Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 85

Eyeing the Decisive Moment

shutter to think: the rock & roll lens of paul natkin @ the chicago cultural center.

Keith Richards, New York, 22 September 1987. Photo: Paul Natkin/Getty Images.

Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise…which will make it less acute. Hence the photograph whose meaning…is too impressive is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically. — Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Photographer Paul Natkin takes Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous goal to capture the “decisive moment” of an event quite seriously, and this nice little exhibit of his images of musical performances and personalities offers countless realizations of his efforts.

Many of these images are quite iconic on their own. You will recognize them from the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and elsewhere. What was most noticeable in bringing them together was a certain look to the eyes that Natkin seemed to catch repeatedly whether taking portraits or action shots. Many of these familiar faces and images—Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Madonna, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters—shared a kind of gaze of deep concentration that seemed, in the very same instance, to take in everything around them and transcend their moment. Looking at them intently, in the context of a museum gallery, I found myself continually drawn to the eyes no matter what the context.

The performers in these images are doing many things—strumming guitars, singing, dancing, sitting, talking, laughing, thinking, moving, posing—but so many of them seemed to be looking out from the image in the same particular way, and their shared look seemed to be linked to Natkin’s understanding of the “decisive moment.” Natkin’s images framed a silence amidst the exciting maelstroms of sound. This suffused the images, profane, with blazing, penetrating holes of religiosity. So too, the humanity of these iconic performers lurked in their eyes.

You might not notice it among the photographs one by one, too caught up in their commercialized uses, but taken together, the images presented the ecstasy shared in a common glance. There it was: Barthes’ famous punctum in the studium of stadium rock. These photographs suggested that popular music might roar out with movement and energy, but that its power, its attraction, its force, could be dramatized, paradoxically, through photographs that eyed a tremendous stillness.

Links:

Shutter to Think: The Rock & Roll Lens of Paul Natkin @ The Chicago Cultural Center.
Paul Natkin, Photo Reserve, Inc.

The Joker and the Thief

“There must be some kind of way out of here said the joker to the thief…”

December 1969: Marines move through a landing zone. AP Photo.

Life imitates art in the Vietnam War as Bob Dylan’s elliptical lyrics about a conversation between a joker and a thief in “All Along the Watchtower,” a song made most famous by the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1968  version, seem to come alive in this 1969 AP Photo of two marines, one with a Joker card stuck to his helmet. Notice the American flag with them…citizenship! Featured in the book Vietnam: The Real War. HT to Mark Murrman and Mother Jones Magazine.

Jimi Hendrix Experience, “All Along the Watchtower,” 1968.

Space-Time Continuum: Richard White’s “The Spatial Turn”

richard white, “the spatial turn” @ northwestern university center for historical studies, 2 october 2013.

Richard White.

Richard White‘s recent talk at Northwestern University’s Center for Historical Studies asked the audience to move with him across a terrain of digital projects that all involved thinking spatially about the past. The basic outline of the talk can be found here: Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” https://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29. White was careful to describe his turn less as a revolution than as a new contribution to historical thinking. This was perhaps false modesty. There was an undercurrent in the talk of the importance of thinking spatially and using digital technologies to do so.

On the theoretical level, White asked us to think more carefully about the elasticity of space as a concept. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, White argued that space is most of all defined by movement. It is not something static or immobile, a vessel waiting to be filled or a structure beyond human shaping; rather, White contended, space is created out of the interaction of humans with other elements of the natural world and built environment. To prove his point, he showed us Aaron Koblin’s striking visualization of United States air flight patterns over the course of 24 hours, which almost by magic seemed to create the boundaries of the US nation out of, quite literally, thin air (http://www.aaronkoblin.com).

The motion makes the map: Aaron Koblin’s visualization of flight patterns in the US.

From this theoretical sensitivity to space as made and produced instead of passively present, White took his audience through a number of project that suggested how the spatial imagination allowed historians to pose new questions, develop new interpretations, and create new modes of presentation. At times, the talk devolved into a bit of a show-and-tell exercise. This is the danger of much digital humanities presentation, which can easily skim the surface of historical inquiry by getting too focused on the exciting dazzle of graphic design. I wished White would have spent more time on one case and taken us more deeply into the linkage between its “weird” evidence, his thinking about space as movement, his digital visualization design, and how it all related to the realization of historical interpretation and historiographical intervention.

