Decentering the privileged white male experience

Decentering the privileged white male experience

Regardless of your background, chances are that 70 to 90% of your academic reading has been based on the authorship of white academic men of privilege. Men who have rarely experienced the challenges - socio-economical, physical, emotional, other - of being a woman of color. It is therefore with great pleasure that I would like to introduce or re-introduce or re-frame the work of women of color.

There have always been "others" who have attempted to have their work introduced, shared, understood, or published since humans first made the attempts to communicate. Women / grandmothers are noted story tellers in many, many cultures and "the grandmother" "is often revered for her attempts and ability to share learning over generations. The >grandmother< who lived longer than the cultural lifespan of her era was the exception, as the challenges to women's health and longevity is often framed by both reproductive health and violence. Women who survive childbirth (or do not have children) are able to pass on knowledge (especially practical - like how to survive) to their children and their children's children. They are therefore often repositories for the culture(s) that they co-create.

Often western cultural biases would have us dismiss or erase this knowledge as useless or non-academic or otherwise simplistic and unrefined. The filter of sharing across generations and thru multiple circles of networked knowledge are thus reduced or dismissed by western ontology (ways of knowing) as not professional, or logical or rational, etcetera. As you will discover, in this and - most - of my other offered classes I am allergic to simple pre-programmed and pre-scripted ways of knowing. I want YOU - whoever you are - to explore many ways of knowing = researching, studying, reading, watching, observing "others" and their ways of interacting, creating and co-inhabiting the planet.

If you are not prepared to stretch and do something other than what you have always done - you are probably in the wrong class.  For now, you need to know that I have studied with people of a variety of genders and with a variety of sexual passions. I choose work that I believe could or would excite your engagement, if you were given the chance, the choice to study and / or do something other than what you've always done. If you don't do the reading or watch the movies, it is your choice but also your loss to not learn a much wider realm of knowledge.

I don't do different for different's sake, or even for cultural diversity. I do it as a scholar of intercultural communication. I do it as someone who studied with Audre Lorde, as well as Everett Rogers. I do it with a knowledge that Rogers work is protected as the academic work of an extremely well-known and respected social scientist. On the other hand, I could share a very personal knowledge of Audre Lorde's work in her era and in a very white, stigmatized society that might either excite or scandalize you. 

If I had published with Rogers, as I should have, I would have a more renowned scholarly career. If I published my work with Audre, it would be far more personal and self-revealing. Is it an either/or dichotomy - I hope not ! But, it is the path I attempt to navigate and negotiate in ALL that I do and assign.

Post-Oppositional Consciousness - Part I the Quantification of Everything

I am a Martial Artist, so I believe that sparring is important - it has its place. It teaches us that some of what we are learning may be applicable in a real life situation and it may even be deadly if applied correctly. Usually though, sparring is used for making "points" on an opponent. This also may have its benefits in terms of indicating either our own or our opponents vulnerabilities and weaknesses. It is important to learn the efficacy of our own forms, but at the end of the day, no serious martial artist wants to destroy sister/fellow practitioners.

In academic Life, it would seem to me that sparring makes even less sense. In the life of the mind, though, we are frequently encouraged to think "critically" = question everything and think our way through various proofs and situational appeals. Their are any number of Problems associated with this Oppositional Consciousness. We have been using it far too long, and far too destructively to get much further use out of it. I will >argue< here that it is time to move toward a post-oppositional consciousness in order to constructively change and build new structures for education.

As I have progressed through the Ranks of Scholars, I have increasingly witnessed the destructiveness of various forms of applied oppositional consciousness. The first move is the Quantification of EVERYTHING. While scholarship itself in many of the social sciences, and even in the hard sciences, has softened somewhat in accepting qualitative evidence or data - academia itself has attempted to become increasingly quantifiable. As I start to enumerate my observations, I realize that this quantification has slithered in to just about everything that we do, say or teach.

