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Transformative Studies Institute's Documents
Introduction: The Politics of Knowledge and History
Moments of clarity in American politics are rare. The current season of Republican debates and primaries offers few exceptions. While the gaffs and hijinks provided by Newt, Mitt, Rick and Ron are already legion, the humor that paves the GOP campaign trail obfuscates more often than it illuminates. When Romney does his best Thurston Howell III impression, highlighting how different the daily lives of the very rich are from the rest of us, it shows more about his idiosyncratic aristocratic aloofness than it demonstrates how structural inequality shapes the way in which wealth and money dominate democratic processes and economic policies. And regardless of the way in which liberal pundits lament Clinton era policies or the 1960's War on Poverty, or even FDR's Economic Bill of Rights (now that was Socialism), it is important to remember that elite power and wealth have ALWAYS dominated electoral politics and economic and social policies in the United States. Inequality, discrimination, and fascism are not simply manifestations of Regan or either Bush, but have existed throughout Democratic and Republican regimes alike.
Category:ResearchReads:34Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionTransforming Student Engagement through Documentary and Critical Media Literacy
Young people entering college today have grown up in a multimedia environment, yet the classroom they most often encounter reflects nineteenth-century pedagogy. This paper explores the paradigm shift that is making documentaries more widely accessible for use in the classroom; describes a pedagogical strategy for connecting a critical media literacy ‘reading’ of documentaries with more traditional reading of written texts; investigates the effectiveness of this method to engage students through critical media literacy in ways that encourage transformation. Effectiveness was measured in a voluntary, self-reported questionnaire, emailed to students after the semester they took Introductory Sociology. Students in the sample favored the use of documentary films in the classroom, reported seeing connections between assigned readings and films, and said that because of the films they were more able to grasp core sociological concepts. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:21Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionDesigning Health Messages to Promote Social Change
This article explores course design in Health Communication as taught in an undergraduate liberal arts college setting. The course fuses social justice, public health, and health promotion techniques and orientations to encourage active learning and promote social change. The course is organized around three central areas of scholarship: (1) media systems and health related content; (2) health promotion; and (3) curriculum design. A variety of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical practices are examined to demonstrate how course-learning goals are achieved. A case study of the conceptualization, design, and implementation of a public information campaign on social smoking is also introduced. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:23Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionFrom Apathy to Activism: Civic-Mindedness, Critical Pedagogy,and the Sociological Imagination
From a humanist perspective, the worth and significance of a college education lies primarily in its potential to bring forth competent, mature, and enfranchised citizens willing and able to work cooperatively with others to advance the cause of social equity and justice. Regrettably, traditional pedagogies tend to overemphasize the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and skills at the expense of nurturing in students the civic competencies and cognitive-affective dispositions necessary for the civically efficacious real-world application of such proficiencies. I will begin with a brief overview of the core values and principles of humanist sociology. Next I will examine the major pedagogical implications of the humanist perspective in sociology. This will be followed by an in-depth look at civic mindedness as a necessary affective-cognitive precondition for activist sociological citizenship. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:16Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionCritical Pedagogy and Dialectical Thought in the Secondary English Classroom
In this nation’s schools, there must be an increased focus on critical and dialectical thought if there is ever to be any substantive societal change. Due to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the increased focus on standardization and uniformity of thought, there has been a move away from critical thinking and the fight for social justice. This paper discusses Marx’s notion of dialectical thought and its necessity in the secondary English/Language Arts classroom. This is interwoven with examples of techniques and projects which help students view the world around them in a more critical fashion. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:18Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionThe disappearing immigrants: hunger strike as invisible struggle
This article invites readers to consider an act of civil resistance as a performative one. A large scale hunger strike conducted by 300 immigrants in central Athens in early 2011 became a catalyst for Greek conversations about civil society. In particular, the strike offered supporters the opportunity to engage more widely with debates on immigration and human rights across Europe, alongside reading the virulent effects of the economic crisis in financial capital terms and resulting neo-liberal backlashes. The authors employ a performative frame; initially the context of Athens is explored as the stage primed for a performance. Secondly, the value of the Law School as site for the hunger strike is considered, with specific reference to Lefebvre’s spatial resistance. The hunger strike itself is analysed as a ‘performance of resistance’, and as a spectacle. The audience is considered a witness to the act, reflecting their moral imperative to react to the ‘performance’. Finally, the wider social, political and cultural implications of such a hunger strike are considered. Throughout, we are concerned with the invisible bodies of the hunger strikers, particularly regarding how their struggle is represented or appropriated. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:48Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionMarginalization and the Multiplicity of Rationalities: A Discourse Theory of Poverty
This essay argues for the necessity for a rationality based theory of poverty. It explains how the roots of poverty are rooted in the marginalization of the rationalities of the so called poor, a marginalization that renders them disempowered from realizing their conception of the good life. It argues that the genuine liberation of the poor demands their empowerment founded in the liberation of their rationalities. This means that reformers must focus on building systems of discourse that allow the marginalized to participate in the shaping of the dominant rationalities that govern us all. . [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
Category:ResearchReads:23Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionBook Review: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon.
When I have completed the final pages of the latest environmental studies tome or walked to the parking lot after an environmentally themed public lecture, whether the subject is climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss or transition town planning, I am predictably feeling breathlessly apprehensive, pessimistic, and more than slightly wrung out. There is no question that humans have royally screwed up the planet as a place to sustain ourselves and that we have come close to or past the tipping points on the most critical of abrupt and irreversible changes for all life on earth. We have, as Aboriginal Australian culture tells us, “eaten our future.”
Category:BookReads:28Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionBook Review: Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State by David H. Price
Most of us are familiar with anthropology’s deadly origin and history as the research arm of the colonial empires and, knowingly or not, contributing to the genocide/ethnocide of first nations all over the world. To my field’s credit, we have begun to face our responsibility for the uses of our research. Many assume that we are freed from the stigma if we follow the guidelines for ethical research that have come out of the Nuremburg Trials, national and local academic institutional review boards, and our own professional organizations (like those of the American Anthropologist Association.) I was smug in my knowledge of the possible abuses of ethnographic research and my commitment to “do no harm”. I lost the smugness very quickly in the introduction to this book when Price points out that World War I was considered the Chemists’ War, World War II, the Physicists’ War, and the current wars – The Anthropologists’ War.
Category:BookReads:37Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collectionBook Review: Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence by Christian Parenti.
Christian Parenti has written a solid tour de force on environmentallyinduced conflict, worldwide, as seen from within the first decade of the 21st century. Indeed, the book title itself—Tropic of Chaos—is derived from the names of the geo-climatic zone situated between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. And, just as these geo-climatic zones are now slowly spreading north and south, respectively, so too is human-induced violence and destruction, as more and more people engage in a neo-Malthusian competition for fewer and fewer natural resources. Parenti provides an on-the-ground, first person description of what this actually feels like for a few of those individuals caught up in these struggles. He then works backwards, to explain some of the history and “back story” behind these events.
Category:BookReads:66Uploaded:05 / 02 / 2012ShareAdd to collection
