Class Acts

Mother and Warrior

September 4, 2014 by Mary E. Marvin Comments Off

thomas-400 In today’s session of Professor Valorie Thomas’s class on AfroFuturisms, the discussion focuses on a painting by Christy Freeman and how the image both represents and challenges our conceptions of motherhood and reflects the blending of African Diaspora spirituality with Christianity.

Thomas: The belief is that when you are born, everyone has a protector, an Orisha who watches over your head, your “Ori,” like a guardian spirit or a guardian angel. You might have relationships with one or more Orishas, and it is within your power as a human being to cultivate those relationships and to learn the lessons that Orisha has to teach you.

There are many Orisha and Catholic saint correspondences as a result of Africanisms encoded within Christianity. If you see images of Mary, and she’s surrounded by stars and is in this archway full of color, and she’s standing on a rock on the sea, all that ideography is consistent with Yemaya, the ocean goddess who is seen as the ultimate protector and great mother figure. So she may be respected as Mary, but the figure will also be recognized and loved as Yemaya.

Each Orisha can have dozens of paths. There’s Erzulie, a Haitian Orisha or Loa, who corresponds to the Yoruba Oshun and is also related to Yemaya. Erzulie is also connected to nurturing and motherliness, but she is the personification of love and the erotic, so she is seductive, flirtatious, loves jewelry, mirrors and sweets and wants to see people happy. But beneath that sweet façade, there’s a formidable persona. I’m going to show you a painting of Erzulie Dantor, a different side or path of this deity. I’d like to have you respond to the image first, and then I’ll tell you what fascinates me about it.

Chloe: In the heart on the crown, the top reminds me of ram’s horns, giving the sense that this is someone who is tender and warm but also can defend herself.

Thomas: Yes, this is reworking stories about the feminine, about gender, about power, breaking some of those conventional story lines that associate romance with sentimentality and weakness and docility. There’s tension that comes through that might, in other contexts, seem diametrically opposed, but in this figure they are combined. The softness and hardness; the love, the heart, but also the dagger.

Sophie: It feels like a lot more emphasis on the mother figure, but then also there’s a protective quality that I don’t think is in Western portraits. Mary isn’t usually actively protecting the baby and wielding a knife or wielding any sort of weaponry.

Thomas: What do we know as viewers about those images that you’re talking about? Where Mary’s not necessarily on watch, on guard; the child is just in his mother’s arms. How does the story end? Those images of Madonna and child, that’s the beginning of the story. We already know the ending. This is a disturbing image in that this Mary is thinking off script. It’s a stance of agency and aggression, a huge intervention on the narrative and on the established, fundamental, archetypal, Christian narrative, even though it’s still framed as Christianity.

Byron: I have a question about her necklace. I wanted to know: what’s the significance of that as a Christian icon?

Thomas: It’s a heart and what else? What is hanging below the heart?

Chloe: It could be a skull.

Byron: It looks like a nail.

Thomas: It’s silver. Is it a nail, are we agreeing that it’s a nail?

Byron: There is also something that looks like a snake.

Thomas: I’m so glad you brought up the necklace. We need to consider all those possibilities. The snake is an ancient Vodun archetype, not evil but representative of life and transformation. What about the line of that little dagger on the necklace? Where’s the line going?

Renata: It’s going right towards him.

Thomas: It’s going right towards him, right? In this case, Mary’s saying, “Well, I have a knife, too.”

Sophie: The stars in the painting also are evocative for me. It’s like faith of some sort, which maybe is nonsensical or unreasonable, because they also have resonance with anti-faith.

Thomas: In a particularly African-American or African diasporic context, how might you come to be thinking about the stars?

Sophie: A star guide for going home.

Catherine: Using the signs of the stars to move north.

Thomas: To move north because?

Catherine: Out of slavery. To freedom.

Thomas: The stars are the liberation narrative, at least back in the day of enslavement when knowing about astronomy was a useful skill in escaping and moving towards liberation. When I first saw this amazing picture it immediately tweaked my understanding of the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She commits infanticide when the slave catchers are on her heels. The controversy, the tension in this story is the question: Is this motherhood? I think the painting also asks that same question. What if the knife ends up being something that is protecting the child by keeping it from the attacker who will certainly dehumanize and obliterate its spirit? Sethe says, “I wasn’t going to let them take that child, wasn’t going to let them make that child go through the monstrosity that I went through.” It redefines the terms of motherhood as not only creator but also potential destroyer; nurturer but also warrior. That’s the ultimate extreme case, extreme scenario, but it does bring the idea of the feminine principle into connection with the highest possible stakes of life and death.

