WWW www.habermas.org

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: December 26, 2005
Latest Update: December 26, 2005
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Topic of the Week:
Naked Space and Feminism

As I answered your postings and began to upload the dialogs that constitute your A's, I came across so many references that I couldn't resist pausing today, the first day after Christmas, to upload lectures and self tests that explain much of what I have included in the proposal for the Conference of Independent Scholars: Scholars Across Disciplines, to be held in Princeton in June 2006.

The campus is closed until January 3, and the Dean's office has access to your grades as posted here on the site. And I will get them all up. So I opted to take out several hours because it will help you better understand our teaching model, our performative art exhibit, and all that we will start this January.

The image I chose for the topic of the week is one that has been on my artist cards for years. That sketch of an ancient Japanese goddess is one of my favorites, done in five minutes before the guards through us out of one the Seattle art museums just at closing time.. As I contemplated preparing exhibits for the Spring, I thought of all that feminism means today: a return to brides of the pre-feminist movement, of Mommy-track professionals, and now older rpofessionals at the height of their career, creating a Daughter-Track, caring for their parents. All that is part of what we must consider as we move into No Child Left Behind.

How are we going to define "child"? How are we going to define "parent"? Will Mommy-track professionals find opportunities, according to Rawls' principle of difference, when they discover their children grown? Or will we expect them to sit idle from 40 or 50 till the end of their lives? Jobs and careers, as we presently know them are no longer what we once expected them to be. Race, age, and gender are all up for new meaning in the coming decades.

What will "life in prison without parole" really come to mean? What kind of havoc will prison sentences wreak on lives that must go on for 40 years after release? What will families look like as great grandchildren increase our families to extended family size again, but spread across entire countries or the globe? What will teaching look like once we realize that banking education of memorized trivia leads nowhere? What will education look like as we come to understand more fully that testing sucks?

These are some of the questions I've posed in this issue, and for which I've begun to provide lecture materials and self tests. How will we visually display Rawls' liberty and difference principles in box structures? How will we capture a tiny piece of those principles or justice or fairness in cards that we give to strangers and friends (recalling the hippies of yesteryear with their flowers) to serve as stimuli to governance discourse in our communities?

What does answerability mean when many of us are unheard? How will we balance the individual and the community so that the least among us is advantaged, as well as the privileged? What are our responsibilities to one another? How will we get around Hirschman's "rhetoric of reaction" to hear one another in good faith?

Feminist scholarship brought us Maria Pia Lara's "illocutionary discourse," reminding us that hearing one another in good faith is an essential start to reasonable governance discourse. Habermas jumped right in with governance, and merely regretted that we had lost the skills for such discourse. We need our feminist goddesses to remind us to go back to more careful listening, to consider again Bakhtin's answerability, to take responsibility, and to hold one another to that standard.

Gee whiz, as Susan would say, that's an awful lot for a new year. May we find our way. love and peace, jeanne

NEWS, Announcements, and

Current Events Discussion Topics:

Learning Records - About one third of the learning records from the Learning Record Site are posted. I will do my best to finish them tomorrow. The first person who sends me an e-mail saying that "mine's not up" is a rotten egg and I'll come after you! The Dean's office knows they're coming in a day or so late, and I want them to be as correct as all my records can manage. I didn't post grades on all of them yet. I'm doing it bit by bit. No message in that. Just the order they come up in on my computer. love and peace, jeanne

• Statistics - Sociology 220
• Moot court - Sociology 370
• Helping Professions - Sociology 386
• Love 1A - Sociology 395
• Grad Love 1A - Sociology 595
• Directed Reading and Practicum - Sociology 597, 599

We don't have an office anymore. They moved us out last week, while I was having a reaction to the radiation therapy. All our stuff got moved across the hall, but it's in no condition for immediate use. So communicate with me over the site and transform_dom. Pat's coming up on Thursday, and we plan to put up the grades. Check learning records starting Thursday, December 15, after radiation therapy. We hope to get moved into the office across the hall by late January. jeanne

Conference in June 2006

Please check out the proposal I submitted on Christmas Eve. If you want to go, we need to start thinking about money NOW!

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.

Visual Sociology

• Pondering the Death Penalty
  Death Penalty

  

• Live Out Loud

  A card project on social justice you can play with over the holidays. Also in the previous issue.

  
  

  

  Patterns and instructions for the basic card.

Lectures, Lecture Notes, Text Lectures

• Giving Details Which Help Us Understand One Another - Diversity in Our Discussion Group - This piece reproduces an e-mail exchange between Aisha Welch and jeanne (before transform_dom existed), in which Aisha's reaction gives jeanne important data on which to base her reply.

  • Self Test on Details as Necessary Phase of Illocutionary Discourse

• Expanding Our Discussions Beyond Our Local Community - Jury Selection - This piece reproduces e-mail (before transform_dom existed) between Talia Baran and Gordon Fellman, the author of the text Talia was using at UWP, Rambo and the Dalai Lama.

  • Self Test on Expanding Our transform_dom Discussions to Authors

• Reviewing Rawls' Theory on Justice and Fairness - Different Perceptions of Justice - The Power Point presentation is on the Society for Industrial Organization and Psychology Inc. website, consulted on December 26, 2005. You may want to run through this form of the lecture. It's very good. To move from one slide to the next, just click in the lower left hand corner of each slide. The notes for teachers give much greater detail and references. If you are planning to work on a Distributive Justice box project, you will want the more extensive notes below. But you might want to share the PowerPoint lecture with one of our workshops so everyone will understand the box sculpture project.

