http://parkeharrison.com/

Artist Statement: "We create works in response to the ever-bleakening relationship linking humans, technology, and nature. These works feature an ambiguous narrative that offers insight into the dilemma posed by science and technology's failed promise to fix our problems, provide explanations, and furnish certainty pertaining to the human condition.  Strange scenes of hybridizing forces, swarming elements, and bleeding overabundance portray Nature unleashed by technology and the human hand." 

ECON 136:  Week 7 Tasks

A underlying theme for this week is the difference between private and public.   When is/should a transaction between two individuals purely a matter for the two of them and when does a wider community have a stake in the transaction?    In the latter case, how does the wider community allocate resources to promoting/protecting its interests?

Monday:  Externalities

Preparing for class:

All:       Read Taylor Ch. 14, pp. 259-263

            Watch Khan Academy video on Negative Externalities

Non-360 Students:   Review you notes  from Friday’s class.   Be prepared to explain how taxation to fund amenities in the consumption of a good or service could be economically efficient.

S.A

Intertwined Threads

Mexican-American, I’m both, not one stepping over the other. My skin radiates historical adventures that trace back beyond what my spoken memories can share. My speaking tongue and my perking ears can understand both sides of the spectrum as I walk on the land of the free, America the brave. I walk each step with fluidity and flexibility, making sure I don’t get too tight on one niche. As a Mexican-American, I carry both threads in me, I’m “heterogeneous and a complex network of entities.” I’m absorptive of both cultures and my existence as a whole is porous and permeable, for both cultures to flow in and out of me but never dissipate.

I have the privilege of being able to jump from one niche to the other. The access and ability I have to be flexible between both worlds is undeniably one of the best advantages of growing up in two different cultures, two different homes fostering me into a young woman with insights in both worlds.

When I was first asked to write about home, I wrote about a place, a school that sheltered me and offered me the landscape to feel safe and free of judgment. But after analyzing the works of Yinka Shonibare’s Magical Ladders and the reading article by Stacy Alaimo: Porous Bodies and Trans- Corporeality, my thoughts on home have altered. My home, my environment, my ecosystem is the intertwined threads of my identification as a Mexican- American.

Since we’ve written our first papers about home, I have realized that there are more factors that go into a home and what defines a home. In my first paper Anne mentioned whether I would consider geologic and natural disasters as part of my home. After reading Exile & Pride by Eli Clare I saw natural disasters as being part of my definition of home. However, in my opinion, natural disasters try to exiles humans from their homes. 

In Exile & Pride Eli Clare talks about his physical disabilities but how he still embraces nature through hiking regardless of the fact that he has a “disability.” People don’t choose to be born with a disability, but if they do have one they learn how to work with it to live a “normal” life. Eli embraces his disability just like he embraces nature. He works with his disability to be able to do what he loves and wants to do. This ties into the idea of where we choose to have our homes and what events will try to “exile” us from them.

Natural disasters are a part of the planet. They affect various areas of Earth mainly along coasts or on plate boundaries where two plates (oceanic or continental) collide, separate, or slide past each other. Natural disasters include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. In most cases, these events cause property damages, injuries, deaths, and in the long run economic issues due to the rebuilding of the area(s). In particular I wanted to focus on Hurricane Sandy.

this guy (robert fairbanks) is teaching in bmc's soc dept now!
--maybe we should ask him to come and talk w/ us???
sounds like he has some interesting ideas re: the "recovery model":
http://www.ssa.uchicago.edu/end-mass-incarceration

Porous: “having small holes that allow air or liquid to pass through; easy to pass or get through” (Merriam-Webster). Being porous is being open, understanding that we are not just one, standalone, unchanging, impenetrable being. It is understanding that nothing in our world ever is. However, the other aspect of being porous is that to be ‘easy to pass or get through’, it needs to be separate, distinct, and individual. It must, in some way, be nonporous. Can gas be porous? How does gas be considered porous if it is entirely penetrable, and in no way can it be nonporous? In order to be porous, one needs to be an individual entity. With porosity always comes distinction and self-identification. It is in some ways a given in our lives, but it can also be a choice – to see, experience, and interact with the world from different perspectives and vantage points of life. It helps determine who we are as people, and how we function as a society. I feel I have come to my own definition of the word, and my own understanding of the relevance of porosity in our lives to finding our homes and ourselves.

When I first entered this class weeks ago, I wrote an essay defining “home” as “self,” not a structure or a contained space, not family or friends. Home, within my own spirit. In some ways, this demonstrates just how porous a mindset I live with—pushing against the confinement of stability and instead reaching for fluidity. Yet in retrospect, I have come to realize just how bounded my view of “self” in fact was. In separating “self” from place and community, I failed to recognize that these crucial aspects of my life, in fact, create self.

“The material that passes through a body also transforms that body,” so described of the trans-corporeal self (Alaimo 3). Self is, in essence, the reflection of past experiences, relationships, and places. Self might not be inherent or fixed, but instead porous and dynamic. Occasionally my dad notices similar characteristics that delineate parallels between all of my aunts and I, hidden genetic connections dotting our identities of self. At least part of my self may stem from birth, but much of it grows throughout life.