Archives: Imagine Day

Who am I not when I am?

I am always very reflexive (when the occasion calls for it — which is almost always, well, always) when I put myself into a discourse or a discussion. That means I am always, as I was trained to be, very aware of who I am and why my perspective would be what it is.  For example, this is something I wrote for one of my papers for a university theory class:

Before I proceed with my essay, I will first take this time to position myself socially and be reflexive about my specific background. I am doing this as an exercise to act on my awareness that my personal subject-position has an effect in the production of knowledge that I will be endeavoring.

I am a Third-Year Arts student at the University of British Columbia majoring in Sociology. I am a Filipino-Chinese male who, at the moment, resides in Canada with a permanent resident status.

I am writing this essay with two main agendas: to fulfill an academic requirement for my Sociology class, and to be socially relevant – I am writing to bring attention to the presence of taken-for-granted realities that are responsible for propagating and perpetuating the inequality and oppression very much present today.  (Arlantico 2013)

That’s the kind of awareness I have for my positionality — or, in other words, I am very much aware of the different identities I have and how they present themselves.  For the most part, I always try to be as exhaustive as I can be when I position myself. TRY being the operative word, which means there are identities I often leave out — either accidentally or intentionally.

However, in my two-year stay at UBC so far, I’ve been to two distinct events when I was (almost) completely ONLY ONE THING: a UBC Student. 

In September of 2013 I was a new transfer student to UBC — and of course, that meant I was attending Imagine Day. Imagine day was really fun. Tons of people everywhere, I get to see a really beautiful campus that I can call mine [sic], I’m meeting a lot of new and interesting people, and it marks a new chapter in my life.  I was still very aware of who I was throughout that day though — I was a transfer student, I was a sociology major, I am an immigrant, and I am visibly Asian — as excited as I was to use the hashtag #IAMUBC, I was completely aware that I am not JUST a student at UBC, I am more distinct than that.

BUT… this happened:

and this…


Yup. PEP RALLY happened at the end of the day. The Thunderbird stadium, which can seat about 3500 people, was full of loud cheers, music, and a lot of of other really REALLY happy noise! I was in a sea of people all cheering for UBC! There were different rousing speeches made by different pertinent people in the university whose pertinence did not matter as much to me as their very inspiring speeches on #IAMUBC and how WE are UBC! Then there was an alumnus who did spoken word poetry on getting a degree, a couple of musical acts followed, and a WHOLE lot of cheering happened. Every faculty had their own color, own cheer, and occupied a distinct space in the auditorium; however, there was no other competing feel in the air: WE ARE UBC STUDENTS AND WE ARE DAMN PROUD THAT WE ARE.

That was instance one. The first instance in my UBC stay where I was nothing else other than — I AM UBC.

Fast forward a full year and a month — October 2014, this happened:

AMS AGM 2014

 

For the first time in 40 years, we have quorum.

Because of the proposed increased international student tuition and residence fees, UBC students banded together to show that we are AGAINST IT. (If you want to know more about the proposed fee increases, here is an article on The Talon about it, here is an article on The Ubyssey on the international tuition fee increase, and here is one on the residence fee increase also from The Ubyssey). For the first time in 40 years, YES, FORTY years, the AMS held an AGM and we had quorum — which means any and every decision made in that meeting was binding, WHICH in turn means that the AMS can say that the decisions and stances agreed upon during the meeting are representative of the whole student body.

Could you imagine being part of that? I was overwhelmed by the overall atmosphere in that room. Students were politically active! It did not matter who you were, at that very moment, you are a UBC student standing up for yourself and your fellow UBC student!

At that moment, I was nothing else but a UBC student — I am a student, I want my voice heard, and I am voting on these issues!

Reflecting back, the 2013 Pep Rally and the 2014 AMS AGM were two instances where I was solely a UBC student — which means, those were two instances where I was completely devoid of any other identity and social position other than those afforded to me as a UBC student.

