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.

for next class: Hunt/Guantanamo/Literacy Narrative

Here’s the homework assignment for next class:

— Read Chapter 2 of Inventing Human Rights: "'Bone of their Bone:' Abolishing Torture."
— Watch The Road to Guantanamo (on DU Course Media)
— Write write a response to ONE of the following two prompts:

Prompt 1. In “Bone of their Bone,” Hunt writes:

It might seem rather a stretch to link blowing one’s nose into a handkerchief, listening to music, reading a novel, or ordering a portrait to the abolition of torture and the moderation of cruel punishment. Yet legally sanctioned torture did not end just because judges gave up on it or because Enlightenment writers eventually opposed it. Torture ended because the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart, to be replaced, bit by bit, by a new framework, in which individuals owned their bodies, had rights to their separateness and to bodily inviolability, and recognized in other people the same passions, sentiments, and sympathies as in themselves. “The men, or perhaps the women,” to return to the good doctor Rush one last time, “whose persons we detest [convicted criminals], possess sould and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations.” If we contemplate their miseries “without emotion or sympathy,” then “the principle of sympathy” itself “will cease to act altogether; and . . . will soon lose its place in the human breast.” (111-12)

To judge by the treatment meted out to those accused of being “enemy combatants” in The Road to Guantanamo, our culture’s “framework of pain and personhood” is falling apart again, to be replaced this time by one in which the principle of sympathy has indeed “lost its place in the human breast.” How does The Road to Guantanamo, through its artistry, seek to fight against this loss? That is, how do the filmmakers use the medium of filmic storytelling to create the film's own “framework of pain and personhood,” wherein the principle of human sympathy is returned to its proper place. And via what verbal and/or visual storytelling techniques does the film "teach" that framework to its audience?

(Your response should be about 250-500 words in length. Please email it to Catherine and John.)

Prompt 2. Complete the literacy narrative that you started today in class. Tell the story of an experience of reading that you’ve had that significantly changed the way that you view yourself, the world or some aspect thereof.  And try to write your story in such a way as to grip your readers, so that you’re writing, too, has a powerful, transformative effect. And remember: you're not trying merely to summarize what you read; you're trying to tell the story of your experience of reading.

(Your story should be at least 250-500 words in length.  Please email it to Catherine and John.)

Please remember that you are to respond EITHER to Prompt 1 OR to Prompt 2, NOT to both. However, even if you're writing to Prompt 2, please be sure to read Hunt and to watch the film.

A note about DU CourseMedia

• To access CourseMedia, go here. 
• Log in using you student ID and passcode (i.e., the same ID and passcode you use for webCentral and MyWeb).
• Click on the image beside “SJUS videos.”
• Click on the image beside “Road to Guantanamo”

Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness

For our next class meeting, please complete the following:

1. Please read the chapter titled "Torrents of Emotion" from Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights.
2. Please read pages 113-166 of the selection from Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness that I’ve put up on Blackboard. (It's in the folder labelled "PDF files.")
3. Please write a brief essay (say, between 250 and 500 words) in which you explain how Day's narrative dramatizes at least ONE of what, in class, we were calling "the paradoxes of human rights." You’ll recall that we discussed how, in order to promote justice, human rights must paradoxically be both natural and social, both universal and particular, both equal and respectful of difference, both individually held and collectively held. As you’ll see, Day struggles with these paradoxes in her own thinking and in her own life; indeed, these struggles make up the themes of her story. So pick out what strikes you as an especially interesting moment in that story and interpret it as you would a piece of literary fiction, say, or a poem or play, by asking: What does this specific moment in the story have to say about one of the book’s larger themes?

Please email your responses to me and to Catherine by the start of class on Tuesday.

Also, please note that I added an “extra” chapter to the PDF. The portion of The Long Loneliness that I’m asking you to read is the climax, so to speak, of Day’s spiritual autobiography; it recounts the religious conversion that she underwent before she undertook the work for which she became well known. But since I thought that some of you will want to read about this better-known work, I included the chapter that describes the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement. You’re not required to read this last chapter (titled “Peasant of the Pavements”), but it’s there if you’re interested.

Speaking of which, here’s a bit of background on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement:

The Long Loneliness is the spiritual autobiography of Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism who, along with a fellow named Peter Maurin, founded what became known as the Catholic Worker Movement. The group started out in 1933 by publishing a newspaper (called The Catholic Worker, still in publication today) whose mission was/is to speak out against poverty, war, and injustice of all sorts. They then opened what they called a "house of hospitality" on NY's Lower East Side, where the poor could find food, friendship, and a respite from the world outside. Catholic Worker houses soon began to spring up all around the country and eventually around the world. (Even today, you can find a Catholic Worker house in Denver (it's at 24th and Welton), and members of the local Catholic Worker community serve meals at the Saint Francis Center.) 

Catholic Worker communities are not an official part of the Catholic church; they're independent of the church and, indeed, largely independent of one another; they're made up of individuals who've decided to make common cause with the poor, and to do so outside of any official institutional structure. 

Day herself is a fascinating person. Prior to her conversion, she was a member of the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village, where she hung out with lots of famous and soon-to-be-famous poets, playwrights, painters, and the like. She was also deeply involved in the radical politics of her time, especially that of the Communists. In fact, she made her living as a journalist writing for various leftwing publications.  

At the age of about 30, however, Day underwent a profound religious experience, converting to Catholicism and leaving behind the political ideologies of her youth as well as many of her Greenwich Village friends. Soon, she started the first Catholic Worker community, channeling her activist energies into work on behalf of the poor and her literary energies into The Catholic Worker newspaper. Although, in her day, she was frequently in conflict with the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church, she has recently been named a candidate for sainthood. 

If you’re interested, you’ll find an old television interview with Dorothy Day here. Not only is the interview quite interesting in own right, but, because it was filmed in the early 1970s, it features some truly awesome clothes, hair, and visual effects.

For our first-day thought experiment

From “How to Really Save the Economy,” by Robert J. Barro, New York Times, September 10, 2011

I believe that a long-term fiscal plan for the country requires six big steps.

Three of them were identified by the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission: [1] reforming Social Security and Medicare by increasing ages of eligibility and shifting to an appropriate formula for indexing benefits to inflation; [2] phasing out “tax expenditures” like the deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes and employer-provided health care; [3] and lowering the marginal income-tax rates for individuals.

I would add three more: [4] reversing the vast and unwise increase in spending that occurred under Presidents Bush and Obama; [5] introducing a tax on consumer spending, like the value-added tax (or VAT) common in other rich countries; and [6] abolishing federal corporate taxes and estate taxes. All three measures would be enormously difficult — many say impossible — but crises are opportune times for these important, basic reforms.


From “White House Outlines $467 Billion In Savings To Pay For Jobs Act,” by Sam Stein, Huffington Post, September 12, 2011

The Obama administration announced on Monday a series of tax policy changes that officials say will pay for the costs of the president’s job creation plan.

The provisions, announced by Office of Management and Budget Chair Jack Lew, would raise a projected $467 billion over the course of 10 years. The American Jobs Act, as outlined by the president last week, will cost an estimated $447 billion.

The primary piece would be to limit itemized deductions for individuals making over $200,000-a-year and families making over $250,000 -- which Lew said would raise $400 billion over 10 years. Another pay-for would be to treat carried interest as ordinary income rather than capital gains, which Lew said would raise $18 billion. The White House is also calling for the end of tax subsidies for certain oil and gas companies, which the administration believes would raise $40 billion, and the axing of a tax break for corporate jet owners, which it believes could save $3 billion.

From In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

View larger.

Our Community Partners

Here are some videos about our community partners. Check them out as you think about your volunteer preferences. (There are a bunch more videos on our YouTube channel and in our Vimeo album.)

El Centro Humanitario
Tribute to Minsun Ji at El Centro Humanitario from Eric Firnhaber on Vimeo.

El Centro Humanitario promotes the rights and well-being of day laborers in Colorado through education, job skills and leadership development, united action and advocacy. Our goals are to develop a sense of community and self sufficiency among workers and to foster worker ownership over El Centro.

The GrowHaus

Everyone deserves a healthy meal. But in some communities, healthy food simply isn't available. The GrowHaus is a non-profit urban farm and market in one such community - northeast Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood. Our mission is to support the growth of healthy, self-empowered communities in Elyria-Swansea and beyond through education, improving food access, and urban agriculture.

Human Trafficking Clinic

Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing human rights violations in the world today. Around the globe and in your backyard there are anywhere between 12-27 million people forced to harvest crops, sell sex, make clothes, and work in other inhumane situations without pay. Even though slavery has existed for centuries, today’s response to human trafficking and modern slavery is plagued with term confusion, unreliable data, and lack of inter-organizational communication. The Human Trafficking Clinic . . . aim[s] to provide research that improves inter-organizational cooperation and accountability, influences policy, and raises awareness in combating human trafficking and modern slavery.

Trailers and previews of our course texts

Here are some sneak peaks from/about the texts we'll be reading and viewing in class this fall.

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.
From the publisher: How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals far and wide. Hunt also shows the continued relevance of human rights in today's world.



Here's a lecture that Hunt recently gave, summarizing the main argument made in Inventing Human Rights:



Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre, The Photographer.
From the publisher: In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel/photo-journal is a record of one reporter's arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan accompanying the Doctors Without Borders. Didier Lefèvre’s photography, paired with the art of Emmanuel Guibert, tells the powerful story of a mission undertaken by men and women dedicated to mending the wounds of war.

Clipped from: www.firstsecondbooks.com (share this clip)

Here's a short piece about how The Photographer was made:

Fall 2011 syllabus

Here's the syllabus for the fall quarter:

SJUS 2010 syllabus, fall 2011