The beginning

I wanted to post this so Aneil knows I have begun to write, but this is a couple pages into beginning my exploration through my auto ethnography which focuses on language and my engagement with it. This is a rough rough draft.

I grew up in a typical suburban town in the Southeastern part of Virginia…. (more about my context)

My mother was a reading specialist who worked in an elementary school in the downtown part of the city, where the only thing higher than the illiteracy rates was the poverty line. She went to work every day with children who read dangerously below their grade level, spending hours with phonetic pronunciations in her trailer with the hope that the 6 year olds she worked with would make it through elementary school at the proper reading level. Deeper than this intention, though was her desire to give lower class, black children the opportunity to succeed in a society that was going to attempt to define their lives for them. It was with this passion for language and reading that she brought spelling into my life when I was three years old. I remember sitting on her lap in our rocking chair, while my dad vacuumed our living room, drawing the loopy letters of my name across pages, trying to mock my mother’s big, perfect elementary school teacher handwriting. This opened up the door for my learning experiences.

Language became my intervention into the world around me. I developed a complex syntax and understanding of the world around me because of my ability to speak about anything I wanted to. My father loves to tell the story of how when I was three years I was sitting in my child seat in the backseat of our van and I said to him, “Dad, aren’t clouds just balls of moisture in the sky?” My parents raised me with this passion for learning and always instilled in me two very valuable ideas that I would carry with me throughout my life: I can do anything I want to do and that my education is the most important thing I will ever invest my life and time into. I think these concepts made me a bit more boisterous and arrogant than I should have been for such a young child, but they allowed me freedom, even before I entered school, to challenge the world around me. This firm grasp of language as a way to inquire into the world and astonish those around me had left its indelible mark, and because of that I wanted to succeed in everything I did. I loved to be the best. I remember clearly in first grade, when anyone needed a word to spell the said “Go ask Simone”, and called me the Human Dictionary. Our teacher encouraged us to help each other find conclusions and would never directly tell us how to find the answer that we wanted. So, as we all sat at our desks writing stories on paper that was filled with dotted lines and empty space for us to color the pictures of our imaginations, people would march over to me and ask me to spell words like “first” and I would sound out each letter as though I was answering for a spelling bee. These small moments still stick clearly in my mind because I remember them as ways in which I was able to etch out a presence for myself in the context of my education, my friends, and my successes. I always had the authority of words, literally and metaphorically.

The way in which my command of language grew was not as much through writing, as it was through readings. I spent my childhood blanketed by books of fiction. Because my mother was a reading teacher, the value of books was never lost to me. She not only read to us for as long as I can remember, but she encouraged us to read and made it seem like it was the most exciting thing we could participate in. At the beginning of every summer, we would sail over to the library to participate in their Summer Reading Program. We would enter and receive our blank lists waiting to be filled with the titles of young adults books. My brother and I would check out 20 books each and go home and stack them in the order we would want to read them, while we carefully examined every reward we received for each five books we were able to add to the list.

I can't write, poetry.

I can’t write; poetry

Shadows from the blank light bulbs overhead

Cast words below the cloak of consequence

The conception of Pretext

Thrusting the struggle for words

underneath

Uncovering is uncomfortable

(But)

I am unproductive.

We have smothered luminescence

Only the fragmented color spectrum

Caresses opaque drapes

I long for penetration

Profane vindication

Atonement

Banality lurks behind the façade of permanence

Insidiously eclipsing the glow of creation

E(In)vasion

Even when my mind is fecund

Words are stillborn

Unnoticed in suffocating darkness

Stuart Hall- From last week. I never posted it.