Putting the spotlight on something inevitably casts shadows on some other things. Spotlighting my identity as a UBC student effectively erased all my other identities — at least in the brief moments when I had the spotlight on that particular identity. Often it’s not really about identifying with multiple things; I suggest that tackling identities — whether it be in your daily life or in an academic paper or class — should always be done by looking at the context through which those identities arose.

What does this mean? It means individuals and their (well, OUR) identities are products of the tension between the social and the personal — or as CW Mills will put it, the public and the private. Basically, following Mills’ idea of how personal troubles and never detached from public issues, we can never see ourselves apart from the social context within which we stand. That context could be as constant as your personal family history (where you were born and where you were raised) to something as fleeting as which seat on the bus you took and who sat beside you.

What am I getting at? Two things:

1. Our identities are closely tied in with our lived experiences and the contexts within which those experiences came about and are rooted in. That means, our identities are formed and understood through different contexts, AND the different expressions of our various identities are also understood through different contexts.

2. Every time a specific – -or some specific — identity of ourselves take the spotlight, some other identities are muted. Often, this is based on the context within which you express that certain identity.

So the next time you start your statement with “I am…” think of all the “I am not…” that come with it.

References:

CW Mills, The Promise (1959)

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Kant, Marcuse, and the One-Dimensional Society – Reflections on UBC Sauder School of Business’s Imagine Day Orientation

In “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, philosopher Immanuel Kant sets out his ideas on the nature of enlightenment and the state of affairs that would allow it to take place.  Kant defines enlightenment as people gaining the ability “to use [their] own understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant 1784/1970: 54) and argues that its occurrence in society is “almost inevitable” as long as citizens are allowed the freedom to make “public use of [their] own reason” (Kant 1784/1970:: 55). Through the constant exercise of this freedom, he postulates that humanity’s “original destiny” (Kant 1784/1970: 57) of “upward progress” (Kant 1784/1970: 58) will continuously be achieved. However, in his discussion of the conditions necessary for intellectual freedom, Kant does not adequately address the limitations which systems of societal oppression can impose on critical understanding. As Herbert Marcuse argues, modern industrial civilization makes individuals discursively dependent on itself through a “manipulation of needs” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 406). This idea is problematic for Kant’s notion that the freedom of “public reason” will lead to enlightened progress because it demonstrates how society can exert a conforming influence upon reason at the level of language, resulting in a world where an individual’s ability to think freely is restricted.

In this blog-post, I will analyze observations that I made at UBC’s Imagine Day orientation event at the Sauder School of Business, where first year students were led on guided tours of the university by upper-year business student mentors. I will show how the patterns of interaction and communication between the students and their student leaders illustrate the implicit critique that Marcuse brings to Kant’s notion that the freedom of “public reason” will lead to enlightened progress.

Kant describes the freedom to the “public use of reason” as the right to openly criticize any societal policies, arrangements, or beliefs. The presence of this freedom will guarantee enlightenment because, according to him, progress revolves around a society’s capacity to continuously “extend and correct its knowledge” ” (Kant 1784/1970: 57). In essence, Kant asserts that enlightenment lies in the constant revision of the status quo and the realization that no aspect of society is incapable of being improved upon by “higher insight” (Kant 1784/1970: 57). Thus, Kant’s argument hinges on citizens possessing the ability to “think freely” (Kant 1784/1970: 59) enough to come up with effective critiques of the established social order. For Kant, the only necessary condition for this to occur is that the act of “addressing the entire reading public” (Kant 1784/1970: 55) with ones ideas be made permissible (i.e. that coercive violence, laws against the freedom of speech, political pressure, etc are absent). He assumes that without explicit institutional pressure, the public use of reason will become sufficiently autonomous to produce ideas that result in the progressive revision of social arrangements. It is here that Kant overlooks the role of systemic oppression in shaping the language use upon which the “public use of reason” depends. Specifically, oppressive social arrangements restrict the ability of individuals to think independently, calling in to question Kant’s claim that the freedom to make “public use of reason” is all that is necessary for enlightenment.

