Comics-Based Research

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Paul

Last week I was in San Francisco for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference. Among other things, I was presenting a paper on Comics-Based Research, the use of comic-book style art and storytelling in educational research. When I got there, I found an entire panel presentation on the topic! For the past five years I have been exploring how to use comic-book style art in my research on cultural organizing, but until last week I had never met someone else doing the same — and I came away both awed and excited by what I saw.

A Page from Nick Sousanis’s Dissertation

One member of the panel was Nick Sousanis, a doctoral student at Columbia’s Teachers College. He is currently doing his dissertation entirely in comics form. His complex black-and-white layouts are stunning, and he uses the comic form to concretize big, abstract ideas about visual/verbal knowledge and how comics work. You can see pages from his dissertation on his website: http://spinweaveandcut.blogspot.com/

Another panel member was famous activist, educator, and author Bill Ayers. He was there to speak about the process of turning his book To Teach into a graphic novel with the help of artist Ryan Alexander Tanner. He spoke eloquently about how his thinking shifted through the process — from thinking they were merely going to illustrate his writing, to understanding that they had to write an entirely new book using this unique form. You can read my review of the resulting collaboration here: To Teach: The Journey in Comics

From Jones & Woglom’s TC Record article

The third panelist was James Woglom, a comic artist who has been working with researcher Stephanie Jones to translate her research on feminist pedagogy into comic form. The two have developed an intriguing collaborative system of analysis and writing, and have published in Teachers College Record and the Harvard Educational Review.

And chairing the panel was Marcus Weaver-Hightower, a professor at the University of North Dakota whose research, in comic form, explores the incredibly difficult topic of losing a child at birth, with a focus on the experience of fathers. His work has recently been featured in the new book Qualitative Research: The Essential Guide to Research and Practice.

What struck me, as I listened to these writer/artists was the wide variety of approaches they brought to the table. Some wrote and drew alone, some struggled through the difficulties of collaboration. Some spoke of their work in terms of narrative, others in terms of the arts. They came with different levels of knowledge about comics. But it meshed better than many panels I have seen because of the obvious passion for the form, and the wide possibilities in using comics in research and writing in the field of education.

As soon as I got home I was inspired to get back to drawing!

Dancing Against Violence Against Women: Behind the Scenes

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Paul

For V-Day this year, February 14th, Boston’s youth cultural organizing group Project HIP-HOP joined One Billion Rising to counter violence against women through dance. Check out this excellent behind-the-scenes video from Press Pass TV, a local youth-Led media group.

Am I Worth It? Crowdsourcing and Critical Pedagogy

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Paul

by guest blogger Dalitso Ruwe.

“Look at the weak and cry, pray one day you’ll be strong
Fighting for your rights, even when you’re wrong
And hope that at least one of you sing about me when I’m gone
I am worth it?”
— Kenderick Lamar

The existential question posed by Kenderick Lamar in the song “Sing About Me,” off his album good kid m.A.A.d city, aptly depicts the states of terror that shape the subjectivity of today’s youth. While critics may be prompted to dismiss his anecdotes as part of Hip Hop’s phantasmagoria, contextualized they excavate the growing nexus of violence that dominate the lives of youth. The State terror that drove Aaron Schwartz to commit suicide; the domestic violence that killed Kasandra Perkins; the communal violence that killed Trayvon Martin and fatally wounded Malala Yousufzai; have all become commonplace.

Education is not the sole key to addressing this public crisis, yet educators must help reclaim the public by affirming with youth that life is worth living. Pedagogy must wrestle with the fact that the worth of youth often vacillates between being targeted as consumers and being seen as a disposable population fit for the prison industrial complex. Critical pedagogy, as postulated by world-renowned educator Paulo Freire, helped us understand the need for renewed societal values by showing how racism, sexism, and economical exploitation shaped the experience of youth through the lens of popular media in the 80′s. Feminists building on critical pedagogy illuminated the complex ways that power and violence function in the nuclear family and heterosexual relationships. Yet the buck stops there. Critical pedagogy has become confined in academic camps because we lack the language and values necessary to address the states of terror that have escalated into youth-on-youth violence.

