A Justice Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Site faculty.
Created: September 7, 2000
Latest Update: November 14, 2000
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata. November 2000.
"Fair Use" encouraged.
ABSTRACT:
In intertexuality, we focus on the importance of getting some of the practice of teaching down in writing, both from teachers and from students, so that the Dear Habermas site (www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas) can play a role in providing flexibility. By treating student texts as texts for intertexuality, we grant them social distance from the routine completion of "ritual assignments," and make a number of acceptable interpretations available to all students. We also provide a more manageable approach to working with student writing, since all of them can watch the development of a discussion thread, and follow detailed writing samples on the site. Term papers and tests are very much isolated endeavors which do not encourage academic discussion and involvement.The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical analysis of faulty information distribution as structural violence. Intertextuality, through the creation of non-traditional texts is a foil to such structural violence, suggesting an academy role in educating for public discourse. There are numerous areas in which we need to see new textual roles, that broaden the reach to professionals in many different contexts. Teaching has been too long cut off from research, and we are paying for the consequences in the resulting structural violence of our institutions. Our need for texts to guide each other into the new technologies is as great as our need to hear our students and each other in good faith.
Creating a Forum for Student Texts
In the interest of intertextuality we have created a forum for student and teacher texts. This format takes away some of the stress of "publishing" information that has been thoroughly researched, reviewed, and edited. Our students don't have time for that. Neither do their teachers in most undergraduate institutions.Instead of finished pieces of scholarship, we publish our academic discourse. The discourse is carried on in face-to-face interaction during class time, in e-mail, and published on our teaching site, Dear Habermas.
Faculty and advanced students share in editing, which generally consists of no more that cleaning up typos and clarifying mis-statements. Faculty and other students, join in the dialog. It is in this phase that we are able to conceptually link theories to policy and to practice. It is also in this phase that mis-statements permit us to see where misunderstandings are and how to address them.
We include here a sample that went up on our site on November 14, 2000.
Sample Materials from Academic Discourse Forum
On Structural Violence in Institutions
On November 13, 2000, Adriane Pool wrote:
The concept of structural violence is very interesting. I think that you are saying that rules, or maybe the lack of flexibility in those rules, causes such incidents as what occurred in Colorado. I feel that without rules there is chaos.I work in a Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall, and rules are what the minors must follow. I think that without those rules there would be no control in the hall. On the other hand, sometimes the minors refuse to follow the rules, and in those instances, there has to be a mediator between the minor and me.
The lack of rules in the home is a contributing factor to why the minors end up in the juvenile justice system. I feel rules are needed to keep some type of order. There should also be flexibility with those rules as well.
On Tuesday, November 14, jeanne responded:
Good comment, Adriane. I'd give you a "B" for the comment as it stands. Here is a detailed explanation of how I came to that grade:The word "causes" worries me. Causal analysis is complex, and requires careful self-reflexivity to assure that the researcher is not including his/her own perspective in the analysis to the exclusion of other important perspectives. But I would suggest that the "lack of flexibility in the rules," which I would express as lack of "agency" on the part of the young people, contributes to the chaos. (Henry and Milovanovic) I like that you expressed a reaction to the concept of structural violence. For an "A" I would like you to situate that reaction in terms of theory we have studied. Perhaps I could explain this by saying that your expression of your feelings to the theoretical explanations we are discussing is like the first step, and a very important one, at that, to synthesizing the construct into your own knowledge base. In doing so you are focussing our attentiion upon one aspect of the argument explaining the construct. For an "A" I want you to take the next step of analyzing your reactions in terms of the theoretical excerpts we have studied.
I have some concern with the expression, "no control." One of the most important factors Fellman brings out is that we need in a paradigm shift to see the problem as not one between "control" and "no control," or between "control" and "chaos," but as a problem in which we must discover an appropriate balance between the two extremes. That concern also applies to your use of "without rules" in the first paragraph. This is not an issue of choosing "with rules" or "without rules," but of balancing the "agency" between the young people themselves and the institution, in just the way Joanne balanced agency between herself and her parents. I thought you expressed that very well when you said that there should be "flexibility with those rules as well." All I would ask is that for an "A" is that you conceptually link that expression and cite the source of that reasoning: Fellman, and Henry and Milovanovic.
Adriane, your response provided a wonderful basis for discussion. For your own record of grades, the extension of reasoning I ask for here could be included in a simple face-to-face dialog, so that I am sure you have grasped the reasoning.