Marcuse’s criticism of modern society illustrates how individuals are made discursively dependent upon the status quo. In an essay from One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse describes the paradox of the “advanced industrial civilization” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 405) in which we live. “Freedom from want” and the individual’s liberation from the “alien needs and alien possibilities” imposed by labour are within reach of society, yet the very “apparatus” that has made this possible continues to impose its “economic and political requirements… on labor time and free time, on the material and intellectual culture” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 406). This imposition creates what Marcuse calls a “totalitarian” society through the “manipulation of needs by vested interests” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 406), which unites groups with originally distinct social aims under “the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 408). On an ideological level, this unification “precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 406) by creating a “pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour” in which challenges to the system are inevitably “repelled or reduced” to the terms of “the established universe of discourse” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 410).

Marcuse’s conceptualization of a one-dimensionality of society poses a clear problem for Kant’s thesis that freedom for the “public use of reason” is sufficient to achieve progress because it asserts that such “freedom” fails to produce critical assessments which transcend the discourse of the society in which it is created. As long as individuals are dependent on manipulated needs, their capacity for criticism remains reliant on the assumptions of the society that they are trying to assess, foreclosing the possibility of their formulating a critique which challenges the status quo in a substantial manner. To illustrate how social groups come to depend upon these manufactured “needs”, we will return to the UBC Sauder School of Business’s orientation event.

Here, first-year business majors are being socialized into their role as “Sauder students”. In my observation of multiple student groups, I noticed that the upper-year student mentors all led with the same “philosophy”, in which they would imagine a hypothetical, idealized first-year Sauder student and try to communicate this identity to the newcomers. This could be seen in the kinds of information that they would give, ranging from insider tips on what professors would expect from the dreaded essay assignments and going to office hours to “try and get to know them on a personal basis” to recommendations for utilizing career advice clinics and getting assigned readings done on a timely basis. The common theme of all this information is that it is geared towards producing a certain kind of “successful” Sauder student – one that is hard-working, makes full use of university resources, and adept at obtaining good grades. Note that the emphasis is not on whether this is a “realistic” portrayal of the majority of Sauder students – certainly, if reports from professors and current students are to be believed, very few people go to office hours, almost no one uses the career advice clinics, and readings are done the week before the scheduled exam. Nor is the focus on producing intellectual excellence – the tips on essays, readings, and office hours are intended to help newcomers achieve good, or at least passing, grades.

This information conveyed by the student leaders and eagerly consumed by the first-years illustrates Marcuse’s point on how society creates conforming groups of “one-dimensional” people through the “manipulation of needs by vested interests” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 406), uniting people under “the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment” (Marcuse 1964/2012: 408). In this case, the “Establishment” is the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, which desires the creation of a student body which will produce decent marks and maintain the good image of the institution. In order to do this, it manipulates the material needs of its students by controlling the grading system and the conferral of privileged credentials (the Degree). Of course, it is a “common-sense” understanding that in order to obtain good employment to provide for oneself and one’s future life goals, a student must obtain these credentials. Through various institutional structures (i.e., grading rubrics, department guidelines, university policy, etc.) and the resulting implicit understanding acquired by students, a conformist student population is created with material needs (eventual employment) that are oriented towards the goals of the Establishment (good PR). This “one-dimensional” student identity is then introduced to successive generations of new students through orientations events like Imagine Day.

Note that there is no explicit restriction on going against the grain (no one can stop you from failing if you wanted to). However, despite the “freedom” of speech and argument that we enjoy as university students, most of us will perform what is required by the “Establishment” in order to fulfil our material life goals and satisfactions. Those who do not will in the majority of cases be consigned to a fate of low income and social status. This situation demonstrates perfectly Marcuse’s argument that institutional manipulation of individual needs creates conformist groups with patterns of “one-dimensional thought and behaviour” that precludes any effective opposition against the established institution.

 

Kant, Immanuel (1784/1970) “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” In H. Reiss. Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 54-59.

URL: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/What_is_Enlightenment.pdf

Marcuse, Herbert (1964/2012) “From One-Dimensional Man.” In Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles. Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Pine Forge Press. Pp. 405-412.