Leaks and Firestorms

March 20, 2014 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

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In today’s class, students discuss the firestorm ignited by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks of top secret documents last summer. Among the questions raised are: who decides what are legitimate targets for domestic and foreign surveillance; why some secrets should be protected; and whether information gathering by corporations like Google and Facebook should be part of a broader privacy debate.

Munter: I was at the Rand Corporation yesterday on a panel about secrecy and privacy. One side, I had an FBI agent, and on the other an ACLU lawyer, and I realized the reason they invited me was to be sure they didn’t rip each other’s throats out. On the domestic side, they talked about privacy and the Constitution. I suggested that many of these issues should not be limited to domestic policy, but should be part of foreign policy. I’m curious what you think of the (Snowden) revelations about spying on the American people.

Ben: If we are truly at war, we are engaged in a war on terrorism, we have a duty to understand the lay of the land; it’s our job to have a complete awareness of exactly where the enemy is, and understand the lines of communication and organization.

Munter: Let me go back to the first thing you said. You guys think we’re at war. Yes, no?

Aidan: I think it’s almost antithetical to democracy to accept that we can be on a constant war footing. Because it is true when you are in a war, democracy affords certain executive powers that are supposed to be temporary. The problem is this war has been going on for more than a decade, and it can do that because it doesn’t affect our daily lives. Mass spying on citizens inside the country and out isn’t even seen as surprising anymore.

Ben: Are you talking more about spying on foreign leaders? I’m talking about domestic spying. Foreign spying in general is kind of an accepted thing.

Munter: So this doesn’t surprise you?

Ben: Not as much, but domestic spying gets me because it’s shrouded in deep secrecy. The way the administration acted after Snowden’s revelations, trying to tarnish the guy’s name and trying to underplay how big the domestic spying programs were. The whole process itself; there is no transparency anywhere. It seems very antithetical to democracy.

Munter: There is kind of a carve-out that in exceptional times you can have exceptional measures. I don’t know if any of you know the state song of Maryland (hums it), and it has the words, the despot’s heel is at thy door/ Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore.

Now the despot in the song is Abraham Lincoln, There were riots against Lincoln. He put the legislature in jail so they wouldn’t secede from the union. So here is our hero Abraham Lincoln who, basically for the period of the Civil War, was unconstitutional. We can say exceptional circumstances, pretty serious times. We can say 9/11 was a pretty serious time.

Jack: When you frame it about taking away constitutional liberties and the Fourth Amendment and stuff, it sounds very serious and it is. But when you contextualize it in the terms that it’s not just government doing this, it’s the private sector as well. And that, honestly, is what scares me more.

Munter: You mean when you search something in Google and it gives you commentary about what you could buy?

Michael: Google’s and Facebook’s whole business model is to own your information and to sell it. And that worries me just as much if not more.

Tom: I guess where I draw the line is that Google and Facebook can’t put you on a watch list, but the NSA can, based on information that might not necessarily be suspicious, like a search history.

Munter: What you’re saying is that we’re getting it wrong if we only worry about constitutional issues, serious or not serious as they might be, because there is something bigger, which is the technological issue, which is both inside and outside government.

Aidan: It’s such a slippery slope that there are going to be abuses and that brings up the question of either you have to have one extreme, no surveillance, or you have to recognize that it will be abused, and I think most Americans aren’t willing to have no surveillance.

Munter: So there is the permanent war footing argument and the violation of civil liberties argument. Obviously, the American public want something in between; they want to be safe and they’re willing to pay a certain price in order to be safe, but they don’t want to lose the essence of what it means to be Americans and have freedoms, which is not satisfying intellectually but pretty realistic.

Charlotte: I was going to say that it’s really a generational thing. My parents are vehemently opposed to wiretapping, domestic surveillance, where most of the people I’ve talked to don’t really care.

Munter: Because they’re used to it.

Charlotte: Yeah, we’ve grown up where everything is totally public. When it comes down to the message Snowden is making about why this is wrong, most people in my generation probably don’t relate.

Munter: There are reasons why we keep secrets. If I’m in Iraq or Libya, people tell you things in confidence, and they tell you things at the risk of their lives, and you keep that confidence because that’s your job.

Ben: When you say secrets are kept for the reason, the question is who is deciding the reason for that. Obviously, in the example you mentioned it’s for national security, people’s jobs, but I think when it strays to things that would portray the U.S. poorly or things that the U.S. is doing that are illegal, then I think that borders the line when secrets should be revealed.

Nick: My problem with Snowden was for him to take this issue into his own hands and to leak it to the public. I think it’s not really up to an individual to make that call.

Munter: Arguing uncharacteristically on Snowden’s behalf, isn’t that what a citizen is supposed to do, to some extent? Isn’t civil disobedience, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, part of our tradition?

