“In My Life”: Loving Queerly and Singing Across Generations

Photo of Francisco and Emma Mecija in their apartment near Parliament Street. December 1975.  Courtesy of Francisco and Emma Mecija.

December 1975.

The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.

In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.

“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).

What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.

Photo of Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija at their baby shower. December 2017. Image by Sarah Creskey.

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).

January 2018.

I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.

And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)

Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.

Photo of Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija and Casey Mecija at home. January 2018. Image by Casey Mecija.

December 2022.

I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.).  At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.

To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.

Video credit: Directed by Colin Medley

Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”  –Casey Mecija

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020) –Casey Mecija

The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling–Dorothy Santos

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical ConsciousnessEsther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien

Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs–Maria Chaves Daza

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border RegionJosé Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”–Justin Burton

Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón

“In My Life”: Loving Queerly and Singing Across Generations

Photo of Francisco and Emma Mecija in their apartment near Parliament Street. December 1975.  Courtesy of Francisco and Emma Mecija.

December 1975.

The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.

In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.

“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).

What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.

Photo of Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija at their baby shower. December 2017. Image by Sarah Creskey.

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).

January 2018.

I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.

And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.

“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)

Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.

Photo of Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija and Casey Mecija at home. January 2018. Image by Casey Mecija.

December 2022.

I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.).  At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.

To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.

Video credit: Directed by Colin Medley

Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence”  –Casey Mecija

The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020) –Casey Mecija

The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling–Dorothy Santos

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical ConsciousnessEsther Díaz Martín and  Kristian E. Vasquez 

Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien

Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs–Maria Chaves Daza

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border RegionJosé Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”–Justin Burton

Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice – The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice - The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social

by Basem Adi

I am writing a series of blog posts that outline the contents and arguments presented in 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'. In this entry, I briefly summarise the third chapter, dedicated to the morphogenetic paradigm. As the paradigm is the basis of later chapters, an overview is provided, followed by a proposed revision. The revision will provide a conceptual model in which orders of social relationality are morphogenetically anchored in relational reflexivity that steers the direction of relations.

Key terms are italicised in the article - to access definitions of these terms, please refer to the glossary of 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'.

The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social

The articulation and application of social policies are emergent from social relations. Within social relations, individual and corporate agents meet their needs and create relational mechanisms that generate and re-generate responsive institutional structures. The morphogenetic paradigm explains the relational dynamics that define the interdependence between personal identity and social morphogenesis. In 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice', I presented an overview of the morphogenetic paradigm. In this overview, I documented its emphasis on the internal conversation, in the form of world-directed deliberations, as Personal Emergent Properties (PEP). The focus on PEPs is to affirm the efficacy and irreducibility of personal deliberations to the objectivity of third-person ideas.

Thus, Archer (2003) distinguishes socio-cultural structures (context) from the deliberations of active agents (concerns). The nature of deliberation extends beyond the concerns of the discursive order to include the natural and practical orders. Accordingly, the subjective interiority that distinguishes the self from its environment leads to an authority to act in the world in an autonomous way that is not reducible to the discursive order. With authority to act in the world comes the explanatory capacity to account for the activity resulting from subjective authority on the forces of socialisation.

Between the mind and world are Personal Emergent Properties (PEP), through which people distance themselves from their biological origins in the process of social becoming. The existence of these properties means self-conscious reflexivity from a first-person perspective – with an irreducible subjective interiority and authority – is logically and ontologically before any social role. Therefore, system outcomes produced by morphogenetic processes are anchored in the reflexive capacities of persons (internal conversation) as they encounter collectives. First, the 'I' initially reflexively deliberates on its natal context ('Me') – the outcome of reflexive deliberation can lead to a dedication to reproduce or work to transform 'Me'. When seeking to change the natal context, the 'I' becomes part of a 'We', i.e., a corporate agent. In turn, the emergent personal identity aligns with a social role following the deliberative process that will affect the socio-cultural context. Hence, in Archer's morphogenetic paradigm, the deliberation of the 'I', which is ontologically and logically before a social role, anchors the process in which personal identity and socio-cultural context are co-emergent.

Revising the morphogenetic paradigm

In 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice', I propose revising the morphogenetic paradigm. The revision builds on its relational starting point that affirms the irreducibility of personal reflexivity as part of a stratified understanding of an emergent personal identity. The proposed revision understands the reflexivity of the interactional order to be the anchor of personal and socio-cultural morphogenesis. The revision is based on two points:

1. Reflexivity is a meaning-based capacity: As noted, to affirm the efficacy of subjective interiority and authority, Archer understands reflexivity to be irreducible to the discursive domain. However, considering a developmental perspective of the self, subjective authority can be maintained when contextualised within the developmental genesis of reflexivity.

2. When reflexivity is viewed as a meaning-making mechanism, it extends beyond personal reflexivity. As a result, personal reflexivity is considered an element of social morphogenesis rather than its anchor.

Regarding the first point, drawing on Neisser's model, selfhood consists of five developmental stages – the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual selves. The conceptual self – representing the capacity to mentally approximate – is emergent from other forms of self-knowledge that refer to these different developmental selves. As a result, affirming a developmental understanding of reflexivity as a semantic capacity leads to a stratified conception of personal identity. As an emergent property, it is grounded in pre-discursive mechanisms (identified in different developmental selves) that enable its efficacy.

