some of my reactions to meiner's chapters here come also in the wake of my reflection on the silence exercise shirah and i created, as well as reading some of anne’s pieces that involve religion and spirituality.

meiner starts the chapter in a bit of a critique of the ways in which the adult participants in her classroom wrote their autobiographies in a practically formulaic way (“the redemption genre”).

i understand this critique on the level of the institution. she questions the limited tools that are given to these individuals to process their incarceration and traumas, which definitely has a major hand in shaping the internalization of the criminal, deviance, and incarceration narratives.

Latour offers a lot in this article. Honestly, I found itvery hard to comprehend, but this is some of what I've taken out of it.

Latour begins with the declaration that, just as Galileo’s discoveries changed the way that we think about the Earth and its action, the discoveries made today change the way we see the Earth and our actions. It is an “active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, quaking, and easily tickled envelope”, and we are forced to recognize the damages to which we subject it and the consequences of those damages.

When I read Eva’s Man, a very personal novel about a poor black woman who experiences violence as a victim, bystander, and perpetrator and serves time in a psychiatric prison for murdering a man, I could not avoid thinking about politics: the politics of incarceration, of identity (gender, race, and class), and of silence and trauma. Eva tells her story in flashbacks, paralleling the experiences of someone who lives with trauma. She tells her story, too, with many silences. She says more in her pauses and not saying than in her speaking. There is no mention of politicians or policies per say, so how does this fictional (and yet so very real) account become political? Eva chooses silence, even though others often demand that she speak.

From “Mammie” to “Mama”

Exploitation of Black Female Efforts Around the Civil Rights Movement

                            Fanny Lou Hamer at the Democratic Convention (1964)          Hattie McDaniel & Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind (1939)

I'm actually having a lot of trouble absorbing this very dense essay... This is what I've managed to extract:

1. the contructs of objectivity and subjectivity are nullified due to our current Earth-context; the process of scientific investigation must be reimagined (11).

"There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well, or at least an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into accoun the active subject of history" (2).

"A new problem arises: how to understand the active role of human agency not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document?" (2).

The activities of human is very visible and very important to the existence of earth, they have already caused the irreversible effects and it is impossible to build a friendly relationship with it. What we done to earth is reflected on ourselves.

We are connected with our surrounds in a large scale. There is no absolutely object things now.

Human does not realize the urgency of action although we should start ding something to stop climate change immediately.

Question: What’s Latour’s attitude towards climate change and the reaction of human? He mentioned we cannot see the danger currently, but he also questioned the possibility of actions.

As Joel was discussing our latest essays in our political philosophy class, the ideas of “realism” versus “idealism” were brought up in regards to framing conversations. In political discourse, realistic is coded to mean the correct, or best, or reasonable course of action, with unrealistic or idealistic coded in the opposite way. It’s loaded and empty at the same time, as anyone can hand-wave away an idea with the premise that it’s “not realistic”. The most likely or most practical solution may not be the best one, and in fact usually isn’t in terms of radical change.

1. We have passed the point of no return; whereas we could have strived for a more mutal relationship with the earth in previous ages, now we have to focus on mitigating the damage we've caused.

2. The concept of subjectivity is inherintly flawed, as we're all (humans, ecosystems, the Earth) interconnected past the point where any one thing can be a subject separate from the rest. 

3. We all have to find a way to come together to stop climate change, although economics is as large a block in progress for climate scientists as the Catholic Church was for Galileo.

Question: If all this is true, then how would the author propose we chould come together? Is it even possible? If not, what do we do?

Latour offers lots of ideas about a lot of things.

The dichotomy of matter and materiality, in which time flows as a causality from past to present, and then the other flowing from future to present. The flow of materially is baffling to be—it’s backwards—going from future to present. What I also don’t understand is why Latour describes materiality as having a break – why can’t it encompass a past? He describes time as a present moment, though matter is understood differently from the past versus the future. I don’t understand what we gain from this dichotomy, in having these two divided temporal modes, by way of matter. Why do we have to choose?