Category: Blog

Luisa Martin Rojo, “The Impact of the Native-Speaker Model in the Construction of Inequality”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellows Lauren Spradlin and Jennifer Hammano

ARC Distinguished Fellow Luisa Martín Rojo, Professor in Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, presented her current research project The Impact of the Native-Speaker Model in the Construction of Inequality on November 12. Her presentation focused on what it means to be a ‘native’ speaker of a language and the privileges that come with it, and conversely, how inequality is structured, legitimized, and propagated through prejudices relating to notions of who is a ‘native speaker’ of a language.

Native speakers of a language are typically defined as those who have grown up hearing and speaking that language from birth, though scholars have begun to challenge both the validity of this definition and the concept of ‘native speaker’ altogether. As Martín Rojo expressed, native speakers of a given language are usually considered (by linguists and speech communities alike) to be the models and the authorities on that language. In line with this notion, there is an expectation that all speakers of a language should strive to sound like a local native speaker. Any language users who choose to use structures, words, or sounds that do not conform to the prestige variety as spoken by a native speaker are perceived as ‘non-authentic’ speakers of the language, and are policed by authentic speakers accordingly. Speakers whose language practices are non-nativelike are subjected to linguistic shame, which carries social and economic consequences.

In order to demonstrate how power is exerted using language, language policing linguistic surveillance, and notions of nativeness, Martín Rojo conducted a study on university students in Spain who had migrated at a young age from Latin America. She interviewed university students about their experiences being the subjects of linguistic surveillance, with specific reference to use of /θ/ vs. /s/. /θ/ (used to represent a th-sound) is not used in Latin American Spanish, but is used in the area of Spain where the subjects lived. This is an interesting twist in a study exploring the status of ‘native speaker’ – the speakers who took part in the study were truly native speakers of Spanish, in that they had been speaking Spanish from birth. Yet, their language practices were still ‘othered’ by speakers of the prestige variety of Spanish spoken in Northern Spain.

 

 

 

Patrick Simon, “Lighter Than Blood: Ethnic Enumeration in the Era of Equality Policies”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellows Siqi Tu and Erik Wallenberg

Patrick Simon’s presentation “Lighter than Blood: Ethnic Enumeration in the Era of Equality Politics” is a research project looking at how states acknowledge and track racial and ethnic diversity. The title of the talk, “lighter than blood” has its reference to the famous book of Tukufu Zuberi, “Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie”. Simon is looking at the globalization of racial and ethnic politics in the context of equality policies like affirmative action. His concerns include the paradox of the re-creation of racial categories in the practice of using racial categories to track racial disparities and in the production of statistics. Simon looks at how people react to racial classification in census surveys in a multi-country comparison (includes US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, France, among others).

The reasons historically for collecting data on racial, national, and ethnic origins are many. From the domination, subordination, and segregation of sections of populations, to the attempt to acknowledge diversity and create multiculturalist societies, and for political action to right past injustices (used to guarantee voting rights or affirmative action), gathering this data has a variety of uses. Beyond these fraught uses of this data on race and ethnicity, there are problems in the collection of this data as well. And this is not just the threat of the crude essentialization of scientific racism, but the imposition of ethnic identity in the limited choices given in surveys or the taking away of options for identifying oneself. The international human right and equality agencies like OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and CERD (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination) have been asking for more statistical data collection broken down by race and ethnicity in an era of post-mass migration.

Simon argues that the collecting accurate statistics is essential for implementing affirmative action programs which have been implemented in a growing number of countries. He argues that statistics make visible the invisible, showing where discrimination is occurring.

