Pinboard (robertogreco)
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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoHow do I use the internet now? (Is there a sane way to use the internet?) - Search Engine with PJ Vogt (October 2023)2024-03-26T22:46:27+00:00
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-i-use-the-internet-now
robertogrecopjvogt ezraklein internet web online 2023 media news journalism newspapers magazines reporting 2024 socialmedia algorithms analytics attention information nicholascarr sambankman-fried slow time marshallmcluhan mediumisthemessage instagram twitter speed efficiency neilpostman tc television donaldtrump elonmusk seo facebook digitalmedia jennyodell context conversation audience howwethink brain blogs blogging motivation intrinsicmotivation extrinsicmotivation influencers podcasts podcasting quiet silence thinkinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ec9a3e3ac999/Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet - by L. M. Sacasas2024-03-24T02:39:43+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/desire-dopamine-and-the-internet
robertogrecolmsacasas 2024 desire dopamine addiction socialmedia tedgioia technology internet web online distraction history responsibility culture society resistance solitude attention discipline self-discipline engagement restraint vulnerability risk risktaking silence smartphones digital media environment digitalmedia personhood humans compulsion annalembke hannarharendt loneliness blaisepascal alanjacobs dualism dualities duality relationships abundance modernity hartmutrosa superabundance well-being conviviality philiprieff anti-culture deepculture reality scarcity informationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cacb781c0ef0/To See the World Whole - by Christian Study Center2024-02-26T02:00:27+00:00
https://christianstudycenter.substack.com/p/to-see-the-world-whole
robertogreco2024 lmsacasas wholeness objectivity abstraction academia highered highereducation quantification science scientism technology beholding silence agesegregation work life howwelive departmentalization separation philosophy compartmentalization behaviorism technosolutionism ai artificialintelligence machinelearning cyborgs power control hartmutrosa wendellberry cslewis romanoguardini love knowledge progress canon modernity isaacnewton physics specialization faith reason enlightenment mind body humanism facts value values disintegration society culture nature alienation scale humanscale slow small presence distraction attention depression isolation suicide peace wonder maxpicard jrrtolkein livinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5bfaad48bb3a/Is it Weird to Fall in Love with a Machine? - YouTube2024-01-04T19:27:17+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfaSgan0iI
robertogrecodaytontaylor watchmaking life living love loving poetry mentalhealth menralillness howwework fun play making doing report maintenance machines watches 2024 relationships messiness silencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:255c254341fe/Palestine is Still the Issue (John Pilger, 2002) on Vimeo2024-01-02T00:01:27+00:00
https://vimeo.com/17401477
robertogrecojohnpilger palestine israel 2023 2002 occupation terrorism settlercolonialism resistance colonialism colonization nakba imperialism us uk genocide ethnonationalism menachembegin 1946 1948 apartheid yitzhakshamir zionism sterngang middleast violence freedom desmondtutu collectivepunisment holocaust humanity humanism silence onestatesolution ethniccleansing history oppression idf un sixdaywar intifada firstintifada westbank gaza antisemitism policy foreignpolicy settlers documentary 1967 1974 refugees 1987 southafrica arielsharon stateterrorism plo jerusalem yasserarafat 1991 osloaccord 1988 2000 ilanpappé mustafabarghouti shimonperes benjaminnetanyahu ehudbarak dorigold twostatesolution ramielhanan bds lobbying ishayrosen-avi osloaccords globalnorth hamas iofhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0a117d0cc21b/Delving into John Pilger’s 2002 documentary: 'Palestine is still the issue' - YouTube2024-01-01T23:57:22+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acI9zm1TwW0
robertogrecojohnpilger palestine israel 2023 2002 occupation terrorism settlercolonialism resistance colonialism colonization nakba imperialism us uk genocide ethnonationalism menachembegin 1946 1948 apartheid yitzhakshamir zionism sterngang middleast violence freedom desmondtutu collectivepunisment holocaust humanity humanism silence onestatesolutionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:edf60b901c48/Shame, Shame: My Field’s Failure to Act on Palestine [by Aneil Rallin] | Dissident Voice2023-12-26T00:14:51+00:00
https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/12/shame-shame-my-fields-failure-to-act-on-palestine/
robertogrecoaneilrallin 2023 palestine israel rhetoric writing academia highered highereducation silence genocide claudinegay ethniccleansing gaza occupation colonialism colonization 1968 1969 shame us policy composition resistance solidarity congress 1967https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a3d9202e3750/But We Must Speak: On Palestine & The Mandates of Conscience - YouTube2023-11-02T03:22:40+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCEZhhpl_M
robertogreco2023 rashidkhalid michellealexander nataliediaz nouraerakat conscience palestine ta-nehisicoates us israel context mohammedel-kurd gaze westerngaze violence violation idf occupation apartheid police policing silence audrelorde islamophobia gaza westbank colonialism colonization dispossession settlercolonialism jerusalem stateviolence genocide segregation baltimore chicago philadelphia ethniccleansing jimcrow democracy nakba zionism settlers ireland displacement uk france balfourdeclaration 1948 1967 resistance bds greatmarchofreturn joebiden politics policy iofhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a63e3f0c4ac0/How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? - Boston Review2023-09-11T20:03:15+00:00
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is-the-whole-world-worth/
robertogrecoNot everyone we work with on a particular issue has to have deep ideological alignment with us. A skilled organizer should be able to work with people who aren’t of their own choosing, including people they don’t like. It’s really as simple as being attacked by fascist police in the streets. Once the attack begins, there are two sides: armed police inflicting violence and everyone else. We need to be able to see each other in those terms, reeling in the face of unthinkable violence, scrambling to stay alive and uncaged, and doing the work to protect one another.
This will not come easily, because white supremacy and classism have forced many wedges between our communities. Great harms have been committed and very difficult conversations are needed, but refusing to do that work, in this historical moment, is an abdication of responsibility. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world is at stake, and we cannot afford to minimize what that demands of us.
This is not to say that we should seek no respite from the messiness and occasional discomfort of large-scale movement work. We all need spaces where we can operate within our comfort zone. Whether these take the shape of a collective, an affinity group, a processing space, a caucus, or a group of friends, we need people with whom we can feel fully seen and heard and with whose values we feel deeply aligned. In such a violent and oppressive world, we are all entitled to some amount of sanctuary. Many organizers have tight-knit political homes, sometimes grounded in shared identity, in addition to participating in broader organizing efforts.
But broader movements are struggles, not sanctuaries. They are full of contradiction and challenges we may feel unprepared for.
Effective organizers operate beyond the bounds of their comfort zones, moving into what we might call their “stretch zone,” when necessary. No one has to be able to work with everyone, but how far beyond the bounds of easy agreement can you reach? How much empathy can you extend to people who do not fully understand your identity or experience or who have not had the same access to liberatory ideas? How much discomfort can you navigate for what you believe is truly at stake?
These are not questions anyone can answer for you, as we must all make autonomous choices about who we connect and build with, but if we do not challenge ourselves to navigate some amount of discomfort, our political reach will have terminal limits. To expand the practice of our politics in the world, we have to be able to organize outside of our comfort zones. People whose words and ideas don’t yet align with our own often need room to grow, and some people grow by building relationships and doing work—often in fumbling and imperfect ways.
Political transformation is not as simple as handing newcomers a new set of politics and telling them, “Yours are bad, use these instead.” Instead, we will sometimes have to accompany people along messy transformational journeys. And we must also remember that no matter how far we have come, we are still on our own messy journeys, and our own transformations will continue as we grow.
***
To do this kind of work, a person has to hone multiple skills, including the ability to listen.
When people delve into activism, they often grapple with questions like, “Am I willing to get arrested?” when often the more pressing question for a new activist is, “Am I willing to listen, even when it’s hard?”
For organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, it was her time in Alcoholics Anonymous that helped her transform her practice of listening. “The main thing that I learned,” Gilmore told us, “especially in the first couple years that I was going to meetings, was the beauty of the rule against crosstalk. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, that I couldn’t say shit to anybody. I had to listen, and I had to learn to listen.” The urge to interject or object ran deep for Gilmore. “I’ve always been a nerd, yet I’ve always been a know-it-all,” she told us, “so there’s this tension between my nerdiness that wants to know everything and my know-it-all-ness that wants everybody to know that I know it all already.”
At first, listening did not come easily—or feel particularly productive—to Gilmore. “I would sit in these meetings, and I listened to people talk, and listened to them, and listened to them, and at first I was like, ‘I don’t get this, I don’t get this.’ And so for me in the early days, it was just a performance of words. I mean, my main thing was, ‘I won’t drink when I leave this meeting. I won’t drink, and I won’t use.’”
But over time, Gilmore began to appreciate the role of listening in the group’s collective struggle to avoid drugs and alcohol—even when she did not appreciate what was being said. “I would be getting more and more wound up, because there’d be the sexist guy going on about women and his wife, and then there’d be somebody else talking nonsense about whatever, [but I was] learning to just sit there, and listen, and keep my eye on the prize, which was not just that I wasn’t going to drink but that the only way I could not drink was if all of us didn’t drink.”
Being committed to the sobriety of every person in the room, which meant listening to their story and being invested in their well-being, helped Gilmore develop a deeper practice of patience. “That was kind of this transformation for me that carried into the organizing that I already used to do before I got sober,” she told us.