I was reading through Stuart Hall’s article “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities” again, and I was struck by two very interesting points. This first was the part where he said “the truth is that most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it” (11) He spoke of how, in order to revolutionize the humanities through the field of cultural studies, they could no longer just be interdisciplinary, but instead had to change the methodology when utilizing the different disciplines. “It was never a question of which disciplines would contribute to the development of this field, but of how one could decenter or destabilize a series of interdisciplinary fields” (16). They have to come from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, etc., but instead of seeing how these academic disciplines already contained methodologies and ideas with which to approach culture, they redefined these other fields too. I was thinking about the value of this because I realize, as I take more anthropological courses and engage with these disciplines that a distinctive crossing of academic boundaries is the only way to develop a personal and unique way of thinking on a subject. I think I have realized that instead of looking at how sociology and anthropology serve cultural studies and the humanities, I must instead look at how it is a unique piece, in and of itself, in the composition and understanding of the field.

Even though I have been reading a lot of articles by Hall and other theorists, many of these people have yet to enact a specific situation in which I can fully understand an issue that has been analyzed across different trends. However, in my “Power, Poverty, and Urban Life” class with Ted Lowe, we were given a reading that really struck me. At first, because it was an anthropological study of white poverty from the perspective of a black scholar, but really because he was very aware of his boundary-crossing identity position in the context of this study. He began by discussing his context and said he was going to avoid taking an essentialist stance. In his book, The Color of Class, Kirby Moss realized that he as going to have to constantly be deconstructing notions of identity as he was pursuing his study of white poverty in America. After every chapter of his study, he had a chapter of reflections about how he felt in this context and what he thought he could pull away from in in relation to identity formation and poststructuralist methods of deconstruction. However, I found his approach to be heavily influenced by cultural studies (he even cites key theorist such as Hall in his introduction), which is wonderful because it was an anthropological study and that it what his degree was in. This takes me back to the quote that I used in the beginning about leaving the field of humanities in order to do serious work in it.

The second part that really struck me was when Hall laid out an interesting series of questions that I really felt were in line with the ones that motivate me in my exploration of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. “What are you interested in? What really bugs you about questions of culture and society now? What do you really think is a problem you don’t understand out there in the terrible interconnection between culture and politics? What is it about the way in which… culture is now living through its kind of postcolonial, posthegemonic crisis that really bites into your experience?” (17) Can I answer these questions or even begin to explore them if I spend all of my time in the work of theory in the humanities? I guess this is the problem I am having now. Seeing Kirby Moss engage with the ideas of cultural studies in a different academic discipline is probably a reflection of the influential spread of cultural studies thought, and it seems like in order to make these theories more real I will have to apply them to another area of study also. I have been reading and reading articles about theory, but I think now I want to connect them to critical pedagogy. I want to read Giroux and hooks, but maybe it is time to bridge the gap myself and not just stick to reading the theorist who do it for me. However, I think what will be really important in this context, is also looking at how my position and identity is going to constantly be influencing my approach of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. I want to engage with this in the same was that Kirby Moss does. This is why I think it is so important for me to do this autoethnography, through self-reflection and a slightly fragmented construction, maybe I will be able to better approach the motivating questions above. However, maybe in the same way of his book, I can have an area of interest that guides me. I must have a connecting thread through this autoethnography and I want it to be critical pedagogy. Maybe then I can really practically apply cultural studies and have a greater impact on the humanities.

Peter McLaren Interviews

Education as Class Warfare

The Path of Dissent

Foucault Interviews

Conversation with Deleuze

Interview conducted with Michael Bess

The Performative Act of Culture as Public Pedagogy

We are in drastic need of new methodologies and applications of public pedagogy. In an age where vulgarity and cruelty are taking hold of the public culture of the U.S., we must show all stakeholders the plurality of alternatives that exist. The first step must be to reinvigorate public space to once more be a space for critical and creative discourse, encounters, and interactions between community members who all have a stake in the quality of participation of their shared space. (Response to “Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty”)

My search also begins with the interplay between power and agency. To fully analyze and present my ideas, I want to reflect upon my personal context and present the public pedagogy of my cultural heritage. But, before I do this, I’d like to start with Foucault (as Simone suggested in her post) and Freire.