Simon suggests that scholars should move toward a constructivist approach assuming that race and ethnicity are indeed subjective and socially constructed concepts. The constructivist turn in ethnic and racial statistics raises a series of epistemological and methodological issues behind ethnic categorization. Currently, states that do not directly collect data on race and ethnicity use other indicators of ethnic diversity (such as language spoken at home, parents’ original countries) as a proxy. Other methods of collecting ethnic data include self-declaration, third-party recognition and group recognition. Each has its own limits given the fluidity of race and ethnicity. The more open-ended the question is in the self-declaration method of collection, the more assumption statisticians will do in the later process of “re-coding” the race and ethnicity category. Statistics is not objective, as Simon mentions in the beginning of the talk, which only represents the convention understanding of the society. Moreover, since race and ethnicity is essentially a social construct, methodological issues like moving identities, multiple identities and misclassification will constantly emerge. Simon suggests that we do not have to be consistent in creating race and ethnicity categories for each nation, because racism is not consistent. For example, in the US census, “the Hispanic question” has been revised from an extra question outside of the “race” question into part of the “race” question. Conflating the Hispanic and race question is to avoid misclassification of “non-Hispanic white”. Also, the perception for the purpose of collecting the ethnic data has changed slightly over the years. Hispanic population starts to utilize this data to claim their rights. In the Canada case, their household survey asks the interviewee’s ancestors and whether they belong to a loosely defined “visible minority” group. In the UK case, the census asks for the interviewee’s ethnic group. In the Brazil case, the census directly asks the interviewee about his/her skin color. All these cases demonstrate that there is no standardization regarding the ethnic enumeration. It is a pragmatic description of the current situation of the nation. In the French case, the census bureau is not allowed to collect race and ethnicity data because the French constitution supposedly treats its citizen “without distinction”. However, Simon argues that it is hypocritical since the discrimination toward minority groups does exist and being colorblind will not make the situation better.

Simon’s presentation has shown that the categorization process is a dialectic one involving constant negotiation around the epistemological understanding of race and ethnicity. We are looking forward to more findings from Simon’s new project on the globalization of racial and ethnic politics in the context of equality policies (POLRACE).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amy Chazkel, “The Nocturnal Lives of a Nineteenth Century Brazilian City”. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Emily B. Campbell

On November 5th, ARC Distinguished Fellow, and Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Queens College, Amy Chazkel presented her current research, “The Nocturnal Lives of a Nineteenth Century Brazilian City”. Chazkel offered a detailed portrait of nighttime in Rio de Janeiro, and the socio-legal construction of night during the city’s 53-year long curfew, part of her forthcoming book, tentatively titled, Urban Chiaroscuro: Rio de Janeiro and the History of Nightfall. Chazkel opened the talk by challenging the notion of the night as a time of innate danger, and asked the audience to instead see night as a sociolegal construct of control, policing, curfew and states of siege or exception.

Chazkel emphasized Brazil and Rio de Janeiro as a particularly interesting site, where slavery was not abolished until 1888 and urban modernity and slavery overlapped in profound ways. Drawing on an impressively vast archive of information, Chazkel used travel letters, period paintings, maps, newspapers, public records on the theatre, arrest records, police edicts, among other sources to sketch a portrait of night in Rio at this time, in order to further discussions on modernity and social control. The control of public space through curfews, Chazkel argues, gave way to the novel articulation of the ‘right to the city’ and freedom of movement in public space post-emancipation. Chazkel’s project, has literally been that of pulling out from the shadows, as no explicit archives or materials on nightfall or curfews exist. Fascinatingly, a footnote explaining, “after dark a stick became a weapon” piqued her curiosity and led to this research.

Chazkel explained that Francisco Teixera de Aragão instituted the 53-year curfew in 1825 after the Constitution of 1824 upheld slavery. The curfew was imposed at 10 PM and 9PM in winter months, and was signaled by the unceasing ringing of church bells for thirty minutes. After the curfew began, slaves found on the street were subject to arrest, corporal punishment (often public whipping) and detention. The curfew was instituted through polices edicts, practices and city ordinances. Curfew violations were classified under “troublesome activity” and a threat to “public tranquility”. The curfew did not apply to “well known persons of integrity” and free white-persons, though Chazkel was careful to point out the regular, though arbitrary enforcement of the curfew, as police decided a person’s social standing and race in the darkness of night. Slaves that carried written permissions from their owners were not punished. At some points during the 53-years, curfew violation accounted for up to one fourth of all arrests.

Restrictions on movement, through the curfew, did not impair the economy, and served as a means of labor discipline, and class differentiation in the use of public spaces and in the post-colonial distinction of citizen/non-citizen. Most people did not have clocks of their own, though life was structured by time, with a balloon visible throughout the city released at noon, and church bells marking the start of curfew.

