writing journal

R has final (mostly final) drafts of chapters 2 and 3 and i am reading for 4. this is all good stuff.

in the meantime, though, i need to start working on preparing my materials for the job market. which means being able to write an entire paragraph on What My Dissertation Is About.

so what is it about? it's about asking how rhetoric of and about citizenship influences what we think citizenship means, i think. thus the way that rhetorical ecologies throw citizenship and weird together and shopping becomes a citizenly activity. thus the way demonstrators speak about "what democracy looks like" in Seattle in 1999 even as the mayor calls them criminals. and thus the way we accept that participants in the arab spring were fighting to become citizens even though many of them didn't vote, and in egypt have tried to stall voting.

so there's confusion over what citizenship means. to what extent are things like shopping, locking into a human chain, and setting fire to buildings acts of citizenship? and how does place fit into this?

because another thing i need to be able to justify if why these three topics. i start with louisville because of place. the concern of the citizen-consumer, in BL movements, is only with their city. and in reality, the movement only involves parts of the city. (is there potential for more, sure, yeah. but we're not there.) in seattle, there are global concerns, but the objective of the crowd, as a whole, was to shut down this event in this city. and the way we talk about the events of N30 reduce it to an epic battle in that one city, not to a city in a network of worldwide struggle.

so then what about the arab spring? well, it's different, because protesters had local concerns, but saw themselves as part of a pan-arabic movement.

so do i end by saying this is the best example? i mean, maybe it is. but the point maybe is that because it's so hard for us to think about these activities as citizenship that people don't know what to do next?

i don't know. this is as close as i'm getting.

writing journal 2

PW: started putting together the so-what section. next steps might include talking to R.

Diss: realized i've totally lost the focus on local that R and i discussed over the summer. the question of how do we create a local that doesn't also alienate or do damage. i want to see if i can incorporate the discussion of the local (after the section that discusses citizenship as both too big and too small) and then use that to ask this question - how can we connect the local up to something less harmful than guilt and hate-love? and what should that be? and why should this override any concerns we have about making emotion part of judgment? some of the PW stuff is overlapping this, but that should be okay. need to get into this tuesday. find out if he think i should lose the stuff from ahmed about stickiness.

i ran 2 miles tonight. and my hands still hurt from grading all weekend. so fuck a bunch of getting detailed.

writing journal

THOMAS WATSON SUBMISSION

Sat down today with Dr. Pruchnic's "Ironic Encounters." Took notes on his discussion of Hannah Arendt's discussion of virtuosity. Dr. P suggested that one way I might go about finding an argument for my own TW submission would be by responding to him. He argues that we've had an ethical take on aesthetics, and now maybe we need to focus more on aesthetics. He's suggesting we teach tactics that work, even if we sometimes find them unsavory. One of the things he recommends is "less what students need, more what they want." But I feel like when he says this, he's not looking at what I'm looking at. For one thing, he's trying to teach students to survive in a world that capital is rapidly making unsurvivable - thinking of this and attempts to de-skill even supposedly virtuoso-oriented work like bill collection, sales, tech support. So that maybe teaching to genre, DC, etc is the one ethical thing to do. Or maybe what I'm doing is outlining more clearly what a pedagogy of student want should look like. Not sure.

Next steps: Re-read my argument. See if Dr. P's slots in somewhere. Think about reading the Arendt he cites. Clarify for myself what I think about this.


POSSIBLE ARTICLE
Re-read my Phoenix Wright paper. Problems: no beginning. No "so what?" factor. I'm explaining what I'm seeing, but not telling anyone why they should give a damn about it.

Next steps: look into some scholarship about video games being harmful? (seems lame, but maybe worth it). Go back to the stuff I have on citizenship as response, and see if it seems helpful for making a comparison between the player and the citizen. Hope for divine intervention.