Engineering Social Justice

I’ve been attempting to wrap my head around cloud computing since I first heard the term a while back, and since reading Paul Stamatiou’s take on how to “live the cloud life.” It’s an intriguing article about moving your data online (including movies, music, photos, documents) and using online applications exclusively. The benefits: the ability to access all your data at any terminal that has a fast (we’re talking broadband or fiberoptics here) connection. The one immediate, huge downside is, of course, that the internet can be as fickle as a child when it comes to connections, and the type of broadband you would need for seriously using “the cloud” is by no means cheap (minimum of probably around $1000/year to fully use “the clouds” capabilities, not including any sort of access fee or monthly fee for services).

What particularly bothers me about the way “the cloud” is discussed, besides the enormously unacknowledged class/continental/educational barriers, is that it’s a term of obfuscation. A cloud (the sky kind) is vapid. It’s ethereal. It has no substance. But the underlying architecture of the cloud (the online kind) is very much grounded in material goods. And hell, a lot of it is underground. And because it’s grounded to actual, material goods, it implies a who mess of corporate and governmental entities enmeshed in the very foundations of the architecture.

Just because cloud computing allows users to access services without understanding the underlying architecture supporting that service doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It just means that we’re trying to purposefully simplify a complex, hugely connected system by turning it (more so) into a black box: a simple input/output device.

The danger in simplifying a new type of computing is exemplified by what’s lost in the process. Users, disconnected from the underlying hardware (and hardware limitations) become insulated to their own privilege. I’m betting it will also have an effect of limiting most people’s abilities to see other potentials for the architecture, unless you’re already familiar with the technology. This, like Herbert Marcuse says, limits our capacity to think critically and negatively about the current state of our material world.

Further, the amount of power that is handed over to the folks who run the hardware (and background architecture) is aggregated (aggravated?) by cloud computing. Think of China. How much easier would it be to control a population by having all of their files, all their computing, done among a mysterious cloud?

Further, this begs the question of what the cloud is supposed to accomplish. From most of the articles I’ve read, it appears that the cloud represents a great opportunity for businesses to make a buck. Liberation? Doubtful. Freedom from oppression? Doubtful. Happiness? Hardly.

Or have I missed something here?

A typical tactic I’ve seen deployed against those who bring up issues of race, sex, class, ability, etc. is for the speaker to be accused of “always seeing racism everywhere” or “promoting the feminist/anti-racist/anti-classist agenda” and therefore unable to provide an “objective” critique of something. At first glance this seems to make sense: those having a particular bias may skew results to favor a particular interpretation of the world, or ignore results that do not conform to that view, or be incapable of recognizing counter-results. Consciously or unconsciously, of course.

But we don’t really view all bias as bad. Different schools of thought within the same scientific discipline may very well be capable of producing good ideas and evidence, even if they stand in opposition (or partially in opposition) to one another. Think sociology: conflict theory, symbolic interaction, social construction, network theory. Think engineering, and those who solve problems in a lens of classical physics, nuclear physics, or thermodynamics (or a combination). Each represents a fairly significant bias in interpreting data and generation of hypotheses, but all produce empirically accurate results at least some of the time or else we would not use them.

So when the claim “you see __ism everywhere” is used, is it a declaration that a particular worldview is not adequate in explaining the phenomena under question? If this were true, we should be able to dismiss those particular worldviews as inaccurate (or at least less successfully explanatory) than a competing theory (or none at all). This is tantamount to proclaiming that the ideas and evidence gathered by understanding sexism, racism, etc. are not valid in the face of one that is androcentric, racist, etc. Is this true? I think partially: when I dismiss someone as a racist, it’s because I think that they misinterpret or ignore a large body of incontrovertible evidence saying that racial superiority is not true, and doesn’t conform to my experience in the world.

But does the dismissal matter? I argue it shouldn’t. To not discuss the arguments someone is making, or the evidence they have gathered, is to commit a logical fallacy and succumb to an ad hominem attack on someone’s ethos. I suspect it’s deployed in order to convince someone (or yourself) that what someone is saying can’t possibly be right. It’s a cheap tactic, but effective in closing debate.

Frankly, we should be able to move beyond this stage into the stage where we evaluate the claims people make — all people, feminist, anti-racist or not — by the evidence used to support them, rather than seeking to destroy credibility of the people that proclaim them.

I’m continually amazed that Herbert Marcuse wrote such poignant things so long ago. This if from his essay The New Forms of Control, in his novel book One-Dimensional Man:

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social control over a life of toil and fear - that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.

He wrote this in 1964.

As I sat down yesterday morning and attempted to write out the introduction chapter of my thesis, I found myself frustrated that there are few examples of the type of process-writing or revision work that occurs when writing a thesis. Writing is a process, sure, but discovering that a thesis can change dramatically (and look very different from start to finish) is not really discussed. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did find a two-page guide to writing a scientific thesis, and this hilarious presentation on how to write so poorly that you say nothing.