As we move into a more technologically-integrated society, the pressing question is how to elevate youth concomitantly through social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. The first task in answering this question is to challenge the notion that the youth are aloof and normalized to the violence in their midst. If we look closely at these social media hangouts, cultivated by the idea of crowdsourcing. we find that youth are driven by two goals: the need to share information, and the need to be content creators. Our next task, then, is to engage them in transforming their ingenuity and passion to share and create content into a social praxis that revisions the modern world. Blueprints have been offered. The revolutionary maneuvers of youth in North Africa have been realized through Twitter as a cabal for strategy. The Occupy movement illustrated how we can create webs of inclusion in a leaderless movement, and introduced the public speaking platform known as mic check. These ideas engender a generational attitude capsulated in crowdsourcing as a way of being.

Crowdsourcing, however, isn’t the Marxist dream of a classless society. The
carnage youth face in the streets makes us culpable for failing to create effective institutions that integrate youth into society. If the future belongs to the youth, we must engage them by transforming the ideas of identity management on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram into community management by asking them to help share and create ideals we can live by.

Dalitso Ruwe is a research assistant for the upcoming publication Kanye West: Philosophy and the Tragic Image.

Rituals of Social Change

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Paul

Can rituals — with all their focus on continuity and tradition — be a force for social change?

Last week, about fifteen family members and friends gathered in a small chapel in Detroit for my grandfather’s funeral. The dais was decorated with white flowers and photographs of Papa Joe at various points in his 93 years — a young navy man in a bomber jacket, an excited groom, a proud father with his three girls, the grandfatherly face I remember best. The funeral was a catholic mass, complete with responsive readings, bible verses, and communion. Then two representatives of the Navy played taps, and performed a flag folding ceremony, honoring Papa Joe’s service during WWII. These rituals, each movement prescribed down to the creasing of the flag, had a surprisingly strong effect on me. At one moment, during the playing of taps, I was able to imagine my grandfather as a young navy man hearing those same notes decades earlier.

An American Flag Folding Ceremony: http://www.vfwpost2423.com/flag_fold_ceremony.html

The experience has left me thinking a lot about rituals. According to the sociologist Robert Wuthnow rituals are any actions or events that have symbolic meaning beyond their instrumental value. For the navy, folding the American flag is not just about easy storage. And rituals communicate something about the social order: its norms, power relations, etc. We are surrounded by mundane rituals every day — from sending thank you cards to brushing our teeth. But there is a special place in our lives for large, collective rituals that we share with our communities.

Rituals are often associated with maintaining the status quo. They are about continuity. Their repetition and lack of change are what make them powerful. Rituals are used to inculcate new members into a culture, or affirm a group’s values. But can they also be forces for change and resistance? Organizers and cultural workers are doing just that, in a few different ways.

Northwest Bronx Annual Meeting

Rituals as Unifying Practices
Many organizing groups and social movements have made use of the rituals of religion to cohere participants together. In the research my colleagues and I conducted with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in NYC, religious ritual was key to developing a sense of “shared fate” among the diverse Bronx population. For example, beginning their annual meeting with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish prayers served to connect members to the social justice values inherent in their own faiths, and to affirm shared values across religions.

Rituals as Counter-Narratives
While many rituals serve as connections to the past, this does not always make them conservative. Last post I wrote about the Idle No More movement, whose public actions in support of indigenous sovereignty are built around the traditional native circle dance. In a society that often treats indigenous culture as something for the history books, these rituals help to reassert the strength of a marginalized culture. Moreover, doing so in a mall contrasts a native ritual of unity with one of the key rituals of consumer culture — shopping.

New Rituals for a New Culture
Often citing Gandhi’s call to “be the change you want to see in the world,” social change groups develop internal cultures where they can live out the values they preach. One way to do this is through creating or adapting new rituals that embody these new ways of being. The human megaphone or people’s mic used by Occupy Wall Street protesters was more than just a clever solution to restrictions on sound equipment. It became a ritual through which the group publicly lived their values of do-it-yourself sufficiency and collectivity.

Toolbox of Activist Rituals
Over the years, an array of rituals have been created specific to activism and social change. Once innovative, these rituals now serve as available and adaptable resources: sit-ins, work stoppages, marches. They link one action to the history of activism and the spirit of social change. The modern community organizing movement has similarly developed a set of shared rituals, such as one-on-ones, narratives of empowerment, and public meetings (Hart, 2001).

