Making change, registering change, feeling oneself change

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/191921/not-protest-it-uprising#  

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Making, noticing and registering, feeling it all out: where we find ourselves in change, where we place ourselves to change, how we know change as we participate in it....

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What people were talking about in Sweden while I was there for conference and Gender Studies workshops. Note the overlaps across countries with issues about how to create systems of justice and the changes we all variously inhabit today.... 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/sweden-coalition-far-right-threatens-block-budget-immigration?CMP=share_btn_fb   

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Welcome to the last week of class! Our time to analyze learning, social change, and how it all works together!

Today we share with each other our experiences of the class and our understanding of what has changed. This is our time capsule to ourselves: we see how things looked to us at different moments during the semester, at different times in the story of the course. 

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We begin for everyone with some exercises, to help us focus and make it a bit easier to share what we have done in the learning analysis. Each person will speak for only 4 minutes!! (we want to hear everyone!) and offer their own unique sense of  traveling through the argument or story of the course. Our personal feelings are, of course, a special part of this. But do think of this primarily as an intellectual sharing of analysis as well as of any careful personal details. Celebrating each others' work and our own, and especially thinking together today about the knowledge we each bring into being is the collective project here. So listen as carefully as you speak, because active listening is as necessary to collective thought. 

If someone else says something you intended to say, then -- thinking on your feet -- find another something to say that is a unique bit of your own work instead. 

Focusing exercises for presenting:  
EVERYONE: 
1) find your favorite paragraph in the learning analysis. Put a star next to it. 
2) write down what you are most proud of in this paper. 
3) put an arrow next to the place you think best describes the argument of the course. 
4) write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what element of its ANALYSIS made it special for you. 

PICK ONE OF THESE TOO:
=write about a moment in the course where everything seemed to come together for you. 
=write about a moment outside the course where you realized you were using something you had learned in the class. 
=write about a moment when you discovered something new about how you were included in the argument of the class.  

WHEN IT IS YOUR TURN TO SPEAK: 
pick out two of these to share during your four minutes. (Have at least two others as mental backups, so that you don't say the same thing someone else says.) Focus on analysis -- of the course, readings, experiences, realizations -- especially, although feelings and politics have important places too. 

Give some real details: don't be too general. Do show off the hard thinking you are capable of. Make sure what you say is special and unique. 

And may we keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship and connection and intellectual community and joyful living!


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Feminism is for everybody! questioning Thanksgiving and more ....

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Katie will be giving a talk and leading a seminar in Sweden over the next two weeks. You can see what she will be doing on her talksite here: http://paradoxdive.blogspot.com/p/slides.html  


Cheyenne and Sara will take over after Thanksgiving in their own special way! Katie will be back in time for the last week of classes and to hear all about how you are analyzing your learning nowadays! Be sure to check out the rest of this post and the TABS to know what to do! 
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From the National Museum of the American Indian: questions about Thanksgiving? http://blog.nmai.si.edu/main/2013/11/do-indians-celebrate-thanksgiving.html  

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EXPERIENCE SET FOUR: FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY 

Tuesday, 25 November – NO CLASS but there is viewing to do online! 

STEINEM & HOOKS VIDEO see link below (scroll down): this great conversation is all about just how feminism is for everybody. Be sure you have watched ALL of it by now! Watch it again and again! 

• Note hooks description on the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks  

• Her professional site: http://www.berea.edu/appalachian-center/home/faculty-and-staff/bell-hooks/

• Note Steinem description on the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem

• Her professional site: http://www.gloriasteinem.com  

Tuesday, 2 December – Visions for Justice 

• Look over any stuff in Reed, Perez, Freeland you haven’t gotten to yet 

• If possible finish up your book 5 or at least read an additional chapter. 

