Abstract for audio paper The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole, in publication with Seismograf Peer.

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by “rejecting the solidity of a frame” (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged in the in-between of minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity, and “assembly of our obligations to one another” (2021, p. 8.)

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance takes the shape of a formless formation to explore integrity and wholeness among collectives that self-organize for radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about moral virtue but rather a collective, ontological state of being whole.

Guided by an ethic of emergence (brown 2017) and traditions of Black study (Harney and Moten 2013), we assembled members of three creative collectives for regular strategy, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine month period. These collectives are SOLHOT, Fire in Little Africa, and The Aadizookaan. We asked ourselves the following research question: how do these collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time?

These sessions generated a shared archive of sonic material for the not-yet (van Hesswijk et al. 2021): conversation recordings totaling over 20 hours, ritual scripts we wrote, original sound compositions, and more. From these materials, we composed borderless vignettes where voices and sounds converge, dissolve, pulse, and rupture in loving demand for the wholeness we will only find among one another.

Bibliography

brown, a. m. (2017) Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Brown, R.N., Smith, B.E., Robinson, J.L. and Garner, P.R. (2018) Doing digital wrongly. American Quarterly, 70(3), pp. 395-416.

Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013) The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

Ruiz, S. and Vourloumis, H. (2021) Formless formation: Vignettes for the end of this world. Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

van Hesswijk, J., Hlavajova, M., and Rakes, R., eds. (2021) Toward the not-yet: Art as public practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Biographies

Emery Petchauer is most at home in intergeneration art, expression, and learning spaces where youth and adults make things together — especially beats, sounds, songs, and lots of noise. He plays the role of curator and conduit in these spaces, linking together the relational and material assets for teaching, learning, and living. A longtime turntablist and newer sound designer, he is a professor in the Department of English and Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

Ruth Nicole Brown is Professor and the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Brown grew up in Park Forest and Chicago Heights, IL nurtured by bold and determined practices of collective possibility. She continues to activate home truths and bring other’s to futures of radical creative power and praxis through Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective Brown founded in 2006 to celebrate Black girlhood by meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart.

In collaboration with Am’re Ford, Mark C. Francis II, Dr. Stevie Johnson, Sacramento Knoxx, Sandy Love, Jessica Robinson, Jacobi Ryan, and Dr. Blair Ebony Smith.

I got a request from Person asking me to work 9.5 hours, three days in a row, for about $15/day, to review MTTC test items. I was glad to be asked. Excited even. I certainly know a lot in this area. Here’s what I wrote them in response:

Thank you for this invitation. I read it with great interest seeing as though I have been teaching about this topic and conducting research on it for decades. I can’t accept your invitation. Here is why:

You are asking for 9.5 hours of labor a day, up to three days. This is an unrealistic request for professionals who already have jobs. You cannot be serious. Furthermore, you are offering to pay $150 a day, for “sessions attended of two days or more.” This rate amounts to about $15/hour. You are offering minimum wage for highly specialized expertise. You cannot be serious.

Here’s the kicker: all of this shows that you have a test development system that undermines the validity of the test itself. Your labor request and inequitable compensation all but ensure you will not have the expertise needed to review these items. Let me say this again: Your test development process (in this case, item review) work to exclude the very expertise you need to review these items for a fair test.

Start over. Do better.

East coast friends:

We’re back!

We relocated to north Jersey this summer. It’s been a busy move with many twists and turns, but we’re here. We’re getting settled. And we’re getting ready.

The move made good sense as Anica starts her new job at Rutgers University-Newark this fall. She could not be more excited for this new job and season. And for me, I am on sabbatical + research leave for the year – and very grateful for the MSU resources that make this possible. It’s my first sabbatical – ever! In the fall I’ll be a visiting scholar with the Racial Literacy Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, and in the spring I’ll be visiting at Rutgers-Newark in Urban Education.

These engagements are products of other people’s generosity toward me. And in that same spirit, these engagements will bring in many of the artists, organizers, collaborators, etc. who have been a part of my work over the past few years. There will be a performance/teach-in, an open studio session, and some other stuff. There will be plotting, there will be planning, there shall be music and laughter.

So friends in NYC, Jersey, Philly – shoot, all the way to DMV! – let’s (re)connect! Because (say it with me now…)

“In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.” -Grace Lee Boggs

This week the participatory research team listened to a 9-month old recording of our students debriefing a song they wrote about freedom. We looked for insights that might apply to the work we are doing right now with the same students: supporting them writing and composing songs that mean something to them. The recording reminded us of how brilliant and thoughtful they are — honestly, things we don’t always have at the forefront of our minds in the midst of schedule changes, cancellations, the ongoing trauma of Oxford up the road, and more. For me specifically, it reminded me of how students often follow our lead when we are vulnerable and honest. Our vulnerability as grown ups can be a support to them.

