CCA presentation at Congress '08 - see you there!

Here's the abstract for my upcoming presentation at Canadian Communications Association conference @ Congress '08 in Vancouver. I'll be presenting on Friday morning, bright and early at 9am! Hitch a ride if you need to, but be sure to swing by!

Kris Erickson, Independent Scholar, Coordinator, Arts TA Development Program, Ryerson University
Between Two Worlds: Envisioning "Born into Brothels"

Born into Brothels (2004), a documentary film by photographer Zana Briski and filmmaker Ross Kauffman, occupies a unique place as a cultural object. Ostensibly the chronicle of a collaborative, intercultural, participatory photography or “photovoice” project with the children of sex-trade workers in Calcutta, Born into Brothels documents Briski’s encounters with her young students in and beyond the camera workshops she organizes for them. Yet more than simply a collaborative project, the film is also a journalistic account, a narrative authored at least as much by Briski and Kauffman as by the children whose images constitute the filmic space, and whose photographs punctuate the storyline. Since its release, the film’s supposedly neutral portrayal of these children and the products of their photographic education have been both celebrated and criticized, earning at once an Academy Award (as best documentary feature in 2005) and sharp criticism from social advocacy groups in Calcutta and in North America. This paper will analyze several images from the film in order to better understand how the products of contemporary visual communication like this documentary might successfully blur the boundaries between aesthetic representation and political agency. Because this film presents a rare glimpse into what teaching and learning looks like, it is an important text which highlights what I see as a pedagogical impulse underlying key discourses of contemporary media makers and media systems. In this paper I explore what the film attempts to teach us—about photography as well as about cultural practice—and consider what we might actually be learning from it in the end. As questions about the nature of truth and subjectivity, knowledge and information continue to be raised with respect to emerging communicational technologies and new media practices, a critical understanding of the increasing complexities of our visual worlds becomes crucially important.

Notes on Capra's Hidden Connections

Fritjof Capra's work rests on a common premise that, "To build a sustainable society for our children and future generations, we need to fundamentally redesign many of our technologies and social institutions so as to bridge the wide gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature" (pp.98-99). This kind of broad statement raises a lot questions for me: how did current technologies and social institutions get built? who was included/excluded? who will be included/excluded from future attempts to redesign systems? how might 'our' understanding of "sustainable systems of nature" be spatially and temporaly particular? how do gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity factor into the way "sustainability" is framed?

My notes so far:

- The subtitlte is "Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability." This "science of sustainability" refers to the application of systems thinking to an understanding of life that connects "form, matter, process, and meaning" by means of one concept: the network.

- Goal: to build organizations that mirror life's adaptability, diversity, creativity. How would you know if these organizations were fundamentally different from existing ones?

- How to balance "community" with openness to the outside world?

- Questions of authenticity

- Companies need to foster communities of practices within their structures, but do communities of practice need companies (e.g. think of relationship between Arts TA and Ryerson)?

- Is it possible to communicate experiential knowledge? How does this "tacit knowledge" change when it becomes "a thing to be replicated, transferred, quantified, and traded" (116)? Think of Freire's discussion of agrotechnology.

- To what extent is Capra fundamentally transforming or reproducing global capital relations? A shift from computer time to biological time, from profit to sustainability (as guiding value), but how did profit become the guiding value and how will that change?

- Biotechnology can work when it "respects" nature. Who defines "nature"? pp. 201-202

- why do academics adopt positions not supported by existing research? (e.g. Carl Wieman's attack on the "lecutre" and Capra's attack on genetic determinism p. 205). The desire for community belonging can trump the will to dissent--this applies to graduate students too.

- ecoliteracy and ecodesign: www.ecoliteracy.org

- p. 239: system 1: nature; system 2: human community; system 3: circulation of scientific knowledge through the international community. Is this like Latour's discussion of the cave, and Science as the mediating language between human community and nature?

- Capra often refers to the reputation of his sources, sort of like a contrast between credible and non-credible people/communities?

- Overall, this book doesn't make me feel included, but rather more like a spectator to what is already going on (here are all the problems, but just sit back and relax cause it's all being taken care of). If the technical and conceptual realms are ready to go, where's the social? Is political will just a policy issue around tax incentives? what about public education around ecoliteracy? Democracy?

- In my Master's thesis I arrived at the conclusion that: 1) meanings of nature frame understandings of the form and function of urban greenspace; 2) meanings of nature are socially constructed over time and space; 3) at the Ecology Park in Peterborough, "good" human-nature relations mirrored "good" human-human relations, especially around ideas about diversity, health, community, and respect. How might these conclusions fit with Capra?