• Refresh your memory after having read Butler

What are all these books about now you’ve worked with both and done projects that tie you into the insights they want to share with us? How do they each speak to the idea that feminism is for everybody? What feminist worlds do they open? Which aspects of Women’s Studies do you glimpse from these? How do they offer versions of intersectionality, feminist identities, visions of social justice?

Tuesday, 2 December – Sharing Feminisms – LAST DAY! 

• DUE ASS. #4: Final redrafted and edited version of your Learning Analysis: logbook 4 + hardcopy in class; electronic copies to TA – REMEMBER YOU WON’T GET CREDIT FOR ANY WORK IN THE COURSE WITHOUT TURNING IN LOGBOOK 4!

Our class will share learning analyses today in class. You must be present to get credit for this assignment! 

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Hear bell hooks talk about internalized oppression and Gloria Steinem agreeing and disagreeing with her about many feminist issues: a great conversation that illuminates a lot about the folks of the 70s women's movements. Enjoy! • You will want to have watched the WHOLE video by 25 November (and the Q&A at the end is really wonderful too!) Watch it again when you are writing your final Learning Analysis (which is Assignment 4).

http://new.livestream.com/TheNewSchool/Forever-Young-bell-hooks-Gloria-Steinem/videos/64181039


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Learning Analysis for Women, Art & Culture

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Making, Sharing, Demonstrating, Offering, Reflecting, Caring

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Tuesday, 18 November – Offerings
• Look at artists in Perez, Ch1&5. Pick the artwork that speaks to you most. Read about it.
• DUE ASS. #3: Intersectional project & logbook 3

Today we will learn about each other’s projects in a poster-session style event!

You will not be handing the project itself in (if it is a poster or a physical art project). Keep it and cherish it! Take pictures to document your project (which is what artists put into their portfolios too) and email them to your TA. If it’s something electronic, send us links, screenshots, or anything else so that your TA will have a record of what you have done.


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Projects are shared in class poster session-style on Tuesday 18 November. 

At first we will set everything up, creating small displays of our work all around our room. Silently we will go around and look at everything, take notes on what we notice, learn about, like, have questions about, anything that allows us to pay attention now and interact next.  

Then half the class will stand with their displays while the other half will walk around among these displays, talking to their presenters about their work individually and in little groups, interacting with them all at the same time. Katie and your TAs will also wander around, learning about your work and offering insights. Then who displays and who walks around will switch so that everyone will have had a chance to both display and walk around and interact. 

During the third part of class, we will create a discussion about what we have noticed about each others’ projects and what we have learned from sharing our thinking and action and art activisms! 

We may have time at the end of class also to discuss the final experience set and the final assignment, the learning analysis. Both are up on the class website for you to consider and make plans about for the final section of the course. 

Remember that you cannot get full credit for assignment three until after you present your work in this poster session-style event. In other words, just a project object does not in itself complete the assignment: reflection and writing as well as displaying yours and interacting with others is similarly important. If an emergency or illness has kept you from participation today, to get full credit you will have to meet with three other students to share your work and their work outside class, and write up the experience and what you learned from it to complete the participation portion of that grade. 

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1. set up: be sure you have signed in!!
2. silently everyone goes around and looks at everything and takes notes.
3. half of the class stands with projects and other half goes around and talks with folks, takes more notes. 
4. other half class does the same. 
5. we all discuss projects and what we learned from them: be sure you can say specific things about particular projects and know the names of the folks who created it. 
6. speak to what about intersectionality became clearer because of the project you did. what became clearer because of what you see in someone else's project. 

7. the rest of the class and the learning analysis. 

FREEWRITE? 
=what is the argument of the class?
=name a reading that made a difference to you. what difference did it make and why?

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significant otherness: person, times, changes, spirit/s

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http://publictheater.org/Tickets/Calendar/PlayDetailsCollection/UTR-2015/Parable-of-the-Sower/   

"Singer-songwriter-guitarist Toshi Reagon brings her genre-bending music and irresistible performance style to Under The Radar with a work-in-progress concert of her new opera, written in collaboration with Bernice Johnson Reagon. The Parable of the Sower, adapted from Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic novel, follows a young woman fleeing the violence of a futuristic Los Angeles in this fable that blends science fiction with African-American spiritualism and deep insights on gender, race, and the future of human civilization."