URL: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf

 

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#IamUBC and Imagine Day

Dear UBC (past, future, and present) Students,

UBC is an incredible place- a “place of promise” as we see in some of UBC’s messages marketed to us. It provides us with an astounding number of opportunities to redefine, develop, and discover ourselves and turn students into productive, fully functioning members of society. I personally am very thankful to have had the opportunity to attain a rich and fulfilling education here at UBC and would not change my decision to attend UBC for my undergraduate degree. I’m not sure if I would have matured to the extent that I have at a different university than UBC. However, the purpose of this post is not to criticize or praise UBC as an institution of education, rather, I want to point out the importance of recognizing UBC as an institution not unlike many others that participate in our free-market system. Specifically, as with other major institutions, UBC profits off of (y)our identification with and participation in its reproduction, and this means that your reverence for the UBC brand is something this institution works very hard to maintain and survives from in ways far beyond what you might expect. In other words, your consumption of the UBC brand is a highly powerful act.

To explain using some theoretical approaches: let’s start with a Marxian concept. While people with little social science background might associate Marx with communism, he didn’t only talk about a utopian ideal, he was also really good at explaining how systems of power operate economically, but especially socially and politically. Specifically, Marx approaches power through the perspective of the social construct, meaning that power is simply a result of peoples’ thinking. As long as people attach certain values and meanings to symbols, power and control can not only be predicted, it can also be interrupted and changed.

A great quote that Marx uses to illustrate this is through his explanation of ideology in his famous piece called German Ideology: “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc… Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

There is a lot to understand in this quote. Let’s break it down.

First, men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc… this is essentially what I was explaining earlier, that people (you can ignore the gendered language Marx was using, which was normal during his time) ultimately attach meanings to what they see in the world, which are usually informed by value systems other people, like your family and your friends, taught to them as “normal” and expected.

Second, ideology is a word that Marx uses to explain why different classes of people exist. Marx saw the world as consisting of two classes, proletariats (working class) and bourgeoisie (business owners or managers). For Marx, the working class people were exploited by the business owners and he understood this as the result of a collective problem whereby power of business owners was a product of a collective survival of working class people based on wages through work. He saw this as a gross imbalance of power and wanted to understand why this imbalance persisted to the extent that it did during his time.

Third, a camera obscura is one of the first devices developed for the recording of images, right around Marx’s time. It works by completely blocking all light from a room, with the exception of a very small hole. After enough time passes, you can sit in the room and after your eyes adjust, an image of the world becomes refracted onto the wall opposite the hole and this image is an exact upside-down replica of what you would see if you were to put your eye to the hole from inside the room and look out onto the world. This is in fact how cameras work today, and it is how you see the world, literally with your eyes. Since your eye works with a refracted image onto your retina, the image becomes re-oriented to the correct version by your brain, which is connected to your eye through various nerves. You can learn more about the camera obscura through this cool Youtube video.

But I digress. Marx is saying that as images appear upside down and distorted on your retina and in a camera obscura, ideology also distorts peoples’ images of the world. This is because of peoples’ historical life-processes, which basically means the way groups of people have historically come to organize themselves and economically sustain themselves.

So you’re probably asking yourself, how does all of this tie in to UBC?

UBC is an education institution, which means that it requires a relatively large number of students to want to go there for their education each year. Universities need to address a large number of needs today in order to stay competitive. Some of these include employment opportunities for students after graduation, development of research and critical thinking skills, and student clubs and societies so that students get bored on campus. All of these will ultimately involve a great deal of time and organization on the part of someone, whether it be students, staff, or faculty and whether this work is paid or unpaid.

The “I am UBC” slogan is a great way to involve students in the institution’s branding. It attaches the university to the student’s identity, and it is a very clever way to get students to attach themselves and identify with the university. In doing so, it sets the tone and market demand for the university for years to come. It also means that a great deal of labour that the university depends on, such as student organizations, orienting new students to the university’s policies and procedures, and navigation of the university bureaucracy, can all become sought after forms of participation for students since they identify with the university in a way that is meaningful to them.

