Transnationalism in the Streets

I first became aware of the Arab Spring in January 2011. I read an article in the New York Times about the anti-government protests in Tunisia. It amazed me how quickly the Tunisian public had brought down their own ruler. I saw photos of Tunisians occupying the president's home. According to the Wikipedia account of the Tunisian Revolution, it took only 28 days to oust a leader who had ruled for 23 years. That's amazing.

Then came Egypt. The spring semester had begun and I had to sneak away from my graduate studies and teaching obligations to check the New York Times every hour for updates on what was happening in Tahrir Square. This revolution took just 18 days, even faster than Tunisia. At Stony Brook, we made comparisons between Egypt 2011 and Tiananmen Square 1989, hoping that the outcome would be different this time, that the army would side with the revolution rather than the state. We were right, but then we were wrong. The Egyptian military did support the revolution, but then they held onto power and crushed dissent afterwards.

That anti-government protestors in Egypt were influenced and inspired by the Tunisian revolution spoke to a larger, transnational movement. We have come to call it the "Arab Spring."The Wikipedia account of the Arab Spring suggests the following rippling domino-effect of anti-government protests around North Africa and the Middle East. In January 2011, between the beginning of the Tunisian Revolution and that of the Egyptian Revolution, protests began in Algeria, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. By February, the Yemeni Revolution had begun; the ongoing struggle for Bahrain began. The conflict in Libya also began in February, as did the conflict in Morocco and Western Sahara. Syria was perhaps the last major protest movement to begin, in March 2011. And of course it still continues as the focal point of the "Arab Spring" in the spring of 2012.

The transnationalism of this protest movement was of course facilitated by the internet. Indeed, the Arab Spring will be considered the first global protest movement that took advantage of social media technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. For example, one important way we in the United States learned about the revolutions was through the videos uploaded to Youtube and other file-sharing sites by activists and citizen journalists on the ground in Cairo and elsewhere. At some point, the editorial board of the New York Times had to decide whether they would use these videos or not; in the end, they decided to do it. The Lede Blog on the New York Times website was one website that I visited frequently to follow amateur video and twitter updates from the revolutions in Egypt and in Syria.

The transnationalism of this movement was also facilitated by widespread literacy and fluency in Arabic. Indeed, U.S. viewers of the Arab Spring only consumed a small fraction of the media output from these events. True, some videos whether in Arabic or English could simply speak for themselves - especially videos of violence. But it was harder to get involved and stay independently informed when one's options were either to poke around online trying to make sense of Arabic-language media, or rely on huge mainstream media outlets with professional correspondents in the Arab World.



Beyond the Arab Spring: the United States, Europe, and Global Revolution


The transnationalism of the Arab Spring was evident in the United States early on, in the public protests in support of collective bargaining rights and labor unions in Wisconsin beginning in February 2011. Those protests began on Valentine's Day, only three days in fact after Hosni Mubarak had fled Egypt, a milestone victory in the Egyptian Revolution. The protests in Madison grew in size until over 100,000 people were occupying the Capitol grounds (and occupying inside the Capitol building, too, with sleeping bags, food stations, etc.) in opposition to the Governor and the Republican-controlled Senate. (Democratic senators, meanwhile, were hiding across state lines in Illinois, believing - ultimately falsely - that they could prevent a vote by preventing a quorum.) On March 9, after approximately four weeks of daily public protest and occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the Republican Senators passed the bill without the Democrats. The occupation of the Capitol building, in some form or another, continued into the summer of 2011.

From our view here in New York, the Wisconsin protests appeared as a resurgence of the dormant American left - the same left that had elected Barack Obama only then to discover that he wasn't as "left" as we had imagined him to be. It was during the Wisconsin protests in the spring of 2011 that I became more interested in my own union, the Graduate Student Employees Union. I attended some solidarity rallies in support of the Wisconsin protests, and was proud to raise my hand as a "proud union member!"

