We're on to the 'grammar of identity' - how we narrate ourselves and our histories. What's the risk: 'producing a static genre of self' (Hill, 2000) - the idea that the individual has reached a point of perfection which experience shouldn't change. This is something I've experienced in class - students who aren't curious because their lives are fine exactly as they are. But I really don't think that ending 'celebrating diversity', as we've just been told to do, will help. We're being told to go beyond the 'piety' of evoking the cultural wounds of oppression to avoid 'refus[ing' any type of modification, amplification, or meaningful metamorphosis in the face of unfamiliar experiences' (Hill).
This is dodgy. Yes, identity politics is limited, but I can't reconcile a privileged Anglo-Saxon white bourgeois telling the poor, black and colonialised that it's time to move on from the effects of empire and colonialism - despite the effects still being experienced. I'm not convinced that many people are 'held' by their cultural inheritance - they already are dynamic and individual, while not forgetting their histories.
Another colleague singled out.
The solution seems to be that individuals are 'singular'. Yet this makes the mistake of assuming that we are somehow self-created, rather than a confluence of experiences and cultural inheritances. The experiences and the inheritances aren't unique - but the combination is. We aren't stable and fixed - we are dynamic constructs rather than fixed points.
As an aside: Last of the Summer Wine has been cancelled, after 37 years.
Student should 'organise who they are through ambition'. Hmmm…
We should forget 'cross-cultural encounters' and encourage students to distance themselves from their roots. Implicitly, this means the black and foreign ones - implicit because we don't 'celebrate' the Anglo-imperialist pasts of our white English students. We shouldn't only 'celebrate' students' roots - but how does this apply to a diverse classroom? All this would be fine if we didn't exist within a society that is still culturally white, imperialist, Western and capitalist. It's not a level playing field. We still need to critique the dominant narrative, to learn more about the marginalised cultures which she's trying to move past.
We should 'move beyond self-defeating concepts of difference', especially nationalism. Fine if we're combatting BNP nationalism - not so fine if you're nationalist Northern Irish, or Palestinian.
Baudrillardist's being mentioned again - apparently his book on Baudrillard is beautiful and more intelligible than Baudrillard (proved by her definition of Baudrillardian exchange).
Maybe I'm being cruel, but I've heard a melange of 30 year old theorists used to basically say that it's time to stop worrying about global inequality, cultural hegemony and so on - individual 'exchanges' are what matters, so let's be nice to each other on a personal level and our students will be 'global citizens' without having to know a single thing about global politics, history or economics. No sense of how this is meant to tie in with teaching, nor any of how British students are meant to experience the world other than by sitting in class with overseas ones.
Questions.
Executive Board Professor at the heart of the new curriculum:
doesn't too much conceptual fluidity affect mental health?
Response: there needs to be safe pedagogical strategies to avoid this. Eh? Are some questions off limits?
Dean of Students:
Student discomfort with classification - should we not get involved in asking for some classifications?
My thoughts - doesn't self-classification give some people strength?)
Her - there's a debate to be held about that. We should have a box for 'prefer not to say'.
An outsider!
Please don't attack 'assistant bricklayers' (it was a snide aside in the speech) - don't throw away cultural inheritance.
A - I don't think you could even if you wanted to.
The V-C!!!!
'Safe environment' is important. Identity is therapeutic. What about creating a safe environment for students who can't all go on exchanges?
A- 'put in their path experiences' - 'virtually' - this is vacuous - 'in modest ways'.
I'd like to chase the useless appropriation of Baudrillard, but as there's a colleague here who wrote a book on him, I'll leave it to him.
Colleague from philosophy:
Can't underestimate the conflict between equality and diversity agendas, and what motivates a more humanist encounter-based system of encounters. Latter eliminates the need for the first. The first will have effects. What we want to do is not have events which remind us of what we are/were, but these things happen.
I'm very uncomfortable with this discourse. It individualises identity and therefore ignores the fact that if you're white, Western and middle-class, you're going to have a sweet life compared with others, in this country or elsewhere. If you're black, you're likely to have a lower educational level, lower earnings, fewer employment opportunities, worse housing, a degraded environment, a criminal record, worse nutrition and so on. We need to remember and examine this and the effects of this.
I've just asked about this.
'not a satisfactory answer, but there's a line between understanding the power structures and taking up a victimist structure. Students should look for room to manoeuvre'.
Baudrillarist:
You do understand Baudrillard (!) But Vole's criticised you for being postmodern but you're not.
Her - it's postmodern-light.
Him. We don't have identities. You could say that mental illness emerges from identities. Taking identity too abstractly causes problems.
So: let's all be lighthearted postmodernists and institute safe 'exchanges' between students rather than harp on about boring old cultural politics (and actual politics).
That's all folks. Hope you're enlightened.
No comments:
Post a Comment