With the advent of social media, I am UBC has become #IamUBC. Try searching it on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. You’ll see breathtaking images of ocean and mountains as a backdrop to the Rose Garden area, or you’ll see fresh fruit and vegetables being grown at the UBC Farm. You may also see tudor style architecture, shiny and interesting museum exhibits, or First Nations symbols showcased on these feeds. All of these are representations of the UBC brand that the university- and the people who attach such meanings to it (such as students like yourself) have reproduced over the recent weeks, months, and years.

It is time to critically engage with #IamUBC at events like Imagine Day. This year, Imagine Day was overshadowed by a feisty rainstorm that ended up drenching festivities by the afternoon. I remember tabling for a student organization, Sociology Students’ Association. I enjoy what I do and I love interacting with students, new and established, in learning about their interests and putting on events engaging with social issues. It was participating in Imagine Day this year in this unique role that really made me think about my own role as a kind of representative of a certain part of the university to incoming Arts students this year. We had to “compete” with other clubs for students’ attention and curiosity. We ended up renting a button machine (which was the highlight of our table) in order to capitalize on students’ attention just to remain relevant in the sea of tables and booths. All of this is a part of the process of reproducing the I am UBC brand.

I remember seeing a friend of mine working at one of the tables and she seemed rather unhappy. After we chatted for a bit, she told me that she was actually an executive of one of the other student associations, but since she is doing an internship for one of the organizations on campus, she had to stay at that group’s booth instead of the one she identified with more. This is a demonstration of Marx’s concept of camera obscura, because it shows that peoples’ conception of things, like UBC or Imagine Day, is a product of their participation in and therefore attachment to certain ideas and values that make up institutions and organizations. In the case of UBC, it is the idea of personal development, achievement, and redefinition that all students are looking for as they go through a life stage or life transition into adulthood. The university profits from this arrangement of student identification, likely because students see a kind of freedom, or potential freedom, of this kind of identification. To see beyond the fuzzy images associated with #IamUBC and consider the ways you participate in UBC campus activities and organizations contributes to the university’s success means an ability to critically engage with who pays or profits from institutions like UBC.

 

 

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Seeking a Space, Performing a Space: Imagine Day at UBC

“On the first day of classes, campus is transformed and over 8000 new-to-UBC students and over 1000 faculty, student, and staff volunteers come together to welcome you to your new academic community and celebrate the start of the school year.” (Imagine UBC)

“The first-years are so unlucky, they get this cold and heavy rain on Imagine Day. Too bad for people at the booths. Who wants to be outside?” (talking with my friends)

Rain, rain, rain. As a featured outdoor event for new students (mostly first-year) to discover the student clubs and communities on campus, the Main Event seemed to have difficulties escaping the cold and heavy rain on the Main Mall on September 2, 2014.

Seeking a Space: Where is the Community I belong?

As a transfer student, that was my second school year at UBC, and naturally my second time being in the UBC Imagine Day. The Imagine Day description made I imagin that by connecting with the little space of a booth, I can later connect with a certain space on campus where I can call a community. This space could be a physical one (such as a club office or an event site) or/and an imagined one (such as a Facebook group, a friendship network), and it must be one where I feel comfortable revealing my identities (for example, a Chinese person) and behaving as myself. Yet my searching last year as one of the “new-to-UBC students“, I recall, did not lead to any fruitful outcomes.  I signed up for the Meditation Community’s email list, but I had schedule conflict with all of their events; I paid $10 for the membership of CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association) but found it useless; several clubs that I signed up didn’t even send me any newsletters. Besides, what UBC described as  an “academic community” was largely absent in the Main Event, since nearly all the booths were presented by cultural, spiritual, and recreational clubs. Arts academic clubs, for instance, were told to present in the morning at Buchanan Courtyard, a space that was separated from where a wider audience located in the Main Event.