“What relational conditions are necessary for X to happen?” That seems to be the question I’m asking myself in a lot of areas right now: outcomes in class, exchanges among artists in a research project, equity hack sessions with organziers, etc. I seem to be operating on a theory of change rooted in relational conditions and what they might afford.

Not sure if anyone feels the same way, but the difference between (Name, date) and (e.g., Name, date) is so crucial.

Whew! I’m glad somebody said it! Print this out and staple it to the front of every social science research methods book.

The problem with the ‘gap in the literature’ feedproxy.google.com/~r/Impact…

Have you ever been writing a conference proposal but the call asks for stuff that doesn’t fit your proposal? Here’s one way I try to handle that. I insert a sentence like this before getting to the details.

Below I address A and B aspects of the proposal call. Since C and D aspects do not apply to this submission, I instead address E and F because they [reason]

I directly say what I’m not doing so they don’t have to wonder about it. But instead of just saying what I’m not doing, I let them know what I’m doing instead. I try to think about it like this: what’s the information they might have asked for if they better understood the kind of thing I’m proposing.

So instead of addressing the data sources in a call that assumes everything is “empirical,” I might address the ethical stance of the project instead.

“What time is it on the clock of the research project?” (R. N. Brown, personal communication, June 28, 2021)

#What I’m reading, writing, listening to 06.20.21

##Reading

Lots of reading this week related to an article I’m working on about theories of change in activist education research. I’ve revisited many of Eve Tuck’s articles that cross Indigenous thought, theories of change, and participatory action methodologies. A Third University is Possible by la paperson also showed up in the mail right on time, and the decolonizing frames make for good conversation with Tuck’s work. Any time I’m thinking about theories of change, I’m thinking about Grace Lee Boggs again, so I’ve gone down a short path of writings about her work too. Of note is the essay “Living by the Clock of the World” by Matt Birkhold, which provides a lucid clarification of Boggs’ idea of visionary organizing, and the critical reply “In Defense of Struggle,” by Aaron Petkov.

##Writing

I’m almost to the point of First Shitty Draft for an essay I’m writing on theories of change in activist education research. Writing this piece has me thinking about the various activist traditions from which scholars may think about themselves as scholar-activists. It’s also got me thinking about the different kinds of formations – many of which are not legible to institutional heuristics – that these activities form. The risk in this piece is inadvertently drawing lines in the sand about who is and isn’t a scholar activist. That risk has me thinking about lines and what they do. So the intro has this small part on lines. I’m not sure if it will make it to the final version, but I find myself liking this kind of thinking

I proceed below by drawing lines that connect theories of change through participatory action methodologies. By drawing these lines, I take some risks. Lines can connect dots to renderer a useful sketch, and they can also provide a path to a destination. But lines can also also divide, enclose, and separate.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

• DJ Soul Sister’s set from Boiler Room at Ace Hotel New Orleans in 2017. This is a flawless set. Flawless.
• “People Still Make Beats” is back in rotation, a mix of beats and samples I made last year.
• “Spud Roots” mix by Soul Cool Records, for tending to the yard and garden outside.
• “Make a Joyful Sound to Jah” by Anbessa Roots Reggae.

Music by Friends

The Winter Tried To Kill Me: Sad nDn Love Songs by Sacramento Knoxx. (Click to listen.)

New discoveries

Heavy funk covers of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Thriller” by The Traffic, from Australia.

Deep tech house from here in Detroit by producer Nuntheless. Vinyl is available for pre-order now!

I’m 2.5 weeks in working on an essay about theories of change in activist education research. I’m shooing for my First Shitty Draft by the end of June, and I’m at the point now where I’m not quite sure if I have something novel to say anymore, because the piece so far might simply be me narrating to myself why I’m convinced by all of the Indigenous and decolonizing work I have been reading but had hoped to be in conversation with. It’s an interesting swing of the writing process: going from ideas, to conversation and interaction with others’ ideas, and back to your own ideas but wondering if the whole process was to convince yourself that, “Yeah, what they said is basically what I think now. So we’re done here.“ I’m pretty sure I’ll write my way out of it — because I’ve felt this swing before — but either way, I’m learning a lot. And that’s good.