But those aren’t that useful. I was thinking, oh hey, it would be cool if I had a way to track all the major revisions of this thesis from start to finish, when a thought suddenly came to me: I could probably use Google Docs to track the history of my thesis. Plus, I could let others view it, which might save me the trouble of sending out (and keeping track of!) different versions as I send out parts for review. So, there it is, available for viewing if I invite you (if you want to see it). At some point I may even publish it as a webpage, a nifty feature that Google Docs allows you to do, but I will check with the OSU folks to see if I’d be breaking copyright by doing so.

I think it’ll be a blast to be able to track the changes in my thesis this way. It might make for an interesting post some day.

Has anyone else done something like this? Created a way for folks to passively see some piece of writing that is “in process”? Writing seems so mystified, I wonder if this is helpful or hurtful.

Professor Roberts in the Philosophy Department at OSU hands out a short form to all the Masters students she advises, containing a series of questions that should be answered in a few sentences. Once complete, this should provide a good outline for your thesis. It’s basically a stripped-down version of my thesis, not including what will become the copious amount of supporting materials, of course.

Here are my answers to the major questions in that short form:

1. What is the problem/question?

   Engineers in the United States carry out their work using a variety of background assumptions about ethics that may or may not be stated or made apparent to engineers. These assumptions, which are informed by observable values and beliefs, are part of the intellectual framework that comprises the individual and collective standpoints of engineers. What are the background assumptions, taught explicitly or tacitly, that create and inform the ethical standpoint of engineers? Are there local, contextual forms of engineering ethical decision-making that may lead to more ethical, more effective outcomes?

2. Why is this a problem/question?

   Unstated and unacknowledged background assumptions influencing ethical decision-making are (completely or relatively) unavailable for critical scrutiny and may even mask their own influence, leading to problematic or less-effective ethical decision-making processes.

3. Why does this problem/question matter?

   Engineers, as practitioners of applied science, wield significant power to determine what problems related to the material world are analyzed and the manner they are actually or potentially resolved. Without critical depth in understanding how to act according to coherent ethical principles, engineers may unknowingly support, and even foster, systems of power and privilege under which all people involved are less effective in providing for reasoned, substantial ethical outcomes.

4. What is your proposed solution/answer?

   Using anthropological and sociological studies of engineering (Bruno Latour and others), I intend to demonstrate that engineers reproduce discourse on ethics as externally imposed upon engineering and based on the actions of individual engineers, leaving engineers with a reduced understanding of effective methods to resolve ethical problems. This discourse also portrays the practice of engineering as relatively value-neutral as it engages in solving practical material problems of the world. Helen Longino’s analysis of science includes many points readily applicable the practice of engineering, such as: constitutive and contextual values; her normative theory of scientific knowledge (including norms such as venues, uptake of criticism, public standards, tempered equity, provisionality); and her conclusion that because there are examples of good science that already contains contextual values, we may include other contextual values in our understanding of scientific processes.

   These analyses provide a useful starting point to shift the discussion of engineering ethics from the individually-focused question, “What are the attributes of an ethical engineer?,â€? toward the social position of “What are the attributes of ethical engineering decisions?,â€? allowing space to acknowledge the social values that affect engineering decision-making and providing a location to critically analyze those values. By shifting this discussion toward an engineering that is explicitly local, contextual and social, this solution may provide room for more critical problem seeking and problem resolution, along with an engineering that will actively seek diverse perspectives (as in Longino’s analysis of science), allowing for a broader decision-making base that may provide more effective, more ethical outcomes.

A link from Zen Habits about being a Cyber Minimalist: How to Work (Almost) Completely Online. It’s an interesting approach, and one I might consider doing.

Except for the fact that all my data would then reside on a Google server. Which means I have little actual control over where my data is being sent: it could be intercepted, they could keep backups of whatever I put on there, or (perhaps one of the biggest drawback) is that, given current political climates, the info about my life - what I write, where I’m at, pictures of places I go to - would all be accessible in one neat little place.

So perhaps this should just be a caution for my more radical friends: don’t plan activities using Google, or really anything online. Stick to old-school tactics.

>:-)

I haven’t been scared of the dark, or of people walking around in the dark, since I was a little kid. Back then I slept with the lights on, stayed up as late as possible, and generally avoided situations where it was dark. Nowadays I rarely if ever second-guess walking in the dark. I find it kind of peaceful.

The peace is a privilege, though. It took me years to understand that many womenfolk don’t feel comfortable walking alone at night, because it’s viewed as unsafe and a personal risk. It took me another good bout of time to realize how deeply ingrained this fear is - the fear of rape, assault, mugging seems to be much more present in the thoughts of my woman friends than it is in… well, any man I know.

I’m also a fast walker. If I’m walking a block behind someone, I can usually catch up in three blocks or less. At night, I know this looks suspicious. I’ve walked, quickly, behind someone in Portland and watched as he pulled out a can of mace and kept glancing almost-behind him. MACE. FOR ME. I am about as dangerous as a bad hair day. But nonetheless, men walking at night = dangerous person.

