A New Academic Hoax–Complete with Fake Articles Published in Academic Journals–Ventures to Show the “Corruption” of Cultural Studies

We should be sus­pi­cious when researchers assume their con­clu­sion; when the results of an aca­d­e­m­ic study mere­ly con­firm the author’s pre-exist­ing bias­es. Humans are wired to seek con­fir­ma­tion, a cog­ni­tive deficit so deeply engrained that it can be exploit­ed among laypeo­ple and spe­cial­ists alike. Art his­to­ri­ans have been fooled by forg­eries, his­to­ri­ans by fake man­u­scripts, and pale­on­tol­o­gists by pho­ny fos­sils. Physi­cist Steven Wein­berg ref­er­enced such high-lev­el hoax­es in a 1996 essay in The New York Review of Books, and he placed that year’s aca­d­e­m­ic scandal—known as the “Sokal Hoax”—among them.

The gist of the Sokal affair runs as fol­lows: NYU math­e­mat­i­cal physi­cist Alan Sokal sus­pect­ed that post-struc­tural­ist-influ­enced cul­tur­al stud­ies was jar­gon-laden, obfus­cat­ing BS, and he set out to prove it by author­ing his own “post­mod­ernist” text, an arti­cle full of mis­used ter­mi­nol­o­gy from quan­tum physics. He sent it off to the jour­nal Social Text, who pub­lished it in their Spring/Summer issue. Sokal then revealed in anoth­er jour­nal, Lin­gua Fran­ca, that the arti­cle had been a fraud, “lib­er­al­ly salt­ed with non­sense,” and had only been accept­ed because “(a) it sound­ed good and (b) it flat­tered the editor’s ide­o­log­i­cal pre­con­cep­tions.”

Sokal’s hoax, it was round­ly claimed, demon­strat­ed that cer­tain fash­ion­able quar­ters of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties had dete­ri­o­rat­ed into bab­ble, sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing more than rigid ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments and a gen­er­al dis­re­gard for the actu­al mean­ings of words and con­cepts. Wein­berg wasn’t so sure. At most, per­haps, it showed the edi­to­r­i­al fail­ings of Social Text. And while human­ists may abuse sci­en­tif­ic ideas, Wein­berg points out that sci­en­tists of the stature of Wern­er Heisen­berg have also been prone to slip­shod, qua­si-mys­ti­cal think­ing.

But the Sokal hoax did expose to the wider pub­lic a ten­den­cy among a coterie of aca­d­e­mics to indulge in mys­ti­fy­ing lan­guage, includ­ing the mis­use of jar­gon from oth­er fields of study, usu­al­ly in imi­ta­tion of French the­o­rists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kris­te­va, or Jacques Derrida—whom, it must be said, all wrote in a very dif­fer­ent intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture (one that expects, Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, at least “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble”). For a good many peo­ple in the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, this wasn’t much of a rev­e­la­tion. (Sokal has since pub­lished a more thor­ough­ly crit­i­cal book with the apt title Beyond the Hoax.)

Part of the prob­lem with his hoax as a seri­ous cri­tique is that it began with its con­clu­sion. Cul­tur­al stud­ies are rife with crap argu­ments, ide­ol­o­gy, and incom­pre­hen­si­ble non­sense, Sokal believed. And so, when his paper was accept­ed, he sim­ply rest­ed his case, mak­ing no effort to engage char­i­ta­bly with good schol­ar­ship while he ridiculed the bad. Which brings us to the cur­rent state of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, and to a con­tem­po­rary, Sokal-like attack on them by a trio of writ­ers who rest their case on a slight­ly broad­er base of evidence—20 fraud­u­lent arti­cles sent out to var­i­ous niche cul­tur­al stud­ies jour­nals over a year: four pub­lished (since retract­ed), three accept­ed but not pub­lished, sev­en under review, and six reject­ed.

The authors—academic philoso­pher Peter Boghoss­ian and writ­ers Helen Pluck­rose and James A. Lindsay—revealed the hoax this week in an arti­cle pub­lished at the Pluck­rose-edit­ed Areo mag­a­zine. One needn’t read past the title to under­stand the authors’ take on cul­tur­al stud­ies in gen­er­al: “Aca­d­e­m­ic Griev­ance Stud­ies and the Cor­rup­tion of Schol­ar­ship.” While all three hoax­ers iden­ti­fy as left-lean­ing lib­er­als, the broad-brush char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of whole fields as “griev­ance stud­ies” reveals a prej­u­di­cial degree of con­tempt that seems unwar­rant­ed. In the arti­cle, they reveal their moti­va­tions and meth­ods, out­line the suc­cess­es of the project, and post the com­ments of the arti­cles’ ref­er­ees, along with a video of them­selves hav­ing a good laugh at the whole thing.

