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.