Nick: Unless you have a viable alternative like a legitimate pathway to share that information.

Munter: But is the issue here simply the amount of information we’re gathering? The whole point of 9/11 was that domestic and foreign intelligence had different pieces of intel and didn’t bring it together, which was part of what led to the Homeland Security that we know and love. Now that we have that, is there such a massive amount of material to deal with that no one can pick up his or her eyes and ask where we are going strategically?

Entrepreneurship & Social Justice

November 6, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In Class with Professor Jerry Irish

In today’s small group discussion for the class, Religion, Ethics and Social Practice, six college students and three residents of Pilgrim Place discuss social entrepreneurship, which combines ideas and practices from both the business and nonprofit worlds to solve problems such as poverty and inequality. The group focuses on whether social entrepreneurs, who seek to create social value rather than wealth, are compromising their values by working within the capitalist system.

Miranda: I’m really interested in exploring the debate about whether social entrepreneurships are a Band-Aid, because you’re working within a corrupted system, or are they about trying to change that system and using the tools effectively to do so.

Eleanor: I just heard a woman over at Pilgrim Place earlier this morning, who spoke about being in China. She said she asked one of the men there, who teaches Marxism at the university: ‘Do you think Marxism has a future?’ And he said back to her: ‘Do you think capitalism has a future?’ I think if there is a possibility of envisioning a future for capitalism, it has to do with something like social entrepreneurships.

Karl: I’ve found out from my younger radical community organizing days that there is a place and a need for Band-Aids; there is a need for cooperating with the system at some point, even if you’re not altogether happy with it, and there is a need for trying to find innovative ways to bring things together that seem to be diametrically opposed—like business and community organizing. I think you come to a healthy understanding of what is the best thing to do for the most common good at the time.

Christian: I don’t see it as a Band-Aid at all. I see business and profit-seeking and these sorts of drivers as extraordinarily powerful tools. Some advancements, such as electricity and drugs like penicillin, have come about because of capitalism, because we incentivize them. If you have the motivation from the get-go to do something for the social good, a social entrepreneurship can be a truly amazing tool that can be used in really cool ways. That’s the way I see it, but I come from a family that is very pro-business, very different from a lot of people in this room.

Irish: In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus tried a Band-Aid. He found that for $27 dollars he could relieve 42 women stool makers in Jobra of their indebtedness. But just for one week. And then the loan sharks would come right back. It was his idealism about trying to overcome the poverty gap he saw in this village that alerted him to the fact that he needed to go beyond a Band-Aid. He rallied his students and took them to talk to people in the community to see what they needed. That’s when he got the idea that maybe he could leverage the banks. When he discovered he couldn’t, he created his own bank. Do any of you see in either your placements or project proposals the seeds of something like this in the future? Are there ingredients that you could imagine one day that you would employ or work off of as a social entrepreneur?

Christian: My proposal is trying to understand the adherence to medication in Third World companies. One of the major issues is the way the pharmacological system works. Drug companies send HIV and TB medication to Third World countries as window dressing, without any analysis of what’s needed. It’s extraordinarily expensive, especially when you deal with adherence issues, which means the disease becomes resistant and then you can’t use first-line drugs. And these programs don’t even come close to offering second-line drugs.

Becca: This is about the Coronado Garden project I work on with the Draper Center. It’s an organic garden and a curriculum on food justice and environmental justice at Coronado, an alternative high school in West Covina. The teacher has expressed an interest in selling plants, which could be a way to make the whole project self-sustainable. It would also get merged into a small business class. I’m struggling with envisioning this transition.

Mia: Why do you struggle?

Becca: I think it’s the idea that we’ve been very much trying to cultivate the garden as this safe green space and connect food justice and environmental justice with greater societal injustices and connect that with students’ everyday lives, so encouraging them to use the garden as a tool for money—although it would create a self-sustained project, it feels hypocritical to me.

Miranda: I don’t think that is hypocritical because when you’re incorporating funding into a closed loop, self-sufficient system, you’re ultimately benefiting the project for the future.

Irish: You’re changing the definition of investment, that the capital gets invested in a social purpose. What you’re exhibiting are the skills that are entrepreneurial, and I don’t think some of these skills need to be understood simply in terms of a profit. This gets closer to this issue that you brought up in your reflections, a new kind of citizenship and—I hate to bring in my friend Niebuhr (laughter)—the notion of responsibility to a larger social group.