This last bit is unnec­es­sary and obnox­ious, but does the new hoax—“Sokal Squared” as it’s been called—genuinely under­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of cul­tur­al stud­ies as a whole? Is it “’hilar­i­ous and delight­ful,’” asks Alexan­der C. Kaf­ka at The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, or “an ugly exam­ple of dis­hon­esty and bad faith?” Har­vard polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Yascha Mounk tact­ful­ly finds in it a seri­ous case for con­cern: “Some aca­d­e­m­ic emperors—the ones who sup­pos­ed­ly have the most to say about these cru­cial top­ics [dis­crim­i­na­tion, racism, sexism]—have no clothes.”

This is a point worth pur­su­ing, and cer­tain recent scan­dals should give every­one pause to con­sid­er how bul­ly­ing and group­think man­i­fest on the aca­d­e­m­ic left at the high­est lev­el of pres­tige. But the great major­i­ty of aca­d­e­mics are not “emper­ors” and have very lit­tle social or eco­nom­ic pow­er. And Mounk is care­ful not to over­state the case. He points out how the hoax has unfor­tu­nate­ly giv­en wel­come “ammu­ni­tion” to right-wing con­ser­v­a­tive axe-grinders:

Many con­ser­v­a­tives who are deeply hos­tile to the sci­ence of cli­mate change, and who dis­miss out of hand the stud­ies that attest to deep injus­tices in our soci­ety, are using Sokal Squared to smear all aca­d­e­mics as biased cul­ture war­riors. The Fed­er­al­ist, a right-wing news and com­men­tary site, went so far as to spread the appar­ent ide­o­log­i­cal bias of a few jour­nals in one par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of acad­e­mia to most pro­fes­sors, the main­stream media, and Democ­rats on the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The Fed­er­al­ist spe­cial­izes in irre­spon­si­ble con­spir­a­cy-mon­ger­ing, the kind of thing that sells ads and wins elec­tions but doesn’t belong in aca­d­e­m­ic debate. The ques­tion Mounk doesn’t ask is whether the hoax­ers’ own atti­tudes encour­age and share in such hos­til­i­ty, an issue raised by sev­er­al of their crit­ics. As physi­cist Sean Car­roll wrote on Twit­ter, “What strikes me about stunts like this is their fun­da­men­tal mean­ness. No attempt to intel­lec­tu­al­ly engage with ideas you dis­agree with; just trolling for the lulz.” McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal the­o­rist Jacob T. Levy expressed sim­i­lar reser­va­tions in an inter­view, notes The New York Times, say­ing

even some col­leagues who are not fans of iden­ti­ty-ori­ent­ed schol­ar­ship are look­ing at the hoax and say­ing ‘this is poten­tial­ly uneth­i­cal and doesn’t show what they think it is show­ing.’ Besides, he added, “We all rec­og­nized that this kind of thing could also be done in our dis­ci­plines if peo­ple were will­ing to ded­i­cate a year to do it.”

There­in lies anoth­er prob­lem with Sokal Squared. Hoax­es have been per­pet­u­at­ed by smart, ded­i­cat­ed forg­ers, con-artists, and pranksters in near­ly every field, show­ing up all sorts of experts as poten­tial dupes. The sin­gling out of cul­tur­al stud­ies for par­tic­u­lar ridicule—the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of stud­ies of race, gen­der, dis­abil­i­ty, etc. as “griev­ance studies”—reveals an aggriev­ed agen­da all its own, one that ignores the seri­ous prob­lems cor­rupt­ing oth­er dis­ci­plines (e.g. indus­try fund­ing in aca­d­e­m­ic sci­ences, or the gross overuse of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as the main sub­jects of studies—groups that hard­ly rep­re­sent the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.)

