Where The Blog Has No Name

As you may know, Arizona has banned the teaching of ethnic studies, specifically targeting Mexican-American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District. Eleven TUSD teachers, administrators and students are suing the state to bring back Ethnic Studies (www.saveethnicstudies.org<http://www.saveethnicstudies.org/>).

To fight blatant discrimination and the spread of this civil/human rights violation to other states, join us for a fundraiser ($10, but hope you can donate more!) for:

SAVE ETHNIC STUDIES

Saturday, February 25, 2012

2:00 p.m.

Lincoln High School

4777 Imperial Avenue

San Diego, 92113

Here’s the link to the trailer for Precious Knowledge: http://action.nclr.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4802

Here’s the link to the description of the ethnic studies program: http://www.tusd.k12.az.us/contents/depart/mexicanam/index.asp

Please encourage everyone to register at Eventbrite. com for SAVE ETHNIC STUDIES Fundraiser at Lincoln High School.

Add Your Name to the Save Ethnic Studies Petition:

The Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District is facing the real threat of being shut down. The program successfully keeps otherwise-disengaged students motivated to learn and go on to college by using curriculum with which they culturally identify to teach critical thinking skills and empower the students to be strong leaders in their communities.

Despite all of the benefits of the program, in May 2010 Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill (HB 2281) into law that aimed to ban ethnic studies in Arizona schools. This law went into effect at the beginning of 2011 and prohibits schools from offering classes that are designed for students of a certain ethnic group. As a result, the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, which has contributed to a 97% decrease in the dropout rate, is now facing a serious threat to its existence, while African American, Native American, and Asian American Studies programs are all allowed to continue.

An independent audit commissioned by the state found the program to be fully in compliance with Arizona’s ban, and recommended that the program be maintained as part of the core curriculum for high schools. Despite these findings, State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal has threatened to withhold $15 million of state funding from the school district.

Join the 11 teachers and administrators from the Mexican American Studies program and two of its students to defend the program. Sign the Save Ethnic Studies petition below to show your support and we’ll keep you updated on the progress of the lawsuit against the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education.

Learn more! Watch the trailer of Precious Knowledge, which documents the program and the battle to save it. The full program will be shown at the fundraiser.

We the undersigned support the effort to save ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District. The Mexican American Studies program poses no threat to the state of Arizona or its education system. On the contrary, it provides a proven-effective method to educate students and motivate them to stay in school and become productive leaders in their community.

We stand in opposition to State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal’s attempt to withhold $15 million of state funding from the school district. This action is completely unwarranted given the results of the independent audit commissioned by the state, which found the program to be fully in compliance with Arizona’s ethnic studies ban. In fact, the audit recommended that the program be maintained as part of the core curriculum for high schools in the district.

The Mexican American Studies program should be applauded and replicated for its success, not destroyed by a pointless ban.

Here’s an interesting interview by Anderson Cooper interviewing Tom Horne and the great sociologist Michael Dyson

At North Carolina State University (NCSU), shortly after Dr. Terri Ginsberg made supportive political comments at a screening of a Palestinian film in 2007, she went from being the favored candidate for a tenure-track position to being denied even an interview.  Her efforts at redress were summarily rejected by NCSU and two courts.  A jury should be permitted to decide whether NCSU’s real reason for firing Dr. Ginsberg was its hostility to her political views, but this legal right has been denied.  We urge the Supreme Court of North Carolina to review Dr. Ginsberg’s case and to reverse the lower courts’ decisions to dismiss it.  On this basis, faculty at NCSU and elsewhere may finally exercise their legal right to academic speech on the topic of Palestine/Israel and, as such, to their full human rights as scholars, teachers, and intellectuals in the academic community.

To support this request to the NC Supreme Court, we invite academic faculty and students worldwide to sign our Open Letter as an e-petition at this URL:

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/open-letter-to-nc-supreme-court-ginsberg-vs-ncsu.html

We expect to submit the Open Letter with all signatures received by February 7, though signatures received later would still be helpful.