Reflexivity can be extended beyond the personal when understood as a meaning-based deliberation. Hence, the activities of corporate agents ('We') can be described as reflexive, as part of multiple nodes within social networks. These deliberations seek to affect the outcome of morphogenetic processes. Personal reflexivity, therefore, is an element in relational morphogenesis. The interaction between the personal and collective gives social networks new properties and powers that result in relational reflexivity anchoring social morphogenesis in a meta-reflexive way. Relational outcomes fall in the order of possibilities, and the interaction between the personal and collective infuses social networks with reflexivity, monitoring the outcomes it produces. In a morphogenetic cycle, the interactive process monitors the initial structural order and how it regulates relations. Relational reflexivity is directed at the characteristics of the relationship that go beyond the personal perspective of the internal conversation.

Consequently, reflexivity is not restricted to how the subject sees and deliberates on relations as it arrives at a specific dedication. It also pertains to reflexive activity directed at the characteristics of the relation. Accordingly, it is a steering mechanism attuned to the direction of a relationship (Donati 2021). Personal reflexivity operates as an element of the relation, as the 'I' dedicates itself to a social role. After dedication, the 'I' is part of the operation of corporate agents as they seek to transform the structural order. Therefore, what anchors transformation (morphogenesis) or reproduction (morphostasis) is the entwining of agents' internal conversations. When this entwining is part of a meta-reflexive activity, it becomes relational reflexivity that exceeds individual personal reflexivity and is directed at the characteristics of the relation:

What needs to be highlighted is the fact that the social network operates with a reflexivity of its own that is characterised in that it entwines agents' internal conversations between them and in this way generates a relational reflexivity between the nodes in the network which exceeds the individual (personal) reflexivity of agents. (Donati 2021: 97)

The implications of anchoring morphogenesis in relational reflexivity

The morphogenetic dynamics of social relationality are demarcated into two orders: (1) The relational structural order that impinges on agents/actors; (2) The processual relational order in the form of interactions and transactions that reproduce or change the relational structural order (Donati 2021). In morphogenesis, these two orders of social relationality are anchored in relational reflexivity that can be identified in the transaction between the nodes of social networks.

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice - The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social
Figure 1: Different order of social relationality: Processual (interactional/transactional) and structural (Donati 2021: 56).

The implications of anchoring morphogenesis in relational reflexivity are explored in the context of a post-functionalist approach to education. A notion of the curriculum that distinguishes between the lived, planned, and experienced dimensions is proposed. These different dimensions can be mapped to orders of social relationality. In the interactional stage (T2-T3), the curriculum is represented in its lived and experienced forms. On the other hand, the planned curriculum is represented in the structural order in its initial form at stage T1 and in its transformed form at stage T4. In this educational dynamic, assessment is part of relational reflexivity that focuses on the internal dynamics of learning to ascertain changing development points of the student at stages T2-T3. In turn, the planned curriculum is reproduced or transformed based on its role in regulating learning to enable students to meet the learning criteria. The curriculum, assessment and learner development are interconnected aspects of orders of social relationality.

References:

Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.

Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency (First). Cambridge University Press.

Donati, P. (2011). Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. Routledge.

Donati, P. (2021). Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking (First). Routledge.

This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice
This volume argues that relational realism can help us to make better educational policy that is more effective in practice. Basem Adi draws on critical realism to thoroughly re-examine fundamental assumptions about how government policymaking works, developing an ontological basis from which to exa…
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice - The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach

by Basem Adi

I am writing a series of blog posts that outline the contents and arguments presented in 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'. In this entry, I provide a brief account of the second chapter, which covers the underlying epistemic and ontological claims that underpin a relational realist understanding of education.

There are key terms italicised in the article – to access definitions of these terms, please refer to the glossary of 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'.

Relational realism as an alternative general sociological approach

As discussed in the previous article, lib/lab governance is underpinned by epistemic closure. Hence, it is essential to articulate a meta-theory that can conceptually maintain epistemic openness to the relationship between the observer and the observed in and with which they exist (Freire 1985: 54). The idea of an ontological starting point does not entail predefining the parameters of knowledge. Instead, articulating a general approach (a philosophical starting point) is a reasoned necessity. It is a reasoned necessity as all theories –acknowledged or not – must referentially detach when relating to a referent. An ontology of the world will impact the development of paradigms and research methodology. Thus, even theories that give up the idea of the subject as an entity distinct from the object rely on transcendental preliminaries through negation in which representations of the world are reduced to practical activity.

The main objection to philosophising meta-theories is that ontological presuppositions will restrict knowledge by setting the parameters on acts of knowing. However, this pre-definition of referential acts can be avoided if intransitivity is asserted between the act of knowing and referent within a general approach that affirms the relation as the first ontological principle. There is no positing of the parameters of knowledge beforehand, but the contingent world in and with which the observer and the observed exist mediates their relatedness. Nevertheless, the subject and object are considered determinants in a realist approach. Therefore, by considering the contingent dimension and relatively enduring realities of social ontology, relational realism does not fall into different reductionist fallacies that predefine the parameters of social reality by conflating to specific elements.

The epistemic quadrangle and judgemental rationality

As the relation is necessary for intelligible discourse, an epistemic framework is needed to articulate interchanges between the subject and object. The intransitivity between both means knowledge develops a posteriori at the level of active meditations and is open to revision. Judgemental rationality is a relationally reflexive process that constantly seeks to re-codify received mediations in their efficacy in generating transformational social realities. Hence, we have two triangles in this framework: the first triangle represents the process of judgemental rationality that reflexively monitors existing mediations; the second triangle represents the latent ontological reality of the observed. Between the upper and bottom triangles are existing socio-cultural mediations that consist of acts of knowing. These mediations consist of structures open to morphogenesis, regulating interactions between the observer and the observed. The structural order guides interactions, so participants reference the intransitivity of the bottom triangle (latent ontological reality) within the mediations existing in the domain of the actual. These interactions aim to generate potentially transformative structures and mechanisms (Donati 2021).

