism

• If tourism is a practice available only to the monied, and a guide is produced in SF/Frankfurt/Amsterdam, and it is targeted at men (Spartacus), is it surprising that its text presumes whiteness, maleness, and certain class positioning?
  • It may be unfortunate but can we be certain that these are unexamined assumptions?
  • Are they not positive choices on the part of a publisher that wishes to sell guides?
• Are there guides for, say, the Filipino gay man traveling to SF? How do those figure the objects of tourism's gaze differently?

Critical pedagogy

• Revising "knowledge as accumulation" (Freire)
  • Re: Rate-my-professor on Alexander

Email to Celeste

Hi Celeste,

Hope you've been having a good weekend! I've been gathering my thoughts + notes about the Alexander in preparation for the discussion tomorrow. There's so much here! Hard to know where to begin!

According to my notes, the outline we roughed up on Friday looks something like this:

• Hour 1: Discussion of the readings
• Hour 2: Break up into groups to discuss appropriate responses to UCSD's Compton Cookout
• Hour 3: Report back on the discussion in light of the readings

I have some notes and images from a discussion I helped facilitate in another class. They might be useful here: http://kevindriscoll.org/wiki/COMM371/Compton_cookout http://www.flickr.com/photos/believekevin/sets/72157623544209802/

Some open tasks/ practical questions:

• How many groups? Is 4 groups with 5-6 people per group an OK size?
• Should we print out one of the news articles regarding the Compton Cookout so that people have a text to work from (I can make photocopies before class...)
• We talked about making a little handout, what should be on there?

And, lastly, here are some of questions from Alexander that I've been thinking about:

• Alexander engages personally and analytically with Vodou and Santería (which she describes, somewhat surprisingly, as being fundamentally similar in Chp 7.) Can her call for a non-secular scholarship be answered by scholarship informed by "dominant" religious practices such as those of Roman Catholicism? Or does this scholarship rely on a certain orientation toward spiritual work that is present only in a select number of spiritual traditions?
• What are the implications of spiritual work taken up in adulthood as compared with those that people are born into. For example, if I return to Roman Catholicism (the religion tradition into which I was born), it seems a different project than if I were to initiate a new engagement with Vodou at age 29. How might Alexander's call for spiritual scholarship connect with Spivak's caution against speaking for the subaltern? Where are the ethical boundaries?
• It's not hard to imagine a negative critical reception for the passages in which she writes in Kitsimba's voice. Is this an example of daring experimentation in academic writing? Is it successful? Is it comparable to Povinelli's attempt to connect her fieldwork in Australia to her North American experience among radical faeries?

What do you think?

Kevin