  • Self Test on Justice and Fairness - This piece reproduces e-mail from transform_dom that shows how our discussions yield actual and useful data. This is important as we try to understand deeply what we can justifiably conclude from our discussions. You also need to understand this process in order to more accurately understand the extent to which you agree or disagree with what your texts say.

• Our Discussions on transform_dom Yield Snowball Samples - Snowball Sampling As We're Doing It - This piece reproduces e-mail from transform_dom that shows how our discussions yield actual and useful data. This is important as we try to understand deeply what we can justifiably conclude from our discussions. You also need to understand this process in order to more accurately understand the extent to which you agree or disagree with what your texts say.

  • Self Test on How Our Discussions Yield Snowball Samples

• In the Matter of My God Is The "Right" God - Mythos and Logos and Religious Arrogance This piece reproduces e-mail from transform_dom that explains mythos and logos as they permeate our discussions. jeanne's response is based on Karen Armstrong's exlpanation of the belief that one is "right" in fundamentalist religions. Some evangelical Christian churches are fundamentalist. Some are not. The issue of "knowingness" should permit you to differentiate. The "arrogance of knowingness" is not shared by all members of fundamentalist churches, since the church has a hard time keeping its members always in consensus, as Atwood writes in her novel, The Handmaid's Tale.

  • Self Test on Mythos and Logos and Religious Arrogance

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

• John Rawls - justice as fairness - Rawls' concept of justice as fairness in based on two priniciples:
  1. liberty principle - the principle of equal opportunity - each person has an opportunity to exercise her skills and choices in pursuits of her goals, in a social community that offers this same opportunity to every person
  2. difference principle - "Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society." from Rawls' Mature Theory of Social Justice: An Introduction for Students, © by Dr. Jan Garrett, consulted, December 26, 2005.

     "13. What does Rawls' Second Principle mean?

     It means that society may undertake projects that require giving some persons more power, income, status, etc. than others, e.g., paying accountants and upper-level managers more than assembly-line operatives, provided that the following conditions are met:

     (a) the project will make life better off for the people who are now worst off, for example, by raising the living standards of everyone in the community and empowering the least advantaged persons to the extent consistent with their well-being,

     and (b) access to the privileged positions is not blocked by discrimination according to irrelevant criteria. " from Rawls' Mature Theory of Social Justice: An Introduction for Students, © by Dr. Jan Garrett, consulted, December 26, 2005.

  Other references:

  • John Rawls in Wickipedia
  • "justice as fairness" in Wickipedia

• Herbart's apperceptive mass

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.

  • 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

• Urban Legends Reference Pages. They post rumors and scams and phony e-mails circulating, to offer you a quick check. It worked for me. I entered "Fat Boy" as a google seacrch, and when I saw the Snopes.com link, I knew it would help, and it did. To not check your sources is as grievous as to plagiarize someone else's information and writing. A Page from Urban Legends As an Example.

• the-artists.org Good quick reference site with many of the artists, art schools, and visual approaches to present social issue that we discuss. Added April 8, 2005.

• Plagiarism Watch www.streetgangs.com site. The intelligent and effective use of resources means that you have to be careful not to plagiarize other people's material. We have several files on plagiarism, but I think the one that might make the most sense to you is this complaint on streetgangs.com. They give you samples of sites that have taken their material without citation, even at colleges, and they also give you examples of sites that have used their material with proper attribution. I find the irony poetic, and hope that their message will get through to you the importance of attribution. Dr. O'Connor on his Mega Criminal Justice site led me to streetgangs.com and noted that others frequently hack into the site. For that reason I have created a backup copy for your use in case you cannot access the actual site. Please be sure to attribute any citation to streetgangs.com. jeanne Backup.

  You might want to consider also the information on Dr.Woo Suk Hwang of South Korea:

  "Therapeutic Cloning Was a Fraud"
  By Hsien Hsien Lei, PhD | Related entries in Genetic Engineering

  One of the year’s biggest stories in bioscience appears to have been make-believe. In May, scientists in South Korea announced they’d been able to clone eleven embryonic stem cell lines containing the DNA of patients who suffered from diseases such as Parkinson’s, diabetes, and spinal cord injury. The hope was that the cloned stem cells could be used therapeutically via transplantation without fear of rejection.

  Now Dr. Woo Suk Hwang has admitted to fabricating the results. Nine of the 11 colonies of stem cells featured in the study published in the journal Science apparently don’t exist and the other two may not have been real either. The researchers involved have asked Science to retract their paper." From geneticsandhealth.com, consulted on December 26, 2005.

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

  • I Was Scared of Statistics
    • Jennifer Schwind, Fall 2005

  • It Feels Good to Make a Difference
    • Olivia Guttierez, Love 1A, Fall 2005

  • The Site Goes On - You're Always Welcome Back
    • From Angelique Hawley on December 16, 2005: Message No. 9072 on transform_dom.

      Merry Christmas! Jeannne and Pat and all the marvelous students at CSUDH that has shared in "Naked Space"

      I wish I had a lot of money so that I could reward all of you properly. Transform_domDigest is so wonderful.

      I can recall when being one of the first users in 2004 and I see we are at digest 594. my how time flies when we are learning and having fun.

      Jeanne you and Pat are the bomb!

      I continue to read the digest although I am not taking any of your classes now. The digests have been more informative than the school paper. Please continue to keep it going.

      Get rest ! I hope to see you .

• Flying Good Dogs: Whenever something happens in this or any other 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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