Penguins

It was really distressing to read in this morning's paper about 550 penguins dying of apparent starvation off the coast of Brazil. As my younger son said to me - people have to stop eating fish - which means I have to stop eating fish, as he does not eat fish... Fish is the only animal I eat, but I guess I will have to rethink this - despite all the health benefits in seafood.

Qualifying Exam Proposal

I think that I am getting stupider rather than more articulate. I really struggled to put my thoughts together in a coherent way in my proposal for my qualifying exam paper. I looked at what I wrote a year ago or a year and a half ago, and it sounds so much better than what I could come up with now. Now that is discouraging!

As a child whose parents had Alzheimer's it makes me wonder (read "worry") whether this is the first stages of that. I am too young to have my brain not work well!

Trying to move forward

Ok, I am supposed to be moving forward with writing for my qualifying exam, but I have to admit that I am allowing myself to do everything but focus on what I need to do with this!

There are so many interesting things to do besides this! Not that I don't find my topic interesting - I do - otherwise it wouldn't be my topic. But I think one of the downsides to writing multiple papers on the subject is that I feel like I am a little too familiar with what I know and I need a new take or a new lens to jump start my process.

It's not like I have a ton of time to get refocused.

Presentations and Academia

So I have a presentation to do Friday that I had planned to work on today - but because I am home with a sick child, I am now stuck because I have worked on everything I can without the resources in my office. Real world calling...

Presentations in academia are interesting - it's the only time when people will want to sit through boring powerpoint slides of numbers and statistics trying to make deep meaning of them. If you were to do these kinds of presentations in industry or for policy makers or to get a point across to the general public - all the experts on presentations would tell you - DON'T DO IT!! But academia loves it - I suspect academics are really just masochistic.

Bourdieu - why Americans are so suspicious?

I think I have to wonder why Bourdieu has never caught on in America. After call, Foucault, who was a contemporary, is very present in the dialogue in American academia. If I go to my favorite bookstores - all of them - new and used - I can find a multitude of books by Foucault, but NONE - NOT A ONE - by Bourdieu.

I think that Bourdieu is much more enlightening than Foucault. So I wonder, what is up with this?

Don't get me wrong - I value Foucault's writings as well, but I am much more drawn to Bourdieu, and Bourdieu fits what I am trying to explain much better. So why does the American academy ignore him?

Bourdieu - my frustrations

So I am trying hard to work on a couple projects, and was looking to reconnect with resources I had found on the internet 18 months ago regarding Bourdieu. Guess what - they aren't there any more! While I know from people in other countries that many people are still interested in what he had to say, the reality is that if you cannot find anything current using the most commonly used search engine, his work is being relegated to obscurity.

And HE WAS BRILLIANT!

Bourdieu - Obituary from the Nation

Eight years after his death, Bourdieu is difficult to find on American internet sites and search engines. The man who held great promise to increase understanding and societal change, has been buried by the trivia about mundane people who are famous only for being famous and the tendency of the media to prevent understanding and social change.

Here is his obituary from the Nation magazine:

Subject to Debate

Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-2002

The death on January 23 of the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came as the American chattering classes were busy checking the math in Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline--an unintentional parody of sociology in which Posner presents a top-100 list ranking writers and professors according to the number of times they turned up on television or Internet searches. Bourdieu, whose heaviest passages crackled with sardonic wit, would have had a wonderful time exploring this farcical project, which takes for granted that Henry Kissinger (No. 1), Sidney Blumenthal (No.7) and Ann Coulter (No. 74) are in the Rolodex because they are leading the life of the mind--why not include Dr. Ruth or, as one wag suggested, Osama bin Laden? In tacitly conceding the fungibility of celebrity even while decrying it, Posner confirms Bourdieu's gloomy predictions about the direction modernity is swiftly taking us: away from scholarship and high culture as sources of social prestige and toward journalism and entertainment.