SOA Watch March

Rituals and Emotion
Finally, rituals can elicit and make space for emotion, a powerful driver for involvement in social action (Taylor & Whittier, 1995). SOA Watch, a group that protests the US government training of military personnel from Latin America, gathers each year outside Fort Benning in Georgia for a massive march/vigil. Each participant holds a white cross with the name of someone killed by soldiers trained at Fort Benning. Leaders read off a long list of the dead, followed by a chorus of “presente” (present). To be a part of this march is to feel a combination of sadness and anger, and to recommit oneself to the cause.

The Feather and the Fist: Media, Ceremony, and #IdleNoMore

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Paul

The newest of media meet the oldest of traditions as indigenous protests sweep Canada and the web.

The Idle No More movement, which began just weeks ago in response to the Canadian omnibus budget bill C-45, widened quickly to encompass long-running concerns around indigenous sovereignty, land, and environmental degradation. The uprising was originally sparked by four First Nations women who began running teach-ins about C-45, a bill that would weaken environmental laws and make the leasing of indigenous lands easier. It went country-wide with the National Day of Solidarity & Resurgence on December 10th. Today much more is at stake than the fate of one bill, as the protests become a focal point for First Nations demands for sovereignty, environmental protection, and the upholding of treaties.

The movement is taking full advantage of social media and web-based outreach. They have called upon supporters to spread the word via twitter, facebook, youtube, posters, videos, and poems. The organization’s hashtag, #IdleNoMore, is showing up in tweets from across the world. They have put out some striking visuals, and their efforts have inspired poster artists to share their work in solidarity (below from Dwayne Bird, Gillian Goerz, and Aaron Paquette)

At the same time, the protests are rooted deeply in First Nation symbols, ceremonies, arts, and traditions. From the image of the feather in a fist, to the use of sacred peace pipes, organizers are tapping the power of indigenous culture and framing their work through indigenous concepts like “e na tah maw was sew yak” which means “defending the children/generations.” Flash mobs in streets and shopping malls have been centered on the traditional round dance. Even the hunger strike by Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence, which began on December 11th, echoes aboriginal fasting traditions.

The use of traditional symbols, ceremonies, and arts does not only offer support to political efforts — it is a political act in and of itself. As Greg Macdougall puts it:

In this context, a fast/hunger strike as part of Idle No More (along with the many prayer ceremonies, drumming, round dance flash mobs, etc that have been happening) shows how the very Native culture that the people are standing up for is very much alive and experiencing a (re)surgence that can be a point of hope and solidarity in this country racked with so much present and historical pain and amnesia.

In combining the newest online media and communications techniques with traditional symbols and ceremonies, Idle No More is treading ground first successfully walked by the Zapatistas in their 1994 uprising. People can try to write off the growing attention to #IdleNoMore as another twitterverse fad. But as the cultural work of the movement makes clear, this rebellion did not appear overnight with the latest Bieber gossip. This is only the most recent face of a centuries-long resistance movement that has never been idle for long.

To learn more, and to find out how to get involved, check out the Idle No More website, and the recent Native Appropriations interviews with movement participants.

What Superheroes Teach Us About Power

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Paul

This is part 5 in an ongoing series about art and power

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about power, looking at some of the big power theories out there. But many of our everyday theories of power are not buried in academic libraries, but right in front of us in gleaming spandex. I’m talking about superheroes. If superhero comics are all about power, what kind of power are they talking about? What are they teaching us? Read on, true believer!

Power as the Ability to Act
Since Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics, most superheroes have been defined by one or more powers: flight, invisibility, healing factor, vomiting, etc. In this sense, a power is an ability. This usage implies that we all have “powers,” though ours are decidedly less super. I, myself have the power to walk, to breathe, to protest, and to blog. In their typology of power, Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller would call this kind of power “Power To…the unique potential of every person to shape his or her life and world.” This use of the word power also assumes that power is something that an individual has and can use — though it can be taken away with some well-placed kryptonite.

Some community organizers, like Ernie Cortez Jr. of the IAF, speak about power in a similar way. Because they see building power in marginalized communities as positive, they separate the word power from negative ideas like oppression and domination. They often point out that power in Spanish — poder — simply means “to be able to.”

Power = Responsibility
Perhaps the most famous line in comic book history came from Spiderman: “With great power comes…great responsibility!” Superheroes are those who take up this mantle of responsibility to others, while supervillains do not.