The occupation of the Capitol building and grounds in Madison, Wisconsin, in the spring of 2011 was influenced and inspired by the Arab Spring, particularly the occupation of Tahrir Square. But for whatever reason, the transnationalism stopped there, and no other cities in the United States developed Tahrir-style public protests or occupations at that time (despite some midwestern populaces also fighting to preserve collective bargaining rights for labor unions that spring in Ohio and Indiana).

In May 2011, the Arab Spring went transnational, again, as people in many European countries came to recognize that their anti-austerity fight was similar to the economic crises that had originally brought about the Tunisian and other revolutions across North Africa. The two strongest movements appeared in Spain and in Greece. In Spain, the Indignados movement began on May 15, 2011, and continues to this day. The Indignados movement featured an occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol, as well as occupations all across the country. The initial occupation began with only about 100 people at Puerta del Sol (not dissimilar from the numbers at the beginning of Occupy Wall Street). The occupation of Puerta del Sol featured a "general assembly," a decision-making body utilizing direct democracy and "consensus." This occupation continued officially through mid-June, but the Indignados movement continues to this day.

Madrid's Puerta del Sol, May 20, 2011

(Source: Wikipedia Commons)

An inspiring video about the Indignados movement and its legacy, "Camino al 12M" (The Road to May 12)

In summer 2011, while the Arab revolutions began to devolve into violence - or at least that was the perception here in the U.S. thanks to NATO's involvement in the Libyan War - anti-austerity protests began to sweep from Europe to the United States. In New York City, tens of thousands demonstrated in May in solidarity with a global call for anti-austerity protests. Hundreds of protestors established an occupation outside City Hall known as "Bloombergville"which lasted for at least two weeks in June 2011. The organizers of "Bloombergville" modeled their occupation on what they had seen in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Citing a court decision that stated that sleeping on the sidewalk was a constitutionally-protected form of free speech, hundreds - but sometimes only tens - slept on the sidewalk along Broadway downtown until the city passed an austerity budget anyway and then the protest fizzled out.

Over the next two months, July and August 2011, the New York City General Assembly formed. The assembly uses direct democracy and makes decisions based on consensus. The NYCGA was inspired by the assemblies that were held by the Indignados in Spain who used a similar model for self-governance. The goals are: transparency and horizontality - removing hierarchy and thus preventing the rise of authoritarian leaders. This is direct democracy, not representative democracy. Everyone has an equal voice and an equal vote. Assemblies were held in the summer to plan for a new occupation (since "Bloombergville" had then ended).  The Canadian magazine Adbusters put out its famous "call" for an occupation of Wall Street in July.

The original call for an occupation of Wall Street in Adbusters magazine, July 2011

(Source: Wikipedia)

The American (and Global) Autumn

Therefore, what we saw on September 17, 2011, in New York City, and then across the United States and across the world in October, was a model of public protest based in certain principles and strategies - like the physical occupation and the general assembly - that Americans had witnessed in action already from Tunis to Cairo to Madison to Madrid.

The transnationalism of Occupy Wall Street became especially clear on October 15, 2011 when a "Global Day of Action" occurred. According to Wikipedia's account of the day's events, over 950 cities in 82 countries witnessed globally-coordinated public protests in support of Occupy Wall Street. All told, several million people around the world participated. I was in Times Square that evening, as part of New York City's participation in this global event, where somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 people came out and saw the headline "Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide" projected onto the mainstream media billboards surrounding the square! Surreal.

"Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide." Times Square, October 15, 2011

(Source: Alternet)

The October 15, 2011 Global Day of Action marked one month of Occupy Wall Street and exactly five months since the beginning of the Indignados movement - thus showing the great influence the Spanish protests continued to have for Occupy and for the world's many revolutions. The day was not only about solidarity with Spain and NYC, though, but was also an opportunity for the world's most vibrant movements at the time, like Occupy Wall Street, to show solidarity with other movements around the world. For example, the most violent protests that day were in Italy where people were facing the same depressed economy and austerity measures facing Greece and Spain. We all supported each other's own national movements.

