Lately I’ve been trying to watch television shows when I take a break. On the recommendation of my BFF, I started watching Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, an excellent show that I highly recommend. However, as it turns out, Dollhouse is all about the intricacies of the human mind–what it’s capable of accomplishing and what our ambition is capable of destroying. As with all of Whedon’s creations, Dollhouse is thought-provoking and often disturbing for that very reason, not unlike my research. As it turns out, in some ways it’s the best kind of break. I watch it but my mind doesn’t disengage from my overall topic; it shifts. Perhaps as importantly, it’s served to remind me of my purpose and reinvigorate me.

In the television show one character–Echo–has the unique abilities and more importantly the desire to make changes for the better, to help people. Seeing that made me remember something important and realize something more important. First I remembered that I want to help people. But there are lots of ways to help others–volunteering at a shelter, working at a rape crisis center–these are things that I could do that wouldn’t involve writing a dissertation about the rhetoric of trauma blogs. But helping in those ways wouldn’t be using the unique combination of skills and desires that I possess. I’m trained as a rhetorician, researcher, and scholar; I want to help people who’ve been traumatized; and I have the opportunity to write this dissertation at a point in time where no one else has written about the rhetorical strategies of trauma bloggers. This isn’t to say that I’m the only one who is capable of doing so, rather that the confluence of events in my life–both personal experiences and academic knowledge–make me capable of accomplishing this goal and laying groundwork for others to contribute to the research. This is my kairotic moment. It turns out that what began as leisure served to propel my work. While professional success is always a motivating factor, it’s never been enough for me. To be motivated, I must believe that I what I do will help someone other than just me. I possess the ability to do something that matters, and if I don’t, there’s no guarantee that anyone else will. Thanks, Echo.

My specific problem is how to talk about those who have been traumatized. The words typically used to describe those who’ve been traumatized are “survivor” or “victim.” A recent interview with a woman who had breast cancer described herself as a “fighter” rather than a survivor. But “fighter” doesn’t seem like the right word either. I guess it comes down to how we define ourselves. Yet for the life of me, I can come up with a word that shakes the preconceived labels already in use. Even as a someone who has been traumatized, I’ve been unable to find a word that works. I would call myself both a victim and a survivor. For me I’ll always be both. A victim of violence that left me traumatized and could have left me dead. I’m not being melodramatic. Situations involving domestic violence (not just the spouse battering kind) frequently result in death, either by the hands of the perpetrator or by their own hand. Sometimes death seems like the only way out of the horrific memories or the current reality. Fortunately, I now look at myself as a survivor but a part of me will still always be a victim, as disempowering as that feels, it’s a reality that I’ve yet to escape. Still, in spite of my own experience, I have yet to come up with a word that hasn’t already been used and that still reflects my experience adequately. Words are tricky things.

I’ve been considering this issue for some time given that  it’s an essential part of my dissertation. My temporary solution–to refer to them as the traumatized. Long term solution is that I’ll ask my participants how they define themselves. It seems only appropriate given that I advocate participatory research. In future research, I’ll add it to my questionnaire. At this point in my research I’ll need to work the email angle. For now, this is what I’ve come up with for my dissertation. So, here’s a little portion of my draft:

One of the challenges in writing about trauma (and in fact in all writing) is the selection of terminology that best reflects the writer’s perception and coincides with how the reader will understand the term. In this circumstance it is important that I define my choice of terminology and the tensions that exist in selecting them.  As Kenneth Burke notes: “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality” (1966, p. 45). I am conscious of the fact that the terminology I choose to use here will reflect my selection of reality and will thus deflect from other points of view. The best thing we can do, then, is be conscious of the choices that we make and remember (and supply our reader with the transparency) that these terms are our interpretation of reality.

My conflict here is multi-layered. Not only do I need to recognize that my choices are an interpretation, I find it difficult to actually interpret the reality with the terms available to me. I am uncomfortable using the word “victim” because I feel as though it is a further violation of the person who has been traumatized by placing them in the position of a passive object who has been acted upon. A victim is someone that something happened to, who has been acted upon. The traumatized have already been stripped of their agency by the victimizer and resulting trauma; how can I further strip them of that power? But there is a certain reality to the term victim; it does reflect an important fact—someone hurt them So, why not call them survivors? This is a further difficulty. True, the traumatized have survived their traumatic experiences in the sense that they have not died. However, survival is more than not being dead; it’s about living. As I’ve explained, the traumatized are unable to live fully in the present. They are possessed by their traumatic memory; the trauma is still acting upon them. Surviving means healing. By referring to people who have been traumatized as survivors by virtue of the fact that they did not die is a deflection of the reality of trauma’s effects. The term “survivor” deflects attention from the harm done by the traumatic experiences. So, if I choose to use the term “victim” for some of those who have been traumatized at what point do they become survivors and do I have the right to make that determination?