You are also encouraged to send your own letter to:

Supreme Court of North Carolina

Clerk’s Office

P.O. Box 2170

Raleigh, NC 27602-2170  USA

British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) http://www.bricup.org.uk/

U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) http://www.usacbi.org

Center for Constitutional Rights http://ccrjustice.org

Jewish Voice for Peace-Westchester http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jewish-Voice-for-Peace-Westchester-Chapter/201574026528540?v=info

WESPAC Foundation http://wespac.org/

Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) http://www.codz.org

The Department of Education, University of Athens, Greece is hosting the

2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRITICAL EDUCATION

10-14 July 2012, Athens, Greece

Organized by the journals:

 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL EDUCATION POLICY STUDIES (UK)

CULTURAL LOGIC (USA/CANADA)

KRITIKI (GREECE)

RADICAL NOTES (INDIA)

ICCE Conference Website: http://icce-2012.weebly.com/index.html

Some of last year’s papers (from the 2011 conference) will go into a special edition of JCEPS, the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, coming out in around April 2012. In addition, all the papers that were presented at the 2011 conference and were submitted in written form will be published as conference proceedings in the next couple of months.The website is in process of improvement, e.g. re methods of payment, also final keynote speakers not yet confirmed.. we are asking Dennis Beach, Dave Hill, Marnie Holborow, and Alex Callinicos. As well as leading Greek Marxists/critical educators. So, hope to see you at this conference in Athens in July! Last year’s was great- politically, intellectually, socially!

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE (subject to confirmation)

Kostas Skordoulis (University of Athens, Greece)

Dave Hill (Universities of Middlesex, United Kingdom; Limerick, Ireland; Athens, Greece)

Peter McLaren (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Grant Banfield (University of South Australia, Australia)

Dennis Beach (University of Göteburg, Sweden)

Ramin Farahmandpur (Portland State University, Oregon, USA)

Marnie Holborrow (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Alpesh Maisuria (Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom)

Sharzad Mojab (University of Toronto, Canada)

Ravi Kumar (South Asian University, New Delhi, India)

Deborah Kelsh (College of St. Rose, Albany, NY, USA)

Curry Malott (West Chester University, Pennsylvania, USA)

Gregory Martin (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)

Micheal O’Flynn (University of Limerick, Ireland)

Perikles Pavlidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

Brad Porfilio (Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois, USA)

Martin Power (University of Limerick, Ireland)

Helena Sheehan (University College Dublin, Ireland

Juha Suoranta (University of Tampere, Finland)

Spyros Themelis (Middlesex University, United Kingdom)

Salim Vally (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

AHA Convention (Chicago, January 5-8)

Historians Against the War will have a literature table (shared with the Radical History Review) from 11:30 to 2:30 on Friday on Level 2 of the Sheraton Chicago (the headquarters hotel).  The table will be in the common area of Level 2, called the LB Promenade.

Also on Friday, a special session on the jobs crisis, chaired by the AHA president and with Jesse Lemisch as one of the speakers, has been called for 1:00 to 2:30 in Chicago Ballroom VI, also in the Sheraton Chicago.

Among other sessions of interest is one on “Cold War Policing and the American Empire,” chaired by Alfred McCoy, 2:30 – 4:30 Friday in Chicago Ballroom A of the Chicago Marriott Downtown.  The on-line program for the convention is at http://aha.confex.com/aha/2012/webprogram/start.html.

Links to Recent Articles of Interest

“Iran and Historical Forgetting”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/03/iran-and-historical-forgetting

By John Grant, CounterPunch.org, posted January 3

“Debacle: How Two Wars in the Greater Middle East Revealed the Weakness of the Global Superpower”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175484

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, posted January 3

“Will His New Sanctions on Iran Cost Obama the Presidency?”

http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/will-his-new-sanctions-on-iran-cost-obama-the-presidency.html

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog, posted January 3

The author teaches history at the University of Michigan

“Iraq: Remembering Those Responsible”

http://www.truth-out.org/iraq-remember-those-responsible/1325433300

By Stephen Zunes, TruthOut.org, posted January 1

“The United States as a Global Power: New World Disorder”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/28/us-global-power-new-world-disorder