This resonates with the ideas of Steven Lukes. Lukes says that one of the reasons we need to talk about power is because we need to figure out who we can hold responsible. He defines the “powerful” as those to whom we can attribute responsibility — either for acting, or for not acting. Just like Spiderman holds himself responsible for not stopping a thief, who later killed his uncle, we can hold powerful people like CEOs and politicians responsible for not protecting the environment (for example) even if they aren’t the ones doing the polluting. This is because they have the power (and thus the responsibility) to step in.

Power Corrupts
In one of my personal favorite comic book stories of all time, the Dark Phoenix Saga, the author (mis)quotes Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We see this corruption in action as Phoenix, who has the power to consume stars, turns into Dark Phoenix and does just that. In a more recent twist on this theme, the comic series Irredeemable shows how a superman-like character, with a bit of an inferiority complex, transforms into an unstoppable villain.

Today the casualness with which we approach corruption in government shows that we pretty much take this idea as a given. The “balance of powers” in governments like the US is an attempts to avoid absolute power and thus absolute corruption (though this balance seems to be deteriorating).

Money is Power
The X-men got their powers from genetic mutation, Superman from our yellow sun, and the Fantastic Four from “cosmic rays.” But Batman was just really, really rich (and a little crazy). This was enough to land him a spot among the worlds most powerful superheroes in the Justice League.

In his classic, much reprinted book “Who Rules America,” G. William Domhoff has thoroughly documented the connection between economic wealth and power over the history of the US. He doesn’t quite say money is power, but shows that money is a resource for power, money can lead to power, and money is an indicator of where power lies — showing us just how unequal power distribution is. We now know people like Bruce Wayne as “the 1%.”

Collective Power
While many comics celebrate purely individual power, there is also a strain of collective power running through the superhero world. The X-men in particular continually learn that while each has a specific, individual power, its usually only by combining their powers that they can succeed. As the recent Avengers movie showed, even the most powerful must unite when the big threats come down. Combining our powers makes us more than the sum of our parts.

The power of collective action is sometimes called “power with.” Bernard Loomer writes about a similar concept of “relational power,” which is the power that comes from true collaboration, from not only being able to change others but being open to change yourself.

What Comics Don’t Teach Us About Power
While there are many types of power at work in superhero comics, it is perhaps more notable which types of power are absent. There is little to no talk of the power of systems and institutions, or the power of cultural forces like mass media. What if power is not something a person can “have” at all, but something that surrounds all of us, shaping not only what we can do but what we even think is possible? I’ll be exploring some of these ideas in upcoming posts in this ongoing series.

Some Red-Shirt Hip-Hop for Chicago Teachers

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Paul

In Chicago, teachers…forget it. I could never say it as well as Rebel Diaz already has. Listen up. If you don’t know, now you know.

Homey i was taught by a Chicago teacher, Chicago teacher, Chicago teacher
I learned to read and write from a Chicago teacher
So I’m inspired by the fight for my Chicago teachers…

Chicago Teachers Tell a New Story

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Paul

There is a story about school reform that has caught on in recent years. It goes something like this: Politicians, researchers, and superintendents — who know what children need — are trying to institute brave, progressive new reforms in our failing school system. But standing in their way are teachers who are simply not trying hard enough, and evil unions that selfishly protect adults and don’t care about children. The solution? Break the unions and let the leadership do whatever it thinks best.

This story is manipulative and misleading. It ignores the abuses of power that led to the need for unions in the first place; it ignores the deep flaws in the corporate reform and testing movements; it ignores the need for quality teacher professional development and support; it ignores the vast diversity among teachers unions; and it fundamentally puts forward a regressive, untenable solution to our educational woes: improvement through the dis-empowering of a massive number of people.

Fortunately, teachers in Chicago are putting forward a different story, one about empowered teachers acting collectively to improve schools for both teachers and students. Despite confining limits on the union — including a state law that forces them to debate only wages and benefits — the CTU and its progressive new leadership are putting reform issues front and center. The CTU deserves our support. If we are going to have a productive national debate about the reforms we need — even the need to reform some teachers unions — we need to toss aside the anti-teacher narrative for good.

For more info on supporting the CTU, visit http://www.teacheractivistgroups.org/chicago-teachers/