Among the many things I had planned to do before the birth of my first child, one was post a review of Lisa Catherine Harper’s first book, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood.  Now over the initial shock of transitioning into motherhood, I realize all the more how valuable this book was and still is to me, as Harper precisely chronicles a life divided by “before” and “after”— in this case, having a child.

Harper presents the idea that the deep divisions that women experience — specifically around pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, and then the encounter of a child —sunder women physically and emotionally in ways they are left to existentially and practically reconcile.  Her book is categorized into three states of being: “Inside,” which begins with the conception of her daughter and follows her pregnancy; “Inside/Out” which chronicles her labor and birth; and “Outside” which tracks her entry into motherhood as closely as it does her daughter’s new experiences in the world.

Harper holds a PhD in English with an emphasis in feminist theory and research and her book includes meticulous research as she alternates exploring the science behind what is happening to her (with information about how pregnancy alters virtually every system in a woman’s body) and the emotional resonances she feels on a deeply internal level. She also chronicles her reactions to others’ responses to her physically changing state.  At times the tacking back and forth between the more didactic writing to the lyrical can seem abrupt, but the model reflects her commitment to knit understanding of the logical and mysterious, of fact and emotion, the science and the poetry of her experiences. Although I enjoyed Harper’s sensitivity to the physical processes of pregnancy and childbirth so much I gave a copy of her book to my Ob/Gyn, what I later appreciated more was Harper’s willingness to connoiter her new role as part-time professor with fulltime mother.  In this current moment of Lean In rhetoric and new iterations of the perennial “have it all” debates, Harper is disarmingly clear about her own situation, asking, after her daughter is born: “Why didn’t motherhood matter?  Why was the home still a separate, unequal sphere? Why were mothers and children still so isolated from those things that really mattered to the childless, to the world outside the home?  Why did we talk endlessly about stupid things like Cheerios and diapers?”  And to the crux of her book: “Why did I feel so fractured?”

Searching to locate meaning in the time she spends caring for her daughter, beyond a circle of other mothers, is the axis on which identity, cultural value, and priority all spin for Harper.  Scholar that she is, she turns to the volume The American Woman’s Home, written by Catherine Beecher (sister to Harriet) who called for “a revolution in domestic arrangements” and Harper says is the “precursor to all the contemporary lifestyle magazines, TV talk shows, blogs and Websites that have reinvented the domestic arts for the post-millennial home…” Harper recognizes that for Beecher “the created home is a political act” and she wants it to be for her as well, not by redecorating it, literally or otherwise, but by having it hold broad, and real, cultural value, something I think is happening.

Harper writes, “the life of the home had to be remade… it had to matter in real and consequential ways.”  She is critical of the “modern feminist movement,” as she broadly labels it, as one that has decided to “map power where it already existed” i.e. outside the domestic sphere, while neglecting to elevate the work women (largely) do inside the home and keeping this devalued.  In order to support women’s work outside the home, Harper argues, the domestic and childrearing work so many women do needs to be legitimized and legalized, in part to help support women working outside the home.

It’s an argument whose point I see, but I think oversimplifies. While it’s clear Harper’s goal isn’t to go into detail or depth, the idea that the feminist movement, broadly painted, has roundly devalued domestic work to the elevation of work outside the home seems too one-note to me. While not necessarily her point, Harper doesn’t raise the issue of shifting the expectations of gender roles or equal parenting.

Her daughter teaches her how much “to work inside the home is a worthwhile occupation,” Harper writes, although this realization leaves her at odds with her education and expectations of the professional working world. She writes, “I belonged in neither world: much of my energy was invested in raising Ella so I couldn’t fully claim my professional identity, but neither could I identify what seemed to me the petty concerns of motherhood. I loved my daughter and I loved my home.  I did not love the stay-at-home culture of mothering.” Harper concludes that there has to be a future shift where the bifurcation into being a “work outside the home” mother doesn’t square off with “work inside the home” woman either — a “mommy war” reduction that I question as still legitimate.

Fundamentally, Harper wants the halves of her life to join, primarily by feeling each sphere is validated — the life-changing experience of motherhood co-existing with the intellectual and professional ambition she realizes, for her, has been more valorized. She concludes that insisting on motherhood and the home as generative space is an almost radical throwback to Beecher’s nineteenth-century insistence on the importance of these activities and demand for their recognition. It’s an interesting argument, in some ways provocative for its potential to twine conservative strands of thought with progressive ideals. Figuring out how child-rearing and the domestic life matters to her personally, and how to reinvent its meanings within a larger context, politically, is another parsing that Harper negotiates well in the last chapter of her book.

While driving through Los Angeles a few months ago (what else does one do here?) I listened to a new release of a song by a band called The Head and the Heart.  The tune was catchy, but what lingered in my mind was the band’s name — calling out the division of the body and the symbolic resonances each part holds.  The central tenet of Harper’s explorations remains joining what has been sundered into separate spheres: mother/scholar, domestic/public, former self/present self and the million ways identity is fractured, constantly, daily, even moment-to-moment, and the intentional work it takes to keep rearranging these pieces to make a whole.

People coming out of their homes and into the streets to particpate in #duranadam or #standingman. Photo by @myriamonde and h/t to @zeynep

In Taksim Square, at around 8PM local time, a man started standing near Gezi park facing the Atatürk Cultural Center. According to CNN –and more importantly Andy Carvin (@acarvin) and Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) — the man is believed to be Erdem Gündüz, a well known Turkish performance artist who has inspired a performative internet meme that has already made it around the globe. (There’s a nice Storify here. Thanks to @samar_ismail for putting it on my radar.) Gündüz and his supporters were removed by police after an 8 hour stand-off (in multiple senses of the term) but now that small act has gone viral and spread well beyond Taksim Square. The idea is simple: a photo, usually taken from behind demonstrates that person’s solidarity with those hurt or killed by Turkish police actions in the past month, and the increasingly repressive policies of that country’s government in the last few years. On twitter, the hashtag #duranadam (“duran adam” is “the standing man” in Turkish) quickly spilled over the borders of Turkey and has been translated to #standingman as more people in North America and Western Europe start to stand in solidarity with those in Taksim. #standingman is an overtly political meme because, unlike other performative memes like #planking, #owing, or even #eastwooding, it is meant to demonstrate a belonging to a cause.

Performative internet memes are usually photos, sometimes videos, of people doing the same thing in different contexts. Their social or political value come from playing with the genre itself. Planking, lying face down with your arms at your side in a strange or difficult to access place, is one of the first performative internet memes. Know Your Meme traces planking’s origin to the Australian “Lying Down Game” which became popular on Facebook around 2009. During the 2012 American presidential campaign, actor Clint Eastwood spoke to an empty chair (meant to symbolize an absent president) at the Republican National Convention. The performance was so bizarre and creepy that it backfired and #eastwooding meant making fun of the GOP, not the sitting president. I wrote at the time,

#eastwooding is funny because it exemplifies all of the problems of the modern GOP in a simple, easy-to-enact gesture. It is appropriate then, that a party that is made up of old white men would be so perfectly critiqued by a technology (and mythology!) that runs on popular participation.

#eastwooding wasn’t much more than political satire meant to poke fun at a poorly executed effort to speak in memes. Ultimately the symbol of the empty chair was taken up by the very campaign meant to re-elect the most powerful man in the world, so to call #eastwooding activism is a big stretch. Other than #standingman, the only overtly political, subversive meme that comes to mind is the We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr started by one of the original founding members of Food Not Bombs at the very beginning of #OWS. The blog collects and displays photos of people with handwritten messages about why they identify as part of the 99%. Unlike #eastwooding or #standingman however, We Are the 99 Percent is not a single, simple act that speaks for itself. You have to write out a message and it is that handwritten letter that is supposed to convey most of the meaning. There are certainly ways of standing out and being creative with the medium, but it isn’t really a performative internet meme. By posting a 99 percent photo you’re contributing to a project that –as the site itself states– introduces ourselves to one another. It isn’t doing the same kind of rhetorical work that #standingman aims to accomplish. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, they just achieve different ends by somewhat similar means.

Image c/o @GirisimPaylasim

#Standingman is good activism for the same reasons it makes for a good meme: It has low barriers to participation, its simple enough that individuals can innovate and keep the conversation fresh, and it is easily explained to the uninitiated.  Standing is pretty easy for a sizable majority of people in the world and if you can get someone to take a picture of you from behind you’re basically done. In fact, it is the simplic, everyday nature of just standing there that makes #standingman so transgressive. Moreover the aggregate affect of a simple action performed by thousands of people is moving and gives stark visibility to a wide range of intangible inter-personal relationships among strangers, friends, and compatriots. Stand as a crowd and the effect is something between a slow-moving zombie movie and the end of V for Vendetta: inspiring, a little creepy, and very intimidating.

Standing is simultaneously mundane and immensely brave. Stand in line at the grocery store and you’re not doing much, but stand in front of a line of tanks and you might go down in history. Standing can get in the way of something (like a tank, or a tree-destroying bulldozer) but it can also mark a spot. In the right context it can be a powerful message of solidarity, vigil, and remembrance. Some #standingman participants have chosen to stand where fellow activists were murdered by police while others stand far away from Taksim Square to show global support for the Turkish struggle. As a rhetorical device, standing-as-protest is a classic example of Ghandian-style nonviolence. By getting arrested for something as innocuous as standing, you let the government do the work of displaying your oppression.

One thing that #standingman has in common with #eastwooding (and most other performative internet memes) is interpretive flexibility. It is quite easy to frame someone’s actions as a kind of participation in #standingman without their consent. Police standing around waiting to arrest someone can be photographed and said to be part of the protest. A standing penguin became a running gag within the movement when a comparison photo of  CNN Turk showing a documentary on penguins while CNN International broadcasted images of protests in Taksim Square. The ease with which #standingman was able to call attention to, and lampoon, obvious censorship demonstrates just how useful memes are in spreading the word about difficult subjects.

One of the many standing women. Source

Even before #standingman existed, the very idea of standing was loaded with conceptual metaphor. One stands up to/for/with/against/behind one thing or another. To stand is to say you’ve taken a side. You have taken a position. It means you are not going to take it lying down. One stands out in a crowd or strives to be the last one standing in a conflict. Standing is winning, it is powerful. And like all powerful things, it is somewhat unwieldily and sits atop its own forms of oppression and violence. Not all courageous people can stand, and they are certainly not all men. #standingman, fundamentally, relies on the cultural currency of the strong able-bodied man as a source of rhetorical power. That doesn’t mean the meme is completely ablest or sexist, but one should always (at least) acknowledge the more dubious qualities of their activism if for no other reason than to recognize the limits of the tactic. Plenty of women have participated in the meme and if you search #standingwoman on Twitter you get a healthy dose of photos and artwork. The problem is that by relying on an overtly gendered meme you divide potential participants. To dual tag takes up precious characters in your tweet and it can alienate large swaths of potential participants.

#standingman might represent the birth of a new form of political protest. One that is displaced in time and space and extremely difficult to quell. The image of the standing person jumps up like a dandelion in spring time: by removing one you make a dozen more until an entire field is full of them. One the most powerful aspects of #standingman is its recursivity. By performing the meme you not only promise an audience for others, encouraging them to perpetuate the meme, you also produce a setting for the meme. Each individual performance of #standingman is an acknowledgement of the whole and a recreation of the seed pattern. It is a symbol that constantly recreates itself with seemingly no end. It is just one of many ideas who’s time has certainly come.