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach
Fig. 1 For relational sociology, critical realism is an approach that extends the epistemic triangle (commonly used in sociology: observer–culture-observed reality) to the epistemic quadrangle (observer–culture–observed reality–latent ontological reality) (Donati 2011: 100),

Sociology as a knowledge system

As stated above, a meta-theory with a pre-supposing ontological view exists in all theories. Sociology as a knowledge system, therefore, necessarily begins from a general meta-theoretical approach. Derived from a meta-theory, it is a general explanatory paradigm that explains the encountered object as a complex and changing reality (in the case of relational realism, it is the morphogenetic paradigm). The explanatory paradigm influences methodological considerations through research methods and techniques. Applying research methods results in single empirical theories based on the set research questions, i.e., why does Y happen or why has Y happened?

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach
Fig. 2 The components of sociology as a knowledge system (aimed at formulating a theory) built upon two axes, L-G and A-I (Donati 2011: 105).

Policy implications

A general understanding of social ontology underpins social policies. Acknowledging the irreducibility of human needs and nurturing these needs in the mediation between the upper and lower triangles means policies are emergent relational goods. These goods depend on the reflexivity of subjects and a structural order whose feedback mechanisms promote participative acts of knowing which responsibilise subjects for the outcomes of interactions (a positive understanding of freedom). Instead of operating backwards from the structural order – as is the case in lib/lab governance – the structure of the relation promotes associational arrangements in which the norms of relatedness are responsive to morphogenetic processes. Hence, as Freire (2000) observes, 'authority' must be "on the side of freedom, not against it" (Freire 2000: 80).

The interactive phase includes the judgemental rationality of the observer (personal and corporate) as they enter a relation with the observed – the resulting mediations are outcomes that fallibly reference the latent ontological reality of the epistemic quadrangle. In applying judgemental rationality, an explanatory paradigm is adopted that can account for the emergence of Y in a way that does not have predefined parameters of knowledge. Methodological considerations are practical tools in applying judgemental rationality and proposing re-articulations to the elements of the relation.

References:

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1995). A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 377–403.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Third). Continuum.

Donati, P. (2011). Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. Routledge.

Donati, P. (2021). Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking (First). Routledge.

This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.

A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice
This volume argues that relational realism can help us to make better educational policy that is more effective in practice. Basem Adi draws on critical realism to thoroughly re-examine fundamental assumptions about how government policymaking works, developing an ontological basis from which to exa…
A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice: Relational Realism as an Alternative General Sociological Approach

The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing

The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing

By Amy Koerber

The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing

Sometime in 2018, my coauthors and I began formulating a proposal to the National Science Foundation’s “Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM” program. We wanted to examine scholarly publishing, but it took us a while to arrive at “predatory publishing” as our focus. As a team, we represented a range of disciplines: communication studies, journalism, professional communication, and atmospheric science. Thus, we hardly spoke the same language when we discussed research methodologies, theories, and publishing expectations. However, we had all received e-mails inviting us to submit articles to journals with suspicious titles, sometimes far afield from our own discipline, and promising a rapid review and publishing turnaround.

Of course, such e-mails often include some suspicious features. For example, when they praise the recipient’s “expertise,” that is often an expertise far removed from the focus of the journal. And anyone who clicks on the link to the journal’s website may see additional clues, such as an advertised “impact factor” that cannot be verified through Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports. Given the frequency with which such e-mail solicitations were arriving in our inboxes, we knew we had found our topic, and we were delighted to learn in July 2019 that our NSF proposal would be funded.

We initially focused on Beall’s list, including various efforts to replace it with a comparable list of suspicious journals, formerly known as journal “blacklists” but now more commonly referred to as “watchlists.” We also discovered a collection of an opposite kind of list, known as “whitelists” at the time, now more commonly referred to as “safelists.” Instead of identifying suspicious journals, these lists itemized journals that could be trusted. The outcome of these early inquiries was published in 2020 as an article in the Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Next, we began conducting interviews—a total of forty-eight interviews with scholarly publishing stakeholders across the globe. Although we had initially planned to travel and conduct these interviews in person, the pandemic hit in early 2020, so we quickly pivoted to Zoom. We were both vexed and intrigued to discover through our first several interviews that “predatory publishing” was not nearly as straightforward as we thought it would be. As these conversations unfolded, we discovered how deeply fraught is the term “predatory.” Whereas many stakeholders in the global scholarly publishing economy stand to gain from the ability to distinguish journals or publishers that are “predatory” from those that are not, we quickly learned that that such an identification was simply not possible.

As we suggest in the opening chapter of The Predatory Paradox, the term itself, “predatory publishing,” is the product of a desire to find simple solutions and understandings to what is inherently a complex problem. As we demonstrate throughout the book’s chapters, it is the same set of demands and changes that have led to many positive innovations in scholarly publishing that have also created a situation in which so-called predatory publishing has come to thrive. These demands and changes include an ever-increasing desire for rapid turnaround from submission to acceptance to publication as well as ever-increasing expectations for scholars across the globe to rapidly produce a high quantity of articles whose quality will be judged, in large part, by the quantity of citations they accrue. We use the phrase “predatory paradox” in the book to capture all the nuance and complexity of this situation.

In so many ways, The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing is about things not unfolding as initially planned. Our plan for in-person interviews was thwarted by the pandemic. Our plan to help define the term “predatory” was thwarted by complex conversations that occurred during our interview research. Even our initial plan to develop a comprehensive web-based training program to be delivered to global audiences did not play out exactly as we had planned. Once we began learning about open access publishing and came across Open Book Publishers, it became clear that an open access book, with instructional materials and resources accompanying each chapter, was the more appropriate format to deliver such content.