Editorial in The Guardian, posted December 29

“Korea and the US Policy of Perpetual War”

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/harry-targ-korea-and-us-policy-of.html

By Harry Targ, The Rag Blog Digest, posted December 29

“Q&A: Have Human Rights Been Left Behind in Egypt? On Condition of Anonymity, Representatives of Human Rights Organisations Talk about the Current Situation in Egypt”

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/20111213115244470203.html

By Mark LeVine, Aljazeers, posted December 29

The author teaches history at the University of California, Irvine

“Prospects for Peace on Earth”

http://warisacrime.org/content/prospects-peace-earth

By David Swanson, War Is a Crime.org, posted December 22

“David Montgomery, Grand Master Workman”

http://www.thenation.com/article/165235/david-montgomery-grand-master-workman?rel=emailNation

By Dana Frank, The Nation, posted December 19

The author teaches history at the University of California, Santa Cruz

“Iraq: No Comfort in Being Right”

http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2011/12/12/iraq-no-comfort-in-being-right/

By Kelly B. Vlahos, antiwar.com, posted December 12

Retrospective analysis of the Iraq occupation

Cultural Logic

2010
SPECIAL ISSUE:
CULTURE AND CRISIS

EDITED BY JOSEPH G. RAMSEY

 Introduction

Joseph G. Ramsey
“Culture and Crisis”

The Current Conjucture:
Capitalist Crises and the Crisis of the Left

Michael Joseph Roberto, Gregory Meyerson, Jamey Essex, and Jeff Noonan
“Moment of Transition:
Structural Crisis and the Case for a Democratic Socialist Party”

Jeffrey Perry
“The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from
Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen
on the Centrality of the Fight against White Supremacy”

Julie P. Torrant
“Class and the New Family in the Wake of the Housing Collapse”

Dan DiMaggio
“Road Maps, Dead Ends, and the Search for Fresh Ground:
How Can We Build the Socialist Movement in the 21st Century?”

Crisis, Imagination, and the Return to Marx’s Capital

Max Haiven
“The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of the Imagination”

Vesa Oittinen and Andre Maidansky
“A Marx for the Left Today:
Interview with Marcello Musto”

Amedeo Policante
“Vampires of Capital:
Gothic Reflections between Horror and Hope”

Robert T. Tally Jr.
“Meta-Capital:
Culture and Financial Derivatives”

Rethinking Crises in
Twntieth-Century Socialism and Communism

Joseph Ball
“The Need for Planning:
The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union
in the 1950s and the Decline of the Soviet Economy”

Grover Furr
“Stephen Cohen’s Biography of Bukharin:
A Study in the Falsehood of Khrushchev-Era ‘Revelations’”

Remembering the Depression Era:
Recovering Left Culture in a Time of Crisis

Benjamin Balthaser
“Re-Staging the Great Depression:
Genre as Social Memory in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler“

Barbara Foley
Forward to Wrestling with the Left:
The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Joseph G. Ramsey
“Invisible Tragedies, Invisible Possibilities:
Or, Re-Reading What’s Left of a Great American
(Anti-Communist) Novel”
(Review of Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left)

Tristan Sipley
“Proletarian Pastoral Reconsidered:
Reading Mike Gold in an Age of Ecological Crisis”

Chris Vials
“Fight Against War and Fascism and
the Origins of Antifascism in US Culture”

Theoretical Practice in a Time of Crisis:
Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht

Rich Daniels
“Non-Pious Discourse:
Adorno, Ethics, and the Politics of Suffering”

Kevin Floyd
“The Importance of Being Childish:
Queer Utopians and Historical Contradiction”

Carl Grey Martin
Review of
Walter Benjamin and Bertold Brecht –
The Story of a Friendship

Reading Crisis as Ruling-Class Strategy

Kanishka Chowdhury
“Deflecting Crisis:
Critiquing Capitalism’s Emancipation Narrative”

Kim Emery
“‘Crisis Management’ in Higher Education:
RCM and the Politics of Crisis at the University of Florida”

Heather Steffen
“Student Internships and the Privilege to Work”

Poetry

Mary Kennan Herbert
“Been There, Done That” and
“Nothing to Say”

George Snedeker
“Progress” and Other Poems

Joseph G. Ramsey
“Fault Lines: Haiti, Two Years On”

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review
articles and items of interest.