Christian: You have to play it like a community organizer and trust that people will tend to do the right thing most of the time. By allowing capitalism to inject itself into these social entrepreneurships, we worry about becoming tainted, but it leverages all you can do. If you were to talk about Bill Gates in the late ’90s, you’d say he was completely co-opted by the capitalist system, but look at the way he’s leveraged the funds he produced. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a great example; it does really good stuff and is extraordinarily efficient, much more efficient than any other charity or nonprofit group.

Karen: I’m learning a lot from hearing the stories from the elders and the things that we’ve all experienced about having a vision for some sort of project and then having the initiative to do it. I feel I don’t have a full grasp of all of that yet, but I’m definitely learning. I really like the idea that social entrepreneurship is contagious. You start something and then the people you work with are empowered to do their own thing. I feel like I’m catching the bug here.

Immigration and Opportunity

June 26, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s session of Professor Hung Thai’s seminar on Immigration and the New Second Generation, the discussion focuses on whether schools in the U.S. provide opportunity for the children of recent immigrants or, because of the prevalence of tracking—grouping together students based on test scores or perceived ability—schools create even bigger hurdles that have negative consequences long after students graduate and enter the workforce.

Thai: Before 1985, most research in education fervently argued that schools help to equalize opportunities for students from low as well as high economic standings. Since then, there have been many debates about the problems of tracking in schools, including a study that was done in 1998 that set the tone for how we think about tracking today; that it tends to be a negative practice particularly for students who are not tracked at the upper end—immigrants, students of color, the poor.

Anissa: What was the philosophy behind tracking, what made someone think it was a good idea?

Thai: Tracking started as a solution to the immigrant problem. The first mass wave of immigration to this country occurred from the 1890s to the 1920s. With the influx of large numbers of immigrants, educators had to figure out ways to stratify the native populations against the immigrant populations. They did that, presumably, based on ability. How many of you went to schools that had tracking?

Sophia: I went to Claremont High, and it didn’t have tracking.

Thai: You didn’t have tracking? How about AP though, that’s another form of tracking.

LaFaye: We had three different programs in our high school in Chicago. The top floor was for the medical students; the second floor for Phi Beta or the law students and the first floor for regular students. At my school they would give out literacy tests and would separate those who scored above from the others who didn’t score as well.

Thai: There are essentially two ways of tracking students, and both systems are problematic on multiple levels. The main way is based on test scores. The other, which is actually much more prevalent that most people think, is the subjective evaluations of teachers on the perceived abilities of students. Some people argue that tests themselves don’t evaluate a student’s lifelong learning and capacity. The second argument about teacher’s evaluations is that there is something about schools, particularly in more middle class schools, where teachers subjectively evaluate students on the standards of middle class values and the standards of learning that take place in private homes. Which is why we know tracking tends to be racialized and classed, with poorer students tracked in the lower levels much more.

Electra: What are examples of middle class values?

Thai: Perhaps the most well-known book that makes this argument is Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau in which she argues that children who grow up in middle class families tend to be more assertive and tend to question authority. But children who come from poorer families or minority families tend to question less, to take orders more.

In Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis argue that one of the major ways schools reinforce inequalities is that poor schools essentially function as a site for producing a reserved army of labor for the American labor market; that tracking systems train the wealthy to work in jobs that allow them to have more authority, more managerial positions and, at the same time, condition the poor to take on jobs that tend to be more unskilled labor.

Mabelle: This whole idea of mobility over generations reminded me of what Vivian Louie said at the end of her book about immigrant parents and their pessimism about assimilation. That they themselves couldn’t reach a certain level, but because they have the sheer hope that the American dream is worth it for their children, they can take on anything, which is inspiring, but also scary.

Thai: Most people presume that the immigrant success story is linked to one generation. Louie says that is not actually the reality. She points out that it takes at least four generations for the students she writes about to experience long-range upward mobility. Americans tend to believe that we have longer-range patterns of mobility than we do, when in fact, when compared to Western Europe, our patterns of mobility are shorter ranged.

Tim: If one of the major reasons these immigrant families come to the U.S. is to give their kids more opportunities, the more interesting question is: is it morally, is it socially OK for them to come here with that expectation? Is that how immigration works in America? Parents justify the inequality they face because they think their kids are going to have equal opportunity because this is America. But is that actually the case?

The Professor:

At Pomona since 2001, Hung Cam Thai is an associate professor of sociology and Asian American Studies. Thai earned his Ph.D. in sociology from U.C. Berkeley and is the author of the book For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy and the forthcoming InsufficientFunds: The Culture of Money in Low Wage Transnational Families Last year, he was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award by the Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association.

The Course:

Immigration and the New Second Generation focuses on the body of immigration research that gives attention to age-related experiences, paying particular attention to young adults coming of age as they negotiate the major social institutions of American life, such the labor market, family, work and schooling.