Thus, we have certainly not answered all the questions we had at the outset of this project. However, we hope The Predatory Paradox will empower scholarly publishing stakeholders across the globe to engage with the array of problems we explore in the book, which are becoming increasingly complex as the scholarly world begins to grapple with new developments such as AI-generated text. We also hope that we have provided a set of tools that will enable readers to embrace the many paradoxes that infuse scholarly publishing today, as a means to individual success and to sustainability for the global publishing enterprise.

The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing is an Open Access title available below:

The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing
In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might…
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing

SO! Reads: “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies

or, Last Summer a DJ Saved My Life

“Hip Hop does work that a lot of other things don’t do” Young Guru (viii).

The way that we imagine English Studies, specifically Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet), today needs a radical shift. Specifically, we need new techniques for Writing Studies pedagogy to reach students in a more meaningful and contemporary fashion.  Todd Craig’s “K for the Way:” DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies (Utah State University Press, 2023) both documents the need for this shift and enacts it. Craig’s work enables us to recognize the pedagogical impact on writing that Hip Hop has had over the last 50 years—specifically how the DJ/deejay as twenty-first century new media reader and writer teaches students not just to think about sound, but to compose with it, too.

An Associate Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center, Craig has little desire to shake the foundations of English Studies, but instead do what Hip Hop has always done—make a way where there is none. The point is to (re)imagine new ways of doing old things; in this case, of teaching and reaching students who arrive in First-Year Writing courses. “K for the Way” does more than demonstrate the ways in which the DJ is a twenty-first century pedagogical savant; it also teaches readers, using DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy, about the culture that makes them possible.

This summer, a DJ really did save my life: as someone who feels consistently overwhelmed by the vast nature of scholarly discourse, “K for the Way” gave me a chance to breathe, to identify with something that has been a part of me for the better part of my life, and to see myself in a conversation about a topic I am more than passionate about. For Craig, community, history, and culture are the core of his mission as a scholar, educator, and DJ.

Craig defines several new terms that bridge the worlds of Hip Hop and Composition and Rhetoric.  First, we have DJ Rhetoric, which can be understood as the modes, methodologies, and discursive elements of the DJ. For Craig, it “encompasses the quality of oral, written, and sonic language that displays and expresses sociocultural, historical, and musical meanings, attitudes, and sentiments” (23). Next, there is DJ Literacy, which is the “sonic and auditory practices of reading, writing, critically thinking, speaking, and communicating through and with the rhetoric of Hip Hop DJ culture” (23). These two definitions, operating in conjunction, situate the DJ as a kind of griot, a figure that Adam Banks invokes as a carrier of tradition, stories, and histories in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) (2011). The mission of the griot is to carry stories and translate them to various audiences while adhering to the rhetorical conventions and modes of whichever audience they find themselves before; similarly, the DJ is responsible for “communicating the pulse and the evolution of a culture that once sat as ‘underground’ but now has dramatically evolved to ‘mainstream’” (25). These definitions serve as guides for the reader as they are tethered to all of the concepts and (re)imagining happening throughout the book.

Craig is intimately close to the work he is doing. He lives and breathes Hip Hop; and what should a book about the Hip Hop DJ be if not written by someone who embodies the role, culture, and practice of DJing?   Craig  uses a  a research methodology known as hiphopography in which Hip Hop ways of being are central to studying it. Coined by James G. Spady, this term is defined as “a shared discourse with equanimity, not the usual hierarchical distancing techniques usually found in published and non-published (visual-TV) interviewers with rappers” (27). Craig states that hiphopography “allowed me to engage a variety of Hip Hop DJs while also maintaining my own shared values and sentiments around my love of Hip Hop culture and DJ practices” (28).  Hiphopography constructs a conversational, intimate space—touched by history, culture, and music—wherein the interviewer and interviewee can engage and produce meaningful data. This methodology—and Craig’s many interviews with DJs about their craft—becomes part of the text’s core as we begin to see how Craig’s two-pronged argument connects DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy to bring both life throughout the book.

If one understands the DJ as a twenty-first century rhetorician and compositionist and considers the ways in which the DJ is a cultural meaning-maker, sponsor, and master sampler, then one can clearly see the connections between the DJ, DJ culture, and Writing Studies in the contemporary moment. In the first part of his argument supporting the significance of DJ Rhetoric and Literacy in writing pedagogy Craig asserts that, “it is essential that the academy at large works to strengthen students’ undergraduate experiences by reinforcing their racial, ethnic, and cultural ties” (14). This perspective provides the foundation for the second part of his argument that “the DJ (and thus, Hip Hop DJ culture) is the epicenter of Hip Hop culture’s creation” (23). Taken together, these dynamic arguments make the claim that the DJ offers a powerful model of a new media reader, writer, and critic. Today, our students come to writing classrooms with a “vast array of cultural capital. . .in their philosophical and cultural backpacks” (107). If we, as writing teachers, want to honor that cultural capital and build with it, we should follow Craig’s lead and look toward the DJ for some pointers on how to expand students’ access to a language that represents them.

Readers will also see a developing research agenda in “K for the Way” that thinks toward changing the culture beyond the present, while acknowledging the groundwork laid for the current moment and building genealogically upon that foundation, just as DJs do with sampling. Craig best exemplifies this when he writes, “in order to fully engage in a conversation—whether intellectual, pedestrian or otherwise—that discusses what DJ Rhetoric might look like, one has to think about the cultural and textual lineage of sponsors and mentors” (51). This notion of textual lineage is borrowed from Alfred W. Tatum who explains the term as “Similar to lineages in genealogical studies” and continues to note that textual lineage is “made up of texts (both literary and nonliterary) that are instrumental in one’s human development because of the meaning and significance one has garnered from them” (Tatum, qtd. in Craig, 51). Craig builds upon Tatum’s idea by introducing sonic lineage, which follows the same logic as Tatum’s term, but through sound (51). What becomes apparent, is that the DJ, as a cultural sponsor, can deploy sonic lineage as a way of communicating history and culture to members within and outside of the Hip Hop community and, more specifically, DJ culture.