Tens of thousands also came out in Germany, where protests and occupations continue to this day, in opposition to austerity measures across Europe.

In London, protestors occupied the London Stock Exchange, beginning Occupy London, perhaps the strongest "Occupy" movement to emerge in Europe, and one - thanks to language similarities - that has been in frequent communication with Occupy Wall Street in New York.

This was also the day when most small-town "Occupy" movements in the United States began. Some, incredibly, continue to this day.

October 15, 2011 showed how the internet and social media could be utilized to organize a synchronized global protest involving millions of people in 82 countries. Wow.


In the Wake of Occupy: 2012


Following Occupy Wall Street's eviction from Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, as well as further high-profile evictions of other occupations throughout the United States in November and December, it was undeniable that the Occupy Wall Street movement shrunk in size and influence as we moved into the winter of 2011-2012.

By December 2011, the revolutions in the Arab World seemed deadlocked: many wondered if the Egyptian Revolution had, in fact, failed; Libya was "free," but only after tens of thousands had died in a bloody civil war aided by NATO bombs; the Syrian Revolution was now becoming a civil war. Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street was dismantled by local police across this country, thanks, we now know, to local governmental coordination with the U.S. federal government, with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, that tried their best to put an end to our popular movement.

But there was more...

After widespread electoral fraud in Russian elections on December 4, 2011, the largest anti-government protests in two decades came to Moscow. Tens of thousands rallied in a series of demonstrations throughout the winter against President Vladimir Putin and his ruling party. And when Putin cracked down on the protests this spring, people in Moscow developed new strategies, including an occupation in the style of Occupy Wall Street and leisurely strolls through the city involving tens of thousands of people!

There have also been ongoing student movements around the world. Last fall 2011, we in the U.S. were all in admiration of the student protests in Chile that involved hundreds of thousands of students. The students brought a creativity to their direct actions that have since been widely discussed and sometimes even adopted by Occupy Wall Street, including various forms of street theater. The Chilean protests involved student strikes and the occupation of, and shutting down, of universities.

While the Chilean student movement has appeared to quiet down in the winter of 2012 (which is, of course, summer in Chile), a new student movement has since begun in Quebec. The student strike in Quebec began with only a few departments at just one university declaring a strike in mid-February 2012. By mid-March the strike had included at least 150,000 students on an indefinite "general strike" that has paralyzed Montreal. At its peak in mid-March, the student protests have brought out hundreds of thousands of students and supporters into the streets. On May 18, one week ago, the provincial government of Quebec passed a bill known as "Bill 78" which criminalizes certain forms of public protest. Despite that fact that most academics and lawyers in Quebec believe the law is blatantly unconstitutional, the police of Montreal have already begun to enforce the law, arresting hundreds of students for the crime of engaging in political assembly without giving notice to authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of students march through Montreal, March 22, 2012

(Source: stopthehike.ca)

On May 22 (exactly two months since the march depicted in the photograph above), hundreds of thousands of Quebecers marched through Montreal in direct violation of Bill 78. In Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, and here in New York City, hundreds of people showed solidarity. That Occupy Wall Street organized solidarity actions and a march to support the striking students of Quebec, and that Occupy Wall Street has at least temporarily adopted the "red square" of the Printemps érable (Quebec's "Maple Spring" movement), shows that the transnational nature of these revolutions continues.


Transnationalism in the Streets


I share this brief interpretation of the history of the global revolutions of 2011-2012 as a historian but also as a participant. In the classroom, we talk about "transnationalism" all the time - as a historical phenomenon, for example, although of course we do not deny that transnationalism is an element of contemporary processes as well. Of course today's revolutions are not the world's first transnational revolutions. There was, of course, the great "Age of Revolution" in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when new nations formed through public protest, civil disobedience, and violence - for example, France, Haiti, almost all of the present nations of Latin America, and, of course, the United States. It took longer for those revolutions to influence each other, but that's because the transnationalism of the 18th and 19th century revolutions depended on the technology of sailing ships circulating letters and most importantly, people, who traveled between Europe, North America, and South America, and spread ideas. Some, like American radical Thomas Paine, even jumped into the fray elsewhere, as he did in revolutionary France.

