baby bass

My friend Marcus recently scanned a bunch of photos from high school days. Thanks, Marc. I must be 17 or 18 in this pic, and at best had been playing bass for a year. Twenty years later, I'm still thumpin', though not as much as I'd like at the moment.

into the 6th 7

My father used to say that "life cycles in sevens." I've taken that to mean that each seven years is like a mini lifetime, a frame. It's been a good measure for me thus far, and as with any lens we look through, it has helped me make sense of the broad rhythms of my life. My fifth seven, years 29 to 35, were where I started to put some things together in terms of identity and my role on the planet. I know who I am and what I'm supposed to do. I'm pretty happy being me, though what I need to do to be "better than I was yesterday" are even more apparent. A more healthy balance between self love and self deprecation. More empathy without condescension. A better balance of pedagogy and practice. Relying less on social constructs of gender, race, class, sexual orientation and more on a situated understanding of what's going on.

Today, as I enter into my "6th seven," I reflect and realize that I have a pretty great life. I come from a loving supportive family. I'm in the process of trying to help recreate that for my own family. I have every reason to wake up in the morning with the attitude conveyed by my grandmother that "everyday is a good day; if you don't think so just try missing one." I'm surrounded by the love of my wife and son, and have another child on the way. I'm learning something new everyday, and putting in work to become a concerned intellectual who does work "on the ground" where people live (Eli Goldblatt says "from gown to town"). I'm healthy. I'm blessed. I'm embracing the next seven with more awareness than ever of how amazing this life is.

end of the begining

As I come to the end of the first semester in the program, I am in a different place than I thought I'd be. While my concern for affecting "critical literacy for the masses" is still intact, how I plan to engage with the problems has changed. I guess that why I signed up. Note to self: Keep on keepin' on!

ideas are everywhere

A few themes/concepts/tropes have been recurring for me, and present in different academic/intellectual contexts.

The site of authority: I’m starting to see that authority can be viewed as existing in social locations instead of individual or oligarchic ones. I think this gets to Bourdieu’s idea of hegemony and the maintenance of authority by all parties in a given social context. Dis-empowered/oppressed/dis-enfranchized “members” in a social situation participate in the constitution and maintenance of a particular social reality. In this way, the authoritative situation is constituted socially, not imposed. How is this relationship initiated, though? Is it access to resources that lead to an imbalance in power that precede the hegemonic construct? In other words, what is happening to a group prior to participation and occupation in a given social location?

Identity construction: This idea of the site of authority relates to identity construction. Given group participation in a social location, there is a discursive relationship among members of groups in that social location. Individuals claim membership to some groups and not to others relative to an individual idea of belonging. Still yet, self-perception and the notion of individual identity is a social construction. I am who I am relative to others who I identify with along a relational continuum.

Authenticity: Agreement with or discord between an individual and a group with regards to membership (or belonging) cycles back to authority via authenticity. What are the determiners for membership? Or, who determines authenticity? If an individual desires membership and acquires and maintains what she perceives as the tropes of membership (think Gee’s identity kit), what constitutes authentic?  I’m thinking of Pennycook’s Global Englishes where he grants authenticity in terms of the performance of Hip Hop in an international context, without returning to the social location of authority of that culture. Implied here is the concept of ownership: specifically that the culture has a group that could be identified as “originators” and therefore constitute the litmus for authentic performance. I think Pennycook may be getting at the idea that performance cannot be owned. While I’d agree with that, there is still the idea of authenticity as a valid performance. The determiner of validity is the authority.

Embodiment and Spatiality: Enslaved entrance into American society for people of African descent afforded no land (ala nation-state) as a site of reproduction for the culture. I’m interested in viewing the body as that site. The black body is the landscape for the reproduction of black culture. Along these lines, performance is also a site; the act is an embodiment of cultural identification. I’m painting a corner here, but this conflicts with Pennycook’s idea of the trans-cultural flow and a dis-embodied authentic performance. I’ll grant the imative (although bordering on impostership). Can I go so far to say that to do hip hop is to do blackness? Maybe that’s to far, there are some racial implications there. And I ultimately divest components of culture (esp. language) from each other. This is still messy for me…

precarity

Last night I attended a talk by Lauren Berlant, a professor at U of I, Chicago. She is coming to her ideas out of affect theory, a critical perspective that I am a long way from getting my head around. Her framing of "precarity as a grounds for political solidarity" struck me, though. It was the first time I understood a critical theory perspective to have a real world purpose rooted in action, which she says is to "make political demands on the grounds of care."

I agree with Berlant that we (under the influence of western culture and globalization) need a varying perspective to "take on the problem of comfort in inequality." It is as if, with the roof blown off the myth of meritocracy, we've settled for sideways mobility. We've come to accept that life will be unstable, that security is not a possibility. Politics has played with our emotions, made us cautious of taking up hope.

What an interesting point of commonality; it's not that we all feel the same way, but that we all potentially don't feel in similar ways. That we have taken on this "not knowing" as a western cultural trait. And upon recognizing this commonality in precarity, use the affect as a means to make political demands on the grounds that we do care, do desire to feel for ourselves and others who inform our feeling state.

Could it be that Marxism gets emotive?

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.2berlant.html

And so it begins...

Even though classes officially started last week, Tuesday and Wednesday were my first actual class meetings. It feels great to finally get started; meeting or reacquainting with instructors and fellow students never looses its excitement. This mixture of anxiousness and excitement and joy that comes with starting the new school year is always present for me this time of year. I'm really happy to be a student, and especially happy to begin work that I hope will contribute to helping more students feel the way I do about school.

As I begin my work this term, I will attempt to have the work I do in my classes contribute in some way to the questions and issues raised thus far in my professional and academic experience.

What is Standard English? What is the history and boundary of this "standard"?
What is AAVE (African American Vernacular)/Black English? And what relationship does it have to the standard?
What role does identity (cultural/individual) serve in the processes of acquiring and learning language?
In what ways, if any, do oppressed groups help maintain the structures that oppresses them?

This list will of course change and evolve as I find out how to ask better questions and begin trying to address some of my concerns. One of my courses this term, an ethnographic research methods course, I think will help me develop the ability to ask better set-up questions. I think that knowing how to ask the questions will help me pick classes in the future that will narrow my focus and make all the work I do that more relevant in working toward the dissertation. At least that's the goal. I'm really riding this notion of "context informs content," so I'll stay with it for a while and see how far it gets me.

I have a few ideas for projects for this class. One is a study of the Critical Mass rides that take place here (http://critical-mass.groogroo.com/). I'm interested in cycling culture, and it seems to be a prominent part of general student culture in Chambana. Doing some participant-observation during the meetings and rides might be really interesting.

The other project that's crossed my mind is to conduct observations in the (AWP) Academic Writing Program at the University. I wonder what that experience is like for the teachers and students involved. I'd especially be interested in the development of language and communication that takes place between the teachers and students in that program. I'd guess that I'm not the first one to approach this topic, but maybe I can put a different thesis on it.

It's between those two right now. And the latter fits better with my other courses, a Writing Studies survey course, and Globalization and World English. All three of these courses have the potential to address the issue of what is happening to the English language.

Entering the Discourse

It's high time I got around to this. As the dust settles from the recent changes in my life, it makes sense to document the process in some way.