David is on twitter and tumblr.

While the stereotype of the college professor might still be an elbow-patched intellectual cozied up in an office, it might be more accurate to place him in his car.  A new report from the American Association of University Professors finds that more than 40% of college instructors are part-time, often driving from campus to campus to cobble together enough classes to enable them to pay rent.  These types of employees far outnumber tenured and tenure-track faculty, who make up less than a quarter.

This data suggest that the term “precariat” applies well to a significant proportion of college and university professors. Coined by economist Guy Standing, the term is meant to draw attention to the economic fragility of many lower wage workers in today’s labor market.  It’s a combination of the word “precarious” and “proletarian,” a word that is used to refer to the working class under capitalism.

Part-time faculty count as part of the precariat because their jobs are contingent (renewed semester to semester), low paid, and bring little or no benefits.  Let me put it this way.  I just finished my first year as a tenured professor after six years on the tenure track.  I teach five classes.  An adjunct at a public research university would have to teach more than twenty-three classes to earn my salary (average pay is $3,200/class); someone teaching at community colleges would have to teach more than thirty-three (at $2,250/class).  Of course, my salary also reflects research and institutional service, but my hourly wage is obviously far out-of-proportion to that of part-time faculty.  Plus I get a wide range of benefits; adjuncts usually get nothing.

When government funding of higher education shrinks, colleges and universities respond by cutting corners where they can.  Hiring adjuncts is one way to do that.  It’s important to remember, then, that funding cuts hurt not only students; they also hurt jobs.

See also How Many PhDs are Professors?  Via Jordan Weissman at The Atlantic.

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Source: Nick*Rad.

Have a scholar we should commemorate?  Send us a cool pic and we will!

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My daughter and son are only three and a half. But I’ve been thinking a great deal about how girls learn money—or rather, about how we don’t. As the recent Pew report shows, a record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 now include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family. Our daughters are growing up in a world where they will be expected to be breadwinners, just like our sons.

But what are they learning, early on, about money, and how it works?

I sat down with Robin Patinkin, CFA, CFP®, a Principal with Cedar Hill Associates, LLC, an investment advisory firm serving high net worth individuals, families, and foundations. Over a large helping of watermelon in a Chicago apartment high up in the clouds, Robin and I discussed myths and realities around financial literacy and young girls.

Robin has over a decade of experience in investment management and financial planning with a comprehensive understanding of family interests and issues. Working intimately with clients as well as raising two sons and a daughter now in their twenties, she’s an expert in guiding individuals through financial life decisions. She’s something of a trailblazer herself, having majored in business in the 1970s (a time when few women did) and later going back to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management with a concentration in finance at age 45. She became a CFA charterholder, along with her eldest son, in 2012. She’s frequently called upon as a panelist, speaks on a variety of financial issues, and acts as an expert witness in divorce cases.

Here’s how our conversation went down.

DS: You’ve raised two boys and a girl.  Did you notice any differences in the ways your children took interest in money?

RP: Yes. When each child turned ten years old, I had my first conversation with them about money and investing. I gave each an opportunity to invest in a stock they would understand at that young age as a consumer, and then we followed the stock together. There seemed to be a higher interest from the boys. That was the first signal.  Later, when they were in high school, as part of the Illinois state public school graduation requirement, they each had to either take a consumer education course or pass an exam. Academically, my children are all very similar. My sons passed the exam with very little, if any, studying.  Yet my daughter, who found the material uninteresting, asked for my help. I sat down with her and explained everything in the book page by page. She didn’t pass. We were both surprised.

DS: This story sounds like the stereotype. As a woman in the wealth management industry, how did this make you feel?

RP: A few years ago, I heard Marie Wilson speak about White House Project research that found a clear division in knowledge and acumen between boys and girls concerning financial literacy when they hit high school.  This is the very age at which my children took the exam. As you can imagine, here sits a mother who herself beat the stereotypes, was one of the few women majoring in business during the 1970s, and viewed herself as a role model who had knocked down the barriers, I thought: how can this be happening with my daughter?  I started to question what I had done wrong.

DS: What would you tell a mama like me to teach her preschoolers about dough?

RP: Now is the perfect time to start. Even Sesame Street is incorporating financial literacy in their curriculum. I would begin with the basics: put a piggy bank in the bedroom. Show them money, physically. Take them on a field trip to look at currencies of the past. Talk about bartering—use their toys—and explain how the money system developed.  Go to a coin shop. When they’re a little older, perhaps even take a trip to the US Treasury in DC. Teach the basics of saving, spending, and giving. And don’t be afraid to really talk about money. There are many wonderful children’s books that teach what money is. One of my favorites is called The Go Around Dollar, by Barbara Johnston Adams and Joyce Audy Zarins. It takes a dollar bill and dissects what every symbol on it means. It’s important to start the conversation young: “Mommy is saving this for our vacation. Mommy is spending this on food.” Play games with money. When you’re in a store, have children count the change to make sure it’s correct. Money, at a young age, can be fun.

As your children grow, add different parts of financial literacy into the conversation. It’s important for parents not only to role model, but to talk about it. So at an early age, it’s about charity, saving, spending. Children have different personalities and will exhibit varying feelings about these things. As they get older, you build in more about your personal lives: your spending, your saving habits, good debt/bad debt, things that worry you. Talk about how we work to earn money and where the money goes. Do a field trip to a bank, explain credit cards and their use, define what an asset is. When the news is on, if there’s a financial term mentioned, define it for your children right there. Use the moment, whenever and wherever you can.

DS:  In Pound Foolish Helaine Olen writes, “[T]here’s a fine line between making the [personal finance] industry more friendly to women and overtly condescending to them, and frankly, it is a line few have managed to tread successfully.” How do you think parents can be cognizant of occasional differences in attitudes between boys and girls around money, without condescending to the girls?

RP: I assumed, because I was in the business, that my children would understand equally, and there was no need to put effort into educating them differently at all.  In retrospect, I probably should have spent additional time with my daughter, who seemed less engaged, thus piquing her interest more around money and investing. I should have realized back when she was 10 that another approach was required to interest my daughter on the subject. Selecting a stock wasn’t the right fit. One size does not fit all.

I often think about what I should have done differently with my daughter, and why her financial competence was less than her brothers’. I wonder if there was some sort of emotional hook or mode of presentation that I should have employed to involve her more in the conversation and learn the lessons. I could have offered her baby steps, assignments, and tasks in a simple non-threatening way.

DS: Your daughter is currently 23. What do you do now?

RP: Marie Wilson’s presentation was a trigger for me. I am now, and have been for the past few years, making a concerted effort to get my daughter up to speed. In her early years in college, my daughter started overspending. This was not intentional by the way, but more from a lack of understanding. So I then set the stage. My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to put money aside to support college expenses, something so many American families struggle to fund. She had a credit card, her own checking account, and was given a reasonable monthly amount to live on. We covered tuition, and she was responsible for everything else. She learned how to budget and pay bills. She caught onto the lessons of personal finance she hadn’t yet somehow received.  She’s now moving into her first apartment after college and working her first grown up job.  She’s empowered, with me in the background still coaching, but she’s as responsible now as the boys.

DS: It’s been exactly 50 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law yet women still make $.77 to the male dollar, prompting a renewed look at a legacy unfulfilled. So much of the problem, of course, is structural. But do you think an additional problem is that girls and women need to “lean in” more to our own financial education, or that the financial literacy industry isn’t effectively leaning out to us? Are we doing a good enough job teaching our girls, and are the methods employed successful?

RP: I think we’re failing on both accounts. There are outliers of success, and we can’t group all girls into one category. Yet I do believe these discrepancies in financial literacy are a problem across race and class. From my personal observation and experience working with girls, women, boys, and men, I suggest there is much to do. Yes, there are improvements since my college days, when there were few women in business, but the stereotypes persist, especially in much of the personal finance literature. I strongly believe it is our duty as mothers and fathers to recognize this shortfall and focus on the issue of financial literacy for our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, and ourselves. And it’s important for women like myself, in the industry, who have the education, the understanding, and the acumen, to work with our colleagues in the industry to combat this dilemma. My ultimate goal for my daughter—as for all our daughters—is that she pursues her career dreams and ambitions while living a life of financial freedom and independence, so that should a crisis take place, she is not destroyed.

Add your thoughts to the conversation, and be sure to check out Olen’s book. Is there a financial literacy gender gap, and if so, to what extent is the problem structural in nature? To what extent can parents and teachers play a role? Got questions for Robin? Feel free to leave them in comments here.

Over the weekend, I noticed that Facebook hashtags are now linked. “What!? When did this happen??” I quickly asked my network.

This simple shift opens avenues for  deeper discussions about the social media ecology of which I wrote a few weeks back. In particular, it shows the relational nature of the ecological system, and the back and forth multiply influential relationship between humans and technologies, all of which shape each other in a multiplicity of ways.

By social media ecology I refer to all of the media on and through which users are Social (in the capital “S,” linked and connected sense of the word introduced by Whitney Erin Boesel and Nathan Jurgenson). As social media increasingly integrates into the flow and logic of everyday life, users draw on a variety of digital tools to meet a diverse set of needs. The social media ecology refers to the set of tools users draw on, and the ways in which these tools, and their users,  are connected and/or compartmentalized.

This social media ecology is deeply relational, in that each object (i.e., individual tool) is explicitly linked or separated from every other tool.  The status of two objects as linked or unlinked (and their degree of linked-ness) is always a simultaneous product of both built in physical architectures (i.e., code) and human decisions. For instance, Twitter can be architecturally linked to Facebook, such that Tweets show up as status updates, but users must opt-in to this system. Similarly, one can import Facebook Friends to create Snapchat contacts, but does not need to find network members in this way (you can also import your phone contacts). On the other hand, one cannot link Twitter to Snapchat directly. However, one could potentially screenshot a Snap and Twitpic it to hir followers. In short, levels of integration between objects varies, and we would expect those objects with stronger links to take on more of one another’s characteristics. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, though distinct objects and quite different in several respects, are highly integrated through linkable content, similarity of layout, and (relatively) similar user bases—along with actual shared ownership in the case of Facebook and Instagram. It is therefore unsurprising that the practice of hashtagging—originating on Twitter and continuing on instagram—has seeped into the Facebook dialect.

This brings me to my second point: technologies and humans—especially those connected in an ecological relationship—work to shape one another both architecturally and normatively. The hashtag story goes like this: Twitter uses hashtags to categorize conversation threads, linking all Tweets with a shared hashtag to each other; Instagram (owned by Facebook) also uses hashtags to categorize images, linking all images with a shared hashtag to each other; The logic of hashtags bleeds into other spaces, as people start categorizing written, oral, and visual statements with hashtags on both Facebook and in informal conversation (FtF, SMS, e-mail etc.); Fast forward several years, and Facebook alters its code to link Facebook posts with shared hashtags with each other, architecturally establishing a Twitter-style practice in which Facebook users were already normatively engaged. What this means, is that the technological setup of Twitter—a medium with fast growing popularity and mainstream usage—altered 1) general linguistic practices; 2) user practices on a second technological object (Facebook); and 3) the architectural setup of this second technological object.