It is our ability to constructively engage with other people that will ultimately power our efforts. We have to nurture that ability and respect its importance in all of the ways that our society does not. And that skill of constructive engagement starts with listening.
Like so many other aspects of organizing, listening is a practice, and at times, it’s a strategic one.
We might need to hear something true that makes us uncomfortable. Listening deeply makes space for that to happen. But even if the person who’s talking is off base, we can often still learn by listening to them. Why do they feel the way they do? What sources informed or convinced them? What influences them? What strengthens their resolve? What makes them hesitant to get more involved or to engage more boldly? If you are in an organizing space together, how has that issue brought them into a shared space with you despite your differences? What points of agreement might you build upon? What is surprising about them? A good organizer wants to understand these things about the people around them, and you cannot truly understand these things about a person without listening.
Even if the person who’s talking is off base, we can often still learn by listening to them.
Organizers will often repeat the maxim, “We have to meet people where they are at.” It is difficult to meet someone where they’re at when you do not know where they are. Until you have heard someone out, you do not know where they are, so how could you hope to meet them there? Relationships are not built through presumption or through the deployment of tropes or stereotypes. We must understand people as having their own unique experiences, traumas, struggles, ideas, and motivations that will inform how they show up to organizing spaces.
Some task-focused activists brush off activities that involve “talking about our feelings.” This is a common sentiment among bad listeners. The fundamental skill of patiently absorbing another person’s words in a respectful and thoughtful manner is desperately lacking in our society. For this reason, it is folly to expect this skill to manifest itself fully formed when it is most needed, such as in a heated meeting, if we are not building a greater culture of listening in our work.
A group culture that helps participants build their listening skills is an important component of successful organizing. Political education can create opportunities for people to practice listening to one another, without interruption, and interacting meaningfully with what others have contributed. For example, during the Great Depression, communist union organizers in Bessemer, Alabama, developed a practice of devoting thirty minutes of each meeting to political education. For thirty minutes, material would be read aloud—creating space to collectively listen while also allowing members who could not read the opportunity to hear the information. Members would then spend fifteen minutes discussing the material, listening to each other’s thoughts in response to the work.
In organizing, we sometimes expect people, including ourselves, to shed the habits this society has embedded in us through sheer force of will, when in reality we all need practice. Activities that help us hone our practice of listening can make us better organizers, improve our personal relationships, and help us build stronger and longer-lasting movements.
***
As we work to build more sustainable movements, we must think hard about our strategies for responding when organizers make mistakes. Social media can often foster a “zero-tolerance” attitude about political ignorance or missteps. Platforms like Twitter have helped facilitate tremendous accomplishments in movement work, but they have also created an arena for political performance and critique that is often divorced from relationship building or strategic aims. For many people, social media is not an organizing tool but a realm of political performance and spectatorship. A trend has emerged in which some organizers will demand performances of solidarity and awareness on social media but then critique or even tear apart those performances when they fall short or are deemed insincere. As with reality television, favorites emerge, and people are sometimes voted off the island.
When the performance of solidarity via the replication of the right words or slogans becomes our central focus, it’s not surprising that responses might read as empty or even insincere. Sloganizing is not organizing, and paying righteous lip service to a cause, in the preferred language of the moment, does not empty any cages or transform anyone’s material conditions. Rather than fixating on the grammar of people’s politics, we organizers must ask ourselves what we want people to do.
When debates arise around language, we must also understand the extent to which the language of dissent and liberation has shifted over time. The terms and jargon we use today do not represent an “arrival” at the “correct” words that were always out there, waiting to be found, while our predecessors flailed about in search of them. The language we uplift in movements today represents an unending process of grappling—a search for words that embody the experiences of oppressed people in relation to their history, their current conditions, and the culture they are presently experiencing. Policing language, as though our phrasing is written in law, misunderstands that pursuit and the purpose it serves. If these words merely exist to divide us into categories—those who can properly discuss ideas and those who cannot—what is their value in the pursuit of liberation?
While it is important to trouble terminology and to engage with its evolution, the mastery of language does not spur systemic change or alter anyone’s material conditions. The concept of “allyship,” for example, is often grounded in presentation rather than substantive action. Similarly, people who believe they are “good people” often view goodness as a fixed identity, evidenced by their expressed feelings about injustice rather than a set of practices or actions. Goodness, to them, is a designation to be defended rather than something that they seek to generate in the world in concert with other people. Mainstream liberals often fall prey to this line of thinking because liberal politics play very heavily into political identity as being determinant of whether a person is good or bad (Democrats are good, Republicans bad). But the left can fall into its own version of this trap by treating politics as a test of how well we can perform language or recite ideas.
Our movements are not driven by getting the words just right. They are driven by the goal of enacting change through collective struggle as we endeavor to both understand ideas and turn them into action. Fumbling is inevitable, but as Gilmore tells us, “practice makes different.”
Dixon emphasizes that people will show up imperfectly and that organizers have to anticipate that mistakes and harm will happen. “I worry we’re creating a culture now where people are so afraid to make mistakes,” she told us. “They’re afraid to not have the analysis before they open their mouth. The bonds that I’m really trying to build within organizing are the bonds where we can divulge the things that we are nervous about, or ashamed of, or the things we need to learn, all of those areas, because that’s when I know we’re building the kind of intimacy that takes care of each other around heightened threats.”
Dixon points out that when trust is lost, organizing not only becomes more difficult, but it also becomes more vulnerable to surveillance and infiltration: “A huge piece of COINTELPRO was around seeding distrust.” Therefore, she says, a key part of organizing is building bonds of trust, and that can only happen within a context where people are allowed to be vulnerable and make mistakes.
Learning and growing in front of other people can be embarrassing, and even intimidating, particularly for people who have been put down or made to feel diminished in the past. Even seasoned organizers like Dixon often worry about derailing their work with a verbal misstep. “I have a small crew of other organizers where I think our text thread is mostly questions we are afraid to ask publicly,” she acknowledged. “It’s our own little political education circle, where we ask, ‘What does this mean?’ Or, ‘Is this fucked up?’ Or, ‘What is the right way to say this? Because I don’t think this is right.’” Dixon says that she believes “everyone needs that text thread,” but she also hopes that more of our movement spaces can operate in the same spirit and offer opportunities for people to “feel safe in their process of transforming.”
Creating trust-based movement spaces also puts us in a better place to confront harm and conflict, Dixon says.
“The biggest part of the work is how we maintain relationships while navigating harm,” she told us. “Because that’s the thing, that will break your group. That’ll break any project.” Dixon stresses the importance of conflict resolution and accountability mechanisms within groups—that is, group- or community-based methods of confronting harm, such as peace circles and transformative justice. But she also reminds us that in order for accountability mechanisms to serve their purpose, people need room and opportunities to grow. “People need to build skills and mechanisms to navigate conflict. Sometimes we’re not apologizing. Sometimes we’re not accountable. Sometimes we have done harmful things. Sometimes we’re doing things we were never told go against the norms [of the group] and then are being held accountable.”
In an organizing space, accountability should not be about policing or punishment, but our punitive impulses can sometimes twist accountability mechanisms into those shapes. It’s easy to forget how imperfectly we ourselves have shown up in movement spaces and throughout our lives. Sometimes our aggravation with others is rooted in pain or trauma we have experienced; sometimes it is rooted in our uneasiness about things we may have said or done that were equally upsetting because we did not always know what we know now. And regardless of how much we believe we have learned, as the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. Many of us would not be in this work today if someone along the way had not been patient with us.
