Baird, Robert and Stuart Rosenbaum - Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues (Part One)

This edited collection by Baird and Rosenbaum collects some of the leading critics and proponents (at the time) of the use of animals in laboratories. While a nice introduction to some of the concerns of and central points of conflict, I felt that many of the texts were too brief to adequately wrestle the issues they raised. In fact, many of the chapters' authors made such statements in their writing, pointing out that because of the limited space, their arguments would necessarily have holes that they couldn't address as they did in their other writings. Overall, though, it is an interesting, if light on the meat (forgive the metaphor), read largely because it outlines where some of the major points of conflict lie in the debates, and some of the major philosophical approaches to animal welfare/rights.

Robert White's chapter is annoyingly reductive. It lists examples of humans that have been saved because of animal research, pausing a few times to say that he was thinking about writing this essay, before continuing to list. The overall statement is that the human lives are well-worth the cost. The rhetorical structure of listing is not only intended to pull on our heartstrings, but also to increase the emphasis of the lives saved. I actually think this is a smart strategy as its number discourages one from even asking the question "how many animals died for each person?" Or "how many animals die in laboratories that are not medical (e.g. cosmetics)?" Or " how many in science laboratories die in the pursuit of trivial or non-applicable knowledge that is not directly related to disease and human life?" There is no actual consideration of the numbers of individuals (human or nonhuman) involved, what makes a body and its concerns morally significant, etc. It also implies that one should feel particularly guilty for even considering a few animals lives are morally significant. In short, its pure emotional response with no intellectual reasoning. Grump.

Zak's chapter provides a useful explanation of why animal rights are needed and why we can't simply rely on virtue-based ethical approaches. While we can argue that it is demeaning to human character to be cruel to animals (virtue thought), it doesn't take into account the belief that animals have intrinsic value in and of themselves (rights thought). Also, contrary to how a lot of animal welfare/rights activists seem to argue about the similarities of animals and humans to justify our moral consideration, Zak argues that we should value their moral significance not only in spite of difference, but because of it. He notes "The orangutan cannot be redescribed as the octopus minus, or plus, this or that mental characteristic; conceptually, nothing could be added to or taken from the octopus that would make it the equivalent of the oriole. Likewise, animals are not simply rudimentary human beings, God's false steps made before He finally got it right with us" (27). To me, this strikes as an interesting challenge to Utilitarianism in some respects, but moreso to Midgley's contention that relative dismissal can allow us to rank and prioritize animals. If we value the life of each animal type for its difference instead of its similarity, we are no longer able to create a hierarchy based on capacities, the location of many of the current arguments (see the recent Law, Culture, and the Humanities special issue on Animals). The question of what to value and how much is removed, and instead we have to think about how we structure our connections and relations with them to create a mutually beneficial situation. He also provides a brief explanation of positive versus negative rights. For Zak, it is key to legislate animal rights because the law not only polices morality, but it reinforces and creates it. As long as animal rights are not legislated, animal activists will always be considered radical.

Richard Ryder's essay provides a basic explanation of the concept of speciesism - a form of discrimination based on one's species, akin to racism, sexism, etc. It is a concept used to fight against certain kinds of biological determinism in the sciences that justify animal suffering (and have justified human suffering in the past) on irrational grounds. Ryder also argues that animal experimentation is often done in the pursuit of trivial or unapplicable knowledge. He argues that knowledge is not always a positive or progressive thing. Knowledge for knowledge's sake should not be a justification for cruelty. He also notes that while we can claim knowledge is neutral, the funding behind it creates a "strong commercial motive" (41). Ultimately, "To attempt to justify certain suffering of animals against some future, as yet uncertain benefit, seems to be an unwarranted gamble. Furthermore, the suffering imposed upon a laboratory animalis quite deliberate and artifical, in the sense that if the experiment was not performed then the suffering would not occur; but the suffering that it is hoped to reduce by doing the experiment is caused either by natural illness or by self-inflicted risks (e.g., through the use of a new cosmetic) - in other words the speciesist attempts to justify the deliberate infliction of suffering upon an innocent animal by claiming that the knowledge so obtained may perhaps, somwhere at some unknown moment in the future, relieve the natural or self-inflicted pains of his own species" (41-2).