The spread from Twitter and Instagram to Facebook is significant, not only in that the practice is now embedded within multiple sites of the ecology, but also because Facebook is such a strongly integrated ecological point. The use of hashtags in discourse is growing, and creating a particular kind of discursive grammar, one in which primary text garners meaning through its location in categorical schemas. How this affects the logic of thought and speech more generally continues to evolve. As with all patterns of language, however, the true effects sneak in largely unnoticed, providing fodder for future theorists who can look back at cultural shifts with an historical full-scope view.  #OverAndOut #BrainOverload.

Jenny Davis is a regular contributor on Cyborgology. She is generally bad at designating hashtags, but tries to do it anyway. #FollowMe @Jup83

While the flight attendant might be a quintessentially feminized occupation today, the first “stewardess” was, in fact, a “steward.” Pan American had an all-male steward workforce — and a ban on hiring women — for 16 years.  It was forced to integrate during the male labor shortage of World War II, when female flight attendants were considered as revolutionary as “Rosie” riveters and welders.  By 1958, their ban on hiring women would be reversed. There was now a ban on hiring men.  This is just some of the fascinating history in Phil Tiemeyer‘s new book, Plane Queer, a history of the male flight attendant.

By the 1950s women dominated the aisles in the sky.  Airlines accepted this.  Women (1) were cheaper to employ, (2) domesticated the cabin, making commercial travel seem suitable for women and children, and (3) sexualized the experience for the business men who still made up the bulk of travelers.

By the time Celio Diaz Jr. invoked the 1964 Civil Rights Act and sued Pan Am on the basis of gender discrimination, white male flight attendants were seen as downright queer.  Servile behavior — the cooking, serving, nurturing, and aiding behavior characteristic of the job at the time — was both gendered and racialized.  When black men or white women performed domestic duties, it was seen as natural.  (The gender dimension might seem obvious but, from slavery to the early 1900s, black men were also concentrated in domestic occupations: coachmen, waiters, footmen, butlers, valets  etc.)

So, when white men served others — but not black men or white women — it challenged the supposedly natural order on which both hierarchies were founded.  This is why male flight attendants caused such a stir. The airlines wouldn’t hire black men or women, so they hired white men and women. The men, as a result, were suspected of being not-quite-heterosexual from the get-go and have suffered the ups and downs of homophobia ever since.

The double-definition of servile behavior as simultaneously racialized and gendered absolutely leapt out at me when I saw this commercial for Virgin Atlantic, sent in by Grace P.  It captures both the race and gender dimension of a segregated workforce. The two women and single black man play the role of service worker, while the two white men are a pilot and an engineer.  Each is framed as being literally born to do these jobs, thus the insistent and troubling naturalization of these hierarchical roles.

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When I get to UW-Parkside I’ll look into Spanish language offerings in the College of Arts and Humanities. I’ll also speak with my fellow Dean about an interesting idea I came across a year or so ago. I can’t remember where I saw it (hence, no link; sorry), but the essence was that we have entered an age where global citizens can speak to each other fairly well with the assistance of translation devices, so one does not need to be fluent in a foreign language for visits to other countries. The article went on to suggest that a curriculum could be developed that taught students to be world travellers who could quickly acquire linguistic and cultural basics once they hit the ground overseas. I’ve got to do a search to try to find this article!

There will probably always be a place for full scale college-level language instruction for students who need to be fluent in a foreign language in order to live and work for an extended period in a specific international location, but I wonder if a “How to be a World Traveller” curriculum would be useful for the millions of students who will forget most of their language instruction after receiving caps and gowns? The curriculum could include engaging online language learning videos, such as the BBC’s “Mi Vida Loca,” which “takes you on an intrigue mystery adventure to Madrid and beyond in 22 episodes, [in about] 10 min each, covering basic learning points for Spanish absolute beginners.” I watched each episode as part of supplemental language lessons suggested by mi maestra de español fabulosa [my fabulous Spanish teacher], Lucy Cantellano Gallina.

Perhaps the “How to be a World Traveller” curriculum could also include one-semester courses in targeted languages, with a goal of preparing students to be expert users of translation devices, such as smart phone apps. Not only would students be exposed to a variety of gadgets, they would be instructed in recognizing when queries produce flawed responses. For example, at the end of the first paragraph of this post I wanted to use a Spanish expression for “oh well.” BabelXL gave me “bueno,” and Google translate suggested “oh bien.” I know enough Spanish to recognize that “bueno” is “good,” and while “bien” is most often used for “well,” “oh” is not Spanish!  Yo escribí a mi maestra de español para recibir una mejor traducción. (Put that in an online translator and see what you get!) She replied, “Hmm, it’s hard, because we don’t use an expression at the end of something (conversation or situation) that did not work out the way we expected it to.” That’s the type of cultural context the “How to be a World Traveller” curriculum should impart. Another example: the curriculum could inform students that “Sapo verde! Que te la pases bien!” posted to my Facebook page is slang for “Happy Birthday! Have a good one,” instead of the “green toad, may it pass you well” translation delivered by BabelXL.

Being the fan of science fiction that I am, I’ll end by noting that all of the above will one day be irrelevant when we develop injectable translator microbes. In the meantime and in-between times [as a student used to say to me], we should experiment with established teaching and learning practices.

Cover image via 911truth.org.

Social facts have been the focus of several conversations around TSP “world headquarters” recently as we’ve begun to formulate our plan for next year. It is our continuing mission to best represent and explain the value and contribution of sociology to public discourse and the understanding of society. One of sociology’s most important contributions is basic: we report empirical information about how people live and how the world they live in is organized. Often these facts are kind of demographic or quantitative—poverty and income rates, for example, or the number of people having kids, that sort of thing. But sometimes the facts we collect and contribute are of a more cultural or subjective nature, about how folks think about various things, how they understand the worlds that they live in, what they value or aspire to.

All of this took on new salience over the weekend when I read this little post from our old friend Jeff Weintraub. Weintraub, a specialist in social and political theory, recommends a recent column on conspiracy theories from Andrew Sullivan–who insists that there is important insight to be gained from taking even the most ludicrous conspiracy talk seriously–as well as several recent contributions to the scholarly literature on conspiracy theories, urban legends, and the like. Coming from the state that elected Jesse Ventura governor once upon a time, this seems like a literature worth delving into. But what really caught my attention was simply how Weintraub framed his post:

Mass delusions, including paranoid conspiracy theories and other widely shared myths, may be factually and logically absurd, but it’s important to remember that they’re also social facts worth noticing and trying to understand—and if enough people believe them, they can sometimes be quite important and consequential social facts.

Absolutely. We may disagree as to the truth value of these theories and claims, but we can’t dismiss those who hold them. And beliefs, even crazy ones—perhaps especially crazy ones—reveal important things about how people think. They can also have powerful consequences if and when believers act upon them. And so all beliefs are “facts” about the social worlds we live in. We must take those beliefs and those believers seriously if we are to understand social worlds and the people that compose them. Conspiracy theories as social facts–just another one of those great, social oxymorons that make it so much fun to be a sociologist.

The Pew Research Global Attitudes Project recently released data on attitudes about homosexuality in 39 countries. Generally, those living in the Middle East and Africa were the least accepting, while those in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Asia (the Philippines, Australia, and to a lesser extent Japan) were most accepting:

Generally, the more religious a country, the less accepting its citizens are of homosexuality:

The proportion of people who support social acceptance of gays and lesbians ranged from a high of 88% in Spain to a low of 1% in Nigeria:

Attitudes about homosexuality vary widely by age. There is a pretty consistent global pattern of more positive attitudes among younger people, with a few exceptions:

Thus far, legalization of same-sex marriage has been largely confined to the Americas and Europe; New Zealand and South Africa are the two outliers:

The Pew Center points out that of the 15 nations that have fully extended marriage rights to same-sex couples, 8 have done so just since 2010. In the U.S., we’re currently awaiting a Supreme Court’s decision, which should arrive shortly, to know if we’ll be joining the list sooner rather than later.

Thanks to Peter Nardi at Pitzer College for the link!

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

As our society becomes increasingly technological, I love stories that remind us of the value of simpler ways to solve problems, like a faux bus stop to catch escapee nursing home residents or dogs that are trained to sniff out cancer (both stories here).

This weekend we were treated to another such story, this time by Google. The company has announced a plan to bring internet to the whole world… with balloons.  The very first launch of a gas balloon was in 1783.  Two hundred and thirty years later, the company aims to deliver what is arguably the defining feature of our age — the internet — with helium-filled balloons.  That technology will then bring almost countless other technologies, such as medical advances and agricultural information, to people who are largely excluded from them now.  A fantastical plan.

Here’s how it’ll work:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Please enjoy these posts from Father’s Days past:

Stereotyping Men on Dad’s Day

• Happy Father’s Day to Middle Class Breadwinners
• Representations of Gender in Father’s Day Cards
• Feed Them Meat! and “We Call it a MENu for a Reason”
• Buy Them Non-Emasculating Cooking Supplies!
• What Men Want: The Vintage Edition (pictured)

Also…

• Are You Coming on to me Daughter?
• Including Daughters in Father’s Day

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

“In social media, alienation appears as its opposite”

“A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money”

“it’s no surprise to see an app tracking your ability to disconnect”

“It’s no accident that both Manning and Snowden are former soldiers who served in Iraq”

“Should the government know less than Google?”

“7. Realize, w/ horror, that your boyfriend, unbeknownst to you, has had unprecedented access to all of your emails”

““Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped”

“In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight”

“Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges”

“the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him”

“replacing cops and soldiers with PRISM and predator drones: Massively Open Online Police State (MOOPS)“

“all of us slowly come to accept a model of technology use that subtly erases the concept of ownership”

“What Pussy Riot give us is a new, viral-ready model for the digital age– proof that, like feminism & punk rock, the protest song is alive”

“Steve Jobs Time Capsule. Buried at a conference in Aspen in 1983, but remains lost”

“anti-government forces are deliberately buying up basics like toilet paper to destabilise the country”

“To invoke the boundless informant is to call attention to the way powerful actors nonconsensually extract data from populations through the design of everyday life”

“that’s the funny thing about how data is used by our current government. It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

@plouie01 snapped these two pics of the suggested gifts for Mother’s and Father’s Day at Chapter’s Bookstore in Vancouver.  You might notice an interesting difference:

Yep, that’s right.  Men get books, interesting books even!  And women get… pink stuff.  Mostly paper products, but without words and ideas on them, and also candle and soap..  You know, pretty good-smelling things meant to please the daft.  Forgive me, perhaps I’m being overly harsh towards stationary.  All I’m saying is, not a single book for ladies at the book store?  Alas.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

A new symbol to represent people with disabilities is being introduced in New York City. The symbol, designed by a team at Gordon College, looks like this:

We’ve posted previously about the politics of the symbol and its history. The notable changes here are the moving of the arms to the wheels of the chair, suggesting that the person is pushing themselves, and the forward-leaning angle, suggesting active motion.  It tells a story about independence and ability, instead of dependence and disability.  A very nice change.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Image under Creative Commons

I start with a nota bene by saying that I do not self-identify as a “surveillance scholar” but given our current sociotechnical and political climates, the topic is unavoidable. One might even be tempted to say that if you aren’t thinking about state and corporate surveillance, you’re missing a key part of your analysis regardless of your object of study. Last week, Whitney Erin Boesel put out a request for surveillance study scholars to reassess the usefulness of the panopticon as a master metaphor for state surveillance. Nathan Jurgenson commented on the post, noting that Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) has used the term “nonopticon” to describe “a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it.” I would like to offer up a different term –taken straight from recent NSA revelations—that applies specifically to surveillance that relies on massive power differentials and enacted through the purposeful design of the physical and digital architecture of our augmented society. Nested within the nonopticon, I contend, are billions of “boundless informants.”