Final sense making session with co-research team today: These regular sessions have been much more generative than a decontextualized “coding” process. Here is the design on Mural we used to generate insights and point toward data sources. At the top of each grid went a research question the team (made up of researchers, instructors, musicians, mentors) developed at the start of the project. I imagine the sequence of rows (insights first and then data sources, or the other way around) matters in the sense making the designs asks people to do. It could be reversed, but I think insight –> sources matches the way this team thinks, and that might be related to how reflective they are as community-engaged artists – always thinking about insights to inform what they do next. The bottom row is really about data sources, but that term is too specialized for the array of folks on the research team, so it says “example, instance, story, etc.”

There could probably be another row across the bottom, perhaps about why this matters. That kind of row might build out into typical “discussion” points in a research article.

Since our sense making sessions are on zoom, it’s also interesting to see how the chat plays into co-sense making, with us dropping additional comments in there and even links to pieces of art that connect to the insights. I’m looking forward to more with this team and creating protocols that bring us into making sense together as co-researchers.

Doing some reading for an essay and found this gem. I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors.

The balcony may be an interesting piece of architecture, but the scholar/activist needs to spend less time there.

M. Apple, “Theory, Research, & the Critical Scholar/Activist,” 2010

##Reading

On the academic side of things:

• The 2009 classic “Suspending Damage – A Letter to Communities” by Eve Tuck, where, among other things, she discusses theories of change. (More on that below.)
• This new education research piece by Casey Wong, “The Wretched of the Research: Disenchanting Man2-as-Educational Researcher and Entering the 36th Chamber of Education Research.” This one is behind a big, thick paywall.

On the non-academic side of things:

• California’s Novel Attempt at Land Reparations from The New Yorker.
• What exactly is the “system” that we are fighting?, from Roar, which includes this lucid paragraph to define “The System”:

The modern state — with a capital S — does not refer to individual states, but rather to the entire system they form a part of: the political, social, economic and cultural order we live under, including capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and racial and gender hierarchies, all working together as a single, complex mechanism. We can think of it as a vast operating system for ordering and controlling functions and relations among human society, economy, populations, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system like Windows, Unix or MacOS.

##Writing

I’m starting an essay about theories of change in activist eduction research. It will be a shorter piece; I think I can finish in before July. This week I did a lot of iterative drawing and sketching in different colors about the piece. I’m finding this is a better way to start a new piece than putting linear words on a screen. Here’s a peak into the notebook:

In this process, I’m usually capturing stray thoughts that will need to go somewhere, writing out anchor ideas and quotations, making lots of arrows about relationships, and redoing all of this page after page to refine things. The colors have a loose meaning too.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

• Some ambient sounds by low light mixes. Nice for coming down off a busy day.
• Dubstates & Dreamstates, also by low light mixes.
• Jazzy house by DJ Tobi Grimm.

Music by Friends

Horray! There’s a new record label in Detroit called Papaya Records. It’s founded by my friend Eastside Jon, and the first two releases came out this week. Both releases are by local stars, Dez Andres and Hazmat Live. Click on the pics to take a listen. Dancing shoes on.

New discoveries

Descendants of Cain by KA. Dark, earthy, sorrowful writing over melodic loops. Most songs don’t even have percussion in the beat. I’ve been playing this album over and over.

Records I’m spinning & sampling

Dubby cover version of Evelyn “Champagne” King “Love Come Down.”

More from Greg Dimitriadis’ Critical Dispositions: Evidence & Expertise in Education.

The problems facing education and education research today cannot be solved by more and proliferating notions of expertise, linked to more and proliferating fields of inquiry. Rather, they demand an engagement with the world that exceeds any particular explanatory or methodological framework.

On the proliferation of “critical” fields in education:

On one level, the number and range of such fields can provide sharper and sharper perspectives on the question of education inquiry. On another, the number and range of such fields can also work to fragment educators and researchers into more tightly bounded niches–obscuring as much of the world as it helps to reveal.

All from the preface, Greg talking about a kind of “sober humanism.”

I read four novels last week. I read two social science research articles today. It made my spirit die just a little bit - the contrast between expansive world building and empirical certainty.

I finally made time to sit and read this precise, critical research article on edTPA. One might call the article quantitative ether. It reminds me of something Greg Dimitriadis wrote in his 2012 book, Critical Dispositions. A great deal of the book is about evidence in social science education research. It says a lot about research methods and methodologies too. Here is the specific excerpt the article brought me back to:

There has tended to be an unfortunate conflation of epistemological and methodological concerns in both the literature and “received wisdom” on research. That is to say, the assumption is often that those with an interpretive orientation use qualitative research methods, whereas those with a positivist orientation use quantitative methods. In addition, there is also an assumption that the former tend to be more progressive in disposition, and the latter more conservative. (p. 105)

The authors of the article don’t position their inquiry as an overtly critical or progressive one. In my read, they take deliberate steps early on to avoid some of the more charged controversies around the exams, and I wish they hadn’t. They almost apologize at the end of this article for their “quite unusual” recommendation that states place a moratorium on the edTPA. But the article does what Greg argued in this chapter and in this excerpt, and that is refreshing to me.