Tuesday, 11 November – Altar, Alter – Self, Other
• Look at artists in Pérez  Ch 3. Pick the artwork that speaks to you most. Read about it in Pérez.
• Read Pérez, Conclusion
• Read another chapter from the book 5 you chose.

Self and Other, Otherings of various kinds are political and power transactions with implications for social justice. Perez is interested in how people survive oppression through art and spirit, creating culture and meaning, and “politicizing spirituality.” What are the implications for intersectionality? What feminisms are vibrant here? How do your readings intertwine among art-activisms?

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What stories do we tell about how change works out? 
Is the past a history of errors?
Does time enfold or stretch out or spiral and shift?
Is the future better or worse? 


UN Statistics: Millennium Indicators: Millennium Development Goals Snapshot 2014:
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What would Butler's character Lauren say? Is that what Butler would say? Which are the questions, which are the answers, which are the attentions, what are the curiosities? 
Why does it matter? 

in grps of three: 
> name an issue you care about that illustrates your sense of each of the four stories about change: progress (it gets better), decline (things are getting worse), return (stuff circles around and returns), mixed (a lot goes on all the time). 

> pick examples of each of these from art works and books we have read and thought about for class. • Start with the fifth book you chose: which stories about change does it promote, or take for granted, or criticize, or otherwise engage? • Then look through Pérez and choose art works that alter/altar what we mean by any of these stories. 

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"as Chicana and other Latina/o art suggest, the cultural effects of increased globalization and cultural democracy include both the restructuring of religious beliefs and practices and the birth of hybrid forms." (96)

"Amalia Mesa-Bain's altar-installations are among the earliest and the most sustained explorations of the medium, spanning from 1975 through 1997, in more than thirteen major pieces." (97)

Venus Envy Chapter I: "semiotic oscillation between altar and desk, to which are now added vanity table and laboratory....the vanity table also functions...as a theatrical space that allows for potentially expansive refashionings of identity. Like the religous altar it is a place for the care of the self, and for the accumulations of objects imbued with personal meaning. In this sense, it is an altar where reverence for theotherwise devalued, gendered self, and what if important to the self, is cultivated." (100-1)


"In [Carmen] Lomas Garza's case, popular culture-based altars, drawings, and retablo-inspired monito (ie. cartoon-like) paintings were neither naive nor natural choices for a trained artist in the 1970s. They were a conscious political choice for a young artist repeatedly exposed to discrimination against Mexican-Americans in South Texas. To combine teh visual languages of high and popular arts constituted a de facto critical reappraisal of both...." (104) [her website]

Santa Contreras Barraza "recreates the votive tradition, correctly, as a pre-Columbian legacy as much as a Christian one, by framing her exvotos through the use of Maya-like glyphs and the Mesoamerican visual conventions of the codex....it is clear the artis has restyled traditional Maya and Aztec glyphs innto new glyphs of her own.... [These works] express hybrid spiritualities thriough the culturally hybrid media of the retablo as a specifically religious art form. 
Trinity (1993), for example, refigures the cross, the Virgin, and the Christian trinity in feminist and indigenlous terms, surrounded by symbols of rebirth and fertility in nature. Although the mestiza women appear in Western guise, as contemporary women, and as the Guadalupe, they are three in one, as the barely visible hands of an outstretched body behind them suggests." (109-10)



Patricia Rodriguez
Patssi Valdez
Barbara Carrasco
Lourdes Portillo

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Purity and Danger: 
http://www.zcagallery.com/purity-danger/  

"The female body’s entry into the space of the artwork (be it video art, painting, photography or any other medium) is a momentous entry. Due to its being positioned in a conflictive place in the patriarchal culture, overloaded with “otherness”, the female body is spontaneously grasped as a soft platform for trial and error, drafting, kneading, squeezing, twisting, pinching, and pain. At times, this repertoire of various displays of the female body is translated into a burning protest, as in the works by Lena Liv, and Lee Yanor. Yet, at other times, owing to the over-accessibility of the body, the artist neutralizes the corporeal and transforms it into the intangible and fragile, as in the work of Jan Rauchwerger “New Studio”.