Boundless Informant is the part of the NSA that analyzes the data brought in through another recently revealed program called PRISM. It sniffs out trends and linkages by, according to The Guardian’s Greenwald and MacAskill, “counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.”

From the Guardian, images of the Boundless Informant overview interface.

First, I want to make a clear distinction between Boundless Informant (upper case) the NSA program and boundless informant (lower case) the metaphor. Unlike the Bentham/Foucault panopticon, Boundless Informant really does monitor everyone. That might make it seem too literal (and too soon) to use as a metaphor for digitally augmented state surveillance, but I think that makes it perfect. Thanks to recent leaks and excellent reporting, we know Boundless Informant exists, but we don’t really know how it works or what role its played in past events. The boundless informant is half boogeyman and half Orwellian police state. The true evil genius of boundless informant is that it makes Alex Jones conspiracy theories feel dangerously possible. It makes you wonder who’s seen your Dropbox files and why the MPAA hasn’t come after you for all those Game of Thrones episodes you pirated. Boundless informant as a metaphor stands for the secret and arbitrary use of power based on the limitless capacity to collect and subsequently analyze data.

The power of Boundless Informant comes from its position high “above” our planetary information networks. From the NSA’s vantage point one gets exclusive access to a map of 21^st century geopolitics. It shows the geometry and acceleration of the world’s burgeoning nonstate political networks: The thousands of decentralized, global sociotechnical systems that topple dictators and occupy city centers are difficult to see and even harder to infiltrate. An individual becomes a boundless informant by using the products and services that fall under the purview of the state’s PRISM. The state creates boundless informants through the perfection of digital monitoring systems, studying the collection and interpretation of biological evidence, and human terrain mapping. These are the same ordered bodies that Foucault saw as ensnarled in capillaries of power. Even the most finely tuned body gestures and digitally mediated social interactions are studied and catalogued for later analysis.

Describing people as boundless informants should be used to highlight the way individuals unknowingly give up crucial information to powerful actors. The boundless informant does this through customer loyalty cards and connected social media accounts, but mainly through the metadata of how, when, and where those services are utilized. The boundless informant is unable to opt out because to do so would mean to live outside of a sovereign nation. There are degrees to which one can reduce their connections—living “off the grid”—but unless one is willing to live a hard subsistence life there are few means of doing this meaningfully. Moreover, those that rely on computerized state services— Medicaid, SNAP, public transit—are the easiest to track and monitor. To invoke the boundless informant is to call attention to the way powerful actors nonconsensually extract data from populations through the design of everyday life.

Unlike the panopticon, which requires prisoners to know how (but not when) they are being watched, the systems that produce boundless informants are distributed and ultimately unseeable in their totality by any one individual. And unlike the nonopticon, the creation of the boundless informant requires actively obscuring and hiding the tools of surveillance. In fact, knowledge of the modes of watching is grounds for severe prosecution. Power no longer resides in a central tower (physical or cognitive) or in the ignorance of the masses, but in the deliberately opaque, countless and unremarkable black boxes that make up the physical, digital, and cognitive landscape of the network society. Watching must be so pervasive that to point out that one has internalized its gaze is a prosaic–almost naïve–concept that scares no one. The cultural shift is startlingly fast. Just 20 years after their creation the X-Files’ famous dual taglines The Truth is Out There and Government Denies Knowledge are absolutely quaint.

The boundless informant is the state’s ruthlessly logical and genius solution to controlling a world shot through with actor-networks and object oriented ontologies. The program so perfectly matches the recent trends in contemporary philosophy (it’s the connections that matter, not the nodes) that one can easily imagine a row of NSA cubicles filled with books by Bruno Latour and Graham Harman.

Also from The Guardian, the title slide in the leaked NSA Boundless Informant presentation.

For the past 500 years, empires have sustained their prominence by shifting from the dominant player in industry and trade, to being the very medium of those transactions.[1] The United States has done this two fold by not only establishing its war debt (aka U.S. treasury bonds) as a global reserve currency, but by also playing host to a majority of the world’s communications. While a velvet-gloved iron fist still works, it is less obvious (and therefore much more difficult to defy in a way that garners sympathy or solidarity) to command a billion little straws constantly sipping at the world’s collective conversation. The result is a vast treasure-trove of blackmail and ammunition for social movement sabotage.

Finally, (B)boundless (I)informant invokes how much each one of us are implicated in our own surveillance. Everything from our willingness to (pro)actively share our most intimate moments[2] to professionals’ fetishization of Big Data feed into digitally augmented, decentralized state surveillance. Boundless informants are “boundless” in two senses: the information never seems to stop flowing, and the very boundaries of their identy are porus and emergent. The name captures the vast quantities of data that any single self-quantified citizen can provide to powerful entities. Informants are, even if somewhat begrudgingly, willing parties to investigations they do not fully understand and do not have control over. Think of the police informant in crime procedurals (or the X Files!): torn between their concerned for the safety and protection of themselves and their loved ones, and the largely imperfect administration of justice and search for truth. The boundless informant has ambiguous motives and may have his or her data extorted or manipulated out of their hands. They may provide information not knowing that it will be used against their compatriots or themselves.

We are boundless informants when powerful actors can record and analyze our texts to loved ones, our account logins, and our GPS markers. Not because of the content of those actions, but because of their relationship to one-another and our relationships to fellow humans. The boundless informant can be said to be within the nonopticon—that is they do not know they are being watched—but more importantly they enable this unseen watching just by going about their everyday life. We are constantly shedding bits and data points along with our hair and finger prints. We cannot help but leave a trail.

Teen pregnancy, like obesity, is often framed as an “epidemic.”  As such, both the “epidemic” of teen pregnancy and the “epidemic” of obesity can be understood through the lens of what sociologist Stanley Cohen popularized as a “moral panic.” In Cohen’s words, moral panics are “condensed political struggles to control the means of cultural reproduction”; additionally “successful moral panics owe their appeal to their ability to find points of resonance with wider anxieties.”

“The Real Cost of Teen Pregnancy” — a public health information campaign launched by the Mayor and Human Resources Administration of New York City in March 2013 — features babies and toddlers, primarily children of color, chastising their teenage mothers. Launched at a time when teen pregnancies have actually declined, primarily due to the availability of safe and affordable reproductive health care, the accusatory “shame and blame” narrative of these images is not only out of proportion to the “problem” it seeks to address, but is weighed down by its obvious cultural narratives about teens of color, poverty, gender and sexuality.

Having a pensive toddler of color next to the slogan “Honestly Mom… chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” and a weeping boy of color next to the words “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen,” serves to re-stigmatize single teen mothers, encouraging wider social senses of moral outrage, hostility and volatility toward young, predominantly impoverished girls of color. Not unlike cultural narratives about “welfare queens,” the campaign plays into racist and classist fears about sexually active girls of color and teenage mothers who use social services. The message just under the surface here is about the need for social control of “unruly bodies.”

These 4,000 posters, put up in buses and subways, cost a reported $10,000 per year for the city, and have already drawn harsh critique from many. Haydee Morales, vice president for education and training at Planned Parenthood of New York City, for instance, has reportedly suggested the campaign has got it backward. In her words, “It’s not teen pregnancies that cause poverty, but poverty that causes teen pregnancy.”

According to Samantha Levine, a spokesperson for New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, “it’s well past the time when anyone can afford to be value neutral when it comes to teen pregnancy.” Public health campaigns are never value neutral. They communicate social beliefs about normalcy, productivity, desirability, and cultural worth.

An additional cost of the unexamined acceptance of this new teen pregnancy campaign is accepting yet another narrative about individual choice over systemic change. Placing responsibility on the shoulders of the individual, such campaigns silence more complex conversations about accessible and affordable reproductive health care, anti-poverty campaigns, and gender and social justice work. Instead of buying into the “moral panic” of teen pregnancy, perhaps the mayor’s office might look into more long lasting and less stigmatizing possibilities of structural change to improve the lives of young women in New York City.

“Shame and blame” has rarely gotten public health anywhere. In the words of researcher and speaker Brené Brown, “Shame diminishes our capacity for empathy. Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

Sayantani DasGupta is a faculty member in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She is the editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies,  co-authored The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales, and authored Her Own Medicine: A Woman’s Journey from Student to Doctor.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

I’ve been writing a lot about game consoles lately, mostly because a lot has been going on with gaming. To date I’ve mostly been focusing on the Xbox One and the degree to which it contributes to the troubling industry trend – intensely apparent in the game industry but by no means confined to it – of eroding the power of owners and turning them increasingly into users/renters. With the release of the Xbox one, I – and many others – wondered if this marked the final push in the setting of massive industry standards. If, with the Xbox One’s hopelessly restrictive and confusing game lending/resale process and its daily “phone home” requirement, this was simply going to become the norm. Which would mean a serious blow to the power of technology consumers and an important and worrying redefinition of our relationship with the technology that augments our daily lived experience.

Then E3 happened.

A quick explanation: E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo – is the annual trade fair of the game industry. It’s a big deal, a huge publicity event, and one where game developers and hardware manufacturers show off new products and create buzz around those still in development. It’s where, this week, Sony unveiled the next generation of the Playstation console, the PS4. Coming on the heels of the Xbox One reveal, this would have been a big enough deal; Microsoft was naturally also at E3 to push the Xbox One, and everyone was waiting to see how the two giants would go head to head.

What happened is that Sony presented the PS4 as the anti-Xbox. In so doing, they presented themselves as the anti-Microsoft. And Microsoft got shellacked.

Twitter exploded as Sony outlined the major features of the PS4. No internet connectivity requirement. It’s easy to lend, trade, and resell games an unlimited number of times (they claimed, initially; it now appears that third-party developers may have final say there). No in-built console DRM, at least not of the oppressive kind included with the Xbox One. All that control freak stuff that Microsoft intends to do, Sony said? We won’t do that. We’re not evil.

So why should anyone outside the game industry care about this? Because by setting itself up against Microsoft in terms of how much control over its technology it seeks to retain, Sony is introducing the possibility of another way forward in terms of the relationship it affords between technology and technology owners. It’s turning aside from the trend I mentioned above, and it’s doing so in a very public fashion. It’s far from the first corporate entity to do this, but it is one of the most visible.

Let’s be clear about something: Sony isn’t any more or less evil than Microsoft. Sony is just smarter. I’ve said before that one of the things that I think is valuable about DRM disasters like we saw with SimCity and Diablo III is that they bring these issues to the surface and make them impossible to ignore. They expose the direction of the changing definition of “owner” and spark a conversation regarding how we really want things to go. They also make people angry, and these angry people yell. The yelling becomes pressure. If there’s enough pressure, corporations respond.

