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Organizing for Social Change

On pg. 238, Dutta mentions that "the increasing availability and use of the Internet as a communicative platform" has greatly helped activists to organize on an international scale. But in what ways can groups -- who are too marginalized to access the Internet either because of their lack of education or infrastructure or both or are too underprivileged to attend an international conference of grassroot-level activists -- get their voices heard on a global platform/forum? In a hypothetical situation, say, after a successful social resistance movement, when a resistive group comes to the table for negotiations with the structures, or powers to be, how do they decipher whether they are being coopted or not, since structures can operate in insidious ways?

Organizing social change

1) How does organizing subalterns under the dominant structures of economic political organizations upend or reinforce the dominant structure? In other words, is speaking the "language" of the dominant structure to voice the subaltern voice actually just a co-opting of the subaltern voice? 2) What effect does identifying and classifying issues do to the overall ability of the subaltern to speak his/her voice? In other words, does it help in the short run but hurt in the long run for the subaltern to be able to speak, especially if their needs change?

Collective Agency and Approaches to Empowerment

1.) As noted in the readings, organizing for social change fundamentally occurs on a collective level, with frames, identities, issues, resources, etc deriving from individual experience to gain collective resonance. Given this, what is meant by the term “collective agency”? In other words, in what ways are individual and collective agency similar and different both in conceptualization and in practice? 2.) The CCA approach to empowerment foregrounds the perspectives, rationales, and agency of the marginalized, which serves to challenge or provide alternatives to dominant structures precisely through the privileging of those who have been excluded from discursive sites and processes of decision-making. This stands in contrast to the participatory development approach, which relies on experts imparting to the marginalized various skills and knowledge derived from the repertoire of the status quo to empower communities to act within the dominant socio-political-economic system. W

LR- Transcript #2

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #2 LR: what does hunger mean to you? M: when my kidney starts hurting. LR: you have something wrong with your kidneys, like dialysis or something? M: no, so some people are only born with one kidney, and I’m one of those. So I gotta be careful, my kidney hurts a lot. LR: so if it hurts all the time, how do you know when it hurts because of hunger? M: it’ll hurt real bad for a second and then it’ll start to go away. LR: okay, so do you have any experiences where it’s hurt and you haven’t been able to get food? M: I go to the food pantry. LR: do you like going to the food pantry. M: no, the kidney doctors keep telling me that I should eat fresh food and fresh meat and stuff like that, no pot and no coffee, and it’s hard to do that cuz the only thing I can really get is juice from the food pantry and that’s not a guarantee every time either and I don’t get a lot of money to go out and buy food

LR- Transcript #4

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #4 LR: Let’s start with, what does hunger mean to you? BS: for me it’s when my blood sugar drops, I start shaking and sweating, that’s when I know I’m hungry LR: do you have diabetes? BS: yeah. Before I was on the glucal pills, and I think they gave me the wrong ones or something, but now I’m off them and that’s been helping. LR: okay, how often do you go hungry? BS: I only eat about once a day, in the evening. LR: what do you have? BS: I have mac ‘n’ cheese or a bologna sandwich and a coke; I only get 36$ for the month. LR: tell me what it’s like to get food. You said you get 36$ but… BS: I ride the bus. LR: you ride the bus? Okay, how long does that take you? BS: about an hour and a half, two hours. LR: okay, and how, is it cost-effective to ride the bus to get to the food pantry? BS: yeah, it’s worth it. LR: what food pantry do you go to? BS: St. John’s , uh, I go

Transcript #3

Assignment List, H400, Religion in America Transcript #3 LR: okay, so let’s start with, what does it mean to you to be hungry? R: uh, usually to go a meal or two, and then not have any way to get food, just to be sitting there and uh not have anywhere to go really. I mean, maybe the drop or you might get kicked outta there so, if you live there you’re not supposed to eat there, so basically you’re home and wondering, where am I going to eat? LR: so if you’re, at the Drop, you said it was? R: yeah, it’s over on 9 th , and its like a homeless shelter, like a kind of a day shelter, to go to eat during the day, but you’re not supposed to go there if you’re housed. LR: so it’s one or the other? R: right. LR: um, so, if you’re housed there, what kind of options do you have? R: well you can go to the local food pantries, um, LR: is it hard to get there? To the food panties? R:   uh, walking’s kinda hard, I mean you would need to have something to uh

Questions about resistive performances.

1) Among the various kinds of resistive performances that Dutta discusses in Chapter 7, which one is most often the most effective? Also, in case of street performances, how does one make sure that the performance really catches people's attention and makes them think, as opposed to making them watch it for a while and then dismissing it? 2) In resistive performances, what matters more -- the number of people one involves in the performances, or the intensity of the act per se? How does one take a resistive performance beyond art for art's sake and elevate it to the level of a transformative act?

Thoughts about Suicide as Performance

As Dutta (2011) note, TNCs and dominant structures argue that streets are public spaces that are solely for merchandize, as such acts of performance that seek to use such places for performance activities that disrupt dominant structures are silenced through the use force and the law. My question is: 1. How can performing artists overcome such hurdle particularly in underserved contexts where dominant structures wield enormous powers over the population, and any attempt to challenge their agency is interpreted as breach of the law 2. Also in the book, Communicating Social Change, Dutta (2011) elegantly traced the history of performance, and various performance strategies used by groups to challenge dominant structures while pushing for social change. Some of the strategies include dance, strikes, poems, speeches, suicide, Theatre, Barricades, songs, and visual arts. While I agree with the change potentials of these strategies, I am wondering where to draw the line between abuse of

SPSS: Specially Produced Software for Shortcuts

Over the last few months, as I have been reviewing articles and paying attention to the posturing of scholars of a particular breed who are clamoring for legitimacy (most of this is related to resources), I have become particularly aware of the mediocrity of intellectual participation that is ironically shrouded in arrogance that gains legitimacy by putting down others, other ways of doing scholarship, other ways of thinking, and other worldviews. Sometimes, I am taken aback by claims such as "autoethnography is not scholarship." Where does such arrogance and intellectual pettiness come from? I am especially taken aback when I hear a graduate student, or a junior faculty member, or for that matter a senior faculty member make such claims. In most instances, I am confident that the person in question has probably never touched an autoethnography. Even more so, when you press the person to give you a reason, you hear them spelling out some heuristic such as "Oh, that&#

Performance Pieces

1) What role does the audience play in transformative performance pieces? How can we become more aware audience members? 2) What distinguishes open and closed performances? In what ways can we perform challenging pieces?

Potentials and Pitfalls of Symbolic and Aesthetic Practices

1.) How do Dutta’s overview of performing for social change and Drake’s in-depth discussion of her involvement in the sustainable food movement allow us to understand the significance of the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of resistance, mobilization, and social change? How are the contours of agency (for all persons and parties involved) defined through such symbolic and aesthetic practices? What are the dialectical tensions and dialogical possibilities between aesthetic/symbolic practices and political-economic structures? 2.)   Considerable attention in these chapters is paid to the role of the scholar in communicating for (and against) social change. What are the potential pitfalls of academic intervention in movements for change? How do the authors reconcile these potential dangers and justify spaces for the expert scholar? What do these points tell us about reflexivity or the position of the scholar either in research and/or activism roles?