In recognition of this, if I am walking behind a person at night, especially a woman, I cross the street unless it’s in a fairly public, well-traveled street. I don’t want to be that person which causes a woman (or a man) terror. I hate that I feel like I have to do it, but I feel that until we’re at a place where people aren’t afraid of each other at night, and where women aren’t socialized to be terrorized if someone is walking up behind them at night, it’s what I should do.

Part of the Environmental Sociology course I am taking involves online discussion boards where we post our thoughts on a variety of focused subjects. This week, it involves going to peopleandplanet.net to explore one of the issues and report back.

One topic which came up was “green industry,” detailing the fairly rapid shift in multinational/transnational/global company tactics to incorporate sustainable growth and environmental stewardship as part of corporate policy. Another classmate posted an optimistic (note: not hopeful) account of green industry, highlighting the information which Dow Chemical provides about their inclusion of these principles. You can see more on their “Commitments” page.

You can also see the corporate response to Agent Orange, as well. Note that Dow now wholly owns Union Carbide - the transnational company of Union Carbide India, responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster, although they do a fair bit of hand washing on that issue, as well.

I earned a degree in chemical engineering, and Dow Chemical (as well as DuPont and Monsanto) were always looked upon by lots of folks in the program with a sense of ambivalence: they are generally the largest employers of chemical and biological engineers in the world, but they do (and have done) plenty of really controversial things. Pesticides, GMO’s, Agent Orange, explosives, bioweapon development, etc.

So when this classmate talked about Dow Chemical as a model of green industry, I was shocked enough to almost fall out of my chair. My friend Michael Faris had a particularly useful insight into the troubling nature of corporate-sponsored charity, environmentalism and other fun ethical endeavors: “You should be suspicious of any corporation which tries to pass itself off as an individual.”

Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and other transnational corporations are treated legally like an individual, an individual whose goal is to make a profit for shareholders (okay okay, “distribute goods efficiently and increase capital” might be more accurate, but it’s easier to say “guided by the profit mechanism”). So they make sustainable business choices, and saving $1,000,000 dollars in energy costs sounds great, but when it’s going towards (perhaps) facilities which produce rBGH and Roundup I have to be just a tad suspicious that it’s a shell game designed to attract a broader base of capital which has their environmental fears assuaged.

The Barometer has decided to move any and all letters over 400 words “about racism at The Daily Barometer” to an online forum available on their website, which you can also access on their main page. From the forum introduction:

This forum will allow any and all posts to be approved. This forum is mean to encourage the dialogue between students on campus. Letters to the editor that exceed 400 words will be posted to this forum (it may take a few days to get them all typed up). Please e-mail Editor@dailybarometer.com or call 541-737-3191 with questions or concerns.

Two questions popped into my mind. First, does the way the forum is set up really encourage dialogue? And secondly, does this really encourage dialogue among students?

To attempt to answer the first question, I have to try and understand how the forum permits two or more people to engage in a conversation on a subject. While we could attribute posts as submissions of a single individual, there is no system to ensure who is posting what. ALL submissions are anonymous, and unless you include your name and major in the text of your response, there is no way to know who is writing. As I could see from the first post, it is impossible to determine who posted it. A search on facebook and the OSU directory yields nothing.

Of course, whoever controls the forum can probably see the IP addresses of the posters, and could probably tell if there are multiple posts from the same person, but that information is not transparent for forum visitors. I wonder if we can engage in dialogue if the agents of the conversation remain veiled behind anonymity. Anonymity can do lots of good things, especially for folks with less power than others in certain situations, but in the format of the forum it’s difficult for me to believe that this will create an atmosphere likely to foster the sort of thoughtful dialogue about race, racism, images, and the hurt people experience. Instead, anonymity will allow folks to attack those who identify themselves without ever being held accountable for what they’re saying. That’s not dialogue; it’s more akin to chalking a sidewalk.

For the second question, does this forum allow OSU students to dialogue about the topic at hand, I would say no for a few different reasons. The first is that few OSU students read the Barometer’s website, and fewer still will probably click onward to the forum. I know that many people not at OSU (alumni, parents, etc.) check the Barometer website for information about campus. Yet the vast majority of people I know who attend OSU’s campus do not read the online version - the pick up the print copy and read it.

Additionally, given the anonymous situation of the posters, how can we be sure that students are talking and posting to other students? Simply put, the likelihood of students en masse swarming to the Barometer forum to engage in dialogue is about as likely as a snowball’s chance in Hell. I suspect the Barometer editor(s) know this as well.

And finally, the discussion on blackface started in the print version of the paper. This is important. The photo ran in the print version of the Barometer, as did their apology and Renee’s columns. From their“apology”:

To all students, we challenge you to contribute and participate actively, with open minds, to the campus conversation.

…

It is important for a thriving student media that all students participate in the conversation. Please, write a letter to the editor. Stop and visit the Barometer office. Give us a call.

