This is part of the library of Albert Shanker (1928-77), which lines the walls of the conference room of the Albert Shanker Institute, which is inside the American Federation of Teachers’ Building in Washington. I was there earlier today. It seems fitting that such a library should rest in the heart of the AFT, exemplifying the long, rich, and living tradition of intellectual life within the labor movement (and—importantly—outside of universities).
The collection itself reflects a mid-20th century canon. There are books on Freud and idealist philosophers like Collingwood and Croce, as well as pragmatists like John Dewey, who was a founder of the AFT. There are many books about schooling and education, from a variety of perspectives. Several thousand volumes line the shelves.
Shanker was a highly controversial figure. In “Sleeper” (1977), Woody Allen’s character awakens 200 years after being cryogenically frozen and asks what happened to civilization. He’s told that a man called Al Shanker got hold of nuclear weapons. On issues of unionism, race, school choice, and foreign policy, Shanker made many enemies as well as friends, and probably deserved some of both. I don’t really know the whole story well enough to praise or bury him. I take the library more as a monument to the intellectual life of our unions, which is something to prize when they are under such threat.
Cf. Harry Boyte’s recent blog post on agrarian intellectuals during the New Deal and the powerful popular education movement they led.
This three-page article, Kettering’s Evolving Understanding- and my Own: Reflections on Three Decades of Involvement with Democracy and the Foundation that Studies What It Takes to Make It Work as It Should, by Ray Minor, was published Fall 2015 in Kettering Foundation‘s annual newsletter,“Connections 2015 – Our History: Journeys in KF Research”. Minor shares his experience working with Kettering for the last thirty years and how KF’s research has helped to strengthen the democratic process.
He tells of the network of individuals who started the Birmingham National Issues Forums, which would later become the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI). Then goes on to tell of the effort to develop civic capacity in Alabama, which would lead to a series of forums that would shape the David Mathews Center for Civic Life. Below is an excerpt from the article. Connections 2015 is available for free PDF download on Kettering’s site here.
From the article…
I learned over time that Kettering studies democracy from a citizen-centered perspective—the sense that ordinary citizens desire to control their daily lives and that this desire defines what the foundation means by “democracy.” The foundation’s primary research question—what does it take to make democracy work as it should?—derives from this idea and the underlying assumption that democracy is working as it should when citizens “self-rule.”
Democratizing Alabama
In the early 1980s, when I first became involved in this work, a broad network of individuals in Birmingham, Alabama, was convened by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Center for Urban Affairs and supported by the UAB Office of Student Affairs. This group was on the ground floor of what later became the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI). The core group of individuals leading this effort included Odessa Woolfolk, Rebecca Falkenberry, Wanda Madison Minor, Peggy Sparks, and myself. Wanda Minor organized this group after several conversations with David Mathews in 1982. This group operated under the name Birmingham National Issues Forums (BNIF) and annually convened a series of forums on national issues with hundreds of citizens and many organizations representing a cross-section of the community.
…
A Center Grows in Alabama
Still intrigued by the work of the Kettering Foundation, I worked with Bob McKenzie and Cathy Randall to found the Alabama Center for Civic Life, a 501(c) (3), nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, which was incorporated and received tax-exempt status in 2005. The center’s purpose is to conduct research and training on citizenship, democracy, governance, and democratic practices. Since Mathews was the inspiration for establishing the center, in 2008, it was renamed the David Mathews Center for Civic Life. The center was established on the premise that democracy works best when enlightened citizens engage in the affairs of their towns, cities, states, and nations. A small group of Alabamians decided to fill a void in the public sector by establishing an organization that would equip citizens with the skills and knowledge necessary for engaging in public life.
…
Looking back, I have come to realize that Kettering’s work is important for several reasons pertaining to strengthening democracy. Perhaps paramount among the others, Kettering’s focus on the six democratic practices provides a lens through which citizens from all parts of the world can come to see themselves as key actors on public problems and see connections between their work as citizens and the work of people from widely differing circumstances. This recognition of the work of citizens by citizens themselves may well be Kettering’s most important contribution to democratic life.
About Kettering Foundation and Connections
The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is, what does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.
Each issue of this annual newsletter focuses on a particular area of Kettering’s research. The 2015 issue, edited by Kettering program officer Melinda Gilmore and director of communications David Holwerk, focuses on our yearlong review of Kettering’s research over time.
Follow on Twitter: @KetteringFdn.
Resource Link: www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/periodical-article/Minor_2015.pdf
(Washington, DC) On a week when I got an article rejected almost instantly and then participated in an editorial committee for a different journal that celebrated our rising rejection rate, I just have to plug the Journal of Universal Rejection. Arguably the best journal in the entire universe, it rejects all submissions as not up to snuff.
From the instructions for authors:
The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.