My interpretation of this reality is that speaking is survival. By not remaining silent, trauma victims reclaim their agency; they live. While this certainly doesn’t ensure that they heal, it does mean that they are surviving. The trauma isn’t controlling them entirely; they are beginning to process the memories, to loosen their hold. The trauma bloggers that I discuss are survivors, even more so they are activists. By giving voice to the existence and experience of trauma, they are creating an awareness of traumatic experiences and the damage of trauma to the psyche.

Ultimately victim and survivor, as terms, form an either/or binary that obfuscates the complexity of trauma. Not only does it force the individual to be identified as either the acted upon or the actor, it also neglects the spectrum that might exist between these two states of experience. Healing is a process and thus “becoming” a survivor is a process. Using one term or the other deflects the attention away from the lived experience of coping and living with trauma—attention that I am not willing to lose. So, unable to develop a term reflective of how I view those who have experienced trauma, I will simply refer to them as “the traumatized.” While this term still places them in an object position, it lacks the negative connotation of “victim.” Happily, when speaking specifically about people who have both experienced and blog about trauma, I can use the term “trauma blogger.”

Since I am particularly fond of student generated media, here is a short YouTube video created in honor of bell hooks. (Point #7 is particularly relevant to Black History Month.)

A recent talk that bell hooks gave at Burton Street Community Center and Peace Gardens in Asheville, NC is also on YouTube. In her talk, she discusses community, technology, gender, and race and reads from one of her children’s books Be Boy Buzz. She ends her talk with the following: “In Buddhism we talk about the fact that the earth is my witness. So, we are here today to witness together the need to build community on all levels, to remember that community is not one-dimensional, to remember that we can come together in many different fronts and be together and belong.”

hooks’ scholarship and perspectives on community have been instrumental in my dissertation research. They have continued to encourage my belief in participatory research and education. Her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom profoundly influenced my own pedagogical approaches and introduced me to the Pauolo Freire’s “liberatory pedagogy.” I have continued to follow her work with great interest.

In a discussion with The Media Education Foundation, hooks talks about how “popular culture is where the pedagogy is; it is where the learning is” revealing how her interest in analyzing pop culture arose out of her experiences in the classroom. Students had difficulty understanding concepts of difference and otherness and how these were relevant to their lives, but when discussed in the context of films or tv shows, the students were better able to grasp the concepts. Part one of her discussion is included below:

An additional point that I appreciate here is her insistence upon the importance of critical thinking for all people and how the ability to think critically is an important tool that can make a difference in the lives of everyone, regardless of their material wealth or class status.

The most enabling resource that I can offer as a critic or an intellectual professor is the capacity to think critically about our lives. I think thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life and I really believe that a person who thinks critically who, you know, may be extraordinarily disadvantaged materially can find ways to transform their lives that can be deeply and profoundly meaningful in the same way that someone who may be incredibly privileged materially and in crisis in their life may remain perpetually unable to resolve their life in any meaningful way if they don’t think critically.

In addition hooks speaks against this idea that certain students should only be taught what are considered “practical skills” that they can use to get a job and make money. She doesn’t claim that this is unimportant; she simply emphasizes the importance of critical thinking as a tool and the right to learn it. Having taught in the Ivy League and at open admissions universities, hooks notes that the distinction between the students at the two types of schools is mostly based on their perception of their future:

My students were equally brilliant when I taught in Harlem as when I taught at Yale or Oberlin, but that their senses of what the meaning of that brilliance was and what they could do with it, their sense of agency was profoundly different….They don’t have that imagination into a future of agency and as such I think  many professors do not try to give them the gift of critical thinking. In a certain kind of patronizing way education just says all these people need is tools for survival, basic survival tools, like their degree so they can get a job and not in fact that we enhance their lives in the same way we’ve enhanced our lives by engaging in a certain kind of critical process.

The points that hooks makes here are some that I have struggled with myself. It’s crucial that we find the balance between equipping students with the skills that they expect to learn in order to find a job. The reality is that most students enter higher education with the objective of attaining a job, specifically one that is higher paying than the one they would get with a high school education. When I chose to go to college, while I certainly expected to get a job, my primary motivation was to learn knew things. I was lucky to have already been instilled with a belief in the importance of critical thinking and perhaps more importantly with the belief that it was my right to learn these things. (hooks mentions that Yale students feel entitled to that kind of learning in a way that her Harlem students do not.) I was also privileged enough that for me higher education was a given; I never doubted that I could and would go to college. Many of my students at Purdue have had similar experiences though it seems that most of them entered college with attaining a well-paying job as a primary objective. As educators we are faced with the challenge of meeting the wants and needs of our students as they perceive them and as we perceive them.