Even if we never develop a sense of mutual respect and understanding, or even come to like the people we’re working with, we can still build power with them. In many cases, we must. After all, the whole world is at stake. We must ask ourselves, how much discomfort is the whole world worth?"]]>solidarity 2023 activism organizing kellyhayes mariamekaba listening language patience politics affinity difference behavior whitesupremacy generations age race racism diversity discomfort offense growth scale socialmedia tolerance purity puritytests education learning understanding transformation online internet trust conflict transformativejustice justice socialjustice accountability cointelpro surveillance infiltration distrust fear silence allyship action goodness liberalism identity democrats republicans left leftism performance dissent liberation jargon policing division divisiveness sloganizing spectatorship twitter politcalperformance performativepolitics relationships groups communism history society practice praxis ruthwilsongilmore crosstalk discourse conversation alcoholicsanonymous struggle strategy canon groupculture culture movements change changemaking ejerisdixon class classism lcdhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c13f1560a59c/Resistance in the Arts — The New Atlantis2023-08-23T20:58:43+00:00
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/resistance-in-the-arts
robertogrecoalanjacobs 2023 resistance art arts music creativity publishing friction frictionlessness substack bandcamp patreon thebeatles frankgehry guggenheimbilbao shakespeare willkempe collaboration collaborative joywilliams maxwellperkins thomaswolfe gordonlish raymondcarver film cinema photography small slow nietzsche chinuaachebe milesdavis bladerunner stanleykubrick douglastrumbull terrencemalick nfts technology wu-tangclan tonimorrison kafka iamcdonald georgemartin silence michaelacoel violence attention disappearance disintermediation mediation exile cunning freedom stephendedalus farmtotable books writing howwewrite creation scarcityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f06a763adf06/El Sonido: Ana Tijoux: Revolución on Apple Podcasts2023-07-07T15:07:40+00:00
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ana-tijoux-revoluci%C3%B3n/id1677011949?i=1000619763915
robertogrecoelsonido anatijoux chile music latinamerica músicalatina albinacabrera indigenous indigineity violetaparra hiphop rap politics coup southamerica aymara mapuche activism silviorodríguez pablomilanés silence atahualpayupanqui losolimareños astorpiazzolla chicobuarque nuevacanciónchilena france makiza immigration migration exile jupiter&okwess jupiterbokondji okwess julietavenegas kaos mcmillaray saracurruchich sarahebe palestine shadiamansour sashasathya juanamolina cacerolazos revolution protest lajauría socialjustice sebastiánpiñera chiledespertó rebelióndeoctubre 2019 inequality economics democracy patriarchy mapungun spanish español guatemala language pinochet dictatorship víctorjara golpemilitarhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0494680b6b94/The Yale Review | Elleza Kelley: "Ordinary Allurements": Christina Sharpe’s reading lessons2023-06-13T20:34:36+00:00
https://yalereview.org/article/elleza-kelley-ordinary-allurements
robertogrecochristinasharpe ellezakelley howweread reading 2023 literature poetry text tenderness care attention beauty aesthetics attentiveness writing howwewrite bibliographies attribution proximity assemblage structure form caring opacity roydecarava photography observation looking gaze howwelook allthesenses senses multisensory books margins marginalia arthurjafa tonimorrison ariellaaïshaazoulay tejucole keguromacharia saidiyahartman jessicamariejohnson zakiyyahimanjackson keeanga-yamahttataylor adriennekennedy chinuaachebe chickicarter tinacampt davinallen freddiemay robincostelewis langstonhughes ejbellocq natashatrethewey claudiarankine danaschutz karawalker emmetttill jamesvanderzee dawoudbey rolandbarthes possibility repair whitesupremacy silence terror idawrightsharpe names naming epigraphs redaction compendiums litanies inventories appendices epitaphs torkwasedyson composition narrative linearity alinear affect brutality mnourbesephilip witness figuration antiblackness gazing regard dilution extraction co-ohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e0d28de4b240/Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason is Marvelous | The Line Break2023-06-06T16:05:56+00:00
https://thelinebreak.wpcomstaging.com/2018/03/09/jenny-georges-the-dream-of-reason-is-marvelous/
robertogrecopoems poetry 20218 jennygeorge language space bodies memory dark silencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3b44fe7879ed/Eyeo 2022 - Dorothy Santos on Vimeo2023-01-02T08:54:35+00:00
https://vimeo.com/772226780
robertogrecodorothysantos eyeo 2022 interactivefiction if howwewrite writing poetry text subversion language communication time space telephones recordings audio voices patience analog mediamaking memory technology margaretmorse objects podcasts paralinguisticcues allthesenses environment translation meaningmaking listening speaking duolingo rosettastone amazonhalo diy instagram tiktok youtube speech voice sound telemarketing tagalog accents decolonization machinelistening philippines cathyparkhong english voicememos languagelearning oralhistory oralhistories oraltradition prosody relationships claudiarankine silence archives archiving eyeo2022https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e266604b89c3/Notes From the Metaverse - by L. M. Sacasas - The Convivial Society2021-09-05T21:16:59+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-metaverse
robertogrecoivanillich place commerce commons boundaries 2021 internet metaverse facebook abrahamheschel sabbath attention markzuckerberg drewaustin marcandreessen reality senses multisensory children labor work detachment experience technology modernism privilege media mediation advertising billboards wendellberry small slow bodies allthesenses digital matthewcrawford annehelenpeteresen hannaharendt marshallmcluhan praxis friendship secondaryorality walterong johnbunyan robhorning wendyliu parents parenting workfromhome homes howwelive howwewrite howweread oraltradition physical tracking web online silence quiet lmsacasashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9091df3ef053/What remains. A writer's journey to Japan in times of impossible travel|おかえりハウス|note2021-03-30T02:34:18+00:00
https://note.com/okaerihouse/n/n86101dd6f537
robertogrecojapan michaelavieser forests time slow multispecies tea japanese buddhism shinto poetry walking space silence nature morethanhuman animism boredom presence awakening 1995 1996 1997 wildlife 2018 2017 onsen monasteries meditation 2002 temples minakatakumagusu netowrks interconnectedness 2021 satoyama maps mapping present future shinichinakazawa social sociallife stillness hierarchy horizontality kumano shizauka kyoto yakushima gardens yuvalnoahharari kamonochōmei yuvalhararihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0673883b129c/Orion Magazine | The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki2021-03-29T20:21:08+00:00
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-worlds-of-hayao-miyazaki/
robertogrecoissacyuen hayaomiyazaki film animation morethanhuman multispecies 1997 princessmononoke forests animism japan animals plants nature myneighbortotoro totoro 1988 childhood spiritedaway 2001 spirits nausicaaofthevalleyofthewind nausicaa environment ecology 1984 human-animalrelations human-animalrelationships studioghinli 2021 time memory trees silence landscape agriculture children multimedia sound narrative narration storytelling earth care coexistence audiohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d57d5d265b59/Son[i]a #314. Anja Kanngieser | RWM Ràdio Web MACBA2020-09-06T17:51:24+00:00
https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-314-anja-kanngieser
robertogrecoanjakanngieser 2020 sound perception allthesenses listening space sounds eavesdropping geography climatejustice permission orality affects silence silences pauses naturaldisasters ethics fieldrecording soundwalks documentary documentation sonification radio academics academia anthropocene anthropocentrism governance fieldresearch fieldrecordingshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d2a03d37702a/Why I Don't Read Rebecca Solnit | The Walrus2020-04-28T06:35:56+00:00
https://thewalrus.ca/why-i-dont-read-rebecca-solnit/
robertogrecovivianefairbank rebeccasolnit feminism whitefeminism popfeminism 2019 sexism hope intersectionality silencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d7b4fc3d77eb/nsangimwanawange[👻] on Twitter: "it is not it is not it is not enough to be pause, to be hole to be void, to be silent to be semicolon, to be semicolony; –– kamau brathwaite" / Twitter2020-02-05T09:13:41+00:00
https://twitter.com/nkoyenkoyenkoye/status/1224837191362322432
robertogrecokamaubrathwaite poetry semicolons silence void voids being poemshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c9f672479be/Yosemite National Park on Twitter: "“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ― Ansel Adams https://t.co/2FJuQiciYV" / Twitter2019-12-04T06:15:51+00:00
https://twitter.com/YosemiteNPS/status/1201302054829846529
robertogrecoandeladams silence photography wordshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b0d44a6f2b4c/Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark - The On Being Project2019-05-13T03:42:59+00:00
https://onbeing.org/programs/teju-cole-sitting-together-in-the-dark-feb2019/
robertogrecotejucole stillness 2019 truth hope interconnected jamesbaldwin brahms place borders interstitial tomastranströmer smartness reading poetry wokeness kin family families hospitality photography art silence quietness listening donaldtrump barackobama howwewrite howweread writing tonimorrison socialmedia noise meaning seamusheaney fear future optimism johnberger rebeccasolnit virginiawoolf hopelessness kalamazoo pauléluard primolevi instagram twitterhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:63ea3238e235/What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away | The New Yorker2019-04-28T06:07:22+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away
robertogrecojiatolentino 2019 internet attention jennyodell capitalism work busyness resistance socialmedia instagram twitter facebook infooverload performance web online nature nextdoor advertising thoreau philosophy care caring maintenance silence happiness anxiety leisurearts artleisure commodification technology selfhood identity sms texting viber podcasts grouptexts digitalminimalism refusal calnewport mobile phones smartphones screentime ralphwaldoemerson separatism interdependencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8bcfe870ab49/Are.na / 間2019-04-24T20:47:49+00:00
https://www.are.na/florence-fu/pjiptbfkkp8
robertogrecojapan ma space silence gaps emptiness possibility words japanese music soundhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e73fc16174d6/Remembering Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, Master of Silence | Pitchfork2019-03-12T22:14:00+00:00
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/remembering-talk-talks-mark-hollis-master-of-silence/
robertogrecomarkhollis 2019 silence music talktalkhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:802a7fb12fd9/Gnamma #7 - The Teacher's Imposition2019-02-20T22:24:56+00:00
https://tinyletter.com/gnamma/letters/gnamma-7-the-teacher-s-imposition
robertogrecolukaswinklerprins teaching howweteach parkerpalmer education paradox 2019 indoctrination ivanillich exploration boundaries openness hospitality individualism collectivism community silence speech support solitude disciplines tradition personalization unschooling deschooling canonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:39f35f50c89e/Rethinking the Peace Culture [The Pearl Magazine]2019-02-08T03:12:50+00:00
https://thepearlonline.com/2018/12/08/rethinking-the-peace-culture/
robertogrecoProgressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy, stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the coexistence of radically opposing or racially different elements.
Antagonism, indignation, anger — these qualities don’t diminish democracy or impede progress. Each is an inescapable part of political life in a diverse, pluralistic society. And each is necessary for challenging our profound inequalities of power, wealth and opportunity.
