Tag Archives: Works & Days

Cultural Logic 2017 – Scholactivism: Transforming Praxis in and Beyond the Classroom

The editors of Cultural Logic are pleased to announce that our latest collaboration with with Works & Davids is now available online.

This triple issue of articles, reviews, and poetry was edited by Joseph G. Ramsey.

Thanks to David B. Downing and his staff at Works & Days as well as Cultural Logic co-editor David Siar and Jarib Rahman for their technical assistance in publishing this issue of Cultural Logic.

Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis in and Beyond the Classroom

In Memoriam, Edmond Caldwell

Contents

Articles

Editors
“Editorial Note”

Marc Bousquet
“Here We Come”

Joseph G. Ramsey
“Introducing Scholactivism
Reflections on Transforming Praxis in and beyond the Classroom”

Edward J. Carvalho
“The Activist-Scholar:
A Responsibility “to confront and dismantle
Interview with Ward Churchill”

Babak Amini
“Scholactivism:
A Roundtable Interview with Ricardo Antunes, Pietro Basso, Patrick Bond, Michael Lowy, Jose Paulo Netto, and Leo Panitch”

Carl Grey Martin and Modhumita Roy
“Narrative Resistance:
A Conversation with Historian Marcus Rediker”

Toby Miller
“We Are All Activists Now”

Patrick Colm Hogan
“Politically Engaged Scholars:
An Analytic of Positions and Norms”

The MLA Subconference Collective: Bennett Carpenter, Laura Goldblatt, Lenora Hanson, Karim Wissa, and Andrew Yale
“Schol…Exodus?
Learning Within/Against/Beyond the Institution”

Jeffrey Noonan
“Resolving the Contradictions of Academic Unionism”

Gary Zabel
“Critical Revolutionary Praxis in the Neoliberal University”

Bradley M. Freeman
‘”Better Days Ahead”
Teaching Revolutionary Futures and Protesting the Present’

John Maerhofer
“Lukács, Mariátegui, and the Dialectical Roots of Edu-Activism”

Stephen C. Ferguson II and Gregory D. Meyerson
“Shred of Truth:
Antinomy and Synedoche in the Work of Ta-Nehisi Coates”

Ian Butcher
“Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism, and Networks of Mistrust”

Demetrius Noble
“I am Not that Corpse:
A Working Praxis for Black Lives Matter”

Jill McDonough
“Amos D. Squire,
Chief Physician of Sing Sing 1914-1925”

Ali Shehzad Zaidi
“The Promise and Peril of the Virtual University”

Efadul Huq and Xavier Best
‘Untangling the Scholactivist Web
“What’s on Your Mind”‘

Sophia A. McClennen
“What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confronting the Neoliberal Assault on Millenials”

Jeffrey R. DiLeo
“Top Cover:
On Administrative Activism in the Neoliberal Academy”

Katie Hogan
“Complicit:
On Being a WGSS Program Director in the Neoliberal University”

Vincent B. Leitch
“Letter on Scholactivism:
To Graduate Students and Young Colleagues”

Marisol Cortez
“Occupy Los Intersticios!
Or, In Defense of Carbon-Free Unicorns”

Tony Van der Meer
“Fighting to be Different in the Academy”

Kim Emery
“Rights and Rebellion: The Faculty Role, Revisited”

Victor Wallis
“Richard Levins and Dialectical Thinking”

Joel Woller, Courtney Maloney, Charles Cunningham
“On the Ground with David Demarest:
Toward a Methodology of Scholar Activism”

Christopher Craig
“John Trudell and the Spirit of Life”

Contributors

 

CFP: SCHOLACTIVISM: Reflections on Transforming Praxis Inside and Outside the Classroom

A Call for Papers
Works and Days & Cultural Logic

SCHOLACTIVISM:
Reflections on Transforming Praxis Inside and Outside the Classroom
Edited by Joseph G. Ramsey
Proposal Deadline: August 30, 2014
Paper Submissions Deadline: Jan. 30, 2015
To appear in the Winter of 2015

 

Where do radical scholarship, teaching, and activism connect? Where should they? How do academics at present engage in activism? How ought we to? What are the strengths and weaknesses of prevailing modes of scholar-activist political praxis—from union efforts, to conference assemblies, from summer seminars, to party-building efforts, to various on and off-campus coalitions? What do scholars and teachers in particular have to contribute to activist campaigns beyond the classroom? How can the classroom itself be understood as a site of activism? In what ways do the “educators need to be educated” today?What should effective activism produce? What can we learn, both positively and negatively, from past attempts at transformative intellectual-political praxis?

