Worlding and Worlds: entangled among relations of power, systems, embodiments, justice

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PUBLIC HAPPINESS 
From TV Reed (2005): analysis of film in the American Indian Movement (Ch 5) on the ethos of AIM's encampment (p152):

"One of the most profound aspects of collective, social movement action, at least from my experience, is the feeling political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as 'public happiness,' the sense of exhilaration that comes when one throws one's whole being into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom captured in film, with its bias toward individualized storytelling.... It is summed up by Mary's remark [in the film Lakota Woman] that she never felt more 'free' than when inside the Wounded Knee camp. That one can feel most 'free' when in jail for civil disobedience or when surrounded by the trigger-happy federal marshals and FBI agents is a paradox of social activism rarely portrayed in the mass media."

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Lakota Woman: YouTube: https://youtu.be/TX4fKNLepdM
Published on Mar 15, 2013
"Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee starring Irene Bedard, Tantoo Cardinal, Pato Hoffmann, Joseph Runningfox, Lawrence Bayne, and Michael Horse and August Schellenberg. The film follows a young Mary Crow Dog and her poor Lakota family living on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota as she briefly learns the ways of her people and of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee told to her by her grandfather Fool Bull (played by Floyd Red Crow Westerman)."

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PUBLIC FEELINGS: WHERE DO THEY GO? 

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From YouTube and the BBC: 
Chocolate The Bitter Truth 1 of 5 Child Trafficking BBC Panorama Investigation
https://youtu.be/LD85fPzLUjo
Uploaded on Feb 2, 2011
"Chocolate - The Bitter Truth 1 of 5 - Ivory Coast Child Trafficking - BBC Panorama Investigation, recorded 08.05.2010 We spend more on chocolate each year than investors spend on gold - but as Easter approaches, how much do we really know about where it comes from or how it is made? Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon goes undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa and discovers children as young as seven working long hours on cocoa farms, helping to make the chocolate we love so much. He buys a tonne of cocoa made with child labour, and sees how easy it is to sell it into the supply chain which leads to our high streets. He also helps rescue a 12-year-old boy - trafficked across borders - to pick cocoa as a modern-day slave and reunites him with his mother. For the first time, we meet the kids who harvest our cocoa but who have never tasted chocolate. Tracing the bitter truth of chocolate and child labour, Panorama reporter Paul Kenyon poses as a cocoa dealer to uncover the extent of child labour in the chocolate trade."

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>>VIDEO FOLLOWUP:

FREEWRITE: what do you do with the feelings that come up when confronted with injustice? Are you likely to

=blame yourself or others?

=be suspicious of claims?

=feel briefly and then try to forget?

=take action? What sort and how? 

WRITE ABOUT AN EXAMPLE OR INSTANCE OF ANY OF THIS, ESP. SOMETHING RECENT IF POSSIBLE

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AT ALL SCALES OF SYSTEM/S IN INTERCONNECTION AND ENTANGLEMENTS: 

global economies, environmental justice, microflora and neurosystems, trauma

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Tuesday, 3 November – Whose Worlds? Intersectionality and multiple identities

• Read Reed 5 and 8: note "public happiness" and "cognitive praxis" 

• Read two chapters from the book 5 you chose.

• Check out the art-activist online project on microaggressions: http://www.microaggressions.com 

• Check out the Wikipedia's article on microaggression theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression_theory

What connections do you make among your readings for this week? Art and social movements can speak powerfully about the worlds we live in, the differences among worlds created by uneven power and social structures, the forms of oppression and privilege that identities entail, and the histories in which some groups thrive at the expense of others. How does intersectionality help us understand these complexities? How do we live as individuals and as groups at the intersections?

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AT ALL SCALES OF SYSTEM/S IN INTERCONNECTION AND ENTANGLEMENTS: 

global economies, environmental justice, microflora and neurosystems, trauma 

Fair Trade Principles: http://fairworldproject.org/about/movements/fair-trade/principles/

Equal Exchange: http://equalexchange.coop/products/chocolate

About Ten Thousand Villages: http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/about-history/

Hershey Company from the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hershey_Company
Read the TALK section there too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Hershey_Company

Chocolate and gut microflora: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/18/290922850/chocolate-turns-into-heart-helpers-by-gut-bacteria

Chocolate and dopamine: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/chocolate-high2.htm

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THOUGHT-ACTION-THEORY: CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT THE WORLD: 
From TV Reed (2005): analysis of environmental justice (Ch 8) on how social movements engage cognition:

"The concept 'cognitive praxis' (literally, 'thought-action-theory') reminds us that consciousness is a material social force." (218)
"The environmental justice movement has been developing inside and outside of the 'mainstream' environmental movement since at least the 1970s. Likewise, ecocriticism has been developing since the 1970s. But until recently the two fields of activity were not often placed in relation to each other. Ecocriticism has had very little to say about issues of race and class in regard to the environment. Conversely, the environmental justice movement has largely ignored questions of cultural context, focusing narrowly on environmental law, science, and public policy." (230)

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THE TRAFFIC ACCIDENT AND INTERSECTIONALITY (Crenshaw 1989: 149)

"Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm."

See also Sharon Smith. 2013/14. "Black Feminism and intersectionality." International Socialist Review # 91.
http://isreview.org/issue/91/black-feminism-and-intersectionality

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A MATRIX OF DOMINATION (Collins 2000: 227-8; 246, 247-8):

“Intersectional paradigms…shed new light on how domination is organized. The term matrix of domination describes this overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained…. In a particular form assumed by intersecting oppressions in one social location, any matrix of domination can be seen as an historically specific organization of power in which social groups are embedded and which they aim to influence…. All contexts of domination incorporate some combination of intersecting oppressions, and considerable variability exists from one matrix of domination to the next as to how oppression and activism will be organized…. Placing U.S. Black women’s experiences in the center of analysis without privileging those experiences shows how intersectional paradigms can be especially important for rethinking the particular matrix of domination that characterizes U.S. society…. (227-8) Within any matrix of domination characterized by intersecting oppressions, any specific social location where such systems meet or intersect generates distinctive group histories. (246) …moral positions as survivors of one expression of systemic violence become eroded in the absence of accepting responsibility for other expressions of systemic violence. (247) …In this model, there are no absolute oppressors or victims. Instead, historically constructed categories create intersecting and crosscutting group histories that provide changing patterns of group participation in domination and resistance to it…. Coalitions ebb and flow based on the perceived saliency of issues to group members. This non-equivalency of group experience means that groups find some oppressions more salient than others….whereas all systems operate in framing the experiences of Black women transnationally, different configurations of such systems has saliency for Black women differently placed within them.” (248)

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INTERSECTIONALITY, IDENTITY POLITICS (Crenshaw, 1991: 1299)

“With identity thus re-conceptualized, it may be easier to understand the need for, and to summon the courage to challenge, groups, that are after all, in one sense, 'home' to us, in the name of the parts of us that are not made at home. This takes a great deal of energy, and arouses intense anxiety. The most one could expect is that we will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of 'the group' has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few. Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all. Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics."

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[image from: http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv11n08page1.html
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