To me, the message in the apology is that they want folks to write them, to continue the conversation between them, and between the pages of the Barometer (where the conversation started). Given that letters to the editor which are longer than 400 words are being relegated to the interblags, and the likelihood of students actually reading those forums, I find this to be a disingenuous, purposely deceitful, and speciously reasoned action. The forums don’t reach the students who saw the photo as from what I can tell the photo isn’t available in the online version of the original “Student section… color selection” article, although it might have been.

It’s troubling that the insular media organization which controls the print version is suddenly switching the medium of the conversation which is critical of them. I use the term “insular” here to refer to my belief that the Baro is not engaging with the folks who have articulated the harm they are feeling in order to discover appropriate actions or responses. They seem to make decisions internally, without transparency, and without consultation of all members of the staff, which includes columnists like Renee and (formerly) me. I’m not even sure if they’ve talked with the students who organized the protest, a belief I attribute to the fact that they listed the Cultural Centers (specifically the BCC) as the organizers of the protest, when a quick phone call to ANY of the Centers, or looking for more information from the planners of the protest (which they the names for) would have clarified.

If this dialog started in the print version with their photo and apology, why should it be moved to a different medium, especially since it appears that several folks wanted their portion of this dialog to appear in the print version (no, not just me)?

I should note that the Barometer has directed folks to their website before, usually to access additional photos, interviews, or more information for articles. I haven’t seen them do that lately, though.

UPDATE: Upon opening Thursday’s issue of the Barometer, there is a column reprinted from the University of Colorado - about Senioritis. The space issue seems even more specious, now.

Michael just posted about this, and included my column with it. Here is my letter to accompany it. Feel free to forward.

BEGIN

11/07/07

I’m no longer writing for the Barometer.

It pangs me to write that statement, not because it means I lose a paycheck (I haven’t been paid for writing in the Barometer since becoming a graduate student a year and a half ago), but rather because it’s a clear sign that I am angry, frustrated and hurt enough to disengage with my beloved school newspaper. Angry enough at the poor decision-making, missteps, and censorship I’ve discovered at the Barometer that I’m making a personal choice to stop writing and supporting an organization that no longer represents the best of OSU - the best of the “Open Minds, Open Doorsâ€? policy that I believe can lead to great things.

If my words surprise you, then you should know that they surprise me as well. Even though I’ve felt that the Barometer continually prints articles, op-eds, letters and advertisements which I don’t agree with, which I may find disturbing, insulting, or harmful, I’ve never felt that disengaging was something I should seriously consider.

After all, I could always write a column about what I read. Frequently I discovered that someone quicker would address it before I could, leading me to believe that the Barometer encouraged debate about their decisions, their writing, and their ‘process of learning.’

But like the quick changing and temperamental weather of fall, I’ve experienced an unbearable astonishment at the policies and written work found in the Barometer as of late. The picture of the student in blackface, with the connotation of ‘intimidating’ that went along with it, was a mistake. The Barometer’s lackluster apology was another, for various reasons. Requiring Renee Roman Nose to edit her column was another.

I was a floating columnist for the Barometer and wrote and submitted a piece about the image they used and my issues with the apology on Monday evening, November 5th. I was told that it would run in that week’s Wednesday’s issue - space requirements and other columns had priority. Come Wednesday, my column (”op-ed” if you want to be technical) was nowhere to be found. I suspected it was being held because of its content. I love the Barometer but I wasn’t going to sugar coat what I felt I needed to say, and there was so much to address I even had trouble keeping it under the 1,000-word limit of a column. Nonetheless I edited, rewrote, and cut enough away to make it just under.

After inquiring about the status of my column on Wednesday afternoon, I received a message from the Barometer forum editors: my column was being held because of space requirements, and a backlog of pieces were to be published ahead of mine. Later that day I received another email from the forum editor:

We regret to inform you that currently The Daily Barometer is not accepting opposition-editorials on the subject of the October black out at Reser stadium. Op-eds are printed at the discretion of the staff of The Daily Barometer and based on space available in the Forum pages. We will continue to print letters to the editor based on the subject matter, that fall into the criteria: under 300 words, and include name, major, class standing or job title, department name and phone number. The Daily Barometer reserves the right to refuse publication of any submission.

Susie Bafico & Ashley Slocki
737-6376

Like I said before, I was astonished. The message is designed to placate me into thinking that it wouldn’t be printed because of length considerations, when the real reason is clear: they feel like the issue is taking up more space than it’s worth. The issue of the image and their response to it is no longer relevant or newsworthy, or at least not deserving of any more column inches.

I respect their right to publish based on space available. I also understand the need to prohibit publishing material that is false, poorly written, advocating violence, etc. But to then reject my already-submitted column because it contained a topic - at length - which they deemed suddenly taboo is inexcusable.

This has never happened to me before. And it’s troubling. When a newspaper refuses to publish material which is critical of itself, and gives reasoning which is (at best) designed to be tricky, it’s a symptom of a larger disease eating away at the publishing standards of any media organization. If they are unwilling to put themselves out there - to learn about the responsibility of media organizations in an intense and painfully public way - then my Barometer has lost the professionalism I need.