To start, I’d like to discuss the ways in which culture is defined within the texts aforementioned in the previous post. I stand upon the postulation that culture is not simply the “common ground” of everyday life, “culture is recognized by many advocates of cultural studies as both a site of contestation,” accommodation “and a site of utopian possibility” (60). Cultural studies stand on the side of a similar moralist education, and we can see that through the way they define the possibility of education’s idyllic mission for the community, which for me, is an essential tenet of Soka Education. But this viewpoint is deeply connected to a larger project for education; “expanding the possibilities of a democratic politics, the dynamics of resistance, and the capabilities for social agency” (60). These I see at the core of my personal praxes. But herein lays the question: how may we define educations that energize social agency, resistance and democratic politics? I believe that our clues rest in the work of Foucault and Freire.

Foucault is synonymous with ideas of power; he believed that knowledge and power were inseparable. From his perspective, knowledge was always interwoven through the context of power relations in a society. When Henry Giroux posits in “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals” that he believes “that pedagogy represents both a mode of cultural production and a type of cultural criticism that is essential for questioning the conditions under which knowledge is produced,” he is suggesting that pedagogy is cultural feedback and critical reflection on the way that power is enacted within relationships of culture (63). Looking now to Freire, we can appropriate his methodology into a Foucaultian perspective by affirming that the ontology of humanity is open-ended. Power, history, culture, and the like, attempt to regulate and discipline human ontology by assuming the interplay of dynamics between people. With problem-posing education as our guide, the purpose of pedagogy must be the unveiling of reality so that it may be confronted and transformed. Or stated in a different way, the practice of our pedagogy becomes a critical reflection on our interactions to help us redefine each of our encounters as the exercise of complete possibility. Shane Gunster, quoted by Giroux, insists that the main contribution cultural studies makes to pedagogy is “’that any kind of critical education must be rooted in the culture, experience, and knowledge that students bring to the classroom,’” (61) but what happens when we presuppose the need for public pedagogy? “Pedagogy is not simply about the social construction of knowledge, values, and experiences; it is also a performative practice embodied in the lived interactions among educators, audiences, texts, and institutional formations. Pedagogy, at its best, implied that learning takes place across a spectrum of social practices and settings” (61). And if pedagogy is displaced from the classroom, how must teacher-students change?

To search for part of this answer, I turn to my faith and culture. Carl Rogers proposed the foundation for a facilitative education, I believe that the culture of Rastafari adds onto that definition and turns the performative act of culture into public pedagogy. In many ways Rastafari can be seen through the lens of the Sacred Clown of the Heyoka, where a clown shows what is wrong with the ordinary way of doing things and shows how to do ordinary things the wrong way. The way that Rastas live is a public dialogical performance meant to unveil realities so that we can confront them as a community. Please forgive me for only bringing up these ideas without discussing evidence or investigation too thoroughly, but that’s what culture as public pedagogy looks like from the inside out. But using this brief extrapolation, I’d like to respond to the final question posed by Simone; ‘how can I now utilize the purpose and goals of education in my interactions with people outside of the classroom?’ How may we continue to teach outside of a ‘controlled classroom setting’ when we can only teach when people want to learn and out in the real-world people do not have to stay and listen to what we have to say? I return to the performance of culture as public pedagogy and the legacy of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. We must be the corrupter of words at all moments, subverting people’s realities through our very presence, through our questions; we must be doubt creeping into the back of staled perspectives and the catalyst for transforming them. We must continuously go under and consistently go over.

