Reading Capital with David Harvey

Bhupinder blogs:

Listening to David Harvey’s lectures on Capital Vol 1 not only gave me a feeling that I was re- reading Capital but also provided a refreshing enthusiasm that I had experienced when first reading the tome. Though the first three chapters are considered to be somewhat intimidating, these three chapters are also the most interesting ones. As Harvery points out, Marx follows different literary techniques in different parts of the book, and the first three are marked not only by philosophical flamboyance but also literary flourishes with copious references to Shakespeare , Schiller and Balzac (the latter, like Harvey, I read much after reading Capital).

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Student Activists and Protests

Michael Connery blogs about the protests over Tony Blair’s speech at Yale:

Normally I’m skeptical of student anti-war protests. While throwing a pie in Tom Friedman’s face might be emotionally satisfying on some level, it accomplishes very little in the way of real change. In recent years, students have achieved far greater success on campus when their protests were directed at their college or university. Over the past half decade, student protests have helped establish a living wage for workers at Harvard, many campuses, bowing to student pressure have divested from regimes involved in human rights abuses, and many more campuses have made strides toward becoming carbon neutral thanks to the pressure of students. The same cannot be said of student anti-war efforts.

That may be changing…

Teaching Race/Teaching Whiteness

Ann, from Feminist Law Professors, gives us a link to an article on whiteness and teaching in schools:

This Article argues that whiteness operates as the normative foundation of most discussions of race. Legal educators often overlook the role of whiteness in the law school setting and in law more generally. Identifying and understanding whiteness should be an essential component of legal education. This Article considers reasons why legal education rarely addresses this normative role played by whiteness.

IQ and Genetics

Amardeep Singh blogs:

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest in the New Yorker is a must-read for anyone who’s been stuck arguing with an IQ fetishist at a dinner party (sadly, this has happened to me once too often). Gladwell relies heavily on the work of James Flynn, who has a new book out called What is Intelligence?. Flynn shows that IQ scores, in various parts of the world, tend to rise over time — and delves into the implications of those changes for how we understand IQ scores

Asian American Immigrants and Schooling

Stacey J. Lee, over at Asian American Empowerment, blogs about Asian American immigrants and the lack of support they get from the U.S. educational system:

Despite the growing number of immigrant students in schools throughout the country, many schools lack the expertise to adequately serve second language students. In fact, many school districts face a shortage of certified bilingual and English language learner (ELL) teachers. Although there is a significant body of research that suggests that bilingual education programs are most effective, most Asian American students who are English language learners are placed in English as a second language (ESL) classes or other English-only environments (Hakuta & Pease-Alvarez, 1992; Ramirez, 1991).

Battling the Trappings of University Life

The Wily Filipino, a college professor in a tenure battle, gives his two cents on battling neoliberalism in the university system, he opens with:

My former employer, an urban school by reputation, has essentially abandoned its decades-long “commitment” to the working class from its immediate surroundings, and instead has concentrated on recruiting aggressively from the O.C. to fill up their dormitories. (I have nothing against SoCal in particular, but it does raise the question of where the SF high schoolers are ending up. A year ago an overwhelming majority of the first-year students in my anthropology class were already dorm-dwellers. This is a fairly profound student demographic shift in my opinion, suggesting, perhaps erroneously, that they were relatively moneyed and that they had few ties to the local community. But that latter part can change.)

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Enough chitchat; here we go…

Minority Faculty

C.N. Le blogs on a recent study on people of color in college positions:

The study also suggests that there seem to be enough underrepresented minority Ph.D.s out there in the candidate pool, but for various reasons, they aren’t being hired in their same proportions. I’ve covered some of the challenges that minority Ph.D. students face, but for those who make it to the end, one would think that colleges would be eager to hire them to help their schools improve such dismal representation numbers.

But alas, that particular ideal doesn’t seem to match the practical realities, as this study shows. So the question is, why is that the case? I think we in academia need to take a hard look at not just institutional policies at the college level, but also the nitty-gritty details of deliberations at the departmental level and how a particular department chooses their new hires.

In other words, it’s one thing for a college to proclaim that they want to improve their proportions of underrepresented faculty, but it’s another issue altogether for each individual department on that campus to take the initiative to actually hire an underrepresented minority candidate.

