Showing papers in "Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies in 2010"

Stuck in the Pipeline: A Critical Review of STEM Workforce Literature

Abstract: In this critical review of the literature, I interrogate the assumptions underlying STEM workforce studies as it pertains to gender, race, class, and citizenship. First, I provide a brief overview of the pipeline model’s history and critiques. Next, I look at the contemporary use of the model in STEM workforce studies, focusing on the ways in which recruitment and retention, scientific work, and identity are represented, measured, and understood. I argue throughout that the pipeline model has a limited view of retention that is based upon socially constructed ideas about what constitutes “valid” scientific and engineering work and who counts as “real” scientists and engineers.

Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Anti-racist Education

Abstract: Over many years as a white person co-facilitating anti-racism courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels and in the workplace for majority white participants, I have come to believe that the Discourse of Individualism is one of the primary barriers preventing well-meaning (and other) white people from understanding racism. Individualism is so deeply held in dominant society that it is virtually immovable without sustained effort. This article challenges the Discourse of Individualism by addressing eight key dynamics of racism that it obscures. I posit that the Discourse of Individualism functions to: deny the significance of race and the advantages of being white; hide the accumulation of wealth over generations; deny social and historical context; prevent a macro analysis of the institutional and structural dimensions of social life; deny collective socialization and the power of dominant culture (media, education, religion, etc.) to shape our perspectives and ideology; function as neo-colorblindness and reproduce the myth of meritocracy; and make collective action difficult. Further, being viewed as an individual is a privilege only available to the dominant group. I explicate each of these discursive effects and argue that while we may be considered individuals in general, white insistence on Individualism in discussions of racism in particular functions to obscure and maintain racism.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

Abstract: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Since the mid-1990s, the focus of my work has shifted discernibly, if not dramatically, from a preoccupation with poststructuralist analyses of popular culture, in which I attempted to deploy contrapuntally critical pedagogy, neo- Marxist critique and cultural analysis, to a revolutionary Marxist humanist perspective. My focus shifted away from the politics of representation and its affiliative liaison with identity production and turned towards the role of finance capital and the social relations of production. Against a utopian theory of entrepreneurial individuality and agency backed by a voluntarism unburdened by history, I came to see the necessity of transforming the very structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by means of a pedagogical praxis guided by the revolutionary knowledges of historical materialism. In so doing, questions of patriarchal and sexist ideology are connected to their material origins—of social labor—that emphasize the relations between the sexes and how the distribution of labor in capitalist economies have generated the alienating conditions in which men and women relate to themselves and to one another (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, I locate my work within what I take to be the fundamental condition of late modernity—a brutal and systematic extraction of surplus value from proletarianized regions of the world (usually decaying in a climate of bourgeois- comprador nationalism) culminating in a condition of substantive inequality and an egregiously unequal division of labor—a condition that is structurally inescapable under the regime of capital. Through the generalization of exchange- values mediated by the machinations of capital accumulation on a global scale, this regressive situation has spawned alienated lifeworlds festering in the swamp of reification and the commodification of everyday life. Since my shift in focus, I have come to view the assertion of many poststructuralists—that Marxism constitutes a totalizing pressuring of meaning into semiotic foreclosure, placing an overlay of determinism on the free interplay of cultural discourses with their free-floating auto-intelligibilities, their aleatory and indeterminable play of the sign, and turning the jazz of signification into a military march of pre-ordained procrustean meanings—as an exclusion of causality from the domain of history by replacing it with difference and play. In effect, by situating the social as a contingent totality, the avant-garde politics of representation articulated by the poststructuralists become part of a larger ensemble of textual reading practices that obscure the production practices of capitalism (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). I also had serious problems with what progressive educators were describing as the struggle for democracy in the public sphere because so much of this discourse involved pedagogically fostering a respect for the values of democratic citizenship and appealing to moral sentiments and critical reasoning.

The Self-Imposed Limits of Library and Information Science: Remarks On the Discipline, On the Profession, On the University, and On the State of "Information" in the U.S. at Large Today

Abstract: The topic of this paper is the self-imposed limits of Library and Information Science discourse and its institutional discipline. In particular, this paper discusses the disciplinary limits that the field places upon itself, its phobia regarding critical theory and interdisciplinary work (outside of computer science), and why public information, such as 'the news,' is not seen as part of our domain of inquiry. It also engages how persons are understood and constructed as 'information seeking' subjects in this field, including LIS students and researchers. Finally are questions of the overarching disciplining of students and researchers toward 'positive' research in the field, a research that is, in part, often founded upon very shaky 'foundational' theoretical models. Arguably, these questions are linked in the construction of an 'informationalized,' rather docile and uninteresting, political subject, both within and outside of information research in the university, both within and outside of information professionalism, and in the public at large, which should all now be educated to be information professionals in a critical manner. All of this is more striking given the amount of verbiage in the past twenty years or so about the presence and the importance of 'the information age.' These questions are specific to Library and Information Science, but they also extend out to information science more generally understood and to questions about the formation of subjectivity in the contemporary university and in U.S. politics. Issues regarding method and critique are central in this paper.

Market Values in Higher Education: A Review of the For-Profit Sector

Abstract: This paper reviews the research literature on for-profit higher education within the context of an increasingly marketized system of higher education in the U.S. The paper describes how market values have influenced important aspects of the system, including federal student aid policy, accountability standards, and the rise of the private for-profit sector. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research that can provide a better understanding of the role that for-profit institutions play in the U.S. system of higher education.

Warming Up Records: Archives, Memory, Power and Index of the Disappeared

Abstract: Author(s): Royer, Alice | Abstract: Policies of censorship and secrecy in federal governance skyrocketed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11; these measures allowed for the detainment of some 700 predominately Arab and South Asian immigrants, though no evidence was released linking them with the terrorist attacks The documents pertaining to the holding of these “special interest” detainees were kept secret for a number of years, and only released by the Department of Justice after significant external pressures from watchdog groups such as the ACLU Two artists, Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, have called into question this exponential increase in the concealment of government documents with a project titled Index of the Disappeared The multifaceted work, which utilizes several media as well as a variety of site-specific methods of engagement, employs radical archival practices in an attempt to “[foreground] the difficult histories of immigrant, ‘Other’ and dissenting communities in the US since 9/11” Through these efforts, the artists question the structures of archives and power in place in this country today Using Ganesh and Ghani’s work as a touchstone, this paper seeks to examine the ways in which archival and recordkeeping practices function in the United States, and the potential long-term consequences increased secrecy might have on our cultural memory Mobilizing archival, social, and critical theories, this paper interrogates The Archive’s relationship to power, and how that authority is translated into a collective memory Building from Ganesh and Ghani’s notion of “warm data” – that which is opposed to the “cold data” of official records – the paper ultimately suggests that an integration of history and art, such as that suggested by Nietzsche, could proliferate in The Archive, therefore both arousing our instincts and preserving them

Becoming Protagonists for Integration: Youth Voices from Segregated Educational Spaces

Abstract: We report the preliminary findings of a community-based participatory action research project grounded in the principles of emancipatory education. Born as a grassroots response to profound racial and socioeconomic segregation between the gifted and regular learning programs, this action research collaboration was centered in a middle school. The project curriculum was built on the premise that youth have the potential to become protagonists of integration. With that in mind, the project provided a space in which to become increasingly conscious about segregation and to imagine and enact new possibilities for integration. Findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with six youth participants reveal various youth efforts toward integration in three distinct layers of consciousness that we refer to as voice: (a) reflective voice as an awareness of self in segregated places and the associated social consequences; (b) dialogic voice as communal recognition of the structural nature of segregation, solidarity in opposition to it, and a common need for healing and reconciliation; and (c) praxis voice as the commitment to transforming segregated educational spaces through a critique of segregation and demand for subdermal diversity. We discuss the implications of these findings for continued transformative action at the local site and lessons for educational pedagogies and actions in general.

Ghetto Fabulous: Inner City Car Culture, the Law, and Authenticity

Abstract: The Falcon Boys Car Club in East Oakland, comprised mostly of African American males and some Latinos, began fixing up late model Ford Falcons in the early '70s as a way to create a new identity for the members. Most of the members were ex-gang members, and had jobs in auto shops. Never considered desirable, old Falcons and Falcon parts were easy to come by, and allowed the members of the subculture to fix them up and exhibit flamboyant style as they would cruise in newly painted and accessorized Falcons for their immediate neighbors and acquaintances. This reclaiming and repurposing of otherwise disregarded detritus of consumer culture interrogates how different classes value and exhibit style, wealth, as well as mechanical expertise, especially in inner-city neighborhoods. Yet the Falcon Boys remain unknown and undocumented in the larger car culture or in most popular histories of the Bay Area. In 2005 Oakland filmmaker Brian Lilla followed around the best-known members of the Falcon Boys, producing a documentary that won awards in festivals. The film, Ghetto Fabulous, is the most authentic and to date the only self-produced document of this subculture, yet is not available to the general public. The distribution of the film is controlled and limited by members of the Club themselves, who wish to carefully regulate who knows about them and how. In the last 20 years, mass media reporting on urban car culture has been focused and co-opted by illegal and dangerous sideshows that have drawn unwanted attention on the original members, and rather than be misunderstood or imitated, the Club not only has resisted further attempts to distribute the film, but to have anyone else add to this official record. Instead access to the group's members, and copies of the footage from the film, is granted only to an inner circle of acquaintances. This limiting and controlled access to the archival record of their history and members authenticates the sparse evidence of their existence and preserves the hometown, face-to-face aspect of their public exhibition of cars and showmanship.