But what is remarkable about today's "Age of Revolution" is not just the new technologies and the speed of transnational communications, but that people like myself - a teacher, a student, an activist - are aware that we are taking part in something that most of the time we have just talked about in class and studied in dusty history books. As a participant in a global revolution - of a very uncertain outcome, of course - it never ceases to amaze me how my own experiences of these movements either relates, or fails to relate, to the theories about human history that we so often promulgate in the classroom and in our scholarly publications.

The term "transnational" comes up all the time in my own work and in my seminars and teaching, but I had never really thought much about how it applied to my own life until I became involved in Occupy Wall Street.

It has taken me quite some time to recognize our movement's indebtedness to the Indignados of Spain. Our general assembly process - our commitment to direct democracy and consensus - this we learned in part from their experiments in Barcelona and Madrid. Our use of media - especially Youtube and Twitter - to overcome corporate media suppression and ignorance, is based on what we learned from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Spain.

I remember on November 17, 2011, at a rally of thousands of students on strike at Union Square in New York City, hearing Egyptian students make use of the "human microphone" - where we amplify each other's voices through repetition - to tell us about the connections between their struggles in Egypt and ours here in New York. That fall, scores of Occupy Wall Street participants had planned to travel to Cairo to meet with some Egyptian revolutionaries and begin a conversation, but they eventually had to cancel that trip due to the sporadic violence in Cairo. Nevertheless, this conversation between Tahrir Square and Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) was essential, and for me it was particularly inspiring.

From the Indignados (I assume), we adopted a Spanish-language chant: "A-anti-anti-capitalista," which has since become a favorite dance-chant of Occupy Wall Street participants. At a March 2012 action against Bank of America, I remember watching a group of Occupy Wall Street members dancing and chanting "A-anti-anti-capitalista" in front of a line of police. I overheard an NYPD officer say to the officer next to her, "I bet they don't even know what they are saying!" And to be honest, I, too, at first did not understand the chant. But now that I have learned that the chant is in Spanish, and not garbled English(!), I teach it to others at rallies and on marches.

"Anti-capitalista," among other chants, all mashed up with musical accompaniment by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, May Day picket of Chase Bank, May 1, 2012, New York City

Using the Spanish language is not only important for continuing a dialogue with the Indignados in Spain, but also for reaching out to Hispanics in the United States. I am proud that Occupy Wall Street has now begun its own newsmagazine and website in Spanish for Spanish-language readers: Indig-Nación.

Two nights ago, as we showed our solidarity with the striking students of Quebec, we learned a French-language chant, "So-so-so-solidarité."

These are the little things - the multi-lingual chants and cardboard signs - that speak of the larger transnational and perhaps even dialectical relationships between Occupy Wall Street and other protest movements around the globe. We have all learned from each other and also teach one another. Critics will say that "the revolution is dead," or that it never even was, but it is clear to me that the crest of the revolution continues. If Tahrir Square was the focal point in Spring 2011, and Wall Street in Autumn 2011, then it is perhaps in Moscow or Montreal today where we should look for the continuation of this transnational struggle, even as so many struggles continue in many places where the foreign media has packed up and left while the revolution is still mid-stream.

My role in this transnational movement has of course been in attending assemblies and marching in the streets. But I am most proud of my work as a "citizen journalist." Inspired by the use of social media in the Arab Spring, I started a Youtube account last fall to post videos about Occupy Wall Street. I actually posted my first Youtube videos in a different account last summer (2011) while protesting at the New York State Capitol in the days preceding the Senate's vote on the Marriage Equality Act. (Interestingly, some of the activists I met advocating marriage equality have since appeared at Occupy Wall Street events in the city!) I thought, as in the Arab Spring, that it would be important to document our protests in Albany in support of marriage equality. So I made a Flickr page and a Youtube account and leapt into what were new realms of social media for me.