The Idea of Money

March 28, 2013 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s session of Professor John Seery’s critical inquiry seminar on The Idea of Money, the class discussion focuses on the 1904 Max Weber book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The first- year students cover a range of topics, including plans to attend a taping of the TV game show The Price Is Right and whether Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism “Time is money” applies to their lives.

Seery: So what do you think of the argument that capitalism is not just accumulation? In fact, Weber says it involves restraint. This is his thesis: that capitalism in the West, under the direction of a particular form of Protestantism, brought two otherwise contradictory psychological impulses together—acquisitiveness and asceticism. You have to be self-abdicating in order to accumulate.

Nico: I think it makes a lot of sense in terms of what we’ve seen so far in this class—especially when we looked at visual art as well as music, with people throwing money in the air and that being satisfying to them; having and showing off money as an end, rather than a means of acquiring goods. The most basic depiction was the toilet roll of dollar bills—“Look, I have all this money; who cares about spending it on toilet paper?”

Sam: Kind of weird, because it seems to put more value on the potential purchasing money has, as opposed to actually purchasing items. You have this number associated with your name, which has more prestige than having all these other items that have 10 times more use.

Seery: This religious idea—let’s follow his logic. Weber thinks that early Puritans worked hard, became capitalists for the sake of redemption. But then once you get that rational, intensive activity in place, we forget about the religious motivation and start to have people pursuing goods for their own sake, forgetting what it meant in a religious scheme of things.

Noah: That’s where Ben Franklin comes in. He basically says be acquisitive in order to have good virtues.

Seery: Do you think of your life in terms of “time is money”? If you started to think of your activity in this classroom as foregone billable hours, and you’re not billing anyone right now, don’t you realize you’re really wasting your time?

Casey: I feel like it trivializes your time if your time is just about money.

Seery: And you have something better to do?

Casey: I probably don’t, but I like to think that I do (laughs).

Seery: It’s the work ethic, and it’s not for the sake of redemption, worldly or otherworldly; it’s what Weber would call Faustian, striving for the sake of striving. You’re on a treadmill, and do we understand the ends to which we’re directed? Is it possible for you to go out and smell the roses? Or do you think in Ben Franklin terms—time is money, I have to produce?

Erik: I can’t exactly agree that time is money; from my standpoint time is extremely valuable. I kind of think that I have this calling, that I’m obligated to spend my time productively, and if I’m not, I’m letting go of a duty I have. I can’t place that duty, and it makes me believe in how Weber ties that back to a religious sense.

Seery: Erik, when you surf, are you thinking, I have two hours where I can really surf well and be the best surfer I can, or are you thinking this is time out?

Erik: No, it’s time that I value; to me it’s time that is productive; it’s good exercise and it’s fun. That’s why I sort of disagree that time is money. Because time to me is valuable, so if I’m valuing my time, I’m being productive.

Seery: It’s a valuable expenditure and you don’t see it as wasteful; it’s kind of a par with billable hours.

Casey: It’s kind of a cost-benefit analysis. Would you give it up for a certain amount of money?

Erik: Absolutely. Permanently? No. Not for any amount of money.

Seery: For most of the book Weber is being analytical, and you don’t get the sense he’s being judgmental. But, by the end, there is a critique where he says material goods have gained an increasing and inexorable power over the lives of men. Ouch, the searing indictment. The Puritans wanted work to be a calling, but now we are forced to do so. In Weber’s view, the care for external goods should lie on the shoulders like a saint wearing a light cloak. But he says that the cloak has instead become an iron cage.

The Course: The Idea of Money

The catalog course description for this critical inquiry seminar reads: “Students will examine the idea of money, drawing from political theory, philosophy, religion, economics, anthropology, history and literature. As a culminating project we will play the lottery and, if we win, we’ll be better positioned to test our ideas against reality.”

The Professor: John Seery

A member of Pomona’s faculty since 1990, John Seery is the George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics. He earned his B.A. from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. A two-time winner of Pomona’s Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching, Seery received the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Sidney Hook Memorial Award in 2009 and served as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 2010-2011. His books have been on the topics of irony, death, liberal arts education, constitutional age requirements and Walt Whitman.

Samples from the reading list:

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

Michael Sandal, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

David Wolman, The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society

Selections from works by Adam Smith, John Locke, Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, Andrew Carnegie, William Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud.

The Politics of Hunger

November 13, 2012 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s class session of The Global Politics of Food and Agriculture, the discussion focuses on Joel Berg’s book, All You Can Eat, about hunger in America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently estimated that 48.8 million peo- ple, or about 14.5 percent of all house- holds, reported not having enough food on one or more days in the previous month. “Those numbers are sobering,” says Professor Heather Williams. “One in six households. That’s high enough for me to know someone who is hungry—someone at my church, someone who works with me, maybe someone in my neighborhood who puts on a good face but is really struggling.”