“The child can never gain strength save by resistance,” Cooper wrote, a little later in that volume, “and there can be no resistance if all movement is in one direction and all opposition made forever an impossibility.”]]]>2018 peace hongthuy democracy community governance government silence passivity jamellebouie us politics progressive progress change michaelbloomberg terrymcauliffe howardschultz juliacooper antagonism indignation anger pluralism society conflict conflictavoidance diversity resistance joebiden elizabethwarren democrats 2019 barackobama fredupton moderates centrists accommodation statusquo inequality civilrights power privilege discourse civility race wealth opportunity sokauniversityofamerica thepearl soka suahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b050e0a4448b/We’re Having the Wrong Conversation About the Future Of Schools2018-12-29T20:20:39+00:00
https://medium.com/s/story/were-having-the-wrong-conversation-about-the-future-of-schools-e222a0393b67
robertogrecoarthurchiaravalli education edreform reform history invisibility progressive siliconvalley infividualism horacemann 2018 collegeboard individualism personalization commonschool us inequality justice socialjustice injustice race racism whitesupremacy reading hilarymoss thomasjefferson commoncore davidcoleman politics policy closereading howweread ela johnstuartmill louiserosenblatt sat standardizedtesting standardization tedtalks teddintersmith democracy kenrobinson willrichardson entrepreneurship toddrose mikecrowley summitschools religion secularism silence privatization objectivity meritocracy capitalism teaching howweteach schools publicschools learning children ideology behaviorism edtech technology society neoliberalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4b94d66301c7/‘Silence Is Health’: How Totalitarianism Arrives | by Uki Goñi | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books2018-11-03T18:51:56+00:00
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/20/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives/
robertogrecoargentina totalitarianism fascism history 2018 margaretatwood nazis wwii ww2 hatred antisemitism germany surveillance trust democracy certainty robertcox ukigoñi richardwaltherdarré repressions government psychology politics christianity catholicism catholicchurch antoniocaggiano adolfeichmann military power control authoritarianism patriarchy paternalism normalization silence resistance censorship dictatorship oscarivanissevich education raymondmackay juanperón evita communism paranoia juliomeinvielle exile generations worldwarii worldwar2https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:747c12b6902a/Listening for Silence With the Headphones Off | Pitchfork2018-08-20T19:22:44+00:00
https://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/listening-for-silence-with-the-headphones-off/
robertogrecosilence attention audio music 2018 markrichardson anechoicchambers deathhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4eaad148897a/M.I.A. and the Defense of Nuance | Affidavit2018-07-30T17:38:36+00:00
https://www.affidavit.art/articles/mia-defense-of-nuance
robertogrecomia fariharóisín 2018 privilege language cancelling marginalization colorism transphobia orientlism cardib socialmedia disposability whitesupremacy race racism apologies learning power islamophobia islam socialjustice noamchomsky modelminorities modelminority nuance complexity perseverance srilanka silence refugees politics tamil victims compassion blacklivesmatter us australia growth care caring dialog conversation listening ego shame anger change naivety howwechange howwelearn hanifabdurraqib visibility internet problemematicfaves julianassange yourfaveisproblematic antiblacknesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:12763b69fc60/Dr. Lucia Lorenzi on Twitter: "I have two academic articles currently under consideration, and hope that they'll be accepted. I'm proud of them. But after those two, I am not going to write for academic journals anymore. I feel this visceral, skin-splitti2018-07-10T20:17:50+00:00
https://twitter.com/empathywarrior/status/1016421834600796160
robertogrecoform academia cvs dissertations johncage pause silence reading howweead howwewrite writing 2018 lucialorenzi anxiety coercion response performance conversationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4cd207625dbd/Thread by @ecomentario: "p.31 ecoed.wikispaces.com/file/view/C.+A… ecoed.wikispaces.com/file/view/C.+A… p.49 ecoed.wikispaces.com/file/view/C.+A… ecoed.wikispaces.co […]"2018-06-20T23:02:58+00:00
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1007269183317512192.html
robertogrecoisabelrodíguez paulofreire ivanillich wendellberry subcomandantemarcos gandhi 2018 gustavoesteva madhuprakash danastuchul deschooling colonialism future environment sustainability cabowers frédériqueapffel-marglin education campesinos bolivia perú pedagogyoftheoppressed globalization marinaarratia power authority hierarchy horizontality socialjustice justice economics society community cooperation collaboration politics progress growth rural urban altruism oppression participation marginality marginalization karlmarx socialism autonomy local slow small capitalism consumerism life living well-being consumption production productivity gustavoterán indigeneity work labor knowledge experience culture joannamacy spirituality buddhism entanglement interdependence interbeing interexistence philosophy being individualism chiefseattle lutherstandingbear johngrim ethics morethanhuman multispecies humans human posthumnism transhumanism competition marxism liberation simplicity poverty civilization greed phttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3bb709cf40cd/'An oasis of calm': Quakers broadcast 30 minutes of silence | Media | The Guardian2018-04-08T18:29:25+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/apr/08/an-oasis-of-calm-quaker-groups-30-minutes-of-silence-podcast
robertogrecoquakers silence sound 2018 via:subtopes religion georgefox slow slowradio radio atheismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3506aefff433/This Children's Book About Sex And Gender Is A Total Game-Changer2018-01-01T23:10:49+00:00
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristinrusso/sex-is-a-funny-word#.vmyaXXOd8
robertogreco silence.
…
5. "Justice" is an essential word when speaking about bodies.
…
6. Privacy isn’t just for grown-ups.
…
7. Consent matters at every age."]]>books children sex gender consent justice privacy bodies conversation silence honesty information representation sexed parenting corysilverberg fionasmyth 2015 bodyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:87637b250d6c/Qatar opens new state-of-the-art 'noisy' library | News | Al Jazeera2017-11-12T21:26:00+00:00
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/qatar-opens-state-of-the-art-noisy-library-171107124557181.html
robertogrecoqatar libraries doha 2017 silence noise noisiness children learning playhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a409715e280a/NOTHING | but the textures of my body de Nicole L'Huillier2017-10-22T19:17:26+00:00
https://soundcloud.com/nicole-lhuillier/01-nothing-but-the-textures-of
robertogrecosound audio nicolel'huillier chile binaural soundscapes 2017 silence binauralrecordinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:45778f2a112f/The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and the Politics of Silence2017-09-25T05:20:50+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/21/the-assassination-of-orlando-letelier-and-the-politics-of-silence/
robertogrecochile orlandoletelier 2016 pinochet history jonschwarz terrorism us socialsilence silence henrykissinger salvadorallende coup golpemilitar ronnimoffitthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d5fa66fd7598/One Square Inch of Silence – Forks, Washington - Atlas Obscura2017-07-27T02:20:07+00:00
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/one-square-inch-of-silence
robertogrecoolympicnationalpark silence us washingtonstate 2017 hohrainforest sound noise nature via:subtopeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e9fa4299eac5/Apocalypse, Now - On The Media - WNYC2017-07-07T18:22:14+00:00
https://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-07-07/
robertogrecorobertmacfarlane kimstanleyrobinson clairevayewatkins jeffvandermeer sciencefiction scifi speculativefiction anthropocene humans nature multispecies language tolisten economics finance cli-fi climatechange utopia names naming silence pessimism optimism hope dystopia anthopocene deserts natue change earthhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:412a3e3eab74/Silence is a space for something new to happen2017-07-07T15:58:34+00:00
http://austinkleon.com/2017/07/06/silence-is-a-space-for-something-new-to-happen/
robertogrecosilence quakers garryshandling depechemode morrisberman ursulafranklin billcallahan johncage austinchapman austinkleon quiethttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2a658dce1caf/how to do nothing – Jenny Odell – Medium2017-07-01T07:34:33+00:00
https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb
robertogreco…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. (emphasis mine)
He wrote that in 1985, but the sentiment is something I think we can all identify with right now, almost to a degree that’s painful. The function of nothing here, of saying nothing, is that it’s a precursor to something, to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech."
…
"In The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a project I did while in residence at Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), I spent three months photographing, cataloguing and researching the origins of 200 objects. I presented them as browsable archive in which people could scan the objects’ tags and learn about the manufacturing, material, and corporate histories of the objects.
One woman at the Recology opening was very confused and said, “Wait… so did you actually make anything? Or did you just put things on shelves?” (Yes, I just put things on shelves.)"
…
"That’s an intellectual reason for making nothing, but I think that in my cases, it’s something simpler than that. Yes, the BYTE images speak in interesting and inadvertent ways about some of the more sinister aspects of technology, but I also just really love them.
This love of one’s subject is something I’m provisionally calling the observational eros. The observational eros is an emotional fascination with one’s subject that is so strong it overpowers the desire to make anything new. It’s pretty well summed up in the introduction of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, where he describes the patience and care involved in close observation of one’s specimens:
When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
The subject of observation is so precious and fragile that it risks breaking under even the weight of observation. As an artist, I fear the breaking and tattering of my specimens under my touch, and so with everything I’ve ever “made,” without even thinking about it, I’ve tried to keep a very light touch.
It may not surprise you to know, then, that my favorite movies tend to be documentaries, and that one of my favorite public art pieces was done by the documentary filmmaker, Eleanor Coppola. In 1973, she carried out a public art project called Windows, which materially speaking consisted only of a map with a list of locations in San Francisco.
The map reads, “Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, where it is found, without being altered or removed to a gallery situation.” I like to consider this piece in contrast with how we normally experience public art, which is some giant steel thing that looks like it landed in a corporate plaza from outer space.
Coppola instead casts a subtle frame over the whole of the city itself as a work of art, a light but meaningful touch that recognizes art that exists where it already is."
