aag border matters panel

Here’s the text of my talk from the 2012 Association of American Geographers meeting. The session was called “Border Matters!”

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The title of the paper is now “(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity.” What I’d like to do here is condense the paper to its essential arguments; I will do this by outlining the points first, then elaborating upon them later.

• First, borders have lost their previously privileged position as sites of enforcement, especially as symbolic, pedagogical spaces of producing the interior/exterior relationship.
• Second, borders remain key sites in a network of policing and control technologies. However, states employ methods of interiorization, exteriorization, and excision to fundamentally alter the topology of state control.
• Third, the network of control is not solely the purview of the state, but includes supranational bodies (such as the EU, Frontex), non-governmental organizations (such as the IOM), states, and sub-state actors (the Minute Men in the US), and so on.
• Fourth, this network must be studied globally.
• Fifth, viewed globally, migration policing does not aim at inclusion/exclusion, but rather at the modulation of migration as part of what Deleuze called a “society of control.”
• Sixth, control societies are predicated upon open systems and deterritorialization, rather than the systems of enclosure necessary for disciplinary and biopower societies.
• Finally, control is a form of power largely ignored in the migration literature, but better explains the various “exceptional” arrangements of “inclusive exclusions” and “exclusive inclusions” that characterize migration today. In other words, biopower and disciplinary power do not adequately describe how and why the proliferation of migrant securitizations also result in the abandonment of life in favor of control.

My argument hinges upon understanding that the shift to control societies does not mean that there are no disciplinary or biopolitical technologies at work: there are indeed inclusions and exclusions, processes and technologies of enclosure, and so on. But I argue that the tendency, or the gravitational center around which these technologies orbit, is a deterritorialized network of technologies of modulating migrant populations.

            So, now I have to support these arguments, which of course I won’t be able to do in a satisfactory manner in the time allotted, but I’ll try.

Part I: Modulation Away From Borders

            There has been an increase in research documenting technologies of migration control that no longer take either the border as their ‘proper’ site or territorial exclusion as their primary goal. This wave can be conceptualized as a shift from a logic of border enforcement (discourses of sovereign power) to, broadly speaking, a logic of population management (discourses of biopower). Yet I take Foucault’s work on biopolitics to be delimited by its historicity and specificity: essentially, biopolitics is not merely taking life to be the central concern of politics, but it is the establishment of a regime of security over a territory for the purpose of making the population more productive. [I take Foucault’s definition of biopolitics because a) it takes into account both individuals and masses, b) it is oriented towards production, c) it is clearly territorial, and d) it is historicized as a governmentality. Crucially, then, it is not simply taking any life as the object and end of a politics, but a specific form of life, in a particular time and place, for specific ends.] What we see today is different in both operation and effect, in that contemporary governance is no longer territorial (although it retains territorial elements), nor is it directed at a bounded population (although it does not supersede population-level projects entirely), nor is it about the preservation and promotion of life (although it sometimes does this). To be more precise, there is a new diagram of power at work that is primarily indifferent towards life… except only when it is strategically useful to be otherwise. This helps to explain why both Foucault’s lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and Deleuze’s essay on control (1995)  largely ignore the term “biopolitics” and instead, respectively, focus on neoliberalism and the transition from discipline to control. In effect, both recognize that biopower is a constitutive component of a different set of technologies with different ends. Indeed, Protevi notes that after 1980, biopolitics and control are contemporaneous, and work through distinct modes, actors, targets, practices, forms, outcomes, and so on. Following Nealon’s (2008) notion of the intensifications of power, Protevi points out that biopolitics and control are in fact complementary, but that in a control society what matters more than life itself are the mechanisms by which life is put in relation to and modulated with the political, the economic, and the social.

            What I mean by governance is no longer territorial is supported, I think, in the various ways in which migrant policing is no longer strictly territorial. To be clear, I focus here on technologies of migrant population modulation undertaken by the state – for reasons of space – but there are complementary technologies that are non-state oriented. These primary technologies of state-oriented migrant modulation are interiorization, exteriorization, and excision. I point to trends of internalization in the United States, then trends of externalization in the European Union. This is not because such trends are limited to those contexts; I am merely providing a heuristic based on the primary trends in each area. Specific local histories and practices would complicate this heuristic, although I am confident that they would be in line with the global tendency toward control outlined here. Rather than a full explication of each technology, I will simply provide an example for each:

Internalization

            I focus here on the use of license checkpoints, but I acknowledge that there are in fact many technologies at work in the interiorization of policing, including the use of migrant detention, the devolution of enforcement from federal to local officials, and others. The license checkpoint is a nexus of these changes:

These checkpoints are mobilized ostensibly to screen every vehicle and driver passing through the checkpoint for a valid license; routinely, however, this is used as an excuse in order to facilitate the policing of immigration status. Since these stops are often limited to roads that lead from large workplaces to domestic areas with high immigrant populations, they qualify as a selective technology that has the effect of disciplining large numbers of immigrants without actually physically encountering each of them. This discipline results in incapacitation (Coleman and Kocher 2011) but is no longer part of the closed system of enclosures, an integral part of how Foucault characterized biopolitics in Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population. Instead, traffic stops are relatively open systems, part of a network of policing techniques designed to incapacitate and make precarious.

