Listening to and with the lives of adolescents

It's been far too long since I posted an entry here. I have no one to blame but myself... but for good measure I'll also give a little credit to the very long and not always voluntary todo list that consumed me for the past many months.

But another reason is a very good one -- the publication of a new volume that brings a focus of arts and aesthetics to the work my research team and I have been doing over the past several years. Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal Explorations with Youth features contributions from graduate students, youth researchers, arts educators, and established literacy scholars who take up various contours of the intersections of the titular concepts of the book. The book is co-edited with Tiffany DeJaynes, a wonderful colleague and friend who is up to some amazing work of her own with high school students turned budding qualitative researchers.

Building from this volume, that draws on the Reimagining Futures Project, last year some colleagues, graduates students and I launched the Youth, Media, and Educational Justice Project -- a consortium that we are building in an effort to bring participatory approaches to the study and support of the lives of court-involved youth, including the young people involved in the Juvenile Justice system with whom we have been working for the past near decade (and a bit longer than that for some of us...!) as well as young people in foster care who will likely age out while still in the the care of the child welfare system.

What, pray tell, might this have to do with adolescent literacies? In this work we are deeply informed by the basic ideas that have always grounded my study of young people's literate lives:

• youth are engaged in myriad forms of expression and communication (thus rendering the use of "illiterate" utterly moot); 
• found within adolescents' literacies are markers of affiliation and connection (to communities, to people, to texts, and more);
• the varied contours of youths' literate lives are replete with evidence of their ways of knowing -- of knowing about the world, of making themselves known in the world.

We bring to this set of underlying assumptions new questions about belonging and becoming, questions that gain new urgency in the current and ongoing discourses of laws and policies that place adolescents' wellbeing at a far remove from decision making. Most notably, these concerns are brought into stark relief in the ongoing and deeply divided debates about the NYPD's #stopandfrisk policies, including today's ruling on the policy.

We take as our mission four entry points into the pursuit of educational justice for court-involved youth in which our position and posture is that of listening both to and with young people:

• Media making
• Mentoring
• Research
• Education

I, along with my YMEJ team members, will be blogging about these and related ideas over on our YMEJ blog. I encourage you to follow and also to keep up with us on Twitter.


Next up here -- a short post about some of the excellent reads I encountered this summer, all of which touched, in some way, on adolescents' ways of communicating, knowing, being, becoming, and belonging...

Wishing you a restorative August in the meantime.

So that we may shame the shamers

The beginning of the autumn semester brought me into contact with Jessica Ringrose's research on sexting and the related practices of shaming going on in the daily, digitally mediated practices of some adolescents. This past month has brought into stark relief the ways in which shaming and symbolic violence are manifested as actual, heinous, unimaginable violence and violation of another human being. 

Here, I've curated a selection of artifacts -- articles, media, and more -- that touch on various aspects of shaming. These aren't intended to sensationalize, glorify, or horrify. They are meant, simply, to educate, inform, and generate further inquiry. I'll continue to add more over the next few weeks, as well.

• On "slut-shaming" -- a collection of cites inspired by a youth-produced radio piece 

• A Teenage Girl's Perspective on the Culture of Online Slut-Shaming - by Temitayo Fagbenle

• Sexual Cyberbullying: The Modern Day Letter A - by Courtney Stein

• Radio Rookies live chat for teens on sexual cyberbullying

• Sexting: The Risks of Everyday Sexualised Communication among Children

• A qualitative study of children, young people and ‘sexting - by Jessica Ringrose

• On the murder of Delhi student Jyoti Singh Pandey.
• As a Girl in India, I Learned to Be Afraid of Men - by Mira Kamdar
• Purity culture is rape culture - by E.J. Graff
• On shame and (mis)understanding "the other"
• Literacy, speech, and shame: The cultural politics of literacy and language in Brazil - by Lesley Bartlett
• Concerning identity - by John Berger
• and related video of Berger reading from the piece 

2012 - A year in photos

For complete set, click: 2012 (flickr).

A few of the thousands taken in 2012, a year of moving and being moved, of kind invitations and newly nurtured friendships, of breaking bread and sharing drink, of seeing and hearing and falling in love time and again, and an intimate understanding of the word gratitude.

exciting new special issues

1. this friday, a special issue of the Journal of Negro Education will be launched with the following theme: Preparing Teachers to Teach Black Students; Preparing Black Students to Become Teachers

the volume is guest co-edited by my friend and colleague yolanda sealey-ruiz (along with chance lewis) and includes a wide array of articles that take up questions related to the teaching and learning lives of black students across contexts, their education narratives, and possible education futures.