What positive models, past or present, local or distant, can we point to in terms of scholar or teacher activism that have opened new radical possibilities? What pitfalls threaten such academic-activist interventions? In what sense does the intellectual, scholarly, or pedagogical production taking place on or around university, college, of K-12 campuses today become a “material force” in the world in which we live? To what extent does it enable or become an obstacle to genuine movement for radical social change?What opportunities for transformative praxis are being opened up in the current conjuncture of crisis-racked neoliberal capitalism? Which are being shut down?

How is the shifting terrain of the “post-welfare state university” –with its decreasing state support for the humanities and its increasing reliance on super-exploited “adjunct” faculty and high stakes testing—creating new chances and new dangers for radical praxis? Which avenues of activism hold the most promise for us in the present period? Which appear to foreclosed or blocked? Which appear to be fundamentally exhausted and why? What modes of activism today in fact play a negative role in dissipating, confusing, or ensnaring radical political energies, preventing them from pursuing more productive avenues? How should we to relate to the experiences, the legacies, and the cultural productions of previous eras of activism? To what extent do we see our present scholarly and activist, intellectual and political commitments as extensions of these prior efforts? To what extent do we see our own praxis as representing a rupture from these past moments’ work? What are the positive and what are the negative lessons that can be critically abstracted from these prior moments, and how are they of value for us today? For instance: What are the correct critical lessons to be derived from the rapid rise and fall of the Occupy Movement in the US? From recent labor movements on and off campus? From other mass mobilizations across the world since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008? In our writing, our teaching, our conversations, and correspondence: how do we relate to the notion of ‘activism’ in theory and in practice?

What is the unconscious political content of the scholarly and pedagogical forms in which we are engaged? What is the message that our activism sends out, and to whom is it addressed? In recent years Slavoj Zizek has invoked the need for a kind of “Bartelby” politics—a preference for not acting—against a liberal blackmail to “act” in ways that are fundamentally inadequate to the systemic contradictions and crises of the present situation (understood as structurally embedded in contemporary capitalism). Sometimes, he has warned, the injunction to “do something”… anything, right now functions, deliberately or not, as a means of deferring the conversations and investigations that are necessary for a subject’s discovering the correct thing that in fact needs to be done. At the same time, there are plenty on the left who would chastise Zizek and company for theorizing in ways that perpetually defer the necessity for some sort of outward oriented radical action, action that transforms the conditions of conversation and analysis by engaging people who are not usually so engaged. In what ways are left public intellectuals such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, David Graeber, or Arundhati Roy, making material contributions to movements for social liberation? What are the strengths and what are the weaknesses of these scholar activists’ theory and practice? We welcome contributions of any form or length that address any of the above questions or that contribute to any of the following tasks. In this 2015 special issue, help us to:

  • Assess the role of scholars, teachers, and cultural specialists in activist communities, and social movements, past or present;
  • Sum up the role played by academics, teachers, scholars, librarians and others in the Occupy Movement; from “Free University” efforts to “People’s Libraries” to attempts to bring Occupy discourse into classrooms (or union meetings);
  • Engage the legacies, lessons, and limits of Labor Education in the United States;
  • Sum up first-hand experiments with radical pedagogy, inside or outside the classroom; reflecting on attempts to expand or sustain student critique and community beyond the confines of the classroom, in time and/or space;
  • Reflect on attempts (failed as well as successful, recent as well as more distant) to create new spaces for critique, new critical collectivities that transgress and transcend dominant divisions between “academia” and “activist,” from attempts to bring activist groups, methods, or perspectives onto campus or into classrooms, to efforts to bring academic work to the public, and to existing or emerging social movements and activist organizations;
  • Critically analyze the role played by organic intellectuals in past struggles;
  • Offer reports from the field of contemporary social struggles, including but limited to: Contingent Labor and Unionization efforts, Ecological Justice and Sustainability, Feminism, Prisoner and Immigrant Solidarity, and others.
  • Reflect on the role of artistic production and its relationship to scholarship and/or activism. What productive examples of a mutual enrichment of radical politics and creative arts exist in the present? In the past? What are the lessons positive and negative to be grasped practically from a critical study of previous encounters of Art and Politics?

