California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: April 18, 1998
Faculty on the Site.

The papers in this panel represent the work of many students and faculty through the Moot Court Project of the Law and Society Research Center in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. They are process texts, meaning that they have been created over time, by different members of the team and their faculty mentors, as the project itself developed, and as we discussed it in both face to face collaborations and over the Internet. The entire set of papers and the participation of our students in the Western Social Science Association conference was made possible by an Instructionally Related Activities grant to the Moot Court Project. Some travel was also afforded by the Undergraduate Advising Center, which has participated for years in the Moot Court Project.

"Photography as Sociological Method in Establishing Discourse"
" Including the Student in Academic Discourse"
"Inclusion and Practice in Public Discourse: the Academy and the Community"
"Finding Ways to Get the Academy and the Community Together for Discourse"
"Including our Seniors in the Academy and in Community Discourse"

Please see also: Narrative and Changing Views of Criminal Justice:
Ways in Which Changing Technology is Forcing Us to Re-examine our Narrative of Crime
Jeanne Curran, Susan Takata, Robert M. Christie

April 18, 1999.

My profound apologies. There is no way that any of us could have remained "on top of" this project. It grew like Topsy, even though we were convinced that most of our preliminary growing was already done. In the summaries which follow I have tried to bring us all up to date on the development of our virtual community and its attempt to create outreach to an entire community. As predicted, there were many turning points and many times we had to pass the baton on to others. But that is part of the beauty of process texts. They take our situatedness into account and provide us with means to handle our innovative growth as well as support for meeting the deadlines we always manage at the last moment.

This paper describes an approach to working with community participants through photography, a less intimidating medium than academic articles. Both an historical and a descriptive approach are used to convey present community needs and possibilities for coping with them.

This section focuses on the relationship between journalistic reportage and interpretative narrative. In particular, we took a starting point from an art project on the Holocaust, one which had been drawn from photographs. We looked at the use we considered making of photography in this project, through the medium of drawing and art work. Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle and Amsterdam museum study.

This paper describes the role of advising in bringing students within the purview of academic decision-making both for themselves and for the university. At Wisconsin the advising and inclusion are primarily provided by the faculty in Criminal Justice and Sociology. At CSUDH, the Undergraduate Advising Center plays a major role in creating possibilities for the integration of student roles in curriculum and outcomes.

This section focuses particularly on academic advising, the role it plays in the world of higher education, and the extent to which parts of the learning task in public discourse can be shared outside the formal teaching role.

This paper was designed to focus on outreach to non-university participants in discourse relating to major social issues. Most ouf our attention had to go this year to building the conceptual infrastructure on which our virtual community is based.

In our efforts to extend the model of outreach to all validity claims and their valid expression and hearing, we discovered that there were many more stages than we had anticipated, and that the tool of the Internet played a far more significant role than we had been led to believe.

1. Dear Habermas site, WebBoard, and e-mail - we thought that our students had moved to this level. Working closely with them, we have begun to discover that there were many more stages. We need all of these for the virtual community we see developing, but we needed to be more aware of the various roles as they are defining themselves within the process of building community.

   1. discovered patterns in work of last year -
   2. worked with patterns in Fall of this year - turkish publication
   3. work with Encino program of adolescents

   4. Detailed explanations of the part each tool plays in community.

   5. Issues of control, editing, access to forum, and need for "discipline" in old sense.

   6. Different means of controlling threads, by access, by process text development, by alternative means. Extent to which participation can and should be "voluntary" when it falls within formal institutional role. (Student, staff, faculty, parent, child, etc.)

2. Components added this Fall

   1. Older Adult Center
   2. Women's Center
   3. Recognition of site as tool Stages in understanding we're finding Dolly - class - to lab - to own computer Many uses for site Issue -based, forgiveness, good faith, discourse major social issue - helping, justice, law expansion from legal argument to use of reasoning with system

The Human Services Program at CSUDH is instrumental in drawing on a variety of community resources to discuss the major issues facing the community for which public discourse is essential. These include problems of adjusting to mid-life to late-life transitions to new life styles and patterns of living, the containment of violence in the community in face of recent modern metropolitan concerns, the concern of the community for domestic violence, non-reported as well as reported. These are issues that need forums for discussion that are shared across the community. That is one of the major roles of Dear Habermas, to provide such a forum. This paper addresses the barriers encountered and the factors that have aided us in overcoming them.

This paper capitalizes on the advantage of our gerontology program and all its contacts with the senior community. Dr. Raphael supervises our campus Older Adult Center, and works extensively with our graduate students in gerontology. Through their efforts we have extended our outreach to seniors.. Sometimes the seniors aid us in reaching the young people, sometimes they are instrumental in expanding our communication within the community, through both religious and secular organizations.