Henry and Milovanovic: Constitutive Criminology At Work
Agency, Structural Context, and InterdependenceReview and Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Part of Peacemaking Identity Series
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata, June 2000. "Fair Use" encouraged.
Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic describe their theory as postmodern because it takes into account that reality, such as we live it, is complex and interdependent. Although we make claims that we are rational, and although we genuinely believe ourselves to be rational, our agency is often severely limitied by the social structures and roles in which we find ourselves.
What do we mean by "agency?"
As I understand it, Henry and Milovanovic mean by agency the power to make a difference in our own lived reality. The power to make choices, and the responsibility for those choices that society generally holds us to. This means that if we choose, for example, to do something criminal, society holds us responsible for that crime.
This is similar to what Jean Paul Sartre had in mind when he spoke of the terrible anguish ("angoisse") of having no one to blame but ourselves for our choices. He made these claims in the wake of the Second World War, when the whole Western world was trying to understand the ethics of that war. Were soldiers to be held accountable for killing, when they had been given orders to kill? Were generals to be held so accountable? Is there some natural law beyond the law of humans, and, if so, how do we hold each other accountable to basic humanity?
Henry and Milovanovic are critical theorists now, half a century later. As such, they examine the parts of our system that harm people, and they express the need to transform that harm, to guide us to a world we can live in together. With this very different context, they are much less concerned to lay responsibility and guilt at someone's feet, and much more concerned with transforming that harm into a world based on mutual respect for all.
This approach is postmodern in its recognition that there are multiple perspectives, multiple voices, and that all must be respected. This is also the message Gordon Fellman brings us. Both Fellman and Henry and Milovanovic are suggesting ways in which to help us achieve this mutual respect for all.
What do we mean by "structural context"?
By structural context, Henry and Milovanovic are referring to the institutional expectations and roles that help to make us who we are. If we are a student in a local high school, we must be on time for morning classes, or suffer severe penalties, including suspension. The school holds us accountable for arriving on time, even if we are dependent on another for transportation, and even if we have no control over that other, who may, in fact, be overwhelmed by other duties. The structure forces us through its rules and regulations to conform.
This does provide uniformity. It assures the high school that students are on time. But, in the process, it harms some of the students and their families. To the extent that we are willing to consider the structural constraints (like no available public transportation, no available private transportation, and the extent to which one family member is forced to bear these constraints since others cannot, for whatever reasons) we recognize that the student has limited agency.
At the university this is often reflected in the availability of services for night students. Our institutions tend to operate on a nine to five schedule with little regard for the limited alternatives available to the student who must work.
The structural context for women in the sex trade is far more harmful and devastating. Because they are labeled as "bad women," who operate outside the law, they are not afforded even the traditional protections against violence. Some men choose to physically assault such women, just as some choose to physically assault their wives. The wife receives at least the support of the increasingly aware public in such assaults, but that is far less likely to be afforded to women in the sex trade. The public acceptance of violence in the sex trade limits the choices women have to protect themselves. And these women tend to incorporate reliance on their own efforts to protect themselves as inevitable aspects of their lived reality. If we, the public, did not tacitly accept that violence, it would not be inevitable. We could transform this arena of violence by our mutual refusal to accept it, which we have done to some extent, in the area of domestic violence outside the sex trade.
The Interdependence of Agency and Structural Context
Again, as I understand it, Henry and Milovanovic are suggesting that the agency for which we claim responsibility is in fact quite limited, limited by our structural context. We do have choices, and we do rationally choose amongst those alternatives available to us, but we are not accustomed to noticing the extent to which the limiting structures and our resultant choices are socially constructed.Lisa Sanchez reports the narratives of young women working in the sex trade, in Chapter 3. She notes the ways in which these young women incorporate the violence of the streets, the dangers of robbery and rape, into their stories, and accept responsibility for protecting themselves. They treat the reality in which they live as a given, as something which simply is, natuarally, automatically. (I think it is Jonathan Lear in his writing on "knowingness" who clarifies this theoretically. Nag me for the citation.)
Henry and Milovanovic are asking us to examine the wicked little unstated assumptions that have led us to accept as a society this terrible victimization of whole groups of people, like these women working in the sex trade. Henry and Milovanovic are saying that to the extent that we accept these harmful violent conditions as inevitable, we ourselves contribute to the structural context which harms. We need to accept that our complicity adds to the harm. And we need to find ways to express effectively our need to stop inflicting that harm.
Compare this to Jean Paul Sartre's preface statement to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.