##Reading

I’m still working my way through Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I’m enjoying the ways that vanishing is showing up in the novel beyond the twins’s most obvious act. There is Reese’s past, Early’s routine that takes him out of town, and more. I know Stella has to reappear at some point. She does, doesn’t she? Or is she gone for good? But even in vanishing, she’s not really gone.

##Writing

I met the deadline for my promotion narrative. One thing that took me a while to figure out was why a distinction between hip-hop as content and hip-hop as aesthetic form matters. This part was less about why it matters and more about which matterings I felt it necessary to name for the audience that would read this essay. Here is ultimately how it landed after lots of writing and revision:

This distinction was and remains important for at least two reasons. First, it asserts the practices, sensibilities, and heuristics of (often Black) artists as the starting points to generate education practice, theory, and research methods. Second, this distinction compels scholars and (English) educators to expand beyond close readings of hip-hop texts/songs and begin thinking about hip-hop culture how its creators do.

That last phrase,thinking about hip-hop culture how its creators do, went through the most revision – with lots of academic words put in and, eventually, taken all the way out. I think the finally phrasing is most simple and best. That’s really what it’s about for me.

##Listening

Music by friends

• The new Medicine Bag album by Sacramento Knoxx – Detroit Indigenous hip-hop and electronic raps and beats. Love the story excerpts from Knoxx’s mom, too.

• Five tracks by Detroit legend Scott Grooves – soulful, electronic, indestructible. I buy every SG record I see while hitting record stores in Detroit, even the ones with blank white labels that only have a handwritten “SG” on plain white sleeves. If you know, you know.

Mixes I’m playing

• Two hours of African downbeat by Rob. Stunning music. I can’t get enough of it.

• A two-hour mix by my friend Adam appropriately called THAT RUGGED SMOOVE ISH.

• I’m still running this Detroit hard techno mix I put together a few weeks ago.

What I’m making

• My friend Yukiko brought me back a record from Philadelphia two years ago for my birthday. It was Jean Terrell’s solo record. It’s got the stunning track “No Limit” on it, which begins with single hits of a kick, snare, and open hi-hat. Then it has Jean harmonizing over some lush strings and key swings before the 4/4 hits the floor and the rocket ship take off. I chopped it up this week and put some vocals over it from Royce Da 5’9”. So here’s the track I’m calling Jean da 5’9”.

Reading

I started reading Claudia Rankine’s newest work Just Us: An American Conversation, the center of which seems to be an essay of sorts about whiteness and critical whiteness studies. I’m tying to decide what are fair expectations to put on a book like this, or maybe I’m just hesitating to say that I don’t like it so far because it seems to be her deciding what she thinks of critical whiteness studies and letting us in on the entry level thought exercise. But I’m sticking with it.

Writing

More work on my reflective essay for promotion to full professor. I like this part I wrote. We’ll see if it makes the final cut:

My work in this area has provided a third avenue through a topic divided by research methods and conflicting epistemologies. On one side: scholars who advocate for the use of these exams by using mostly quantitative research methods. On the other side: scholars who critique the exams as culturally-biased instruments that discriminate against teachers of color. In my work, I maintain the critical stance of the latter group but have a different epistemological starting point. My starting point is the subjective experiences of students – mostly students of color – who take the exams. I argue scholars, teacher educators, and policymakers have the most to learn from them.

Listening

• This album Play With The Changes by Rochelle Jordan just came out. It’s got UK house and garage, a few slower soul joints, and her super dope singing.

• Indestructible Philadelphia Soul by The Ethics.

• All of the music by Ester Rada, an Ethiopian soul-jazz singer born in Israel. I learned of her while watching a lecture by legendary music engineer Bob Power. Her unique cover album of Nina Simone songs might have gotten her the most attention, but her other albums — including the ones she sings in Amharic — are just as good.

• I made a beat. Check it out.

Teaching

How the semester started:

How it finished:

Many researchers, however, describe the writing of impact statements as works of fiction.

Works of fiction? Impact statements should focus on pathways to impact over short-term outcomes - Impact of Social Sciences