Here’s a good ethical puzzle for a social problems or public policy class.  Is it morally acceptable for New York City to address their homeless problem by providing them a one-way airline ticket.  Apparently, the city has saved thousands of dollars by giving indigent residents the option of moving to another city or state.

On one hand, this seems to meet the conditions of market exchange — two parties engaged in a voluntary transaction.  And with the city’s unemployment over 10 percent, perhaps helping the homeless move addresses a jobs/labor spatial mismatch?  On the other hand, it seems as if the city is “giving up” on its residents.  It is presuming that providing social services is an economic drain rather than a human capital investment.  More importantly, it is signaling that some residents of the city are more valuables than others.

HT: Planetizen

Cool stuff for the day.

From the Good Magazine blog, Inhabit.com and Dwell have announced the finalists of a fantastic competition called Reburbia.  Participants were invited to consider how we could re-envision declining suburbs.  According to the contest description:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Here are the  winners:

Turning McMansions into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants,

Rezoning suburban residential areas to include commercial ventures

and

Creating Big Box agriculture defined as: turning big box store parking lots into farms, the interior of the stores into greenhouses and restaurants, and many of the existing structural details into renewable energy generators.

Looks nice, but the big question is how you frame these changes so that local governments and NIMBY types are receptive. If anyone knows of any places where these types of ventures are happening, shoot me an e-mail.

Bee Lavender has a poignant piece in guardian.co.uk on why she prefers the British health care system (NHS) to the American version.  Here’s the key passage in her essay.

In the US, the greatest restriction on personal freedom that I have ever encountered in my own life, or witnessed in the lives of friends, all comes down to health insurance. Creative, innovative, talented people are unable to change jobs because they need the insurance. Small companies collapse because they cannot afford employee insurance. People die because they do not have insurance.

This to me seems the critical issue we need to work through as we move forward in the U.S. health care debate. Has the U.S. system reached a ceiling in its desire to create the underlying conditions for a free society? We’ve always had a struggle with spending on public goods in this country, but have lurched towards funding basic services to create a just society (education, Medicare, Social Security, etc.). There are lots of ways to cover everyone and the NHS has its critics, but I’m not sure if we as a nation think that access to health services is a precondition for living in a free society. I fear we become too fragmented or skeptical of government’s ability to provide public goods? I’m not sure if we in the social sciences can do more to help drive the debate since the question of universal coverage is about value orientations.

My Ph.D. alma mater, Boulder, Colorado, is home to the best performing housing market in America, which I why I had to live in a basement on Baseline and Dartmouth for four years 🙂  Check out how many of these markets are in college towns:

The Top 30 Housing Markets in America.

HT: Planetizen

HT: Planetizen

Civic engagement denizens, be careful what you wish for. A New York Times article elaborates on the Strange New World of Public Participation resulting from the traveling “town-hall-meeting-palooza” of the past two weeks:

The result was a series of made-for-YouTube moments, with video clips played endlessly on the Internet and cable television, the logical extreme, perhaps, of an era when Joe the Plumber is really named Sam. Along the way, another kind of Joe — Joe Six-Pack, the average Joe — seemed to disappear, pushed into the background by crowds bearing scripted talking points and signs.

“We’re living in the era of the viral town meeting,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who once worked as a Senate aide. “I remember back in the ’70s getting identically worded telegrams in the thousands. What’s happened now is the technology of protest has metastasized, and it threatens to overwhelm the relationship between members of Congress and their constituents.”

The advent of the Internet has created “hyper-public” spaces where the object of “discourse” (I’m being generous calling it that) is an audience of millions even if the pretext is a town hall meeting of dozens. Here’s Arlen Specter getting bum-rushed (I know, I’m 39, what do you want!) by his constituents.

The combination of a contentious issue, public forums, cell phone cameras and You Tube is a primeval soup for loud, outrageous rhetoric that can fill the 24 hour news hole. The question is whether members interpret this as the pulse of their constituents or an orchestrated set of activists using new technology effectively. I find all of this wanting…. If you’re going to make a scene at a town hall meeting, it should look like this:

Zuma Dogg Fights City Hall – Watch today’s top amazing videos here

I’d like my own Johnnie Cochrane team

A few posts back, I talked about Charles Taylor’s view of multiculturalism as a proposed remedy to the ill of mis-recognition — being looked down upon by the majority in society because of your group status. While we can arrive at a general consensus on the problem of mis-recognition, there is some debate on how you resolve it. For my own benefit, I’m interested in thinking about whether the university as an institutional actor has the wherewithal to address misrecognition.