Ultimately, I believe that teaching critical thinking skills and the more “practical” on-the-job skills expected by our students are not incompatible goals. As educators we have the responsibility of providing students with the education that they want while maintaining our goals as teachers. Much of the challenge that arises here has much to do with not wanting to assume that we want to teach our students is more important than what they want to learn. The important point to recognize is that we have been educated and trained to know (or determine) what “global” tools that they need to learn the more specific or “local” tools. Teaching students how to think critically is a way of teaching them how to learn new things on their own. If we equip them with the global tools that they need in order to make learning a lifelong enterprise, we give them the gift of education and not just training. At the same time, if we are to successfully teach them the global tools, we must demonstrate how these tools can be translated into learning the skills that they seek. The important thing to recognize is that we can’t teach them all of the skills that they need for the workplace and the world, but we can help them learn the tools that they can use to continue to learn those skills beyond our classroom. The point that I am trying to make is that we cannot and should not choose critical thinking over workplace skills or vice-versa. Instead we should create curricula that enable the learning of both. It’s analogous to the way that we teach revision in writing. Students work from global concerns such as content, clarity, organization, etc. to more local concerns such as grammar, punctuation, and editing. A grammatically correct piece of writing is of little use if it is not clearly written, well-organized, and contains well-researched and carefully considered content. In the same way, skills are only effective if they are accompanied by an understanding of how the skills can be used and are learned.

• Graduate of Purdue designs shelter for Haiti disaster relief
• Why Intellectuals are All Bad – An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discussing Thomas Sowell’s new book Intellectuals and Society. Sowell, a Stanford economist, “skewers” intellectuals in his book. Not a new song for those of us in the academy. Russel Jacoby notes in the review that Sowell claims that:

Intellectuals do not understand the genius of the market. They ignore empirical evidence. They are elitists. They operate with ideological blinders. Ultimately, they are “unaccountable to the external world.” They judge ideas by how clever or complex they are, not whether they work.

Jacoby also notes that Sowell

writes that his book is “about intellectuals,” but not “for intellectuals,” and he cannot be bothered if his victims find fault with him. But who besides intellectuals would be reading a book on intellectuals?

Ultimately, Jacoby offers a fairly scathing review of Sowell’s poorly argued text.

• 4 Days, 40 Papers, a blog post by Laurie Fendrich that is most interesting in the comments that it generated from Chronicle subscribers
• TC Record’s review of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture by Susan D. Blum. I hope to get a chance to read it soon; it sounds fascinating and very relevant to my recent post on remixing and plagiarism. It also looks to provide some interesting fodder for those of us struggling with teaching research and writing in a world where the rules of research and composition are becoming increasingly blurry.
• Pa. School Official Defended in Webcam Spy Case in The Washington Post discusses the controversial story that a school allegedly used the school-provided computer to spy on a student at home.
• Inside Higher Ed on E-Library Economics

Let me begin my own commentary by saying that the tenure process is not to blame for this shooting. While few things in this world easily fall into black and white (the gray areas are far more prevalent), there are times when homicide can be understood. [I'm feeling chills of discomfort even here. I seem to be at a loss for words as to how to describe my feelings here.] A child whose parents have abused him or her mercilessly can suffer from PTSD (or a range of other mental disorders) causing him or her to dissociate and murder the abuser. I know that I am treading on shaky ground here. As I write this, I am still torn by my belief that murder is never right, never the answer. My next position is also shaky, given that I have just claimed that homicide can be understood. Still, I must say that many people do not receive tenure, and they don’t all go into faculty meetings and start shooting. By that same token, not all children who are abused kill the abuser. So, I don’t want to say that just because other people who don’t attain tenure don’t become shooters that Bishop’s failure to attain tenure could not factor into what she did. To be clear, this does not justify her actions. Ultimately, we will continue to have more questions than answers about her motivation and psychological state. Hopefully, her psychological evaluation will provide insight into why this obviously disturbed individual killed and injured her colleagues. All factors considered failing to attain tenure does not justify homicide.

In spite of some of the arguments that academic culture and tenure requirements can be blamed for Bishop’s actions on Friday, perhaps we can gain something by discussing the culture of academia– not as a justification for homicide, but as a part of our lives that might benefit from careful consideration, perhaps even a bit of excavation.