Bourdieu himself argued that scholars and writers could and should bring their specialized knowledge to bear responsibly and seriously on social and political issues, something he suspected couldn't be done on a talk show. His involvement during the 1990s in campaigns for railway workers, undocumented immigrants and the unemployed, and most recently against neoliberalism and globalization, was the natural outgrowth of a lifetime of research into economic, social and cultural class domination among peoples as disparate as Algerian peasants and French professors, and as expressed in everything from amateur photography to posture. It's hard to think of a comparable figure on the American left. Noam Chomsky's academic work has no connection with his political activities, and it's been decades since his byline appeared in The New York Review of Books or the New York Times. One friend found himself reaching all the way back to C. Wright Mills.

Bourdieu, who loved intellectual combat, called himself "to the left of the left"--that is, to the left of the ossified French left-wing parties and also to the left of the academic postmodernists aka antifoundationalists, about whose indifference to empirical work he was scathing. Reading him could be a disturbing experience, because the explanatory sweep of his key concept of habitus--the formation and expression of self around an internalized and usually accurate sense of social destiny--tends to make ameliorative projects seem rather silly. Sociology, he wrote, "discovers necessity, social constraints, where we would like to see choice and free will. The habitus is that unchosen principle of so many choices that drives our humanists to such despair." Take, for example, his attack on the notion that making high culture readily available--in free museums and local performances--is all that is necessary to bring it to the masses. (In today's America, this fond hope marks you as a raving Bolshevik, but in France it was the pet conviction of de Gaulle's minister of culture, André Malraux.) In fact, as Bourdieu painstakingly demonstrated in Distinction, his monumental study of the way class shapes cultural preferences or "taste," there is nothing automatic or natural about the ability to "appreciate"--curious word--a Rothko or even a Van Gogh: You have to know a lot about painting, you have to feel comfortable in museums and you have to have what Bourdieu saw as the educated bourgeois orientation, which rests on leisure, money and unselfconscious social privilege and expresses itself as the enjoyment of the speculative, the distanced, the nonuseful. Typically, though, Bourdieu used this discouraging insight to call for more, not less, effort to make culture genuinely accessible to all: Schools could help give working-class kids the cultural capital--another key Bourdieusian concept--that middle-class kids get from their families. One could extend that insight to the American context and argue that depriving working-class kids of the "frills"--art, music, trips--in the name of "the basics" is not just stingy or philistine, it's a way of maintaining class privilege.

Although Bourdieu has been criticized as too deterministic--a few years ago The New Yorker characterized his views, absurdly, as leading "inexorably to Leninism"--he retained, in the face of a great deal of contrary evidence, including much gathered by himself, a faith in people's capacities for transformation. He spent much of his life studying the part played by the French education system in reifying class and gender divisions and in selecting and shaping the academic, technocratic and political elite--the "state nobility"--that runs France, but he believed in education; he railed against the popularization and vulgarization of difficult ideas, but he believed in popular movements and took part in several. In one of his last books, Masculine Domination, he comes close to arguing that male chauvinism is a cultural universal that structures all society and all thought; he is that rare man who chastises feminists for not going far enough--but the book closes with a paean to love.

Bourdieu's twenty-five books and countless articles represent probably the most brilliant and fruitful renovation and application of Marxian concepts in our era. Nonetheless, he is less influential on the American academic left than the (to my mind, not to mention his!) obscurantist and, at bottom, conservative French deconstructionists and antifoundationalists. Perhaps it is not irrelevant that Bourdieu made academia and intellectuals a major subject of withering critique: You can't read him and believe, for example, that professors (or "public intellectuals," or writers, or artists) stand outside the class system in some sort of unmediated relation to society and truth. The ground most difficult to see is always the patch one is standing on, and the position of the intellectuals, the class that thinks it is free-floating, is the most mystified of all. It was not the least of Bourdieu's achievements that he offered his colleagues the means of self-awareness, and it's not surprising either that many decline the offer. His odd and original metaphor of the task of sociology holds both a message and a warning: "Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers."

Katha Pollitt

Mother's Day

Well, I spent Mother's Day with a migraine headache, meaning that I did not get to spend time with my mother, nor any "quality time" with my kids. Not exactly a good way to spend Mother's Day - or really any day for that matter.