Williams: I want to talk about Berg’s policy arguments, which are controversial. He says we should consolidate all federal food programs into one efficient entity, have a universal school breakfast, reward states to reduce hunger; allow nonprofits to compete for federal funds; give recipients more choice, provide additional services such as job training. What do you think?

Allie: I’m convinced. I’ve read about these hunger statistics, and am now thinking anyone and everyone should have a breakfast program.

Williams: Berg wants breakfast available to all kids. You don’t have to apply for it or be marked as the kid who is so poor his parents can’t give him breakfast. No judgment. Breakfast food is pretty cheap. The bang for the buck is that any kid who hasn’t come to school with a meal in their belly isn’t going to be missing out on what is being taught in the morning because they’re hungry.

Maya: These policies seem like retroactive policies. If you were to pull back one more step and see why these people can’t access any types of food; why they don’t have jobs. What is the bigger picture? Every week we’ve talked about a vulnerable group of people who are abused or mistreated or lack nutrition or something else, and it all seems to come back to the general structure of capitalism.

Williams: To be fair to Berg, he’d be the first to say, “Amen, sister”— I totally agree with that. This is very much bound up with distributive politics. You need to have corporations called out on their big public Thanksgiving food drive when they’re paying their own employees below a living wage. He couldn’t agree more with you that food insecurity is bound up in complicated ways with inequality.

Monica: What I really liked about reading this book is that there is a solution, a concrete solution of what we can be doing to cut the food insecurity number to a thirtieth. Right now, when people are hungry, we’re talking about what government policies need to be fixed, because those are the mechanisms that are holding this society together. There are a lot of really plausible things that could be done.

Applied Sci-Fi: In Class with Professor David Tanenbaum

July 2, 2012 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s first-year seminar, Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction, students visit a lab in Millikan, where Professor David Tanenbaum grows carbon nanotubes. Particles of iron and molybdenum are combined with methane, hydrogen and argon and heated to 1,000 degrees to create cylindrical molecules, with diameters of one to two nanometers.

Next, a student-led discussion focuses on I’m Working on That: A Trek from Science Fiction to Science Fact by William Shatner and Chip Walter, and covers topics ranging from wearable computers and biowarfare to cryogenics and virtual reality.

Tanenbaum asks the students to consider whether scientific developments have an effect on science fiction or whether the stories we read lead to innovative ideas for new technology, and the abridged and edited discussion follows:

Tanenbaum: There are a lot of virtual 3D video games where you wear glasses and play them, and you feel pretty much that you’re inside the virtual reality space. … Virtual reality is used in rides where people are in a room that is shaken or accelerated or pushed or pulled, so they think the shaking could be associated with a rocket blasting off or an earthquake. We’ve also read about the idea of live feedback in clothing. If you can put on the right gloves and shirts, those things can give you physical tactile responses. It can feel like someone put his hand on your shoulder, even if it’s just your shirt getting tighter.

Connor: Shatner also has a chapter about wearable computers, and I realized that Apple has done a lot of that by combining the iPhone and an mp3 player and PDA (personal digital assistant).

Tanenbaum: How many people do you see wearing their earpieces 24 hours a day, seven days a week? I think we’re already there. I want to ask a question that gets at both virtual reality and the wearable computers.

Can we say anything about the interplay between fiction and reality? Is there a connection between what we see in the science fiction we read and futuristic technologies? For example, the cell phone we have today is modeled—no doubt—on the flip communicator in the 1960’s Star Trek series. Science looked at that and marketing looked at it and said it would be cool to have a communicator. Before the new iPhones and flat tablets, all the sexy phones were flip phones. Do you think the science fiction is inspiring companies to develop the products, or is it the other way around?

Mathieu: It makes a lot of sense that when scientists are growing up they would be influenced by science fiction that they read, and it would definitely have an impact on them.

Mauricio: I think it’s more a mix. I feel that a lot of science fiction writers look at what’s being developed and then come up with applications, which in turn are taken by the science community. A science fiction writer might see a regular telephone and think it would be cool to take that everywhere and build on each other.

Andy: I know a lot of scientific pursuits are not just “Can we make a hologram?” but “Can we make the hologram from Star Wars?” It’s to set a goal for what you want to design.

Hanna: In the article they talk about the back pack, which takes GPS to the next level. It not only knows where you are but nudges you in the right direction, which is one step from the technology we already have.

