snow day, الحمدلله

Projects on tap right now: CCS Conference paper on the impaired citizenship of women.  Reworking chapter on Arab Spring for publication. Charity and Citizenship paper.

What I Did Today/Recently

I have been buried, which is no excuse for anything. Hiring committee stuff, grading both papers and midterms in one class, etc. Plus general health stuff. I lost most of yesterday between seeing my regular doctor, going to a lab, having a ridiculous amount of blood drawn, and then passing out in an exhausted blood-loss coma. I'm not thrilled about this snow day - my 101 class is losing valuable time on a difficult paper - but it is giving me a chance to get caught up on things.




The other members of the Watson panel have decided they're not interested, so that's being dropped from my immediate tasks. The theme is weird, and I was relying on their ideas to help me justify my own. It would be nice if we all had this talk sooner, but whatever. One less thing to do.


I read both "A Pedagogy of Charity," and "The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric" a week or ten days ago. Neither seems helpful for anything I'm doing. Another article, "The Princess and the Magic Kingdom," does seem potentially helpful for the Citizenship piece. Not for a lot, mind you, but there's a reference to heroes living in reality, princesses in unreality that I will probably include somewhere.


I bought a LOT of books last week. One of them, A Question of Sex, had some good stuff. Specifically, it talks about the postfeminist media context as one where success is measured in terms of the products we can purchase, our ability to achieve economic stability. The author says that this tends to depoliticize oppression. She mentions Susan Douglas's work on "enlightened sexism," which I think is probably worth my taking a look at. Wayne State appears to have a copy, so whenever the snow lets up, I can trek down there. The idea, in general, seems to be that we shift the conversation from groups of people to individuals. Not to say that individuals, and their agency and responsibilities, aren't important. But we stop seeing patterns. It's as if every day another student at Kettering was getting mugged and instead of asking "is someone targeting our students?" we just continued to treat each event as involving individuals with no group affiliations. Or, more relevant, like when McCain chose Palin as his running mate, and people were like "oh, look, discrimination based on gender is totally over, forever, because this one woman, EVER, was included."


I also read through a book called Citizen Critics, although I genuinely can't remember now which project I thought it was useful for. I only made a couple of notes on it, and they were about what the author says the role of rhetoric is, to help us begin to "manifest a public-oriented subjectivity...to turn private reactions about literary or cultural texts into discourses that address some shared concerns" (9). This is very much in line with my own definition of citizenship from the dissertation, which is why it struck me. But it doesn't help me make an argument about anything as much as it helps me to justify my methodology.


When I look back over what I've gotten done in the last two months, I realize I need to make some changes. It's great to read, but I can read *forever* and still not know enough. This conference is in early April. I absolutely have to start writing.

Next Steps

1. Take the outline of Citizenship paper that I made and start fleshing it out with actual writing
2.  Read Visions of Charity for the Charity piece
3. Find and read the Susan Douglas book on enlightened sexism
4. Re-read Chapter 1 of Azoulay. 
5. Finish reading Women & Citizenship for Citizenship
6. Do a markup of what's worth keeping and what has to be fixed in Arab Spring chapter
7. Talk with Student Life about Citizenship