Chazkel also profiled the burgeoning demand for public illumination and the growth of theatres, marking a shift towards a culture of night leisure and urban entertainment. Of special importance was the theatre Alcazar Lyrique, which was celebrated as having changed notions of taste, the culture of leisure, and contributed to the growing acceptance of public drinking alongside the growth in theater attendance. By the 1870’s the curfew became more difficult to enforce and it was dropped in 1888 with the end of slavery. The curfew can be seen as the beginning of modern policing, with its eventual end and subsequent growth of vagrancy law thereafter.

Reflecting on Chazkel’s work, one is both enticed by the rendering of the past she evokes, and equally compelled to reflect on her broader questions of the right to the use public space, projects of social control and times and states of exception. Who has a right to the city is as pertinent a question as ever in our contemporary American moment, looking to the neoliberal dilemma of private-public space exemplified during the occupation of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park by Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and public debates around racialized policing practices, most recently decried by the Black Lives Matter movement. The day/night distinction in the use, conception and control of public space persists, and historical work such as Chazkel’s offers a burgeoning, necessary illumination.

David Howell, Lousy Jobs in the Rich World: What happened to shared growth? Commentary by ARC Student Fellows Sarah Kostecki and Orkideh Gharehgozil.

David Howell is a professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School. His recent research “Lousy Jobs in the Rich World: What happened to shared growth?” is focused on economic growth and the how workers have benefited from it. His research is driven by the following puzzle: if economic growth and productivity have been increasing over the last 3 decades during the era of neoliberal reform, why haven’t the effects of this growth benefited the majority of workers? Why should maximizing growth be the priority?

In the orthodox economic point of view, inequality is explained by globalization and outsourcing. The belief is that Skilled Bias Technological Change (SBCT) contributes to unequal levels of income shares (Howell, ARC Talk). However, in this setup there is no emphasis on institutions.

To challenge this orthodox economic point of view, professor Howell’s research emphasizes the effects of institutions on the evolution of lousy jobs across the United States and 4 additional rich countries since the early 1980’ to answer two interrelated questions. The first question is how has decent GDP growth, productivity growth, and decent jobs moved over the last few decades in each of the five countries? The second question is what is the institutional story that can be told? Howell hopes to show the decline in bargaining power for employed workers and institutional factors (rules, laws, organizational structures, policies, and social norms) are to blame for the decline in decent jobs in lieu of traditional economic explanations.

To carry out this research, professor Howell first created two new low-wage threshold measures and compares these to a more conventional low-wage measure commonly used in socio-economic research (2/3rds the median income of full-time workers). Howell’s new low-wage threshold measures are defined as 2/3rds of the mean wage of the bottom 90% of full-time workers and 2/3rds of the mean wage of the bottom 90% of full-time prime-aged earners (between 35-59 years of age). Howell then uses the two new low-wage measures to create the lousy jobs measure defined as low-wages plus those individuals working involuntarily part-time. He then showed descriptive results using these measures for the United States.

Interestingly, the alterative low-wage measures show the cut offs for individuals earning low wages should actually be much higher in the past 3 decades than those calculated using the more conventional measure utilized by the OECD, IMF and others. Particularly for the year 2014, for example, Howell’s new low-wage cut off defined as 2/3rds of the mean for the bottom 90% of full-time prime-aged earners, show that jobs defined as low-wage in the United States should be nearly 16 dollars versus the 12 dollar threshold obtain using the conventional measure. Overall, with these findings professor Howell shows that a much higher share of working men and women have been earning low wages over the last three decades than previous studies have shown.

Utilizing the lousy jobs measure, professor Howell highlights several interesting findings. The first is a tale of convergence. In the United States, women have typically held a higher share of lousy jobs since 1979, but men are catching up. Howell shows, for example, that around 50% of women held lousy jobs in 1979 compared to 45% in 2014. Around 20% of men held lousy jobs in 1979 compared to 35% in 2014. Moreover, professor Howell shows the share of prime-aged men with lousy jobs has been increasing steadily over the last 3 decades to converge with that of prime-aged women, especially for those without a college degree. In 1979 around 15% of low educated prime-age men held lousy jobs, compared with 32% in 2014. Nearly 50% of low educated prime-aged women held lousy jobs in 1979, and after declining slightly, rose to the same levels in 2014.