I firmly believed that the Barometer, as imperfect as it can be at times, represents the process of learning, revision, and mistake making that I love about higher education. I feel like we all go through this in our lives, all the time. But shutting down conversation is not a part of that process. It’s a sign that the mind is no longer open, and that neither is the door.

If this concerns you, or if you do enjoy the Barometer, please pass this along to whomever you like. The 800-odd words of this letter and the nearly 1,000 of my unprinted column below may not seem like much, but they represent much more to me than I ever imagined or realized.

In solidarity,
ML Sugie

My unprinted column:

Blackface is not nice.

“Oh god,� you might find yourself wondering, “not another f-ing column about blackface. His tagline even says that he’s brown and uppity, this is probably going to be awful!� If this is you, feel free to read the cartoon and move along. I won’t be offended. Promise.

Still with me? Okay.

Firstly: to the best of my knowledge, black is not an official color of OSU, or at least about as official as the color white. The following is a quote from the OSU Alumni Association website: “Until the spring of 1893, navy blue was the official color of Corvallis College. All this changed on May 2 when a faculty committee appointed by President John Bloss voted to replace blue with “orange.” Not long after, “black” was selected by the student body as a background color and the Halloweenesque combination has been used ever since.â€?

The Barometer has even acknowledged this starkly orange fact, in a “Civil War Factoidsâ€? article in November 2002. So our school color seems to be officially orange, with black, white, and a panoply of other colors added at various times to cover up the fact that orange looks good with… well, almost no other color. I’m a drag queen, and I still haven’t found a good way to wear plenty of orange and not look like I have jaundice. For being so important to the history and identity of our university, this information is surprisingly difficult to find on the OSU website. So please, don’t say “black is an official color” until it’s resolved that orange is not our only school color.

Moving right along, we come up against the image of the young man in black face paint. The photo was not published because the Barometer is run by a group of racist KKK members. No one is saying that. Renee Roman Nose never said that, although lots of people seem to think she’s calling the Barometer, OSU, and fans of football racist. Read her columns again – she’s not. She’s pointing out that the image of a person with a black painted face is rich with awful historical meanings and usage.

There were many ways to respond to the furor over running the picture. The Barometer editorial board threw back a question to readers when responding to the idea that they should have known the historical use of blackface: “…couldn’t that be a good thing that the era of offensive mockery is now far enough behind us that it was not present in our active memory?”

It took me a minute to process that, if only because some kind soul had to put smelling salts under my nose to wake me from my stupor. I went into overdrive thinking about how it was that my beloved, award-winning school newspaper could print something so banal as a response.

After a second revelation and round of smelling salts, the answer was clear: the editorial board must really believe what they wrote. They must not have known the historical meaning of blackface, or how that image could be received by people of color.

If you’re wondering why in gay hell I care so much, consider my experience: the “era of offensive mockery” is about as far behind me as my flat butt. Others who identify with marginalized communities probably have similar experiences; butt size may vary.

I guess it’s not surprising that the Barometer took this route. There are few (if any) serious repercussions for not knowing the history of media and ethnicity in this country, even for an award-winning student paper. You can just apologize and claim ignorance, silently allow those who point out such instances to be vilified as uppity one-issue writers, and move on. But the problem when folks in dominant groups remain ignorant of the historical citations they make is that no such privilege exists for the “others,â€? which Jerred Taylor pointed out in his letter to the editor last Friday.

If I don’t know the ins and outs of heterosexual culture, I am liable to be physically assaulted or worse by being queer at the wrong place or wrong time. Similarly, if I don’t understand how whiteness is constructed and operated in this country I am liable to face serious negative social, personal, or physical ramifications. The opposite of the two preceding statements is rarely true.

I know the troubling and deeply embedded historical citation being made when someone dresses up like a ninja, slutty Pocahontas, or some other regurgitated stereotype for Halloween - even if they don’t. I understand that a historical citation of a stereotype such as blackface, however accidental or well-intentioned, calls forward the hurt and pain of communities who lived or continue to live with those stereotypes. If you don’t understand why the image of blackface is so powerful, even the mere appearance of blackface, it’s probably because privilege has let you ignore it without consequence.

W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote about a similar phenomenon. He called it “double consciousness,” or the experience of knowing how the culture you live in understands your ethnicity, and how you understand it. He spoke of the difficulties in dealing with the realities of being an American (read: white) and being a Black American. While I can’t take his concept carte blanche and apply it to the identities in my life, it is similar to the effect of being American (read: heterosexual) and living queerly. I’ve noticed that people who aren’t black, or aren’t queer, regularly find this concept difficult or impossible to understand.

And given the way power is organized in this society, it’s not very nice.

So when the Barometer, or other groups comprised of folks who enjoy significant privilege, accidentally offends a marginalized group and attempts to brazenly excuse their behavior with ignorance, we should be vigilant about critiquing the rhetoric of their reason. Behind it could lie something more banal and terrible than should be acceptable to anyone.

