Anne Dalke's blog

I’ve been waving Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women @ y’all for a couple of weeks now, and thought I’d take the time to write out a little of what I find so compelling about the book. It is really making me feel dissatisfied with the sort of writing we are getting, and making me be more thoughtful about ways in which we might help folks dig deeper, be more truthful.

If you don’t know the story of Medea, read about it here—it’s all about betrayal, abandonment, anger, “too much love.”

“Jones finds theatrical ways to interrogate the personal, surrounding the contemporary with the mythical, providing more texts, and thus context, for these women, so that each individual’s story is not isolated but always seen in relation to others…autobiography alone neither guarantees new insights nor changes behavior. As Joan Scott has argued, experience is not transparent but is ‘at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted’ (p. 21).

While some of us were hanging out with Michael last Friday (waiting for the rest of us to show up), he mentioned another article, written by a professor of public policy @ Rutgers Camden, which he thought we might find of interest. He just sent me the link: Poverty Porn in Rolling Stone.

this guy (robert fairbanks) is teaching in bmc's soc dept now!
--maybe we should ask him to come and talk w/ us???
sounds like he has some interesting ideas re: the "recovery model":
http://www.ssa.uchicago.edu/end-mass-incarceration

The Greater Philadelhia Women's Studies Consortium is bring Ruth Wilson Gilmore to the area in the fall.
I will be sure to get her to come to Bryn Mawr!

kelsey--this one's for you! check out the 18 owl species with irresistable faces-->
maybe they are *not* monsters after all....? maybe we should reconsider

from Arts Without Borders: Where Creativity and Life are Inseparable

Ten days ago, Jody mentioned that a silent discussion in her ed class called up some economic questions.

Sophia explained this, in conference w/ me last week, when she said that "information flows in a temporal direction," i.e. from econ @ 10, into ed @ noon, into english @ 2:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays...

but has trouble getting itself inserted again into econ @ 10 a.m. two (or five!) days later--in part because econ isn't set up to invite any sort of on-going, exploratory conversation of this sort....

I've been thinking that the labor of making these connections--of keeping any one of our classes from being
"siloed" and separated from the other, really belongs to you students, who are attending them all...and/but I'm also feeling as though I'd like to encourage more cross-disciplinary conversation in each class, asking (for instance) about the role that economics plays in the novel we're reading now in my class, Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation, which is (in part) about the food industry, and all the economic disincentives for farmers to go organic...

attached

on friday, sara and i shared an over-the-top experience in our current 360, which led us--curiously, curiously--
back to the fund-raising this group did in November. for the backstory, see Dutch wax fabrics, conceived ecologically....