            When the traffic stop is combined with the growth in the number of local law enforcement officers charged with immigration policing responsibilities, the result is non-immigration related offenses leading to immediate or delayed, but inevitable, contact with federal databases, which result in an increase in deportations. Federal programs, such as the 287(g) program, effectively deputizes local law enforcement officials, allowing them to access federal databases otherwise closed to them, and at other times obligating police to detain immigrants indefinitely until status can be verified. Coleman and Kocher (2011) argue that this assemblage of technologies results in a form of discipline that results in the “production of a docile population of ‘territorially present’ residents” who are not “legally present.” In other words, they can be deported but they cannot take an employer to court to claim lost wages. They further propose that “in the abstract immigration enforcement works through the production of an exemplary migrant precarity, i.e. an amplification of socio-economic and legal insecurities for certain immigrant bodies” (235). This uneven and selective enforcement helps explain why, for example, there is such a contradictory presence of “illegal” immigrants even after a meteoric rise in spending on, ostensibly, keeping them out.

Externalization

            Again, a very brief example, of “remote control:” An integral aspect of “remote control” is the prevalence of bilateral agreements between EU member states and its immediate neighbors, especially those in North Africa (Adepoju/van Noorloos/Zoomers 2009). [Note: Bilateral agreements are slowly giving way to Frontex/EU led agreements. This shift deserves recognition, but does not detract from the historical argument being made here. It remains to be seen how Frontex will alter the externalization of policing, but my suspicion is that it will extend the process rather than curtail it.] These agreements can be formalized, but EU member states tend to prefer informal agreements for a number of reasons. Informal agreements are less transparent, more flexible in the interpretation of human rights claims, especially the obligation of nonrefoulement, and subject to quick alteration based on a perceived crisis. Hamood (2008) points to the proposal to create “transit processing centers” in countries bordering the EU (20). These centers would serve as administrative and detention sites to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from reaching EU territory, where human rights obligations would set in. These bilateral agreements extend well beyond the establishment of camps, however, and include development aid, preferential immigration quotas, and circular migration schemes (Adepoju et al. 2009).

            These bilateral agreements reached their zenith in a series of arrangements between Italy and Gaddafi’s Libya. [After the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya it is difficult to know for sure whether such an agreement will be reestablished – as of the time of writing this was not clear – although it would be a safe assumption to imagine that Italy and the EU will base almost any aid to a fledgling Libyan government on the reduction of migrants and asylum seekers setting forth from the Maghreb.] The agreements generally stressed the use of Libya’s military to intercept clandestine immigrants in the Mediterranean (Hamood 2008; Adepoju et al. 2009; Andrijasevic 2009). A 2008 deal between the countries includes a provision that allows Italy to return intercepted migrants to Libya. A 2003 agreement placed Italian police officers in Tripoli full-time to provide Libya with “training and equipment, in particular to assist border surveillance and management” (Hamood 2008, 32). As previously noted, these technologies of remote control result, in part, in a protracted or fragmented journey (Collyer 2007; 2010) and effectively deny political, religious, and ideological refugees the human rights protections many of the EU member states themselves were instrumental in securing.

Excision

            A final problem posed to understanding the contemporary governance of transmigration is the strategic manipulation of territory, or excision, that deeply troubles the “security, territory, population” triplet posed by Foucault (2007). The US, EU, and Australia all engage in the strategic manipulation of territory to create exclusion zones that are formally part of the national territory, but legally outside of the spaces in which migrants can claim workers’ rights or refugees can potentially claim asylum (Mountz 2010). For example, Australia has responded to an influx of asylum seekers by exercising the “power of excision,” or the declaration of “hundreds of islands off the coast of Australia [as] no longer part of Australian territory for the purposes of migration” (xviii). Especially in the case of Australia – but also relevant to Italy and the island of Lampedusa – Mountz notes that,

[b]orders are thus pushed farther away and nearly erased… [and] asylum processing is contracted out to poorer countries. This combines with remote detention (inside sovereign territory) to create a powerful geography of exclusion. (127)

These geographies of exclusion are an intriguing aspect of the paradigm of population modulation, in that they effectively curtail the sovereignty states are ostensibly protecting from “extreme” population flows.