Rambo and the Dalai Lama
IntroductionReview and Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Part of Peacemaking Identity Series
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata, June 2000. "Fair Use" encouraged.
This essay is based on Gordon Fellman's Rambo and the Dalai Lama, State University of New York Press, 1998. The text reads well, and extrapolates many of the ideas that Leo Buscaglia presented for individual social relationships to a general analysis of why we choose adversarial approaches over peacemaking, or what Fellman calls "mutuality."
In Chapter One, at p. 4, Fellman explains: "In the courses I teach, I have spent years trying to explore what I see Marx and Freud as having in common---the project of identifying sources of unnecessary human suffering and figuring out how to reduce it." That's a project I can live with, and I think Leo Buscaglia could have, too.
Fellman summarizes his conclusions about how to go about reducing the human suffering:
"In this book I suggest that the assumption that human life is based on conflicts of interest, wars, and the opposition of people to each other and to nature exists as a model, a framework, a paradigm that supplies meaning and orientation to the world. An alternative paradigm sees cooperation, caring, nurturing, and loving as equally viable ways of organizing relationships of humans to each other and to nature."This is not to pose mutuality as good and adversarialism as bad. Both must be honored as expressing real parts of the self and configured differently in different historical moments. . . ."
I like this setting out of paradigms, models that we find ourselves driven towards. Certainly we have all felt the fun of winning. And we have all felt the joy of working together to reach mutual goals, of being part of a project we could not have done alone. Now we need to manage a paradigm shift from these two extremes, and find a balance between adversarialism and mutuality that will work for us in the twenty-first century.
Agency and Structural Context
On Thursday, November 2, Joanna Carillo wrote:
I found yesterday's lecture very interesting. I never thought of my parents as an agency or myself as the structural context. The scenario I picture is this:I (structural context) always tried to get good grades in school and behave as best as possible so I wouldn't get into trouble with my parents (agency) who wouldn't do much but take away my privileges ( like watch t.v. or play outside), because their parents (social fact) didn't teach them (thank God) to hit their children.
Love and Peace,
Joanna R. Carrillo
On Friday, November 3, 2000, jeanne responded:
Joanna, this is a wonderful piece to work with. I'd give you a B for it as it stands. On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I have a face to go with the name. I know you. How fitting that you chose to explore agency and social structure between you and your parents! Good choice. Also on the plus side, you gave me details, according to which you are analyzing where agency and structural context fit into quotidian experience. Good practice, because now we can both refer to quotidian experiences and clear up any inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Your choice of analysis also guarantees that you are learning this at a level that is likely to stay with you and add to your practical knowledge.For an A, we need some dialog to be sure that we understand each other fully. For example, I think we need to define each of the terms that you are applying to your quotidian experience. I didn't have that up yet, and most of you don't have Henry and Milovanovic. Some basic definitions of the terms ought to help. I just put it up today.
Analysis:
I think it's important to see that you and your parents are the principal focus in the situation you have described. But I wouldn't consider them agency and you structural context. Let's see what agency and structural context mean here."Agency" refers to the ability to make decisions with respect to what you do, with respect to controlling your own life.
"Structural context" refers to the institutions, culture, and social practice that constrain you to keep within certain normative roles.
All living creatures that are a part of this social grouping are constrained by the structural context within which the group lives. So both you and your parents are constrained by the same roles. Your parents are constrained in both their imaginary (the world of which they can conceive or imagine) and in their decision-making ability by the structural context. The roles they play as parents are shaped by socialization and must remain within normative bounds.
They can't decide that you should go to school from 11 to 4 instead of 9 to 3. Or that you should have all your classes on Tuesday and Thursday. Neither can you as a student make those choices. You may choose classes that are taught then, but you can't have the classes you need taught then, unless the university offers them then.
The system constrains you. It limits your choices by what it makes available. It also constrains you by socialization. For example, you are expected to be on time, study hard, be respectful, etc. It constrains your parents by socialization on what kinds of punishment or insistence on obedience are acceptable and which are not. And both you and your parents are constrained in your "agency" by the structural context. These constraints entail limits to your agency for both you and your parents.
Let's try re-interpreting with these definitions:
Both you and your parents are individuals who possess decision-making power in controlling your own lives (agency). Societal institutions like the family, the school, the workplace, the government (structural context) limit the decision-making power (agency) that both you and your parents have.Your ability to make the decisions in your life (agency) is further limited by the extent to which your parents demand some things from you in exchange for their support as parents. This limitation will depend on what you and your parents negotiate between you to the extent that those decisions meet with the normative expectations of the structural context. That is, they may choose to not pay for your college education, especially if you have seven little brothers and sisters who must be fed. Actually, if they chose not to feed your seven little brothers and sisters, and instead give the money to you for college, the structural context would force them to feed the little brothers and sisters or remove them. There is always a delicate balance between agency and structural context.