Academic Dreams

Joshua Castro blogs on Myspace on his dreams and goals of becoming an ethnic studies professor who actually teaches self-determination and struggle:

I thought about how I would finally have the authority to denounce the quackery and phoniness of so many of the bloodsucking leeches of our Philippine high society and contribute to the assassination of their sorry empty façades of reputations with so many strokes of a pen. To inject the revolutionary character back into Asian American Studies (I am tired of shaking my head as I quote the post-modern intellectual masturbation and sycophantic pro-capitalist babbling of the Asian American banana tinged ivory tower). What will it be like to see a book that I have written sitting on the shelf next to so many other pieces of Ethnic Studies literature?

South Asian Studies

Zooey Live blogs about being a South Asian graduate student and South Asian Studies, one of her points is this:

[T]here is also something else which intrigues me about the South Asian departments. Something that’s also very visible in this class. So few of their students work on modern and/or contemporary South Asia. It’s not that I think working on pre-modern South Asian texts or societies is inherently bad. But there is also this general reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a modern South Asia. Very similar to the project of classical Indology. Which relegated India perpetually into the realm of “ancient.” And my pea-sized brain tells me this is not just an innocent fascination with the pre-modern past. But indeed, this is a very problematic manisfestation of an evolutionary understanding of the world and not totally unconnected to the racial-colonial politics which attempted to colonize non-Western territories by claiming that the people in there are not that “modern.”

Afro-Spear Carnival: The Mis-Education of the Negro in the 21st Century

Afro-Spear hosts their carnival for September and tackles topics such as diversity in education and how today’s educational system relies on propaganda and miseducation:

Welcome to Afrospear’s first Blog Carnival. I would like to thank those who participated. If you have any ideas for future Carnival topics, let us know.

Dalit Seminar

A blogger at Teluga Bloggers writes about an upcoming national seminar in India about Dalits and religion:

Religion is one of the problems for Dalits in India. It is the question of its being implicit and explicit, inclusive and exclusive, an insider and outsider for Dalit life. Dalits have been in dilemma as to which religion they have to follow in the Post- Colonial period. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar has made a statement that he will not die as a Hindu. It had an impact on several Dalit Hindus. Moreover, his conversion to Buddhism has influenced thousands of Dalits to follow. However, there may be a few Dalits who are in Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism, Islam and some others have considered Ambedkarism as one of the religions. The Dalits who are in the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism have constitutional benefits and others who are in Christianity and Islam are denied the same. This could be one of the debates that the seminar is looking forward to address.

Originally linked by Kuffir on Blogbharti.

Identity Politics

In a post on Slant Truth about identity politics Thinking Girl blogs:

Relativism is thrown out when someone wants to derail a discussion. It’s the philosophical equivalent of trolling, if you ask me! Relativism is supposedly about giving equal weight to all points of view, cultural contexts, systems of social organizing, etc. Which, to many, sounds fine and dandy. But in reality, what this does is quite similar to totalization, because it ignores relations of power. One can’t claim to have a view from nowhere, and one can’t claim to have a view from everywhere, either. We are all of us steeped in our own contexts; we cannot simply escape them or set them aside, not ever – and we can’t simply adopt another viewpoint or context just like that. Just as we can’t claim to inhabit a neutral position, we also can’t claim to inhabit every position equally. It’s an epistemological limitation.

The Way of Sufi Chivarly

Abudul-Halim V, of the blog Planet Grenada, points us to a book that focuses on the spiritual aspects of futuwwah:

The Way of Sufi Chivalry by Ibn al-Husayn al-Sulami (translated by Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi). The Arabic term translated as “chivalry” is futuwwah. In Arabic, fata literally means a handsome, brave youth. But the book goes on to explain that based on its use in the Quran, the word came to mean “the ideal, noble and perfect man whose hospitality and generosity would extend until he had nothing left for himself; a man who would give all, including his life, for the sake of his friends.” (the term is used to describe Abraham in the Quran [21:60] when he destroys the idols of his people.)

Apologist Academics Beware

Fire Fly share’s her thoughts on the Everyday Multiculturalism Conference at Macquarie University in Austrailia in her blog She Who Stumbles:

I’m sick to death of (white) academics from the so-called “left” apologising for racist violence. I’m sick of hyper-detailed ethnomethodology being used to erase the power differentials between people of colour and white people. I’m sick of self-absorbed academic relativism that refuses to see the bigger picture.