Perhaps most strikingly, professor Howell shows that in 2014, men and women in lousy jobs with a high education had similar median wages to those with low education. Wages for men and women ages 18-34 with a high education were around 11 USD an hour, while wages for men with a low education were around 10 USD an hour and a little more than 9 USD an hour for women. For prime-aged workers the numbers are even more similar. Median wages for men and women with high education were around 11 USD and hour, while median wages for men with low education was right under 11 USD and around 10.50 for women.

Professor Howell’s innovative study should continue to shed more light on the issue of job quality and work precarity. His findings should provide empirical evidence that shows in an era of rising inequality and rising growth, the bounties of this growth did not translate into more high paying jobs. Professor Howell’s preliminary findings also show that no one is safe. Men and women, and especially those with a low education, are not shielded from being stuck in a lousy job. He also shows that once in a lousy job, wages are similar for men and women with both a high and low education – especially for prime-aged workers.

The next step will be looking at other facets of job quality, including the issue of flexible schedules (when workers don’t know their schedule from one week to the next), and lack of or inadequate access to social benefits not tied to employment. Targeting such issues will help to lead researchers toward providing more concrete evidence that “bargaining power” and institutional changes are to blame for the rise in lousy jobs.

To conclude, it is our hope that in the case studies, professor Howell will look not just at institutional changes, but the politics surrounding the institutional changes that are correlated with the rise in lousy jobs, especially in the United States. If social science research is supposed to impact policy and policy change, researchers analyzing the United States need to ask themselves what is the most effective way to do this with the hyper partisan political climate we are currently living in where money rules and issues facing the general public are often ignored.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Drayton, European Empires and the Origins of Modern Inequality. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Gordon R. Barnes Jr.

The Longue Durée and the Origins of Social Inequality.

In his recent talk, entitled “European Empires and the Origins of Modern Inequality,” Richard Drayton situates the existence of contemporary socio-economic inequality as part and parcel to a world-historic process originating in Western Eurasia during the Neolithic era. He argues that in examining the advent of sedentary agricultural societies in what today is the Middle East as well as portions of Africa, Asia, and most importantly for Drayton’s research, Europe, we can trace the social origins of contemporary inequality. The rise of notions of private property, increased regimentation of slave labor, and the concretization of the pater familias as part of social-economic relations are all a part of this lengthy process. The wide ranging talk covered various world events and socio-economic processes from the Neolithic period up until the U.S. led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In moving away from, and indeed critiquing, the standardized approach to historical inquiry – that of area study or national narrative – Drayton’s research posits that understanding the global is necessary to understand the local, and vice versa.

In breaking up the history of inequality into three overarching periods, beginning with the rise of the latifundium currently situated in an era of collaborative management (neoliberalism being just a moment in the late stage of this third period), Drayton wants us to consider the substantial social continuities that have persisted over time and space. With this global and transnational framework as the point of departure for studying, analyzing, and understanding inequality (historical in addition to contemporary manifestations) Drayton focuses upon the rise of European imperial systems within the long post-nomadic period of social differentiation and economic segmentation. He rigorously critiques the variety of endogamous explanations for the rise of the West, whilst simultaneously delineating a collaborative network of European imperial structures. The most salient examples offered during the talk referenced Boudreaux merchants and slavers who had insurance claims with a British firm and Iberian silver merchants backed, again, by British capital. All this interconnectivity at the more personal level of business relations persisted even through the strife of inter-imperial conflagration.

This seemingly ubiquitous set of inter-imperial relations are what concerns Drayton, as it represents what he terms as the “reconstitution of inequality transnationally.” In addition to an historical understanding of inequality, Drayton offers us something to think about relative to recent interrogations of the current state of inequality in the world. Offering two frameworks from which to understand contemporary inequality, the first a set of liberal welfare arguments (national) and the second as derived from colonial experiences (international), Drayton clearly sides, analytically at least, with the latter. Taking issue with Simon Kuznets’ and, more recently, Thomas Piketty’s work (their research utilizes the first framework) Drayton was able to effectively demonstrate the paucity of reliable data gleaned from uniquely national studies of inequality. Noting that Piketty’s work posits capital as a “thing” rather than as a social relation, Drayton further reinforces the problem of provincialized studies which do not reckon with global process. Thus, for Drayton not only as a materialist world historian, but as someone who is critically engaged with the phenomena of inequality, reckoning with the effects of the longue durée is necessary if we are to be able to effectively understand the multilayered and varied ways in which social and economic inequality has persisted over time, well into the modern epoch.

Naomi Murakawa, The Perils of Police Reform. Commentary by ARC Student Fellow Douaa Sheet

In this talk, as part of her broader research on 21st century policing and the politics of carceral expansion, Naomi Murakawa discusses the contemporary developments in the ongoing process of police professionalization. She examines the history of police professionalization through a focus on some of its key discursive terms. The conceptual principle she investigates here is “procedural justice”, as the corner stone of these reforms. Murakawa is interested in how the concept is operationalized: what does “procedural justice” actually look like? She looks at incarceration rates as well as admission rates with attention to the enduring racial stratification. She traces continuities in Obama and Johnson’s speeches, in an attempt to trace antecedents of “procedural justice” as well as what is particular to the current reforms. She also examines the training modules and policing textbooks noting the language used where “listening”, “understanding their perspective”, and “respect” are some of the approaches being pushed for.

Murakawa’s argument is that procedural justice is an effort to secure poor people’s consent to their own dispossession, and to diffuse the potential for collective mobilization. What is being obscured, she argues, are the “substance” of policing, the scale (the number of officers employed and the numbers of people being arrested), the scope, and the routine baseline violence (as opposed to extreme violence). She asserts that this is not the story of good intentions with unintended consequences. Murakawa’s concern here is the reproduction of inequality through these police reforms that ironically are called for often in the name of racial fairness. She asks: what political possibilities are enabled and what critiques are constrained when we use this kind of vocabulary?

Murakawa’s questions are very timely particularly with ongoing manifestations of police brutality, as of recently Ferguson, which she also discusses in this talk. The question however is how is this discourse that she traces in books, police guidelines, and political statements translating on the ground? How are officers responding to these texts? What happens in the translation process? The textbooks certainly reveal the meta-discourse. She shows how the textbook language is consistently echoed in political speeches such as that of the police chief and the president. Murakawa mentions in passing a police officer saying to a fresh addition to the team: “forget everything you learned in these books.” Perhaps a look at what happens outside the textbooks, as these officers deal with actual situations (conflict within their teams on levels of brutality deemed necessary, being from the community where they work, members having been exposed to these new guidelines working with older generations, etc.) may help us understand even more comprehensively the ways in which these police reforms gain such force.

 

 

Temporalities Matter: The Disjunct Between Democracy and Capitalism

“Democracy is an Illusion,” read the slide that opened Dr. Tomba’s presentation for the ARC research seminar. The slide pictured a crowd of protestors assembled in 2011 in Brussels who were, Dr. Tomba argued, part of a series of global uprisings against the manner in which democracy is being practiced today. Respected news sources around the world have published articles with similar conclusions over the past five years, declaring: “Democracy is rubbish,” or, “Democracy is in recession.” There is, it seems, a common sentiment around the world of dissatisfaction with democracy. In his presentation, Dr. Tomba examined the cause of this dissatisfaction and two oft-proposed solutions before advancing a third, alternative possibility.

Sign at a rally in Portland, November 17th, 2011. Originally published on the Our Curriculum Maters Blog.

So why is this sense of dissatisfaction with democracy rising around the world today? Dr. Tomba drew on several scholars to argue that the crisis of democracy is due to the tension that exists between the temporality of capitalism and the temporality of democracy. Economic temporality, or the temporality of market, capitalism, and finance, requires rapid decision-making in an increasingly globalized system. Political temporality, in contrast, requires time for discussion and decision-making in a more localized democratic system. Despite their fundamental differences, these two systems are deeply tied to one another. Thus as the pace of the global market system speeds up, the processes of democratic decision-making are also forced to accelerate – a fact which effectively undermines the democratic base of popular participation and erodes the base of democratic participation and consent.

Rising popular discontent suggests that the current acceleration of democratic processes is not sustainable. There are therefore two options commonly advanced by scholars to reclaim democracy, both of which involve a resynchronization of democracy and capitalism. These are: (1) Effectively accelerate democracy to the pace of the market, or (2) Create a slower democracy to enable true participation (and a find means to decelerate capitalism).