Nancy Fraser has an interesting article in New Left Review where she addresses this question of mis-recognition. Her main thesis is that identity politics as currently practiced creates a “problem of displacement” by elevating cultural claims of mis-recognition (negative portrayals of Latinos in films as an example) over claims of material or resource inequality. This problem of displacement is evident in the way universities do diversity, focusing mainly on addressing mis-recognition through the creating of cultural centers or by expanding course offerings to address cultural stigma. What receives less attention, Fraser (and I) would argue, is a discussion of how cultural mis-recognition is connected to material inequality.

Fraser’s solution is to rearticulate mis-recognition as an issue of status position. From this perspective, addressing misrecognition isn’t about whether or not a group’s culture is properly represented, but rather it becomes an issue of the relative status position of members of different groups within an institution’s interrelated set of power hierarchies. Viewing mis-recognition as reproduced through a lattice of socio-political institutions raises the bar for addressing mis-recognition.  Succcessful diversity efforts is then about how much parity your institution has in terms of power and resource distribution, not simply about how many “awareness weeks” a campus has.

Word to states rights yo!
Low taxes are off the chain, word!

I’ve been doing some reading on the Left critique of multiculturalism.  Scholars like Stanley Fish and Slavoj Zizek have taken multiculturalism to task for its denial of universality.   In this essay, Fish sees multiculturalism as a logical impossibility.  One cannot both embrace universal principles and be geniunely tolerant, he argues, because once an external cultural system violates one of your core tenets, your tolerance becomes a defacto acceptance of that external cultural system.  Put simply, if you tolerate female genital mutilation, you accept that culture’s view of the practice and have thus become a universalist.

Zizek makes a different argument, suggesting that the claim to universality has an intrinsic political power.   Universality is a precondition of politics proper which he defines as:

a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality (“we — the ‘nothing,’ not counted in the order — are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privilieged interest”).

The ability of those not included in the polity to appeal to “politics proper” is the the halmark of liberal progress.  We see this in the civil rights movement’s appeal to universal principles of equal rights and justice.  Multiculturalism mutes the ability to use the universal in politics proper.  When nobody is able to claim the universal, we enter into a post-political moment.

Timothy Powell does an interesting job of challenging thse critiques from the left by highlighting  multiculturalism’s two great strengths.  First, the late 1960’s activist phase was central in the forwarding of recognition claims to a variety of groups including American Indians and gays and lesbians.  Second, the  era of “multicultural critique” of American exceptionalism and Eurocentric hegemony in academia has produced a more acccurate and blended view of American and Eurpoean cultural history.  Wht Takaki calls a “shared retelling of history.”

He criticizes Fish and Zizek for engaging in what Kosofsky Sedgewick calls a (I love this phrase BTW) “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which any project must be deconstructed regardless of their utility.  Powell contends that this “hermeneutics of suspicion” describes the current phase of academic multiculturalism.  His article in Critical Inquiry asks how we pull ourselves out of this spiral of endless critique.

In my work, I’m using Aristotle’s concept of phronesis as a potential way forward.  Phronesis, put simply is the mode of knowledge concerned with wisdom.  This form of knowledge is opposed to epistemological or technical knowledge which is equated with universal knowledge.  Phronesis, instead emphasizes particularity.  Take this passage from Nicomachean Ethics:

Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it (Nichomachean Ethics 1142 a).

rather that viewing multiculturalism in terms of the universal vs. the particular, I argue is should be seen as a complement to it…as the development of wisdom through a diversity of experience, separate from a pursuit of universal truths.  Put another way, one can hold whatever ethical system one chooses (universal), but one needs to understand how to simultaneously stand for what one believes but at the same time be able to exist with difference.   A synchronous toggling between one’s sense of the universal and one’s ability to engage with particularity.

One of the things I struggle most with in examining diversity and it’s benefit to universities is the the question of ethnicity. Namely, of what specific value is an individual ethnicity to a learning environment? As an example, do we want more Latino on our campus because individuals from that pan-ethnic group possess cultural attributes that are distinct from a majority culture? In other words, do we have expectations that Latino students must “do ethnicity” when they arrive, otherwise their value is limited?