We welcome: Testimonials, Credos, Manifestos of Academic and/or Activist practices, and Reports from the Field, as well as more traditional essays and scholarly papers. We seek first-hand accounts of attempts to overcome particular obstacles to engaging social struggles and radical political issues in the classroom or in other academic contexts, in all their mix of positive and negative results. We also welcome personal accounts of struggles to overcome the various forms of alienation that characterize academic labor in the humanities today, and that confront academic activists in particular. How have you sought to reconcile your commitments as activist and as scholar and as teacher in the current environment? What insight or advice can you offer others facing similar struggles? We also welcome: Poetry as well as prose, photography, graphic art, and other creative forms, as well as reviews of recent critical or cultural production (books, films, blogs, etc) that thoughtfully engage any of the above topics. Please submit all proposals (250-500 words) by August 30 to: Joseph Ramsey at jgramsey@gmail.com . The print edition of the volume will appear in Works and Days in 2015. An expanded online open-access version will appear in Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice www.clogic.eserver.org .

 

 

 

Education for Revolution special issue of Works & Days + Cultural Logic launched

Education for Revolution a special issue collaboration of the journals Works & Days and Cultural Logic has just been launched.

Check out the great cover image (Monument to Joe Louis in Detroit) and the equally great stuff on the inside. Hard copies of the issue available from worksanddays.net and Cultural Logic will be publishing and expanded online version of the issue in the coming months.

Rich and I want to thank David B. Downing and his staff at Works & Days for the fabulous work they did on this issue, which is the second collaboration between the two journals. Read Downing’s foreword to the issue here.

Works & Days + Cultural Logic
Special Issue: Education for Revolution
E. Wayne Ross & Rich Gibson (Editors)
Table of Contents

Barbarism Rising: Detroit, Michigan, and the International War of the Rich on the Poor
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University

Resisting Neoliberal Education Reform: Insurrectionist Pedagogies and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, University of The West Indies

Reimaging Solidarity: Hip-Hop as Revolutionary Pedagogy
Julie Gorlewski, State University of New York, New Paltz
Brad Porfilio, Lewis University

Learning to be Fast Capitalists on a Flat World
Timothy Patrick Shannon, The Ohio State University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University

Contesting Production: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Struggle to Produce Knowledge
Brian Lozenski, Zachary A. Casey, Shannon K. McManimon, University of Minnesota

Schooling for Capitalism or Education for Twenty-First Century Socialism?
Mike Cole, University of East London

Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context
Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

The Pedagogy of Excess
Deborah P. Kelsh, The College of Saint Rose

Undermining Capitalist Pedagogy: Takiji Kobayashi’s Tōseikatsusha and the Ideology of the World Literature Paradigm
John Maerhofer, Roger Williams University

Marxist Sociology of Education and the Problem of Naturalism: An Historical Sketch
Grant Banfield, Flinders University of South Australia

The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
David Blacker, University of Delaware

Hacking Away at the Corporate Octopus
Alan J. Singer, Hofstra University

A Tale of Two Cities ¬– and States
Richard Brosio, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

SDS, The 1960s, and Education for Revolution
Alan J. Spector, Purdue University, Calumet

Cultural Logic, Works & Days to co-publish special issues on “Education for Revolution”

The journals Cultural Logic and Works & Days are collaborating to co-publish special issues on “Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution.”

The issue will be published this fall, in print, by Works & Days. Cultural Logic will then publish an expanded online version—including several additional articles, including pieces on Greece, India, and Turkey—in 2014.

Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross, co-editors of the special issue, describe the context and focus of the issue as:

The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating color-coded inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class-conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself. In this context, schools in the empires of the world are the centripetal organizing points of much of life. While the claim of capitalist schooling is, in the classics, education, “leading out,” the reality is that schools are segregated illusion factories, in some cases human munition factories. Rather than leading out, they encapsulate.