Some, but not all, of the suc­cess­ful­ly-pub­lished hoax papers sound ludi­crous and ter­ri­ble. Some, in fact, do not, as Justin Wein­berg shows at Dai­ly Nous, and should not shame the edi­tors who pub­lished them. Some of the jour­nals have much high­er edi­to­r­i­al stan­dards than oth­ers. (An ear­ly hoax attempt by Boghoss­ian tar­get­ed an ill-reput­ed, pay-to-play pub­li­ca­tion.) The whole affair may speak to broad­er fail­ures in aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing that go beyond a tiny cor­ner of the human­i­ties. In part, those fail­ures may stem from a gen­er­al trend toward over­worked, under­paid, increas­ing­ly pre­car­i­ous schol­ars whose dis­ci­plines, and fund­ing, have been under relent­less polit­i­cal attack since at least the 1990s and who must keep grind­ing out pub­li­ca­tions, some­times of dubi­ous mer­it, as part of the over­all dri­ve toward sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty as the sole mea­sure of suc­cess.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy & French Intel­lec­tu­als, and How They End Up Sup­port­ing Oppres­sive Pow­er Struc­tures

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Cornell Note-Taking System: Learn the Method Students Have Used to Enhance Their Learning Since the 1940s

How should you take notes in class? Like so many stu­dents who came before me and would come after, I had lit­tle idea in col­lege and even less in high school. The inher­ent­ly ambigu­ous nature of the note-tak­ing task has inspired a vari­ety of meth­ods and sys­tems, few of them as respect­ed as Cor­nell Notes. Invent­ed in the 1940s by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sor Wal­ter Pauk, author of How to Study in Col­lege, Cor­nell Notes involves divid­ing each page up into three sec­tions: one to para­phrase the lec­ture’s main ideas, one to sum­ma­rize those ideas, and one to write ques­tions. After writ­ing down those main ideas dur­ing class, imme­di­ate­ly sum­ma­rize and add ques­tions about the con­tent. Then, while study­ing lat­er, try to answer those ques­tions with­out look­ing at the main body of notes.

You’ll find a com­plete and con­cise expla­na­tion of how to take Cor­nell Notes at Cor­nel­l’s web site, which includes infor­ma­tion on the “Reflect” stage (in which you ask your­self broad­er ques­tions like “What’s the sig­nif­i­cance of these facts?” and “What prin­ci­ple are they based on?”) and the “Review” stage (in which you “spend at least ten min­utes every week review­ing all your pre­vi­ous notes” to aid reten­tion).

For a more detailed visu­al expla­na­tion, have a look at teacher Jen­nifer DesRochers’ instruc­tions for how to take Cor­nell Notes in the video above, which now approach­es one mil­lion views on Youtube. Her own ver­sion encour­ages tak­ing down main-idea sum­maries in draw­ings as well as text, and includ­ing things like “key points” and “impor­tant peo­ple or ideas” in the ques­tion col­umn.

That DesRochers’ video now approach­es one mil­lion views sug­gests stu­dents still find the Cor­nell Notes sys­tem effec­tive, as much as or even more so than they did when Pauk first pub­lished it. Over time, of course, its users have also aug­ment­ed it: take Doug Neil­l’s video “Improv­ing Cor­nell Notes With Sketch­not­ing Tech­niques” above, which com­bines stan­dard Cor­nell Notes with his sys­tem of “sketch­not­ing,” also known as “visu­al note-tak­ing and graph­ic record­ing.”

He pro­vides exam­ples of what such Cor­nell-for­mat­ted sketch­not­ing might look like, explain­ing that “hav­ing the option of doing some­thing more visu­al in your mind trig­gers a dif­fer­ent type of pro­cess­ing pow­er, so that you’re more active in the way that you’re respond­ing to the ideas. You’re not just pas­sive­ly tak­ing in infor­ma­tion.” The nature of school, as stu­dents in every era have known, can often induce a state of pas­siv­i­ty; sys­tems like Cor­nell Notes and its many vari­a­tions remind us of how much more we can learn if we have a way to break out of it.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,300 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Features Incredible Digitally-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Per­haps one of the most crim­i­nal­ly over­looked voic­es from World War I, Siegfried Sas­soon, was, in his time, enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar with the British read­ing pub­lic. His war poems, as Mar­garet B. McDow­ell writes in the Dic­tio­nary of Lit­er­ary Biog­ra­phy, are “harsh­ly real­is­tic laments or satires” that detail the gris­ly hor­rors of trench war­fare with unspar­ing­ly vivid images and com­men­tary. In lieu of the mass medi­um of tele­vi­sion, and with film still emerg­ing from its infan­cy, poets like Sas­soon and Wil­fred Owen served an impor­tant func­tion not only as artists but as mov­ing, first­hand doc­u­men­tar­i­ans of the war’s phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al rav­ages.

It is unfor­tu­nate that poet­ry no longer serves this pub­lic func­tion. These days, video threat­ens to eclipse even jour­nal­is­tic writ­ing as a pri­ma­ry means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, a devel­op­ment made espe­cial­ly trou­bling by how eas­i­ly dig­i­tal video can be faked or manip­u­lat­ed by the same tech­nolo­gies used to pro­duce block­buster Hol­ly­wood spec­ta­cles and video games. But a fas­ci­nat­ing new use of that tech­nol­o­gy, Peter Jack­son shows us above, will also soon bring the grainy, indis­tinct film of the past into new life, giv­ing footage of WWI the kind of star­tling imme­di­a­cy still con­veyed by Sassoon’s poet­ry.

Jack­son is cur­rent­ly at work on what he describes as “not the usu­al film that you would expect on the First World War,” and as part of that doc­u­men­tary work, he has dig­i­tal­ly enhanced footage from the peri­od, “incred­i­ble footage of which the faces of the men just jump out at you. It’s the faces, it’s the peo­ple that come to life in this film. It’s the human beings that were actu­al­ly there, that were thrust into this extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion that defined their lives in many cas­es.” In addi­tion to restor­ing old film, Jack­son and his team have combed through about 600 hours of audio inter­views with WWI vet­er­ans, in order to fur­ther com­mu­ni­cate “the expe­ri­ence of what it was like to fight in this war” from the point of view of the peo­ple who fought it.

The project, com­mis­sioned by the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­ums, “will debut at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val lat­er this year,” reports The Inde­pen­dent, “lat­er air­ing on BBC One. A copy of the film will also be giv­en to every sec­ondary school in the coun­try for the 2018 autumn term.” No word yet on where the film can be seen out­side the UK, but you can check the site 1418now.org.uk for release details. In the mean­while, con­sid­er pick­ing up some of the work of Siegfried Sas­soon, whom crit­ic Peter Levi once described as “one of the few poets of his gen­er­a­tion we are real­ly unable to do with­out.”

Learn more about the war at the free course offer­ings below.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

The Bat­tle to Fin­ish a PhD: World War I Sol­dier Com­pletes His Dis­ser­ta­tion in the Trench­es (1916)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Margaret Atwood Teaching an Online Class on Creative Writing

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

The prob­lem of dystopi­an fic­tion is this: quite often the worst future cre­ative writ­ers can imag­ine is exact­ly the kind of present that has already been inflict­ed on others—by colo­nial­ism, dic­ta­tor­ship, geno­ci­dal war, slav­ery, theoc­ra­cy, abject pover­ty, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, etc. Mil­lions all over the world have suf­fered under these con­di­tions, but many read­ers fail to rec­og­nize dystopi­an nov­els as depict­ing exist­ing evils because they hap­pen, or have hap­pened, to peo­ple far away in space and time. Of course, Mar­garet Atwood under­stands this prin­ci­ple. The night­mares she has writ­ten about in nov­els like The Handmaid’s Tale have all already come to pass, she tells us.

In the pro­mo video above for her Mas­ter­class on Cre­ative Writ­ing start­ing this fall (it’s now open), Atwood says, “when I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, noth­ing went into it that had not hap­pened in real life some­where at some time. The rea­son I made that rule is that I didn’t want any­body say­ing, ‘You cer­tain­ly have an evil imag­i­na­tion, you made up all these bad things.’” And yet, she says, “I didn’t make them up.” In a Swift­ian way, she implies, we did—“we” being human­i­ty writ large, or, per­haps more accu­rate­ly, the destruc­tive, greedy, pow­er-mad indi­vid­u­als who wreak hav­oc on the lives of those they deem infe­ri­ors or right­ful prop­er­ty.

“As a writer,” she says above, “your goal is to keep your read­er believ­ing, even though both of you know it’s fic­tion.” Atwood’s trick to achiev­ing this is a devi­ous one in what we might call sci-fi or dark fan­ta­sy (though she spurns these des­ig­na­tions): she writes not only what she knows to be true, in some sense, but also what we know to be true, though we would rather it not be, as in Vir­ginia Woolf’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of fic­tion as “as spider’s web, attached ever so light­ly per­haps, but still attached to life at all four cor­ners.”

Atwood says that writ­ers turn away from the blank page because they fear some­thing. She has made it her busi­ness, instead, to turn toward fear, to see dark visions like those of her Mad­dAd­dam Tril­o­gy, an extrap­o­la­tion of hor­rors already hap­pen­ing, in some form, some­where in the world (and soon to be a fun-filled TV series). What she feared in 1984, the year she began writ­ing The Handmaid’s Tale, seems just as chill­ing­ly pre­scient to many readers—and view­ers of the TV adaptation—thirty-four years lat­er, a tes­ta­ment to Atwood’s spec­u­la­tive real­ism, and to the awful, stub­born resis­tance real­i­ty puts up to improve­ment.

As she put it in an essay about the novel’s ori­gins, “Nations nev­er build appar­ent­ly rad­i­cal forms of gov­ern­ment on foun­da­tions that aren’t there already.” The same, per­haps, might be said of nov­el­ists. Do you have some truths to tell in fic­tion­al form? Maybe Atwood is the per­fect guide to help you write them.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Mar­garet Atwood Explains How Sto­ries Change with Tech­nol­o­gy

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Steven Van Zandt Creates a Free School of Rock: 100+ Free Lesson Plans That Educate Kids Through Music

When I think of rock ‘n’ roll high school, I think of the Ramones, but in the 1979 Roger Cor­man film no one real­ly learns much. In real­i­ty, how­ev­er, anoth­er leg­endary musi­cian, still going strong after five decades in the busi­ness, has put his cred to seri­ous use, lever­ag­ing star­dom as a musi­cian and actor to cre­ate a music cur­ricu­lum teach­ers can use for free, with lessons on rock his­to­ry, Native Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Bob Dylan’s poet­ry, immi­gra­tion and the blues, civ­il dis­obe­di­ence, the fight to end Apartheid, and much more. That man is Steven Van Zandt—aka Lit­tle Steven of the E Street Band, or Sil­vio Dante of The Sopra­nos, or Frank Tagliano of Lily­ham­mer, or a few oth­er alias­es and fic­tion­al char­ac­ters.

“For the past decade,” writes John Seabrook at The New York­er, the ban­dana-clad gui­tarist has been “work­ing on a way to recre­ate” a “dynam­ic, out-of-school learn­ing expe­ri­ence inside class­rooms, through his Rock and Roll For­ev­er Foun­da­tion.” Work­ing, that is, to recre­ate his own expe­ri­ence as a dis­af­fect­ed youth who “had no inter­est in school what­so­ev­er,” he recalls. What inter­est­ed him was music: the Bea­t­les, at first, but as he learned more about them, he picked up “bits of infor­ma­tion” about East­ern reli­gion and orches­tra­tion. He learned about lit­er­a­ture from Dylan.

“You didn’t get into it to learn things,” he says, “but you learn things any­way.” At least if you’re as curi­ous and open-mind­ed as Van Zandt, who came to val­ue edu­ca­tion through his non-tra­di­tion­al course. Over ten years ago, when the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Music Edu­ca­tion told him that “No Child Left Behind leg­is­la­tion was real­ly dev­as­tat­ing art class­es,” he con­front­ed Ted Kennedy and Mitch McConnell, telling them, “did you ever hear that every kid who takes music class does bet­ter in math and sci­ence?” They apol­o­gized,” he says, “but they said they weren’t going to fix it.”

So Van Zandt decid­ed to do it him­self with a pro­gram called TeachRock. Work­ing with two eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gists, he built the cur­ricu­lum to con­nect with kids through music. “Instead of telling the kid, ‘Take the iPod out of your ears,’” he told a crowd of teach­ers gath­ered at Times Square’s Playsta­tion The­ater in May, “we ask them, ‘What are you lis­ten­ing to?’” Van Zandt calls his cur­ricu­lum “teach­ing in the present tense,” and while his own back cat­a­log may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be stream­ing on kids’ cur­rent playlists, he incor­po­rates not only his music and the fifties and six­ties rock ‘n’ roll he loves, but also hip-hop, pop, punk, and the “Latin rhythms of ‘Despaci­to.’” He even uses Beyoncé’s “Sin­gle Ladies” video to prompt a dis­cus­sion on the slave trade.

The focus on pop­u­lar music as a force for change is ful­ly in keep­ing with Van Zandt’s own path. His self-edu­ca­tion led him into activism in the 80s when he wrote and record­ed “Sun City” with 50 oth­er artists to protest South African Apartheid. Unlike some oth­er ben­e­fit songs of the time (like the cringe-induc­ing “Do They Know It’s Christ­mas”), “Sun City,” with its accom­pa­ny­ing video (above), took effec­tive polit­i­cal action—a blan­ket boy­cott of the Sun City resort—and didn’t sug­ar-coat the issues one bit (“relo­ca­tion to pho­ny homelands/separation of fam­i­lies, I can’t under­stand”). The Sun City boy­cott gets its own mod­ule.

As Van Zandt told Fast Com­pa­ny in 2015, “I had been research­ing Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy post-World War II just to edu­cate myself, which I had nev­er done, being obsessed with rock ‘n’ roll my whole life. I was quite shocked to find that we were not always the good guys.” His dis­cov­er­ies com­pelled him to vis­it South Africa and to “ded­i­cate my five-record solo career to that learn­ing process, and also com­bine a bit of jour­nal­ism with the rock art form.” That same pas­sion for jus­tice informs all of the TeachRock lessons, which you can browse and down­load for free at the TeachRock site. The mul­ti-media units incor­po­rate video, audio, images, activ­i­ties, infor­ma­tive hand­outs, and oth­er resources.

Each les­son also explains how its objec­tives meet Com­mon Core State Stan­dards (or the state stan­dards of New Jer­sey and Texas). “TeachRock is root­ed in a teach­ing phi­los­o­phy that believes stu­dents learn best when they tru­ly con­nect with the mate­r­i­al to which they’re intro­duced,” notes the site’s “Wel­come Teach­ers” page. “Obvi­ous­ly, pop­u­lar music is one such point of con­nec­tion.” Per­haps not every kid who learns through music as Van Zandt did will go out and try to change the world, but they’re more than like­ly to stay engaged and stay in school. And that’s exact­ly what he hopes to accom­plish.

“Teach­ing kids some­thing they’re not inter­est­ed in,” he told the teach­ers in New York, “it didn’t work then, and it’s even worse now. We have an epi­dem­ic dropout rate.” Then, in his refresh­ing­ly hon­est way, he con­clud­ed, “Where are we going to be in twen­ty years? How are we going to get smarter look­ing at this Admin­is­tra­tion? You know, we’re just get­ting stu­pid­er.” Not if Lit­tle Steven has any­thing to say about it. He’s cur­rent­ly on tour with his Dis­ci­ples of Soul, and offer­ing free tick­ets to teach­ers, pro­vid­ed they show up ear­ly for a TeachRock work­shop. Sign up here!

For more, check out Steve’s new mem­oir, Unre­quit­ed Infat­u­a­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Help Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

The Con­cept of Musi­cal Har­mo­ny Explained in Five Lev­els of Dif­fi­cul­ty, Start­ing with a Child & End­ing with Her­bie Han­cock

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

Teaching Tolerance to Activists: A Free Course Syllabus & Anthology

The waters of acad­e­mia have grown chop­py of late, and many vet­er­an sailors have found them­selves ill-equipped to nav­i­gate the brave new world stu­dent activists are forg­ing at a break­neck pace.

Trig­ger warn­ings. Safe spaces. Cur­ric­u­la restruc­tured with an eye toward iden­ti­ty. Swift judg­ments for those who fail to com­ply.

Admis­sions brochures and cam­pus tours make fre­quent men­tion of their institution’s com­mit­ment to social jus­tice. They have to—many high school­ers share the under­grads’ beliefs.

Those of us whose col­lege years are but a dis­tant mem­o­ry should­n’t depend on our school’s alum­ni mag to paint an accu­rate pic­ture of the bat­tles that may be rag­ing with­in. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, pre­ferred pro­nouns, and inclu­sive bath­room facil­i­ties may get a men­tion, but the offi­cial organ’s unlike­ly to peek into the abyss where tol­er­ance goes to die.

Cul­tur­al schol­ar Frances Lee, a queer trans per­son of col­or recov­er­ing from a forced con­ver­sion to evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty, took a hard look at the prob­lem of intol­er­ance with­in activist cir­cles as a sec­ond year Mas­ters stu­dent in Cul­tur­al Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton.

Pub­lished exact­ly one year ago, their essay, Kin Aes­thet­ics: Excom­mu­ni­cate Me from the Church of Social Jus­tice, was plain­spo­ken about the neg­a­tive side effects of social progress in activist cir­cles, and by exten­sion, on cam­pus:

Telling peo­ple what to do and how to live out their lives is endem­ic to reli­gious and to dog­mat­ic activism. It’s not that my com­rades are the boss­es of me, but that dog­mat­ic activism cre­ates an envi­ron­ment that encour­ages peo­ple to tell oth­er peo­ple what to do. This is espe­cial­ly promi­nent on Face­book. Scrolling through my news feed some­times feels Iike slid­ing into a pew to be blast­ed by a frag­ment­ed, fren­zied ser­mon. I know that much of the media post­ed there means to dis­ci­pline me to be a bet­ter activist and com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. But when dic­tates aren’t fol­lowed, a com­mon pro­ce­dure of pun­ish­ment ensues. Pun­ish­ments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include sham­ing, scold­ing, call­ing out, iso­lat­ing, or evis­cer­at­ing someone’s social stand­ing. Dis­ci­pline and pun­ish­ment have been used for all of his­to­ry to con­trol and destroy peo­ple. Why is it being used in move­ments meant to lib­er­ate all of us? We all have made seri­ous mis­takes and hurt oth­er peo­ple, inten­tion­al­ly or not. We get a chance to learn from them when those around us respond with kind­ness and patience. Where is our humil­i­ty when exam­in­ing the mis­takes of oth­ers? Why do we posi­tion our­selves as moral­ly supe­ri­or to the low­ly un-woke?