Occupy Movement protestors outside of the London Stock Exchange. Originally published in The Guardian.

Using popular movements such as Occupy and Arab Spring as examples, Dr. Tomba broke from these typical arguments to envision the creation of a third possibility outside of the common framework that represents both a different political experience and a different temporality. He argued that this new temporality, a temporality of anticipation, “expresses itself not in new constitutional architectures, but in architectures that have to be realized in the experiential dimension of practice.” Simply, the temporality of anticipation involves: (1) social and political change through self-change, and (2) change by creating new forms of being together in relationship.

Dr. Tomba argued that this is a fundamentally different type of political praxis, focused on solely the means rather than on justifying the means by the ends. Indeed, in addition to highly publicized movements such as Occupy and Arab Spring, this temporality of anticipation is also expressed in many locally-based movements, with local foods, transition towns, ecovillages, and alternative currencies all being examples. These movements create alternatives to the current political and global economic systems through the work of connected individuals using their own agency to affect change in their daily lives. These social movements choose the alternative, rather than the oppositional, path to change.

Whether this approach, this temporality of anticipation, can truly create sustainable social, political, economic, and environmental change, however, remains an open question. Does the temporality of anticipation truly open up new ways of being and doing that are capable of changing global systems? Or do we need the traditional “slow slog” through democracy to truly affect change? This is a conversation that needs to remain active as we continue to evaluate our current systems of democracy and capitalism in order to consider how to build more sustainable societies.

Ebola Crisis in West Africa

On September 22, 2015, the Advanced Research Collaborative sponsored a panel discussion on the mortality analysis, socio-political implications, and Western response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.


On September 22, 2015, the Advanced Research Collaborative sponsored a panel discussion on the mortality analysis, socio-political implications, and Western response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

Panelists included:

Leith Mullings (moderator) – The Graduate Center
Leith Mullings is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and immediate past president of the American Anthropological Association. Her research began in Africa on traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial Ghana, and her work in the U.S. addresses the consequences of class exploitation, racial discrimination, and gender subordination for the health and well-being of working- and middle-class women in Harlem.

Adia Benton – Brown University
An assistant professor of Anthropology, Adia Benton received her Ph.D. in social (medical) anthropology from Harvard University. She is a medical anthropologist specializing in HIV/AIDS, essential surgical care, race, post-conflict development, humanitarianism, and gender violence.

Kim Yi Dionne – Smith College
Kim Yi Dionne is an assistant professor of Government who teaches courses on African politics and ethnic politics. The substantive focus of her work is on the opinions of ordinary Africans toward interventions aimed at improving their condition and the relative success of such interventions. Her work has been published in African Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, and World Development.

Stéphane Helleringer – Columbia University
Stéphane Helleringer is an assistant professor of Public Health who has worked extensively in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Malawi. Most recently, his work has focused on developing new approaches to evaluating the impact of large public health programs on mortality in sub-Saharan countries.

Oppressor Walks Road to Freedom

Famously, Walter Benjamin tried to confront this problem by presenting his ideas unconventionally so that they could not be appropriated for Fascist purposes. In “The Work of Art in the Age of [Its] Technological Reproducibility,” he writes, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” The problem Benjamin references, of course, is not limited to rhetoric, but in our very structures of being together. The revolutionary affordance of every new communication technology is exactly equal to its usefulness for surveillance. It works the opposite way as well, however. The internet itself, for example, first developed for governmental purposes, now also hosts art, dissent.

Two weeks ago, Hester Eisenstein, a professor in Sociology at the Graduate Center, presented some ideas from her most recent book, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World.  As the title suggests, Eisenstein argues that the ideology of 20th century feminism unwittingly lends itself to the principles of global corporate capitalism. By equating feminist liberation with women’s right to paid labor, feminist rhetoric leaves itself vulnerable to use by hegemonic forces. In her talk, Eisenstein drew from both domestic and international examples to show how corporations have masterfully employed feminist ideology to further exploit female laborers. I had to leave early, so if possible solutions were mentioned, I missed them.

