Last blog post! Until… next term, that is. Dr. McNeill suggested in class that we could do a term-long reflection for our final post, and that’s what I’m going to do. What kind of reflection? The scholarly kind! Obviously! Getting a little overly casual here so let’s break it down. What does a scholarly reflection mean? Reflections in the traditional sense are just feelings, and as we have learned in ASTU feeling aren’t really what scholars are aiming for. As we have been told many, many, many times in class but I still often manage to forget, scholarly writing is supposed to be both “relevant” and “productive”  (see Academic Writing or Laurie for more info). If I were to summarize (which we learned how to do) the gist (we also learned that) of the knowledge I have gained in ASTU this term, I would say it boils down to that. Scholars have different expectations for writing than high school teachers do, and much of that has to do with what kind of knowledge is expected to be included in a paper. Of course there are also stylistic genre expectations for scholarly writing, but I’ll be talking about content because that is much more interesting to me.

I was apprehensive about coming to University, as I knew I would be required to write in styles that I was unfamiliar with. What I didn’t realize was how much less structure is often required from academic writing. It’s not a report, it can be a journey (to use a truly exhausted metaphor). A report is a collection of knowledge, to be sure, but it often falls short of really synthesizing the information it presents. Much of my high school writing could hardly be considered “productive” in any substantive sense of the word. Perhaps a reader might learn something new from one of my papers, but I doubt I produced many conclusions that would count as new knowledge in any field. That part of academia is exciting to me– that even as a first year (where I’m from, freshman), we are all capable of participating in and adding to a scholarly discussion, even if it’s in a small way. It’s possible we are coming up with ideas that no one has articulated before– and although nothing I write this year is going to be published anyway, it makes writing a little easier when I feel like I have something to contribute. Now that I think about it, much of my frustration with high school writing came from the lack of relevance or productivity that was expected from me. I didn’t feel like what I was writing was interesting or important, and the “so what” of my papers was “because I was told to do this.” There was no examining why it was helpful or significant to be examining my paper topics, which is an integral part of the academic process. And* it makes sense! Why do something if you don’t have a good reason?

Good luck on all your final papers, and I will see you next term! Er, at our midterms.

*I know I shouldn’t start a sentence with “and”… sorry, Laurie.

It is a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit these days, and I often hear it from celebrities in particular when they describe their charity and advocacy work. Now, certainly, celebrities have a long history of charitable involvement, and with their access to resources and press attention, they are certainly uniquely positioned to work actively with humanitarian causes. This post is not to critique celebrity interest in humanitarian work– rather to critically examine some celebrities’ motivations, as well as critique some of the ways in which these causes are publicized by famous people. In their article Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog, life narrative scholars Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd detail the  American obsession with celebrities and their lives that has snowballed in the past couple of decades. They observe a “significant cultural trend in the 1990’s, the weakening boundary between the public and the private and the expansion of celebrity culture to politics and beyond” (page 3).

Celebrities now, more than ever before, have been given and national (and sometimes global) platform on which to speak, and many of them are using this attention to highlight humanitarian causes of their choosing. This is the age of the celebrity charity– and often, the effectiveness of these charities goes unquestioned, ethics relegated to the shadows cast by hollywood fame and glitter. Take Bono’s charity, for instance. More accurately, “charity.” Some of you may remember the 2010 scandal surrounding Bono’s ONE foundation (he is not the majority fund supplier, but acts more as a figurehead for the organization.) In September of that year, it came to light that around 1% of the funds donated to the charity were being given to the people it was supposed to be benefitting. Yes, 1%. With donations upwards of 5 million pounds, only 118,000 ever found their way to those in need. (Source)

Corruption, however, is not the only questionable choice celebrities make in their pursuit of charitable giving. I would like now to return to that phrase so often thrown around by celebrity advocates, and the sentiment behind it: “giving a voice to the voiceless.”  (One example here). Our work in class with Whitlock’s and Shaffer and Smith’s explorations of human rights and life narratives have been particularly helpful in guiding my analysis of this phenomenon (and I am not the first to speak on this, by far.) Who exactly, counts as “voiceless” in our society or around the world? Certainly, there are plenty of stories and human rights abuses that never make it to  center stage– but does that mean the people involved cannot speak? Of course some are deliberately silenced, but isn’t it more a question of selectively unheard than unable to share? Human rights violations are ignored, not incognito: those whose rights are being violated are quite aware of what is happening, and often do try to speak out. Celebrities claiming to be the “voice” of these people and events is an incredibly arrogant move, and one that serves to further dismantle the agency of the individuals involved. When attempting to humanize a person or cause, Whitlock reminds us that it is important to ask: who needs to be humanized in the first place?

At this point, I am sure many of you have heard of Malala Yousufzai (yes, I’m linking to Wikipedia– just a good way to get an overview if you’re unfamiliar), the young Pakistani girl who was attacked and nearly killed because she sought an education as a young woman. Her story sparked an outcry through the Western world, and she has since become an activist for women’s rights and education justice. She has written a book, “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” and appeared as a guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In short, the Western media loves her. However, our class readings on the overlap of human rights, commodification, and life narratives has made me question some of the ways she is talked about. Before we continue: Malala is absolutely an extremely courageous and very intelligent person– it is absolutely not the intention of this post to attack her in any way. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the way her story and she herself has been “commodified”, as Gillian Whitlock would say, by the West.

In her book “Soft Weapons,” Whitlock discusses the power of life narratives to insight change by illuminating injustice. Shaffer and Smith also highlight this in their article “Conjuctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights”. Both, however, also detail the potential for life narratives to become a tool that simple supports whatever dominant concepts the West has about itself and other countries. In the case of Malala, I believe that many Westerners are using her story to support the “enlightened, morally upstanding West” and “backward, corrupt East” tropes that are part of what Shaffer and Smith would call our “national myths.” For a more in-depth assessment of this, I will direct you here.

While perusing an unnamed social media site, I happened upon a brief story about another young Pakistani girl named Nabila. She recently traveled to the United States to speak at a Congressional hearing on CIA drone warfare, and spoke about her grandmother, a civilian who was killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan (I haven’t seen it, but her testimony is available to watch here). Only five member of Congress bothered to show up to the hearing.  Meanwhile, Malala’s story has been covered by pretty much every major news outlet in the United States. (In the interest of full disclosure– Al Jazeera has also made this comparison, but it was after I started writing this so I’m just gonna finish. It’s available here, and is much more in-depth than this post.)

Malala and Nabila are both brave, they both have important things to say, and they both deserve to be heard. Malala’s story meshes well with the West-as-savior daydream that many Westerners (and Western foreign policies!) buy into. Nabila’s opinion is unpopular: she is challenging our biases and standing up, as one young girl, to the entire U.S. government– and they refuse to even acknowledge her presence. A just nation doesn’t cherry-pick injustices that it finds convenient to fight, it pays attention to injustice everywhere. We must be aware of when we are complicit in this silencing and amplification, and pay close attention to whose stores are told.