Microsoft didn’t. So Sony did it for them. Sony saw how people responded to the DRM-y issues with the Xbox One and turned it into a marketing strategy. They’re arguing that not only should oppressive DRM not be an industry standard, but that positioning oneself as opposed to it can win market share.

But let’s be clear about something else: Sony is positioning itself against the kind of DRM that Microsoft built into the Xbox One, which is DRM of a very apparent sort. There’s visible, bad DRM that makes very clear how little control owners have over a device. And then there’s invisible, good DRM that never gets in the way of anything, that never makes waves, that makes no one angry and sparks no conversations. Right now DRM technology is still arguably in its infancy, and there’s more of the former than the latter. But if there was more of the latter than the former, the furor over the Xbox One probably never would have happened, and Sony wouldn’t be adopting the marketing strategy that it is. The downward slide from owners to users would continue unchecked.

So this is a hopeful sign. But we shouldn’t regard it as the end of DRM. And we shouldn’t automatically trust companies to not be evil about it, regardless of what industry we’re talking about.

Sarah yells angrily about everything on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry

Earlier on SocImages, Lisa Wade drew attention to the tourism industry’s commodification of Polynesian women and their dancing. She mentioned, briefly, how the hula was made more tourist-friendly (what most tourists see when they attend one of the many hotel-based luaus throughout the islands is not traditional hula).  In this post, I want to offer more details on the history and the differences between the tourist and the traditional hula.

First, Wade states that, while female dancers take center stage for tourists, the traditional hula was “mostly” a men’s dance.  While it has not been determined for certain if women were ever proscribed from performing the hula during the time of the Ali’i (chiefs), it seems unlikely that women would have been prevented from performing the hula when the deity associated with the hula is Pele, a goddess. Furthermore, there is evidence that women were performing the dance at the time of Captain James Cook’s arrival in Hawai’i.

Second, while the traditional dances were not necessarily sexualized, they were very sensual.  The movement of hips and legs that are seen as sexual by some visitors, and showcased as such by the tourism industry, certainly existed in early practices.

In fact, the supposedly lascivious and blasphemous nature of the hula prompted missionaries to censure the public practice of hula, and in 1830 Queen Ka’ahumanu enacted a law prohibiting the public performance of the hula. This law was highly ineffective, however, and when King Kalakaua ascended the throne he actively encouraged public hula performances and other expressions of Native Hawaiian culture, earning him the moniker “Merrie Monarch.”

Eventually, a modernized dance emerged that did not incorporate much religiosity and employed modern music rather than chants. This is closer to what you would find at a hotel luau, but differs drastically in costuming and lacks the uncomfortable cloud of objectification associated with hotel-style hula (that is, the focus is on the dance rather than the dancers).  Below are some examples of the evolution:

Hula (ladies’ dance, traditional):

Hula (men’s dance, traditional):

Hula (contemporary):

These examples of hula, and other Polynesian dances, are vastly different from what one finds in a hotel’s “Polynesian Revue” luau.

Hula (hotel):

In conclusion, it is true that the hula dances, and other dances of Polynesia, have been usurped by the tourism industry and commodified.  The culturally authentic forms, however, still thrive. Native dances are impressive enough without the ridiculous costuming and disrespectful bending of the islands’ histories seen at hotel luaus; unfortunately, it is difficult to find any culturally sensitive displays of Polynesian culture due to the huge influence of tourism over these locations.

*The information in this post was gleaned from various courses I’ve taken at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. For more information on hula and the commodification of the Hawaiian culture, see Haunani-Kay Trask’s From A Native Daughter.

Sarah Neal is currently working on obtaining her M.A. in English at North Carolina State University.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

1. Who did Dawes choose to interview, and why?
2. Why were interviews an appropriate research method for this project?
3. Were people willing to talk with Dawes?  Why do you think this was the case?
4. What did Dawes learn about why these “evil men” committed the crimes they did?
5. What do his findings tell us about why people commit war crimes?  Based on what you have heard, do you find anything problematic about drawing scientific conclusions from his book?

This podcast could also be paired with several other activities on Teaching TSP, such as these activities about the Milgram experiment and this activity about power.

Earlier this month Geoffrey Miller (@matingmind), the now infamous professor of evolutionary psychology, punched out a really awful tweet. He said this:

His message is blaringly ironic, coming from a man who clearly lacked the willpower to think through the statement before making it public #truth. Although he later deleted the tweet, his followers had already created screen captures and sent the image into a spiraling journey of virality.

I don’t want to spend my post today harping on Miller’s particular indiscretion. Others have been busy doing just that, quite eloquently, for the past week and a half. Instead, I want to talk about Fatness as a moral stigma, and the ways in which Miller’s tweet first, exposed the moral nature of body size and in turn, offered Fat Activists an opportunity to publicly reject Fatness as a marker of immorality. This was facilitated, I argue, by the affordances of new technologies coupled with determined and conscientious social actors.

Like all other “isms,” sizeism constructs a hierarchical system which imbues different kinds of bodies with different meanings, and explicitly devalues some kinds of bodies while venerating others. In turn, this hierarchical arrangement of bodies places differential values on the people who live in each kind of body. In the present example, American society differentially values Fat and Thin, degrading the former while lauding the latter.

Another way to talk about “isms” is through the language of stigma. Stigma, as famously described by Goffman, refers to a mark of Otherness, that which designates a person as non-normative in a negative sense. Although all forms of stigma hold negative consequences for stigmatized subjects, those with moral stigmas endure amplified effects. A stigmatizing characteristic takes on moral meaning when the stigmatized subject is perceived to maintain control over the stigmatizing attribute. So for example, while both race and “excess” body fat are stigmatizing attributes, the latter, but not the former, holds moral meanings.

Importantly, designations of (im)morality, though often deeply embedded within cultural logics, are not stagnant or deterministic. Rather, they are products of social relations, and so always subject to change. Fat Positive groups have sprung up in a collective effort to engage in such resistance with regards to the stigma of large body size. As stated by Joy Nash in her Fat Rant below:

I’m fat, and it’s OK. It doesn’t mean that I’m stupid or ugly or lazy or selfish. I’m fat. . . . F-A-T. It’s three little letters. What are you so afraid of?…Fat is a descriptive physical characteristic. It’s not an insult or an obscenity or a death sentence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The internet has been instrumental in bolstering the Fat Positive movement, by connecting people and spreading their message. One might say that through digital technologies, coupled with passionate people, Fat Activism and the identity as Fat Activist have been prosumed into being. However, these are still niche communities, as evidenced by their minuscule presence in comparison with weight loss oriented groups and the meanings that these latter groups reinforce. By default, thin is still “good” and fat is still “bad.”

Fatphobia is a persistent systemic problem. One of the things that makes stigma so powerful is its ability to hide from conscious awareness. We are often unaware of own biases, and yet these biases, on a collective level, manifest in tangible ways. Scores of research, reviewed powerfully here by Puhl and Heuer, show the breadth of penalties endured by people—especially women— with large bodies. Socially, those with larger bodies are seen as less desirable friends and romantic partners than their thin counterparts. They are less likely to be selected for professional positions, and less likely to be promoted. They suffer ill health beyond that caused by “excess” body weight, as doctors narrow emphasis on weight leads to a) misdiagnosis and b) patients who avoid visiting doctors due to the shame-inducing experience. In short, people hold prejudices against fat bodies, and these prejudices are pervasive. Or, as wonderfully stated by Marianne at xoJane:

…honestly, any given individual instance of people hating on fatties is not a surprise to me. Nor is it shocking to me that PhD programs might be discriminating against people based on their appearance. Hello, it is 2013. Don’t we all know about racism, classism, and general appearance bias? Academia is not, alas and alack, a shining bubble of equality based solely on academic merit.

Miller’s tweet, as distasteful as it was, reflects an underlying social logic with material implications and institutional embeddedness. Miller said what a lot of people didn’t even know they were thinking. Namely, that fatness is a thing to be avoided, and that those who fail to accomplish thinness are somehow less worthy. In doing so, he also created a platform for Fat Activists to place their message on display.

Twitter just about caught on fire with the vitriolic responses to Miller’s comment, so much so that he quickly locked his profile and began vetting all followers. Outrage. This was the overwhelming response. Outrage, and the vigorous sharing of links. Take for example the Tumblr set up by Dr. Cat Pause entitled “Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs” on which self-defined Fat Academics can post pictures of themselves. Within days, the blog collected well over 100 images, and continues to collect contributors daily. Or look at public letter writing campaigns and prefab tweets of protestation.

The Fat Positive movement has its personified enemy in the form of Dr. Geoffrey Miller. In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight, along with damnable evidence of their long suffered discrimination. He gave them an opportunity to say “Hey Internet, Look over here!!” The message is one of moral redemption for those with large bodies, and moral denigration of those who shame peoplefor their body size. With Fat Activist and Fat Academic taking hold as claimable identity categories, Miller’s tweet–to a sizeable following of connected people–became a spring board for the Fat Positive movement as they work to relocate body size away from moral judgment.

So in the end, Thank you, Geoffrey Miller.

Jenny Davis is a regular contributor for Cyborgology. She tweets @Jup83. She did not try to follow Geoffrey Miller.

Fat Acceptance pic: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lurs8kfQWG1qckxkgo1_1280.jpg

“Steve, what did we decide to codename her?”

Steve clicked through his notes. “Turnkey, sir.”

“Turnkey? Who the hell came up with that?” Raymond knew The Agency was running out of codenames, but this was ridiculous. As a top official, he had enough on his mind; how was he supposed to keep track of this shit?

“Well, I think it’s because—”

“So does that mean we’re moving ahead?” Isobel interjected.

“The data is there,” said Michael. “We’re positive she has one of the stronger connections to Wedge that we’ve been able to identify. The frequency of their SMS communication alone—plus the fact that they so often text late at night—indicates that this is clearly more than a working relationship.”

“Not to mention,” Patricia added, “that Occupy essay they wrote came out almost a year ago. If it was purely a working relationship, they’d have no reason to still be in contact.”

“So you think they’re lovers?”

“Well, we’re not certain yet,” Michael replied. “I’ve got Steve filing for a warrant to go through the SMS content, and her email content as well. We’re hoping she’ll turn out to be less opaque than Wedge—” 

“That bastard lives to spend words but say nothing at all.” Patricia still hadn’t forgiven Wedge for the two days she’d wasted pouring over the dense, obtuse, & poorly punctuated prose that populated his outbox. The man was a journalist by trade; that his private communications were so terribly written seemed nothing short of a deliberate (and successful) effort to antagonize The Agency. Patricia was certain Wedge must have at least one other account somewhere—probably several of them—in which he communicated more clearly, and through which he conducted most of his conversations. But so far, despite a week of effort, no one at The Agency had been able to find it. Though her specialty was code in text, and not text as code, Patricia blamed Tor. Anonymity was the scourge of The Agency.

“What about the cameras?” Raymond asked.