Chapter three, especially, works at the interdisciplinary junction of Sound Studies, Writing Studies, and Hip Hop studies to convey a clear critique of the dominant discourse surrounding plagiarism.  Craig is unsatisfied with the black-and-white conception of plagiarism as it presents itself in the academy. As a result, he moves to inquire “how we as practitioners [of teaching composition] approach citation methods and strategies within a twenty-first century landscape” (75). Craig promptly turns us toward the DJ’s conceptualization of sampling as a citation practice. Sampling in Hip Hop, as defined by Andrew Bartlett, “is not collaboration in any familiar sense of the term. It is a high-tech and highly selective archiving, bringing into dialogue by virtue of even the most slight representation” (77). The highly selective archiving, a.k.a crate diggin’, builds upon the idea of sonic lineage.

For the DJ, the process of diggin’ through crates to find that right sound, that one joint that going to get the party jumpin’, is a key element in the practice of “text constructing” (79). The Hip Hop sample functions alongside an understanding, offered by Alasdair Pennycook, of “transgressive-versus-nontransgressive intertextuality,” which, for an academic audience, complicates the idea of plagiarism.. The DJ becomes a figure through which we can understand intertextuality, sampling becomes the practice through which we can see parallels to citation through text construction, and the mix is where we begin, with the help of Pennycook, to complicate notions of plagiarism.  In this chapter, readers are able to understand through sound.

Subsequently, Craig explores the concept of revision as it relates to the DJ’s ability to engage with an emcee on the point of “remix as revision” (107). Building from on Nancy Sommers’ article, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Craig lifts and examines four strategies of revision through the lens of the Hip Hop DJ: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering (Sommers, qtd. in Craig, 107). These practices not only identify the Hip Hop DJ as a master of revision but also center the DJ, in the context of the writing classroom, as a key figure for understanding editorial practice. As teachers of writing—and especially for those of us who are deeply connected to Hip Hop culture—we have traditional scholars, such as Sommers, but we also have the DJ as cultural scholar, which offer new models with communicating and practicing the craft of writing in the twenty-first century.

Prof. Todd Craig, aka DJ T. O. Double D, in the Mix: Deejaying, Teaching, Writing, Making, Speaking, Listening (Source: Twitter, 11/7/2023)

Chapter Five, which is co-written by Craig and Carmen Kynard, centers on six women DJs: DJs Spinderella, Pam the Funkstress, Kuttin Kandi, Shorty Wop, Reborn, and Natasha Diggs to work toward developing a “Hip Hop Feminist Deejay Methodology” that positions women in Hip Hop culture as a key source of key knowledge production–as meaning-makers, theoreticians, storytellers–and as tastemakers in twenty-first century discourse about education, technologies, race, and gender.  This chapter is also apt representation of hiphopography at work, as both Craig and Kynard ground their position in the interviews of these six women deejays, “deliberately situating their stories first… as opposed to the usual academic expectation that a tedious delineation of methods and an extant literature review come before a discussion of the actual subjects” (123).

In part, this chapter focuses on the affordances and limitations—political, social, and economic—present in DJ culture, and the effects it has on these women DJs to make it do what it does. For example, the introduction of the digital software Serato has simultaneously made access to music easier, and complicated access to the cultural archive that made the music possible in the first place. Natasha Diggs, states, “While she values the ability to access mp3 files so readily, she argues a deejay’s research and craft suffer, because many times the mp3 files do not include information about an artist’s name, history, or band” (129).   Pam the Funkstress ties this sentiment up nicely when she argues, “There’s nothing like vinyl” (129).

The final chapter is fashioned like a Hip-Hop outro, with Craig leaving with a few parting ideas. Most important among them is his vision of “Comp 3.0,” a version of Comp/Rhet wherein “we have to push the scope of writing and rhetoric—with or without the field’s permission or acknowledgement” (171). For scholars of composition and rhetoric and writing teachers who ground part of their understanding of the field in Black Studies, Hip Hop, and the DJ, we gotta make it do what it do, regardless of who says what! Comp 3.0 does not seek approval or recognition from the powers that be; instead, it focuses on the new ways of thinking and writing, and of teaching, that we are able to conjure—with history, culture, and practice propelling us—when we invoke that which got us to the academy in the first place.

What is at stake, for those of us who engage Black Studies, Sonic Studies, Comp/Rhet, and Hip Hop Studies as critical points of departure for the teaching of writing, is that our presence—our being, methods, and our teaching—is crucial for developing a genealogy of scholars and world citizens who are aware of the myriad possibilities present in the twenty-first century.

Featured Image: Cover Art for “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies by Cathey White

DeVaughn (Dev) Harris is a PhD student studying composition and rhetoric in NYC. His academic interests are mainly in writing studies and pedagogy, but those are often supported by other sub-interests in music, creative writing, African American studies, and philosophy. When not reading or writing, Dev enjoys making music wherever and however possible. He has published music before under the collective AbstraktFlowz. 

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist ProjectTodd Craig

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening--Airek Beauchamp

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes

Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne–Lucreccia Quintanilla

Ill Communication: Hip Hop and Sound Studies–Jennifer Stoever

SO! Amplifies: Regina Bradley’s Outkasted Conversations

A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

SO! Reads: “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies

or, Last Summer a DJ Saved My Life

“Hip Hop does work that a lot of other things don’t do” Young Guru (viii).