Mainstream educational and social research typically ignores, disconnects, the ineluctable relationships of what is in fact capitalist schooling, class war, imperialist war, and the development of varying forms of corporate states around the world.

At issue, of course, is: What to do?

The long view, either in philosophy or social practice is revolution as things must change, and they will.

Connecting the long view to what must also be a long slog necessarily involves a careful look at existing local, national, and international conditions; working out tactics and strategies that all can understand, none taken apart from a grand strategy of equality and justice.

“Marxism and Education: Education for Revolution” will be the second collaborative publishing project between Cultural Logic and Works & Days. In 2012, the journals co-published the special issue “Culture and Crisis,” edited by Cultural Logic co-editor Joseph G. Ramsey) in print and online versions.

Table of Contents for Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution

Marxist Sociology of Education and the Problem of Naturalism: An Historical Sketch
Grant Banfield, Flinders University of South Australia

The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
David J. Blacker, University of Delaware

A Tale of Two Cities – and States
Richard A. Brosio, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Schooling For Capitalism or Education for Twenty-First Century Socialism?
Mike Cole, University of East London

Barbarism Rising: Detroit, Michigan, and the International War of the Rich on the Poor
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University

Reimagining Solidarity: Hip-Hop as Revolutionary Pedagogy
Julie A. Gorlewski, State University of New York, New Paltz
Brad J. Porfilio, Lewis University

The Pedagogy of Excess
Deborah P. Kelsh, The College of Saint Rose

Contesting Production: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Struggle to Produce Knowledge
Brian D. Lozenski, University of Minnesota
Zachary A. Casey, University of Minnesota
Shannon K. McManimon, University of Minnesota

Undermining Capitalist Pedagogy: Takiji Kobayashi’s Tōseikatsusha and the Ideology of the World Literature Paradigm
John Maerhofer, Roger Williams University

Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context
Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Insurgent Pedagogies and Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, The University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of The West Indies

Learning to be Fast Capitalists on a Flat World
Timothy Patrick Shannon, The Ohio State University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University

Hacking Away at the Corporate Octopus
Alan J. Singer, Hofstra University

SDS, The 1960s, and Educating for Revolution
Alan J. Spector, Purdue University, Calumet

About the Co-editors:
Rich Gibson is emeritis professor of social studies in the College of Education at San Diego State University. He worked as a foundry worker, an ambulance driver, a pot and pan washer, fence painter, soda jerk, bank teller, surveyor’s assistant, assembly line chaser, a teacher, a social worker, organizer and bargaining agent for National Education Association, TA, and as a professor at Wayne State University. With about ten other people, he helped to found what is now the largest local in the UAW, local 6000, not auto-workers, but state employees.

E. Wayne Ross is professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and a former secondary social studies (Grades 8 to 12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia. He has taught at Ohio State University, State University of New York, and the University of Louisville. Ross is a member of the Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC and co-editor of Critical Education and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.

Gibson and Ross are co-editors of Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Hampton Press) and are co-founders of The Rouge Forum, a group of K-12 and university education workers, parents, community people, and students, engaged in fighting for a democratic and egalitarian society. Find out more about The Rouge Forum conferences here and here.

About Cultural Logic:
Cultural Logic—which has been on-line since 1997—is an open access, non-profit, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes essays, interviews, poetry, reviews (books, films, other media), etc. by writers working within the Marxist tradition.

CL co-editors are: David Siar (Winston-Salem State University), Gregory Meyerson (North Carolina A & T University), James Neilson (North Carolina A & T University), Martha Gimenez, (University of Colorado), Rich Gibson (San Diego State University), E. Wayne Ross, (University of British Columbia), Joe Ramsey (Quincy College)

About Works & Days:
Works & Days provides a scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, especially as they are impacted by the global economic crisis of late capitalism. Whereas most scholarly journals publish groups of relatively unrelated essays, each volume of Works & Days focuses on a specific issue, and contributors are encouraged to share their work with each other.

Recent special issues of the Works & Days journal have focused on the effect of globalization on women and the environment, the attacks on academic freedom, the privatization of higher education under neoliberal capitalism, the increasing exploitation of part-time, temporary faculty, the shift from print to electronic media, and the politics of knowledge.

Works & Days is edited by David B. Downing (Indiana University of Pennsylvania).