Wright's article does many things... His argument relies on the idea that sentience is the key capacity that makes animals worthy of moral consideration. For him, to argue language, rationality, and language give humans a dimension of suffering animals lack is to concede the point to animals because these capacities all emerge from sentience. They all magnify the suffering. The suffering still exists without them. Utilitarianism is an unsettling approach for Wright because of the countless forms of animal experimentation that would be perfectly justifiable under its calculus (pending how one weighs the suffering of which animals against the benefits for other humans and/or animals). Thus, rights might be where animal activists should turn. However, he points out the difficulties of rights. I would say he has a fairly contractarian understanding of rights - as a "non-aggression pact" signed by everyone who's allowed to for "mutual convenience" (50). The problem with bringing animals into the pact is that gaining access to rights has historically been a bloody and difficult affair. First, most pressure for rights has come from the oppressed group, usually with war, revolution, and violence, and animals are not in a position to accomplish this. Second, supporters of their causes have been able to empathize with how similar they were to the oppressed group, usually on the basis of their species as humans. Hence, liberatory humanist projects. The difficulty with animal rights doesn't come from logical moralism for Wright, but from practical moralism. Activists would have to sway so many people and change their ability to empathize. From this practical moralism perspective, the concept of speciesism - while perhaps an inelegant and logically flawed approach to rights (see Midgley) - has enormous persuasive power. In Midgley's terms, it presumes animals are already part of the group, and one would need merely to equalize their rights with the rest of the norm (humanity).

Noske, Barbara - Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals

Anthropologist and philosopher Barbara Noske analyzes the sociohistorical context, cultural values and beliefs, and language practices as well as their influences on human-animal and animal-human relationships. After exploring continuities and discontinuities, Noske concludes with an anthropology of animals. Noske's book can be divided into roughly three sections: (1) a critique of practices and industries of domestication, (2) an analysis of the discourses and representations of animals with an emphasis on science, (3) and finally a turn towards an anthropology of animals.

1. Noske utilizes P.F. Wilkinson's definition of domestication - the process of actively forcing changes on animals' seasonal subsistence cycles in order to make it coincide with  particular needs (3) - in order to avoid how other definitions (i.e. the capture and taming by man of animals, their removal from their natural living area and breeding community, and their maintenance under controlled breeding conditions for profit) convey a picture of an active human subject deliberately manipulating an animal object. Wilkinson's definition allows for a broader continuum of human-animal and animal-human relationships as well as a broader historical understanding of the situation. This definition is essential less for her analysis of domestication itself. Rather, it allows her to deconstruct the gendered associations of animals and animality-in-the-human in the second section by providing historical evidence of how actual relations with animals do not align with recorded and repeated stories about them. For example, the claim "there is no real reason to postulate an overall connection between domestication of animals and the domestication of plants (agriculture)" (10) and its concomitant evidence becomes the foundation for a later analysis of depictions of hunter-gatherer groups and their implications. The rest of this section relies on a fairly traditional Marxist analysis of domesticated animals, focusing largely on industrially produced animals - as food, food producers, lab animals, etc. Her analysis stresses how animals and humans experience the capitalist industrial complex in similar ways. Both experience four interrelated aspects of alienation from the "product, from productive activity, from species life, and from fellow-humans [for humans... surrounding nature for animals]" (20). This seems to be an attempt to demonstrate how humanist liberatory ideals, like those of Marxists and labor rights activists, align with those of animal rights activists. Afterall, the forward does mention that the text was written in conversation with animal rights activists, implying that the text itself is a strategic part of the movement. The chapter on "The Animal Industrial Complex" is perhaps the most interesting and useful analysis of the book.