PhD Program Plan

I mentioned how FES is quite fond of writing plans to guide your academic studies. If this exercise is done well, it can be very useful. The PhD Handbook outlines the steps towards making the Program Plan (and much more) but, at this point, we would probably find more interesting just to consider the sections of the plan:

• Personal context of inquiry
• Current research interests
• Key terms and definitions
• Tensions and questions related to these interests
• Comprehensive areas with preliminary biblioigraphy
• Timeline
• Potential advisory committee
• Needs

At FES, first-year PhDs do this in the first term of study and it is revised later on. The dissertation proposal is separate (and after the comps). It might sound a bit prescriptive but, as an admirer of plans, checklists and "to do" lists, I think it will be of great help!

the craft of academia: final round, the phd

thanks for stimulating conversation last night, dudes. i hope i didn't come off too didactic or preachy—the catholicism in my family history sometimes makes me fervent about certain things. i think last night i was going off on the craft of academia, and how i believe what we do as phds is training and rehearsal for that craft. (craft's a big term, but in brief: not suggesting that it's only learning the ropes of academia that's involved in acquiring the phd-craft; but there's also a matter of pushing the boundaries to shift what it means to be academics, struggling to change what needs changing in the structure/institution/industry, etc.—in short, craft knowledge as both a matter of professionalization and a matter of radicalization and change)

so what follows is all my belief—clearly to be taken with a grain of salt, but worded with conviction as it is firm belief for me... take from it what you will.

1) writing needs to be a daily act—time of day, duration of writing activities, nature of immediate environment: i think these all need to be both reflected upon very carefully and varied to determine best fit for our needs. i wonder if we need to get out of strict and rigid habits, or whether we need to form them...

2) everything goes into the phd—which is to not to mean we spend every waking hour and every sleeping one dreaming about our dissertation; but i think we need to reflect on how our interests and passions about everything from Barney to Foucault (no comparison intended!) need to be deeply considered. i guess it's about finding a balance, perhaps between carving out discrete chunks of time to spend with family and friends away from work/research, and about allowing oneself to think about research/work during these times without rushing to a keyboard.

3) befriend technology, yet remain a luddite—i was talking about RSS feeds from journal providers, joining email listservs for areas in our field (even peripherally), organizing our interests in refworks, and probably setting up a wiki or blog to order thoughts and gain some writing and web development experience... yet part of me wants to build tables, paint watercolours, and forget all about the hi-tech stuff. i guess the point is to recognize where tech can kill creativity and innovation, and to be skeptical of it for that reason, and for the other ways we let it dehumanize us (is this thought overly dark?)

anyway here's a hit list of some programs i find useful (i'll only mention the free stuff).
+ Firefox is the web browser of choice for doing research: it allows you to "add on" different features, like Zotero, which is a bibliographic research tool.
+ Thunderbird is a great email program that lets you organize and archive your email better than doing stuff only online. it's a bit of a pain to set up, but once you do, you should be sailing. it also allows you to bring in RSS feeds so you can bring all your research into here, a kind of one-stop place for daily mail and news...
+ GMail is the only online mail service that i use, mostly because it's a great interface, but also because, once you create a Google account, you have access to all the other free stuff Google has created (like Blogger, Calendar, Scholar, Documents, and so on)—this is all great stuff for if you're not working from home, but are mobile (esp. during classes in first year). Useful too, because Google Documents are totally compatible with the Microsoft Word format
+ Foxit reader is an alternative to Adobe PDF Reader, and really nice because it lets you annotate PDF files: specifically, make highlights and add comments—Adobe doesn't let you do that!

...here's some of the writing/editing resources i mentioned, too
+ Howard Becker's kind of the guru for social science writing, in my opinion. very clear and direct writing, and a narrative style that directs his readers away from snap judgements toward more analytical, multi-faceted, and responsible thinking on a topic. (I would recommend hitting a library or a used-book store to peruse them first: you might find one to be better than another [or you might find one for cheaper than what Amazon or Chapters sells it for...])