However, decoding a work of art can never be reduced to a single theoretical move. Thus, in Lee Yanor’s video art “Lullaby” the female body is positioned both as the symbolic stance representing total purity, seeking to expropriate any carnality, and, in an act that is rooted in the visual depictions of Maria in Christian tradition, the secular and a-sexual, post modern contemporary mother1, as a present day saint. The never-ending fall in Yanor’s video is not a mere effort “to break the body”, both in the perverted, Sado-Masochistic earthly sense, up to the metaphysical desire immanent in it. Equitably, the rite of infinite fall, the fall into abyss and nothingness, and then the return to life, is the simultaneous rite of both consecration and desecration."

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27130-prison-itself-is-inflicting-mass-violence-bill-ayers-interviews-maya-schenwar  

"But when we simply call for a fight against "mass incarceration" or against the "drug war," we do this thing where we divide people into "good prisoners" and "bad prisoners." We talk about people who don't deserve to experience the violence of incarceration and people who "do deserve it." We allow ourselves to discard large numbers of people and deem them (or continue to deem them) less than human. That kind of thinking is not really landing us outside the framework of a prison nation. Plus, it creates the impression that if you end the drug war or mass incarceration or "fix" sentencing laws, you'll get rid of the problems that are actually intrinsic to the institution."

http://www.iamsafezone.com/resources/Ally_Handouts_Microaggressions_Table.pdf  


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alter/altar: artists have us 
DIVING INTO CONFUSIONS AND PARADOXES! 

the Other and Othering: separation & projections 
significant otherness and alterity: respect for anOther

Wikipedia "disambiguation" page (boundary objects unknotted) on Otherness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherness  

on Progress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress  

Hanging out with theory & its people and animals: 
Haraway's "significantly other to each other" book review:

"One of the reasons that Haraway is fun to read is that she is in conversation with so many different academic fields and scholars. She brings to bear competencies in biology and the history of science, continental philosophy, feminist and Marxist theory, structuralism, semiotics, science fiction, and popular culture.... In When Species Meet, Haraway frequently rails against the doctrines of human exceptionalism in both its religious and secular forms. Her trope of “companion species” is her way of deconstructing the boundaries between human and animal, self and other. Humans and domesticated animals are coevolved, significant others to each other in complex and asymmetrical ways. The dogmas of human exceptionalism render our significant and troubled relationships with animals invisible, one-dimensional, and deceivingly simplistic."

Katie's work on SL Tranimal significant otherness, forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). 

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Worlds, realities, working on justice

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Tuesday, 4 November – Whose Worlds? Intersectionality and multiple identities
• Read Reed 5 and 8.
• Read two chapters from the book 5 you chose.

What connections do you make among your readings for this week? Art and social movements can speak powerfully about the worlds we live in, the differences among worlds created by uneven power and social structures, the forms of oppression and privilege that identities entail, and the histories in which some groups thrive at the expense of others. How does intersectionality help us understand these complexities? How do we live as individuals and as groups at the intersections?

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Celia Herrera Rodríguez of NEW FIRE from emiloid encina on Vimeo.

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Vimeo: "Celia Herrera Rodríguez is the Costume and Set Designer of NEW FIRE - the latest production by playwright Cherríe Moraga."