The only good thing about migraines (if that is possible) is that when I recover it's like I am totally slowed down - I can't do anything quickly, so everything is slow and reflective. Nothing like the average day.

The Demise of Blogging?

So I thought it was interesting that teens and young adults are less interested in blogging than they were in the past. Obviously the people who were blogging in the last survey are older now and are probably still blogging - accounting for more older people blogging - but what does it say about technology that other young people aren't moving in to take their places?

Have they found other ways to communicate those thoughts & make those connections? Or are they not wanting to communicate & connect in the same way? Is technology changing so rapidly that things are becoming passe before they even fully develop?

Moving forward?

Well, my abstract got rejected by CSWE (Council on Social Work Education) for their annual conference. The problem is that I still don't have any idea really what it is they want to see - what was I missing in this submission & what should I do differently next time. I am sure there is a method to the process, but as someone outside the process, I can't tell what it is.

Of course it's really disappointing! So I think, well, I guess I will have a little pity party for myself and then hopefully get over it. Just because it is my first submission, does not mean it will be my last. The reality is that unless I give up and never try again, I will have other rejections.

I can think of it like when I was going to be a writer and I got a rejection letter from the New Yorker. Although perhaps that isn't a good parallel, since obviously I gave that dream up!

Bipolar Disorder

So, the DSM-V is proposing an alternative diagnosis (to bipolar) for children - "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" - because many people are concerned that bipolar disorder is being over-diagnosed in children. And there is the obvious backlash that this proposal has created: "people are minimizing and denying a real problem and that this will keep children from getting the treatment they need." The DSM-V is still in process so things could change again, but this is where we are.

I have to admit that I am on the side of the fence that says "hmm, I think we ARE over-diagnosing bipolar in children."

Many layers to my thoughts. I think that I have seen teens diagnosed as bipolar who were just intense teens. Adolescence in America is prone to intensity and moodiness - we as a culture have emphasized those aspects. People feel an intensity in adolescence that for most will not continue past their twenties. There are other teens who I have seen diagnosed as bipolar who were reacting to chaotic (sometimes abusive) environments. They were irritable and violent, but bipolar? Perhaps - but if so it will take time to tease out. There are other adolescents where alcohol and drugs are playing a role in their behavior and diagnosis.

I am not denying bipolar disease. But I also think it is a disease of our culture. As such I think it is difficult to have enough of a perspective to see it accurately.

Hoarding part 3

So my personal goal for the summer is to sort out my personal junk room.

Hoarding part 2

So I started by thinking about why do I watch this? Why do enough people watch this for it to be a SERIES of television shows? Because that means that there is an audience of people to watch it, and there are enough people whose lives are like this and who are willing to be on television to film a bunch of episodes, and both of those are significant.

For watchers, there are multiple aspects. I think that as a viewer I feel a sense of "oh at least I'm not that bad" - I only have one junk room not a house of junk. I think there is the fascination similar to driving past a car wreck on the highway, you drive past slowly staring as if to learn some lesson from witnessing it. I think there is also an element of hope - they tend to wrap it all up in an hour or half an hour so you can walk away thinking about happy endings. I suspect there are also people who like to watch it and laugh at the people on the show (because I know that some people just enjoy being mean). Why is there reality TV in general?!

For the people on the show, I suspect that there is a sense of desperation. And that they are compensated in some way (whether that is in services that help them to deal with the problem or whether they are paid cash outright, I don't know). Hmm, for a few it maybe an attention getting mechanism. Some may be pushed into it by other people. I think there is also a sense of hope - "maybe these people can help me finally get it together." And I think that Oprah and Phil Donahue (remember him) made it ok to bare it all on TV.

Hoarding

Watching hoarders on TV (I think this show is Buried Alive) and thinking about the dynamics of people who hoard & people who watch it on TV.