…
"What amazed me about birdwatching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which was pretty “low res” to begin with. At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. In particular I can’t imagine how I went most of my life so far without noticing scrub jays, which are incredibly loud and sound like this:
[video]
And then, one by one, I started learning other songs and being able to associate each of them with a bird, so that now when I walk into the the rose garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: hi raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch, and so on. The diversification (in my attention) of what was previously “bird sounds” into discrete sounds that carry meaning is something I can only compare to the moment that I realized that my mom spoke three languages, not two.
My mom has only ever spoken English to me, and for a very long time, I assumed that whenever my mom was speaking to another Filipino person, that she was speaking Tagalog. I didn’t really have a good reason for thinking this other than that I knew she did speak Tagalog and it sort of all sounded like Tagalog to me. But my mom was actually only sometimes speaking Tagalog, and other times speaking Ilonggo, which is a completely different language that is specific to where she’s from in the Philippines.
The languages are not the same, i.e. one is not simply a dialect of the other; in fact, the Philippines is full of language groups that, according to my mom, have so little in common that speakers would not be able to understand each other, and Tagalog is only one.
This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems not only naturally cumulative but also a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.
What these moments of stopping to listen have in common with those labyrinthine spaces is that they all initially enact some kind of removal from the sphere of familiarity. Even if brief or momentary, they are retreats, and like longer retreats, they affect the way we see everyday life when we do come back to it."
…
"Even the labyrinths I mentioned, by their very shape, collect our attention into these small circular spaces. When Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust, wrote about walking in the labyrinth inside the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, she said, “The circuit was so absorbing I lost sight of the people nearby and hardly heard the sound of the traffic and the bells for six o’clock.”
In the case of Deep Listening, although in theory it can be practiced anywhere at any time, it’s telling that there have also been Deep Listening retreats. And Turrell’s Sky Pesher not only removes the context from around the sky, but removes you from your surroundings (and in some ways, from the context of your life — given its underground, tomblike quality)."
…
"My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. It reminds me of how John Muir described himself not as a naturalist but as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.”, or of how Pauline Oliveros described herself in 1974: “Pauline Oliveros is a two legged human being, female, lesbian, musician, and composer among other things which contribute to her identity. She is herself and lives with her partner, along with assorted poultry, dogs, cats, rabbits and tropical hermit crabs.” Incidentally, this has encouraged me to maybe change my bio to: “Jenny Odell is an artist, professor, thinker, walker, sleeper, eater, and amateur birdnoticer.”
3. the precarity of nothing
There’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. I can go to the rose garden, or stare into trees all day, because I have a teaching job that only requires me to be somewhere two days a week, not to mention a whole set of other privileges. Part of the reason my dad could take that time off was that on some level, he had enough reason to think he could get another job. It’s possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those.
But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.” I’m struck by the quality of things that associated with the category “What we Will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine.
These are bodily, human things, and this bodily-ness is something I will come back to. When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the 8-hour movement, was asked, “What does labor want?” he responded, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not 8 hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “8 hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, what seems most humane is the refusal to define that period.
That campaign was about a demarcation of time. So it’s interesting, and certainly troubling, to read the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space. True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for — and thus the spatial underpinnings of — “what we will.”"
…
"The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week:
In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine. … The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary. (emphasis mine)
The removal of economic security for working people — 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will — dissolves those boundaries so that we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles."
…
"I also started noticing some crows in my neighborhood. At the time I had just read The Genius of Birds, and I’d learned the crows are incredibly intelligent and can recognize and remember human faces. They can in fact teach their children which are the good and the bad humans, good being ones who feed them and bad being ones who try to catch them or do something else weird. I have a balcony, so I started leaving a few peanuts out for the crows."
…
"This isn’t only about me watching birds. I think a lot about what these birds see when they look at me — and I’m sure anyone who has a pet is familiar with this feeling. I assume they just see a female human who for some reason seems to pay attention to them.⁵ They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress — they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week.
And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are.
There are ravens that I noticed live half in and half out of the rose garden, until I realized that there is no “rose garden” to them. These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.
Their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy, recalling a question that one of my favorite authors, David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”⁶"
…
"But beyond strategic / activist self preservation, there’s something else to be gained here: Doing nothing teaches us how to listen. I’ve already mentioned literal listening, or Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in a broader sense. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”
There are a lot of us, and I’m certainly not immune to this, who could stand to learn how to listen better, and I mean listen to other people. As a lover of weird internet things, I definitely do not want to write off the amazing culture and also activism that happens online. But even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other about very important things do not encourage listening. They encourage shouting, or having a “take” after having read a single headline.
I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem of listening, and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a helpful distinction between connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units — an example is something getting a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by likeminded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue; check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.
Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous — and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit differently than they went in.
This always brings to mind a month-long artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other — that wasn’t the point — but we listened to each other, and we did each come away differently, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position."
…
"Ukeles’ interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” Her 1969 Maintenance Manifesto is actually an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition … My work is the work.”"
…
"I think of the hours and hours that I have now spent in the rose garden, putting off returning to my work on a glowing two-dimensional screen an arm’s length from my face; or the days on which I’ll leave just to get coffee and wind up almost involuntarily on top of a hill four hours later, regardless of the shoes I’m wearing; or the fact that the last five or six books I’ve read have had to do with animal intelligence and the importance of landscape in memory and cognition. I don’t know where any of this, where I, will end up."]]>jennyodell idleness nothing art eyeo2017 photoshop specimens care richardprince gillesdeleuze recology internetarchive sanfrancisco eleanorcoppola 2017 1973 maps mapping scottpolach jamesturrell architecture design structure labyrinths oakland juliamorgan chapelofthechimes paulineoliveros ucsd 1970s deeplisening listening birds birdwatching birding noticing classideas observation perception time gracecathedral deeplistening johncage gordonhempton silence maintenance conviviality technology bodies landscape ordinary everyday cyclicality cycles 1969 mierleladermanukeles sensitivity senses multispecies canon productivity presence connectivity conversation audrelorde gabriellemoss fomo nomo nosmo davidabram becominganimal animals nature ravens corvids crows bluejays pets human-animalrelations human-animalelationships herons dissent rowe caliressler jodythompson francoberardi fiverr popos publicspace blackmirror anthonyantonellis facebook socialmedia email wpa history bayarea crowdcontrol mikedavis cityofquartz erhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:eb75f2831428/The Art of Teaching2017-06-27T05:07:36+00:00
http://taeyoonchoi.com/artofteaching/#/
robertogrecotaeyoonchoi education teaching purpose routine ritual silence flow conflict communication structure nurture authority kojinkaratani jean-lucnancy community howweteach pedagogy learning howwelearn eyeo2017 unlearning curriculum syllabus sfpc schoolforpoeticcomputation art craft beauty utility generosity sfsh tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject classideas cv reciprocity gifts kant discretion instruction discipline johndewey bmc blackmountaincollege justice annialbers stndardization weaving textiles making projectbasedlearning materials progress progressive unschooling deschooling control experimentation knowledge fabrication buckminsterfuller constructivism constructionism georgehein habit freedom democracy paulofreire judithbutler sunaurataylor walking christinesunkim uncertainty representation intervention speculation simulation christopheralexander objectives outcomes learningoutcomes learningobjectives remembering creativity evaluation application analysis understanding emancipation allankaprow judychicago shttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7bd2f4fe549b/Saying ‘No’ to Best Practices – OFFICE OF DIGITAL LEARNING2017-06-19T20:15:11+00:00
http://digitallearning.middcreate.net/instructional-design/saying-no-to-best-practices/
robertogrecoLearning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging ourselves to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust — trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community.
Critical pedagogy assumes that students want and are motivated to learn. Only about 75% of teachers I’ve talked to feel this way. We need to change that for ourselves. Teaching is not only more effective when we trust students to learn (which I distinguish from following instructions or passing a test), but it’s also more fun, more satisfying, and less exhausting.
Grade less / Grade differently
Peter Elbow writes, “Grading tends to undermine the climate for teaching and learning. Once we start grading their work, students are tempted to study or work for the grade rather than for learning.” We all know this is true. Working for a grade undermines not only a lifelong attitude toward learning, but also student agency. A critical pedagogy asks us to reconsider grading entirely; and if we can’t abandon it whole-hog, then we must revise how and why we grade. Consider allowing students to grade themselves. Offer personal feedback on work instead of a letter, number, or percentage. There are lots of options to evaluating work without artificial markers.
Question deadlines
When pressed, most teachers have told me that they enforce deadlines because students will need to meet deadlines in the “real world.” There are no students in higher education who got there without meeting deadlines. Education need not be militaristic about deadlines. Ideas and creation are more important than timeliness. I wrote, in my post called “Late Work,”
We are put in the most unique spot of coaching learners into a world of knowledge. What we need to remember is that their world of knowledge may not align perfectly with our own, their process may not fit our schedules, their ideas may not synch with our own.
Think about what you are actually teaching and question whether you need deadlines, whether students need deadlines, and whether either of you benefit from them.
Collaborate with students
Learners are pedagogues in their own right. Chris Friend, Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy journal, writes:
If we give students the freedom to choose their own path, they might choose poorly or make mistakes on our watch. But we must be willing to allow them the challenge of this authority, the dignity of this risk, and the opportunity to err and learn from their mistakes. They learn and gain expertise through experimentation.