A Caution

            There is a danger of overstating the prevalence of these new technologies of population modulation and reducing the border to a merely (and weakly) performative status. It is true that borders are performative (Brown 2010), as iterations of both the extent of sovereign power and the ‘container’ of rights claims. However, any study of borders/bordering and adjacent policing practices will show just how powerful these spaces remain. But as a tendency, borders are now responding to the paradigm of population modulation, or what Deleuze termed “control” (Deleuze 1995). It is not an overstatement, then, to note that the combination of internalization, externalization, and excision are drastically changing the way migration is governed. It is relatively easy to point to instances of each having occurred prior to the 1980s and the global rise of neoliberalism, but what is new is the specific assemblage of such technologies and how they operate together with particular effects and outcomes: precarization and control.

Control

Briefly, I want to differentiate my approach from the more common biopolitical understanding of migration policing. I base my argument on the contemporary crisis of enclosure institutions, which is partly a crisis in their territoriality. Various forms of power take different territorialities:

• Sovereign power: the king’s court, the pillory, the imperium bello where territorial expansion was displayed in the king’s medals rather than through the setting of ‘secure’ borders.
• Discipline: enclosures – i.e. hospitals, prisons, factories, the family unit; institutions with overlapping territorialities working on the body – i.e. the co-presence of church and state exacting allegiance and discipline.
• Biopower: nations as enclosures; presumes and intensifies disciplinary enclosures; utilizes the givenness of an already existing set of forces to increase productivity/health/lifespan.

Biopower, then, works primarily through closed systems, or at best through partially open ones. However, as Ong (2006) has noted, we are in a moment where sovereignty exists as yet another tool in the toolbox, where it is manipulated at will in order to suit particular ends. This form of graduated sovereignty does not work primarily through enclosures; it presumes open systems which must be modulated between, retaining only the final say over the extent of sovereignty. What moves to the fore here is not enclosure or life, but a mechanism or network of mechanisms, including, in this instance, the manipulation of sovereignty in ways that seemingly weaken the state itself. This is a natural byproduct of a society that takes a global political/economic space as its presumption and abandons the concern for life, even as life’s utterance, its discursive presence, proliferates.

            In sum, biopower is predicated upon a system of enclosures that presume impermeable borders – even if they do not exist in practice. The organization of social life and political organization centers on and resonates with these enclosures. However, after the generalized crisis of enclosures in the latter half of the 20^th Century into the present, there has arisen a new paradigm of power centered upon open systems. Control, as we will see, organizes social life and political organization away from borders, presumes a dissolution of enclosures, and reterritorializes governance around control mechanisms that are modular, adaptable, and highly selective.

            Control abandons the ideal subject, and only attempts to minimize the most obvious outliers (i.e. terrorists). Control is indifferent to life: life, territory, sovereignty, and discipline are simply utilized strategically under a process without a subject, a process without goals. Security for whom, or for what? Security today is achieved only by negating meaningful life. Movement curtailed, why, and to what end? Movement is fundamentally liberal, and in the triumph of liberal democracy and liberal economics, why do we insist on rigidly controlling it? Control, ultimately, becomes hegemonic without benefitting anyone; to paraphrase Arendt, how do we contend with the banality of control?

            This abandonment brings into clarity the distinguishing feature of control, as opposed to the border enforcement or population management paradigms. Deportation is thus not about shaping the ‘correct’ populace, as much as it is about producing striations in space otherwise tending toward smoothness. License checkpoints and visa systems determine appropriateness to travel, but do not oppose ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (or the dialectic of inclusion versus exclusion). Indeed, by acting as turbulence that redirects a flow, rather than a barrier that excludes, the internalization or externalization of transmigrant policing has fundamentally altered the relation among people, politics, and place. The spatiality of control does not revolve around the resonant centers of state, nation, borders, yet it is not an unmediated deterritorialization. Control reterritorializes along new striations, new power configurations, and new social subjectivities. Precisely by abandoning the ideal subject, control, and its other – precarity, differentiates itself from disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, which work to secure populations, not radically precarize them.

Conclusion

            Ultimately, I argue that the topological border, the border’s proliferation across space, has the specific effect of producing mass precarity, which is precisely the point. This precarity is not only advantageous to capital, but is politically and socially advantageous to the global north, as it replicates the colonial relation without a responsibility to support and protect actual colonial subjects. This is the capital and state wet-dream. It is the culmination of a relationship set in motion with the original colonial conquests in the 16^th Century; only now capitalism and the state are well-developed enough to maximize, at least for a time, the instability that comes with such a mobilization of mass precarization.

            Understanding control and the modulation technologies it employs not only provides a description of the tendency of global governance, but it opens a space for weaponizing precarity, to use it against capital and the state, rather than to lament the loss of stable identities and rights. This is where I hope to take the next paper.