As Erik Kaufmann points out in a very interesting piece in Ethnic and Racial Studies, culture is an analytically distinct concept from ethnicity. In previous times, most people acted out the culture attached to their ethnicity pre-ontologically, in that they had no communal identity relative to other groups. But our global, networked society, suggests that cultural markers do not automatically become part of a meaning system.   I’m Cuban-American, but I live among no-one from my distinct ethnic group.  Kaufmann suggests that community is what transmits culture to members of ethnic groups.

So perhaps our role in the university is to provide these spaces for ethnic communities to transmit culture to ethnic groups via organizations like MeCHA or Black Student Union.  In the research I’m doing, I find that institutions are moving away from this type of boundary maintenance, instead seeking to make all clubs open to all students. An there’s a good argument for it. When you create a Chicano resource center or a Black student union on a campus, you are making the presumption that for students, culture and ethnicity are one in the same. There seems to be a fundamental illiberalism present in enforcing boundaries or encouraging boundary formation. Cosmopolitanists would say that our job should be to break up boundaries and make students global citizens.

Ok, fine. But if there are no boundaries, then is there  little purpose to ethnicity as a “value added” in the university learning experience?   As Michael Waltzer points out:

‘the distinctiveness of cultures and groups depends upon closure and, without it, cannot be conceived as a stable feature of human life. If this distinctiveness is a value, as most people . . . seem to believe, then closure must be permitted somewhere’ (Walzer 1983, p. 39).

Without boundary maintenance via a community in the larger project of transmitting values, what’s the point of ethnicity in the university? Social justice? Maybe. But if we’re going to make the case that ethnic diversity enriches the campus learning environment, we have to take the importance of boundaries more seriously.

More later 🙂

It is interesting for me to watch the Sotomoayor confirmation hearings while I’m working on a manuscript on multiculturalism. I think the whole “Wise Latina” imbroglio could be clarified by a look at Charles Taylor’s classic essay on the politics of recognition. In it, he emphasizes the great psychic harm done to individuals who are misrecognized in a society:

misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grevious wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred.  Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people.  it is a vital human need.

This misrecognition causes damage becuase we are dialogical in our identity formation (i.e. reading cues from others in making assessments of our own self worth). This reality has led us politically towards the affirmation of a discourse of recognition where we actively seek to address misrecognition in our society. Sotomayor’s explanation of her “wise Latina” comments in her testimony on Tuesday suggests an effort on her part to combat this idea of misrecognition — that Latino/a’s are not capable of being lawyers and judges.

The pushback to Sotomayor on the right occurs because, as Talyor highlights in his essay, a politics of recognition has come to mean two distinct things. One one hand recognition can be defined as the recognition of commonality — the idea that we are all worth of equal dignity. This universality approach to the politics of recognition has been embraced by the right, at least rhetorically. The inference is that we in public life should emphasize our commonality.

Sotomayor’s response was to invoke a second way of thinking about the politics of recognition (i.e. group differences are valuable in public discourse and should be encouraged). Here’s her defense of her comments:

I think life experiences generally, whether it’s that I’m a Latina or was a state prosecutor or have been a commercial litigator or been a trial judge and an appellate judge, that the mixture of all of those things, the amalgam of them help me to listen and understand.

Or as Taylor puts it:

with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctiveness from everyone else. The idea is that it is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.

Of course when put in the harsh spotlight of American political theater, Sotomayor seemingly did what most smart people do — she retreated to what is politically expedient and in the American context, a politics of difference is not politically viable. Here’s her response to Sen. Pat Leahy’s question on the “wise Latina” issue:

“I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that any racial, ethnic or gender group has an advantage in sound judging,” Sotomayor said. “I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experiences.”

Sounds very universalistic to me. But in thinking about it more, I’ve decided that she’s not walking anything back, but rather she believes both things.

This multiculturalism stuff is sticky business. While both a universalist and particuarlistic claim originate from the same universality place, (all people deserve human dignity, all people have distinct identities worthy of recognition), they produce distinctly different outcomes. While a universality stance is blind to group differences, a politics of difference calls for additional benefits/concessions for specific groups (Quebecquois, Aboriginal peoples, etc.)

The trick, I think, is being able to hold both concepts in your head simultaneously. There are spaces where universalism is appropriate and there are spaces where particularity is appropriate. The challenge is figuring out where those spaces are. it is kinda cool that this is even coming up as a point of contention in American politics more frequently.