If pedagogy is the sole purview of the instructor in the room, students are asked to follow along a path predetermined by that instructor’s best (we hope) intentions. However, because students bring different levels of expertise to any material or discussion—and because their lives, identities, and intersectionality inform their learning—students should be as involved in their own learning as possible. From syllabus creation to grading, building rubric and assignments to self-assessment. As Daniel Ginsberg writes, “my students are the most central members of the community in which I learn critical pedagogy.”
Inspire dialogue
Very little can be accomplished through direct instruction. Bloom’s Taxonomy makes a show of positioning knowledge-level learning as the foundation of any learning experience. But learning is more chaotic, messier, and more confounding than taxonomies provide for. In “Beyond Rigor,” Jesse Stommel, Pete Rorabaugh, and I argue that:
Intellectually rigorous work lives, thrives, and teems proudly outside conventional notions of academic rigor. Although institutions of higher education only recognize rigor when it mimics mastery of content, when it creates a hierarchy of expertise, when it maps clearly to pre-determined outcomes, there are works of exception — multimodal, collaborative, and playful — that push the boundaries of disciplinary allegiances, and don’t always wear their brains on their sleeves, so to speak.
Simply put, learning happens outside the lines. It’s perfectly acceptable for instructors to provide lines, but whenever we do so, we must just as diligently encourage learners to leave those lines—to question, to redraw, to imagine, to refuse, to explore. When we do this, we inspire dialogue, not just between students, but between ourselves and students, between ideas, between the act of learning and the act of instruction themselves.
Be quiet
Generally speaking, teachers fear dead air. Silence in the classroom, or few to no responses on a discussion forum, can stir all kinds of thoughts and emotions—from “they’re not getting it” to “I’ve done something wrong” to “they’re bored,” and worse. But in truth, thoughtfulness and thoroughness takes time.
Janine DeBaise writes that: “Every student has something valuable to teach the rest of us. I’ve made that assumption for over thirty years now, and so far, I’ve never been proven wrong.” If at the core of critical pedagogy we believe that learners are their own best teachers—and if we have spent any time at all as teachers ourselves preparing lesson plans and discussions—then we can acknowledge that teaching takes time.
Filling silence may come out of a desperation to keep the class moving and to ensure that all ideas are understood, but it also reinforces the teacher’s voice as primary. When we are silent, we can hear what students have to say (even when they’re not saying it), and listen for the swell of understanding as it builds.
Be honest and transparent about pedagogy
Teaching isn’t magic. In fact, there are very good reasons for teachers to reveal their “tricks” to learners. I have, numerous times, sat on the desk at the front of the classroom and called attention to how that’s different to standing behind a podium, sitting in a circle with the class, or lecturing from notes. Not to qualify one over the other, but to reveal something about the performativity of learning and teaching.
Similarly, we should invite students into a discussion about the syllabus, the 15- or 10-week structure of a course, the usefulness or uselessness of grades, etc. Kris Shaffer, in “An Open Letter to My Students,” brings students in close to his teaching process:
I am not perfect. Nor are any of your other professors. We are experts in the fields we teach, and some of us are experts in the art of teaching. However, we make mistakes … and each pass through the material brings new students with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, sensitivities, prejudices, loves, career goals, life goals, financial situations, etc. There is no one way — often not even a best way — to teach a topic to a student.
There is power in secrecy, as any magician knows. But for a collaborative, critical pedagogy to work, that power must be shared.
Keep expectations clear
In digital learning, instructions are vital. If we haven’t adequately prepared a learner to navigate whatever cockamamie educational technology we’re employing, then we’re setting that learner up to fail. And this applies more broadly to teaching in general. If we don’t make very clear what hopes we have for students, we lay the foundation for misunderstanding, distrust, angst, and combativeness in a classroom.
However, this does not mean we need to parse in clear terms our learning objectives for a course. Adam Heidebrink-Bruno writes, about the syllabus as a container of our expectations,
The problem with the form arises when we share this information without its cultural and historical contexts. The content appears isolated and meaningless. And while an educator may quickly jot down that “participation is worth 20% of your grade” or “office hours by request,” it is a wholly different experience to consider this rhetoric in relation to its implied ideologies.
In fact, learning objectives are a red herring when it comes to keeping expectations clear. We should think about expectations in terms of the community we are forming in a class; but we also need to be very honest about the ways a student might run aground of our own silent standards.
Be open to change
Thomas P. Kasulis wrote that “A class is a process, an independent organism with its own goals and dynamics. It is always something more than even the most imaginative lesson plan can predict.” Most teachers have had the experience of a class going “off the rails” at one time or another. In some cases, we struggle to get students back on course, back in line; but in other cases, we follow the lead of a tangent or derailment to a surprising, revelatory end.
And this is the most troubling side of best practices: they rarely allow for an improvisational approach, a “yes, and” methodology. Amy Collier and Jen Ross have written about the idea of not-yetness, a theory antithetical to evidence-based teaching. In “What about Qualitative Research in the ‘New Data Science of Learning‘?”, Amy offers:
Maggie Maclure calls the push for evidence-based education “animated by the desire for certainty, willing to sacrifice complexity and diversity for ‘harder’ evidence and the global tournament of standards.” The push for “harder evidence” often pushes out the kinds of learning and evidence that come from post-structural, phenomenological, and critical approaches.
The problem with the evidence-based approach, Amy goes on to say, is that it can’t account for learning that might be tied to a person’s identity, to the intersectional way in which they approach the material. In fact, the goal of best practices that come out of randomized controlled experiments is efficiency, not learning… not dialogue, not trust, and not collaboration. If we’re going to enact any best practices, they should be unattached to outcomes, deeply seated in our interest in students, and wholly malleable."]]>bestpractices education pedagogy teaching howweteach 2017 seanmorris learning edtech digitalliteracy jessestommel criticalpedagogy sfsh grade grading howwelearn deadlines collaboration chrisfriend hybridpedagogy dialogue peterorabaugh rigor janinedebaise silence quiet listening performativity expectations adamheidebring-bruno change thomaskasulis maggiemaclure krisshaffer amycollier jenrosshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8691ae508160/Eight Theses Regarding Social Media | L.M. Sacasas2017-05-29T20:01:40+00:00
https://thefrailestthing.com/2017/05/23/eight-theses-regarding-social-media/
robertogrecolmsacasas socialmedia virtue forgetting attention attentioneconomy economics power silence self-denial walterong figeting addiction emotions digitalrelativity relativity space time perception experience online internet affectoverload apathy exhaustion infooverload secondaryorality oralcultures images text commodification identity performance 2017 michaelsacasashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9d1dbedba181/What should teachers understand about the snapchat back-channel? - Long View on Education2017-05-14T22:00:58+00:00
http://www.longviewoneducation.org/teachers-understand-snapchat-back-channel/
robertogreco“To keep drivers on the road, the company has exploited some people’s tendency to set earnings goals — alerting them that they are ever so close to hitting a precious target when they try to log off. It has even concocted an algorithm similar to a Netflix feature that automatically loads the next program, which many experts believe encourages binge-watching. In Uber’s case, this means sending drivers their next fare opportunity before their current ride is even over.”
We live in a culture where active listening, deep reading, and quiet reflection must compete with the incentivization to constantly participate and score points. I don’t read this as a lesson in psychology like a 5 Unusual Ways to be More Productive listicle, but rather as a lesson in politics and democracy: 5 Sneaky Ways Corporations Keep You Focused on Yourself in a Precarious World.
The last thing I want to do is normalize surveillance in schools by prying into what kids are doing on their devices or to outright ban things. That kind of approach both reflects ableism, ignoring how some people might rely on devices to learn, and classism, ignoring how people with low-incomes might rely on smartphones for internet access.
Should we turn Snapchat into an educational tool? I doubt that kids want school to bleed into their social space any more than my generation wanted their teachers to post homework assignments in mall food courts, on basketball hoops, or Facebook.
Should teachers aim to be more entertaining than Snapchat? I view education as kind of conversation which requires both parties to make an effort to listen. The classroom should explicitly examine and address the conditions under which people have a voice. As someone with power in the classroom, I am less worried about kids paying attention to me than I am worried about them paying attention to each other. What student would want to become vulnerable by sharing their important thoughts if they are really entering into a combat for attention, trying to out-entertain an app designed to be addictive?
Should we just butt out, as Gary Stager suggests? Amy Williams poses an important question in reply:
[tweet by Benjamin Doxtdator @doxtdatorb
https://twitter.com/doxtdatorb/status/863648814724505600 ]
"@garystager Which doesn't mean monitoring or surveilling the kids or banning it"
[tweet by Amy Williams @MsWilliamsEng
https://twitter.com/MsWilliamsEng/status/863688181811687425 ]
"@doxtdatorb @garystager Can a school follow anti-discrimination laws (i.e. really claim that it's preventing harassment) & ignore what happens in backchannels?"
Relegating Snapchat to a completely unsupervised space in schools makes no more sense than not supervising playgrounds, especially given the unprecedented power of social media to quickly spread images far and wide. Supervising the playground does not mean that I don’t allow kids the freedom to talk without me hearing every word, but somehow balancing the freedoms that kids need with obligations to care for them.
I think I worry most about students taking photos and sharing them without consent. Who could learn under those conditions? I couldn’t. Imagine taking a risk by trying a new move in PE class or giving a speech and then seeing a phone peek back at you. As a teacher that uses a lot of technology, I play a role in modelling best practices. If I want to tweet something from my classroom, I tell my students why I want to take a picture of them, show them the photo, and then ask if they are willing to let me post it.