Agamben and immanence

“Language and Death, perhaps the definitive work of Agamben’s early thought, presents the history of Western metaphysics as an incessant but essentially hopeless search for such an ungrounded ground on which we are supposed to walk, or a silent voice to which we are supposed to listen. The bedrock of our society, he claims, is always revealed at the end to be a void, a self-annihilating nothing. According to his analysis, the ultimate name for the place of negativity at the vanishing core of our culture is ‘death.’ Nevertheless, within Spinoza’s absolute immanence, where there is nothing outside the single substance that he calls either God or nature, this entire metaphysical castle is revealed to be a house of cards…

The idea of immanence, this ‘vertigo of philosophy,’ as Deleuze calls it, is meant to bring about this desired absolution by calling all separations into question, by rendering the search for a ground redundant (Potentialities). If everything is in everything, then the idea that something is fundamentally distinguished from everything else is at best an artificial superfluousness and at worst a nonsensical quibble. For Agamben, the most problematic separation that plagues the history of Western thought is the bifurcation of the concept of life… Agamben traces the root of the problem back to the Greek distinction between zoe (the fact of being alive) and bios (the way of life)… by following Deleuze, who follows Spinoza, Agamben tries to jam this metaphysical division-machine. By treating life as absolute immanence (and immanence as a life), he brings all those traditional binary oppositions into the zone of indistinction that is the turf on which his philosophy thrives.”

~David Kishik, The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics, 33-34.

migration in control societies: governmentality without territory

I submitted an abstract for the 2012 International Geographical Congress (August 2012 in Cologne, Germany). It’s a huge conference, from what I gather, and they seem very concerned about the submissions being “cutting edge science.” So I have no idea if I’ll get in, but I figured I’d apply and see what happens.

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My abstract:

This paper responds to the call for research on the practices motivating and promoting changes in the management of international mobility, the social consequences for migrants and societies resulting from mobility-related practices, with a view toward elaborating normative ideas of a “no borders” politics.

Contemporary practices of policing migration flows no longer follow a logic of inclusion/exclusion because the border is no longer the primary site of enforcement and the goal of such practices is no longer to keep mobile populations out of a territory. Western (“receiving”) states rely instead on myriad techniques that implement three broad strategies: the internalization and externalization of policing, and the excision of territory. By shifting migration enforcement away from borders, the governance of human mobility has become dislocated from territory, contributing to the rapid rise in the securitization of migration precisely because of this dislocation. This paper explores various technologies of migrant policing and their relation to, production of, and ambivalence toward various territorialities. Using Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of “control societies,” the author orients these technologies as mechanisms that modulate population flows in ways that produce “inclusive exclusions” and “exclusive inclusions,” where migrant presence or absence is approached as a process of filtration rather than exclusion. The author argues that these control mechanisms, or modulating technologies, help to produce a generalized condition of precarity, which facilitates state and economic interventions that would not otherwise be possible. The paper concludes with a consideration of potential political subjectivities produced by and through governmentality without territory. Rather than a project of “open borders,” the author explicitly locates these subjectivities as operating in a politics of “no borders,” paralleling the territorially dislocated technologies of population modulation. New spaces, literally and figuratively, for politics and resistance are opened as an incitement toward articulating a stronger “no borders politics.”

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Session Information:

Title: Free Flow or Better Stay at Home? Changing Practices in the Management of International Mobility

Abstract: This session discusses new developments in the field of mobility and migration politics. The international governance or ‘management’ of human mobility is based on the (re‐)construction of migrants as ‘risks’ and of cross‐border mobility as a ‘risky project’ for individuals and receiving societies. The trend to distinguish between the ‘openness’ to skilled migration (‘free flows’ across ‘smart borders’) and the ‘closure’ to unskilled workers obscures the convergence of apparently different state and non‐state policies and practices in creating categories that order human mobility. Contemporary state and non‐state practices of cross‐border mobility and migration are characterized by a high degree of complexity; they are based on a mix of traditional coercive and direct interventions (‘border management’) and less repressive and indirect practices. Mobility and migration ‘management’ takes place at mostly all political levels and scales: transnational, international, and national scales; the individual migrant ‘level’; social behavior and body politics (as illustrated e.g. by the use of large‐scale ‘information campaigns’ that promote ‘better stay at home policies’ or the increasing popularity of ‘medical pre‐departure screenings’). Against these material practices of control and regulation, migrants and the advocates for ‘free movement’ and ‘no borders’ are challenged to find their own creative spaces and answers to the question if and how migration should be regulated and how autonomous mobility projects can still be realized.

We invite contributions that analyze the (1) narratives and worldviews of recent mobility and migration politics; (2) key actors and practices motivating and promoting changes in the management of international mobility; (3) social consequences for migrants and societies resulting from mobility‐related discourses and practices; (4) spatial and multi‐level modes of mobility politics; and/or (5) normative ideas of the free and open cross‐border flow of people.

radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

the self

My sister, a MFA student at the U of Iowa, asked me what appears to be a simple question, which of course necessitates an incredibly complex answer: “How would you define a self?”