This morning, while searching for any and all articles on women and engineering, lots of good things came up. Not good because I agree with what they’re saying, but good because it makes me think. And get mad. Consider this, from “Woman of Steel Steals The Show in Man’s World” in the Engineering News-Record:

Marstellar, loquacious and vivacious, shatters the pocket-protector engineer stereotype on all fronts, from personality to fashion. When not jogging or on a shop floor, she wears high heels and high styles. On June 11, she charged herself with a challenging task–to be a fly on the wall as one of her auditors put Cives Steel Co.’s Mid-West Division in Wolcott, Ind., through the grind of certification day.

This reminded me of those WWII ads, where women who aren’t bulldykes are just oh-so-rare, like a fucking Unicorn in the Land of the Butch:

The worst part? The article I quoted above is from July 16th… of 2007. That’s right, less than four months ago. Some days…

It is difficult for me to continue reading a paper when, within the first two pages, it frames the divergent history of the US and Europe with the following:

In America there was enough cheap and free land and resources so that newcomers could become rich.

In the margins I have scrawled “What? For who?” in an attempt to disguise my rage at this statement. The way this phrase is used, and the type of historical whitewashing it calls forth, makes it clear what type of audience the author is trying to talk to: those who agree with this statement, or agree enough to read past it and on to the rest of the paper (it also uses the phrase “America” or “American” in place of the United States or US citizen).

This article is part of a Yes/No debate around the topic “Is Sustainable Development Compatible With Human Welfare?” Both the Yes and No “sides” take first-world standards of living and economic systems as those to aspire to, without really critiquing them in a non-banal or trite manner.

I was asked to help facilitate the presentation and discussion of No Dumb Questions, a short video showing the process of three girls aged 6, 9, and 11 as their Uncle Bill becomes Aunt Barbara. I think it’s a fantastic movie, especially for folks who may not be comfortabl/familiar with trans people - it gives folks the space to hear their own questions (and see their own reactions!) played out by these little girls going through this process.

The group setting it up for the conference we were presenting at filled out all the paperwork, asked me and another woman to facilitate, and told us when and where to go. The facilitators had nothing to do with setting it up, We just showed up, introduced ourselves, and started showing the video.

The discussion was good but strange: people seemed to be all over the place with knowledge about transfolks, and it seemed like this was a really new group, who maybe had never talked about gender like this before. I thought it was strange, but fun. Then, within the last two minutes of our time, someone in the back asks us, “Is there a reason why you deliberately didn’t let us know what the movie was about?”

What?

Come to find out, there was no description in the printed programs about what this program was about, just “a film presentation and discussion.” Everyone in the room attended the program because they were intrigued by the title. Talk about a facilitation nightmare.

There are two things we were taught in Team Liberation to avoid at all costs: facilitations where the audience has no idea why or what the facilitation is about, and facilitations that are mandatory for the attendees. And now I see why - the folks were not really prepared for the discussion, and ideas were all over the place. The discussion was good in a lot of ways, but people were disappointed because they came expecting something else.

They gave me a coffee mug full of chocolate kisses because we were program presenters, though, so that was good!

Radiohead is selling their new album, “In Rainbows,” on their website. They found themselves recently out of their six-album contract with EMI Music, so for their seventh studio album they decided to self-produce and offer it on their website in two distinct formats: a “Discbox” version for £40 featuring more goodies than something filled to the brim with goodies, and a “Name Your Own Price” version of just the songs, in DRM-free (read: transferable, play-anywhere) MP3 format. You, the consumer/techno-savvy nethead/Radiohead geek, get to name your price - all the way down to £0, or in other words, free. If this sounds like a revolutionary way to provide music, then you should know that you’re not alone: some places are heralding Radiohead’s “name your own price” strategy as “yet another challenge to the music business,” and/or “the opening salvo in the all-out war for the future of the music industry.”

I was curious upon first hearing about this. After dealing with a decade of formatwars, DRM, “music rights,” and the ubiquity of illegal music downloads, it seems like a novel idea: have people pay what they want to pay for music they want to hear. How democratic. How egalitarian. How revolutionary. People who were going to download the album illegally anyways now have a legit* means to do so, and fans of Radiohead (or fans of providing some sort of compensation to Radiohead) can pay however much they think the album is worth.

But, then, while walking home (and listening to my Ipod), there are a lot of things I had to wonder. What audience is being targeted for this new album? What assumptions could I safely make about audience requirements? Who isn’t included in this, but might want to be?

Well, the short life of requirements I came up with, after paying** for the album:

1. You must have access to a computer
2. You must be able to download the entire 50MB album
3. You need to have a computer capable of playing the music
4. If you want to transport your music, you need to have a way to do that as well (flashdrives, CD, DVD, webspace, pushsites, etc.)
5. If you pay any amount, you must have an acceptable credit card
6. You need to register with the website, which includes email, address, name, and mobile phone #

Upon reflection, that’s a pretty limiting set of traits in order to download an album. Given that there was no national announcement - “Radiohead! New album! You can get it for free!,” I imagine most people who have heard about this offer read up on technoblag or music sites, or are a fan of Radiohead. If you don’t like them (or have never heard of them), why even bother downloading it, right? And given the distribution of computer and web access around the world (usually called the digital divide, although I like to call it the continuation of oppression), the audience is probably Radiohead listeners, music aficionados, and people with significant computer access and know-how. No FAQ about the music, downloading, or listening is provided, so it’s safe to assume that they think you know all the necessary steps to listen to their aural delights.