Mostly, I’d love to hear what students think. Imagine the possibilities in large-scale research that solicited anonymous feedback and also made use of in-depth interviews. We might be missing an opportunity to really learn something."
[See also:
https://twitter.com/doxtdatorb/status/863799711098130433
"Nope, it's this kind of nonsense that equates education with entertainment and immediate gratification that's the problem."
in response to
"If kids in your class are more engaged by a fidget spinner than they are by your lesson, the spinner isn't the problem. Your lesson is."
https://twitter.com/plugusin/status/863389674223669248 ]]]>technology education schools snapchat distraction entertainment coercion gamification classism garystager learning supervision surveillance modeling reflection silence quiet teaching howweteach howwelearn sfsh middleground amywilliams edutainment engagement gratification fidgetspinners socialmedia discrimination backchannelshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cedf98a0d48c/CHAMPS and the Compliance Classroom | Ryan Boren2016-10-01T18:57:10+00:00
https://ryan.boren.me/2016/08/20/champs-and-the-compliance-classroom/
robertogrecovia:carolblack compliance ryanboren teaching howweteach education learning howwelearn unschooling deschooling neuroiverisity schools silence stillness conformism conforming anxietyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:51a25bad043c/The Bliss Station2016-07-22T21:14:00+00:00
http://austinkleon.com/2016/07/21/the-bliss-station/
robertogrecoYou must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
My wife pointed out to me that Campbell says you must have a room OR a certain hour — whether Campbell really meant this or not, she suggested that maybe it’s possible that a bliss station can be not just a where, but a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time.
The deluxe package would be having both a special room and a special hour that you go to it, but we started wondering whether one would make up for not having the other.
For example, say you have a tiny apartment that you share with small children. There’s no room for your bliss station, there’s only time: When the kids are asleep or at school or day care, even a kitchen table can be turned into a bliss station.
Or, say your schedule is totally unpredictable, and a certain time of day can’t be relied upon — that’s when a dedicated space that’s ready for you at any time will come in handy.
What’s clear is that it’s healthiest if we make a daily appointment to disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves.
“Choose the time that’s good for you,” says Francis Ford Coppola. “For me, it’s early morning because I wake up, and I’m fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one’s gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”
The easiest way I get my feelings hurt by turning on my phone first thing in the morning. And even on the rare occasion I don’t get my feelings hurt, my time is gone and my brains are scrambled.
“Do not start your day with addictive time vampires such as The New York Times, email, Twitter,” says Edward Tufte. “All scatter eye and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short term memory.”
Every morning I try to fight the urge, but every morning my addiction compels me.
“The new heroin addiction is connectivity,” says V. Vale. “The only solution is not one that most people want to face, which is to become lovers of solitude and silence… I love to spend time alone in my room, and in my ideal world the first hour of every day would be in bed, writing down thoughts, harvesting dreams, before anyone phones or you have any internet access.”
Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time.
“Where is your bliss station?” Campbell asked. “You have to try to find it.”"]]>2016 austinkleon josephcampbell time space solitude aloneness francisfordcoppola vvale attention socialmedia howweowork connectivity internet web online addiction silence mobile phones focus workspaces distractionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f16f060922fb/Hot Allostatic Load – The New Inquiry2015-12-26T21:53:19+00:00
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hot-allostatic-load/
robertogrecoThere are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.
—The Broken Teapot, Anonymous"
People crave community so badly that it constitutes a kind of linguistic virus. Everything in this world apparently has a community attached to it, no matter how fragmented or varied the reality is. This feels like both wishful thinking in an extremely lonely world (trans fems often have a community-shaped wound a mile wide) and also the necessary lens to convert everything to profit. Queerness is a marketplace. Alt is a marketplace. Buy my feminist butt plugs.
The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.
—Stephen Murphy
These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.
Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death."
…
"There is immense pressure on trans people to engage in this form of complaint if they want access to spaces—but we, with our higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, lifelessness, lovelessness, are the most fragile. We are the glass fems of an already delicate genderscape.
Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.
Deleuze wrote, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”
>>
ENDING
People talk about feminism and queerness the way you’d apologize for an abusive relationship.
This isn’t for the people who are benefiting from these spaces and have no reason to change. This is for the people who were exiled, the people essays aren’t supposed to be written for. This is to say, you didn’t deserve that. That even tens or hundreds or thousands of people can be wrong, and they often are, no matter how much our socially constructed brains take that as a message to lie down and die. That nothing is too bad, too ridiculous, too bizarre to be real when it comes to making marginalized people disappear.
Ideology is a sick fetish.
RESISTING DISPOSABILITY
— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time.
— Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life.
— Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock.
— Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal.
— Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion.
— Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied.
— “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder
Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models.
— A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other.
— Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.
DREAM
On January 18, 2015, I woke up from a dream. It was early morning, still dark. I felt very sad that the dream wasn’t real. I wrote it down, like I’ve written down all my dreams for the last eight years.
“She was my abuser. She came to my house on the island. I begged her to stop what she had done, to clear my name. She would not. It had been two years of being abused like a child because of her. I turned to walk deeper into the house. I looked back. She had a knife. She stabbed me. It was the happiest dream of my life. Because finally an abuser had done something to me that people would pay attention to. When I woke up my entire spirit was crushed because I had not been stabbed. I felt the weight of all these years of abuse. I wished so badly I had been stabbed.
I pulled the knife out. I wrestled the knife away. I called my friend to come over and help me.
I walked along the beach of the island and saw for the first time how PTSD had numbed and corroded every perception I’d had since that August, this debilitating disease. I finally felt the brightness of the air in my lungs, the color of the sand and the waves. It was so beautiful. I just wanted to experience all the things that had been stolen from me.”"]]>porpentine community via:sevensixfive feminism abuse disposability identity interdependence ptsd trauma recovery punishment safety socialmedia call-outculture society culture violence mobbing rape emotionalabuse witchhunts silviafederici damage health communication stigma judithherman terror despair twine laziness trashart trashzines alliyates social socialdynamics stephenmurphy queerness jackiewang complaint complaints power powerlessness pain purity fragility solitude silence ideology canon reintegration integration rejection inclusivity yvetteflunder leadership inclusion marginalization innocence guilt binaries falsebinaries predators gillesdeleuze deleuzehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4179001952ce/The 'Standing Man' Of Turkey: Act Of Quiet Protest Goes Viral : The Two-Way : NPR2015-12-25T21:53:43+00:00
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/18/193183899/the-standing-man-of-turkey-act-of-quiet-protest-goes-viral
robertogreco http://duraninsanlar.tumblr.com/ "
https://twitter.com/mahir_nyc/status/544266333320671233
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfIuKelOt4
via "@litherland reminds me of silent protests, too: standing man in taksim square and the silent protesters at UC Davis http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfIuKelOt4 "
https://twitter.com/datatelling/status/381530858387427328 ]
[related: Jen lLowe on disturbing data futures, quiet protest, and becoming more dangerous
http://vimeo.com/114393677 ]]]>silence protest turkey 2013 jenlowe duranadam mahiryavuz resistance quiet ucdavishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fa26746480db/paperplanes. To Be a Better Listener, Embrace the Awkward Pause2015-10-31T18:52:17+00:00
http://www.paperplanes.de/2015/10/1/embrace-the-awkward-pause.html
robertogrecolistening conversation 2015 mathiasmeyer slow silencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:efcc1a25b3ca/The Look of Silence2015-05-08T09:04:26+00:00
http://thelookofsilence.com/
robertogrecofilm towatch documentary silence indonesia joshuaoppenheimer theactifkilling thelookofsilence genocide historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fe71d617bd06/blogging, being wrong, malcolm x & the pharcyde — cecile emeke2015-04-30T08:44:10+00:00
http://www.cecileemeke.com/blog/2015/4/30/blog
robertogrecocecileemeke malcolmx audrelorde 2015 blogging criticism criticalthinking silence wrongness truth liberation thinkinginpublic fallibility infallibility paulgilroyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7fdb301be464/79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation. | The Infernal Machine2015-04-13T17:49:05+00:00
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-for-disputation/
robertogrecoalanjacobs anthropology culture digital history technology attention dunning-krugereffect anosognosia pleasure ethics writing howwewrite jaronlanier alextabattok stupidity logic loki cslewis algorithms akrasia physical patheticfallacy hacking hackers kevinkelly georgebernardshaw agency philosophy tommccarthy commenting frankkermode text texts community communication resistance mindfulness internet online web josémaríaarizmendiarrieta simonwiel society whauden silence attentiveness textualist chadwellmon surveillance 2015 audenhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:022b6f49ca41/Silence: an experiment | Quomodocumque2015-03-08T19:21:39+00:00
https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/silence-an-experiment/
robertogrecovia:maxfenton silence listening jordanellenberg gender 2015https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c7fda181c093/One Square Inch2015-02-19T19:15:51+00:00
http://onesquareinch.org/