The way that we imagine English Studies, specifically Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet), today needs a radical shift. Specifically, we need new techniques for Writing Studies pedagogy to reach students in a more meaningful and contemporary fashion.  Todd Craig’s “K for the Way:” DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies (Utah State University Press, 2023) both documents the need for this shift and enacts it. Craig’s work enables us to recognize the pedagogical impact on writing that Hip Hop has had over the last 50 years—specifically how the DJ/deejay as twenty-first century new media reader and writer teaches students not just to think about sound, but to compose with it, too.

An Associate Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center, Craig has little desire to shake the foundations of English Studies, but instead do what Hip Hop has always done—make a way where there is none. The point is to (re)imagine new ways of doing old things; in this case, of teaching and reaching students who arrive in First-Year Writing courses. “K for the Way” does more than demonstrate the ways in which the DJ is a twenty-first century pedagogical savant; it also teaches readers, using DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy, about the culture that makes them possible.

This summer, a DJ really did save my life: as someone who feels consistently overwhelmed by the vast nature of scholarly discourse, “K for the Way” gave me a chance to breathe, to identify with something that has been a part of me for the better part of my life, and to see myself in a conversation about a topic I am more than passionate about. For Craig, community, history, and culture are the core of his mission as a scholar, educator, and DJ.

Craig defines several new terms that bridge the worlds of Hip Hop and Composition and Rhetoric.  First, we have DJ Rhetoric, which can be understood as the modes, methodologies, and discursive elements of the DJ. For Craig, it “encompasses the quality of oral, written, and sonic language that displays and expresses sociocultural, historical, and musical meanings, attitudes, and sentiments” (23). Next, there is DJ Literacy, which is the “sonic and auditory practices of reading, writing, critically thinking, speaking, and communicating through and with the rhetoric of Hip Hop DJ culture” (23). These two definitions, operating in conjunction, situate the DJ as a kind of griot, a figure that Adam Banks invokes as a carrier of tradition, stories, and histories in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) (2011). The mission of the griot is to carry stories and translate them to various audiences while adhering to the rhetorical conventions and modes of whichever audience they find themselves before; similarly, the DJ is responsible for “communicating the pulse and the evolution of a culture that once sat as ‘underground’ but now has dramatically evolved to ‘mainstream’” (25). These definitions serve as guides for the reader as they are tethered to all of the concepts and (re)imagining happening throughout the book.

Craig is intimately close to the work he is doing. He lives and breathes Hip Hop; and what should a book about the Hip Hop DJ be if not written by someone who embodies the role, culture, and practice of DJing?   Craig  uses a  a research methodology known as hiphopography in which Hip Hop ways of being are central to studying it. Coined by James G. Spady, this term is defined as “a shared discourse with equanimity, not the usual hierarchical distancing techniques usually found in published and non-published (visual-TV) interviewers with rappers” (27). Craig states that hiphopography “allowed me to engage a variety of Hip Hop DJs while also maintaining my own shared values and sentiments around my love of Hip Hop culture and DJ practices” (28).  Hiphopography constructs a conversational, intimate space—touched by history, culture, and music—wherein the interviewer and interviewee can engage and produce meaningful data. This methodology—and Craig’s many interviews with DJs about their craft—becomes part of the text’s core as we begin to see how Craig’s two-pronged argument connects DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy to bring both life throughout the book.

If one understands the DJ as a twenty-first century rhetorician and compositionist and considers the ways in which the DJ is a cultural meaning-maker, sponsor, and master sampler, then one can clearly see the connections between the DJ, DJ culture, and Writing Studies in the contemporary moment. In the first part of his argument supporting the significance of DJ Rhetoric and Literacy in writing pedagogy Craig asserts that, “it is essential that the academy at large works to strengthen students’ undergraduate experiences by reinforcing their racial, ethnic, and cultural ties” (14). This perspective provides the foundation for the second part of his argument that “the DJ (and thus, Hip Hop DJ culture) is the epicenter of Hip Hop culture’s creation” (23). Taken together, these dynamic arguments make the claim that the DJ offers a powerful model of a new media reader, writer, and critic. Today, our students come to writing classrooms with a “vast array of cultural capital. . .in their philosophical and cultural backpacks” (107). If we, as writing teachers, want to honor that cultural capital and build with it, we should follow Craig’s lead and look toward the DJ for some pointers on how to expand students’ access to a language that represents them.

Readers will also see a developing research agenda in “K for the Way” that thinks toward changing the culture beyond the present, while acknowledging the groundwork laid for the current moment and building genealogically upon that foundation, just as DJs do with sampling. Craig best exemplifies this when he writes, “in order to fully engage in a conversation—whether intellectual, pedestrian or otherwise—that discusses what DJ Rhetoric might look like, one has to think about the cultural and textual lineage of sponsors and mentors” (51). This notion of textual lineage is borrowed from Alfred W. Tatum who explains the term as “Similar to lineages in genealogical studies” and continues to note that textual lineage is “made up of texts (both literary and nonliterary) that are instrumental in one’s human development because of the meaning and significance one has garnered from them” (Tatum, qtd. in Craig, 51). Craig builds upon Tatum’s idea by introducing sonic lineage, which follows the same logic as Tatum’s term, but through sound (51). What becomes apparent, is that the DJ, as a cultural sponsor, can deploy sonic lineage as a way of communicating history and culture to members within and outside of the Hip Hop community and, more specifically, DJ culture.