After submitting your work, the decision process varies. Often the Editor-in-Chief will reject your work out-of-hand, without even reading it! However, he might read it. Probably he’ll skim. At other times your manuscript may be sent to anonymous referees. Unless they are the Editor-in-Chief’s wife or graduate school buddies, it is unlikely that the referees will even understand what is going on. Rejection will follow as swiftly as a bird dropping from a great height after being struck by a stone. At other times, rejection may languish like your email buried in the Editor-in-Chief’s inbox. But it will come, swift or slow, as surely as death.
There is a topic which has caused generations of debate. Lines have been drawn. Enemies have been made.
I refer, of course, to the Oxford comma. Should it, or should it not, be a thing?
For those who don’t bask in the depths of English grammar debates, let me explain. The Oxford English Dictionary, a worthy source of knowledge on this subject, defines the Oxford comma as:
a comma immediately preceding the conjunction in a list of items.
“I bought apples, pears, and grapes” employs the Oxford comma while “I bought apples, pears and grapes” does not.
You can see why there are such heated debates about this.
The Oxford comma , so named due to “the preferred use of such a comma to avoid ambiguity in the house style of Oxford University Press,” is also known by the more prosaic name of the “serial comma.”
I have no evidence to verify this, but I believe that what one calls the comma gives insight into a person’s position on the matter. Those who are pro-comma prefer the more erudite “Oxford comma” while those who are anti-comma prefer the uninspiring “serial comma.”
Why do you need another comma? They ask. You already have so many, you don’t need a serial comma as well!
These people are wrong.
As I may have given away from my own references to the “Oxford comma,” I am firmly in the pro-Oxford comma camp.
It is clear that a comma is better there.
Not only because there’s no end to the silly and clever memes you can create mocking the absence of an Oxford comma, but because – more proudly – a sentence just feels more complete, more balanced, and more aesthetic with the comma there. It just feels right.
But, of course, this is what makes language so wonderful. Language is alive, and that life can be seen in all the little debates and inconsistencies of our grammar.
It’s like cheering for your favorite sports team: we can fight about it, mock each other, and talk all sorts of trash, but at the end of the day we can still be friends.
…Wait, we can still be friends, right?
Can food be used as a way to bring strangers together, if only for a meal or two, and create the beginnings of a new type of community? Penny Travlou, a cultural geographer and ethnographer at the University of Edinburgh, decided to find out. In an interview posted on “Social Innovation Europe,” an EU website, she talks about her experience in co-organizing “pop-up dinners” that bring together immigrants with local Greeks in Athens. The idea is to use meal preparation and eating together as a way to break down cultural barriers and support migrant integration in Greece.
Travlou’s specialty as a researcher is the collaborative practices of digital artists and practitioners. But recently she has been fascinated with “nomadic co-living communities, hackers and refugees.” Syrian refugees of course face some very different challenges than hackers, makers and other nomads of digital culture. Yet they both are living a kind of “nomadic transient citizenship” that Travlou believes is changing Europe. One might say that ad hoc cooperation based on mutual need, empathy and shared circumstances is a big aspect of modern life.
In developing the idea of pop up dinners for refugees and local Greeks, Travlou had been inspired by Jeff Andreoni of the unMonastery, who had been organizing dinners in Athens for locals and immigrants. Working with a professional cook, an Eritrean refugee named Senait, Andreoni and Travlou held a dinner for 100 people at a house in Athens. As Travlou explained:
That made us think that such small-scale events can be a great way to give job opportunities to newcomers -- i.e., immigrants and refugees -- and get them feel part of the Greek society and culture. From that event onwards, we got collaborated with and participated in other immigrant collective pop-up events. In the summer, we set up the African Collective Kitchen “OneLoveKitchen” with a group of cooks from Senegal, The Gambia, Sudan, Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. We collaborated with the African United Women Organisation and Nosotros: the free social centre.
All our events have been self-organised without any formal funding. We have organised small pop-up dinners in houses and roof terraces, have served food in a solidarity economy festival and have catered for two conferences. Since September when a great influx of Syrian refugees has been arriving in Athens, some of us have also been involved in daily collective kitchens preparing food for a housing squat for refugees and other similar initiatives.
Travlou and Andreoni are now setting up a new project, Options Foodlab, which is a professional kitchen and co-working space for food training. Travlou said that food is a great way to bring people together:
What I always say when people ask me why I got involved in such a project is to think of where the words ‘company’ and ‘companion’ come from. They both derive from the Latin word ‘companio’ which means one who eats bread [pane] with you. Thus, food making and sharing is a social act and a means of exhibiting respect for an existing or future relationship of reciprocity. Food making is about hospitality and connectivity. There is not a better way to bring people together: you don’t need linguistic cues to connect with others. With this perspective, we can think food as an object of exchange, a gift that can be shared and exchanged.
An inspiring project! You can read the full interview with Travlou here.