Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

The problem was first asking the demand for my coffee shop and was confused. But I put it away and then I noticed I couldn't type anything on the PC. I called my dad in North Carolina, not for that he could possibly help us in Houston, but perhaps I was thinking that my dad alone has enough times with emergency that I could have an empathy. The conversation with him was a jumble and I could hear the mixture of his impatience and concern. I then called my best friend, a nurse, and his conversation sent me to get to the ER. I should have made the idea already -- the symptom was obviously. The brain is ironically a great amazing of the star dust made of miracles, firing neurons that both sympathetic and parasympathetic breaths us our heart millions away without thinking, and designing and playing a Chopin etude. Yet as miracle as this the brain, it is so sensitive, so frailty, so that gelatin we sapiens  keeps us so closely to what keeps us ... stop. 16th Century Medical Text B...

Part 1 Marginalization and the Rhetorical ecology of Community College Latinos Though I believe that the site of the community college is one of the nation’s last hopes for a utopian system of equality, the reality is that most often it has adopted multiple practices of postcolonization that other state institutions have practiced for decades. One of these practices is the hidden and implicit labeling of Latinos as “other” for the college’s statistical means of reporting to the state. Lazaro Lima argues in his Latino Body that it was an early identification of Mexican Americans in an 1894 pseudo-ethnographic description that framed Mexicans as “other” because of physical markers, “savage” traditions, and so forth, that demarked these Americans as non-Americans. This otherness continues to this day, though now we must add the complications of limited education, literacy, class, language, and even the imagined reification of “documentation” to maintain this otherness. This weighs ...

The narrative of most studies that deal with Latino education begin with a common narrative: citing national statistics of growth, discussing economic disparities between Latinos and Anglos, and low rates of college persistence. I choose to begin this discussion without these statistics for multiple reasons, the most important being one of identity, or the question of identity when institutions use terms such as “Hispanic” or “Latino” for their own administrative and budgetary purposes, most often accumulating such data without the explicit consultation with the students themselves.  Secondly, I will discuss in this chapter how -- though most students who are enrolled in the First Year Writing course (FYW) take the course in the nation’s community colleges -- the narrative of the community’s ethos is still detached from the identity of the community, especially as public institutions at all levels are being defunded in a neoliberal economy. This simultaneous ubiquity of the ...

The “mindless and depraved” refer not to anyone in particular. Richard Butsch has an interesting introduction in his book The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals and I need to spend more time in the book itself. Consider these few notes as a summary of his argument, how socio-economic class identifies itself (or has its identity crafted) in the social sphere. This tension between classes can explain how some in the college institution see community college students as mindless and depraved crowds instead of intellectual publics, thus shifting attention and resources from the needs of the community to the skills of the few who meet the expectation of administration and faculty middle class ethos. By seeing the multicultural student's body as depraved and "other" (though Butsch doesn't address Said's orientalism), the tension exhibited in the passive-aggressive monitoring of the college student's body by the dominant-culture mind can be expla...

Some Publics are Not Spherical Since Habermas (really, Dewey, with another lexicon), we've been talking about publics and publics spheres, and most people discuss the public sphere without considering both terms sufficiently to critique Habermas's basic metaphor -- that private individuals, coming together in informed, rational discourse, create a public that counters the state's discourse and engages through literacy to shape the democracy. But what if, instead of "sphere," the public is another shape, either two- or three-dimensional? Daniel Brouwer and his co-authors address the geometry of publicity in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life . Considering my own experience in a public education institution and engaged with students largely invisible in public, the question of the shape of public discourse becomes an essential one, because I see less spherical influence and something more wobbly, less perfect, less egalitar...

Parce que le crayon sera toujours au dessus de la barbarie... The reality of the American academy is that the public institution creates so many meetings to justify itself, its bloated administrative bureaucracy, as well as meeting demands of the state's own bureaucracy that the central mission of learning-through-teaching is obscured. One can rationalize the necessity of learning objectives and accreditation, especially within the language of competition, standards, and other jargon, but ultimately the arguements end up in a cul-de-sac of ad absurdum  when the collaborative relationship between/with students and professors is erased. That's pretty much how my last week went. Part I and Part II of this mini-series. The Study of Literature as a Critical Thinking Dialog Irvin Peckham quotes Freire: “Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking-thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people a...

Previous post on Hannah Arendt and action = promise + forgiveness If I accept Arendt's proposition that action requires promise and forgiveness in an ideal public, or even to nurture a nascent public, then I also need to define that public as an associative one, not an agonistic one, such as our current social constitution today. Seyla Benhabib explains this where he argues that Arendt's vision of public is a liberal one, in the Kantian sense, such that liberalism is a culture where the question of legitimacy is paramount and necessarily consistent. Calling upon Ackerman “Whenever anybody questions the legitimacy of another’s power, the power holder must respond not by suppressing the questioner but by giving a reason that explains why he is more entitled to the resource than the questioner is” [Ackerman 14]. Ackerman understands liberalism as a way of talking about power, as a political culture of public dialogue based on certain kinds of conversational constraints. The m...

A quick review. Others such as Dr Chris Bateman do Arendt more justice. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. ( The Human Condition  7) Action : HA here defines action as the interaction between people "without the intermediary of things or matter" (7), which has some semblance to Habermas' public sphere and the ideal speech situation and inevitably comes with plurality. The principle of action is it requires freedom , in a political and economic sense, and produces political power. Consider what this means to us in our communities. Labor (human as Animal Laborans ) is what we do to survive; it never ends. It's the ...