NEW FIRE – To Put Things Right Again
Written and Directed by Cherríe Moraga
Designed by Celia Herrera Rodríguez

"After a fifteen-year hiatus, Cherríe Moraga returns to Brava Theater Center to help celebrate its 25th anniversary with her fourth Brava World Premiere production, NEW FIRE – To Put Things Right Again. Co-produced by the new-to-the Bay Area, cihuatl productions, NEW FIRE follows the sacred geography of Indigenous American ancestors to tell a post-modern story of rupture and homecoming. Of her return to Brava, Playwright, Cherríe Moraga, states: “It’s about coming home, returning to the same place, but as a different person, a different artist. The world has changed so dramatically in fifteen years, and I, along with it. I am older, yes… and the work, more mature as well. I have, with my collaborators, discovered the poetry of movement, of visuals, the music of silence, even as I continue to write with words. It’s a beautiful thing to return to Brava -- this woman’s theater -- changed in this way, to celebrate a homecoming with a play that requires return for each of us – man, woman, elder and the young.” 

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Sweet Honey in the Rock: "Are My Hands Clean?" 
•http://collegeofsanmateo.edu/integrativelearning/learningcommunities/commons/James/AreMyHandsClean.pdf 

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http://gawker.com/women-making-70-feminist-shirts-in-factory-paid-under-1653799400  

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Alma Lopez. 1997. California Fashion Slaves 

Perez 2007: 146: "The ideas of knowing your place and having a place are tied together and suggest that the personal sense of being at home, whether in society or in your body, whether it is a female, a queer, an immigrant, or a negatively racialized minority body, or a combination of these, is shaped by our sense of belonging socially. This sense of belonging is not untied from our historical relationship to the places in which we dwell."

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Hooks 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. South End Press.

Mexican segregation in Texas

Her story here about the small Kentucky town is a now classic statement of what feminists sometimes call "standpoint theory." Here she makes it clear that segregation meant that black people moved across the railroad tracks, and -- correctly -- saw the town on both sides. The town was literally larger to them than it was to the white people who stayed on their side of the railroad tracks, whose reality was thus more narrow and circumscribed. This violates any assumptions that "privilege" or having more or being advantaged means that you "know more" -- usually understood as having been better educated or schooled. But this work on standpoint claims that such education doesn't account for the knowledges about living in the world that are greater among oppressed people: what is sometimes called "subjugated knowledge."

This does not mean, however, that having privilege means having no way to know what subjugated people know. Or that oppressed people are even always aware of what it is that they know in these ways. Standpoint theory says that all of us need to raise our consciousness, to learn more about how to know what we know as oppressed people, and how to acquire knowledge about what we don't know as privileged ones.

This happens in many ways that require our struggles together: in the work of political solidarity, such as in coalition politics, in the kinds of consciousness-raising done in CR groups, in the kinds of multi-issue broad base mass movement work hooks calls feminist movement, in multicultural education where we learn about the histories of social movements and struggles for social justice, in work on intersectionalities: personal, collective, policy and research oriented, legal, activist, even philosophical or psychological. Different feminisms tend to consider some of these more important than others, often with an eye to the identities, movements, social justice issues they find most urgent.

Reed 2005, 152: "One of the most profound aspects of collective, social movement action, at least from my experience, is the feeling political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as 'public happiness,' the sense of exhilaration that comes when one throws one's whole being into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom captured in film, with its bias toward individualized storytelling. But a sense of community, so much a part of native nations as well as social movement cultures, is conveyed well in the film [Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee]. It is summed up by Mary's remark that she never felt more 'free' thatn when inside the Wounded Knee camp. That one can indeed feel most 'free' when in jail for civil disobedience or when surrounded by the trigger-happy federal marshals and the FBI agents is a paradox of social activism rarely portrayed in the mass media.... the film's narrative moves toward collective power and communal responsibility." [American Indian / Native American Activism] 

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He/Man language: generic masculine: unmarked & marked categories:  

Martyna 1980, 489: "Empirical explorations of how we comprehend the generic masculine also indicate its sex exclusiveness. My studies of pronoun usage show striking sex differences in both the use and understanding of the generic masculine. Females use 'he' less often than do males, and turn more frequently to alternatives such as 'he or she' and 'they.' Males have an easier time imagining themselves as members of the category referenced by generic 'he.' Seven times as many males as females say they see themselves in response to sex-neutral sentences referring to a 'person', or 'human being.' In general, males appear to be using and understanding 'he' in its specific more often than in its generic sense. Females both avoid the use of 'he' and respond to its use with a more generic than specific interpretation."

