The assignment for today: two ways to think about generations:
• Webbing: Girls/choose several links:
GIRLS, ARTS & GAMES, ACTIVISM, FEMINIST RESEARCH
Sister's Choice: storytelling and songs for girls
Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum
Prince Edward Island: Virtual Green Gables
American Girl: Games, Dolls, Stories
The Children's Music Network
New Moon, the Magazine for Girls and their Dreams
Stone Soup Magazine
The Children's Encyclopedia of Women
Just 4 Girls: Junior Girl Scouts
Welcome to Club Girl Tech!
Girl Power! Campaign
Websites for Girls
The Wellesley Centers for Women (Research on Girls)
/www.mediathatmattersfest.org/6/a_girl_like_me/index.php?fs=action...girl like me family society gender women racial justice
7 min - May 4, 2007another way to think about generations:
• Goldbard, Ch. 6 & 76: Theory from Practice: elements of a theory of community cultural development
• comprehending internalization of the oppressor • live, active social experience • expansion of dialogue • self-determination • expand liberty • redress inequalities
7: The State of the Field
Beyond the US community cultural development often receives reliable public funding,
while in the US the trend to "privatization" has reduced the kind of public funding available in the 60s and 70s.
"From Generation to Generation" makes two points:
• the importance of transmitting knowledge from the Baby Boomer arts activists to today's younger artists and organizers
• the different funding environments created by political changes over the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s: neo-conservative government and privatization, the culture wars
For other ways to conceptualize Feminist Generations, see:
Feminist Generations: the persistence of the radical women's movement
Nancy Whittier, Temple University Press, 1995
• Entry into activism: Whittier's 1995 model with micro-cohorts:
Whittier's model challenges age-stratification or stage in life cycle as definitions of generations, rather initial politicization during the same era define generations, which are internally volatile and divergent in micro-cohorts. Two large generations: the Second Wave and the Third Wave.
Second Wave micro-cohorts:
=initiators (1969-1971) [years refer esp. to study in Columbus OH]
=founders (1972-1973)
=joiners (1974-1978)
=sustainers (1979-1984)
Third Wave micro-cohorts (don't have names just descriptions): (AKA post feminist);
understood by Whittier to redefine meanings of "feminism" by conflict with Second Wave building new collective identities (mid 1980s and later):
= micro-cohort 1: reluctant to use term "feminist" because of media associations and initial belief that feminism had completed its political tasks; rethinks these assumptions over next ten years and becomes outspoken and pro-feminist
= micro-cohort 2: establishes earlier continuity with Second Wave & esp. with radical forms, disruptive social and cultural action.
In both Goldbard and Whittier the funding climate for activism plays a pivotal role in the experiences of feminist and other activist generations:
Wikipedia on "privatization":
"privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of business from the public sector (government) to the private sector (business). In a broader sense, privatization refers to transfer of any government function to the private sector including governmental functions like revenue collection and law enforcement."
Goldberg contrasts the countercultural generations of the sixties and seventies:
"was nourished by steadily rising hopes and expectations. In the very real achievements of the civil rights and anti-war struggles of that period, activists acquired a heady sense of their own agency.... The feeling that social arrangements were ripe for remaking was pervasive...." (167)
with the shock of change during the Reagan years and after:
"It is difficult now to grasp what a shock the election of Ronald Reagan was to this system of believe. The resulting demoralization was profound and has persisted.... (167)
and now with a shift from just surviving to sustenance:
"community cultural development...has increasingly been seen as addressing the new for greater social equity, dialogue and participation in shaping community life, some...groups have been quite successful in attracting support and expanding their programs."
"AS the old arts orthodoxies fray at the edges and the right's grip on cultural politics begins to loosen, as social activism in other fields expands, we once again begin to hear harbingers of resurgent activism and interest in community cultural development." (168)
from Cynthia Koch, the NEH and NEA funding crisis:
"The 1966 appropriation to the NEA was nearly $2.9 and $5.9 million went to the NEH. Funding and programming at the endowments grew throughout the 1970s, expanding to new audiences and dramatically increasing the arts and humanities presence in local communities and national institutions....
"...in late 1980, the criticism suddenly took a more ominous turn... the anxieties of cultural advocates.... Michael Joyce, executive director of the James M. Olin Foundation, had prepared a report for the Heritage Foundation that was called "highly critical" of both agencies. As part of a larger study of the federal government prepared as a 'blueprint for a conservative American Government,' the report found in both endowments 'a tendency to emphasize politically inspired social policies at the expense of the independence of the arts and the humanities' and called for 'redirecting the endowments toward the highest purposes for which they were intended.'"
