Building Relationships

 Back in October I posted a paper on this site exploring the relation between the medicalization of disability (as seen in Eli Claire's Exile & Pride) and the pathologization of transsexuality (as seen in Rachel Ann Heath’s The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset.

(read the full paper here: /exchange/node/11075 )

In The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset a lot of Heath's discussion of the medicalization of disability revolved around the standards of care (SOC), standards written by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to guide doctors with transsexual patients. The Praeger Handbook was published in 2006 and critiqued the 6th edition of the SOC, published in 2001. It was this critique that I incorporated into my own work.

But right around the same time that I posted my thoughts, something happened that I didn’t know about until later. A new and revised SOC was published.

           Recently, our class has been confronted with many theorists who urge us to recognize that we exist in relation to one another and that our concerns are closely tied to others. Farmer reminded us that we live in an “increasingly interconnected world” (Farmer, 158). Barad urged us to “experience life like electrons” and be aware of the ways our lives and concerns are entangled with those we share the world with (Barad). Finally, Butler suggested that it is time to “expand what we mean when we say ‘we’” and to foster alliances across groups that have been subjected to various levels of “precarity” (Butler, Flexner Lecture 2). I decided to investigate the potential for alliances to be formed between the food justice movement and broader environmental health movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. The research led me to Planting Justice, an Oakland, CA based organization that seeks to increase access to organic produce by installing organic gardens in community spaces and private homes. By using the work of Growing Justice as a model, this web-event will seek to suggest ways that community gardens and the organizations that support them can mobilize political action on local environmental health issues.

Communal Clarity

Making Sense of Media

About Communal Clarity:

     We are bombarded with hundreds of media images each day. This overload of information is something universally experienced in industrialized countries, and it can be paralyzing. How many of us are taught to evaluate these messages? And once we make our evaluations, what then?

     According to the Center for Media Literacy, media literacy is “the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture” (read more at http://www.medialit.org/about-cml). Different organizations are working hard to promote media literacy education in schools, and the mission to teach as many individuals as possible these tools of analysis is a vital one.

     But this website is founded on the premise that media literacy is not an individual matter. Individuals can and should learn to analyze media messages for themselves, but this is not an end in itself. Because media messages are received in a different way by everyone, they can't be fully understood alone. While media literacy may be a skill set, media analysis is always a conversation.

     I want to create an online space for these conversations, and Communal Clarity is the result.

Riley Diffenderfer

Empowering Learners

 The author responds to an earlier paper in this handbook, focused on transcending cross-cultural barriers in mentorship and teaching.

 Apocalipsis Rosario, ENGL 257: Gender & Technology, WebPaper 1, February 11, 2011

 David Harris

This paper takes on the idea of boundaries in education, and why they should be viewed as fences rather than walls.