“We’re working to get more of them placed near her condo, and Steve’s going through our drone footage from New York last spring. But we’re pretty sure they haven’t been in the same city at the same time for a month or two, which is well before we considered Wedge a priority target, so it’s hard to tell.” Michael forced himself to bite his tongue about the drones; a year later, he was still angry that The Agency hadn’t funded his project fully. If he’d had his way, each of them would have had a small swarm of micro-drones shadowing their every move—not just Turnkey and Wedge, and not just this new Gang of Eight, but everyone in their whole Twitter cabal, all 50 or 60 of them. As it happened, Michael only got 20 drones, and neither Wedge nor Turnkey had seemed among the most urgent targets at the time. As a result, Wedge had managed to take his computers and his phone and slip straight through The Agency’s fingers sometime during the last three days, perhaps mere hours after agents first attempted to question him. Michael’s old anger over budget cuts and partial funding was compounded by his new chagrin at apparently having failed to deploy the drones correctly.

“They haven’t been in the same city for two months?” Raymond looked at Michael with disappointed skepticism.

“Not since the Personal Democracy Forum, no. We don’t think.”

“I may not be a young man,” Raymond said, as he took off his glasses and folded them into his shirt pocket, “but I do seem to recall there are critical parts of taking a lover that require…in-person participation. Explain to me how—”

“Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped. She was the only social scientist on the team, and she knew no one else would get the joke, but it didn’t matter.

“A digital who-what?”

“It’s not so uncommon, especially among that set,” Michael said. “Spring semester at the University didn’t end until mid-May, and she’s teaching summer courses, so her ability to travel is limited. And obviously he’s been off covering—”

“Yes, we all know what he’s been covering,” Raymond snapped. If it wasn’t for Wedge, they could all be going home right now.

“So you see, the fact that they haven’t been in the same place doesn’t necessarily indicate—”

“Then what does make us think that—goddammit, what—”

“Turnkey,” Steve supplied.

“What makes us think engaging Turnkey will be useful? Does communication between the two indicate any sort of special relationship? Any secrets to which she’d be privy? Any reason at all to believe she knows where he is?” He was looking at Patricia.

“Not the communication we have right now, no…not directly. But again, right now we’re only looking at metadata and the contents of his email communication. We don’t have hers yet, and his are clearly—”

“Shouldn’t you have her responses in his account?”

“No new ones for a year, no. Which is part of why we believe he has an additional account, or accounts, probably stored locally on his machine and sent using encryption, at minimum. As soon as her responses start to become personal, they stop. And there’s no mention of the Occupy essay at any point—no initial idea, no exchanged drafts, no discussion. There’s no way this was his only email account. We’ll have the contents of his SMS transmissions in a day or two, which might help, but since we don’t know when he started encrypting those, it’ll take some time to figure out when the clear messages became decoys. But given the patterns we see in his communication before the fall of 2011, and the patterns in her communication throughout, we believe it’s highly likely that their communication moved off email as they became better acquainted. We’re working on getting full access to his Twitter account, though Twitter is being characteristically uncooperative. And unfortunately, we know they’re both avid Snapchat users.”

“We don’t have a backdoor there?”

“No, not yet,” Patricia sighed.

“Frankly, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get one. They delete all the images server-side as soon as recipients view them,” Michael added. “Right now, the only way for us to get the ‘Snaps’ sent between Wedge and Turnkey would be to pull the files from one of their phones using recovery software. But we have no reason to believe she’d just hand hers over, especially now that Wedge has left the building (so to speak). We could easily get a warrant, but as soon as we show up with orders, we lose the opportunity to form a more…collaborative working relationship with her. Which is what I think—”

“And you have no idea where his phone is, because you have no idea where he is.”

Michael could feel his cheeks pinking with anger, but he swallowed his pride and did his best to speak in measured tones. “At the moment, we are short on leads. But that’s why we want to move forward with Turnkey. Right now, she looks like the most promising available target.”

“Because you’re somehow convinced that they’re—”

“Honestly, I don’t know if that matters,” Isobel said. “What we see in the metadata alone—”

“I think it matters. Until very recently we’d tied him to that actress, and an illicit—”

“Raymond, if we want to go the discrediting route, we’ll have plenty of ammunition for that. There’s always plenty of ammunition, no matter who it is. Everyone is discreditable now. What we need tonight is an indication, a reason to start taking action, and we already have that in the metadata.” Isobel was firm. “Up until his disappearance, they were in near-constant contact. When we look at the last year in particular, the only times we see gaps of more than 48 hours are times when we know they were both in the same place. So what this tells us—”

“It’s true,” Michael said, cutting her off. “We’ve got their movements very well documented, even without going to The Archives for camera data. Public speaking engagements, passages through airports, locations of credit card purchases, Facebook and Twitter activity, occasional photos. Location data for both from cell phone towers, and from her toll transponder. And when you line up the dates from all that with—”

“So if their movements are so well documented, where is he now?”

“Someplace where he’s not using his phone or his credit card, clearly.” Patricia was ready to go home for the day, too.

“You know this could have been prevented if—”

“Raymond.” Isobel was going to have her say, even if she had to talk over Michael and Patricia both. “Look, right now the sex thing doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what was said in the text messages, or what was shown in the Snaps, or whatever. We have everything we need to move forward in the metadata. It’s right there.”

“And what is it? What are we looking at right there?”

Isobel suddenly noticed the room had gotten quieter. She felt awkward. Her title may have said one thing, but after two months at The Agency, she still wasn’t sure exactly where she fit within its hierarchy. Steve stared studiously at his keyboard, poised and ready to type.

“Feelings,” she said, on the spot and lacking a better word.

“Feelings.”

God, this building was quiet after hours.

“Feelings,” Isobel said, as if she wasn’t aware of how stupid she probably sounded to the rest of the team. “They have been in constant contact, and that’s all we really need to know. We don’t need to know what they’re talking about. What we know is that they rarely go two days without talking about something—anything—and that it’s been that way since even before they wrote the Occupy piece. Sex or no sex doesn’t matter; what we see in the data is that this consistency of dialogue isn’t common for either one of them. It shows some kind of closeness, some kind of attachment. And maybe it means she knows where he is, or maybe it doesn’t, but what it almost certainly means is that they care about each other. One way or another, that’s something we can use to our advantage—and we need to do that before we lose track of her, too.”

*       *       *       *       *

Behind thick blackout curtains; through the rarely unveiled windows in that Agency meeting room; down below, as a city was growing still and its streets going silent; out in the nearer distance, where electric lights shimmered on the rippling mirror surface of a river: night had arrived.

Patricia read over the most recent posts on Turnkey’s blog, highlighted and tagged passages that seemed like patterns, pieces that might be of possible interest. She updated her notes. She thought about her son, who was probably asleep by now. Or hopefully asleep by now. She realized she felt more relief than guilt over missing another bedtime story, another bedtime struggle. The Agency was so peaceful once most of everyone had gone home, so quiet.

Raymond pushed his carton of takeout aside, and leaned heavily on the conference table. He was tired, in more ways than one. He didn’t want to go home; he didn’t want to stay here. He wanted a drink.

Isobel washed her hands, checked her face in the mirror, and reached for the door…then hesitated. She paused to pull out her phone, while she still had some privacy. “Another late—” she started to type, but then heard the echo of her earlier words, and thought about feelings laid bare in quantified frequencies, and rode backspace back to its inevitable conclusion. She put the phone in her bag, and stepped out.

Steve collected the takeout cartons, wiped down the table, & brought in a fresh carafe of coffee. He sat down, and waited for Raymond to reconvene the meeting. He stared at his laptop, and wished he could check Facebook. More than that, he wished he could check other people’s Facebooks, other accounts. Well, maybe just a certain someone’s Facebook account. Someday. A few more promotions. A few more missed opportunities, and a few more Friday nights sacrificed to this room.

Michael ran one last query using a new program he’d been tinkering with, but his mind was on the drones. His drones. If The Agency had just given him the allocation he’d wanted, none of them would have to be here right now. If he’d deployed the drones that he had gotten differently, none of them would have to be here right now. Anger. Guilt. Frustration. Regret. Focus on next year’s budget. Spin this the right way. The first step toward making The Agency believe that this mess was their fault was believing it himself. He was short on belief. He was certain that drones were what The Agency needed, that drones would finally enable The Agency to keep the Nation safe. He was less certain how he could have known, how he would prevent himself from making the same mistakes with the drones in the future. There might never be enough drones. He tried to set that thought aside for the rest of the night.

All five were seated at the conference table again.

“So. Turnkey,” Raymond said. “What do we know? Steve, give us the basics. Refresh our memory.”

“She’ll be 36 this fall. Single, never married, no children; some fairly ambiguous friendships but no clear significant other, at least not for the last few years. She had one sister, who died in a car accident a couple of years ago. It doesn’t seem like they were close. Her parents are both still alive, though. They have a family business that makes signs near Cincinnati, and are active in a local Tea Party group—”

Patricia couldn’t keep from smirking. “Given her line of work, there’s your ‘discrediting.’”

“We don’t get to choose our parents…or our children,” Raymond responded, perhaps more pointedly than he’d intended. He made it his business to keep close tabs on his team, just as his team made it their business to keep close tabs on The Agency’s targets. He knew, therefore, that Patricia’s son had already been expelled from two preschools, and that they were having trouble finding a kindergarten that would take him next year. The child was a terror, and Raymond had quietly given him the ‘honor’ of being the youngest name on a watch list of potential school shooting perpetrators.

“Didn’t your own daughter turn out to be a real, card-carrying Communist?” Michael joked. “I heard that—”

“My daughter is not the topic of conversation here.” Raymond glared at Michael while nodding at Steve to continue. He had no patience for this tonight, nor did he have a sense of humor about it on any particular night.

“That’s it for family, really. Her father is an only child, and her mother has been estranged from her family since before Turnkey was born.”

“What about friends? Mentors?”

“Based on her metadata and the communication we’ve been able to pick up so far, there aren’t any big surprises. Most of her closer connections map onto our existing network model, and none of the new nodes seem likely to be persons of interest. At least, not at this moment.”

“Tomorrow, start with looking at the parents. If they’re Tea Party, there’s probably something you can get them for. Guns? Disgraced mega-church pastors? Sedition? How many employees at the sign shop?”

“Three, plus the two of them.”

“They do their own taxes?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

For the first time that day, Raymond almost smiled. “Great. Perfect. Nobody gets that right—and if they’ve done it by the book, they still don’t have the capacity to absorb the work-hours they’d lose responding to an audit.”

Isobel was uneasy. “You really want to send the IRS after a pair of Tea Partiers, after all the—”

“No, I don’t. Not if there are better options.”

“And we don’t really need to audit them,” Patricia added. “All we need is for Turnkey to believe we’re willing to audit them.”

“How much do we think that would affect her?”

“It absolutely affects her—her father is the cosignatory on her mortgage,” Michael said. “She was still working as an adjunct when she bought the condo. Couldn’t have done without the family help. They’re more entangled than you’d think.”

“Steve, add ‘condo inspections’ to the list—Stick side. Put ‘mortgage’ on both Carrot side and Stick side. Michael, fixed or adjustable?”

“Fixed, unfortunately.”

“Dammit. Well, look into zoning at least, see if there isn’t something at the city level that we could use for leverage. Isobel, what do we know about her inner circle? Who’s important to her, other than Wedge?”