The most obvious example is standardized testing at ALL levels from K-12 up through anything that bears the possibility of being evaluated with a quantifiable test score: percentages and rubrics being the obvious translation tools. But, increasingly these quantifiable moments are being integrated into other forms of Scholarship such as publishing, retention and hiring. The number of journal articles one has published upon exiting a master's, or even an undergraduate program, has become part of the evaluation of candidacy for graduate and post-graduate acceptance. Databases whose whole purpose is to capture ALL of the information supposedly encompassed in a Curiculum Vitae make it possible to further quantify such information.  Increasingly, just as Colleges and Universities attain different rankings for various fields and nationally - justifying their "competitiveness", so do Departments within fields of study, as well as the judgment of the caliber of their researchers and instructors AND their students in those departments and centers of higher learning.

But WHAT have we PROVEN with all of this quantification? Our ability to evaluate WHAT ? What do we WANT to know at the end of the day? As various scholars - especially Anthony Giddens and Dorothy E. Smith have demonstrated in their Sociology, we are a society fixated on forms and/or templates that proscribe activity and behavior. Increasingly, through quantification, our Scholarship has become formulaic and almost entirely quantifiable. But, I ask is this Scholarship or the Measure of All Things?

The most obvious form of quantification and the correlation that is most eagerly grasped within Academia is the pay scale. Living in a capitalist / market / consumer system - one must have some measure to pay academics - Yes ? Pay differentials between private and public universities and colleges belie the efficacy of these forms of quantifiable differences. There are very few standards set here - other than to continually reinforce and inform us that women and minorities will always make less in every system, no matter how intellectually or academically advanced. Furthermore, almost all of the current systems in the United States reinforce the ideas that Sports/Entertainment figures, Administrators and, especially, CEO's are the top salary performers across the Academic spectrum. As my Business Professor regularly taught us "What you reward - you will get a lot of, . . ."

So, quantification is usually applied in the evaluation or assessment stage of various forms of Academia. It is supposed to be used as the proof / evidence of learning or that you have accomplished some form of output that is beneficial. As we increasingly standardize these outputs in things like Grades - we are given the numeric Grade Point Average (gpa) that is so central and key to the Students existence. And - YES - your gpa will be used to evaluate you for almost everything from suitability for jobs and employment, as well as scholarships and further education. About the only area that may still be free from the gpa hurdles could be the long term care facilities that many boomer faculty will be exploring in the near future.

The "Dead Granny problem" or >STUFF< happens

Death and the Academic

Every semester, I and my students face all of the serious problems of dealing with >TIME< and "stuff" happening. Now, I intentionally teach HYBRID classes. This means that I am NOT available every week for short blocks of time where students can pick and choose, which parts of my schedule are amenable to them (or NOT). But, we are also ALL caught up in a Society that values "busy-ness" or business (in both senses of the word) above all else.  I ask my students to work in small groups in order to address the organizational problems of large classes and my being the central hub. I KNOW from my years of teaching organizational communication that one of the most difficult issues in small academic groups is finding a TIME to meet.

Now, idealistic me thinks that since they have a set class time EVERY week - where we do NOT meet every week - why couldn't they schedule their group meetings at the same time as class would happen, IF we were actually meeting on a weekly basis. That is my very idealist version of WHAT could happen on the group level, but now back to the class problem. I choose the times the class meets during the semester, and obviously, try to make it work around MY schedule.

My academic life has been 'blessed' for lack of a better term with some short and a few long protracted illnesses of several very important people followed by death. Each of these events completely disturbed my work/life balance and several involved extensive travel. All of them came while I was responsible for classes - either as a Student or an Educator. I have either dropped out of classes or semesters as a student, or found ways to arrange my teaching around illness when I was the responsible educator. This is not always easy, and indeed much more difficult to plan than births, weddings and other life events.

As an educator, I almost always REFUSE documentation for life events and illness. I want my Adult students to have an adult sense of truth, honesty, trust and morality. If they have written up an Obituary for a dead granny a thousand times, so be it. If they are pulling the cover up over their  heads to have a day off - more power to them and congratulations on their wisdom in self-care. In any case, the consequences like their lives are up to them. They will have enough difficulties figuring out and sorting their priorities as they go through a life faced with hectic schedules and scheduling and ever increasing amounts of busy-ness.

