Political Science

What emerged during my meeting

Throughout this semester, so many memorable things happened that stood out to me about the topics of dehumanization, critical reflection on personal narratives, the importance of multidimensional understandings about social issues. However, I want to reflect on our experience of final evaluation in the last lesson and talk about a major concern that has been becoming more and more obvious for me.

Abby Rose

Arts of Freedom

Prof. Joel Schlosser

12/11/15             

Confronting Ageism and Embracing My Mother’s Feminism: A Second Look at Women’s Lib

I have not been able to post this paper in the format I created it in so I am posting it as an attachment.

I.

I'd like to begin with the course evaluations. Julia will pick up the forms from outside my office and distribute them to everyone. As you probably all know, these evaluation forms are very important: I will read them closely to revise and improve the course; they will also be read by senior faculty when I go up for tenure in a few years. So take your time and please be honest and generous!

II.

In "Arts of Freedom," we began with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) as a kind of invocation for the entire course. We continued to return to Rankine throughout the semester. Rankine raised the question of what it means to be a citizen in the United States, a democracy that still prides itself on freedom yet also contains within it various modes of subjection and subordination, especially continuing racial domination and the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world. Rankine invokes these themes while also crafting what we came to call an art of resistance in the poem itself, a stunning and powerful creative act against the broader structures she details.

From “Mammie” to “Mama”

Exploitation of Black Female Efforts Around the Civil Rights Movement

                            Fanny Lou Hamer at the Democratic Convention (1964)          Hattie McDaniel & Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind (1939)

I.

Here is my take-away from what we discussed last night (November 30) about using our next (and last) class on Monday,December 7.

1. Cookies!

2. Time for course evaluations.

3. Time to check-in with Joel about final projects.

4. Time to work on final projects.

5. Possibly more "political science" time.

Do y'all have anything to add?

Here I'm posting my bare bones essay ideas, as well as three pages of blackout poetry I've completed so far for the research project. Cheers!

Art has a way of not working out the way that you plan it to. The process of making this poetry ended up being a lot deeper than I anticipated, and challenged my thinking on abolition. Ideally I want to form this as a sort of theoretical appendix to my art project, adding some background and clarification to my behind the scenes work I put into the piece. I think this experimental essay can delve into my thought process and how examining the question of abolition in this way has expanded my view beyond "abolition is impossible."