I have long been of the opinion that the culture of graduate school does not encourage self-care but in fact rewards behaviors that are unhealthy and even dangerous. How many of us have complained about the little sleep that we get while being secretly proud of our dedication? We work through the weekend, late into the night, at the expense of sleep. We fail to eat regular meals and crowd our schedules with additional projects and committees. Being busy demonstrates our ambition and dedication to our work, even when it comes at the expense of our health and relationships. I am completely guilty of buying into this culture and even having pride in my capacity to deny myself. In fact, it comes naturally to me. I’ve always been dedicated and obsessed with my work. It has been my life for so long that I almost forget that there are other things in the world. I inherited my mother’s workaholic gene. Yet this dedication that is so prized when demonstrated through our busy lives, sleep deprivation, and singular obsession with our work has often been to my detriment. Those who know me are aware of my health problems, which are extensive and at times have been disabling. There have been countless times where my obsession with work (and demonstrating the dedication that I have) has been extremely detrimental to my health, often resulting in set backs that I could ill-afford. As an epileptic, I must have a certain amount of sleep and avoid stress as much as possible. Two of the biggest factors in triggering seizures are stress and sleep deprivation. I know this and have tried to get enough sleep and avoid stress. (The latter of which is kind of a joke when you’re on the job market.) Yet even knowing all of this, last March I was working feverishly on a project, not getting enough sleep, and feeling the mounting stress of dissertation work and the upcoming job market. As a result, I ended up in the hospital emergency room, having my clothes cut off of me, and getting fourteen stitches above my left eye. I had a seizure and fell on my face, the cause of which, my doctor adamantly insisted, was my stress and sleep deprivation. This seizure could have caused me to lose an eye; the head trauma could have killed me; I was lucky. Every time I look into a mirror and see the arching scar above my left eye I am reminded of this. Yet even with this powerful reminder, I don’t always get enough sleep and the stress of dissertation and job market is such that I am losing my hair. My point in revealing all of this is simple: I can’t do this alone. I still live in a culture that praises lack of care and views care of self as indulgent.

Certainly this is not exclusive to academia. Being driven and ambitious is highly valued among many, particularly in the United States. The corporate culture is most assuredly a proponent of this mentality. It makes me wonder if corporate culture values have seeped into academia. Corporate practices most certainly have; universities are most often run like corporations rather than educational institutions. So, have the teachers and scholars taken on these characteristics or have we always been this way? And if we have taken on these characteristics in response to a corporate culture, is it because the university is run like a corporation and behaving like aspiring executives is our best way to ensure job security or is it because of a more pervasive ideology? Or am I asking the wrong questions? Would these answers be too simplistic to truly explore why we drive ourselves into the ground? Okay. I’m digressing somewhat and pontificating a lot, so back to Huntsville…

Let me continue to say that I am confused by my response to the shooting in Huntsville and the information that continues to filter into the news. Reports of Bishop’s previous violent acts and alleged violent acts are of great concern, while at the same time they raise concerns regarding inclusion of prior bad acts. Certainly in a legal setting this is frequently not allowed when trying a defendant in court, but in the court of public opinion everything is fair game. It certainly raises questions about vilification that goes beyond the shooting. How many of us would stand up to the rigorous scrutiny that Bishop is undergoing? At the same time, her past and the extreme nature of the events being uncovered are certainly piling up, foreshadowing what could be a terrible avalanche. From the shooting of her brother (with two versions of the story varying widely) to her alleged involvement in the attempted bombing of a fellow professor to punching a woman in the head at an IHoP in Huntsville because she got the last booster seat (Bishop plead guilty to the charge of assault and battery in this case) this story just continues to get more and more bizarre and convoluted. In truth, the more I read the less I understand and the more confused I become. All I can say at this point is that all of this violence saddens me and like the stories I’ve read on trauma blogs, it makes me question humanity. To paraphrase from a favorite character: the one thing that humans have been consistently good at is inventing and learning new ways to hurt and kill one another.

*Note: I know that the more mainstream media outlets have also been following the story, as evidenced by this NY Times article, but I have been primarily following it through the coverage on The Chronicle website.

I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me.

I’m not certain of the veracity of that claim given that she also claims that she did not understand the protocol for appropriate attribution of sources. Not having read the novel, I don’t know if this was somewhere within the text or not. Unless of course she was referring to this line by one of her characters: “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.” Ironically this claim is also taken verbatim, and without attribution, from the blog written by Strobo‘s author, Arien.

While I am a proponent of remixing and sampling in the context of multimedia, I also believe in using appropriate attribution in those contexts. In addition, the remixing of a single work or sampling from a variety of works to create something new (like a mashup) should serve a specific rhetorical purpose and be presenting in a context that is not identical to the original work. In my own practice and in my teaching, I follow the standards for fair use as defined by The Center for Social Media at American University in their publication Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Their video Remix Culture is a great representation and follows their Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.

Check out the  Remix Culture video here: