WWW www.habermas.org

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: October 28, 2005
Latest Update: November 9, 2005
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Topic of the Week:

Naked Space and the Art of Engagement

Betty Melton, Secretary in Sociology, took this photo of naked space for us Thursday afternoon. And I posted the call for papers on Teaching in Higher Education this afternoon on transform_dom. Something about what Betty captured in the photo seemed to communicate naked space to me. I can't explain it, not yet. It's like my attempt to explain "will i still be me" last week.

Naked space is about our social learning, our creation of a learning community, and about our intense engagement with the substantive issues that are currently part of our lifeworld. We symbolize the concept by the empty space, but that's just a visual metaphor. Naked space is more than an empty space. Naked space is about creating space for answerability and for the Other, about respecting each other and humans well enough to restore the earth to her powers and ourselves to loving life and the living and those who came before us and will come after us in this endeavor.

Think about it. Help us find visual, aural, metaphors that will let others understand the importance of engagement in this process. Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology. I left it up. What was Helnwein saying? Why was he willing to offend. Why do Beau and Michael want to shake us up? How are those things related? Why did one of my students make a giant box that when opened had a lovely smiling face inside that said "F^&* the Patriot Act"?? Isn't that a lot like what Helnwein and Kiefer and Beuys were doing? Maybe saying "wake up and look at what you're doing?"

The French sometimes portray the poet as the real leader of humans. Why do you suppose? Can we understand and become more aware when we "get it" all at once without beating it to death with words? I once had a teacher who could take a really exciting idea and beat it absolutely to death by the end of an hour lecture. We need the words. We need the books. But might we need the visual and aural to hit us up the side of the head and wake us up??? When we insist on politeness and gentleness and kindness and not correcting each other are we destroying our own creativity and lining it up like desks all in a row? What about our poets and musicians and artists?

What was I really seeing of all this in Betty's photograph above?

love and peace, jeanne

References:

• Voter Turnout as an Act of Engagement: the Propositions.
• Art of Engagement, exhibit and lecture, on Peter Selz' new book Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
• Artists Represented in Art of Engagement Exhibition

NEWS, Announcements, and

Current Events Discussion Topics:

VOTE TUESDAY . . . VOTE TUESDAY . . . VOTE TUESDAY

Propositions on Ballot for California Special Election Tuesday, November 8, 2005.

Student Get Out the Vote Campaign (GOTV) at CSUDH:

Thanks again for volunteering and for freeing your class to help in our Student GetOutTheVote Campaign. I think I may have misspoke on the phone with you this evening. To confirm for your students – CFA Interns, Maggie Gomez and Yesenia Diaz can be reached regarding the Student GOTV campaign at CSUDH by email at save_the_csudh@yahoo.com or by phone at 310-243-2168 (I think I may have gotten the email wrong over the phone). Please have your students contact us – we will be running a GOTV campaign and caravan all day Tuesday, from 9am – 7:30pm. Thanks!

The Ecstasy Exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art through February 20.

"Ecstasy" is the trippy, messy, highly entertaining survey put together by Paul Schimmel of the Museum of Contemporary Art here. It sprawls through the Geffen Contemporary, the museum's cavernous warehouse in Little Tokyo, which too often begs for attention but is now jammed with blissed-out mobs.

The Art of Engagement:

Opening Friday, November 11, 2005
7:00 till 9:30 p.m.
The Art of Engagement
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Gallery
357 North La Brea
Los Angeles, California 90036

Revised Syllabi for jeanne's Fall 2005 Classes
Instructions for Tutoring Requests and to Upload Learning Records

• Revised syllabi for jeanne's Fall 2005 classes, given registration problems. The lectures will be rearranged by topic. The notes by date given. The texts by text. But I won't be able to do that until Friday.

• Learning Records for jeanne's classes, Fall 2005:

  Rosters for Learning Records
  Updated to Late Add List - everyone should be on roster this time - jeanne

  • Learning Records for Statistics, Sociology 220-01, Fall 2005 Updated October 15, 2005.
  • Learning Records for Moot Court, Sociology 370-01, Fall 2005 Updated October 15, 2005.
  • Learning Records for Sociology of the Helping Professions, Sociology 386-01, Fall 2005 Updated October 15, 2005.
  • Learning Records for Special Topics: Love 1A, Sociology 395-01, Fall 2005 Updated October 15, 2005.
  • Learning Records for Graduate Special Topics: Love 1A, Sociology 595-02, Fall 2005 Updated October 15, 2005

• Instructions page for joining transform_dom and transspan

  • Link for joining transform_dom: Fixed this link. jeanne

    
    Click to join transform_dom

• Yahoo Group: Transparent Learning Measurement

  We have created this site for students who have questions, would like someone to help by reading over their work, would like some practice in using the site, aren't clear on a specific concept and would like one of us to explain it in different words, etc.