I may post more on this subject as I ponder what I have learned from each of the significant illnesses / deaths in my life and as I encounter ever increasing material on the impact of death in/on ALL of our lives, . . .

Academic WORK

What is > Academic Work < ?

No - seriously - what IS academic work ?

A few years ago, I would have idealistically answered with something about Scholarship - and then set out to explain Scholarship. Scholarship - based on the Modernity of the Enlightenment and 1000 + years of the western University with multicultural ambitions in a global marketplace today. I have been a pragmatic idealist for a long time when it comes to my own understanding of Scholarship and the Academy in which I work. I like to believe that scholarship can be addressed or encompassed by looking at research, methods and a form of output (publishing?); but, still, often wonder - how can I  share this with any/many of my students in teaching them?

While I always try to simplify what Scholarship means for an undergraduate population - I feel continuously undermined by an industrial situation that wants to reduce ALL scholarship to some kind of measurable industrial output. Even my undergraduate students at a large public University see through the templates and formula of academia and its portrayal of Scholarship. If our only common goal is to see that they have remunerative employment - where do we leave the other facets of education? How do we understand historical and cultural context, the evolution/development of ideas, and/or a critical understanding of power in society?

In the meantime, various so-called Stakeholders: from students and parents all the way up to and including President Obama (and his Secretary of Education = Arne Duncan) and the billionaire Bill Gates (who dropped out of a very prestigious University), have had increasing feedback on subjects of Academia. Of course, teachers, instructors, lecturers and Professors should also have some input on the subject - and most of us believe we KNOW it all too well. We certainly all have opinions on the subject, which are also reflected by administrators at ALL levels, as well as the politicians of various stripes who distribute, limit and evaluate funding. Then there is the media and shaping of attitudes towards Academia.  But, still we have not said anything about what is academic work or who is the academic worker?

Organizational Communication does recognize Academic Organizing as one of the many subsets of its discipline to investigate the world of work and the world of organizing vis-a-vis academical organizations (including both public and private schools, colleges, universities, and unions, etc) and a wide variety of various academic theories of organizing (hierarchical, hr/hr, systems, cultural, critical, etc) to help explain our workplaces. Then - there are all of the multiplicities of schools that teach aspects of academia in all of its widely varied forms of scholarship: teaching and training of teachers, instructors, administrators, etc. Circles within circles within circles. More importantly, as any number of Deans, especially those from Colleges of Education, and teachers and administrators have pointed out to me - EVERYONE has opinions about education because we have all been its subjects. We have experienced some form of education - almost everyone has been a Student on a multiplicity of levels, and some of us actually do function as Teachers (or instructors or trainers or professors).

But few of these investigations actually address the idea of what is academic work and how it is organized. Furthermore, how could it be organized to address the loftiest standards and goals of education and scholarship? If we abdicate the responsibilities of critical scholarship, we will default to the templates and implications of industrial models of academic organizing and academic work. Not only does this leave the assessment and evaluation of academic workers to ever increasing quantitative standards (e.g. digital databases, formulaic weighting of CV's, numbers of journal articles and quantitative weighting of the standards for those journals, etc), but students really do not have any value outside of consumers intended to become the most productive efficient workers in whatever field they are slated to enter in an industrial world. This, of necessity, would include those students who themselves intend to become academic workers. What do they have to look forward to and what impact will they have on the academy? And, just as importantly, should they have a voice in these processes?

This blog is an INVITATION to those who help me shape my attitudes towards Academic Work. From students to co-workers, to professors and scholars at various levels - I hope to elicit a number of posts and/or short or long essays that can help us all to establish a better idea of Academic Work. These posts may be personal musings, thoughts, researched scholarship or reviews of others' works. After all, Academic Work is central to those of us whose lives center around the academy as students, teachers and scholars. I also invite these same scholars to comment on each other's posts (and mine!) and to go off on their own tangents. Yes, for now, I am targeting my own social network circles to help me develop this blog.  If you are interested in becoming a part of the ongoing work (or know someone else who is), please contact me at mhmbear.prof@gmail.com. I look forward to the reading and the writing ! Let the games begin.