2. the recently published special issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique on: Literacy(ies) and the Body  guest edited by another friend and colleague Stephanie Jones (along with Kerryn Dixon and James Albright)

articles include an exploration of embodied literacies, how bodies are read and what that has to do with education, and a piece on performing critical literacy (written by the very thoughtful and exceptionally observant elisabeth johnson)

3. another special issue bringing an exploration of bodies together with geographies is found in the journal Emotion, Space and Society titled: Emotional Geographies of Education -- edited by jane kenway and deborah youdell (whose work i continue to be enamored of and blown away by)

these articles draw on theories and metaphors of geographies and spaces to bring forth new sites of teaching and learning, under-appreciated or less visible contours of how we live and experience education.

for the love of picture books

it is perhaps fitting that my return to this blog, after a brief hiatus, comes following a memorial service for larry sipe, a former professor and the person who gave me words with which to describe my own love of books and stories and characters and narrative delights: jouissance! plaisir! performative responses! cover pages! aesthetic!

among my favorites that larry introduced me to, that i have been thinking about and revisiting in the several months since his passing are:

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

The Giver

Smoky Night

and if you want to hear more about children's and young adult literature, definitely check out the very excellent blog: The Classroom Bookshelf: Teaching with Children's and Young Adult Literature in the 21st Century.

over the next several months, i'll be sharing reflections on the many ways i continue to witness the joy for stories that larry held and shared as they thrive in the practices of the many young people i've spent time with these last several years. in part, this will be a part of the collection of essays i am preparing along with my research team in a book about bringing an arts-based approach to digital media in literacy explorations with youth, particularly court-involved youth. and other vignettes will be drawn from a book length manuscript i'm working on based on five years of ethnographic research at the program i've called ATIP in various publications.

for now, though, i'll take in the jouissance that comes with recognizing the beauty of a beautifully crafted page, made of pastels and paint and cutouts and hours of labor...

On the meanings of writing and publication

"publication is the auction of the mind of man"

These words, penned by Emily Dickinson, sometimes keep me up at night.  Her words take me back to the reflexive musings of Deborah Appleman found in the chapter, "are you making me famous, or are you making me a fool?" Here, Appleman reflects on the ways in which she has represented the youth whose lives she has studied as part of her language and literacy research. She wonders about the weight of her representational actions; words that freeze in time the dynamic and shifting identities and lives of youth who, in many ways, have been the object of stultifying representations in the past.

What do we do when we "publish our research"? What does the act of publication mean for those of us who call ourselves researchers, whose identities are wrapped up in the business and art of storying the lives of others (and perhaps by proxy, ourselves)?  When we move from initial notations of our observations to narrative accounts of "what happened" or "who someone is"?  How might we compose with intentional fluidity and fluid intentionality?  Whose lives are auctioned when we publish? And with the possibility of collateral damage, what are the possibilities for...what? What do we gain when we publish? Do we distribute knowledge? Further reify or discursively disrupt?

During a recent seminar discussion with colleagues, while discussing texts - whose forms locate them on the margins of my daily readings, yet whose meanings are familiar - we considered the distinction between "writing as reporting" and "writing as enacted inquiry".  What vulnerabilities do we risk when we step aside from a 'disembodied voice of authority' to reveal our own discursive hesitations?  Is there an audience for writing that reveals rather than merely reports?  Writing that seeks to educate through invitation rather than obfuscation? 

Dickinson's words haunt me, but so, too, do they keep me alert - alert to the ways I put pen on paper, fingers on keyboard to produce words that claim to tell a story about the multi-storied lives of the young men and women who share their stories with me.  Where does that leave the ethnographer: as a storyteller?  Storymaker?  Storybreaker?  Are we making meaning?  Constructing knowledge(s)? Representing our ways of knowing?

Within the frame of publication, therefore, can we imagine or move toward publication that does not cause us to sell our souls?  (or to recall, with chagrin, the sins of our (publishing) infancy?)  What is it to publish, to make public, particularly from within the university? At times, it feels like a dance performed ever-so-delicately through norms and assumptions, skeptics and critics, our communities and naysayers, with the goal of remaining standing long enough to learn another step.  Do we risk paralysis in our writing when we focus on publication?

CFP: Visual Interpretations conference at MIT

humanities + digital conference 2010

"Visual Interpretations" - Aesthetics, Methods, and Critiques

Of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

May 20-22, 2010 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology/HyperStudio

http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? 
And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

We welcome submissions from practitioners and theorists of digital humanities as well as such connected disciplines as art, design, visual culture, museum studies, and computer science.

Topics include:
·       Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
·       Subjectivity and objectivity in information visualization
·       Dynamic/multidimensional visualizations and user collaboration
·       Social media and contextualized visualization
·       Cultural history of visual epistemology
·       Limits and affordances of the translation from data to visualization
·       2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
·       Visualization across media and the archive
·       Digital visual literacy & accessibility
·       Relationships between database and interface
·       Alternative modes of data representation.