“Like Steve said, it’s about what you’d expect. She has a fairly extensive network of weak ties, especially when you take her social media presences into account—her Klout score is 72, to give you an idea. But she really has only a dozen or so people that we’d consider strong ties—the rest of the Gang of Eight, one friend from her PhD program, a few friends she’s known since college, and one friend from her job in between college and graduate school. None outside the Gang of Eight are involved in any political activity, so there’s no new information there. One of them spends a lot of time on autism awareness. That’s about it.”

“Well, add the new ones—what is that, four of them?”

“Five.”

“Add them to the list of people we start investigating tomorrow morning. I want every possible vulnerability exposed, every opportunity to make any of their lives better or worse—whether we can use those openings to persuade Turnkey, or to persuade her friends to help if we have to.”

Steve typed away on his keyboard, making lists as instructed. Raymond raised his mug, swallowed coffee, and set the vessel down hard. Click-click, bam.

“Patricia, the job. What do we know about that?”

“She’s an assistant professor of American Studies at the University. It’s her first tenure-track position.”

“And when is she up for review?”

“Two or three years from now, most likely.”

“How does that look?”

“Hard to say. The Occupy essay she and Wedge coauthored got them both a lot of exposure, but it wasn’t published in an academic journal—so it won’t be given as much weight by the committee, and some of the senior faculty may hold it against her. She’s published two other short papers since she joined the University, but nothing of note. And her blog is fairly popular, but again: a lot of academics don’t think that’s a good thing.”

“Who are our friends over there?”

“No one in American Studies, unfortunately. We have the Dean of Social Sciences, but administration isn’t supposed to participate in tenure decisions.”

Raymond had no patience for academia’s archaic, Byzantine protocols. “Well certainly he has some influence.”

“She, actually. And yes, influence, but…it’s tricky. That’s not the kind of thing—”

“I don’t care what kind of thing it is, I care whether we can directly impact Turnkey’s chances of getting tenure.”

“We know we can do it indirectly,” Isobel volunteered. “She’s well-enough known that any personal scandal will at least embarrass the University, if not worse. But the trick will be getting the scandal right. That she’s a public figure in some circles is why she can’t risk losing face and disgracing the University, but it also means that if we don’t choose carefully—if we pick something related to social movements that she can put a good spin on, for example, or that she can make into some kind of statement—then we’ve damaged her publicity just to hand her fame and potential notoriety in the process. At which point, she may actually have an easier time finding a new job, and at an even better University.”

“I don’t think she’d take that risk,” said Patricia. “She knows she’s on thin ice as it stands, especially if they want to review her case in two years instead of three. She bought a condo. She’s not planning to leave, if she has any say in the matter.”

“What are we working with here?” Raymond asked. “Michael, what have we got on tap for discrediting?”

“Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’ll be much more to go through once we get the surveillance camera footage, and her email, and the texts, and the rest of the social media pieces, but there’s already much more than enough here to work with.” Michael’s tone seemed to indicate that this was one hell of an iceberg.

“And? Is this—”

“There are some repeated web searches that her health insurer would probably like to know about,” Isobel said, “and more than one extra social media profile she’d probably prefer the University not know about. But our strongest hand here is by far the gender card, which will be very easy to play.” She and Michael exchanged a knowing look. “Granted, our society has become more accepting of a lot of different behaviors, and even identities. But the fact remains that women are still held to different standards than men are, especially professional women. And while some of these photos are very old—”

“Where did we get the photos?”

“All over the place, really,” Michael responded. “I crawled the Facebook database looking for accounts with overlapping IP addresses, and sure enough: she has a second account. It was clearly not a professional page—a lot of profanity, nothing of intellectual merit—but I didn’t find any discrediting photos posted there. There were a few pictures that showed her wearing a lot of eye makeup, though, and when I combined those photos with the more professional photos we already had, the facial recognition software I’ve been beta testing did an incredible job. I let it run for 30 minutes during our dinner break, just to see what would happen. When the program can triangulate with those two different image sets, Turnkey’s face becomes pretty distinctive. The images the software returned are spread over 20 some-odd years, but we estimate 70-80% of them are photos of her. That’s almost unprecedented. Most of the photos are embarrassing, but benign—”

“But there are also some clear exceptions,” Isobel interjected. “There’s a range of photos in which she is clearly intoxicated, at least one of which appears to show her both underage and possibly unconscious. There are some unfortunate subcultural phases, one of which involved some questionable cosplay and one of which included a runway show where she worked as a fetish model. But most importantly”—she paused briefly, for emphasis—”we’re nearly positive we’ve found a still from an amateur pornographic film.”

Raymond may have been skeptical, and Patricia flat out didn’t believe them, but Steve couldn’t help himself. “Really?!” he exclaimed. As far as he was concerned, it would be the first interesting thing that had happened all week. Isobel, too, was fighting hard to contain her excitement; she felt as though—for once—she finally had a contribution to make, rather than an argument.

“It’s a crappy scan of a paper photograph, and the photograph was probably taken around 16 years ago if we’re reading the date stamp correctly,” she said. “But the webpage states that this film was created in the same town where Turnkey went to college, and the date stamp places the photo within the timeframe that she would have been living there. We’re almost certain that she’s one of the women in the scene—and if she is, that film is an incredible liability.”

“Where did this come from?”

“A page tucked in the way, way back of the Way Way Back machine,” Michael said, with some resignation. He had to admit: Sometimes it bothered him that the Way Way Back Machine still had files The Agency’s network of databases didn’t have, or at least couldn’t find.

“And what is this film called?” Though he’d never have admitted it, Raymond was afraid to ask. His own estranged daughter was the same age as Turnkey, and he just didn’t want to think about it.

“A Virgin Sacrifice…so not terribly original,” Isobel said. “But to be fair, based on the plot synopsis on the archived webpage, it seems clear—at least, from a critical perspective—that this is really just a group of young, college-age girls, who happen to have access to some old 8mm equipment, and who have chosen the medium of film both to counter Freudian notions of ‘penis envy’ and to explore nascent notions of queer subjectivity. But to most audiences, it’s not going to read—”

And just like that, the fledgling acceptance Isobel had been starting to feel again seemed to evaporate. Sometimes she wondered why coming to work for The Agency had seemed like a better idea than working as an adjunct, specter of food stamps or no. She sighed, dejected.

“Basically, they thought they were doing something artistically edgy and intellectual, but I’m fairly confident most people who watch this will just think it’s really fucked up,” Isobel said. She paused a second to see if anyone was going to comment on her F-bomb, but that no one blinked at. “And since Turnkey doesn’t do film studies, or even gender studies, she’s going to have a really hard time explaining this to the University, to say nothing of the general public. It would be very, very difficult for her to salvage her academic career if this went public, so we’re looking either for a digitized copy online, or for someone who holds a film copy—there may only have been 3 or 4 of them. If we can find one, I think we have our trump card.”

“Raymond,” Patricia asked warily, “Is destroying both her career and her name really on the table?”

Isobel was unsympathetic. “She could easily get a book deal. Wedge got two!”

“Yes, and that essay will obviously continue to be far more beneficial to his career than to hers,” Patricia snapped, to her own surprise. When had she started to feel protective of Turnkey? She’d never met the woman. They had little-to-nothing in common. Yet, Patricia had to admit: The situation was making her feel increasingly angry. The more research she did, the more time she spent reading and learning and watching, the more she believed the trajectory of Wedge and Turnkey’s relationship—whatever its precise nature may or may not have been—was one in which he consistently took more of the credit, yet left her with more of the blame. Turnkey wasn’t even a suspect; she was someone who probably had information about someone who almost certainly had information about, and had perhaps collaborated with, some people The Agency wanted very much to interrogate. But were they really thinking about dredging this film up just for that?

“Look,” Patricia began again, “Turnkey wants to publish books, not get ‘a book deal.’ It doesn’t matter what she could do in theory; it matters what she will and won’t risk on Wedge’s behalf. We don’t need to find this film—she won’t be willing to risk her shot at tenure, not after getting this far. Intimations will be enough. We don’t need the thing itself.” Whether more for Turnkey or more for herself, Patricia wished she could believe her own words. But the truth was that, the more she learned about Turnkey, the less likely it seemed that she would ever betray her friend Wedge.

“So we’re certain we can have a negative, indirect effect on her tenure evaluation, and we believe we can have a either a negative or a positive direct effect on her tenure evaluation. What about a positive, indirect effect? Do we have that capability, Patricia?” At the end of the day—and this one had ben such a very long day—Raymond did prefer carrots to sticks. He believed they built better long-term relationships, better networks of informants. And they didn’t require such a strong stomach.

“Short of coming up with grant money to fund her research, I don’t see how,” Patricia replied. But she wanted to see how.

“It won’t work,” Isobel replied. “She has to state where the support for her projects comes from every time she publishes, remember? What’s she going to write, ‘This paper was made possible by a generous grant from—’”

“Michael, do we have anybody at—who gives money to American Studies, anyway?”

“We have a few Board Members at some of the bigger private foundations. It might be a possibility.”

“Well, look into that tomorrow morning, too. I want to make sure we’re clear on all our options before we make contact with her. In the meantime, all of you, go home and get a few hours of sleep.”

None of them needed to be told twice; it was nearly one in the morning. They went to lock computers and notes in their offices; to wait for the elevator; to be anywhere other than here, however briefly. Raymond stared blankly into the room, empty but for the curtains, the chairs, the table, and the coffee carafe that Steve had forgotten in his rush to leave. It would wait until the morning. He flipped the row of light switches in the meeting room, one by one by one, and walked back toward his own office in the dark.

“Raymond?”

It was Isobel, stepping out of the ladies’ room. Her face was lit only by the green glow of an exit sign a bit further down the hall. She spoke softly.

“I’m positive…we find that film, we can end this whole thing now. I know it.”

He sighed.

“I know. Go get some rest.”

“Goodnight,” she said, and paused—then turned to go. He waited until the hallway door had shut behind her, until the faint chime of the elevator announced her departure.

He walked back through the darkness into to his office, and pulled back the curtain.

*       *       *       *       *

Three stories up, on a wooden porch; at a metal table with a glass top, surrounded by pots full of plants. A mere suggestion of a breeze, just enough to stir cover sheets on two stacks of term papers. A Saturday afternoon, partly cloudy, a little too warm.

The doorbell filled the space left vacant by her still and silent phone.

This essay is a work of fiction inspired by recent events. It makes reference to previous scholarly work by the author, as well as to work by Erving Goffman (spoiled identities), Mark Granovetter (strong and weak ties), Nathan Jurgenson (digital dualism, IRLfetish), and Sarah Wanenchak (ephemeral media). 

Whitney Erin Boesel likes to push the boundaries of different formats. She does so with far fewer words on Twitter: @phenatypical.

Cell tower image from here; tiny drone from here; encryption graphic from here; stormy tower from here; takeout carton from here; mirror frame from here; camera from here.

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog.

We got another reminder last week that despite complaints about federal government programs that give money to the poor, when it comes to taxes, the government is much more generous to the wealthy.  The news came from a report from the Congressional Budget Office on tax expenditures.