At Occupy Wall Street events, I always carry my camera. I take photos and videos. I have learned to videotape every arrest because my video can later be used in court to potentially vindicate falsely-accused protestors. I am constantly videotaping the police - not because I am paranoid, nor do I believe they regularly engage in "brutality"; they do not. I videotape the police because the NYPD frequently break the very laws they have sworn to protect, and I feel it is important to document that.

I have recently come to realize that I enjoy the role of "journalist" primary because I am a historian. I believe documentation is so important because if people in the past had not documented their own lives then we today could not attempt to understand history. Historians of Occupy Wall Street will not be lacking in data to interpret - indeed, I don't know how they will begin to make sense of the vast amount of data that has been produced since last September - but I do think I can add something to that. And I am not naive about the propaganda effect of my documentations. Yes, I am documenting history as it unfolds, but I also rush to upload my videos to Youtube because I recognize that this media is not just history, but also news! Often the professional news media mischaracterizes or just fails to mention an Occupy Wall Street event, and therefore my photos and videos can help inform potential audiences as to what in fact occurred.

"Citizen journalists" can tell stories that the corporate media ignores. For example, this photograph of mine captures a scene from New York City's May Day parade. The taxi cab reads: "No Disability Insurance. 15 Years on the Job. Garage Greed Shames Even Wall Street." Major news media outlets reported almost exclusively on May Day's arrests and violence, all the while neglecting the fact that a 10,000+ person march down Broadway occurred, and that the march was led not by hooded white male anarchists, but by immigrant taxi drivers, just one of the myriad constituencies participating in Occupy Wall Street as part of the "the 99%."

This gets to the crux of the matter of "citizen journalism," which is that, for all of us who use Facebook or Twitter or similar social networking platforms, we increasingly get our news from each other rather than through corporate media outlets like television or newspapers. I don't have time to read multiple newspapers, listen to podcasts, and watch videos all day, so I rely - as many young people do - on the gleanings of online friends to tell me what topics I should learn more about. When lots of friends "like" a particular article, photograph, or video, I am more likely to pay attention to it. This is partly why I take so many photos and videos at Occupy Wall Street events. My photos are not released publicly, but they still reach about three hundred friends on Facebook. My videos have, as of today, reached nearly 80,000 people! And, by the way, this very blog, "Pacific Dreams, New York Life," has in its two-year lifetime already reached over 20,000 people.

This "reach" - on the blog and on Youtube, for example - is incredibly transnational. This blog's readership is predominantly in the United States, but of the 20,000 who have viewed it, a few thousand reside elsewhere. Readership is especially noteworthy in Australia and New Zealand, thanks, I am sure, to the Pacific theme of much of my scholarship and teaching.

My reach on Youtube is also predominantly in the United States, but certain videos have taken off in foreign countries thanks to transnational social networking. My video of a musical ensemble from Brittany, France, performing on the outskirts of Zuccotti Park on the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (until the NYPD stopped them and threatened them with arrest), for example, has been viewed more times in France than in the United States. Based on comments posted on Youtube, it is apparent than many in Brittany were proud that musicians from their region had gone up against the NYPD in order to show their musical solidarité with Occupy Wall Street.

A musical ensemble from Brittany, France, performs on the outskirts of Zuccotti Park on Occupy Wall Street's six-month anniversary, March 17, 2012, New York City

My latest video, of our New York solidarity march with the students of Quebec, has now been viewed over 40,000 times in just the past 36 hours! This is thanks to viewership in Canada, predominantly in Quebec, as noted by the hundreds of messages of merci and solidarité from viewers across the province. Certainly our solidarity action was meaningful with or without the transnational dialogue facilitated by Youtube. But the video helps us express our solidarité in a powerful way. Hundreds of students and supporters in Quebec have written to me saying that the video gives them renewed hope to continue marching and to continue fighting the Charest government. We were only two hundred New Yorkers in the streets, but we have mattered to 40,000 Quebec viewers and counting. Now that's solidarité.