And then, the clincher: Radiohead wants you to buy their CD. For money. Really. They are offering it in this manner to pay for the CD, and cut out the producer/distributor from the equation. So, if you’re a Radiohead fan, give them money. If you’re not, but you just want to listen to the music, give them money. They want you to. And, from reading that most of the people who have paid for the album paid £4 on average, they’ve made a cool £4.8 million already.

That’s not revolutionary. Hell, it’s not even an “opening salvo” in an us-versus-them, David-and-Goliath music biz war, or “yet another challenge” to the music industry. It’s another way to distribute their songs and earn money from them. A real challenge would be to offer music for free, in any format, without copy protection, and not attach it to a “shopping cart” where you have to offer up a price - a tactic which, I am assuming, is designed to get you to think about how much you’re cheating them if you grab it for free.

* Provided certain requirements are met
** I paid £1.45 for “In Rainbow” - roughly $3.

Here is the paper I presented for the 6th Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, held October 4th-6th 2007. The panel consisted of myself, Michael J. Faris, and Sarah Burghauser. Our panel was titled “Performing and Critiquing Gender in Civic Discourse,” and incorporated Anais Nin, drag queens, and Ann Coulter. Quite the spread of topics, although I felt that they were all tied together fairly well.

Begin paper: Read the rest of this entry »

Following the Farisian tradition of listing vocabulary found in reading that I didn’t know (or wasn’t 100% sure of the definition), here is my list of words from reading Harriet Taylor Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Marie-Olympes de Gouges. As a bonus, I’ve included the outside concepts that were used in the readings (like the Treaty of Cambrai).

amanuensis - someone employed to write from diction or copy manuscript
profundity - being profound or deep
fervid - extreme intensity or fervor
eloquence - forceful or persuasive expressiveness
dereliction - intentional abandonment
turpitude - inherently base, depraved
pecuniary - relating to money
insuperable - incapable of being overcome
abnegation - denial, esp. self-denial
sedulous - diligent, careful perseverance
inculcate - implant, teach by repetition
abjure - abstain, avoid, renounce or reject
obloquy - discredited, condemnation
acharnement - savage fierceness, ferocity
effrontery - shameless boldness, insolence
verbiage - profusion of words with little or obscure content
artifice - clever or cunning tactics
mens divinior - Heaven/Divine mind

Radicals/Chartists in England -

Reformers from the mid-19th century Britain who advocated for political reform, including “universal suffrage” for any male over the age of 21, the abolition of the property requirement to be a member of Parliament, pay for Parliament members, and a yearly Parliament session. While initially losing, most all of their reforms (except for the yearly Parliament session) have been enacted. Harriet Taylor Mill takes objection to the Chartists for believing in universal male suffrage, and accuses those who do not advocate for the enfranchisement of women as merely “… a Chartist oly because he is not a lord: he is one of those levellers who would level only down to themselves.” (p. 96-97 of the essay “Enfranchisement of Women,” from Essays on Sex and Equality, Alice S. Rossi, ed.)

Treaty of Cambrai (also: Paix des Dames, Peace of the Ladies) -

The Treaty of Cambrai ended a war between the French and the Hapsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire. It was negotiated by the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor and the mother of the French King. Thus, the Peace of the Ladies. Mill uses this as a refutation of the notion that women aren’t fit for politics. (p. 102, ibid)

Patient Griselda -

Old tale about a patient wife who, upon marrying her husband, agrees to be obedient to him at all times. He sends away their two children, and then divorces her. She’s obedient the entire time, even offering to help plan the wedding with his new wife, and in the end her reward is being reunited with her children and being by her husbands side once more. Mill uses the story as an example of how women are trained into submission and subjugation, and women who didn’t want enfranchisement were merely acting out their socially conditioned oppression, which operates on the edge of their awareness. (p. 119, ibid)

Engineering codes of ethics are a funny thing. They aren’t really ethics in that they describe broader theories of morality and outlooks on human behavior (beyond whichever profession they belong to), so to call them codes of ethics is probably a misnomer: they’re more like pragmatic rules to help guide engineers towards some (unknown) end.