Chapter three, especially, works at the interdisciplinary junction of Sound Studies, Writing Studies, and Hip Hop studies to convey a clear critique of the dominant discourse surrounding plagiarism.  Craig is unsatisfied with the black-and-white conception of plagiarism as it presents itself in the academy. As a result, he moves to inquire “how we as practitioners [of teaching composition] approach citation methods and strategies within a twenty-first century landscape” (75). Craig promptly turns us toward the DJ’s conceptualization of sampling as a citation practice. Sampling in Hip Hop, as defined by Andrew Bartlett, “is not collaboration in any familiar sense of the term. It is a high-tech and highly selective archiving, bringing into dialogue by virtue of even the most slight representation” (77). The highly selective archiving, a.k.a crate diggin’, builds upon the idea of sonic lineage.

For the DJ, the process of diggin’ through crates to find that right sound, that one joint that going to get the party jumpin’, is a key element in the practice of “text constructing” (79). The Hip Hop sample functions alongside an understanding, offered by Alasdair Pennycook, of “transgressive-versus-nontransgressive intertextuality,” which, for an academic audience, complicates the idea of plagiarism.. The DJ becomes a figure through which we can understand intertextuality, sampling becomes the practice through which we can see parallels to citation through text construction, and the mix is where we begin, with the help of Pennycook, to complicate notions of plagiarism.  In this chapter, readers are able to understand through sound.

Subsequently, Craig explores the concept of revision as it relates to the DJ’s ability to engage with an emcee on the point of “remix as revision” (107). Building from on Nancy Sommers’ article, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Craig lifts and examines four strategies of revision through the lens of the Hip Hop DJ: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering (Sommers, qtd. in Craig, 107). These practices not only identify the Hip Hop DJ as a master of revision but also center the DJ, in the context of the writing classroom, as a key figure for understanding editorial practice. As teachers of writing—and especially for those of us who are deeply connected to Hip Hop culture—we have traditional scholars, such as Sommers, but we also have the DJ as cultural scholar, which offer new models with communicating and practicing the craft of writing in the twenty-first century.

Prof. Todd Craig, aka DJ T. O. Double D, in the Mix: Deejaying, Teaching, Writing, Making, Speaking, Listening (Source: Twitter, 11/7/2023)

Chapter Five, which is co-written by Craig and Carmen Kynard, centers on six women DJs: DJs Spinderella, Pam the Funkstress, Kuttin Kandi, Shorty Wop, Reborn, and Natasha Diggs to work toward developing a “Hip Hop Feminist Deejay Methodology” that positions women in Hip Hop culture as a key source of key knowledge production–as meaning-makers, theoreticians, storytellers–and as tastemakers in twenty-first century discourse about education, technologies, race, and gender.  This chapter is also apt representation of hiphopography at work, as both Craig and Kynard ground their position in the interviews of these six women deejays, “deliberately situating their stories first… as opposed to the usual academic expectation that a tedious delineation of methods and an extant literature review come before a discussion of the actual subjects” (123).

In part, this chapter focuses on the affordances and limitations—political, social, and economic—present in DJ culture, and the effects it has on these women DJs to make it do what it does. For example, the introduction of the digital software Serato has simultaneously made access to music easier, and complicated access to the cultural archive that made the music possible in the first place. Natasha Diggs, states, “While she values the ability to access mp3 files so readily, she argues a deejay’s research and craft suffer, because many times the mp3 files do not include information about an artist’s name, history, or band” (129).   Pam the Funkstress ties this sentiment up nicely when she argues, “There’s nothing like vinyl” (129).

The final chapter is fashioned like a Hip-Hop outro, with Craig leaving with a few parting ideas. Most important among them is his vision of “Comp 3.0,” a version of Comp/Rhet wherein “we have to push the scope of writing and rhetoric—with or without the field’s permission or acknowledgement” (171). For scholars of composition and rhetoric and writing teachers who ground part of their understanding of the field in Black Studies, Hip Hop, and the DJ, we gotta make it do what it do, regardless of who says what! Comp 3.0 does not seek approval or recognition from the powers that be; instead, it focuses on the new ways of thinking and writing, and of teaching, that we are able to conjure—with history, culture, and practice propelling us—when we invoke that which got us to the academy in the first place.

What is at stake, for those of us who engage Black Studies, Sonic Studies, Comp/Rhet, and Hip Hop Studies as critical points of departure for the teaching of writing, is that our presence—our being, methods, and our teaching—is crucial for developing a genealogy of scholars and world citizens who are aware of the myriad possibilities present in the twenty-first century.

Featured Image: Cover Art for “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies by Cathey White

DeVaughn (Dev) Harris is a PhD student studying composition and rhetoric in NYC. His academic interests are mainly in writing studies and pedagogy, but those are often supported by other sub-interests in music, creative writing, African American studies, and philosophy. When not reading or writing, Dev enjoys making music wherever and however possible. He has published music before under the collective AbstraktFlowz. 

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist ProjectTodd Craig

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening--Airek Beauchamp

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes

Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne–Lucreccia Quintanilla

Ill Communication: Hip Hop and Sound Studies–Jennifer Stoever

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Hôpitaux et santé publique face à la pandémie de Covid-19. Perspectives de santé mondiale

Sous la direction de Valéry Ridde, Lola Traverson, Kate Zinszer

Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF, cliquez ici.

La santé mondiale n’est pas la santé des Autres, mais une analyse réflexive internationale dépassant les clivages géographiques et disciplinaires tout en se préoccupant des questions d’équité. Ce livre collectif, qui donne notamment la parole à de jeunes chercheur·se·s de différents pays et continents, propose des études originales sur la résilience des hôpitaux et de leurs personnels face à la pandémie de Covid-19 (Brésil, Canada, France, Japon, Mali, Sénégal), sur la prise en compte des inégalités dans la formulation et la mise en œuvre d’interventions de santé publique (Brésil, Canada, France, Mali) et sur la diffusion de l’information auprès des populations ainsi que leurs perceptions de la Covid-19 et des mesures préventives (Mali, Burkina Faso, Bénin, Sénégal). Tirer des leçons opérationnelles de la pandémie de Covid-19 est essentiel pour que les systèmes de santé soient mieux préparés aux crises multiples et permanentes qu’ils traversent. Notre souhait n’était pas uniquement de produire de nouvelles connaissances mais aussi de partager ces données pour soutenir les prises de décisions actuelles et futures. Utiliser la recherche pour concevoir des interventions et politiques publiques n’est pas encore un réflexe, mais nous espérons que cet ouvrage pourra contribuer à combler cette lacune.