White might have focused on his own research on the history of railroads in America. He showed us what was, to most historians, an intriguing but mostly inscrutable freight table from the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was a bit of archival evidence that he suspected possessed important information about the relationship between railroads and their customers, but whose meaning could not easily be unlocked simply by looking at it directly. The numerical data, he convincingly demonstrated, required visualization in order to discern more compellingly. When White and his team at Stanford’s Spatial History Project mapped the data to a dynamic digital map that added cost and time to distance as factors contained in the table, the resulting spatial visualization began to reveal compelling results. As a “distortion visualization” of grain rates charged by the Southern Pacific, it explained how the railroad company manipulated prices in relation to space in order to outmaneuver steamboat competition on the Sacramento River. This allowed the railroad company to reach far into the southern San Joaquin Valley hinterlands as the only contender to bring wheat to market and then recoup costs on first class consumer goods going out from San Francisco. White’s key last step—a step that a human not a computer can make—was to notice how this “spatial manipulation” by the Southern Pacific left the farmers at the mercy of the railroad company, which in turn (the crucial turn of the spatial turn?) illuminated why they grew so angry to the railroads for seeming to control their fates.

Freight table, Southern Pacific Railroad, 1876.

In this example, White demonstarted how the spatial turn allowed him to link material factors to popular consciousness through unlocking the information hidden within an archival object whose significance at first seemed difficult to discern. Thinking spatially—which is to say about space as created by human agency in this case—opened up a key historical relationship between rural farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad running into and out of San Francisco as the emerging wholesaling center of the West Coast in the 1870s. Digital technology empowered a “distortion visualization,” producing an interactive map that, when accompanied by good old-fashioned prose, dramatized the social relations and struggles buried in the freight tables. This was compelling stuff, a good example of how the spatial turn deepened one scholar’s intuitions about the significance of a piece of evidence from the archive and allowed him to more precisely describe and analyze the interplay of human decision making and material factors hidden within that document. From the neat and ordered columns of the Southern Pacific Railroad freight table erupted the messy class and regional conflicts of agrarian-industrial relations in the late nineteenth century.

In fact, I hungered for White to go deeper into this one example rather than jump to other projects. My appetite was whetted further when in response to a question about how to convincingly connect spatial analysis to understandings of popular consciousness, White remarked that the freight table mapping exercise fundamentally altered his perception of “everyday working Americans” when they contend that economic life is getting tougher for them. White explained that their perspective is, he now believed more firmly than ever, usually right. Their common sense should not be overruled by abstract, aggregate data that claims to shows material improvement. This kind of overarching data is always tied to ideological struggles about capitalism in the United States and it can easily hide other economic relationships of power, relationships that remain buried in items such as freight tables. When brought into the light of the digital screen, this economic data confirms perceptions in popular consciousness by various groups. It allows us to be far more finely-grained not only in our comprehension of the economic factors involved in the making of history, but also in our understanding of their social effects.

White’s talk left me wondering about a number of other questions:

First, does the reliance of spatial visualization on certain kinds of “data” have limitations? Or better said, does it foreclose other kinds of evidence and interpretations? What I mean is that digital visualizations of space frame a certain kind of relationship between numbers and their representation spatially and visually. This is fine, but we must be aware of how it emphasizes certain modes of logic and reasoning about the links between material structure and cultural experience. It might crowd out, for instance, the role of religious, of culture, or, most importantly, the agency of historical actors who do not typically appear in the numbers, such as women. This is not to reject the spatial turn, but rather to emphasize, as I suspect White would agree, the criticality with which we must approach the use of the digital to represent historical evidence and argument. Moreover, does this kind of spatial imagining and digital visualization risk asserting certain assumptions about scale: that more equals more true. Does it risk missing the weird moments when one act, isolated, sparks historical change? Does it have the danger of missing the volatile shifting of weight and force, thought and action, little and big, push and pull, that we must honor as the very levers of historical change and continuity? I do not think it has to, but it will if we do not carefully scrutinize the logics guiding the spatial turn.

Second, in striving to emphasize the dynamic, invented quality of space, was he perhaps underplaying the times when space is a bit more rigid, implacable, resistant to human manipulation? It is exhilarating to see space become something unfixed, but are there times when it also persists stubbornly in the efforts of humans to make it their own, “create” it for their own purposes?

One might go a step further here. In pushing us to think of space as created by human imagination and action, White kept taking space to the brink of other driving forces, most obviously time. In the examples of the spatial turn that White provided, space as movement almost, to my mind, gave way to time. Perhaps then the spatial turn is really better characterized as a new kind of temporal turn? At what point does thinking spatially merely become a journey back to thinking temporally? Does this matter? Perhaps not. But it does raise the question one has about any “turn”: in this case, to what space is it finally taking us as its destination?

Dancing the Animal Spirits

bodycartography project, super nature @ chicago cultural center’s storefront theater, 10 October 2013.