Because I want to develop this more later, I’m posting my response in full here.

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Not knowing the context in which you are trying to write, the notion of “what is a self” is a bit tricky.

 

There are many ways to think about the self. One can think about a sort of disciplinary self: what does a concept of the self mean in the context of an academic discipline; in other words, what is the self of History, of Philosophy, of Theater, of Math, etc? Are these similar selves? Is there a singular self of Philosophy (I would say no)?

But more commonly, you have two notions of the self: as identity and as subject. These are distinctive positions and entail different modes of thinking, even if people generally misuse vocabulary that would elide the two.

1) Self as identity: The concept of identity is basically the question of “who am I?” This notion of the self attempts to ground the social being in notions of identity that can then act as anchor points off which to engage with other social beings. This is the self who is always compelled to speak itself – “I am (insert identifier here, i.e. man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, etc.).” Identity (often referred to as identity politics) places relatively stable notions of these characteristics at a center and builds a relatively stable self on top of them. Just think of the many claims to identity that trail us in the everyday world and the politics built upon them: the NAACP/Black Panthers/Nation of Islam built upon notions of shared oppression translated into a politics of Black Power; the Human Rights Campaign’s basic assertion of the gay desire to normalcy translates into a politics of marriage that reproduces heterosexual hegemony; the “band geek’s” elevation to the student council translates into the constant refrain “band is a sport too…” Identities are necessarily collective, and therefore selves are never fully singular, they oscillate between singularity and multiplicity, making the desire to ground the self in an identifier all the more frustrating. This frustration manifests itself as alienation (see Marx for more on alienation). What is essential in this notion of self as identity is that it is produced only in the Modern context with the rise of capitalism. Capitalism’s drive for ever new and expanded markets produces identities. In other words, capitalism is a machine that produces identities. These identities are ever more refined and multiplied. In the 1960s, one was Black or White. Now we parse ourselves out: I am a white, heterosexual, male, PhD student, former athlete, psoriasis sufferer from New Jersey… The self as identity is the psychological subject of self-help books: I’m looking at a book in Barnes and Noble right now called “Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child” and another “You’re On Your Own” and another “Boys Adrift.” The self as identity is compelled to ask, “Am I authentically (blank)?” This is the only way capital can keep alienated selves engaged in self-seeking, soul-searching, identity-interrogating processes that lead us back to the market. We tried it in 1968: the revolution of identities will only lead us back to weak cycles of inclusion – lack – demand – demonstration – inclusion. This re-inscribes the inside/outside, friend/enemy distinction that prompted the cycle to begin, which provides the illusion of progress while really being a constant engine of difference and exclusion.

2) Self as subject: The concept of the subject can best be posed as “who or what am I always becoming?” Inaugurated by most accounts by Nietzsche, the notion of the self as subject is an historical question. Rather than a search for an originary position though (I am White/Black/whatever), it asks the question another way: if in this historical moment I am this thing called White, what is the process that made White an historical possibility? This is a self that is contingent (based on historical circumstance) and radically de-naturalized. There is no inherent Blackness, Whiteness, gayness, straightness, whatever. Rather than a self alienated by the motor of capital, the oscillation between singularity and multiplicity, the self is always already singular, existing in multiplicitous assemblages. Blackness becomes a set of historical circumstances that, importantly, exists only as such because you make it such. Rather than a self that is called into existence by an identity (as above), the singularity calls the category into existence. We produce ourselves instead of being produced by things such as skin color, nation of origin (which is the most unnatural thing in the world!), and so on. The most radical form of singularity is what Giorgio Agamben calls the “whatever singularity” (see The Coming Community). Rather than the subject of pop-psychology and self-help books, the self as subject is an entirely schizophrenic self (see Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. 1 and 2). Whereas the self as identity posits a notion of human nature by its very mode of relation between self and identity, self as subject posits the notion that the construction of being-together (what we often call “culture”) is human nature. In other words, the human imagination that quite literally constructs our life-world is what both makes us subjects and is our very reason for being. In a sense, this is the post-humanist notion of the self, because it places our entire existence back onto ourselves as humans (I say this is somewhat ironic, since the humanism of the Enlightenment supposedly did this by destroying god by elevating the human to status of God. So, it could be said that the self as subject is a humanist position; but it decidedly is not, because it completely erases the notion of the sovereign subject upon which humanist, rationalist selves are built.)

The politics of self as identity is a politics of closure, always foreclosing the possibility of becoming by always presuming a grounding in what is. The politics of self as subject is a politics of becoming and openness, always opening onto what is not yet but perhaps could be. Identity, in an ironic sense, then is trapped in history, but it is merely the history of the actual. Subject, even though it is an historical subject, exists on the plane of the virtual, as it is merely the momentary coagulation of a limited infinite number of possibilities.

toward an anarchic metaphysics of law

As usual, block quotes in red.