Eisenstein’s work is an important reminder that every inch advanced on the road toward freedom will serve the feet of the oppressor equally well. If there is a rhetoric immune to contradictory deployments, we have yet to find it. Famously, Walter Benjamin tried to confront this problem by presenting his ideas unconventionally so that they could not be appropriated for Fascist purposes.  In “The Work of Art in the Age of [Its] Technological Reproducibility,” he writes, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” The problem Benjamin references, of course, is not limited to rhetoric, but in our very structures of being together.  The revolutionary affordance of every new communication technology is exactly equal to its usefulness for surveillance. It works the opposite way as well, however. The internet itself, for example, first developed for governmental purposes, now also hosts art, dissent.

As someone deeply interested in developing tools that empower students to learn as a community rather than competitively and in isolation, this is a problem I think about a great deal. My dream tool kit of scholarly liberation — a personal online archive of all of one’s intellectual activity (though not necessarily public) — would be a disaster in the wrong hands.  One need not even call up the fascists to paint a picture of such a disaster. Corporate educational tools have already invaded our pedagogical space to such a degree that software driven by profit rather than pedagogy, such as Blackboard, is a university norm. Any innovation can be co-opted by commercial forces to the effect that it no longer serves its rhetorical purposes.

Hannah Arendt, it seems, was much more stoic about how the fruits of her labor were to be ultimately used. “Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be,” she reportedly said towards the end of her life “I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.” She is speaking specifically, of course, of her individual works, but it is worth considering whether such an attitude is useful or harmful when pursuing our daily activities as activists, academics and toolmakers.

Reflection on “The Performance of Exile: Deportation as a Theater of Cruelty”

In an eloquent presentation entitled “The Performance of Exile: Deportation as a Theater of Cruelty,” David C. Brotherton presented his research on deportation hearings, using the framework of Antonin Artaud’s theory of the theater of cruelty. Based on his experience as an expert witness in over 50 deportation hearings held at immigrant detention centers, Brotherton’s research sheds light on the experience of some of the 350,000 people deported each year, and the families many deportees leave behind. For Antonin Artaud, the theater needed to show the vibrant and cruel reality of modernity and represent the unrepresentable of society, which Brotherton argues, fits with the spectacle of immigration court in the United States today. Brotherton notes that in 2011 Congress appropriated nearly 700 million dollars for the government’s deportation programs, that ICE receives about 9% of the total funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and that record numbers of immigrants are being held in immigrant detention centers.

Brotherton argues that in the courtroom of deportation proceedings, emotional turmoil affects all those involved, including the deportable subjects, their families, the judges, and the lawyers present. The proceedings are performative. Brotherton describes five scenes from the inner proceedings of deportation and detention centers including the story of Frank Medira who is blind, diabetic, paralyzed on his right side, has had five strokes, and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Frank is trying to contest the government’s deportation order. His lawyer argues that his deportation should be seen as a death sentence and asks the judge to use his discretion to stop the deportation. The judge finds that the case does not meet the criteria for him to use discretion and orders him removed. Brotherton poses the question: What possible threat does Frank pose to U.S. society? He argues that the proceedings continue as if failure to adhere to tropes of good versus bad and deserving versus undeserving will cause a social crumbling.

In other scenes described by Brotherton, family members of the deportees are present and their emotional torment becomes part of the spectacle of deportation proceedings. In one “scene” a mother stands up and begins to pray and plead with the judge to release her son, swearing that she believes something terrible will happen to him if he is deported back to the Dominican Republic, before she collapses onto the bench having had a heart attack. In another case, the niece of a deportable man testifies that she believes her uncle will indeed face conditions akin to torture if he is deported. When pushed on her definition of torture, she states “If you want to know what torture is, this is torture, what you’re doing to my uncle…I have done my research, I have studied criminal justice and I don’t see any here today.” And in yet another case, a deportable man is cross-examined on the details of a long past criminal charge. Unlike in any other modern court, this crime is dragged up and its perpetrator re-tried and re-punished over and over again. For Brotherton, the performance spectacle of deportation court can be well served with Artaud’s frame of the theater of cruelty. These performative scenes illustrate the severity and the cruelty involved in state threats against immigrants, which constitute a particular form of othering that is indicative of denying processes of legal and social citizenship. This draws upon and reconstitutes moral panics around immigrants and criminality.