robertogrecoolympicpeninsula audio nature silence washingtonstate conservation gordonhempton horainforest olympicnationalpark sound noicepollutionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:325523a2ee46/New map shows America's quietest places | Science/AAAS | News2015-02-18T22:47:27+00:00
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2015/02/new-map-shows-americas-quietest-places
robertogrecomaps mapping sound us silence 2015 soundscapeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3931dff4708f/Why I am not Charlie | a paper bird2015-01-10T03:37:18+00:00
http://paper-bird.net/2015/01/09/why-i-am-not-charlie/
robertogrecocensorship france islam terrorism charliehebdo islamophobia 2015 scottlong solidarity freespeech freedomofspeech religion violence oppression oneness stereotypes silence satire #JeSuisCharlieHebdo #JeSuisCharliehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fde700b7de6b/The Text Is Silence2015-01-08T00:35:34+00:00
http://thetextissilence.tumblr.com/
robertogrecotext silence tumblr blogs punctuation commas arthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:535009f0ee7f/Context collapse, performance piety and civil inattention – the web concepts you need to understand in 2015 | Technology | The Guardian2015-01-04T08:08:27+00:00
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/31/web-concepts-need-understand-2015-guide-netiquette
robertogrecocontextcollapse 2014 internet socialmedia communication conservativeneutrality algorithms alicemarwick kony performativepiety activism performance presentationofself online socialnetworking privacy audience via:chromacolaure civics urban urbanism twitter facebook civilinattention attention discourse ervinggoffman daraóbriain silence inattention kathysierra helenlewis serialpodcasthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c8eadea3ccb1/Jen Lowe :: Deep Lab Lecture Series on Vimeo2014-12-26T18:22:15+00:00
https://vimeo.com/114393677
robertogrecojenlowe politics data datamining 2014 deeplab quiet silence activism purpose protest corporatism ethics culture corporations colonialism capitalism tracking prediction privacy algorithms cruelty power google facebook internet bigdata chicago mastercard predictivepolicing foia lawenforcement police quantification bias ninasimone freedom love canon qualitative militarization vulnerability awareness slow refuge immigration arizona border borders immigrants law legal anonymity darkweb wildwest resistance blackmirror dissent performance danger money subversion commodification online webhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c44e3fe8c5bd/Some observations on Taiye Selasi’s “Driver” – The New Inquiry2014-12-01T19:39:15+00:00
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/some-observations-on-taiye-selasis-driver/
robertogrecoobservation power silence control policing 2014 aaronbady taiyeselasi storytelling powerdynamics subjectionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5b64d81c88b5/more than 95 theses - This man who speaks to you was born 55 years ago...2014-10-09T05:43:07+00:00
http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/99533839188/this-man-who-speaks-to-you-was-born-55-years-ago
robertogrecoivanillich commons 1982 vulnerability speech communication technology motorization acceleration productivity silence busyness loudspeakers news speed slowhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2af73c9b8e43/Silence, Solitude, Laziness and Other Pillars of the Good Life | The Evergreen State College2014-09-30T21:41:42+00:00
http://www.evergreen.edu/catalog/2014-15/programs/silencesolitudelazinessandotherpillarsofthegoodlife-10909
robertogrecoevergreenstatecollege coursedescriptions programdescriptions 2014 consciousness consciousnessstudies education philosophy writing sociology billarney sarahuntington haydencarruth silence solitude laziness leisure leisurearts artleisurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d5c522141a5d/Justin McGuirk on Bose headphones and the Internet of Broken Things2014-09-05T17:01:10+00:00
http://www.dezeen.com/2014/08/29/justin-mcguirk-opinion-bose-headphones-internet-of-broken-things/
robertogrecojustinmcguirk 2014 headphones noisecancellation ivanillich silence dosposability fixing urbanism urban attention noise noisepollutionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ea45f2dc0e54/How to Be Polite — The Message — Medium2014-08-13T21:36:00+00:00
https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c
robertogrecoetiquette paulford 2014 listening politeness behavior social cv canon understanding people apologies patience love empathy socializing relationships secondchances interestedness silence interestedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e8420deb6ad0/Relingos | The Brooklyn Quarterly2014-07-17T05:09:17+00:00
http://brooklynquarterly.org/relingos-the-cartography-of-empty-spaces-2/
robertogrecoarchitecture cities design spaces space commonplace geography relingos mexicodf df mexico valerialuisellu writing silence via:alexismadrigal alejandrozambra restoration robertobolaño tomássegovia gillesdeleuze jacquesderrida baudelaire heidegger hannaharendt robertwalser tseliot slavadornono walterbenjamin emptiness absence possibility possibilities imagination urban urbanism deleuze mexicocityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4d3c5b93386f/cityofsound: Essay: 'Designing Finnishness', for 'Out Of The Blue: The Essence and Ambition of Finnish Design' (Gestalten)2014-05-12T05:39:28+00:00
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2014/05/essay-designing-finnishness-for-out-of-the-blue-gestalten.html
robertogreco"The press conference is over, and in comes Jari Litmanen, from behind the door. And I looked at his face and I looked at his eyes, and I recognised something in those eyes. And I thought, this is a man with a great willpower. Because he was not shy, not timid, but he was modest. He is not a man who will raise his voice, or bang with his fist on the table and say, ‘We do it this way.’ No, he was more of a diplomat, not wanting to be a leader, but being a leader." [Former AFC Ajax team manager David Endt, on legendary Finnish footballer Jari Litmanen]
Finland has proven that it can take care of itself locally and globally. At home, its sheer existence is a tribute to fortitude, guile and determination, never mind the extent to which it has lately thrived. Globally, through Nokia, Kone, Rovio and others, through its diplomatic and political leadership, and through its design scene in general, it has punched well above its weight. Having been a reluctant leader, like Litmanen, will Finland once again step up to help define a new age, a post-industrial or re-industrial age? Unlike 1917, there are few obvious external drivers to force Finns to define Finnishness. So where will the desire for change come from?
Finland, and Finnishness, is not immune to the problems facing other European countries; the Eurocrisis, domestic xenophobia, industrial strife. Challenging these is difficult for an engineering culture not yet used to working with uncertainty, and in collaboration.
That requires this sense of openness to ambiguity, to non-planning, which is quite unlike the traditional mode of Finnishness. And yet there are also valuable cues in Finnishness, such as in the design—or undesign, as Leonard Koren would have it—of Finnish sauna culture.
"Making nature really means letting nature happen, since nature, the ultimate master of interactive complexity, is organized along principles too inscrutable for us to make from scratch. … Extraordinary baths … are created by natural geologic processes or by composers of sensory stimulation working in an intuitive, poetic, open-minded—undesign—manner." (Koren, ibid.)
Equally, the päiväkoti day-care system demonstrates a learning environment built with an agile structure that can follow where children wish to lead. The role of expertise—and every teacher in Finnish education is a highly-qualified expert—is not to control or enforce a national curriculum, but to react, shape, nurture and inspire. As such it could be a blueprint not only for education generally, but also for developing a culture comfortable with divergent learning, with exploration and experiment, with a broader social and emotional range, and with ambiguity.
Chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower once said “Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do, strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” Indeed, Finland's early development was driven by tactics—survival, consolidation and then growth in the face of a clear set of "things to do"; defeat the conditions, resist the neighbours, rebuild after war.
With that, came success, comfort and then perhaps the inevitable lack of drive. The country is relatively well off and stable, and perhaps a little complacent given the recent accolades.
Design in recent years has seen a shift towards the ephemeral and social—interaction design, service design, user experience design, strategic design and so on. Conversely, there has been a return to the physical, albeit altered and transformed by that new modernity, with that possibility of newly hybrid “things”: digital/physical hybrids possessing a familiar materiality yet allied with responsiveness, awareness, and character by virtue of having the internet embedded within. With its strong technical research sector, and expertise in both materials and software, Finland is well-placed. Connect the power of its nascent nanotech research sector—interestingly, derived from its expertise with wood—to a richer Finnish design culture capable of sketching social objects, social services and social spaces and its potential becomes tangible, just as with the 1930s modernism that fused the science and engineering of the day with design in order to produce Artek.
Finnish design could be stretched to encompass these new directions, the aforementioned reversals towards openness, ambiguity, sociality, flexibility and softness. Given that unique DNA of Finnishness — both designed and undesigned, both old and young—Finland is at an interesting juncture.
The next phase, then, is knowing what to do, despite the appearance of not having anything to do.
Buckminster Fuller, a guest at Sitra's first design-led event at Helsinki’s Suomenlinna island fortress in 1968, once said “the best way to predict the future is to design it.” Finland has done this once before; it may be that now is exactly the right time to do it again."]]>finland 2014 design danhill cityofsound sitra buckminsterfuller education strategy culture exploration experimentation ambiguity emergentcurriculumeurope undesign leonardkoren nature complexity simplicity davidendt jarilitmanen unproduct efficiency inefficiency clarity purity small slow sisu solitude silence barnraising helsinkihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7147498e00d9/MoMA’s ‘There Will Never Be Silence,’ About John Cage - NYTimes.com2014-01-05T04:25:24+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/arts/music/momas-there-will-never-be-silence-about-john-cage.html?pagewanted=all
robertogrecojohncage eventscores erasure silence music blackmountaincollege 2014 bmc art happenings moma marcelduchamp barnettnewman yokoono lamonteyoung robertrauschenberg via:shannon_mattern fluxushttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8eed0bf6c818/MoMA | Composing Silence: John Cage and Black Mountain College2014-01-05T04:24:03+00:00
https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2014/01/03/composing-silence-john-cage-and-black-mountain-college-3/
robertogrecojohncage silence happenings performance music erasure bmc blackmountaincollege 2014 robertrauschenberg via:shannon_mattern josefalbers annialbershttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:323735612b5c/