Here are two youtube videos I would like to juxtapose having to do with a real fight amongst students from my hometown and then a staged wrestling match that the mayor involved herself in.  It seems atrocious to me that the mayor involved herself in a staged fight (a form of entertainment it seems) and then come down so harshly when students perceive a real fist fight as a form of entertainment.  What example is she setting?  Also, I love how the news station is chastising the students for videotaping the fight, but yet they continue to show the video.

News clip of students fighting

News clip of mayor discussing her staged wrestling match

This might seem directly related to prisons, but it does lend to conversations about who is allowed to participate in certain acts (the right to be violent, perhaps?) and who is punished for such acts.  It also demonstrates the role of schools as punishers, but what does the punishment of a suspension really do?

In Wideman's book, I noticed that he touched on the notion of life going on "on the outside" while incarcerated people seem to stay where they are, removed from the passing of time, but unable to fit back into the world without acknowledging the time that has passed. Wideman measures the first few years of Robby's sentence by his daughter Jamila's growth, seeing that, although she is growing up in a changing world, Robby's world is centered around staying put, where Jamila's growth is a strong, and perhaps the only, reliable measurement of changes in time. This reminds me of the discussion that we had in Barb's class yesterday about time and boredom as a means of punishment. The women in the prison that she is studying have so much time on their hands, so much time to do what relatively few activities that they have, and the rest to be filled with a monotonous boredom. Given both our discussion and Wideman's thoughts, I think the passage of time without activity, motion or change is an effective punishment, but a horribly cruel one, a method by which we, once again, deny the humanity of those who are incarcerated.

A friend just shared w/ me an AMAZING review of "Are You My Mother?" by Heather Love (an English professor @ Penn), which I want to share w/ you all: http://publicbooks.org/fiction/the-mom-problem  As you know, I really REALLY did not like the book on my first reading, but this review has gotten me re-thinking/re-feeling my damning critique ...I will now have to go back and re-experience it, for sure...

A few bits to tease you into the review-->

Bechdel's quip: "I think people who are well-adjusted are not going to be interested in this story...
Fortunately, there are a lot of people who are not well-adjusted.”

Then there are Love's several insights (to have such a name!), including the difficulty of portraying "resentment and ambivalence toward the mother as an inevitable result of her role as caretaker," and also her lovely LOVELY final evocation of Winnicott's question about

“where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life.” He thinks we're in a space of “deep dreaming" that is created between individuals, and between individuals and their environment. What I am thinking now is that your "site sits" might be such spaces (if you can allow them to be). And what I am wondering is whether we can make (are we making?) our shared classroom time into such a space. We'll return to these questions when we read Thomas Barry's essay, "Dream of the Earth," but I wanted to flag them now.

Hey everybody, I don't really know if this has any place in this Ecological Imaginings class, but maybe if we can imagine the preservation of women to be a form of ecology, not unlike the preservation of all plant life, animal life.

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to this excellent documentary currently being shown on PBS on Mon & Tues nights at 9:00 PM.  I imagine you guys have lots of time to watch films, yeah!  But this is an amazing series.

"Half the Sky" about gender based violence.

Here's the link to the first & second segment:

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283557115   

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283558278

The siren of the art gallery in Canaday goes off out of nowhere. I am so pulled away by my work that I am very reluctant to react to the noise. There are at least thirty people on the floor. Actually NO ONE cares about it. It has been five minutes as I finish the work I am doing. The noise becomes louder and louder. Some burglar is around us and the warning bell really wants us to notice! I am finally hearing it. This turns out to be very annoying. The sound even fastened my heart beat. Shall I ask? Shall I leave? Shall I do anything? I know someone is going to fix it – within a short time – because circulation desk is making a phone call about the siren. I know I should definitely stay and work, to prepare for a better weekend. Oh, this is a struggle.  

But sorry, I just cannot stay. I am going to the Labyrinth, to calm down myself from the chaos. Unfortunately, those restless crickets just don’t know when to stop!

…

This has been a busy, easy, chaotic and very unusual Friday night!

            Through the process of research professors are able to enter an academic conversation with goals that range from solving a social problem to giving voice to particular communities. Interviews, surveys and participatory observation serve as channels that seek to deepen and broaden our understanding of certain groups of people. What is done with the results of months of data collection can range from a change in policy, to simply sharing the findings with other academics. What happens when research is conducted, policy does not change and communities are left “damaged”? By using Eve Tuck’s desire-based research, I will explore the ways in which research can either give voice to or silence communities. Are researchers truly giving communities a voice, even if the act of research is simply a representation of their stories? Who is listening to these voices besides the researcher and the academic community? What is the purpose of research if voice and/or change are not outcomes?

Haney's discussion of Visions tempted me to compare its problems to those of Alliance.  Which was worse?  Which group of women had more problems due to the instution's model of rehabilitation?  I'm not quite sure why I felt so inclined to compare the two, as both had unique "visions" to make a rather unfortunate pun.  Perhaps it's because when it comes to incarceration, we want to choose a model that does less harm than the current punitive role of most institutions.  It's difficult to decide what "less harm" actually means--is it short term or long term?  I worry that so many of these reformers with good intentions, similar to those who created ESP, seem to only create models with a set of unique challenges.  The experience of being in a cage for hours is traumatic but so is the experience of being forced to share intense traumas with an audience.  Like after reading Rigoberta Menchu's testimonial, I don't know quite what to do with the information  I learned in Haney's book.  I used to think that alternative models of incarceration were "the answer" or at least an answer, but I'm no longer so sure that they're actually better than prisons..