These are the ways that the government uses the tax system to give money to people. Some expenditures are tax credits, which can take the form of cash payments.  Others are tax breaks — taxing people less than the going rate. For example, if I am in the 35% tax bracket, but the government charges me only 15% on the $100,000 I made playing the stock market, the government is giving me $20,000 it could otherwise have had me pay in taxes. That’s an expense. The preferential rate for my luck in the market costs the government $20,000.

The justification for these expenditures is that they are a way the government can encourage people to do something that it wants them to do.  With tax breaks, the government is basically paying people by not charging them full tax fare — encouraging them to buy a house or give to charity or get health insurance at their work.  Similarly with the tax credits that go mostly to the poor. We want people to hold a job and to care for their kids.  The child tax credit gives people more money to care for their children.  The Earned Income Tax Credit pays them for working, even at jobs that pay very little.  By the same logic, the government is paying me to invest my money in companies — or put another way, to play the stock market.

This government largesse, however, benefits some people more than others:

About half of all tax expenditures go to the top quintile (top 20% of income earners).  The bottom 80% of earners divide the other half.  And within that richest quintile, the top 1% receive 15% of all tax expenditures (this distribution of tax breaks roughly parallels the distribution of income). Were you really expecting Sherwood Forest?

Here is a breakdown of the costs of these different tax expenditures:

The Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefits mostly the poor, costs less than $40B.  The tab for the low tax on investment income (capital gains and dividends) is more than twice that, and nearly all of that goes to the top quintile.  More than two-thirds goes to the richest 1%.

Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post WonkBlog regraphed the numbers to show the total amounts overall plus the amounts in each category for each income group:

The point? People complain about government payments to the poor, but tax breaks are also payments, though less obviously so, to the rich.  And those tax breaks cost the government a lot more money.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, 1768
Courtesy of MFA Boston & Wikipedia via Slate

An elegant design, compelling evidence, and a timely story rendered exceptionally well. Sociologist Kieran Healy’s wonderful post on using metadata to find Paul Revere (and/or Jack Black) is now attracting megareaders at Slate. The opening lines:

I wanted to give non-specialists a sense of how the structural analysis of what’s being called “metadata” works, and to show in a fun but hopefully telling way how much you can get out of that approach. So I tried to emphasize that I was using one of the earliest, and (in retrospect) most basic methods we have, but one that still has the capacity to surprise people unfamiliar with SNA. 

Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1963.

In this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer, sociologist Chip Gallagher reminds us that two formative events in the history of American race relations unfolded just hours apart, fifty years ago today: JFK’s ground-breaking speech demanding that the federal government address institutional racism against African Americans and the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers. Gallagher uses the anniversary to reflect on the “undeniable… progress that has been made” and how much more remains to be done to “level the playing field.” Gallagher writes, “Social scientists are fond of pointing out that when individuals, typically white individuals, discuss racism, they use the past tense,” but wonders, “How much has changed in 50 years? Is our democracy self-correcting, with our moral arc consistently bending toward justice…?” He concludes with a open challenge: “What we should be asking ourselves is, Where are the speeches like Kennedy’s that appeal to the citizenry’s better angels to right a social wrong? Where are the pleas to Americans on moral and ethical grounds by those who can use the bully pulpit to raise public awareness of the social inequalities that continue to plague our nation?”

Perhaps predictably, I didn’t love it. I did like parts of it—I was moved by many of the stories and the way several of them were rendered into prose, and I left feeling with a much better sense of the complexity of the challenges facing these nine extraordinary girls. But while the film succeeded in places, it failed in others.

Let me start with what the film does well.

As Natalie X. Baker points out in Bitch Magazine, the strongest part of the film is its exploration of the “bravery and self-determination” possessed by all of these girls. Although they face significant obstacles, these girls aren’t victims. Here are some details from a few of their stories:

• Fourteen-year-old Senna lives in poverty in an Andes mining town in Peru. Named by her father after the heroine of Xena: Warrior Princess, she discovers Peruvian poet César Vallejo and memorizes his poetry, which she reenacts with passion at school competitions.
• On the streets of Kolkata, India, eleven-year-old Ruksana paints pictures and attends school. Both her parents work wherever they can and insist that both of their daughters will complete their education and go on to a better life.
• In Freetown, Sierra Leone, sixteen-year-old Mariama attends school, hosts her own local call-in radio show, and dreams of becoming a scientist.
• Eight-year-old Wadley survives the earthquake with her mother in Haiti, but they have to relocate to the Carradeux tent camp in Port-au-Prince. Although her mother can no longer afford the school fees for her daughter, Wadley pesters the teacher until she relents and lets Wadley join the class.

Like many other viewers, I found these individual stories far more compelling than what came in between: mostly, stark statistics narrated by a solemn Liam Neeson. I didn’t mind the inclusion of the actual statistics (which do provide a broader picture) as much as the mode of presentation: important facts about girls and education are presented on charming posters held by a beautiful and diverse assortment of girl child models cavorting in the fields. From garbage dumps in Cambodia to the pages of a Garnet Hill catalog.

These precious scenes on the hillside feel like ads. And they are: they are selling the issue of girls’ education. In contrast, the stories about the nine girls are moving. Even when they do not unfold in realistic modes, they generally convey a sense of the girls’ lives.

I just alluded to the fact that many of these stories push at the boundaries of documentary storytelling with playful artistic and poetic flair. Some viewers do not like this. Natalie Baker, for example, criticizes the film for letting the writers take “linguistic liberties in translating and transforming each girl’s story.” She would rather the girls speak for themselves, instead of hearing the girls’ stories as they have been shaped and crafted by writers, and then spoken by actors.

In principal, I agree with Baker—allowing subjects to speak for themselves can be crucially important for informing our understanding and knowledge about their lives and the conditions in which they live. But for some reason, the writerly interventions of Girl Rising didn’t bother me so much. For one, I trusted many of these writers, most of whom were born in the countries in which their subjects live, and many of whom have spent years navigating the tricky ethical territory of writing about others. I also liked the result in many (though not all) of the stories. And importantly, I had a sense of the process. At the beginning, the film explains that each writer spent time with her subject and then did her best to render the girl’s experience in a form that captured the truths of her life. Girl Rising isn’t “straight” documentary, and it doesn’t present itself as such.

All nonfiction is crafted, including “straight” documentary and personal narrative. So I took these stories as stories, based on each writer’s understanding of her subject. That said, I did prefer the way some of the writers approached and crafted their subject’s story more than others; some of the narratives deeply moved me, while others felt overwritten.

A larger problem emerged when stories were reenacted. In general, the girls were played by themselves—so, for example, the character of Wadley is played by Wadley, and presumably some of the other characters in her story are played by those people. But I’m pretty sure that the earthquake scene wasn’t actual documentary footage but rather a reenactment, and it seemed to me that there had to be other actors—in her story, perhaps, but also in others. (The film does tell us that the two girls who live in the Middle East, one in Afghanistan and one in Egypt, were played by actors in order to protect the girls’ identities.)

I’m not a fan of this kind of docudrama, most of all because the film didn’t signal when we were viewing reenactments. As a result, I sometimes wasn’t sure what I was watching: was it “real”? was it fiction? The film crossed some kind of line without informing me. As a result, I had difficulty gauging my emotional reactions.

If part of the success of a documentary (or of any film) is how well the story is told—how it impacts us emotionally as well as intellectually—Girl Rising failed when I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry.

In case you hadn’t guessed, Girl Rising is a film with high production values, expertly directed by documentarian Richard Robbins, and backed by what appears to be a fair amount of money (Intel Corporation is one of the “partners” of 10×10, the “global action campaign” that produced the film, along with The Documentary Group and Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions). This is neither an indie film nor the Women Make Movies documentaries that I frequently show in my Women’s Studies classes. Rather, it’s a new kind of collaboration that brings corporate money to documentary/narrative filmmaking and social issues.

This kind of collaboration generates the money and resources that documentary filmmakers, nonprofit organizations, and social programs need. But it also means that Girl Rising is part of Intel’s program of Corporate Social Responsibility. So should it really come as a surprise that the film’s good intentions get mired in what Natalie Baker calls “cinematic chivalry”? That it leaves out feminist activism on girls’ issues in these various locations? That it lacks any kind of structural analysis, as articulately pointed out by an anonymous commenter over at Bitch? (Never mentioned, for example, are the neoliberal economic policies that have contributed to the existence of school fees in countries like Haiti, or the behavior of multinational gold mining companies in countries like Peru.)

I’m not condoning these omissions. I’m just pointing out that Girl Rising isn’t about economic or political revolution. It attempts to do one thing, and to do it well: to give names and faces and stories to an issue—girls’ education—that is precisely the kind of issue that many people agree with in the abstract but which has failed to become a priority for individual governments, the United Nations, development and human rights organizations, and private foundations. 10×10 wants us to put girls’ education at the top of our list, and they want to make an impact on policy makers and donors—as well as girls in the U.S. And girls and their mothers might well constitute a major portion of the viewing audience. (While I think my nine-year-old daughter is still a little too young to watch Girl Rising, I do wonder whether the film might be particularly well-suited for middle and high school students.)

Which brings me to my last point: the film’s assumptions about its subjects and its viewers. Clearly, girls in the U.S. will be among its viewers. But what about the girls who struggle in this country? We all know that there are groups of girls in the U.S. who face extraordinary challenges in attending and graduating from school. Where are these girls? Don’t we do ourselves a grave disservice by perpetuating the idea that only girls who live elsewhere need help? How hard would it be, really, to include one segment focused on the life of one girl living in this country? That would go a long way towards breaking down the us/them binary that troubles so much U.S.-based activism—and might bring a sense of urgency to the social inequalities affecting girls’ lives here at home.

Girl Rising will premiere on June 16 at 9pm EST on CNN.

I should note that I’ll really be the “Dean in Semi-Residence,” as the students will live in a traditional dormitory while I’ll be in the apartment complex next door. I have no qualms about going back to a dorm — my first year of college (1986-1987) and last year of graduate school (1998-1999) were in this type of building — but my wife vetoed that possibility, as she did not want to be running to a bathroom at the end of a hall in the middle of the night during visits. I guess that I would also get tired of that too. Two units in the apartment building are available for visiting faculty, so I’ll be in one of those.

I was the co-creator of a 2012-2013 University of Minnesota Living-Learning Community (LLC), Huntley House. I’ll miss these guys, but maybe I can call on them in the future to start a similar LLC at UW-P? I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Bring on the Exploration LLC students!

This post originally appeared in 2010.

Most of us familiar with Down‘s Syndrome know that it brings characteristic facial features and delayed or impaired cognitive development. People with Down, however, are also more vulnerable than the general population to diabetes, leukemia, and infectious and autoimmune disease, and about 40% are born with heart defects.

For most of history, then, the life expectancy of people with Down was very low.  But, with advances in knowledge and access to health care, life expectancy has risen dramatically… especially for white people:

The Centers for Disease Control explain that severity of Down does not vary by race, so most likely the cause of the gap in life expectancy is differences in the quantity and quality of health care.

Possibilities include differences in factors that may be associated with improved health in the general population such as socioeconomic status, education, community support, medical or surgical treatment of serious complications, or access to, use of, or quality of preventative health care.

This is just one striking example of the wide racial gap in health outcomes and access to care.  We see data with similar patterns most everywhere we look.  As examples, pre-term births, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and likelihood of living near a toxic release facility.

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, via Family Inequality.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)