Members of BodyCartography Project.

“And all I gotta do is act naturally.” — written by Johnny Russell and Voni Morrison, sung by Buck Owens, the Beatles, and many others

What are our animal spirits and did Keynes misuse the phrase when he famously employed it in his 1936 greatest hit of economics, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money? He meant, essentially, the instinctual human avarice and greed submerged below yet driving all social behavior by humans. But BodyCartography Project’s Super Nature turned toward a far more ecological perspective on the inner workings (at one point quite literally the innards) of the animalistic. Co-directed by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, set to a fabulously weird harp-meets-blender score by Zeena Perkins, and featuring Minneapolis-based dancers Justin Jones, Timmy Wagner, Emily Johnson, Anna Shogren, Otto Ramstad, Francesca Mattavelli, and Sam Johnson along with a few Chicago guests, the piece strived to grasp what we might call the viscera at the heart of the visceral: the meat and bones, blood and breath, convulsions and nerves that allow us to both transit between and transgress across the lines between the human and the animal.

There was an interest here in the archaic and elemental, in animal myths and Ovid-like metamorphoses, in the animistic as well as the animalistic. The dancers began by positioning themselves on the street and in the lobby as one entered the Storefront Theater. They blended in—just a few more hipsters among the hipsters in the culture of dance-goers—until one suddenly stared at an audience member zombie-like or bent a foot and leg over the railing leading up to the balcony. It was weird, uncanny, and it was supposed to be, slowing bringing us from the cultural space of the Cultural Center to a different world, one that was of us, but also beyond us, wilder and beyond the social norms of the art event.

Once inside the theater, a herd of dancers gently bent into and out of one another under a set of ropes hanging from the rafters. They were strange, but still social and human until suddenly dancers started emerging from seats in the audience, unsettlingly tumbling down stairs, convulsing and twisting as if being shocked, out of place and pulling us into their disorientations. A female dancer sprang up from an audience seat, throwing off her jacket and shoes and began to breathe. The dancers on stage started following her breath patterns in a kind of collective dance of the diaphragms, literally making the air stand still and move, stand still and move, with their lungs. It was a startling kind of call and response of oxygen and its denial, a basic act of ecological realities that we forget to think about in our daily lives. Us mammals, at least, all need air to breath. Yet it was also an act of cultural description: in nature, as in the theater, we sometimes all collectively hold our breath. The ecological wilds and the wildness of highly-cultured, avant-garde dance met.

The group then broke apart into a series of solos, duets, and group set pieces. Individual dancers became snarling attack dogs, two-bodied loping giraffes, reptiles, squawking birds, and other creatures half-recognizable. They were trickster figures: humans that were animals that were humans again. The always wonderful Emily Johnson seemed to transform herself into a dainty, balletic gazelle or deer, dancing just for herself then pulling the other dancers around her, ignoring them yet taunting them, entrancing them yet angering them, ethereal yet carnal, full of base desires spun into circles and spirals of grace that contrasted to the Butoh-like language of stillness and spasm that the other dancers so often pursued.

Then there was the requisite dry-ice smoke and semi-nude dancing holding tree limbs. Well, all of these kinds of dances have to have it I suppose. But the most striking moments came at the end of the piece, when two dancers crept under large blankets that became the hides of large beasts. As they moved, the dancer was still there, under cover, but the animal sprang to life too, all rippling skin of muscle and fat, hair and bone. These blanket-dancer-beasts were eventually eaten by a pack of predators and a following wave of scavengers. A spotlight cast on one dancer’s body showed the entrails of this great beast slowly turned to skeletal remains.

It was, as the co-directors readily admitted of their piece, rather melodramatic. But Super Nature also worked its magic by asking us to imagine a “radical ecology” at once archaic and futuristic, elementary and yet quite sophisticated. The performance did something that dance as a corporeal, embodied yet also highly symbolic and evocative art form is particularly good at doing: it cast a spotlight on the animalistic as at once artifice and edifice, something implacably beyond human agency yet also shaping it, something beyond yet also in our bodies, something we leave our human identities behind to ascertain but can only do so through our human apparatuses of perception and comprehension. The dance presented the animal as something other—out there—that was also fundamentally a part of the human—right here in the dance. The animalistic became a monstrous phantom, a projection, a fantasy that was also an intimate essence.

Here was a deeply intellectual experience of consciousness conveyed through physicality. These dancers used their bodies to invoked the animal spirits as they described a logic they discerned in the ecological. But in doing so, they also suggested, whether consciously or not, that we always must access this logic through the cultural. The dancer became a bear, but the bear also became a human dancer. There were no more masks, at least for a moment, and the logic of the human-animal binary grew omnidirectional and multifaceted instead of dichotomous or unified. We were poised at the moment where the animal spirits at once arrive and depart, are fashioned by human imagination and action yet also override logics, whether economic, cultural, or even ecological.