ISBN pour l’impression : 978-2-925128-32-8

ISBN pour le PDF : 978-2-925128-33-5

DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.10149930

619 pages

Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell, photo d’Omar Thiam, prise à Kaolack en 2021

Date de publication : novembre 2023

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Table des matières

In memoriam

I. LES RÉPONSES DES HÔPITAUX ET DE LEURS PERSONNELS FACE À LA PANDÉMIE DE COVID-19

SECTION A : ÉTUDES DE CAS UNIQUES

SECTION B : ÉTUDES DE CAS COMPARATIVES

II. LA SANTÉ PUBLIQUE EN PÉRIODE DE PANDÉMIE DE COVID-19

SECTION A : LA PRISE EN COMPTE DES INÉGALITÉS DANS DES INTERVENTIONS DE SANTÉ PUBLIQUE

How can you read a novel in hundreds of translations? (and why would you want to?)

How can you read a novel in hundreds of translations? (and why would you want to?)

by Matthew Reynolds

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been translated hundreds of times – in fact, more than 600 times into at least 68 languages. So this novel, often thought of as a very English book, is in fact not that at all. Almost immediately after its publication it was being read, not only across Europe in Danish, Dutch, French, German and Russian translations, but also in Chile, Cuba and Bolivia, in a Spanish version that was serialised in newspapers. More recently Jane Eyre has had a vivid translation history in many Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi and Tamil. And there have been at least 38 translations into Persian, and more than a hundred into Chinese.

What can we do with this phenomenon? How can we set about understanding it? Could it be possible in some to way read all these translations? What would be the point?

The first step is to get away from that widely accepted idea of translations according to which they are simply not as good as their source text. On this view, what Charlotte Brontë wrote is what matters and the translations are just so many inadequate copies. In fact, translations are much more a matter of imaginative interpretation and recreation than this view assumes. Think of the many hundreds of Jane Eyre translations as being like the many thousands – or probably millions – of performances of Shakespeare plays. You wouldn’t refuse to go to a production of a play because it could never be as good as the printed text (which in Shakespeare’s case is variable and contested anyway). Obviously you accept that a performance can bring new interpretations and new insights. And it is easy to see that what a Shakespeare play means to people today has been affected by all the ways it has been interpreted. A production has the power to change what the play is.

Of course, translations are in some ways different from theatrical productions: they don’t happen on a stage. But what they have in common is that they are not mere copies of the source text: they re-make it, using a different medium (different language) for a new audience in different cultural circumstances. As they do so, they find new possibilities of meaning and draw out fresh interpretations. Just like an adaptation of Shakespeare (or of Jane Austen, for that matter) they keep the work alive. And obviously they are not any the less interesting and important simply because they are in languages other than English: in fact, the reverse is true.

Reading these translations, we can trace the effects of cultural difference, in how translators adapt the novel to new circumstances (for instance, creating anti-régime suggestions in Franco’s Spain). We also observe the ever-growing and changing imaginative life of the novel, conceived as a world work – that is, a work made up of the text that Brontë wrote and all the translations together.

So, that is the ‘why’; but what of the ‘how’? Clearly, the world work that is Jane Eyre can only be read collaboratively, so I have co-written Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages with twenty other scholars (Andrés Claro, Annmarie Drury, Mary Frank, Paola Gaudio, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Jernej Habjan, Yunte Huang, Abhishek Jain, Eugenia Kelbert, Ulrich Timme Kragh, Ida Klitgård, Madli Kütt, Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos, Cláudia Pazos-Alonso, Eleni Philippou, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Léa Rychen, Céline Sabiron and Kayvan Tahmasebian.)

Even they cannot read all the translations – and you would probably not have the time to read about them – so we have been selective. The process of deciding what to focus on was collaborative too: we recognised that our writing was itself a kind of translation, with each participant bringing their own perspective to our shared material and framing it in their own way. Though encyclopaedic in its range, the book does not have the homogeneity and closure of an encyclopaedia: it is, rather, an environment to explore, with a succession of chapters written by me offering overarching orientations, while essays by the co-authors zoom in on particular contexts, languages and issues.

Key to this open and dynamic conception of the book is the inclusion of interactive digital media which the pioneering flexibility of Open Book Publishers has made possible. You can investigate where and when the translations have been published via a suite of interactive maps created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali, and – if you wish – you can watch interesting moments in multiple translations unfolding as animations on your screen, as well as laid out synoptically on the page. Printing the scripts of many of the languages was a challenge too, as publishing software has a Eurocentric bias which Open Book has worked hard to overcome. Prismatic Jane Eyre is experimental in concept, method, and form, and it offers a landscape of fascinating imaginative transformations for you to explore. Begin here.

Senyawa: Compound Lyricism

Senyawa: Compound Lyricism Translation of lyrics from experimental Indonesian band Senyawa Senyawa, the experimental Indonesian band formed by Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi, does not sound like anyone else… the combination of Wukir’s handmade instruments and Rully’s other-worldly vocals, channeling Javanese melodies with the intensity of punk and metal, with an avant-garde / DIY approach to constant experimentation and boundary … Continue reading →