*****

Based on my reading of Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Before the Law,” and the work of Robert Cover, I’ve begun to try to think about an anarchic metaphysics of law. This seems paradoxical, and on the surface, it is. Law is typically conceptualized as an instrument of social control, a way to keep people in line – perhaps to be exploited by the State and capital. This is only partially true.

There are a few basic problematics in thinking about law that I have identified in the reading I have been doing. First, the moment of the founding of the law. Second, the role of the judge (interpreted broadly, to include the jury). Third, the representability of the law. Fourth, the ontological foundation of the law. And finally, the aporia of law.

The founding of law

There are (at least) two important stories which tell us about the foundation of the law. One is a familiar one to us: Athena’s founding of a court in The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Aeschylus describes the mythical founding of Athenian law. The founding of the law occurs in the moment in which a shift from a legal economy of vengeance, represented by the Furies, to a legal economy of law, represented by Athena as judge and a group of Athenian men as jury, takes place. Aeschylus, writing early in the time of Athenian democracy, wants to valorize the newly formulated system of laws, so he distinguishes for his audience the figures of vengeance, the Furies, from the figure of wisdom, Athena. The Furies ultimately pursue Orestes, who has just killed his mother, Clytaemnestra, to Athens, where they place themselves under the judgment of Athena. The procedural aspect of the case hinges upon a disagreement over how the crimes of matricide or patricide are valued, ultimately necessitating a judgment that will put an end to the cycle of murder and revenge. According to the Furies, matricide is absolutely wrong, in that it destroys ones flesh and blood: “Matricides: we drive them from their houses.”[1] Apollo counters with an inquiry:

Apollo: “And what of the wife who strikes her husband down?”

leader of the Furies: “That murder would not destroy one’s flesh and blood.”[2]

Apollo’s response to the Furies sets up the first view of justice in the play – the order of vengeance:

Why, you’d disgrace – obliterate the bonds of Zeus // and Hera queen of brides! And the queen of love // you’d throw to the winds at a word, disgrace love, // the source of mankind’s nearest, dearest ties. // Marriage of man and wife is fate itself, // stronger than oaths, and Justice guards its life. // But if one destroys the other and you relent – // no revenge, not a glance in anger – then // I say your manhunt of Orestes is unjust. // Some things stir your rage, I see. Others, // atrocious crimes, lull your will to act. // Pallas will oversee this trial. She is one of us.[3]

His act of drawing attention to the Furies’ selective notion of justice highlights the limits of the legal order of vengeance, and prompts a series of events that begin to shift the play from the order of vengeance toward the order of law by proposing a trial overseen by an outsider to the situation, but an insider to the social milieu of Apollo, the Furies, and Orestes.

The second story is that provided by Deleuze and Guattari. D&G provide us with a story of the foundation of the State as an all-at-once, and as fully formed. The State arrives through a dual process of conquer and pacification. The law is imported all-at-once as an aspect of the pacification process, which includes the distribution of State entitlements, privileges, and so on. This is one reason John Rawls’ notion of distributive justice fails, as it rests upon a founding violence that is replicated in each and every act of distribution.

The two stories serve two different purposes. In Aeschylus, the founding of Athenian law is a progressive moment, a triumph of reason over non-reason, of consistency over inconsistency. Such a story masks the violence of the law and the State. In D&G, however, we are provided with a non-progressive foundation story, a story which foregrounds the constitutive violence of the law and the State.

The judge

Between The Eumenides and the Oedipus plays by Sophocles, we see the emergence of a legal order that contains an important figure: the judge. The ideal judge is autonomous from the State. The ideal judge is one who places himself under the same legal order as the rest of the polis. However, we know that this is not the case. The judge is part of a much larger legal apparatus directly controlled by the state. The election of professional judges, the collusion of judges and the police, and many other pressures prevent the figure of the judge from ever achieving that ideal (of course there are exceptions to this, but I would argue that they are not the norm, they are rare).

The representability of the law and the ontological foundation of the law

See my previous post on Derrida’s “Before the Law.”

The aporia of law

I pick up again after my discussion of Derrida to note that we are left with an aporia. Derrida leaves us with an aporia where the law is inaccessible yet constantly performed, interpellated, and represented. In contemporary Western liberal democracies, the law is an integral component of the State apparatus and is wholly conflated with the bureaucratic representatives who administer it. It is this conflation that leads to the paralysis of the contemporary moment. As Benjamin notes:

I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.”[4]

We need, then, a conception of law that follows Derrida’s aporia in the opposite direction from which it is normally carried through: a separation of law from the State.