"Solidarity with Striking Students of Québec," May 22, 2012, New York City

I end here, with great hope for the future. Wherever people are fighting against repression, against authoritarianism, against police brutality, against austerity, we should recognize our role - indeed, our responsibility - to support them. There are numerous ways to support these ongoing revolutions. Wherever you are, get involved with a local movement for social justice and democracy. Locate media sources that you trust, and remain informed about what is going on all over the world. Go online and read about the Arab Spring, about the Indignados, about the European debt crisis, about Occupy Wall Street. Look at photographs and watch videos. It is never too late to make a change, whether it is personal, collective, local, national, transnational, global, or even interplanetary! ;)

Solidarity!

Planning the Dissertation

Master of Degrees, Shackled by Debt!

1T Day [the day when student loan debt in the U.S. reached 1 trillion dollars], April 25, 2012 

Union Square, New York City

I have been in graduate school now, off and on, for the past five and a half years. When I received my first Masters degree in 2007, I completed that entire program in 15 months. But this time around, working on my Ph.D., I have been at it already three years and only just recently finished my coursework and exams. Having advanced to Ph.D. candidacy, there is only one thing left to do: write my dissertation.

All of this work is supposed to lead to something. But Ph.D. students sometimes have trouble keeping that endpoint in view. And of course, we hear from our elders that a Ph.D. is no longer worth what it once was a decade ago, even five years ago. There is no job waiting for us when we finish our degree.

So...let's just chill for a moment. Let's think about what a beautiful thing it is, after all this hard work, to have nothing left to do but write a really big dissertation that is all my own, and as long as I am writing that dissertation, I need not face the "real world" possibilities and pitfalls of the academic job market.

So how should I plan this dissertation project? How to make these next few years of my life worthwhile? How to make the whole thing fun, rather than stressful? How to write a really good dissertation, but not just that, but also, be happy about it?

Step 1: Pacing and Benchmarking

Students and graduates march through NYC's Financial District on 1T Day 

[the day when student loan debt in the U.S. reached 1 trillion dollars], April 25, 2012 

Some people take two years to write a history dissertation. Some take ten years. Some take even more. I have heard that the average nationally is something like seven years to complete a Ph.D. in history (including coursework and dissertation). In our department, I hear the average is more like nine.

My goal is two years (five, if you count the three previous years of coursework). Why? Well, first, because by the time I finish it will have been nine years since I graduated with my Bachelors degree. So, in a way, if you compare me up against someone who goes straight into a Ph.D. program after college, I will race to the finish just to match that not-so-hot average of nine years. To put it another way, when I graduated from college, I was a headstrong, idealistic 22-year-old. I wanted to go change the world. I was young. But when I receive my Ph.D. in the future, I will be in my thirties, married, still headstrong and idealistic, but certainly not out-of-my-socks if I were to say, "Am I still in school?!" Of course, that's why we get Ph.D.s, because we love school. We feel safe there. I wouldn't want to be a professor if I didn't love school and want to live the rest of my life on the school calendar. I guess I learned this from my dad, also a college professor, who always told me what a good life academics have. And I believed him, and I still do.

Anyway, who am I to complain about aging? Some people don't receive their Ph.D.s until they are in their 40s, or even older. If this is what I love - and it is, or at least it is part of what I love about life, but certainly not all of it! - then what's the problem with spending so much of my time doing it??

So, why two years? Not just to save myself some early gray hairs, but for another reason, too: because it may take longer than that!

Yup. I figure that planning to finish in two years might put me on track to actually finish in three. The earlier I get drafts of chapters to my advisor, the sooner I'll find out that those drafts are rubbish and need complete overhauling - months and months of editing and revisions. If I waited years before even turning in my first draft chapters, then that would push the whole thing back some years. So, it may not be realistic to finish the entire dissertation in two years, but striving for that goal will put me on track to finish it in no more than three years.