Critical Education
Vol 2, No 14 (2011)
Table of Contents
http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/40

Articles
——–
Ecologically and Culturally Informed Educational Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
C. A. Bowers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WAKE UP, NLRB! CHICAGO GRAD STUDENT EMPLOYEES RALLY
TO WAKE THE NLRB FROM ITS COMA,
HELP IT RECOGNIZE THAT GRAD LABOR COUNTS!

Chicago, IL, December 13, 2011 — Today at noon, Chicago-area graduate students and their supporters will demonstrate outside the Chicago branch office of the National Labor Relations Board (209 S. LaSalle St.) and present a petition calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma of inaction and recognize private university graduate student teaching and research assistants as employees with a legal right to unionize and collectively bargain.

The rally, organized by Graduate Students United, the graduate employee union at the University of Chicago, and the national Grad Labor Counts! campaign, will feature a dramatic skit in which the NLRB is presented as a comatose hospital patient to reflect its record of inaction and danger of imminent demise. The Grad Labor Counts! campaign has been endorsed by the 1.4 million-strong American Federation of Teachers and the 70,000-member American Association of University Professors.

“We’re calling for for urgent medical attention to the ailing patient from President Obama and Congress, who have the power to restore the NLRB by appointing a new member in 2012,” explained Dasha Polzik, a member of Graduate Students United and an organizer of the Grad Labor Counts! campaign.

“We’re also calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma and issue a ruling on a case that has sat before it since April 2010 concerning the employee status of graduate students at private universities,” added Greg Goodman, another GSU member. Graduate student teaching and research assistants were first recognized as employees by a unanimous NLRB ruling in 2000, and then stripped of their employee status by a later Bush-era ruling in 2004.

Representatives from Grad Labor Counts! will deliver a petition with over 2,700 signatures from across the country calling on the NLRB to rule on the case and recognize graduate student teaching and research assistants at private universities as employees. Details on the Grad Labor Counts! campaign and petition are available at http://gradlaborcounts.org.

Contacts:

Maddy Elfenbein (madeleine.elfenbein@gmail.com)
646-206-5154
Samuel Brody (sam.brody@gmail.com)
917-748-4146

Graduate Students United (AFT-AAUP) at the University of Chicago
http://uchicagogsu.org
# # #

Rouge Forum Dispatch December 10, 2011

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at http://www.criticaleducation.org. We invite you to
examine the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to read articles and items of interest.

Critical Education
Vol 2, No 13 (2011)
Table of Contents

Articles
——–
Federal Initiatives and Sex Education: The Impact on Rural United States
Jennifer Michelle de Coste

Abstract
Overall, there is much that is yet unknown in rural sex education initiatives. Federal programs connected with NCLB attempt to measure AYP in numerous areas, but sex education is not among them. However, sex education is defined quite narrowly within existing legislation, including AFLA, Title V, and CBAE, as “abstinence-only-until-marriage” and fiscal incentives are given to school districts for following these guidelines. In rural areas, where issues of size, poverty, financial distress, geography, local control, enrollment decline, and rapid ethnic diversification are at the forefront, it should come as no surprise that rural districts often require this money for survival. From there, however, the path becomes less clear in relation to sex education. It is unclear what is being taught and who is doing the teaching. In addition, the narrow definition of abstinence-only-until-marriage ignores sexual agency in students and involves a heteronormative metanarrative that often associates queer with disease. Due to the lack of research in this area, it begs further questions of the field of rural sex education, such as: Who is teaching? What is being taught? Is there a curriculum? How are queer issues handled? How do students and teachers make sense of abstinence-only-until-marriage in a way that is inclusive (or not)?

________________________________________________________________________
Critical Education