Wandering around the Main Mall among crowds of twenty-something-looking people, walking in and out among tents and booths, reading banners, signs and posters for information, writing down my name and email, talking or refusing to talk with others: I saw myself as one unit of complex identities attempting to build connections with other unites of identities.  Using Sherene Razack’s concept of linking bodies with space in Race, Space, and the Law (2002):

“[T]he symbolic and the material work through each other to constitute a space” (pp. 8). 

a space is not just an “innocent” space outlined by objects and people, it should be further analyzed as a social product (pp. 7). In other words, a space can be social, and its social meanings should be performed. In the searching of other spaces, bodies have to move, symbols and languages have to be shown, interpersonal interactions have to be performed (physically, verbally, emotionally). Occupying a bodily space in the Main Event, I saw myself entering, exiting, and re-entering different social spaces that were performed by groups of individuals with certain identities.

Performing a Space: A Chinese Community of What?

Redoing my searching this year, I tried to focus on one aspect that I was always interested in: the Chinese cultural clubs. Directly related to my identity as a Chinese student at UBC, I would like to use my perspective to briefly examine how a space is performed with social  meanings. How do these clubs represent themselves? What kinds of space do they create at UBC?

1. A Space of Language

A space can perform its social identities through verbal and written languages. It was easy for me to identify most of the Chinese cultural clubs by looking for signs and banners, since many of these material spaces were presented through Chinese characters. Interestingly, since modern Chinese have two written forms, some of the signs were in traditional Chinese, which was officially used in Hong Kong and Taiwan; some were in the simplified one, which was officially used in mainland China. This language difference not only showed the culture that the clubs intended to present, but also showed what audience these clubs were presenting to. Occasionally, I also hear Mandarin and Cantonese communicated between students. Building instant identity connections, language performs symbolic meanings through the material spaces; it also reflected the diverse cultural identities within the “Chineseness” of the clubs.

IMG_20140902_164751IMG_20140902_170747IMG_20140902_164730

[Language representation (top&middle: in traditional Chinese; bottom: in simplified Chinese).]

2. A Space of Racialization or/and Sexualization

Through asking questions to every Chinese cultural clubs I found, I noticed that the three most common events these clubs organize were parties, games, and ski trips. I imagined myself being in a club, a party room, and a Whistler hotel room, but I couldn’t imagine a conversation or a community. Once again, I found no way to seek an “academic community” among different Chinese cultural clubs. Moreover, I was shocked to hear some public announcements from two Chinese cultural clubs:

A male executive from one club spoke loudly to his surroundings: “….If you have yellow fever or Asian fever, this is the place for you.”

A male executive from another club said to the people who were passing by: “come for parties…… and get laid.”

Performing as representatives of their clubs, these two male executives presented their imagined community that I perceived as dangerous spaces. As a female I felt very uncomfortable with what these two particular clubs created within the public space of the Main Mall: the terms “yellow fever” and “get laid”, and the images (as show below) created a social spaces that was either racialized or sexualized, or both. The naturalization of the term “yellow fever” used in club promotion was especially problematic, since this term was profoundly based on western superiority and male domination. The term also brought me question the way non-white individuals use the racialized language in a predominantly white space. UBC is located in a white settler society, a space that is “established by Europeans on non-European soil”, as Razack explains (pp. 1). When naturalizing the term “yellow fever”, the male executive intended to attract non-Asian audience with racial/cultural preference to his imagined community. Yet he was completely ignorant of how the meanings and practices of this term do harm to an Asian female like me. I imagined that, if I were in a space that welcomes “yellow fever”,  my body would be realized mostly in terms of my race and my gender, and I would be expected to perform as a stereotypical Asian female who is submissive, reserved, and feminine. In no way I would feel safe!

CVC cute girlsHKSA party

Gendered and Sexualized texts and images.

Using Razack’s concepts of social space, when seeking a place with my identity as a Chinese person in Imagine Day, I observed how different Chinese cultural clubs perform their values and visions: first, symbolic performance, such as the banners with Chinese language; second, interpersonal performance, such as the public speech from executives. Notably, it was difficult for me to find a safe space among the Chinese cultural clubs that promoted parties as their main activities, because the way they performed their social spaces put me under the risk of being gendered, sexualized and racialized.

Reference:

Razack, S. (2002). Race, space, and the law. Toronto: Between the Lines.

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