2. While Noske's reading of the role of nature in enlightenment philosophy seems a little reductive compared to the nuanced reading given by Midgley, her focus is less on content of these thinkers and more on their intellectual framework and methodology - a move I appreciated and found lacking in Midgley. Time over and again, Noske identifies in enlightenment philosophy a double standard about processes of knowing capabilities and capacities (see quotations below). When she shifts to analyzing the discourses of contemporary science, she repeatedly identifies the dangers of a biological determinism or natural essentialism that runs through their interpretations of data. One key aspect that allows animals to be analyzed and objectified, according to Noske, is their de-animalization, their reduction to genetic and biological codes which control their behaviors. In fields like sociobiology, Noske persuasively argues that these theoretical orientations push their scientists to interpret cultural behaviors as biologically determined, not only in animals but also in humans, as though we were programmed by our genetic codes to have such cultures. Autonomy, personality, and culture all disappear under the reductive grind of biological determinism with this orientation. Page 98 is particularly relevant to bioethics, as it discusses the way this theoretical outlook impacts what are seen as good and bad ethics, adaptive and maladaptive respectively. The sociobiological perspective is dangerous because "it conceals an ideology which helps legitimize inter-human forms of discrimination and, like all previous biological determinist theories, is already being used to defend the social status quo. Some sociobiologists have complained that their theory is essentially neutral and has unfortunately been politicized. This attitude is at best naive in view of the sociobiological call for a biologization of human ethics" (99). Because this theoretical framework and biologically determinist tendency can be found in areas like ethology and biology, this is particularly relevant to animal rights activists as they think about what kinds of expertise to draw on in their debates. The implications of this insight, I believe, call for a redefinition of what counts as expertise in particular ways. A rhetorical intervention would need to be made in order to focus politicians' (or judges') attention on the right kinds of expertise, such as those who work regularly with animals (trainers and philosophers like Vicky Hearne). Though this too is complicated as trainers can carry the Behaviorist perspective of animals that reduces them to mechanistic responses to external stimuli.

While we don't have to believe that all animals are the same and there can still be species boundaries, these boundaries don't exclude the species from being considered morally. Noske's most useful contribution in the book is positing that it is conceivable that animals have their own distinct cultures. She looks at cases of feral children to argue not only that animals have their own cultures that help them construct their lived-worlds, but that they can imprint this culture on others. Feral children, by becoming almost one with the Other in the form of an animal, demonstrate that animals can recognize humans as part of their distinct culture. This leads her to argue that there needs to be an anthropology of animals. Anthropology, as the "science of the Other," has all the makings of an inter-subjective science even if situated in a sea of subject-object oriented sciences. Curiously, Nosky touts "participatory observation" as the pre-eminently "inter-subjective method[s]" of research. Yet, despite her turn to ethnographic methodology, she does little to complicate or discuss how the earthshattering developments of postmodernism affected the epistemological ground upon which the ethnographic method relies. This, sadly, is one of the lacking parts of the book. By merely gesturing to an alternative without picking up its complexities, Noske's impressive book becomes 98% critique without much of a viable framework to replace the admittedly reductionist and essentializing frameworks she demolishes in her analysis.

I want to take a moment to comment on the book's methodology and presentation. As Noske is an anthropologist, I was surprised by the form of the book. It relied very heavily on thick description and then analysis - unsurprising for anthropology - but it didn't seem to take into account any of the discursive innovations the discipline has wrestled with since the 60s due to the major epistemological debates surrounding ethnographic research. I suspect this was in part because of the author's imagining the book as participating in the animal rights movement itself. While many of the discursive innovations help alleviate epistemological concerns about positivism and the complications of speaking for the other, they are also off-putting and disconcerting to read at times - collage, mixed authors, multiple languages/genres, etc.. To a reader not aware of why these discursive moves are being made, these moves could affect the credibility of the text, whether it would be read, and it could increase the ways the text could be interpreted.


Quotations:

"In a sense the consciousness of animals ranges wider than ours. To define them as human-like individuals, such as ethical philosophers do, and give them rights accordingly, is to do them a disservice - to downplay their otherness and to treat them ahistorically as it were." (xiii)


"Before the rise of capitalism animal subsistence cycles were disrupted and changed. Under capitalism animals have come to be totally incorporated into production technology." (14)

"Since animal products have become commodities, animal 'skills' and bodies have been subdivided in roughly the same way as favoured by Frederick Taylor." (15)

" the animal industrial complex cannot be called neutral even as far as human-human relations are concerned. For the question has to be asked which human needs are being fulfilled and whose interests are promoted by the existing animal industrial complex." (23)

"At the heart of the animal research industry is the paradox of a presumed comparability of animals and humans, and at the same time the negation of this comparability." (37)

