Project 2: What Does Your Work Mean?

The Assignment

The struggle for social justice takes many shapes and forms: from the mass movement politics led by figures such as Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day, to the high profile artistic interventions of, e.g., Michael Winterbottom and Vik Muniz, to the considerably more ordinary, everyday work of laundering clothes at the Saint Francis Center or creating a newsletter for the GrowHaus. All of this work is significant — indeed, vital — to the struggle. However, understanding the significance of one’s work emerges only from a careful process of reflection. We need to place our individual efforts in the larger philosophical and historical context of the social justice movement in order to grasp what our work really means.

In this project, you’ll reflect upon the significance of your own social justice work. Using terms and concepts from Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (or from any other appropriate work of philosophy or history), you will describe and analyze the larger meaning of a specific experience you’ve had this term working with one of our community partners: How has your work contributed to the mission of the organization? How does that mission, and your contribution to it, serve the cause of social justice more broadly? And perhaps most importantly: What fundamental questions about or insights into the nature and pursuit of social justice does your experience offer?

Format, due dates, etc.

Your reflection should take the form of an essay of approximately a thousand words. The first part of the essay should describe, in vivid detail, the experience you intend to share; the second part should analyze that experience, deeply and rigorously, using Lynn Hunt or another text to help you.

Please bring a first draft of your essay to class on Tuesday, 11/15, and email a copy to John and to Catherine. Your first draft should be complete (i.e., it should include both your description and analysis of the experience), so that we can give you useful feedback

Your final draft is due by noon on Tuesday, 11/22.

And finally. . .

1. If you didn’t work with your community partner this term, you need to write to John and Catherine ASAP to explain what happened. Working with a community partner is a crucial element of your participation in the LLC. So, if there’s been a problem, we need to solve it.

2. Don’t freak out if, at first, it’s hard to imagine how your experience of, say, sweeping floors, or filing papers, or planning a party constitutes social justice work. It does. You just need to step back and think in a larger context about what you’ve been doing.

Waste Land assignment

In class yesterday, we talked about some of the ways in which the nation-state serves, for better or worse, to define our humanity, our relationships to other human beings, and hence our rights and responsibilities. As Catherine pointed out the nation-state is a fiction: that is, it’s a social construction (akin to a novel or a painting), not a natural fact (like, say, DNA or the force of gravity). To say that the nation-state is a fiction, not a natural fact, is not to say that it’s not real; rather, it is to say that the nation-state is not a timeless, inescapable feature of life on earth, like wind, or rain, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but one among the many possible and actual ways that human beings have organized themselves into societies. There have been — and are — alternatives.

 For next class, please view the film Waste Land (on DU Course Media) and write a 300–500-word response to ONE of the following questions:

1. How do the artistic fictions we see created in the film serve to criticize, support, or otherwise comment upon the political/legal fiction of the nation-state?

OR

2. What is ONE alternative form of social organization to the nation-state that the film explicitly or implicitly explores? Do you think that alternative is more just than the nation-state or less just? And why?

N.B. There’s no reading for this week, only viewing.

Which Way Home assignment

 For next class, please read Inventing Human Rights, chapter 5: “‘The Soft Power of Humanity:’ Why Human Rights Failed Only to Succeed in the Long Run,” then watch Rebecca Cammisa’s Which Way Home (on DU Course Media), and then write a response to the following:

Lynn Hunt contends that the rise of the nation-state served both to advance and to frustrate the spread of human rights. On the one hand, many of the new national constitutions enshrined in law the individual rights of their citizens. On the other hand, those rights were understood to belong not to all human beings universally but to the particular groups regarded as “true” members of the nation in question, thus giving rise to all manner of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion, and gender. A contemporary instance of this conflict between particular, nation-based rights and universal, human rights can be found in the controversies surrounding immigration. So, in a 300–500-word essay, please use Hunt’s argument to analyze the plight of the Central American child migrants depicted in Which Way Home. How does their plight reflect the conflict between national rights and human rights?

Please email your response to Catherine and John by the start of class on Tuesday.

SoleJourney / Project 1 draft due

Your revised draft of Project 1 is due to Catherine and me by the start of next class. Per my earlier instructions: Each of you should be submitting at least one Word document: i.e., your revised 500-word reflection on your project. However, as to the project itself, many of you are working in media other than print: you’re creating videos, photo-essays, graphic novels, etc. If you’re one of these people, you’ll want to turn your project draft in by (a) finding the appropriate website for posting your kind of media; (b) posting your draft there; and (c) sending me and Catherine a link to the work you’ve posted. For example, if you’ve created a video, you might post it to YouTube; if you’ve created a collage, you might photograph it and post it to Flickr; if you’re creating a radio play, you might post it on archive.org. If you don’t know of a site that hosts the kind of work that you’re doing, please email me ASAP, and I'll tell you where to go.

