Just wrote “more-than-human” as an adjective in a draft. Now I’m asking how did I become this person?

#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!

When Toni Cade Bambara said she was “brooding about this article that won’t write itself,” I felt that.

The Boggs Blog: A Project of the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership

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.

I was really trying to keep this article simple, but here I go talking about onto-epistemologies. When will I learn? Oh wait, this is learning!

This ability to turn anyone into a debtor is what fuels the first university toward inclusion.

Your Sunday sermon from la paperson, A Third University is Possible

Going in 🔈

This is a multi-stage assignment I use in my Young Adult Lit + Anti-Racist Teaching undergraduate course. It unfolds over about 5 weeks and makes up the major action in one learning module, usually at the start of the semester. Most students in the course are studying to be high school or middle school English language arts teachers. Although at the center of this assignment is students facilitating a discussion, I should say that most of the learning happens in the steps leading up to the discussion and the steps after the discussion.

Assignment goals:

1. Design and facilitate a critical race discussions about literature.
2. Know and be able to use accurate critical race concepts while analyzing and discussing literature.  
3. Gain comfort/affective stamina analyzing and discussing anti-Blackness, racism, whiteness, etc. in literature. 

Background:

This assignment leverages key ideas in Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides. Students have already read this book, and I anchor excerpts about white education discourse (p. 96-98) and critical race literary analysis (p. 74-78) to this assignment.

Texts:

These novels offer a variety of ways characters negotiate incidents of anti-Black racial violence and white supremacy. The characters also center or challenge whiteness in various, incomplete ways. These exact texts are not essential for the assignment, but a set that presents a variety of responses to racism, racialization, etc. is important.

• Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes
• All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
• Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White by Lila Quintero Weaver

I have students facilitate their own discussions in pods as we read these novels over three weeks. Importantly, these discussion are open-ended without much direction from me. I have students audio record their discussions and, at the end of each week, transcribe a 5-10 minute portion of the discussion. Like the discussions, I don’t give much direction about what to transcribe, and they don’t know the exactly what we will do with this transcripts. This is important. “Choose a part of the conversation you think is important or interesting,” I say. At the start of each week before we move onto the next novel, I briefly ask them about what they transcribed and why, and what came to mind as they were transcribing. This brief touch keeps the transcriptions in view even though they are without much broader context at this point.

Part I: Pre Discussion Planning

After we’ve finished the novels and discussion, we revisit the key ideas in Letting Go of Literary Whiteness and turn toward the assignment.

Steps to Students:

1. Annotate your 3 transcripts. Annotate them by looking for instances of white educational discourse (LGLW p. 96-98) and critical race literary analysis (LGLW p. 74-78). You might find some clear instances of these, wonder if these are happening in some places, or notice an absence of these. Make your annotations as comments in the margins of your transcriptions. Shoot for at least 10 annotations. Keep all this to yourself and don’t share among your podmates. 
   
2. Write insight statements. From the annotations you made, write 1 insight statement based upon each transcript. What’s an insight statement? An insight statement synthesizes smaller points (like your annotations) into one meaningful point so you can design learning around it. It’s a full sentence with subject, verbs, and perhaps conjunctions and other parts. Example: Pod sometimes agrees or supports white discussants to help them feel comfortable while discussing racism in the text, rather than pushing to deeper and less comfortable examination.
   
3. Reflect on you own racial self (300 words). Reflect on your own racialized position and experiences that play into designing and leading a critical race discussion. In what ways do you feel competent or incompetent for this task? What emotions do you feel in your body (e.g., nervousness in your belly?). What specific prior experiences have influenced these feelings?
   
4. Fill out the planning grid.

I then have 30 minute pre-discussion meetings with each student. In the meeting, we look at the alignment among the four parts of the planning grid, the quality of questions, the staging each question might need, and other aspects of inspiring dialogue. Most students are good to go after the meeting; some need to revise a bit and wait for me to approve their planning grid before leading the discussion. These meetings are time consuming but essential to the meaningfulness of the experience.

Part II: Students Lead Pod Discussions

Each students leads their pod in a 15-20 minute discussion based upon their planning grid. These discussions are not about their past discussions but rather about a character, scene, conflict, etc. from one of the novels. Depending on the length of class and size of pods (typically 4-6 people), there can be multiple pod discussion in the same period. Occasionally pods will run some of their discussions on their own outside of class. Be sure to audio record.