(488): "Cognitive confusion is another consequence of the generic masculine, one particularly relevant for the academic disciplines. Joan Huber, for example, has characterized the use of 'he' and 'man' as 'an exercise in doublethink that muddles sociological discourse.' She cites the recent sociology text which proclaims: 'The more education an individual attains, the better his occupation is likely to be, and the more money he is likely to earn.' The statement is accurate only if the individual is male."

"Man can do several things which the animal cannot do....Eventually, his vital interests are not only life, food, access to females, etc., but also values, symbols, institutions." [Miller, Swift 1980: 12]  

[See also Wikipedia: Gender Neutrality in English ; and Markedness ]

unmarked categories: am I included? 
gender: man/(wo)man -- (cis)gender/(trans)gender 
race: white/people of color
sex: sexuality/(homo)sexuality
ability: able/(dis)abled
class: middle class/working class  
age: young adult/children and the old 
religion: Christian (often Protestant)/range of religions and non-religions, from Jews and Muslims to atheists and nontheists and more 
language in US: English (monolingual)/range of languages in multiple knowledges, from Spanish to Spanglish to bilingual to multi-lingual -- often coded for immigration status and race 
nationality: citizen/non-citizens of many sorts, especially immigrants of various kinds 

WHAT OTHER UNMARKED/MARKED CATEGORIES CAN YOU THINK OF? 
Notice how many people fall through the gaps between these? Mixed race people, bisexual people. Intersectionality tries especially to deal with that. Or how many change from one place to another? one time to another? who counts as "white" is very changeable in this way.


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Seeds & Earth & Change & Groundings

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<<<EXPERIENCE SET THREE: 
INTERSECTIONAL ART ACTIVISMS & IDENTITIES>>>


Tuesday, 28 October – self-aware, questing, problem-solving flesh
• Check out the art-activist online project on microagressions: http://www.microaggressions.com
• Butler, the whole book by now
• Note Butler’s description on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler
• Read about Earthseed on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthseed
Note the link there to an interview with Butler.
• mirror-touch synesthesia on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-touch_synesthesia  

From the book: 
“We are Earthseed. We are flesh---self-aware,
questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that
aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God
knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife
preparing to fall away from the parent world.
We are Earthlife preparing to take root in
new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose,
its promise, its Destiny.”

http://solseed.org  

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I mentioned in class listening to a radio program as I began to listen again to an audiobook version of Parable of the Sower. This is the program I was listening to, and the parallels are powerful ones. Butler evokes many kinds of experiences in her SF novel. Consider how these intertwine her book, the Microagressions Project online, Solseed folks and their hopes, and the experiences of immigration for many today. http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/07/24/334494493/who-are-the-kids-of-the-migrant-crisis   


Who Are The Kids Of The Migrant Crisis?

Since October, a staggering 57,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been apprehended at the southwestern U.S. border. Sometimes, they've been welcomed into the country by activists; other times they've been turned away by protesters.

President Obama has called the flood of migrant children seeking refuge from violence and poverty in Central America a "humanitarian crisis at the border." Earlier this month, he requested $3.7 billion from Congress to respond to the crisis and urged Central American leaders to discourage more children from attempting the dangerous journey through Mexico, where they are targets for local criminal gangs and drug cartels.

The number of migrant children hailing from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala has more than doubled since last year. But who are these young people, and why are they coming in such large numbers?

Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar who's been working in El Salvador, has some answers. As part of her research in the capital, San Salvador, on unaccompanied minor migrants, she interviewed more than 500 children and adolescents as they returned to El Salvador after being deported from Mexico. She tells NPR's Robert Siegel that many of them are desperate.

"These are the most dangerous places in the world," Kennedy says. "The only place that has a higher murder rate than Honduras is Syria."

Of the 322 interviews she's analyzed, Kennedy says 109 interviewees "received direct threats that they could either join a gang or be killed."

In most cases, Kennedy says, kids and teenagers leave Central America to avoid climbing levels of gang violence, extortion and drug trafficking.

Sometimes, it's to find their families. Ninety percent of the young people she's interviewed have relatives in the U.S.; 50 percent have one or both parents there.

The Mexican government has recently announced a new initiative to step up control of its southern border. Kennedy says El Salvador is feeling the effects. The migrant return center where she works has gone from receiving one or two buses of children twice a week to receiving more than six a week.

But, Kennedy says, those kids will try again. She interviewed a 12-year-old boy who returned to El Salvador barefoot; he had been robbed of everything he owned.

"I asked him if he was going to try again," says Kennedy, "and he just burst into tears and said, 'What would you do if you were me? I haven't seen my mom or my dad in 10 years ... and no one here loves me.' "

If the children have family in the U.S., they can often afford to pay a smuggler to get them across the border. If a family is too poor to afford a coyote, however, the child will often try to ride on a network of trains that run the length of Mexico, known as "La Bestia" — The Beast.

Deborah Bonello, a freelance video journalist in Mexico, says that riding The Beast is dangerous. Because it's a cargo train, not a passenger train, migrants have to jump on while the train is moving and climb onto the roof. Many have lost limbs; others have lost their lives.

And there are other dangers.

"Criminal groups are charging a tax now to migrants who want to ride the train, and if you can't pay, you basically get thrown off," Bonello says. "And it's half a day, a day on the train, so if the train doesn't stop, they have no access to food."

Migrants riding La Bestia often have to rely on charity. Bonello says that groups like the women who call themselves "Las Patronas" throw food to migrants as the trains go by.

If they make it to the U.S.-Mexico border, children are readily giving themselves up to U.S. agents, crossing the Rio Grande on inner tubes and tires. They will be encountering even more patrols in the coming weeks; Texas Gov. Rick Perry has announced that he's sending 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border.

These children hope their long journey will end here, when they surrender to U.S. officials — but as they head to crowded detention centers to await immigration court hearings, it may be just beginning.

Writing and research was contributed by Caroline Batten and Nicole Narea.

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Katie's talksite for Purdue events: Transcontextual tangles, how they matter: http://tanglematters.blogspot.com   
**Handout14 Purdue by Katie King
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Feminism (singular) and Feminisms (plural) are boundary objects: words, ideas, concepts, ways of connecting in solidarity, politics in the making....

> boundary object: keeps boundaries from getting in the way of solidarity as struggles for a/many yet-unknown-possibility/ies is/are in the making among different folks, differently. 
> struggle: for what cannot even yet be imagined but is worked for anyway. 

"Drawing on contemporary work in feminist science and technology research, we are working with an expanded notion of a 'learning object' to incorporate insights about 'boundary objects.' This theoretical reframing asserts that the 'object' participates in the creation of meanings: of identity, or usefulness, of function, of possibilities. The concept of a 'boundary object' was promoted by the late Susan Leigh Starr (a prominent feminist scholar in science/technology studies) to assert that objects (material, digital, discursive, conceptual) participate in the co-production of reality. At base, the notion asserts that objects perform important communication 'work' among people: they are defined enough to enable people to form common understandings, but weakly determined so that participants can modify them to express emergent thinking.” FEMTECHNET’S BOUNDARY OBJECTS THAT LEARN (Juhasz & Balsamo 2013): http://femtechnet.org  

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