Robert Cover begins to provide this with his notion of “jurisgenesis.”[5] Cover notes that law is a “world in which we live,”[6] a set of norms or legal precepts and principles we communicate to others, not just demands on us form God, sovereign, the people, or society.[7] His conception of law, while very different from Derrida’s, nonetheless separates law from the State:

Law may be viewed as a system of tension or a bridge linking a concept of a reality to an imagined alternative – that is, as a connective between two states of affairs, both of which can be represented in their normative significant only through the devices of narrative.[8]

Of course, Cover’s work itself is ripe for deconstruction, but my point here is to link the separation of law from the state with the notion of narrative, which brings us back to the law as ideology. Cover then encourages a proliferation of law creation – or, in our terms, ideology creation – through what he terms jurisgenesis. Jurisgenesis is the creation of legal meaning.[9] A proliferation of legal meanings in relation to a single State enforcing a single legal order sheds light on one of Cover’s other contributions to legal theory – that every legal act of judgment is also an act of violence. On the macro-level, the State enforces a legal order, but communities of juridical sense (those communities engaging in jurisgenesis) are also enforcing legal orders. Already we have a system of legal orders that is in some sense weakly anarchic.[10]

We end up, then, with law in an undecidable space where it is both the force of the State expended to maintain its own existence and the anarchic impulse of human beings to create meaning in the world as a generative activity. Cover, however, ends up privileging the State in his final analysis:

It is not the romance of rebellion that should lead us to look to the law evolved by social movements and communities. Quite the opposite. Just as it is our distrust for and recognition of the state as reality that leads us to be constitutionalists with regard to the state, so it ought to be our recognition of and distrust for the reality of the power of social movements that leads us to examine the nomian worlds they create. And just as constitutionalism may legitimize, within a different framework, communities and movements. Legal meaning is a challenging enrichment of social life, a potential restraint on arbitrary power and violence. We ought to stop circumscribing the nomos; we ought to invite new worlds.[11]

His suspicion of social movements ultimately points to his underlying view that inviting new worlds is ultimately a reformist impulse, one meant to harness the power of social movements rather than to allow them the truly transformative role they could have in reconstituting a world without a State. Unlike Cover, then, who puts faith in the ability of the Supreme Court Justices, I prefer to continue to watch and participate as social movements continue to lay bare the State’s violence. The space opened up by separating law from the State and by turning to the jurisgenerative potential of social movements, we initiate a move toward a new legal order, one differentiated from the order of vengeance and from the order of Athenian law; this new legal order, though, is yet to be defined. Contemporary social movements may indeed contain within them the seeds of a new legal order, however. To name but a few: a decentering of the role of the judge, especially away from the intertwining of the powers of judge and State; a resistance to codification that could articulate the somewhat opposing ideals of freedom and equality better than could any state; a proliferation of value systems that could overlap temporally and geographically – imagine a single geographical space with several communities with different legal orders existing simultaneously. While it would be foolish to imagine a sort of utopic future without violence, a new legal order inspired by contemporary social movements would at least replace the masked violence of the State with a new constitutive violence, one that could, if possible, be imagined to be less coercive, destructive, and normalizing.

---

[1] Aeschylus, The Eumenides, p. 240, line 208.

[2] Aeschylus, The Eumenides, p. 240, l. 209-210.

[3] Ibid., p. 240, l. 211-222.

[4] Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” 141.

[5] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative.”

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 9.

[9] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 11.

[10] I differentiate between a weak sense of anarchism, which is the sense of an anarchism that is simply chaos without order and resembles Hobbes’ war of each against all. The sense of anarchism that jurisgenesis lays bare is a weak anarchism. A strong sense of anarchism, however, is a relationship between order and contingency, relations and freedom that is not Hobbesian in the least. What differentiates this strong sense of anarchism from its weak cousin is a set of communal relations. In other words, a community’s internal relations are communistic, but the external relations are anarchistic, without institution, state, or pre-established or transcendent relations.

[11] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 68.

 

AAG paper number 2

So I’ve submitted one paper already to a panel for this spring’s Association of American Geographers meeting in Seattle. I should also be sitting on a panel discussion there on the No Borders theme. A friend of mine at Minnesota suggested I submit a paper for yet another session, so I figured what the hell.

Here’s my abstract (and apparently I just realized I need a paper title…):

The scale versus flat ontology debates have highlighted a disjuncture in our thinking, not only in Geography, but in the social sciences more broadly. What implications does thinking about social phenomena through a flat ontology have? Marston, Jones, and Woodward attempt to answer this question in a series of influential articles. However, their vision of a flat ontology is so often misunderstood because they did not go far enough in linking the particular geographic concepts of scale and space to a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology. This paper pushes the flat ontology debate further toward such an ontological stance by articulating the flat ontology of Geography through immanence, assemblage, and nomadology. In particular, Marston, et. al. are pushed on their notion of immanence to fully articulate the implications for such a conception. Then, to respond to some critics (such as Collinge, Hoefle, and Jonas, to name a few), the notion of assemblage is discussed more concretely as a replacement for hierarchical scale. Finally, the author will discuss why a flat ontology is necessary for understanding the contemporary problems of immigrant and refugee policing and governance because it is the only theoretical framework that can make sense of the material practices of States, individual actors, group actors, and institutions simultaneously.