For instance, take the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Code of Ethics

Members of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers shall uphold and advance the integrity, honor and dignity of the engineering profession by: being honest and impartial and serving with fidelity their employers, their clients, and the public; striving to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering profession; and using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare. To achieve these goals, members shall

1. Hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and protect the environment in performance of their professional duties.
2. Formally advise their employers or clients (and consider further disclosure, if warranted) if they perceive that a consequence of their duties will adversely affect the present or future health or safety of their colleagues or the public.
3. Accept responsibility for their actions, seek and heed critical review of their work and offer objective criticism of the work of others.
4. Issue statements or present information only in an objective and truthful manner.
5. Act in professional matters for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees, avoiding conflicts of interest and never breaching confidentiality.
6. Treat fairly and respectfully all colleagues and co-workers, recognizing their unique contributions and capabilities.
7. Perform professional services only in areas of their competence.
8. Build their professional reputations on the merits of their services.
9. Continue their professional development throughout their careers, and provide opportunities for the professional development of those under their supervision.
10. Never tolerate harassment.
11. Conduct themselves in a fair, honorable and respectful manner.

Talking with Faris today, I stated that engineers are fundamentally always in moral conflict: obligations to employers, employees, the “public and environment,” etc. are conflicting and confusing. Since I haven’t come across any engineering code of ethics that is explicit about moral principles (as in, general moral theories concerning why we should be concerned with benefiting the public, the environment, etc.), it is difficult to see a way out of this.

Perhaps a topic for my thesis?

Yesterday in Creative Democracy, Professor Orosco asked us two questions:

1) Is democracy a good system of government? Why or why not?
2) “The US has squandered its democratic potential.” Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree? Why?

My written responses, with some commentary:

1)

No, not inherently. Democracy is not rooted in justice, but simply “rule of the people.” Which means, there is nothing about democracy that prevents it from becoming oppressive, unjust or harmful to a great many people. It does not command us to be better people - just to express our collective will somehow.

I was surprised that, from what I could tell, I was the only one who didn’t feel as though democracy was a good form of government. I should probably clarify and say that I was the only one who felt that there was nothing inherently good about democracy in an of itself. Although, after listening to everyone else’s responses (which placed a huge emphasis on conditionally good of forms of democracy - deliberative, communicative, “not US democracy,” etc), it seems more people might have understood this than I initially thought. I concede that democracy may present the easiest and most plentiful means to enact justice, but it requires a will to commit justice that is not the root of democracy. And, like many others in the class, it may be the best form of government we’ve discovered, but it certainly isn’t “good” - there’s something about governments facilitating the consumption of goods for 7 billion people that strikes me as never being good.

2)

Strongly agree. There have been many instances where justice could have been enacted but wasn’t - the era of Reconstruction, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the Cold War, etc. The potentials for justice may be more apparent and easy to grasp in a democracy, but we have chosen not to grasp them time and time again.

And then Orosco called me and Mikey pessimists. To which we replied, we’re not pessimists… we’re hopeful. Critically hopeful.

From “Theories, Problems and Suggestions,” The Music of Our Lives, by Kathleen Marie Higgins:

Generalizing to the broader spectrum of musical experience, Feld insists that such nontechnical metaphorical vocabularies are not indications of verbal incompetence. Instead, they point to shared features of musical experience that we all, in practice, recognize:

“When people say “it’s different from…”, “it’s kind of…”, “it sort of reminds me of…”, and things of this sort, they are creating discourse organizations that has locational, categorical, and associational features. When they say, “Well, if I had to name it… I mean… on some level,… for me at least,… you know, I really can’t say but do you know what I mean?…” they are not just tongue-tied, inarticulate, or unable to speak. They are caught in a moment of interpretive time, trying to force awareness to words. They are telling us how much they assume that we understand exactly what they are experiencing. In fact, we do understand exactly what they are experiencing. We take it as socially typical that people can talk this way about music, stringing together expressives, and we assume that this confirms what we are all supposed to know: that at some level, one just cannot say with words what music says without them.

Like, for instance, trying to describe coffee to someone who has never tasted it. Bitter? Earthy? Like dirt? It makes sense only in a (shared or unshared) context.

Throughout the nineteenth century, certain policies of the United States government did have an impact on the nation’s literature and other forms of art. Yet throughout this period, the indirect effects of policies designed primarily for other purposes were often more important for the arts world than were government actions that were consciously designed for their impact on the arts.

- Government and the Arts: An Overview, from Milton C. Cummings Jr.

He identifies three indirect effects of government policies on the arts, two from the 19th-century and one from the early 20th:

1. Copyright law. Actually hurt American literature writers, since only U.S. authors could copyright their works, since the work of well-established non-U.S. authors could be printed royalty-free.
2. Second-class postal rate. Allowed the rapid expansion of U.S. magazines, leading to (among other things) the popularization of the short story in the latter 19th-century.
3. Federal Income Tax Law of 1916, Federal Inheritance Tax in 1918, and the inclusion of contributions to arts organizations as tax-deductible. When federal tax rates went up, more incentive was provided for private citizens to donate to arts organizations.

I wonder how current federal infrastructure policies are inadvertently contributing to a shift in the art world - the ubiquity of the internet and communication services (think YouTube, fanfiction sites, etc.) comes to mind immediately, since the internet was originally a science and military organization with fairly laissez faire operating rules, although I’m sure more examples can be found. Any other examples of the spillover-effect accidentally contributing to the arts recently?