Across the synapses between sensation and thought, the animal and the human, the ecological and illogical, the participants in Super Nature roared, howled, tingled, and leapt, flinging themselves over to feel out the distance and, for a moment, close the gap between the animal spirits and what it means to act naturally.

BodyCartography Project

Boxed In, Going in Circles

lucky plush, cinderbox 2.0 @ links hall/constellation, 3 October 2013.

Lucky Plush’s update of their 2007 piece, which was inspired by artistic director Julia Rhoads’s interest in reality television, offers contemporary dance as backstage musical. We seem to be at a rehearsal that starts without warning and ends just the same. The dancers sit in chairs, talking on a cell phone or engaged in chit-chat. At one point, as if to speak for the audience, one of the dancers remarks “Wait, is this the beginning?”

There is a kind of gag-like quality to Cinderbox 2.0. Sometimes it gets a bit too cutesy and gimmicky, but the comedy is also key to the dreamy mood that Rhoads seems to want to create: an atmosphere in which time is suspended and we in the audience are left feeling simultaneously confounded and adored.

In between the uncertain beginning and inconclusive end of Cinderbox 2.0, there is some extraordinarily powerful dancing, much of it circular and balletic. A formal, athletic elegance bursts out from the gags, such as when in the midst of a visionary riff on the packaging of Fuji water bottles, the dancers spin around, legs lifted almost entirely vertically. Sometimes the gags themselves are also quite beautiful, as when the dancers let their upper bodies go limp and, bent over, scurry across the stage like spiders.

One is constantly unsure whether what is occurring is rehearsed or spontaneous. But instead of making the action seem more immediate, this has the strange effect of sealing up the dance. It makes it feel more insular, as if there are a series of inside jokes taking place and we are invited to accept a knowing wink. Or maybe the point here is to create a space that evokes just how insular our “outside” worlds have become—socially mediated, seeming to extend across networks that in the end perhaps only lead, solipsistically, back to ourselves.

Such is the unreal reality of Lucky Plush’s show. Or is it the real unreality? The troupe has created a world of its own, filled with goofiness and beauty spun together so as to be almost inseparable.

At the end of the show, the dancers try to bring up politically-relevant issues. But it all breaks down in a spoof of how much the common citizen has to say about issues of social import—and what little difference it all makes to know a little bit about a lot of different problems around the globe. The concerned voices of the dancers jumble together into an overwhelming cacophony of competing assertions of what matters as each dancer tries to be lifted up into a formal pose by the others. Their ability to seem the most informed and concerned becomes farcical, just an urge to be at the center of attention. It is quite funny, but it is also sad. There is a frustrated, almost raging undercurrent to the humor. Something is wrong in this reverie. The dancers are, within their cinderbox, sealed off from actual political efficacy. And so are we too, by implication, in the audience. Trapped in a box, glowing under the spotlights, we get spun in circles, still in our seats, waiting. It’s beautiful, it’s silly, it’s meaningful, it’s nothing at all. What will be the difference?

Excerpts from “Cinderbox 2.0″ (2012) from Lucky Plush Productions on Vimeo.

Lucky Plush presents Cinderbox 2.0 and The Better Half at Links Hall/Constellation this weekend, 10/12-13. For info, see http://www.luckyplush.com/upcoming/.

Links:

Lucky Plush Productions.

The Sounds of American Counterculture and Citizenship

I created a Spotify playlist to tell a sonic story about The Republic of Rock. Hope it’s fun to give it a read and a listen:

http://blog.oup.com/2013/10/republic-rock-counterculture-citizen-playlist/.

Sly Stone.

 

Walter Lippmann, Affect Theorist

The making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery, as so many social philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders, politicians, and steering committees. It consists essentially in the uses of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas, and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogenous will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires. The process, therefore, by which general opinions are brought to cooperation consists of an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance. Before a mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is executed not by the mass but by individuals in control of its energies.

— Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

Walter Lippmann

 

Gated Community

a canary torsi, paradis @ garfield conservatory, 8/8/13.

Dressed in white, the dancers approached, slowly, out of the trees and bushes, in a V-shaped formation, dipping to the left and the right but marching steadily toward us in the audience as we sat or stood in the field behind the Garfield Conservatory. It was a cool, beautiful August night on the South Side, and you could here people partying in the distance, the hum of traffic, the rattle of the Green Line, and an occasional police car. The light glowed warmly from the glass roof on the Conservatory. The dancers moved around us, between us, through us.