(A reminder: After Catherine and I read/view/listen/play your project draft, we'll write back with suggestions for revision. The key word here is that last one: revision. You'll revise your project again before submitting it for a final grade at the end of the course.)

2. Please read Inventing Human Rights, Chapter 4: "'There will be no end of it:' The Consequences of Declaring,"and please watch the documentary film SoleJourney, by Kate Burns and Sheila E. Schroeder (available on DU CourseMedia). One of the filmmakers, Kate Burns, is coming to our to class on Tuesday. I think you'll be really interested to talk with Kate, both because her film is so interesting and because Kate will be teaching your SJUS class in the spring.

3. Please send Catherine and me a 1-paragraph response to this question: How can we see the events depicted in SoleJourney as a synecdoche for a larger social structure or historical trend (i.e., of what larger wholes are these events a representative part)? And how does the film serve to ironically subvert, undermine, or otherwise cause us to question the conventional understanding of these larger social and/or historical wholes? It'll really be great to use your responses as the basis of discussion when When Kate visits class; so please deploy all of your considerable brain power to develop a keen and insightful response to the question. A good way to come up with a keen, insightful response is by drawing upon the Inventing Human Rights to help you.

Martin Luther King, Jr. "I've Been to the Mountaintop"

Delivered on April 3 1968, in the Mason Temple, Memphis, TN.
The text of the speech is here.

Reading for next time: Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963

Below is an embedded Google Books version of the reading for next time: the chapter on the Montgomery Bus Boycott from Taylor Branch's truly magnificent three-volume biography of Martin Luther King. I'm not sure how deep into the chapter Google Books will let you get before it cuts off. I'd planned to put up a PDF, but the book's checked out of the library and I won't be able to purchase a copy till later tonight. So expect to see the PDF tomorrow, and, in the meantime, if you'd like to get started, you can begin reading this version.

(Please note that there's no writing assignment attached to this reading assignment. I'd prefer that you concentrate on completing your draft of Project 1.)

Project 1 Assignment: Tell a Story for Social Justice

Over the last few weeks we’ve read and viewed a number of compelling stories for social justice. I say “for social justice” rather than “about social justice” because, although the stories have indeed been about a variety of social justice issues, the creators of those stories tell them in order to advance a cause. By seeking not merely to describe the world but to change it, these storytellers act for social justice.

In this project, you’ll attempt to do the same thing: You’ll tell a story that aims to change how your audience feels, thinks, and acts about a social justice issue that is vitally important to you.

• WHO you tell the story to depends on the issue you’re trying to affect. So ask yourself: Who is in a position to do something about the issue I want to affect? Whose emotions, thought, and actions am I trying to change? Your audience may consist of a single, relatively small group (say, students on campus), or it may be a large and various group (say, conservative Christians + liberal Muslims + Conservative and Reform Jews + engaged Buddhists). Who the audience for your story is will depend on what you're trying to do.
• WHAT story you tell depends on who you're trying to reach. It might be the story of a personal experience (like The Photographer and The Long Loneliness) or of the experience of someone you know (like The Road to Guantanamo), or of someone you’ve never even met (like Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years). The important thing isn’t where the story comes from; the important thing is that it be compelling: i.e., that it serve to move your particular audience and advance your cause.
• HOW you tell the story depends upon who you're trying to reach and the nature of the story you're telling them. You might tell it in words; you might tell it in pictures; or you might use both. You might create a video; you might create a podcast; or you might create a photo-essay, graphic novella, or suite of poems. Here again, the important thing is that your story be told in the most compelling way: i.e., that it move your particular audience and advance your cause.

Due dates, etc.

The first draft of your project is due in class on October 11. Because I want you to get feedback from your peers before you craft a really polished story, video, graphic novella, etc., your first draft should be truly rough: i.e., no more than an outline of plot points, or a rough sequence of un-shot video scenes, or a sketch of some comic panels, etc.

In addition to your rough draft, you should bring a roughly 500-word reflection on what you’ve done so far. That reflection should explain: (1) who your audience is, and why, given the change you want to bring about, you’ve decided to focus on this audience; (2) why you believe the particular story you tell will move your particular audience; and (3) why, given your audience and the story you want to tell, you’ve decided to tell it in the particular form that you do (i.e., as a short story, or a video, or a podcast, or a photo-essay, etc.)

A polished draft and revised reflection are due to John and Catherine by the start of class on October 18.


Your final draft and reflection are due to John and Catherine by noon on Tuesday, November 22.