The essay’s viral suc­cess gives extra oomph to “Wok­er Than Thou: Left­ist Activist Iden­ti­ty For­ma­tions,” a com­mu­ni­ty course Lee designed and taught ear­li­er this year.

Intend­ed for com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers, polit­i­cal activists, and orga­niz­ers, Lee wel­comed any­one with any inter­est in the sub­ject, pro­vid­ed they were will­ing “to stay open to dis­sent­ing or unpop­u­lar ideas for the sake of dis­cus­sion, instead of fore­clos­ing cer­tain top­ics or ideas by judg­ing them as not wor­thy of atten­tion.”

The 10-week syl­labus delved into such rel­e­vant top­ics as Call-out Cul­ture, the False Promis­es of Empa­thy, and of course “wok­e­ness,” a term Lee takes care to attribute to Black cul­ture.

While not all of the required read­ings can be found online, Lee pro­vides a wealth of links to those that can.

Titles include Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co Pro­fes­sor Rhon­da Magee’s “Address­ing Social Injus­tice with Com­pas­sion,” author Andrea Smith’s “The Prob­lem with Priv­i­lege,” Trau­ma Stew­ard­ship Insti­tute founder Lau­ra van Der­noot Lipsky’s TEDx Talk on sys­tem­at­ic oppres­sion and lib­er­a­tion the­o­ry.

There’s even a Suf­jan Stevens song that evolved from cheap shots at skater Tonya Harding’s expense to some­thing that con­sid­ered the “whole­ness of the per­son… with dig­ni­ty and grace.”

Fol­low­ing Lee’s course mate­ri­als seems a much more ratio­nal way to con­front the cur­rent social cli­mate than bing­ing on con­fes­sion­al essays by lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors who feel ham­strung by not-unfound­ed fears that their stu­dents could cost them their jobs … and the good rep­u­ta­tion required to secure anoth­er.

For fur­ther read­ing, Lee offers free down­loads of Toward An Ethics of Activism: A Com­mu­ni­ty Inves­ti­ga­tion of Humil­i­ty, Grace and Com­pas­sion in Move­ments for Jus­tice, an anthol­o­gy that “seeks to dis­rupt dog­mat­ic, exclu­sion­ary activist cul­ture with kind­ness and con­nec­tion.”

Find Frances Lee’s “Wok­er Than Thou” syl­labus here.

Down­load a PDF of the anthol­o­gy Toward An Ethics of Activism here. (A screen read­er acces­si­ble ver­sion is also avail­able.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Dr. Jane Goodall Is Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Con­ser­va­tion, Ani­mal Intel­li­gence & Activism

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Petersson Helps Kids With Autism Learn Language With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Discover “Rock Your Speech”

You can’t fault peo­ple for turn­ing away from cur­rent events these days, but there are many pock­ets of light, even if they rarely make head­lines or get curat­ed by gloom and doom algo­rithms. Some opti­mism has come to us by way of musi­cians like David Byrne, whose good-news aggre­ga­tor “Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful” show­cas­es pos­i­tive devel­op­ments around the world. Indie rock drum­mer Thor Har­ris has encour­aged fans with tips on how to stay healthy in try­ing times, and he has announced a run for gov­er­nor of Texas. And last fall, Cheap Trick’s bassist Tom Peters­son start­ed a project called Rock Your Speech, which “lever­ages the pow­er of music to build lan­guage skills in chil­dren who are work­ing to over­come speech delay asso­ci­at­ed with autism.”

As Peters­son and his wife Ali­son explain above, they were inspired by their expe­ri­ence with their son, Liam, who, “until the age of five,” reports David Chiu at Huff­in­g­ton Post, “had dif­fi­cul­ty com­mu­ni­cat­ing,” They dis­cov­ered that music could help when Liam began singing along to one of her favorite Elton John songs. Peters­son want­ed “to help oth­er par­ents,” he told Huff­Po, “and to let peo­ple know they’re not alone.” An L.A. ben­e­fit con­cert har­nessed the col­lec­tive pow­er of celebri­ties and indie artists to jump­start the project, with bands like the Dandy Warhols and Red Kross and actors Ed Asner and Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton par­tic­i­pat­ing.