"Capital interests appropriate and misapply enormous natural resources at the expense of the well-being of animals and increasing numbers of humans... To adopt a non-exploitative, intersubjective attitude towards one's fellow human whilst continuing to approach animals as objects, is indefensible. Animal exploitation cannot be tolerated without damaging the principle of inter-subjectivity." (38)

"I have always wondered how humans (Marxists and others) can be so sure about their own ability to judge animal inabilities. Humans pretend to know from within that they themselves possess certain faculties and to know from without that animals do not." (78)

"Animals will continue to be objectified (and abused) as law-bound animate matter just as long as nobody protests against their de-animalization." (88)

"Facts, in Donna Haraway's words, depend on the interpretive framework of theory, and theories are loaded with the values of the theorizers and their cultures. (All knowledge, evidence, data and truths are products of the perceptions, methodologies and language of those who describe them.)" (101)

"In other words, even if there is such a thing as a species boundary between ourselves and all animals, might this discontinuity exist on a horizontal level rather than on a vertical and hierarchical level?" (125)

"Our own limited and ddefective command of body language may have created a situation where, rather than the animals' need, it is really our own need which dictates our efforts to teach apes and dolphins human languages." (148)

"The notion that animals culturally construct their own world some people already find hard to digest, let alone that animals could actively imprint humans with their culture!" (161)

Cowen, Tyler - "Market Failure for the Treatment of Animals"

Argument:

Emphasizes the importance of making sure that policies encourage collective action by looking at several areas of regulation. (1) Cowen examines the often maligned and undervalued animal welfare movement. The movement cannot rely on individual actions because of the externalities of the market. For example, individual purchase and release of animals creates a free rider problem where all "animal altruists experience an improvement in welfare" (40). Instead we need to create policies that internalize all relevant externalities, such as happy meat programs (even granting the issues of monitoring and enforcement), because they lead to more effective collective action and mass change of our treatment of animals. Two criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of different policies would be willingness to pay (as in happy meat or social taxes) and willingness to be paid (i.e. to allow current treatment of animals to continue). (2) as Cowen notes, these externalities can be remedied if animals can trade with human - a farm animal offering affection if made a pet, for instance. Unfortunately, there is both a limited amount of space in certain categories such as pet, and in other categories, such as factory farming, no cooperation is needed from animals, leaving them with nothing to offer. Thus, Cowen argues that we need to tax "less salubriuous sectors and subsidize the allocation of that animal to a more salubrious sector" (42).This can be accomplished through government planning techniques or coordinated boycott. This seems to require a group agreement on which sector counts as worst in order to levy mass action, though. 

Important Quotations:

"I wish to examine and evaluate the human treatment of animals from the perspective of a very simple form of utilitarianism, namely economic ordinalism. Under this ordinal standard we use only the information contained in (human) market demand curves. Animals therefore 'count' only insofar as there exists a willingness to pay or be paid for their welfare" (39).

"I have sympathy for cardinal approaches, but it is difficult to produce agreement on how much an animal should count for, relative to a human being. I therefore examine what kinds of policy conclusions follow from a minimalist ordinal framework, counting only human willingness to pay" (39).

"Singer conjectures what utilitarianism would mean for the treatment of animals, but does not provide any formal derivation of his claims. Singer advocates complete vegetariansim, does not wear leather, and has written a book called /Animal Liberation/. But the intuition that animals matter does not suffice to support these claims... piecemeal reforms sometimes will make animals worse off rather than better off" (39-40).

"Markets, however, do not take into account one relevant welfare externality. Reallocating some animals to a friendlier sector will improve the welfare of animal lovers. Animal altruists would be willing to pay some amount to bring such a reallocation about if they could act collectively" (40).

"The simplest form of the argument does not require interpersonal or interspecies utility comparisons of this nature" (40)

"The existence of property rights in animals does not eliminate the basic externality problem...If I  buy  an  animal  to  liberate  it,  many  animal  altruists  experience  an  improvement  in  welfare.  Given  this  free  rider  problem,  not enough  animal  liberation  will  occur, relative to  an  optimum,  at  least  assuming  that  all  the  animal  altruists cannot contract with each other at low cost. By assumption,  animal  lovers  cannot  act  collectively  to  buy  up animals and reallocatc them across sectors. " (40)

"We have arrived at animal reallocation [between better categories such as pet and worse cat. such as slaughter animal] as the central and robust policy recommendation" (42)

"...whether zero meat consumption is desirable in ordinal utilitarian terms... The welfare costs of this offense [meat eating], as measured by willingness to pay to stop meat eating, must be weighed against the consumer surplus enjoyed by meat eaters. The current preponderance of meat eaters implies some positive amount of meat eating as an optimum, but smaller than what we observe under laissez-faire (42). 