Tanenbaum: How many have read the preface to The Diamond Age or the book we’re going to read, Katherine Goonan’s Queen City Jazz? In the prefaces and author’s comments, both writers include Eric Drexler [sometimes called the godfather of nanotechnology] in their lists of what inspired them to write their books. We’ve talked a lot about science fiction leading science, and people who say it’s a two-way thing with science sometimes leading science fiction. If you look at Arthur C. Clarke’s novels, the fact that we had a space program and were putting up satellites and people in orbit had a great influence on his being able to write 2001: A Space Odyssey because it was an extension of existing science. That science helped inspire the trajectory for the story. The influences work in both directions.

Memories of War

March 5, 2012 by Anna Miller '13 Comments Off

Students in Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval’s Latino Oral Histories class spent the fall semester interviewing Chicano Vietnam veterans as part of a project that will live on for posterity.

The histories will be added to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which compiles first-hand accounts from U.S. veterans so that future generations may “better understand the realities of war.”

The number of histories in the collection from Vietnam veterans is growing, but Summers Sandoval notes that only a small minority of those histories are from Chicanos. Contrast that with estimates that Chicanos, who often served on the front lines in Vietnam, accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of U.S. casualties in comparison to their proportion of the U.S. population.

To Summers Sandoval, who grew up in Southern California, the stories he’s collecting hit close to home—his father, uncle, and “pretty much every male I knew growing up” were Vietnam veterans. “I approach it as a historian, but it also has a very personal connection for me,” he says. “It’s an endeavor to retrieve and start to analyze what is part of larger [Chicano] history.”

The project involves recruiting volunteers, recording their oral interviews and compiling the interviews in a digital format to eventually be posted online. To find participants, Summers Sandoval and his students first targeted alumni networks of 1960s grad classes from East Los Angeles high schools, and have collected about 25 oral histories so far—in a year, he hopes to have 100.

“They’re not just interviews about Vietnam, they’re life stories,” says Summers Sandoval, assistant professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies. “There’s a strong sense of the entire process of surviving— adapting and learning to be a veteran of this war, learning to be one of the ones who survived, learning to live with post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a culture of survival.”

The interview process isn’t always easy, dealing with subjects that can be hard to talk about, not to mention events that occurred 40 years in the past.

A Vietnamese American, Evyn Le Espiritu ’13 noted in her final reflection piece for the class that she had initially felt some wariness about how the veterans might view her. But her fears were not realized and the interviews were “intimate but not threatening.”

“I felt honored that the veterans shared their stories with me,” she wrote. “I was struck by their intimate association with death, by the fragile miracle of their survival, by the lasting effects of war on their psyche and well-being. I realized that there was a way to feel heartfelt respect and admiration for these veterans as individuals, without compromising my pacifist politics.”

Professor Summers Sandoval notes that after plenty of preparation, the students as a whole have been doing “very well.”

“It’s a very humbling thing to hear someone’s life story—I’m always very grateful that a stranger is willing to share that with another stranger,” says Summers Sandoval.

He has noticed a common thread among the veterans. “For a lot of them,” the professor says, “at times … it seems like they’ve found some kind of peace with the past.”

Stellar Vision

March 5, 2012 by Marisa Cherry '15 Comments Off

Professor Choi with Will Morrison '12 and Daniel Contreras '13

Tucked away in the basement of the Andrew Science Building, Room 58 carries a light-hearted vibe as students trickle in after lunch, chatting and cracking jokes as music blares in the background.

Then, back to work. Alongside Astrophysics Professor Philip Choi, the students turn to the tiny instruments that are deliberately arranged on a large table in the center of the astrophysics lab. This has been their calling for the past two years.

In January 2010, Choi and his research team received a four-year, $637,138 National Science Foundation grant to build a groundbreaking adaptive optics system for the College’s Table Mountain Observatory one-meter telescope in Wrightwood, about a 45-minute drive from Claremont in the San Gabriel Mountains. The optics will correct for the distortion in the atmosphere that is manifested in the twinkle of stars. The result? Image quality rivaling that produced by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Choi explains that the turbulence in the atmosphere—a result of clashes in air density and temperature—causes the distortion of stars, planets and other astronomical bodies viewed through telescopes. This is analogous to ripples in a swimming pool blurring the image of a penny at the bottom of the pool. Adaptive optics systems solve this problem with deformable mirrors that bend beams of light back on track based on how much distortion has altered their paths.

First, wave front sensors measure the distortion of light from a reference star. The sensors then send signals via high-powered computers to flexible mirrors that compensate for the distortion by deforming ever so slightly, as though there are little fingers pushing and pulling them from behind. This must occur every 1,000th of a second to keep up with the ever-changing atmosphere. If the system has done its job, stars that are blurred due to the turbulent atmosphere instantly come to a sharp focus, with a factor of 10 improvement in image resolution.