A white grand piano sat in the field though it did not seem particularly out of place. It tinkled a pleasant melody. The best sound of all, however, was our feet—both audience and dancers—as we brushed through the tall grass.

a canary torsi, Paradis. Photograph: Kevin Kwan.

At first it seemed to be the dancers and us in the audience, interacting but distinguished from each other. Eventually the dancers divided us up into groups, asked us to follow them. We were no longer audience and performers, but rather subgroups snaking through the field toward the next act. The leader of my group took off her shoes, asked me to hold them for her. I did. The dancers came close to us. Then they drew back again, singing a chant-like song, once again separating into two main groups: performers and audience.

We were taken back to the piano, the dancers vanished into the trees and bushes, we were asked to sing the song they had earlier chanted from a distance. The dance was over and we all disappeared into the night.

Inspired by the final Dante’s Inferno-inspired segment of Jean Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique, which pictures paradise as an island of young people playing on beaches until a man and a woman in a little hideaway bit into an apple by the ocean waves, a canary torsi’s Paradis is less surreal, less lonely, less sardonic, less bitter than Godard’s film. It is sweeter. A number of commentators (Matt de la Pena, “A surreal paradise, overshadowed by the shrubs, Chicago Tribune, 7 August 2013) have thought of it as a study in intimacy, and this is so, but it is the intimacy of strangers, not a community. Indeed, it evoked how strangers in public connect momentarily, and the strange kind of intimacy generated by these temporary encounters, which involve no commitment other than a demand to be in the moment, fleeting yet present. This was the paradise invoked and it raised questions about what paradise is exactly—perhaps not something lasting and eternal but rather in time even as it gestures to experiences that are out of time.

Moreover, taking place in a garden, this was fundamentally a dance about urban paradise. These were not fauns in the countryside or some small community in the hinterlands. Performers and audience alike became bodies of the city passing each other for a pastoral moment among the grit. The delicate intersection of lives was sustained precisely because all involved knew full well that they would never meet again. Or better said, their meeting would never gain the deeper roots of community. There was no pain here, only an ephemeral erotics, an Edenic charge. It came for free and it was liberating. Then it sent us on our way, out the gates of the Garfield, where guards stood with walkie-talkies. We exited one by one with the knowledge that we could not reenter.

Paradis (excerpt) from a canary torsi.

Can You Pass the Acid Test Test?

My noble Chicago-based colleague Joe Lapsley is teaching The Republic of Rock in his course on the 1960s. He developed this “Acid Test Test” for his students after they read Chapter 1 of the book. To paraphrase Chief Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, Can you pass the Acid Test Test?

Joe Lapsley’s Acid Test Test

1.  Ken Kesey was first given LSD by

A) Allen Ginsberg

B) an Indian Shaman

C) a CIA-funded program

 

2.  Kramer likens an Acid Test to a

A) pirate ship

B) bonfire

C) volcano

 

3. Phil Lesh saw in the Acid Tests

A) egotistical evil

B) Cold War liberalism

C) spontaneous consensus

 

4.  The Acid Tests sought to avoid

A) simplistic libertarianism

B) constraining communitarianism

C) both A and B

 

5.  Kesey’s ideas about society were similar to Foucault’s

A) Pendulum

B) Panopticon

C) Pandemonium

Fall Course: The Challenge of the Citizen-Scholar

This fall I am teaching a graduate seminar, “The Challenge of the Citizen-Scholar,” at Northwestern University. The course focuses on public scholarship and civic engagement, with ample attention given to how the digital relates to these endeavors. I am working with four marvelous graduate students as they pursue internships at local Evanston and Chicago civic institutions and groups. You are welcome to follow along and join us. The best way to do so is through our Twitter hashtag #nugeo. The course website is located at: http://sites.weinberg.northwestern.edu/geo/. And here is the syllabus for the course:

As of 10/1/13:

The Challenge of the Citizen-Scholar

Civic Engagement and Graduate Education Seminar

Fall 2013 | CFS 495-0 Section 20

Time and Place

Mondays 2:00-5:00pm

Center for Civic Engagement Seminar Room, 1813 Hinman

Instructor

Dr. Michael Kramer

mjk@northwestern.edu | twitter: @kramermj | www.culturerover.com

Harris Hall 212, Office hours: by appointment

Seminar Description

What does it mean to be a citizen-scholar? This seminar probes the question of connecting specialized academic research to broader audiences from multiple perspectives. We explore both historical models and contemporary debates as we think across the humanities, arts, social sciences, natural sciences, and applied fields of design, engineering, law, journalism, non-profit work, and business. The course pays particularly close attention to the new opportunities and challenges of public scholarship in the digital age: how might the digital offer new ways of moving between academia, specific communities or institutions, and conceptualizations of a broader public? Students contribute weekly posts and comments to our collective blog, maintain a collective Twitter feed at #nugeo, and complete a final, longer “white paper” that relates to the particular internship completed during the quarter. The seminar convenes in connection with the Graduate Engagement Opportunities Program at the Northwestern Center for Civic Engagement.

Assignment Guidelines

You are going to write a lot in this course, but your writing will often be different than the typical research essay. Instead, we want to use the course to investigate our writing styles more closely in terms of how we can connect specialized academic knowledge to broader audiences. What does it mean to “bridge” this divide? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?

Since our blog is public, you might think of your audience not only as your classmates and me, but also as a broader readership of interested people. You might consider how those at your placement site might respond to the readings and your responses, or you might imagine your audience as others who also wish to pursue a civic engagement internship and enroll in the seminar but are unable to do this term. In other words, try to write clearly and precisely, describing what you are reading and thinking about as well as offering your interpretation of materials and experiences. Be honest. Take seriously that your words and comments matter, that others rely on them to be substantive, civil, and judicious. Don’t be afraid to not understand things. Ask questions. Take a chance. Model what it means to write in the space between being a scholar with a developing expertise in a field of specialized research and a citizen-at-large, an equal with others who also has something distinctive to say.

1. Weekly blog posts. We will be using a WordPress blog for our course. Each week I will ask you to post a response to the readings and an additional post. Be sure to add the proper category to your post and add tags.

2. Weekly responses. Each week I wish for you to respond to at least one other student’s post. What did it make you think about? What kinds of constructive criticism can you offer? Be substantive!

3. Weekly follow up comment. Sometimes revelations emerge after we read or write something and have some time to reflect on it. Therefore I ask you to write a short follow up comment to your previous week’s post. What has changed for you since you wrote the post? What remains the same? Be substantive!

4. Twitter. I would like each of you to create a Twitter account. It can be an existing one or you can create a separate one specifically for this course. We will use Twitter to share ideas, thoughts, information, and more with a broader community of people interested in where academic and public scholarship meet. We will also consider the problems of using Twitter in this way: how does it extend scholarly and civic engagement? What are its shortcomings? Please use the hashtag #nugeo so that we can compile tweets for the course. My “handle” is @kramermj if you are trying to find me on Twitter.

5. Final essay. A more sustained final paper or project—roughly 10-15 pages—analyzing or contributing to the substantive, public work of the internship or field study is due at the end of the quarter. Ideally, the paper or project can also be a kind of “white paper” that is of direct value and assistance to the community organization or public entity with which you are interning. But it can also review the analytical or research work completed or connect your research interests to your internship in other creative ways.

A final note on using a public blog:

If you have any concerns—technical, personal, ethical—about contributing to a public course blog, please feel absolutely free to confer with me to make arrangements. Generally, I advocate what has become known as “open access,” but there can be very important and worthy exceptions to this philosophy. If you are curious, here is more on the ethics of public blogs for classroom use: http://hastac.org/blogs/superadmin/2012/11/30/guidelines-public-student-class-blogs-ethics-legalities-ferpa-and-more.

Seminar Grades

Grades for the seminar will be based on class participation (30%), weekly assignments (40%), and the final project (30%). The experiential work done in the internship will not be graded as such, however students must perform their weekly hours at their internship and stay in good standing with the host organization for seminar credit to be earned.

Book to Purchase

• C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, with a new afterword by Todd Gitlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), available at online bookstores and through NU Reserves.

• All other readings online at either Blackbord (courses.northwestern.edu) or respective link.

Weekly Schedule

9/30 Getting Engaged

• Julie Ellison, “The Humanities and the Public Soul,” in Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy, ed. Katharyne Mitchell (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 113-121, see Blackboard.

• George J. Sanchez, “Crossing Figueroa:
The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy,” with Responses, Imagining America Foreseeable Futures Position Papers #4, 2005, http://imaginingamerica.org/fg-item/the-tangled-web-of-diversity-and-democracy/?parent=520.

• Jenny Pickerell, “The Surprising Sense of Hope,” Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy, ed. Katharyne Mitchell (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 132-137, see Blackboard.

• “What Is ‘Public’ About What Academics Do? An Exchange with Robert Kingston and Peter Levine,” Higher Education Exchange, 2004, see Blackboard.

• Michael White, “Traditional New Orleans Jazz as a Metaphor for American Life,” wth Responses, Imagining America Foreseeable Futures Position Papers #9, 2009, http://imaginingamerica.org/fg-item/traditional-new-orleans-jazz-as-a-metaphor-for-american-life/?parent=520.

• Nick Spitzer, “Rebuilding the ‘Land of Dreams’: Expressive Culture and New Orleans’ Authentic Future,” Southern Spaces, 29 August 2006, http://southernspaces.org/2006/rebuilding-land-dreams-expressive-culture-and-new-orleans-authentic-future.

• Imagining America Page Fellows blog posts from Fall 2013, http://imaginingamerica.org/news-and-media/blog/.

Blogging:

A. Blog assignment due 9/29:

a. Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your academic research and your civic engagement work this quarter.

b. Develop a 2-3 paragraph response to one of the readings in which you seek to explain it to a friend who is not in academia. What is the argument of the essay? Can you paraphrase it? What do you see as the key words or phrases in the essay? Why? What do you agree with or disagree with and, most importantly, why?

B. Comment due 10/2.

C. Followup due 10/4.

10/7 Expertise and Democracy, The Public and Its Problems

• Walter Lippmann, Excerpt from The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 3-52, see Blackboard.

• John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 3-74, 143-184, see Blackboard.

• Sue Curry Jansen, “Phantom Conflict: Lippmann, Dewey, and the Fate of the Public in Modern Society,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, 3 (September 2009): 221-245, see Blackboard.

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 9/29:

a. What should the role of the “expert” scholar be as a citizen in society? What does it mean to be a scholarly “expert”? What are the challenges of this role? Develop a 2-3 paragraph post in which you draw upon Lippmann, Dewey, and Jansen along with your own experiences to probe the meaning of the expert in a democracy.

b. Write 1-3 paragraph reflection about your placement internship thus far. What are you noticing? What has been exciting? What is frustrating you? If you had to start writing your final essay today, what would its topic be?

c. In a few weeks, I am going to ask you to write an online essay about one event or speaker at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Northwestern Day. Begin thinking about what you wish to write about and let us know this week. You might write a review of a speaker’s book or article, conduct a q-and-a podcast or interview with a speaker, tell us more of interest about the content behind one of the events, or imagine some other creative way of *engaging* with this kind of public event and the public scholarship it entails.

B. Comment due 10/9.

C. Followup due 10/11.

10/14 Sociological Imagination 1: C. Wright Mills as a Case Study

• C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-99.

• Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” in The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, ed. John H. Summers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 203-212, see Blackboard.

• Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction and Overview,” Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1-27, see Blackboard.

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 10/13:

a. Develop a 2-3 paragraph response to this week’s readings.

b. As Mills does with the paragraph of Talcott Parsons, select a paragraph from your favorite article or book in your academic speciality and translate it into prose that is accessible to a general audience. Quote the original in your post and, as Mills does, follow with your translation.

B. Comment due 10/16.

C. Followup due 10/18.

10/21 Sociological Imagination 2: C. Wright Mills as a Case Study

• Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 100-228.

• Jonathan Sterne, “C. Wright Mills, the Bureau for Applied Social Research, and the Meaning of Critical Scholarship,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 5, 1 (2005): 65-94, see Blackboard.

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 10/20:

a. The Sociological Imagination has just been republished. How does it hold up? Develop a short book review of the book. You may incorporate observations from your internship and materials from the other readings about Mills. But the review should connect Mills’s work from 1959 to contemporary times. What still matters about the book specifically and what doesn’t?

B. Comment due 10/23.

C. Followup due 10/25.

10/28 Chicago

• Chicago: City of the Century DVD, see Blackboard. More at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/.

• Lucy Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 179-305, see Blackboard.

• Harold Washington This American Life Special, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/84/Harold.

• Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; reprint, New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 133-206, see Blackboard.

• Mary Pattillo, “Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer,” Ethnography 4, 1 (2003): 61–93, see Blackboard.

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 10/27:

a. Connect a specific aspect of the materials for this week to your own reflections on Chicago.

b. Write a short essay for a smart reader about one of the events at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Northwestern Day. The essay should be geared toward publication on the Internet. Think about multimedia components (images, sound recording, etc.) that you might utilize. Consider how you might write differently (down to the size of paragraphs and the very design of your font style, size, color, links, etc.) for the medium of the web. Think of your piece as a sharply written Talk of the Town essay in the front of the New Yorker. It should be substantive but accessible. You should make an argument and provide evidence but you can be creative with your voice, tone, and style to reach a smart reader who might not be an academic specialist.

B. Comment due 10/30.

C. Followup due 11/1.

11/4 Going Digital

• Henry Farrell, “The Tech Intellectuals,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 30, Fall 2013, http://www.democracyjournal.org/30/the-tech-intellectuals.php?page=all.

• Peter Dahlgren, “From Public to Civic Intellectuals Via Online Cultures,” Participations 10, 1 (May 2013), 400-404, see Blackboard.

• Diana Taylor, “Save As… Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” Imagining America Foreseeable Futures Position Papers #10, 2010, http://imaginingamerica.org/fg-item/save-as-knowledge-and-transmission-in-the-age-of-digital-technologies/?parent=520.

• Axel Honneth, “Idiosyncrasy as a Tool of Knowledge: Social Criticism in the Age of the Normalized Intellectual,” Transformations of the Public Sphere, http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/honneth-social-criticism-in-the-age-of-the-normalized-intellectual/.

Browse the following websites. Pick one to discuss in your blog post this week:

• Mukurtu, http://www.mukurtu.org

• DH Press, http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu/projects/dhpress/

• The Community Tool Box, http://ctb.ku.edu/en/default.aspx

• History Harvest, http://historyharvest.unl.edu

• Freedom’s Ring: King’s I Have a Dream Speech, http://freedoms-ring.org/

• Prison Valley: The Prison Industry, http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/?lang=en

• The Knotted Line, http://knottedline.com

• Public Sphere Forum, http://publicsphere.ssrc.org

• The Chicago Arts Archive, http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/archive/

• Digital Media and Learning, MacArthur Foundation, http://www.macfound.org/programs/learning/

• Geographical Perspectives: A Geographer’s Thoughts on Business, Real Estate, and Education, http://www.justinholman.com

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 11/3:

a. What can the digital offer to civic engagement by scholars? What problems does it raise for the citizen-scholar, for the expert, for conceptualizations of the public? Write a 2-3 paragraph response to these prompts that draws specifically upon your sense of the readings for this week’s seminar.

b. Write 1-3 paragraph reflection about your placement internship thus far. What are you noticing? What has been exciting? What is frustrating you? If you had to start writing your final essay today, what would its topic be?

B. Comment due 11/6.

C. Followup due 11/8.

11/11 Citizen-Scholar and the State (Guests: Dan Lewis, Human Development and Social Policy, Institute for Policy Research, and Center for Civic Engagement; and Stephen Eisenman, Art History)

• Theda Skocpol, “The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement in American Democracy,” Social Science History 21, 4 (Winter, 1997): 455-479, see Blackboard.

• Tony Judt, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?,” New York Review of Books, 17 December 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/?pagination=false.

• Rebecca Solnit, “The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government,” Harper’s, 1 October 2005, 31-37, see Blackboard.

• Laurie Jo Reynolds and Stephen Eisenman, “Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison,” Creative Time Reports, 6 May 2013, http://creativetimereports.org/2013/05/06/tamms-is-torture-campaign-close-illinois-supermax-prison-solitary-confinement/.

• Dan Lewis, Gaining Ground in Illinois: Welfare Reform and Person-Centered Policy Analysis (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 110-129, see Blackboard

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 11/10:

a. What role should the state play in civil society? How should the expert-scholar relate to the state and those in political (or economic for that matter!) power? What about to other institutions, from corporations to non-profit associations to the university itself—how should the citizen-scholar position herself or himself in relation to institutions? Develop a 2-3 paragraph response that draws upon this week’s readings with specificity.

B. Comment due 11/13.

C. Followup due 11/15.

11/18 Art and Engagement, Local and Global: Visit to Soyini Madison’s “Studies in Performance” Seminar, Krause Studio

• Soyini Madison, Introduction and Epilogue, Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), http://nucat.library.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=5765295.

Blogging

A. Blog assignment due 11/17:

a. Write a short profile of someone at your internship. It can be in the form of an interview, an essay, a podcast, a videocast, or another form that you think best expresses your conversation with this person.

B. Comment due 11/20.

C. Followup due 11/22.

11/25 Presentations

Final Get Together and Celebration December

Michael’s house. Screening of The Examined Life, food and drink, conversation.

A Few More Notes

Academic integrity

Be sure to comply with all academic integrity policies at Northwestern: http://www.northwestern.edu/provost/policies/academic-integrity/index.html. Be aware that the instructor is required to report any suspected instances of academic dishonesty. The instructor also reserves the right to assign a failing grade for the course if a student is found to have violated university policy concerning academic integrity.

Special Needs

Students with special needs and disabilities that have been declared and documented through the Northwestern Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) should meet with the instructor to discuss any specific accommodations. For further information, see the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) website:http://www.northwestern.edu/disability.