Submissions:
We are inviting submissions for the following conference formats:
·       Papers with 15 minutes of presentation and short discussions (12 slots)
·       Short presentations, so called “6/4s” with 6 minutes of presentation and 4 minutes of discussion (18 slots available)
·       Mini-Workshops, 30 minutes each (6 slots)
·       Demos and Posters (30 slots)

Deadline for submissions:  March 31, 2010
Organizers:
MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities (http://hyperstudio.mit.edu)
MIT Communications Forum (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/)

For more information: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/ or contact: h.digital@mit.edu

Newark Mayor Cory Booker pt.2 (10/16/09)

was watching this clip (below) of cory booker talking with conan, and was especially moved by this quote:
"people think that life is about the big victory. but in my opinion, life is about the small acts of decency, kindness, and love that over a lifetime add up to transformative change."

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

bar code art

taking something meant to be invisible or what goes unnoticed and repurposing it by (re)imagining it as a modality for creating art. fantastic!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"are heels oppressing or empowering?" -> what passes for 'debate' over morning coffee...

bio-anthropologist versus (talk show host + magazine editor + sexist stand-in co-host) = very difficult to watch morning segment.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

links!!! media, storytelling, documentary...

a long overdue compilation of fabulous links i learned about while attending the making your media matter conference hosted by center for social media at american university.

and now, in no particular order:
http://media-democracy.net/
http://cmml.usc.edu/
http://www.meaningfulmedia.org/ - funders database
http://www.unheardvoicesproject.org/- job loss due to outsourcing
http://www.newmediawomen.org/ - 10k prize
http://www.newday.com/ - coop of social issue media makers; selling media to educ'l market
http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/
http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/dirt_the_movie
http://cinematech.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/mediathatmatters
http://www.ijcentral.org/ - social network for int'l justice, focusing on icc
http://mobileactive.org/ - resource for activists using mobile techs
http://www.prx.org/ - public radio exchange
http://betsylevypaluck.com/Paluck_Green_AnnRev_2009.pdf - a report about 'prejudice reduction'
http://www.snagfilms.com/ - virtual movie theater
http://www.artsengine.net/index.php/ - indy media distributor
http://cinematech.blogspot.com/ - somebody's interesting 'bout cinema' blog
http://www.madeinla.com/ - about film 'made in l.a.' - interesting look at how a movement and a film are wrapped in each other
http://www.bavc.org/ - bay area video coalition
http://www.wardancethemovie.com/ - beautiful film - was discussed under the panel heading of 'what happens when you make a beautiful film about a dark subject'?
http://www.chimpanzeeproductions.com/ - the filmmaker of the CP film 'through a lens darkly' also featured in 'beautiful film' panel
http://silverdocs.com/ - afi/discover channel doc festival

visualizing data

i saw this a while ago in nytimes and facebooked it, but have begun exploring it anew this week:

Many Eyes: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home - presents ideas about how to visualize sets of data, including using wordle.net and other nifty apps.

it's finally (almost) here! the 8th annual media that matters film festival!

each year, for the past few years - which is as long as i've been aware of it - and always at the same time - early april - i start asking everyone i know if the media that matters film festival date has been announced. when is the screening? when will the films be posted? did i miss it? and to those i've asked - sometimes, often, more than once - i apologize . but invite you, now, to rejoice with me the arrival of the announcement of the 8th annual media that matters film festival. after the screening at the ifc center, the films will be available on the mtm festival website, and join the illustrious collection of the previous years' compilations.
can't wait :)

Conference on the Visual Study of Education (VISE) @ SUNY Albany

accepting photo submissions now - encourage your students/youth/children with whom you work to submit their work for presentation/publication at the fall conference.

more info here: VISE 2008

past is present again

80s male rock stars 20 years later

except for the fact that kenny rogers isn't my idea of an '80s rock star' and that billy idol now looks like a gargoyle, this made for some fun reminiscing.

lines

this week, there's been a lot of hype about people, lines, and the iphone and all manner of news has been peppered with images that look like this one - an AP wire photo had the following caption on cnn.com:

Martin Perez, left, and Erika Puquirre, right, are at the head of a line in front of an Apple Store in Santa Monica, Calif.

here are some other human lines...

to the right is a photograph of people waiting to vote in Sierra Leone








to the left is one that depicts people waiting in line for coal in Amsterdam in 1956









the soup kitchen line during the great depression







waiting for a wiggles concert at disney land, in california









malawians waiting in line for food rations

unity (through) hope (might equal) peace

i took these photos outside of truce, a youth development and media organization located in harlem and part of the harlem children's zone. they have an excellent public arts project going on right now and are developing a garden and several more of these fence messages. the others read:
build love
build power
build hope
[build unity]
build peace

the message is hopeful, thoughtful, and curious. which comes first? i've listed the phrases as they appeared from left to right on the fences on either side of the truce building. i'm eager to see the project and the messages unfold, particularly as they are youth directed and youth produced. more pics to follow.

(note: my camera and the sunlight were not too sympatico on this particular afternoon, so i'm aiming to shoot the fences again.)

fun with photoshop

oh the fun to be had with a little image, a little software, and just the right amount of imagination:
picture of the day