I think the reason you saw your parents as "agency" is that when you were younger, they had more decision-making power than you did, and they still might, if you live at home. But as you reach maturity, you exercise more and more of your own decision-making power.
Let's see if I can put it into a graph:
Figure 1. Agency and Structural Context in Joanna's Family.Figure 1 shows that both Joanna and her parents have agency, and that the agency is constrained by the normative expectations of the structural context. Figure 1 also shows by the orange overlap that Joanna and her family have shared agency which they are able to negotiate relatively free of structural constraints. For example, many families today still put most of their resources into the son's educataion on the grounds that their daughters will raise families. Some social groups are likely to frown on this more than others, but the U.S. is unlikely to impose rules and laws that limit the agency to apportion resources as the family sees fit.
Now let's try to clarify the supplementary details that Joanna has given us:
- "I always tried to get good grades in school and behave as best I could so I wouldn't get into trouble with my parents."
"Agency" refers to power to make decisions. Joanna indicates here that she assumes responsibility for the decision to get good grades. That assumption of responsibility indicates that Joanna perceives hereself as having agency. She sees this as her choice.
"Structural context" refers to limits to our decision-making power. Joanna says she made her decision to get good grades so she wouldn't get in trouble with her parents. Here, her parents' agency, their right to define her as "in trouble" says that they appear to Joanna to have greater agency in this situation than she did. But here parents aren't making up structurally violent rules to control a whole institution. So that Joanna gets to negotiate with them over getting "in trouble." This might be considered "shared agency."
If Joanna simply decides not to go to school (at least before the legal age to leave school), then she will be "in trouble" with the school authorities, whose "rules" are not so readily negotiable.
- " . . . in trouble with my parents, who wouldn't do much but take away my privileges ( like watch t.v. or play outside)"
Here Joanna is giving detail on the normative expectations of her structural context. In the world in which she and her parents live, children are not sent out to work in order to survive and gather food, children are not physically punished, children, in fact, have TV and play. These expectations are part of her lived reality.
- "because their parents (social fact) didn't teach them (thank God) to hit their children."
Now let's look the definition of social fact: "ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that present the noteworthy property of existing outside the individual consciousness." (Emile Durkheim, in What Is A Social Fact?, in Faraganis, at p. 63.)
The placement of the parentheses makes reading this difficult. Essentially, I think Joanna is saying that it is a social fact that parents don't hit their children in the lived reality of her parents, and that because it was their lived reality, that has been handed down, so that that is now her lived reality, too.
On Sunday, November 5, 2000, Michael Planck wrote:
Jeanne, your understanding of education is so clear. May I commend you on the ability to help Joanna and people like myself to expand the capacity for choice. Your motivation is to take advantage of Joanna's desire to be heard, and not to be a part of, as I understand it, the same structural context that Joanna is struggling with - dominant discourse. That is, the attempt on the part of structural context (culture, social practices) to constrain the individual to the extent of creating confusion within the imaginary (the world of which they or I can try to make sense).Your graph to help Joanna to "visualize" her position within the area of agency and structural context helped me, too. Thanks, Michael
PS In our conversation, in your office on Thursday, you mentioned a site where I could locate sociologists that would help to clarify or expand my choice of professional direction. Who were they?
On Sunday, November 5, 2000, jeanne responded:
Michael, I'm glad the graph helped. I'm visual. It always helps me to put things in visual form. Some people are oral/aural. It helps them to talk these concepts through."A" for your comment because it shows that you were applying the concepts we've been discussing to the material as you review it. Notice please that the comment does not need to be long to show me that you have learned. It needs to give me detail on which I can base my own conclusions about your learning. In this case, Michael, you related the concept of "dominant discourse" to the structural context, indicating that you are trying to bridge the various paradigms in your mind. Notice also, that the many face-to-face discussions you have had with me permit us to understand each other more easily. Knowing you, and knowing what interests you, helps me to see latent as well as measureable learning.
I liked your allusion to struggling with the dominant discourse.
Interdependence
Agency and Dominant Discourse Struggling for the ImaginaryOh, yes. The sites that might strengthen your imaginary:
Try these for starters:
