Author: Sara

hacking as troublemaking

For some time, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which hacking is a form of troublemaking. While I’m still not ready to explore what this might mean (I’m currently deeply immersed in a project with digital stories), I do want to make note of a brief all tech considered story that links my own understanding of troublemaking as asking questions and challenging authorities with hacking and, even more importantly, a hacking ethos: At this Camp, Kids Learn to Question Authority (and Hack It).

This camp isn’t just about learning how to hack, but about developing a larger ethos of challenging systems and questioning authority. Here’s what the founder of the camp says:

And unlike most technology camps that have sprung up around the country, DefCon Kids is as much about questioning authority as taking apart computers.

Hoff wants his own kids — all kids — to ask more questions.

“Every time you see an end-user license agreement on a screen, you just hit accept,” he says. “You don’t know what it means, what you are giving away, what you are doing.”

The camp’s goal is to teach kids how the technologies and systems that surround them work.

Hoff wants kids to think about it and figure out exactly what it means when they hit that button marked “accept.”

Cool.

memories of mom

For the past six months or so, I’ve been reviewing old video footage that STA and I took between 1999 and 2004. Most of it is from our various trips to the Farm (and some of it ended up in our farm films). I’m hoping to use it in a bunch of different video projects. For my first project, I decided to capture some memories of my mom as they relate to my sister. It’s a present for my sister on her birthday. The video represents a few of my clearest memories of my sister at the farm and some haunting images of my mom hiking through the back 40 of our farm and at a park near Crystal Falls, Michigan (Bewabic State Park). I’m not sure if I like haunting as a description here. Maybe reverent instead?

It’s not a very long video, but I really enjoyed the process of creating it. I think it might be part of a larger project about my mom, the Puotinen family, the Farm and the UP.

Feeling trouble, take two

So, last summer I attempted (quite unsuccessfully) to write and submit an article about “feeling trouble not troubled in the classroom.” While I generated some useful ideas, I never converted them into an academic article. Why not? I’m sure it had something to do with my need to prep two classes while watching/hanging out with my two kids (who were 5 and 8 at the time). And I know that it had a lot to do with my growing resistance to academic writing. It’s difficult, and frequently not in ways that push me to engage more deeply and meaningful with ideas or authors or experiences.

Now it’s a year later and I’m trying again. I’m still resistant to writing in ways that I don’t want to, but I also recognize the value of sustained, deliberate, and laborious attention to working with and through what it might mean to feel trouble in the classroom. As a result, I’m trying to craft a very brief abstract today to submit for a call for papers on queering academic spaces.

I’m amazed at my resistance to this activity. I know that I’ve taught, thought about and practiced a queering pedagogy that fits with the themes of the edited collection that I want to be included in. Yet, I’m doing everything I can to avoid writing the abstract. Like tweeting:

Or posting on facebook (which, BTW, I almost never do):

Or, writing this blog post. Why such resistance? Perhaps even the fact that I want to pose this question and then engage with it is an effort to procrastinate?

Or is it? The theme of my proposed essay is “feeling trouble in the classroom.” It’s all about creating spaces within (and outside of) the classroom for feeling (addressing, processing, struggling with )the trouble that engaging with queer ideas/concepts/authors engenders. In “Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy is a Queer Thing,” Suzanne Luhmann writes:

As an alternative to the worry over strategies for effective knowledge transmission that reduce knowledge to mere information and students to rational but passive beings untroubled by the material studied, pedagogy might be posed as a question (as opposed to the answer) of knowledge: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students (7)?

She continues by offering these questions:

How does the reader insert herself into the text? What kind of identifications are at stake in this process? What structures these identifications? How do identifications become possible, what prevents them, and ultimately, makes learning (im)possible? (7)

In my own pedagogical practices (inside the classroom and online–course blogs and this trouble blog), I strive to create spaces where readers/class members, myself included, can explore/work through/engage with what knowledge does to us. This is true in all of my classes, but especially the three undergraduate queer courses that I’ve taught: queering theory, fall 2009; queering desire, fall 2010; queering theory, fall 2011. In each of those classes, I experimented with online and offline ways in which to articulate, share and process our feelings (resistance, confusion, excitement, wonder, anger, uncertainty) about the ideas that we encountered.

Could my resistance to writing about queering pedagogy be about more than mere procrastination? Yes. Do I have time to reflect on why I resist? No.

As I (try) to work on my abstract, here are the posts that I’m drawing on:
Feeling Trouble and Troubled in the Classroom, part ONE, part TWO, part THREE

another version of yes!

On Monday, I wrote about Barbara Kruger and included one of her images, NO. At the end of that post, I added in my own image response. I did it really quickly (and, as it turns out, sloppily) with Pixelmator. Earlier today, I decided to try again, using some newly acquired, yet still rudimentary, skills. Here’s my new version of YES: