Garage Band Rock

When I was young, I used to make home recordings of pop songs by layering track after track on a karaoke machine. By the time I got the drums, bass, rhythm guitar, lead and piano, and vocals there was eerie bleed through on the cheap Memorex tapes I was using. It would take me an entire day to get one song down.

I recorded Radiohead’s Weird Fishes yesterday in a similar way, layering track after track, but instead of using my karaoke machine, I used my iphone’s voice memo app and my internal laptop mic with garage band. I recorded the drum track on the voice memo app on my iphone and playing it back through an amp while recording the guitar with the internal mic on my laptop in garage band. Then I did a second track of vocals in garage band with the “live rock” preset. I got some fun quirky crackly worbly artifacts — for instance, I didn’t have any trem on the guitar, but there it was, even before compressing the file.

Part of the game I constructed for myself this time was to do it in one take without edits and let accidents add to the wacky artifacts. Instead of taking an entire day, it took about 30 minutes. Ain’t digital technology grand?

Carey’s home recording of Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

[Thanks to Wendy Hsu for hosting the file!]

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You’re Young — You Should Know Better!

I teach a seminar called Media, Culture and Society where we focus on issues of interactive digital media, or “new media.” In a discussion about Dhiraj Murthy’s article on new media and ethnographic research methods, my students raised concerns about how they, as young people, are expected to know how to use digital media tools to produce information in the workplace, but that they rarely receive any formal training. They described internships where they were expected to draft multimedia presentations in office settings where no one else knew how. At the same time, they recounted being admonished for stating their technical skills on their resumes because “everyone your age knows how to blog.”

According to my students not everyone knows these things. In other courses I’ve found that most students are familiar with how to absorb on-line entertainment (through facebook and youtube for example), but are nervous about moving from their role as consumers to producers of content. They are also unsure how to gather knowledge from on-line sources, because they are consistently told such sources are unacceptable in classroom assignments. For those students who do have expertise in final cut, photoshop, blogging, or even powerpoint and excel, they have learned these tools through trial and error in their leisure time or independently and haphazardly on the job.

Sociologist and communication studies scholar Eszter Hargittai has found that access to participation in the creation of new media content is unevenly distributed. It boils down to who feels comfortable messing around with technology and who does not. Women students and students whose parents have lower levels of education are less likely to develop these skills on their own.

This “participation divide” suggests that faculty need more information and more training about how to empower students to become media producers. But where do we begin? At UVa, SHANTI has developed a “knowledge base” though an open wiki that offers background information on emerging teaching and learning tools such as Zotero, Kaltura, and VisualEyes. I’m curious if readers know of other sources that are being developed to help faculty navigate emerging tools for teaching and learning. If you know of any, please offer suggestions in the comments.

Problems and Possibilites for Student Activism

Today in my Social Movements class Kevin Simowtiz of Virginia Organizing shared his experiences as a student organizer of the Living Wage Campaign. He also facilitated a useful discussion with the class on the obstacles and resources for student led movements. Here are the highlights of their conversation:

What are the obstacles to student* involvement in social activism or service?

Disconnection

• Lack of an emotional connection to an issue – people may know facts but lack empathy
• Social differences between students and less privileged people makes it hard to relate social problems to students everyday lives
• Social and physical distance between students and the outside world makes it hard to escape the “bubble” and know what is happening
• Service is not always regarded by universities as central to learning or student life

Time Bind

• Students have increased demands on time – studying, working, commuting – service can be an added burden
• Being a student means being transient. Four years is a short time to be engaged in a community.
• In universities without service requirements or a strong center for service, it takes time and energy to find opportunities for engagement

Disempowerment

• While students are sometimes treated like consumers, they are not like regular consumers because they are also competing for scarce resources (admission, grades, credentials)
• Competition can limit involvement in activities that are not seen to produce benefits in the job marketplace
• Uncertainty about whether actions will have any real effects or cause real change
• Fundraising can feel more tangible than direct service or protest
• Bystander effects – someone else can take care of the problem

What are the particular opportunities for students to get involved in social activism or service?

• Students have more time and flexibility than full time workers to engage and to do so in ways that are thoughtful and reflective
• Students are often held at the bottom rungs of the job market in service occupations. In these jobs, they may have opportunities for contact with struggling older adults
• Students make up a large and active constituency
• Students often still have idealism and are more passionate about change

* We implicitly defined “student” as young adults enrolled full time living on or near campus

Community Service for Faculty

This week at Prof Hacker, Billie Hara suggests that service learning is not just for students. Service can also enrich the life of faculty. Specifically, service can help faculty break out of the ivory tower, teach us new things about “industry, community, populations, or activism,” and help us create work-life balance. In addition, I would suggest that service, when conducted as community based research (CBR), can enrich scholarship by linking community engagement with teaching and research.

CBR extends the concept of service learning by situating service within faculty research interests and the research needs of community organizations. Ideally, it is a collaboration between faculty, students, and the staff of community organizations or their clients. For example, while volunteering at a local soup kitchen, students might also survey the needs of the community or research funding models from similar programs elsewhere. The projects would grow out of a prior dialogue between the faculty, who may for instance be doing research on homelessness, and the organization, who may for instance want to expand their services and secure funding to do so.

Hara’s assessment of the benefits of community service for faculty bears out in my own experience as a graduate instructor. I started out volunteering at the Bridge PAI as an events coordinator, helping to create a local scene for experimental sound artists. This activity gave me a break from “work.” It also taught me how non-profits run and how the sociological concept of “social capital” is put into practice.

The relationships and interests I discovered through volunteering became a foundation for a CBR course I designed on Community Organizing and the Arts. In guiding my students’ independent research, I became more deeply engaged in the volunteer work I was already doing. The students’ projects generated a rapid and rich survey of the organization from issues of funding, to outreach, to the fulfillment of its mission. Their work also created a data set that the organization can use as it develops its outreach programs and applies for funding. Through the CBR course, my role as a volunteer has changed. I am becoming more involved as a sociologist who can work with the organization to measure its impact on the community. This experience also contributes to my scholarship on how independent artists generate local resources to support their craft.

My experience has been inductive – where volunteering as a citizen fed into a community based research project. But it can also work the other way around, where a research interest can spur faculty service and student involvement.

We can learn a lot from our local communities. We can also work to make our research applicable for those in our immediate surroundings. Community based research can integrate work and life while also showing hiring and tenure committees the value of community service to our teaching and scholarship.

Why Are there No Great Women (Rock) Artists?

This is the question asked by Andrew Cedermark, songwriter and recording artist/rock journalist, in the current issue of C-Ville Weekly. The reasons are social, cultural, and historical – stretching back to constraints on women’s ability to be “alone” in public spaces, to ongoing girlhood socialization as quiet and non-aggressive.

The article covers the experiences of eight local artists in genres from indie to noise to metal. I contributed as one of the artists who also happens to write about issues of gender and music culture. Andrew was kind enough (and patient enough) to incorporate my academic research on music instrument stores into the piece:

There is also the question of buying gear. Haughty gearheads, piles of tiny, useless stuff, bowling shirts that faintly smell of weed—it’s no secret that music stores can be uncomfortable places to visit. Double the discomfort for many women. Carey Sargent plays drums in the local bands Dzian! and the Pinko Communoids, and is a sociologist who has published on the topic of local music stores. “For others with different experiences,” Sargent wrote in a 2006 paper, “such as playing privately, knowing more about hip-hop than rock, or having classical training on the guitar rather than immersion in the rock music practice, the experience can be a struggle to comprehend the language and interactions of the environment. Finding themselves in this position, these musicians may defer to others to perform, speak and choose in their place.”

Landragin’s experience as a young player bears testament to Sargent’s research. Landragin says that she “never, hardly ever” sees women in local music stores. As a classical guitar player, she slipped inconspicuously into music stores to buy nylon strings.

Music store employees “started getting interested and asking about my playing” when she started buying steel strings for her electric guitar. “I never started playing guitars in music stores,” Landragin adds, “until I got the balls to realize that it didn’t matter.”

Overall, the women interviewed do not cite direct exclusion as the source of the problem, so much as a wider rock culture that sees femininity as a detriment to authenticity. This culture is in the music instrument store, but it is also in performance expectations, the lack of female role models and instrument teachers, objectifying lyrics, and rehearsal room (locker room) banter.

The burden has always been on women to adapt to the culture of rock in order to prove themselves. Its something we have previously only discussed with each other and occasionally, carefully, with the men we perform with. This article, and the men and women involved in its production, opens up what will hopefully be an ongoing conversation, rather than a lament or blind celebration of equality.

Academic Community Engagement @ the University of Virginia

The University of Virginia has developed a growing community of scholars involved in academic community engagement, which is elsewhere sometimes known as community based research or service learning. At an end of the semester reflective luncheon this afternoon, over twenty faculty gathered to discuss their previous experiences and their plans for the upcoming year. The diversity of fields and courses was exciting, ranging from student-led theater workshops in juvenile corrections facilities, to education students’ mentoring of middle school girls, to a photo documentary of the diabetes epidemic in southwestern Virginia.

This group shared some important insights:

• Partner with an organization in which you already have a good working relationship with a key staff member
• Communicate your expectations with the partner organization early and often
• Anticipate that students will need guidance on time management, scheduling, and interpersonal communication as well as academic content
• Build in structure for students through clear assignments and expectations – its better to have too much than too little, you can always back off
• At the same time, be flexible and encourage your students to do the same – they may have to switch the direction of their projects or reschedule appointments when working with a community partner
• Regular journal assignments are a key tool for students to learn and for instructors to assess student learning in the form of students’ personal transformation

There were some interesting things to note about this group of educators. We were primarily working in either applied fields (e.g. medicine, social work, education, public health, engineering, urban planning) or were socially-engaged humanists (e.g. history, theater, literature). Additionally, one participant noted that tenured and tenure track faculty are a minority in ACE and service learning. The majority are instead general faculty, adjunct instructors, or graduate instructors. I’d be interested to see more data on this issue from the University of Virginia as well as from other research universities. The engagement of non-tenured faculty demonstrates their vibrancy and creativity as well as their commitment to students. The task at hand is to further engage tenure-track and tenured faculty in ACE.

I’m excited to see how Megan Raymond, Director of Academic Community Engagement, Dorothe Bach, Assistant Director of the Teaching Resource Center, and the ACE faculty grant recipients develop these exciting connections between teaching, research, and service.

Community Based Research Reflection

A colleague of mine commented today on facebook that it is better to give than receive, and this is particularly true during exams. But I often find myself nervous to see how my students perform. Did my intentions for their learning get realized? This semester I taught a new course on Community Arts that had a community based research component. It was my first time incorporating any activity beyond the university walls, and so I was especially eager to assess my students’ final work.

Our partner organizations were The Bridge PAI in Charlottesville, an experimental space devoted to building social capital through the creative process, and Gallery 5 in Richmond, an experimental grassroots gallery. I built on a wave of Academic Community Engagement that is building at the University of Virginia. With the aid of Deandra Little at the Teaching Resource Center and Emily Kane, my undergraduate mentor and professor of Sociology at Bates College, I took the practice of service-learning a bit further to include student driven research that was conducted in partnership with the two organizations.

I drew upon my orientation to music improvisation – complete openness to expression made possible — paradoxically — by my obsession with building implicit structure. Like any good improv, it could have been a disaster. As Helen describes:

At the beginning of the semester, I was very excited about the prospect of partnering with a real arts organization in Charlottesville. I remember sitting there in a circle with Greg [the director of the Bridge] and thinking about all the ways in which The Bridge might be helped. A half-formed question was tickling the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite articulate it. It was a week or two later, when we were forming our project groups, when I realized what my question would have been: “What are your most pressing needs?”

The constant, yet controlled, threat of collapse drove the students’ creativity, pressing them to take responsibility. Students set up initial discussions with the staff of the organizations, working directly with them to identify how they could make a meaningful contribution – as independent researchers – to the needs of their wider community. Through collaboration, they decided what to research, how to research it, and in what format to present it. As Chris describes:

I remember the moment that I realized this was in our first meeting with Greg, when we initially pitched our idea. I remember how excited he was to see the potential of our project, and I was able to see quite literally how the project would structurally affect The Bridge for the better.

What set the meeting and the entire project apart from past service projects that I’ve been a part of was that we met at as a group with Greg, and pitched our ideas, but more importantly, we listened to his. It was less of one person telling another what they wanted done, and more of a dialogue. This made me feel like it was a true partnership, and not simply service.

The theme of engagement resonated throughout the final reflections my students posted to their public blogs for the course. In conjunction with traditional seminar style reading and discussion, it was this community component that made the deepest impression on students. As Tatiana describes:

I suspected when I began this course, although I didn’t know for sure, that I was going to encounter material that would start me thinking in ways I hadn’t before. My suspicions proved correct: I’ve been fundamentally changed by what I’ve read and experienced in this course. More often than not, these changes happened outside the classroom, as I worked with my group and partner organization or engaged with CAN and other reading material.

Community collaboration (and field trips to neighborhoods and galleries) got students hooked. Once hooked, I guided them through their own execution of an original and creative project in which they applied methods of analysis they had learned in previous social sciences and humanities courses. To my surprise, students felt empowered by the opportunity to reuse methods they had learned in previous courses because they could see the immediate relevance of surveys, textual analysis, and interviews.

But perhaps more importantly students learned things I never expected when they applied academic methods to community collaboration. Here are some happy accidents of community based research “improv”:

And to become truly passionate about the issue my group and I were addressing made me feel that dipping my toes into the waters of the real work energized me to be proactive about community and urban space.

I feel like SOC 4559 opened up an entirely different world to me that I didn’t know existed, in Charlottesville or otherwise. I come from a scientifically minded family, and at the beginning of the semester, I’d never heard of community arts, been to a poetry reading or studied local art movements (we’re more likely to go to the National Air & Space Museum than the National Gallery). All that has definitely changed for me this semester – I feel like I have a grasp of the community arts scene in Charlottesville, I know how local galleries interact with the community around them, and I’ve definitely got the hang of poetry readings now (and can’t wait for the next one!).

I always viewed the Arts as this lofty often high brow endeavor that was usually reserved for an elite sect, with little opportunity for an attainment by all social classes…those within the art world are coming to understand the power of their field to elevate all people regardless of their socioeconomic status, prior exposure to the Arts, or even their previous interests in artistic endeavors.

I’ve learned that [community arts] is perhaps the best kind of activism for today’s society for it plays upon the rising creative class that holds power in our world.

Finally, students learned to appreciate each others’ talents and contributions as meaningful to the world beyond the classroom. As one student wrote:

I was thoroughly impressed by the work done by my classmates and it was amazing to see how so many different great ideas and suggestions came about through their CBR work. I am excited to see how the two galleries will receive the finished products of our research, and I sincerely hope that the research may be of some benefit to them in their current and future endeavors.

As a start, my students’ work has inspired me to move from my role in music programming at the Bridge to collaborate with them on research and analysis of their community outreach programs.

The best part of giving is the intangible returns of appreciation and growth and this is particularly true during exam period. My students, in return, affirmed for me how much students can do when they have the tools and the freedom. They have also made a damn good case for community based research as effective learning.

Brain Steroids in the Classroom

Today in my Social Problems class I let students choose a topic for me to discuss. They chose drug abuse. Since drug abuse is not really an area I study, I was at a loss for a good hook that could get me interested in the topic. I found that hook when I caught the 60 minutes episode that focuses on the prevalent abuse of Adderall on college campuses. Adderall, a drug that went to market in 1996 for ADD, has been labeled “brain steroids” because, for those without the diagnosis it can increase focus and decrease fatigue. One professor’s study of students at the University of Kentucky estimated that 50% of juniors and seniors have tried the drug without a prescription, making it the most popular drug on campus outside of alcohol.

Its no news that college students use and abuse drugs. But what is striking about this use is that it’s mostly for work, rather than for recreation. Students use it to focus on their studying – flying high as kites for days on end though final exams. Psychological addiction sets in as their scores sore and they fail to believe that they can achieve without the drug. They worry that without it, they are missing a competitive advantage.

I am concerned about the physiological and psychological effects of Adderall abuse because I saw first hand how the drug affected a close friend. It alienated him from others who were not operating at the same speed. Over time it wreaked havoc on his body, which became frail and dull. Once he kicked the habit, he was plunged into a deep depression. Its not worth all this to get a few points on an exam, so why has Adderall abuse become so pervasive?

Partly, ADD drugs have become more available. My students’ generation grew up with them. But I think there’s more to it than this. If I take a long view, imagining our society in this particular historical moment, I think Adderall abuse is a red flag for a deeper crisis in higher education and its relationship to work opportunities. More students are attending college – its has become nearly a necessity across industries. At the same time, the potential employment rewards have been diminishing (even before the economic crisis). Students (and the parents who push them) know there are fewer seats at the middle class table. The pressure is on to snag a chair, even if it means pumping yourself with drugs to out-sprint hordes of equally well-qualified contenders.

At the end of each lecture, I try to offer students some ideas about solutions or social actions that could address the problem. Today, I focused on what students and universities can do in terms of acknowledging the problem, changing the campus culture, and holding students accountable. It got me thinking about what faculty and graduate instructors can do to alleviate the pressure without compromising learning goals or handling students with kid gloves. Here are a couple of my ideas:

• Outline clear grading criteria prior to assigning work
• Offer several smaller assignments in addition to or instead of major exams or final papers/projects
• Stage major paper and project assignments over the course of the semester
• Give consistent feedback throughout the semester

I struggle to meet these ideals as I try to balance teaching and research. I’m also stumped on how to minimize the stress of midterms and finals in large lecture courses, where smaller, less standardized, assignments may not be feasible. I’d be interested to hear suggestions from others in the comments.

Roadblocks Force New Paths

Limitless opportunity creates incapacitating uncertainty.

The academic job market has bottomed out due to the Great Recession, but it has been faltering for years as universities, like other industries, turn toward part-time contract workers. Recent PhDs, primed for a lifetime of learning and knowledge production within the institution of academia, have diminishing opportunities to put those degrees to use in economically sustainable ways. Resisting giving up on the dream, we work in flexible, part-time, low paying teaching gigs with few (or no) benefits as we did throughout graduate school. This problem is old news, but there is still a great deal of denial among graduate students and faculty alike. To face reality means accepting that many of us are on a path toward a life sequestered by student loan debt, working below our skill levels and intellectual capacities, and failing to realize the identities we have crafted for ourselves as intellectuals.

I will always be a sociologist at heart. And I believe the sociological imagination can help us grad students and recent PhDs to understand and act on our situation. Our anxiety and depression, relationship conflicts, guilt, and self-doubt is not just a personal issue, it is a manifestation of a social problem that is rooted in the institutional structures of higher education. These structures are impersonal. No one person, from above or below, is going to stop them from operating as they do. These structures are not a problem in and of themselves. The problem comes because these structures, and our assumed paths to careers, are shifting beneath our feet. Recent PhDs and graduate students need to adapt new strategies for success and survival. This is difficult because we believe in the existing system, we trust our advisers who have achieved success there, and we know no other system.