Connections or Lingering Questions:

In what ways do the categories "better" and "worse" lead to reductive analogies (e.g. animal industries vs. pollutive industries)? Even if we work within the minimalist framework he sets up, the physical and health damage caused by dirtier industries seems to be the driving force behind the taxing and subsidies, not the affective damage done by what we value...

How does one decide "better," "medium," and "worse sector[s], as ranked in terms of their salubriousness for the animals"? More importantly, there seems to be something flawed with the assumption everything operates on a continuum in that it oversimplifies human relations to animals, which is inadequately covered by his justification for a reductive ordinal approach. 

Midgley, Mary - Animals and Why They Matter

Midgley's book Animals and Why They Matter is an exploration of how and why our moral relationship to animals have been dismissed by major philosophers, scientists, and political activists. According to Midgley, animals can be dismissed absolutely and relatively. Absolute dismissal comes from the categorical refusal to consider animal claims as anything other than nonsensical. Relative dismissal "merely give[s] them a very low priority" compared to human claims. While many claim that moral consideration for our resource distribution and treatment should be based on nearness - what Midgley calls "the lifeboat model" (seen in either the reductionist us/them concentric circles or overlapping circles of values on p. 30) - she argues that while nearness is a real psychological factor, it alone should never be the deciding factor in how we treat animals. She is careful to not side too closely with rationalists or emotivist theories of morality. While rationalists dismiss emotional responses to moral issues as demonstrative of ignorance or insincerity, or as being inappropriate to the situation, emotivist theories of ethics support the perspectives that "morality altogether is nothing but the expression of emotion, or attitudes formed from it. Striking a middle ground between rationalist and emotivist theories, Midgley argues that responses to moral situations that are devoid of either rationality or emotion are wrong. Emotions are rightfully part of our response to moral issues but only when grounded in reasonable beliefs. The central chapters of the book chastize simplistic or "casual" readings of enlightenment philosophers' treatment of animals and morality, arguing that their discussions about the exact meanings of terms like rights, justice, and duty are often within the boundaries of a broader morality and animal examples are often used to clarify important points about the treatment of animals. That said, Midgley argues that the philosophers and scholars face a conceptual problems when trying to think about moral relations with animals. Symbolism is a powerful tool that has been used to denigrate women and colonial subjects. And terms like "equality" cannot remain vague to be used - both in terms of what equality, in relation to whom, and who is excluded from this equality. If equality is a term used to level treatment within a group, it is difficult to expand the size of the group at the same time. Putting traditional humanist enterprises in conflict with those concerned about animals when using equality as a framework to argue for rights and better treatment.


One of the more interesting aspects of this text is its close attention to how language is connected to forms of political activism and reform. She notes that Kant's attempt to define the term duty became less effective as a moral term in part due to everyday language practices that used the term differently. Her analysis of terms like liberty and equality is strongly reminiscent (perhaps prescient) of Michael McGee's theory of the ideograph. This attention to language allows her to make the insight that, while many philosophers now agree that animals deserve some kind of moral consideration, "the disagreement has so far focused mainly on the proper use of words like rights and equality rather than on defending traditional dismissive habits of thought and practice as a whole" (65). Curiously, though, rather than beginning to dismantle these intellectual methodologies and theoretical frameworks, Midgley's decision is that "we all need to clear up these concepts" - leaving the terms under which the argument about animals' claims for moral consideration under a traditionally humanist orientation (66).

After noting but not deeply exploring that both social claims (on behalf of individual animals) and ecological claims (on behalf of species, forests, etc.) seem to bear consideration, Midgley moves on to critique Utilitarian perspectives that preference of our own species is "nothing but a prejudice comparable to racism" (96). While she does not rely on distinctions between species to categorically dismiss their relevance, she notes that moves sweeping intellectual moves of this kind do a disservice to the animal rights/activist movement because it doesn't allow us to think through very real distinctions between species - the bee, wolf, bedbug, protozoa, etc. - and how they experience the world. However, she seems to prefer Singer's Utilitarianism over many others.