Rock Your Speech is not the only such ini­tia­tive, but it is prob­a­bly the most high-pro­file, and could bring atten­tion to sim­i­lar efforts like Audi­to­ry-Motor Map­ping Train­ing, devel­oped by Dr. Got­tfried Schlaug of the Music and Neu­roimag­ing Lab­o­ra­to­ry. At the Autism Speaks blog, Schlaug writes, “as many as three in ten chil­dren with autism are non­ver­bal. Yet many chil­dren with autism have supe­ri­or audi­to­ry skills and a par­tic­u­lar attrac­tion to music.” Like Rock Your Speech, his approach uses “forms of music-mak­ing that encour­age vocal­iza­tion as a path­way to devel­op­ing lan­guage.” Musi­cian and psy­chol­o­gist Adam Reece has also writ­ten about his research show­ing the pos­i­tive role music ther­a­py can play in lan­guage acqui­si­tion for kids on the spec­trum.

Petersson’s project puts a rock star face on music ther­a­py and comes “from the point of view of the par­ent,” he says. Rock Your Speech not only rais­es autism aware­ness but also offers orig­i­nal music and videos designed to stim­u­late and inspire kids. Hear “Blue” from the Rock Your Speech, Vol­ume 1 album above, one of sev­er­al songs Peters­son wrote that “employs actu­al rock music,” Chiu writes, “not nec­es­sar­i­ly the gen­tle, kid­die-type of sounds that are gen­er­al­ly preva­lent in children’s music.” Videos on the Rock Your Speech site for “Blue” and oth­er songs “not only show the words but also demon­strate to kids how those words are formed and mouthed.”

The project’s Vimeo chan­nel shows the Peters­son fam­i­ly involved in Liam’s speech devel­op­ment through music, includ­ing his old­er sis­ter Lilah coach­ing her broth­er with a song called “Wash Your Hands.” (See Lilah’s video above for her song “All the Same,” writ­ten for Liam.) Liam, now ten, has come a long way. “He’s in school,” says Peters­son, “He loves music… He’s def­i­nite­ly on the autism spec­trum, but he speaks, he’s social. He’s the sweet­est lit­tle guy.” His musi­cal fam­i­ly has a lot to do with that, but Rock Your Speech offers even non-musi­cian par­ents a wealth of catchy tools to help kids strug­gling with speech to con­nect with lan­guage through rock ‘n’ roll. For many fam­i­lies, that could be very good news indeed.

via Huff­Po

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

Teach­ing child vis­i­tors how to write their names using an unfa­mil­iar or antique alpha­bet is a favorite activ­i­ty of muse­um edu­ca­tors, but Dr. Irv­ing Finkel, a cuneiform expert who spe­cial­izes in ancient Mesopotami­an med­i­cine and mag­ic, has grander designs.

His employ­er, the British Muse­um, has over 130,000 tablets span­ning Mesopotamia’s Ear­ly Dynas­tic peri­od to the Neo-Baby­lon­ian Empire “just wait­ing for young schol­ars to come devote them­selves to (the) monk­ish work” of deci­pher­ing them.

Writ­ing one’s name might well prove to be a gate­way, and Dr. Finkel has a vest­ed inter­est in lin­ing up some new recruits.

The museum’s Depart­ment of the Mid­dle East has an open access pol­i­cy, with a study room where researchers can get up close and per­son­al with a vast col­lec­tion of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and sur­round­ing regions.

But let’s not put the ox before the cart.

As the extreme­ly per­son­able Dr. Finkel shows Matt Gray and Tom Scott of Matt and Tom’s Park Bench, above, cuneiform con­sists of three components—upright, hor­i­zon­tal and diagonal—made by press­ing the edge of a reed sty­lus, or pop­si­cle stick if you pre­fer, into a clay tablet.

The mechan­i­cal process seems fair­ly easy to get the hang of, but mas­ter­ing the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world will take you around six years of ded­i­cat­ed study. Like Japan’s kan­ji alpha­bet, the old­est writ­ing sys­tem in the world is syl­lab­ic. Prop­er­ly writ­ten out, these syl­la­bles join up into a flow­ing cal­lig­ra­phy that your aver­age, edu­cat­ed Baby­lon­ian would be able to read at a glance.

Even if you have no plans to rus­tle up a pop­si­cle stick and some Play-Doh, it’s worth stick­ing with the video to the end to hear Dr. Finkel tell how a chance encounter with some nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring cuneiform inspired him to write a hor­ror nov­el, which is now avail­able for pur­chase, fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign.

Begin your cuneiform stud­ies with Irv­ing Finkel’s Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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