Blogs

This Esem class teaches me to put myself in someone else's shoes. The more open-minded I am to new ideas, the less confident I feel about education. I am not sure about the purpose of schooling. I am wondering about the class issues in class. I am questioning myself about the meaning of education. It is much harder for me now to reach an absolute conclusion. I started raising more questions and getting a more balanced point of view. It is useful for me not only in this class but also in other matters I have in my life. However, I don't confidently admit that I am totally impartial. Sometimes my prejudice prevents me from acknowledging others'opinions.Seeing things through somebody's lens is an ongoing learning process. I haven't finished but I am confident that I am improving.

I also realize that our thinking can't just be stopped in a 3-page-essay each week. Three pages are a limitation for our writing but not an end to our thinking. Hence, more questions should be raised in my conclusions.

I always have a great time in class discussion. I encounter many new and unconventional ideas thanks to my classmates. They also contribute to my balanced point of view. I become more confident and overcome my fear of people's judgement. I am glad to be a part of the class where I can exchange my ideas and rethink my opinions.

taking advantage of fall break to read extracurricularly, but---so much resonance with our course in egan's novel, including...

opening passage from Proust In Search of Lost Time with echoes of Eli Clare and "memory palaces":
"Poets claim that we recapture for moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth.  But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success.  It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years."

(p168-9)  a reporter writes about his 40-minute lunch with a celebrity and brings in Karen Barad:  "--but the throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiter's hysterical recognition of my subject's fame.  And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us."  (The footnote continues to play with the idea of entangled particles.)

(p234-309)  Chapter 12 (written by a 12-year old girl about herself, her autistic13-year old brother, and their parents) is in the mode of powerpoint slides!  Particularly interesting to me is the exchange on p253 about the value of using new expressive media: 

My pre-class song suggestion is Lady Gaga's "Yoü And I" because Gaga plays both the lead male and female romantic interest in the song, playing with gender identity. In addition, the male persona, named "Jo Calderone" is how she chose to attend/perform at the VMAs. Does this example of "gender play" speak to you? Do you feel like Gaga is doing something useful and thought-provoking here, or just attention-mongering? Does her performance lend support to or mock the many people for whom gender performance is a very real aspect of daily life?

Here's the music video.

Here's an article about her decision to "be" Jo Calderone at the VMAs.

And here's a link to the lyrics, which offer some interesting moments for gendered analysis as well, including: "There’s only three men that Imma serve my whole life/It’s my daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ"

Finally, here's the wikipedia entry about the song, which explains more about the background (Gaga has said that it refers to her former relationship with Lüc Carl).

I just finished reading The Packing Problem proposal and I really hope that the book actually gets released, because it was a very engaging read, which I think is a hard thing to do when talking economics.  As I was taking a break to eat with my family, a story about Sesame Street on the local news caught my attention.  It seems that Sesame Street will be introducing a new character, who is food insecure, during a special that will air this Sunday.  This story caught my ear because it highlighted the fact that there are 17 million hungry children in the US.  That figure was staggering to me and I wondered why, if so many children here are hungry, why there aren't late night commercials pleading for their care.  One of the things that I often think about, especially in the context of this class, is the fact that we share a common internalized myth about life in this country, that kind of dictates that issues like domestic hunger are not directly addressed very often.  When I returned to The Packing Problem, I wondered how living with food scarcity for the sum total of one's life would affect how that person opperated as an adult.  I think that it would affect how they approach most everything, since gaining money is not always a cure for a scarcity mentality.  I wonder if this idea may be feeding the common conception that the poor in America are in the position they are in because they are ineffective managers of money.

Today while we were discussing Traub's idea that "in the inner city, social capital barely exists", I was able to make a connection between the reading and what I have learned thus far in my Urban Sociology class, but I wasn't really sure how to fit it into in class discussion, so I'll put it here. 

What we didn't talk about is that the very nature of cities limits the social capital (as defined by Traub) between its residents. Louis Wirth, who wrote Urbanism as a Way of Life describes the physical structure and layout of a city and how this affects people. According to Wirth, a city can be defined as a large, heterogenous, high-density dwelling. He continues to assert that because there are so many people in cities, primary ties are replaced by secondary ties, and those moving about through the streets are more isolated and lonely because they are less likely to know everyone. This is the idea of the "metropolitan man" and although it's been almost 75 years since Wirth's work was published, we can still see our modern metroman in the city today. 

What I gave here is a very general summary of some of Wirth's points, but you can read the whole essay here: http://www.sociology.osu.edu/classes/soc367/payne/Wirth_1938_AJS.pdf 

Here we all are, anticipating.....

...are now accessible from this page. A number of you had tagged them to appear here, in this forum, but I thought they were sorta clogging things up/slowing down the conversation, so I re-tagged them to appear over there. Please feel free to go read and comment on one another's explorations--there's lots of interesting stuff going on over there!

The video “Nature: What Females Want…and What Males Will Do” featured clichéd, even asinine commentary about animals’ reproductive behavior. The DVD showed heterosexual animal interactions punctuated with quotes from biologists and the narrator such as “Males will do anything they can do copulate with a female – we know that!” In a look a male geladas, whose ability to withstand sub-0 nighttime temperatures is demonstrated by the deep red of their chest patches, were described as “Pretty tough!” Female fireflies that mocked another species’ light patterns in order to eat the males were described as “true femme fatales.” In reference to jumping spiders, a biologist explained,  “Females are looking for complex things; they want more and more, so males have evolved these dances.” Red-sided garter snakes that were forcibly inseminated would in a day or so “have another chance at love.” This constant commentary, while meant to be entertaining, was not only distracting but often times offensive because of the way it demonstrated stereotypes about gender and sexuality.

I was fascinated by the concept of “cryptic choice” introduced in the video “Nature: What Females Want…and What Males Will Do.” Female red-sided garter snakes are rendered immobile by males competing to inseminate her. They have, however, evolved a means of defense against forced copulation: they can choose which of the snake’s sperm will fertilize their eggs. Another example of “cryptic choice” is seen in ducks’ reproductive systems: they twist opposite ways to make reproduction more difficult. A third of ducks’ copulations are forced, but they produce only 3% of the young. Explained the narrator, “Evolution has given females the edge.” Last week, my psychology-major roommate sent me an article called “Women’s Avoidance of Rape” which, like the video, acknowledged that “Sexual coercion and rape have been documented in many different species.”