What are these shifting structures? First, the funding structures of higher education are changing. Public money has waned as colleges and universities have grown. Academic institutions have been compelled to turn toward private and market-based strategies for survival. The primary strategy has been that of growth. The growth model has benefits – it has democratized access to higher education, which is no longer for the white, male, and rich. Growth has also created a wider consumer market whose tuition can offset diminished public resources. But the strategy of growth also has costs.

One cost has been to students themselves, as 60% of undergraduate students take out loans in their own name to fund their educations. Another has been the outsourcing and downsizing of faculty. About 45% of all faculty are part-time, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In English, it reports, fewer than 50% of graduating PhDs can expect to land tenure track jobs in their first year on the market. Temporary teachers are a permanent part of institutions. Meanwhile, administrative support is scaled back and tasks are heaped upon small bodies of teaching and research faculty.

Academic institutions appear to be one of the few industries weathering the present economic storm, even helping their communities to stay out of the recession. But if this industry rests on consumers who buy with debt and on temporary workers without institutional ties or support, it is not sustainable.

The second structure affecting higher education is that research and knowledge production are facing a rapid reevaluation because of interactive media technologies. The angry professor who yells at her student for citing Wikipedia is doing more than trying to teach academic research skills, she is rallying against the devaluation of her own knowledge, which she has worked for decades to build. Academic knowledge is slow knowledge. It builds its own data and experiments and carefully frames information by hand within existing sets of specialized knowledge. Academic knowledge takes years to compose and it’s comprehension requires sustained, trained attention. Slow knowledge is outpaced in the economy of attention by faster, popular, collaborative, fragmented approaches to information. We see evidence of this not only when students instantly check our lectures against a Wikipedia entry on the topic, but also in the decline of the academic publishing industry, which is still treated as the foundation of professional evaluation in academia.

Free knowledge is ideal for consumers and can further democratize access to learning. But like growth models, it is not sustainable. Academic knowledge and open information parallel the battle between blogs and newspapers. Interactive media organizes and arranges information, but it rarely generates it from scratch. This is because generating knowledge (or “content”) takes time and resources that most individuals do not have on their own.

In the 1980s, GI Joe used to tell me that “knowing is only half the battle.” Now that we graduate students know we are subject to economic, institutional and technological forces beyond our immediate control, we have two choices – act on this knowledge, or give up. Continuing to fight for that tenure track dream may work for some, but most of us will beat our heads on the wall until its a bloody pulp. That wall ain’t moving.

In my teaching, I try to push students beyond the binary of “thank god its not my fault, the world sucks” — or — “that structural problem doesn’t exist, I’ll keep working harder.” I try to inspire them to engage in practical action that navigates structural constraints. Constraints inhibit us, but they also provide a foundation for action if we know how to read them relative to our own situations. We need to consider what assets we have, who is with us, and how to put those assets and relationships to work for us.

Assets: Graduate students have high level skills in knowledge production and dissemination. If we haven’t yet succumbed to a nervous breakdown, we also have near pathological levels of commitment to the expansion of our own and others knowledge.

Networks: There are lots of graduate students (and PhDs unhappy with their jobs) who share a common experience and worldview. When wired together, as most of us are via social media, we compose a powerful block of diverse specialized knowledge. Among a few of my close friends in the humanities and social sciences I know a robot builder, a programmer mapping music communities, an ethnographer of on-line anti-human trafficking activism, and an analyst of downward economic mobility.

Conditions: Knowledge wants to be free. At the same time, knowledge, culture and information industries are some of the only things making money. In 2008, the GDP grew by just over 1% and information and communication industries accounted for 30% of that growth. We also see that those involved in knowledge culture and information industries are taking a different approach to capitalism, what Bill Gates refers to as Creative Capitalism. The idea is that market logic (which is likely not going away anytime soon) can be used toward social ends. We also see that knowledge is increasingly produced and disseminated outside of traditional firms or in smaller networked organizations lead by individual entrepreneurs.

What are our new paths? All I see is bramble in the bushes, but at the same time I feel a sense of excitement about what we could build together.