Watching how they don't take care of their homes because they are so messy that it is overwhelming so they go from messy to trashed - they have piles of junk that become trash because food and dirt and literal trash accumulate on them. And that makes me think about neighborhoods and that process of deterioration. When I drive through neighborhoods that are in transition from marginal to declining, you can see the litter starting to build up - no one cares - they are trashed. The neighborhoods exude hopelessness.While I think most of the dynamics are different, there is a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness that is parallel in the two situations (hoarding and poverty). People see no way out.

So you think you're in charge of your medical care?

Well, I can't believe the delusion that many Americans have regarding decision-making about their medical care. The reality is that decisions are made by insurance companies and the hospitals/medical centers. Here's a lovely example:

I went for my annual exam with my ob/gyn. (As an aside, I will mention that I didn't go last year because I was too busy taking care of my mother, kids, going to school & working, to take care of myself by going for an annual exam).

Anyway - we had a conversation about my health & concerns that hit on many areas. I found it helpful, blah, blah, blah. I did my copay at the appointment, as I always try to do. I happen to have pretty good insurance, which means that I can afford preventive appointments like this one.

Lo and behold I get a bill/summary of charges & payments a couple weeks later and I was being charged for TWO appointments. So I call the insurance company, who said, no it wasn't us that charged you twice - that would have been a decision by your doctor. Of course at no point did my ob/gyn say that she was charging me for 2 appointments, so I was annoyed, and called the doctor's office all in a huff. Well, her nurse was as confused as I was and said that I should not have been charged for 2 appointments.

What became clear as we talked was that this was a decision made by a coder at the medical facility where the doctor is employed. So, some non-medically trained data person at the Cleveland Clinic reads over the notes about my medical appointment (which I find offensive anyway - how many secretaries, data entry people, billing clerks, etc are privy to the intimate details of my life??) and decides that my ob/gyn actually saw me about 2 separate concerns, so I should be billed for 2 appointments. It's not about time, it's about the number of concerns addressed, whether it takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes. (Although I know that some circumstances, it is about the amount of time your doctor takes with you).

So, don't tell me that you are upset that the government might make decisions about your medical care (which isn't the case anyway) - the reality is that you aren't making the decisions anyway!

Fresh Beginnings

I am restarting my blog & will try to be a more faithful blogger - hence new beginnings!

I am almost done with my required doctoral coursework - it's an interesting feeling - excited, apprehensive, uncertain. I think that as one gets older one has fewer of these opportunities/experiences unless you seek them out. Life gets more routine - get up, take the kids to school, go to work, do the job tasks, come home, make dinner, cleanup, supervise homework, get the kids to bed, watch tv, go to bed & start all over again. You know what to expect.

But here I am, and it's like being seventeen again - the world is potentially my oyster. I feel like I can do great things in the great unknown. All possibly an illusion, but a nice illusion, nonetheless. Yes, there is a lot more work before I actually get my doctorate - just a little thing like a dissertation - but this is the end of phase one. So a big accomplishment & a new beginning.

It doesn't hurt that the sun is shining & it's a beautiful spring day.

Visioning

So I was invited to take part in the visioning process for Pen's elementary school - how do we want the school to be "branded." I think that my mix of open-mindedness and skepticism means that I am happy to engage and support, yet a part of me questions things at a multitude of levels.

For instance, why "branding" -- the creep of consumer and marketing language into an area like education seems to be inherently problematic. Education should be a counter balance to consumer culture and marketing. Yet here it has been co-opted by it. (And no, I do not see this as an instance of education co-opting the concepts of consumer culture - clearly the consumer culture has the upper hand and power).

Or the closing video which reviewed the importance of technology in our world, going on about the internet, blogging, podcasts, and other marvels of technology. Obviously I have no objection to technology, as I sit here blogging on my laptop, but it confuses a medium for achieving one's ends with an end-product. And throwing out-dated facts regarding technology use at me makes me crabby and argumentative. There is a large body of knowledge arguing against teaching elementary students technology! Better to teach them basics of reading, writing and mathematics; and HOW to learn and explore; and that learning is FUN -- all of which needs to be done in the context of relationships.

So, stay tuned for my next post, as I organize my thoughts regarding what wonderful insightful response I can make when the opportunity presents itself!