Part III: Post Discussion Analysis

5. Reflect on you own racial self  (300 words). Reflect on how your own racialized position played into leading the discussion. How did you feel while leading? What questions or parts of the discussion challenged you the most, and why? You should also consider how your own racialized position in context with that of your group played into your experience. (This applies even if you and everyone in your group identifies as white.)
   
6. Annotate and analyze the discussion by (A) transcribing it and (B) annotating the transcript for evidence of your desired antiracist outcome (see your planning grid). Also continue looking for instances of  white educational discourse (LGLW p. 96-98). Shoot for at least 10 annotations.
   
7.  Write insight statements. From the annotations you made, write 1-3 insight statements about the discussion – just like you did before.
   
8. Draw conclusions (300 words). Write a conclusion that explains: How successful were you in achieving the antiracist outcome of your discussion, and why? What is your evidence for success, and/or what kind of evidence is missing?

I emphasize that having a “successful” discussion and meeting their antiracist goals is not necessary to be successful on this assignment. Without stating this point, students will be put in the position to manufacture a successful discussion.

Students turn in each of the 8 items listed above, in that order, in one document.

Coda

With so many parts and moving parts in this assignment, I also rolled this assignment out to students in an editable google doc. I gave them time to annotate the assignment sheet with questions in class, and then I answered the questions in that same document. This process helped surface layers that I hadn’t anticipated, and it made the whole thing seem more feasible to students.

I figured something out today that’s been bugging me for 2 years: Efficiency for the sake of capitalist production is different than efficiency for the sake of human capacity. The former is to make more stuff. The later is to honor what we are and are not capable of. I’ve been trying to disentangle those two ideas in my head for two years. Since I couldn’t, I’d feel like a capitalist when asking for efficiency. But now I think I’ve realized I was asking for processes that might be within my capacity as a human. Sometimes literally: what I have and don’t have time for.

Nice to see Heather at Lansing’s The Record Lounge mentioned here.

20 Woman-Owned Record Stores in the United States blog.discogs.com/en/woman-…

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.

This week’s newsletter: I’m thinking about Terence Nance’s 18 Black Boys/Girls… performance, Detroit’s newest record label – Papaya Records, the 10-year anniversary of I AM YOUR GRANDMA, and a bit more.

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.”

Put some respect on his name.

Hero Rat Magawa Is Retiring From A Career Of Sniffing Out Land Mines In Cambodia : NPR

Enjoyed the first half of this podcast over lunch, especially the tension between organizing and spontaneity, and value judgments about what constitutes the inside and outside of networks. Spadework: A New Grammar of Organization - ROAR Magazine

Afternoon listening to get me over the hump: some deep and acid house.

Revisiting this now-essential classic for something I’m thinking through this week:

Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities

At His Moment of Triumph, Arthur Jafa Is Looking for Trouble

What links Jafa’s art across mediums is the idea that items brought out of context and juxtaposed, whether metal pipes or appropriated YouTube clips, can develop expressive power beyond their original employ. It is precision work — obsessive micro-editing goes into the videos — that draws on a forager’s instinct for finding beauty in the ephemeral and mundane.

It invokes, as well, a particularly Black tradition — shaped by economic scarcity — of making art that transforms what is available. That impulse in Black creativity, in Jafa’s view, was a way to stake a claim in a largely hostile world. “It’s a form of radical determinacy in the face of the chaotic,” he said.

It connects, for instance, the craft of the D.J. — an analogy he offers for his video work — with the yard sculptures he saw in Mississippi, where he grew up between Tupelo in the hills and Clarksdale in the Delta, and where “people just felt compelled to make” things.

This is such a cool sonic composing prompt. Shut off the lights and give it an Isley Brothers twist.

Disquiet Junto Project 0491: Footsteps Sequencer disquiet.com/2021/05/2…

So I didn’t know any of this, nor about the bombing. The Whitest Historically Black College In America : Code Switch : NPR

This is a refreshing review philosophy from The Journal of Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture. Thank you, Dr. Carmen Kynard.

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.”

Issue 044 of my newsletter went out on Monday. It covers the sculptures of Chakaia Booker, how time works in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and more. Check it out, and subscribe if you’d like it landing in your inbox every few weeks.