"In the end both agencies did sustain cuts, which appeared at the time to be minor. In fact, the 1982 cuts were severe. The arts appropriation dropped from $158.8 million in fiscal 1981 to $143.5 million the next year. The NEH lost close to 14 percent of its $151.3 million budget in 1982 and would not regain its 1981 level of funding until 1989. In an era of double-digit inflation this represented a real dollar cut of approximately 50 percent over the course of the 1980s -- an amount consistent in the end with the Reagan administration's original objective. The NEA, which had a more effective lobbying network in well-known performing arts advocates and a large and dedicated institutional base of arts organizations, did return to (and exceed) its 1981 appropriation by 1984; however, even that did not keep pace with inflation."
Goldberg examines "The New Hybridity" in the US, required without public funds:
"in partnerships with social service agencies, schools, community development organizations, activist groups and other non-arts groups, even, less often, in specific initiatives undertaken by conventional arts organizations and institutions..."
"The result has been a number of vigorous, popular projects attractive to funders particularly because they straddle so many fields, the work's hybrid character earning it attention and legitimacy in better-resourced, more visible arenas, arenas less accessibel to creators of smaller scale, locally focused community cultural development work."
How do you put this generational story into your own sense of yourself as a historical subject? What time frames for politics do you know from your own experience? What stories can you tell about art in public meanings? What do you remember or know about congress and arts funding? What sort of arts have you taken for granted as part of your own histories?
The Art of Storytelling
Turn to a person sitting near you and come up with a story of art in your life, how these histories make any sense of what art you have come in contact with; for example what sort of arts learning did you have in school? Have you had any experiences yourself with what Goldberg calls community cultural development?
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Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners) by François Millet, 1857For the Story behind the picture....
A community cultural development project by a friend of mine, Rusten Hogness; it just got its grant from the California Council for the Humanities:
The Gleaners of Salinas Valley: Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change
(project website):
Summary: We will collect the stories of those involved in gleaning post-harvest produce from the fields of the Salinas Valley and providing it to the needy. This is a multi-media project that will create audio archives, produce radio stories, and make written and audio stories available on the Web.
The Gleaners and Their Stories
We will collect the personal stories of the gleaners, who spend long hours gleaning fruits and vegetables in the fields to help fight hunger.... We will attend organized gleaning sessions and meet the gleaners. We will follow the gleaners and the food they harvest from the fields through the cleaning and bundling processes to the distribution of the food to the hungry. We will collect as diverse a selection of their stories as we can. We want to know their backgrounds; how and why they became gleaners; whether gleaning has changed their relationship to food, agriculture, and the hungry; and what gleaning means to them.
There are several hundred gleaners participating in organized gleaning programs in the Salinas Valley. While we will talk to many, we will collect extended stories from 12 to 15 of the gleaners whose stories highlight different motivation, different backgrounds, and different parts of our community. For each of these, we will present excerpts of their stories (in text and audio), along with their pictures, on our website. We will turn at least 6 of the stories into full audio portraits for airing on public radio and streaming broadcast on our website. If time allows, we will produce more audio portraits....
The practices of gleaning, broadly conceived, have achieved a particular salience recently. As a model for sustainability, gleaning has inspired all sorts of collection and re-use projects. As a practice, from dumpster diving to other sorts of scavenging, it has become a contentious element in local politics around the homeless, youth culture, and anti-authoritarian street action. Gleaning has also inspired local art, both as a subject and as a practice – in found-art and junk-art assemblages. Recent showings of the French documentary The Gleaners and I provided a particularly delightful and poignant example of gleaning as both the subject and the practice of documentary art. This new salience of gleaning practices generally increases the salience of our gleaners’ stories.
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25 Docs You Must See Before You Die
Shot entirely on hand-held digital camera, legendary 72-year-old director Agnès Varda observes the historic custom of gleaning in an eye-opening journey. This magically inspiring documentary provides a unique social critique of human behaviour.
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Trecho do filme "Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse" (2004) de Agnes Varda
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From the Wikipedia:
"The Gleaners and I is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features the practice of Gleaning. It was released as Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse in France in 2000.
The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection. Varda travels French countryside and city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. It touches on things such as the teacher named Alain who is an urban gleaner who has a master's degree. He teaches immigrants. Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French law regarding gleaning. Varda also spends time with Louis Pons, who explains how junk is a 'cluster of possibilities.'"
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