Writing for Social Scientists | Telling About Society | Tricks of the Trade

(i'd also recommend his book on Art Worlds which, even though it's about the social construction of systems of artistic practice, i think there's a great deal of what's said that informs how systems of scientific practice operate...)

anyway, that's the list for now—any more to add? thanks for listening & i'm sure the conversation will continue...

bruno latour at U of T: notes on method

first, latour's work is ground-breaking. for that reason alone it is difficult to understand since we are ill-equiped both to understand the precise ways in which certain words are meaningful, and in the more general patterns of how such words form discursive patterns. i've read a bit of him through howard becker (in the latter's telling about society [2007] for example), and have appreciated his thoughts more directly through what little i've read of science in action (1987).

i thought the audience, at least judging by the majority of responses and some conversations i had afterward, was a little cold (inhospitable even) to what he was proposing. then i thought, what a wonderful illustration of his premise: namely, that matters of fact have become matters of concern in the sciences. audience responses revealed thinkers more interested in (concerned with) semantics, it seemed, than the content of latour's talk. some, i'd argue, were more concerned with positioning themselves as various personae (mostly academically) in the room than they were with engaging latour's specific arguments, suggesting more a thing or two about institutional politics and ego-formation in hierarchical systems than about anything to do with problems about objectivity. (an exception: peter ryan's review, while brief, is at least even-handed and more giving to the territory latour was stridently marching through.)

perhaps i'm not the best person to ask (because i had far fewer qualms than did others about how he was framing things, and was more interested in what he was getting on about), but here are a few things i got from his talk.

1. first, that some objectivity can still be asserted in natural and social scientific research. however, the ways in which it's to be asserted have changed (i.e. objectivity cannot be divorced from the networked and interacting systems, local and global, of which everything is a part). i think this is what he was suggesting as a tension between the object and thing: he used the example of the challenger space shuttle (as object, symbol of scientific progress, and as thing, exploded scraps of forensic meaning) to suggest that there's a continuity of meaning between the two that often gets obscured (too often, and too quickly) as one assumes certain dominant interpretations of an object, rendering other equally viable interpretations invisible, even those which it is clear are no less important (like faulty o-rings known in advance to be faulty).

by way of comparison, and as an example entirely out of personal interest, i think of the photograph—any photograph. the last thing that's ever seen of a photograph is that it is a photograph: it's always, primarily, a photograph of something. yet to discount from any interpretation the enormous and elaborate systems of technological, economical, political, cultural and other forms of organization that have contributed to an author creating that image is to misread it entirely. (something we almost invariably do, of course, but that's another matter.) it's a representation, after all: an object holding some validity (contextual meaning), but not necessarily complete facticity (definitive or universal meaning).

thus what i gather latour means by taking an "object-oriented" approach is for researchers to pay attention less to the object as the source of meaning (which is ultimately partial and contingent), but to the object as a nexus of qualities, characteristics, and valuations. not as a fact, but as a vehicle (a rhetorical vehicle?) through which facts among other values (concerns) can be found, such as political orientations, struggles for real and symbolic power, and so on.

2. from this ultimately pragmatic position, how we choose our methodological and representational tools and why we do so is crucial to our practice. we'll do best, he suggests, to make this methodology explicit, rather than implicit. doing so will allow us to broaden our repertoire of representational techniques, sharing research findings in more ways than simply monographs or peer-reviewed journal publications, and work iteratively to refining representational forms. as our lack of knowledge in some of these areas becomes evident, greater collaboration becomes necessary as our practice expands outward to connect with others who possess better craft-skills in certain areas than do we ourselves. as our work needs to be shared amongst a broader-ranging audience of participants and collaborators, it has a greater likelihood of becoming more widely communicable and meaningful to a broader network of stakeholders. Both of these possibilities are politically progressive: first in making improvements to the ways institutional research gets conducted and shared; and secondly in engaging others in more meaningful, pragmatically grounded questions.

anyway, some rough thoughts. would love a ping back or two, especially if you feel i'm being unfair at all, or non-objective in my estimations ;-)

CFP: Graduate Student Research Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean

Note to self:

Marta, apply to this the Graduate Student Research Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean. It is only a grad conference and you'll feel bad when the time comes and you haven't applied and you realize that your abstract would have totally have gotten in. Don't delay, do it now.

2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of York University's Centre for
Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), Canada's oldest and
largest research group on the region. As part of a year-long series of events to
mark this achievement, CERLAC is hosting a Graduate Student Research Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean on November 7th and 8th, 2008, at York University in Toronto.

In recognizing the strength of diversity, papers and presentation proposals are
welcome on any aspect of study of Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole
and/or its constituent parts. We particularly seek, however, to attract
those contributors whose work can open fruitful dialogues and exchange across
disciplines. Consistent with CERLAC's long-standing spirit and practice of
collaboration, graduate students from other institutions are also invited to
submit abstracts to the conference and to share in this celebration of graduate
student scholarship.