Finally, Midgley notes that claims about anthropomorphism - the projection of human qualities onto nonhuman beings - is often used to dismiss moral claims about animals. How can we get at their subjective experience, those who hold this perspective ask, if they are a different species? Midgley notes that this extreme form of skepticism - often associated with Behaviorist models - should also be extended to our interactions with other humans if taken seriously. However, that should not be our approach. While we might not be able to access and measure the inner experience of animals, that does not stop us inferring them from visible data. Emotions like anger are connected and displayed through behaviors. If this were not the case, Mahouts would regularly be killed by elephants because they wouldn't be able to tell they were angry. Yet, this is not the case.

Quotations:

"I shall argue throughout this book that the proper way to treat it [the idea that those nearest to us have special claims on those limited powers and resources] is to recognize nearness as a perfectly real and important factor in our psychology, and therefore in our morality, but to refuse to treat it as the sole or supreme one. We are subject to other claims. Nearness alone can never have a walkover." (21)

"There is obviously no simple formula for determining priority among these distinct kinds of claims [kinship, special need, justice, special responsibility, prudence, gratitude, admiration and wonder, fellowship], and moral philosophies like Utilitarianism which try to make the job look simple can only deceive us. Each culture, and each individual, must and does work out a map, a quite complex set of priciples for relating them." (30)

""Accordingly, anyone accused of being emotional about injustice or oppression or war or bad science or anything else can quite properly reply, 'Of course I feel strongly about this, and with good reason. It is a serious matter. Anyone who has no feeling about it, who does not mind about it, has got something wrong with him.' Strong feeling is fully appropriate to well-grounded belief on important subjects. Its absence would be a fault." (35)

"Obscure concept can often be used effectively for reform in this way, so long as they are employed only on issues where their practical bearing is clear." (63)

How to Read My Lists

Since I'm about to embark on my reading lists, I'd like to create a model for how I'll read and take notes. Undoubtedly, this will change and shift as I read; however, I think it might be a useful activity to have considered as I approach reading. I'd like to take a little bit of space after each text to summarize them. Note which questions from my list they will be relevant to (and a few comments as to how). I'd like to note down any references to nonhuman bodies (especially in my rhetorics of the body list) by page number. Finally, to jot down any lingering questions or connections to other texts I notice.

When I label them then, I can use Activism1 (body1, animal1) to indicate the relevance to the first question on the activism list (etc.). This will help in my returning to study, as well as when I return to the texts in the future.

I'd also like to build in some time to reflect on the texts and see if alternate questions or categorizations would be more useful. Perhaps each week, I should take an hour or so to write reflectively about what I've read so far and the ideas that are bubbling up from them for me.

Argument:

Relevance to List Questions:

References to Nonhuman Bodies:

Important quotations:

Connections or Lingering Questions:

Introduction to Comprehensive Lists

            As I look back over my research projects at Northeastern, I’ve noticed a strong and sustained interest in political activism surrounding animals, and I would like to begin my dissertation with an eye toward what strategies the animal rights/welfare movements deploy and what is at stake in these approaches. Bioethics and biolaw are key areas to focus on in activism, not merely for activists concerned about animals, but for anyone concerned with ethical engagement with the Other (be that other human or nonhuman), and the animal rights/welfare movement is struggling currently with what strategy is best to address its current inadequacies. My exams will build toward this project by allowing me to deepen my knowledge of activism and writing, rhetoric of the body, and animal studies.

            While each list is separate, they all speak to broader trends within rhetoric and composition as well as interdisciplinary shifts. From object oriented ontologists to feminist corporeal theorists to ethologists to posthumanist new media scholars, academics are rethinking what is at stake in our assumptions of materiality and the body as well as how materiality produces meaning and escapes representation. For rhetoric and composition scholars, this has drawn our attention to everything from the role of circulation and material processes in meaning-making to questioning the agency of individual writers and revision without physical protest to exploring how the material body participates in the production of meaning. Rhetoric and composition has recently turned to animals as well. In a recent issue of JAC focused on animals, articles ranged from rhetorical analyses of the animal rights movement to representations of animals and human-animal relations in popular culture to the use of animalizing rhetoric in colonialism. Despite the range, each sought to explore the complexities of our relations with animals and what our ethical obligations to them ought to be. However, these trends also push us to rethink fundamental assumptions and practices of the discipline – what do we deem worthy of study, in what ways do we study them, how do we ethically represent them, and what is the role of the activist scholar. Finally, by exploring in my list on “Activism and Writing” how specific methodologies prompt taking up different objects of study and asking different questions of them, I hope to provide myself with a foundation for what methodologies would best suit my future research. 