 

powerpoint and knowledge

So last summer I noted briefly that the US military was beginning to crowdsource its war fighting efforts by importing the logic of wikipedia into writing its manuals.

Now, it appears that the Army is saying some relatively interesting things about the nature of knowledge based on the popularity of the Microsoft Powerpoint technology.

There isn’t much substantial here in terms of strategy or tactics, but there are a few comments in the original New York Times article on the nature of knowledge that I find somewhat interesting, especially as they are being said by officers in the US military, one of the bastions of Taylorist, Fordist thinking.

The idea that knowledge can be cut up, parceled out, and made manageable got a major boost by co-developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in both universities and the military. Now, however, high ranking officers are saying otherwise: one said, “Powerpoint makes us stupid;” another noted, “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in life are not bullet-izable.” (see the full story here)

I just can’t get over the weirdness of a military officer thinking this way, since so much of military culture and the fighting of wars seems to fly in the face of such statements. I mean, we’re still talking about winning wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by controlling territory and holding elections. Then again, I can’t get over the Israeli military’s use of Deleuze and Guattari to go after Palestinians either. It’s hard to argue that we’re in a postmodern world when explicitly anti-Statist and perhaps anarchist theory is used to fight better wars by nation-states.

Anyway, I just had to post the photo that came with the article and my surprise at the clash of theories of knowledge going on in the US military right now.

Politics and Ontology CFP

For the Society for Social and Political Philosopy’s meetings to be held in conjunction with:

SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010.

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers@sspp.us

Theory…on accident

I’ve just finished teaching my first course in which I could say that theory was front and center. Due to administrative snafu, I had incredibly low enrollment in my summer course; four students on the first day, two for the remainder of the quarter. However, because of an obligation to another department, we had to go ahead and run the course anyway. (I’m not complaining, I needed the money anyway.) The most amazing thing happened, though: the students asked for more theory.

Sometimes it’s a crapshoot when you put some things on your syllabus. I teach a 300-level course (at a university in which undergrads take up to 600-level), and I have very little understanding of what is offered in other courses that the students I get have taken. Some of them tell me they’ve never been asked to think (or read) before, most say nothing at all. So I plug along and teach what I think a course called “School and Society” should address with little regard as to what they’ll get or have gotten in other courses.

(Sidebar: I’d like to change this and find out more about what other professors are teaching. The problem is, most of my students seem to have little investment in much of the material whether it is new or repeated. Also, with increasing calls for “accountability” and “standards” in teacher education, I fear that any attempt to bring my course in line with the courses in the Teaching and Learning school – I’m in the Policy and Leadership school – would actually do further damage to my independence and academic freedom.)

Anyway. My two students told me they had been introduced to concepts of inequality, privilege, prejudice and so on. They’d had enough of “schools” and wanted more sophisticated ways to interpret the world around them. Could I help?

I chucked my syllabus and said, yes!

Because of the change in plans, I didn’t want them to have to buy all new books, so I had them read sections of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (the middle third, on “The Means of Correct Training” through “Panopticon”), and the first few chapters of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

Overall the experience was quite good. It was extremely rewarding to help guide the students through some difficult concepts they’d never encountered before. As expected, Foucault’s notion of power in D&P was a bit shocking to them. Deleuze was almost incomprehensible. If it weren’t for DeLanda’s lectures at the European Graduate School youtube channel, I’m not sure it would have been productive for us at all. But, judging from their final papers, engaging with these thinkers proved highly challenging and, it seems, deeply rewarding for them. I can’t speak for them and say they have been changed forever (after all, most people in the field of education in America seem to have little interest in such thinkers anymore), but my desire to teach different material differently has been greatly affected.

The lessons I’ve learned from this summer center around the following:

1) Lecture can be a highly effective tool in a 10-week quarter when you can’t read several books on and about theory.

2) An end-of-course writing assignment has a high value to me as the instructor, in ways very different from the final project I usually give, which seems to have a much higher value to the students than it does to me. I need to find a way to close the gap and have an assignment that is valuable to both myself and the students.

3) Teaching theory provided the most profound revelations in my thinking since the very first time I opened a book by each author. These revelations far surpass what I have been able to make while taking courses so far.

4) Finally, my typical pedagogical practice of giving up about 50% of my curriculum (which I did not do this summer due to time constraints) to the students is one I must continue, but with new guidelines, topics, and an altered format.