Since its founding in 1978, the academic and institutional reputation of CERLAC and York University’s diverse graduate programs have attracted many students from Canada and abroad. This conference represents an outstanding opportunity to recognize, explore and build upon the work of the current generation of graduate students in all disciplines, including (but not limited to) the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, environmental studies, law and business.

Contact/Submissions:
To obtain the required conference application form, please click here. The form
includes a request for a 250-word (maximum) abstract for papers or alternative
presentations.

The deadline for applications is August 31th, 2008; however, those planning to present in artistic/alternative formats (e.g. film, dance, visual arts, music, etc.) are encouraged to contact us earlier for logistical/planning purposes. Inquiries and completed application forms may be sent to lacsconf@yorku.ca.

Applicants will receive confirmation of acceptance by October 1st, 2008. Those
students wishing to receive more detailed feedback from a panel discussant will
be asked to submit their full papers/presentation material by October 10th, 2008
to facilitate a thorough review.

CFP: Environment, Curriculum and Education

another one of interest, perhaps (oh, and no apparent deadline, since they want to publish it serially over the next few years?? not sure; here it is anyway):

The Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) welcomes submissions for a forthcoming special issue on "Environment, Curriculum and Education"

For full details please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/tcuscfp1.pdf

Since the 1970s, the state of the environment and pathways toward sustainability have both emerged and been contested as onjects of political and pedagogic discourse in a range of institutions and places throughout the world. Often ties to shifts in and a broadening of ecological consciousness, it can also be noted that various attempts to "green" civil society and structures have led to mixed responses on the part of new social movements and formations, schools and communities, and business and governance, amongst others.

The Journal of Curriculum Studies seeks to publish a series of scholarly articles and essays on "Environmental, Curriculum and Education". Papers might address, but are not limited to, inquiries about:

- the politics and philosophy of the environment and / or sustainability in teaching, learning and the curriculum
- contemporary and possible purposes, expectations and policies shaping formal education systems
- the relationship between academic environmental and sustainability research and scholarship and the curriculum

To read the full Special Call for Submissions please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/tcuscfp1.pdf

For more information and the Journal of Curriculum Studies, please visit www.informaworld.com/jcs

Submissions should be sent to Alan Reid, special editor for the "Education, Curriculum and Education" strand of Journal of Curriculum Studies.

Alan Reid is Editor of Environmental Education Research. Please visit www.informaworld.com/eer for more details.

doing some writing...

hey, so i'm petrified of the kind of reading and writing work that needs to be done over the next few years as a phd student, and panicked over the quality of writing that i'm thinking is necessary. i've begun to blog in earnest, writing about stuff that i think is (personally) interesting in order to motivate myself to write more frequently, in a forum where stakes are a little less high, and where i can play around a little with the focus and themes and style.

here's the feed, so you don't have to put it as your homepage:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/localweather

would like to know what you think, and would be thrilled if you think it's worth sharing around.

CFP: A Question of Scale

Due: May 28, 2008

Is small always beautiful? Small-scale industry is often functional and sustainable, but sometimes it seems to be limited to a peripheral role. Where and to what extent can it be dominant? When is small best, and when do we need to involve major players in order to achieve substantial change? Alternatives is looking for examples of successes and failures in artisanal mining, small-scale forestry, agriculture or other sectors in an attempt to discover whether, when and how small-scale and sustainable development are merry bedfellows. Ideas include, but are not limited to:

• Should sustainable forestry certification programs, such as FSC, prefer small-scale logging operations?
• With the current push for local food, can there be sufficient sustainable supply from nearby farms?
• Is there a role for small scale mining operations in developing countries, and are they necessarily better for the environment and nearby communities?
• Can we achieve sustainability without engaging large scale industrial operators?
• To what extent do we need provincial, national or even global government or governance initiatives to support attractive small scale operations in the face of the advantages already won by global corporations?

Queries should explain, in less than 300 words, the content and scope of your article, and should convey your intended approach, tone and style. Please include a list of people you will interview, potential images or sources for images and the number of words you propose to write. Send submissions electronically to Nicola Ross, Executive Editor (editor @ alternativesjournal.ca) by May 28, 2008.

summer sessions at OCAD

seems like the more interesting, "hands-on" sessions are the shorter ones running through June, and the others run later. either way, seems fun!

http://www.akimbo.biz/workshops/?id=11254