Activism and Writing List

Activism and Writing: Community Literacy, Service-Learning, and Community Research

This list has assembled texts that allow me to explore how people participate in activism through different language practices in order to gain representation and resources as well as to struggle against discrimination and prejudice. By gathering texts in community literacy, service learning, and community-based research, I hope to explore how each understands and engages in activism and what is at stake in the different methodological approaches. I imagine these forms of activism occurring in the public sphere and over recognition in it. Simplified conceptions of public sphere theory imagined it as a space where individuals freely came together to identify societal problems and discuss how best to address them through reasoned debate and political action; however, critical theorists have problematized this conception by exploring the mechanisms through which individuals and groups are excluded from participation.

Shifting definitions of literacy has historically been one mechanism through which access to the public sphere has been regulated. Rather than imagining literacy as a set of skills (as in dominant approaches), scholars of community literacy conceive of it as a social practice, often taking place in contested relations of power. Their reliance on ethnography as a methodology also affords insight into how they relate to the community they study. While community literacy explores ongoing language practices, scholarship in service-learning encourages the university to combine writing instruction with community action in a variety of ways. One key aspect of service-learning is problematizing the relationship between the class and community in order to avoid detrimental assumptions, such as the work is charity, and as Janet Eyler argues, one tool through which assumptions can be brought to light and grappled with is through reflective writing before, during, and after the projects. If service-learning brings the classroom to the community, community-based research brings scholarly research outside of academia and its preoccupations. Ellen Cushman urges scholars to participate in “activist research” so that they help the communities in which they serve. Some key concerns for community-based research are how research topics are selected and prioritized, building ethical relationships between the university and community, and ensuring that marginalized voices are heard. Reading these texts will allow me to think about whose literacies are dominant in the public sphere, whose are marginal or resistant, how individuals struggle for representation and material resources, and what relationship exists between community and university. 

In particular, I’m interested in reading the list with the following questions in mind:

·         What is at stake in the different methodological approaches to language practices as activism?

·         What language practices are considered objects of study for each approach?

·         How do scholars theorize and understand their relationship to the community?

·         How do we imagine the space and place of the public sphere?

·         What strategies are used to exclude and gain entrance to the public sphere and other resources?

List:

Ackerman, John and David J. Coogan.. The Public Work of Rhetoric: Civic Scholars and Civic Engagement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Print.

Adler-Kassner, Linda, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, eds. Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1997. Print.

Anderson, Erin. “Global Street Papers and Homeless (Counter) Publics: Rethinking the Technologies of Community Publications.” Reflections 10.1 (2010):76-103. Print.

Anderson, Jim, Maureen Kendrick, Theresa Rogers, and Suzanne Smythe, eds.  Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities, and Schools: Intersections and Tensions. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Print.

Ashley, Hannah. "Between Civility and Conflict: Toward a Community Engaged Procedural Rhetoric." Reflections 5.1-2 (Spring 2006): 49-66. Print.

Barton and Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Branch, Kirk. “Eyes on the Ought to Be”: What We Teach When We Teach About Literacy. Cresskill: Hampton P, 2007. Print.

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Cain, Mary Ann. “Bringing It Home: The Struggle for Public Space in Education.” JAC. 29.4. (2009): 833-842. Print.

Calhoun, Craig. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Print.

Callahan, Kevin J. Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889-1914. Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing Itd, 2010. Print.

Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon P, 1997. Print.

Coogan, David. “Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue.” Community Literacy Journal 1.1 (2006): 96–108. Print.

Coogan, David J. “Counterpublics in Public Housing: Reframing the Politics of Service-Learning.” College English. 67.5 (2005): 461-82. Print.

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