The adaptive optics system is set to be integrated into the Table Mountain telescope by the end of 2013. Although the opacity of the atmosphere in some wavelengths will prevent adaptive optics telescopes from rendering space telescopes like the Hubble obsolete, Choi says that adaptive optics will allow scientists to “tailor the space missions to complement what we’re doing from the ground.”

Interestingly enough, Dr. Choi went into his undergraduate years planning on majoring in philosophy. A poor freshman enrollment time locked him out of philosophy seminars and opened up a slot for Astronomy 101. He came to realize that the natural sciences in general and astrophysics in particular would be the perfect avenue to allow him to continue exploring “the big questions…of why we’re here, how we got here, where we’re going.”

Choi’s research team includes Pomona Astronomy Professor Bryan Penprase, along with additional co-investigators and collaborators from Caltech, Harvey Mudd and Sonoma State. Add to that a crew of Pomona undergrads; among the most recent are Daniel Contreras ’13, Claire Dickey ’14, Anne Hedlund ’14, Lorcan McGonigle ’13, Will Morrison ’12 and Alex Rudy ’11.

Choi enjoys doing research with undergraduate students because they are “not jaded. They’re doing it for the enjoyment and for the love of it. … To be in that exploratory mode is the most exciting part of science, I think. And so to be working with students who are all in that mode is inspiring.”

For their part, the students like working on so many different aspects of the project, from software and programming to optical alignment and machining. Contreras notes the feeling of being “in the lab working on the code behind our instrument and just seeing everything work and everything just fit together so nicely. It’s really awesome.”

The research team also fits together well, with occasional In-N-Out runs when their work is done. As Morrison puts it, Professor Choi is “a fun person to be locked in a lab downstairs with for eight hours.”

Rockin’ History

March 5, 2012 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

In today’s session of Flashpoints in Rock ‘n’ Roll History, Professor Kevin Dettmar recounts the 1980s rise of Irish rock band U2 to peak popularity with The Joshua Tree. The band becomes known for its sincerity and social consciousness, but Dettmar notes questions to consider regarding how U2 goes about promoting its causes.

The professor plays U.S. concert footage from U2’s 1988 Rattle and Hum documentary in which the band performs an extended version of its early anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Lead singer Bono interrupts the song with a fiery speech: “Irish Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution. … What’s the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? … No more!”

That sets off the classroom discussion, abridged and edited here. Does the midsong monologue undermine the music— and the message? Can Bono’s American concert audience even grasp what he’s talking about?

DETTMAR: So tell me what you saw …

WILLIE: Bono was very emotional throughout. That’s part of what makes him such a good performer. He was becoming really close with his audience, talking about the terrorism in his country.

LEE: The monologue in the middle just seems kind of over the top. If I had gone to see a band I really like I would mostly be going there to listen to their music, not to have them tell me about how I should change the world.

DETTMAR: I think that the band and Bono, they have the best of intentions. … But you can question their strategy. Part of the problem with these sermons in the middle of songs is they are implicitly saying the songs aren’t powerful enough to do the work that we want them to do: We don’t trust the song to carry the message.

SHERIDAN: The song keeps losing its momentum. All of a sudden Bono starts talking and preaching for two minutes. Then the song ends. Then they start playing again. They’re trading off the actual musical quality for the preachiness and the message.

SARAH: Maybe they don’t trust their songs to carry the message, but people in America do have a really big problem with not knowing what’s happening outside of the U.S. I think this is one of the ways, maybe, that they can get people’s attention.

DETTMAR: The problem is that if you don’t understand the political situation—if you don’t understand that they’re from Ireland and that the violence is actually in Ulster, for instance—then what he says is too telegraphic. You’re never going to understand it.

BEN: I find it interesting that people react against Bono being “preachy.” Without that preachy nature, what is U2?

The Professor: Kevin Dettmar

At Pomona since 2008, Kevin Dettmar is the W.M. Keck Professor of English and chair of the English Department. He splits his research and teaching between British and Irish modernism, with an emphasis on James Joyce, and contemporary popular music. He is the author of Is Rock Dead?, editor for Oxford University Press of the book series Modernist Literature & Culture and general editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

The Class: Flashpoints in Rock ‘n Roll History

Rock ’n’ roll has both endured and enjoyed a rocky public reception since its earliest days: Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) provoked riots across the country. We will trace the “scandalous” history of rock ’n’ roll through its public controversies. In such moments, we learn a great deal about what rock hopes to be, about its intrinsic contradictions and structural instability, and about the resistance it meets from its own fans.

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