  This is also the site on which you should ask me to put up a specific Message No. that you would like to use for your learning record. This'll make it much easier for me and Susan than trying to pull your messages for learning records from the general discussion.

  For instructions see Tutoring.

• Revised Syllabi for jeanne's Fall 2005 Classes
  Instructions for Tutoring Requests and to Upload Learning Records

Famous People and Concepts We Should Have Heard Of, But Often Haven't.

People


• Helnwein - Austrian artist who is deeply engaged and uses his art to convey his messages. Compared to Beuys, who despised the commodification of art.

• Botero - Colombian artist who could not help himself - he had to paint the violence he witnessed in his own country.

Concepts:

• The painting of torture and terror

Jeanne's Lectures for Fall 2005

• Lectures, Lecture Notes, Text Lectures

  Fall 2005:

  • Fall 2005 Letters to My Students: jeanne's World and Welcome to It
  • Application Lectures on Current Events in Chronological Order
  • Lecture Notes in Class Order
  • Text Summaries in Text Order
  • Self Tests in I. Activites Order; II. Class Order and; III. Text Order

  Lectures Posted for Week of November 6, 2005

  • Defending Imperial Nudity Op-Ed Column in the New York Times on November 4, 2005. Backup Discussion up soon, I hope. Remind me to tell you about Montesquieu. jeanne

  Lecture Notes

  Index of Lecture Notes for Fall 2005

  • Lectures Posted for Week of November 6, 2005:

    • Topic of Week for November 6.

  Text Lectures

• Index for Text Lectures

• Text Lectures Posted for Week of November 6, 2005:

  • Up soon.

  Discussion Pieces from Transform_dom

• Index for Discussion Pieces

• Discussion Pieces Posted for Week of November 6, 2005:

  • Evaluation of Naked Space - Discussion based on Shirley Dunn's comments.

  • How Our Vote Counts

  • Felons Voting Suggestions appreciated. You guys are right in the middle of this one. jeanne

  • I don't have time to upload it separately, but would like to know what your reactions were to Matt's post on Jenny? What message did Mevysen convey about jeanne's response? How would you suggest we handle unanticipated responses in the naked space, with an eye to preserving both community and a meaningful focus on substantive discipline - i.e. focus on theory in its applications to practice? Mevysen suggested that it was not by accident that Matt fell into this naked space. I'd like us to continue that thought.

  Self Tests Posted for Week of November 6, 2005

  • Self-Test on Reliability and Validity in Musical Understanding Statistical terms and music appreciation, all in one. Have fun. jeanne

  • Self Test on Ecstasy Exhibit Understanding how artists approach politics, philosophy, ideology.

  • Self-Test on Naked Space Evaluation How will we know that our naked space is accomplishing the goals it set itself in the process of the semester?

  • Self-Test on How Our Vote Counts

  Visual Sociology

• A Mind-Bending Head Trip (All Legal):

  Some big idea seems to be mixed up in all this. It's not about glorifying drugs or drug culture, the show's red herring. Mr. Schimmel writes about the appeal of Ecstasy to clubgoers and ravers in the 90's. It provided, he says, "intense feelings of connectedness with one's companions and with humanity in general." He continues, "This experience is not about the hippie ethos of 'Turn on, tune in, drop out,' but about overcoming the isolation of contemporary life - the pervasive sense of disconnectedness that is to some degree due to the failure of hippie ideals, to the cynicism and greed that followed the dissolution of 1960's counterculture."

  There is a dream of radicalism and the cynical sense of its inevitable corruption - an awareness that utopia and dystopia are often the same. From A Mind-Bending Head Trip (All Legal), by Michael Kimmelman, in the New York Times on Nov.4, 2005. Backup

• A Hanging Matter? On Helnwein as an artist of engagement.
  