What it is and what it isn't... for me

Toby Miller states in the beginning of his chapter on cultural studies that “Cultural studies is a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself.” (1) He continually addresses the fact that cultural studies is “blending and blurring textual analysis of popular culture with social theory, and focusing on the margins of power rather than reproducing established lines of force and authority”, meaning that inherent in cultural studies is a host of theoretical frameworks, but also that these seek to create a climate of critical thought for change. One of the biggest problems with cultural studies is that it is full of contradictions and antagonistic ideologies that attempt to situate the field of study into a framework of power, agency, authority, and change, to essentially challenge dominant institutions. I guess you could say, however, that this is not a problem but rather the beauty of the field of study. With cultural studies, we can approach our definitions of culture from all of the themes of power, agency, and authority, and even go further as to soak these in gender, race, class, and sexuality within perspectives of economics, politics, anthropology, sociology, and literature, among others. With all of these theoretical frameworks to build across, cultural studies leaves room for a person to study a variety of environments built from the contexts that they find the most important. I am finding with bibliographic readings that Darin has given me, along with my readings of Stuart Hall, Toby Miller, and other scholars, that I am less interested in reproducing definitions and ideas of cultural studies, but rather learning how to utilize the tools that they say help build the knowledge and thought processes that are associated with this field. My interests really lie in the interplay between power and agency, and while I want to connect this to pedagogy, I am also really interested in how popular culture is being utilized in the classroom. This seems to branch further away from the founding fathers idea of cultural studies and focuses more on the American utilization of the field. I have noticed that Toby Miller really shows through his examples of scholars that cultural studies developments have really been a product and reflection of the culture they originate in. I would like to say this is ironic, but I think its just appropriate. Because of this, I also thinks its important to engage with my own context and develop my own understanding and research within the context that is closest to me.

With all this being said, I still want to develop my understanding of cultural studies as a field of inquiry. I have read Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies: two paradigms” and I still want to read “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”. I am still also trying to soak up more information on power and agency to connect these ideas to my interests in cultural studies and educational institutions. I almost feel like I should go back and read Foucault again, in order to re-examine his text from this cultural studies framework.

However, I couldn’t help but jump to my interests in pedagogy from my already limited understanding of cultural studies. The most striking article I have read so far, is Henry A. Giroux “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. The reason I categorize it as striking is because it was the first article I read that prompted me to seriously reorganize my thoughts around the idea of pedagogy. Many of the ideas inherent in cultural studies seem to resonate with me, and the engagement I had with critical theory has not (yet) brought something so ideologically radical as to make me reorganize any schema in my brain. Giroux, in establishing his definitions of culture and pedagogy, eventually challenges his reader to rethink pedagogy by stating that “Pedagogy is not simply about the social construction of knowledge, values, and experiences; it is also a performative practice embodied in the lived interactions among educators, audiences, texts, and institutional formations. Pedagogy, at its best, implies that learning takes place across a spectrum of social practices and settings.” (61) He pushes this definition further when he explains his research into “public pedagogy” and how “the processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through which identities are shaped and desires mobilized, and how experiences take on form and meaning within and through collective conditions and those larger forces that constitute the realm of the social” (63). Essentially he wants the reader to rethink their definition of pedagogy to social processes that occur not just in the classroom, but through every interaction that occurs between two cultural bodies in society, whether this is from person to person, person to object, or person to idea. If we examine how all of these interactions are imbued with political and social meaning, then the way that information and interactions are translated across sources take on a greater importance and allows us to see process with greater depth of meaning. Pedagogy is not just a term to talk about classroom interactions, but about all social interactions, which are inherently educational. Giroux makes a beautiful statement about the possibilities of pedagogy when he states that “Pedagogy is a referent for understanding the conditions of critical learning and the often hidden dynamics of social and cultural reproduction. As a critical practice, pedagogy’s role lies not only in changing how people think about themselves and their relationship to others and the world, but also in energizing students and others to engage in those struggles that further possibilities for living in a more just society.” (63) He provides a number of compelling reasons why educators must begin to utilize cultural studies inside and outside of the classroom because of its growing possibilities, ultimately with the purpose of creating a critical, democratic future for any society. I know a lot of critical theory deals with language and semantics, but this new, profound explication of pedagogy has created a new interest with my engagement with educational processes. Instead of seeking to bring cultural tools and media into the classroom to inform education, I want to now ask how can I now utilize the purpose and goals of education in my interactions with people outside of the classroom? How can I affect the power structures at play in education not from within the classroom, but by examining political media and socialization? How can I be critical about socializing and education process that are happening at every moment of the day and still affect change when it is not a controlled classroom setting? I guess this is only the beginning of my questions.