  Helnwein's Adoration of the Magi on exhibit in Ireland

• Learning to Use Art as a Tool for Discourse

  • Index of Art Techniques for Naked Space Exhibits, Virtual and Real

    • Index of Art Techniques for the Computer that you can use for the naked space exhibit

    • Index of Art Techniques that jeanne knows and that you can use for the naked space exhibit

  Our Naked Space Exhibit on Love 1A is now started on the Internet. Visit it by clicking on the hot links on the image map below. Remember, you can determine a hot link by running your cursor over the image until a hand appears. Click where the hand is. And start thinking out of the box.

  

  Invitation and Image Map for The Naked Space Exhibit for Fall 2005 Love 1A

  You might want to look at the Spring 2004 Exhibit Online:

  Invitation to Naked Space Exhibit

  
  Link anywhere on the invitation to enter the exhibit.

  • Hypertext Poem, Freeing the Feminine Other, Spring 2004
  • Table of Links to Contents

Academic Support and Resource Links

• A Range of Sources on Global Info

  Left/Right Perspectives - Cursor - New York Times - The National Review
  Arts and Letters Daily - The Economist - The Sierra Club - The Guardian
  Wall Street Journal - The Weekly Standard - The Nation - The Cato Institute (Libertarian)
  BBC NEWS | Americas - truthout - Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles
  Los Angeles Times - Chicago Tribune - La Opinion - The Washington Post
  Cursor's Al Jazeera Archive - Ha'aretz - Palestine Monitor - Palestine Report

  Indymedia - Mother Jones - BBC News - New Profile - KPFK Progressive Radio
  Progressive Sociologists Network Environmental Working Group - Mirror of Justice

• Mentoring

  Graduate Exams Study

  • University of Chicago Prelim Study
  • Revised Syllabi for jeanne's Fall 2005 Classes
    
  • Instructions for Tutoring and Learning Records Requests

    Some older files not yet revised for Fall 2005, but useful.

  • How to Navigate the Web Site
    
  • Mentoring Help for New Students with Frequently Asked Questions
    
  • Mentoring Help for Returning Students with More Frequently Asked Questions
    
  • Shared Reading Suggestions
  • Learning Styles

  • Home Page for transform-dom You can read all the messages on Transforming Dominant Discourse from this page. Just click on messages in the left hand frame. You can read the messages, even if you're having difficulty signing up.

  Preparing for Graduate Study:

• Test Prep Preview Joshua L. Stewart, recommended this site because it has free practice tests. If you're thinking of taking the GRE, the LAST, or any other graduate entry test, this might be a good place to gather some early information. Joshua suggested it for Praxis Practice, but a quick first look suggests they don't mean by praxis what we do. Check it out, anyway, if you have some spare time. jeanne

Resource Literacy

Using Academic Language Effectively

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

and Careers

• Resumes:

  • College Journal Resume Suggestions . . . Backup

• Letters of Recommendation:

  • Letters of Recommendation: How to get me to respond to your request. Many of you need letters. If you will follow this format, I can do them quickly and make them good.
  • Dog Letters If you do not give me adequate information, but do manage to get my attention, you may end up with a dog letter. That is a letter that says that you work well with people, that you are enthusiastic, that you persist at getting things done, and that everyone likes you. Of course, my dog gets along well with people, brings his ball to them, is enthusiastic, and persists at getting them to take his ball. Everyone likes my dog. That's a dog letter. It's so general it could be about my dog. jeanne

• Career Options You Might Not Have Considered

  • visual media and their interdependence with other means of knowing to understand that we are not totally rational creatures deciding things apart from our feelings and values. Wolfowitz (new President of the World Bank to aid developing countries AND principle advocate of the Iraq War) might feel very differently when he is exposed to visual and aural images of the poor developing countries that have not before been his primary concern. So we want to know how best to present those developing countries visually. And we might find that we can have a career doing that sort of thing, so it does reflect on us as individuals. Added April 2, 2005.

Sneaky Strokes and Flying Good Dogs

Flying Dog is also a painting by Zhang Kai. Best I've ever come across to illustrate our site with magic numbers and unicorns and whipped cream cats and now, flying dogs, oh, and Faupel's Flying Fish.:

• Icons and acronyms and what they mean in Internet Speak

• Index of Nice Things We've Said to Each Other

• Flying Good Dogs: Whenever something happens in class that works out well, that inspires you, that helps in studying, whatever, take a few minutes to send us an e-mail. We'll post it where all of us can learn from it, including other teachers.

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