Lastly, why two years? Because that's when my funding runs out! :) A minor technical matter, for sure. Because, seriously, there is almost no difference between making $15,000 a year and zero dollars a year. Indeed, the difference between those two figures can't be more than the annual raise SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher gives herself every year. And if she says that that's not enough money to huff and puff over - and that is exactly what she says (or something close to it) - then how can I complain about getting zero dollars rather than $15,000 a year?

I don't blame SUNY for my troubles. I organize. I protest. Not that it is so bad for me, but it's worse for the undergraduates who are facing tuition increases and an upcoming mid-life crisis when they have to pay off all their student loan debt and interest.

But, sidetracked again. The goal is to write the dissertation. Whether I've got the funding to support that project or not, I've got to finish it on time. There is, also, the matter of outside funding. For my project, I need to travel to Hawaiʻi to do almost all of my research. But traveling from NYC to Hawaiʻi is not cheap. And yet funding agencies may not be that excited about giving thousands of dollars to a young dude from New York to spend months on the beach in Hawaiʻi doing "research." Of course they do know that I'll actually be inside a cold, sterile library everyday from 9am to 5pm, staring bleary-eyed at old documents written in bad handwriting in the Hawaiian language, right?! Now, does that sound like a vacation to you?! :)

So, we'll have to see about money issues. I may have to paddle out to Hawaiʻi on my own homemade "Kon Tiki" if it comes to that.

Pacing and Benchmarking, for real

A Cooper Union student, scaling the thirty-foot-high memorial to Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union as a "free university" in 1859, protests the administration's effort to begin charging tuition for graduate students. He was later arrested by the NYPD.

1T Day [the day when student loan debt in the U.S. reached 1 trillion dollars], April 25, 2012 

Cooper Square, New York City

Cooper Union students cheer from the second-floor balcony of the Great Hall as hundreds of students rally below.

1T Day [the day when student loan debt in the U.S. reached 1 trillion dollars], April 25, 2012

Cooper Square, New York City

Okay. So how am I going to do it? This whole "two years" thing?

Here's my plan:

My dissertation is planned to be five chapters long. Two theoretical chapters, and then three more narrative ones. Plus an introduction and a short conclusion. The introduction and conclusion, of course, should come last. As for the five main chapters, I plan to focus on the three narrative chapters - my three case-studies first - and then hit up the two more theoretical chapters after I have exhausted all my evidence in the case studies. The idea here is that I am not going to have to do much primary research for the two theoretical chapters, because I will just put the juiciest stuff there from the three case studies, which will be heavily based upon primary sources. The theoretical stuff will require more secondary reading, and at this point I think that should come after I've done exhaustive amounts of primary research.

So, primary research and case studies first. Secondary research and theoretical writing second. Intro and conclusion third, including going back and conforming everything to the new overarching narrative and thesis.

Summer 2012:
Primary research (aka summer reading): whaling
Travel: two weeks in California; archival research
Add to this that I am teaching a summer course, getting married, and honeymooning during the summer. So not much dissertation action this summer!

Fall 2012:
Teaching Assistantship (pro: $; con: holds me down to NY instead of traveling to do research)
Chapters due by November 1, 2012: 3 (on California); 4 (on whaling/guano).
Primary research: sugar


Winter 2013:
Usually I teach a winter course to make some $, but now I need to travel to do archival research
Travel: at least two weeks in Hawaiʻi; archival research


Spring 2013:
Teaching Assistantship
Chapter due by April 1, 2013: 5 (on Hawaiʻi)
Secondary research: the body & the Pacific World


Summer 2013:
Now, during the 2012-2013 school year I will be applying to as many grants and fellowships as possible. The best outcome will be if I receive enough funds to spend the entire summer conducting research. Worst possible outcome: I could stay in NY and work for $, but by this point I need to really, really, really jump into the archives....so, worst possible outcome: I spend my savings to live and study in Honolulu for a summer. (Fingers crossed: please, higher power out there, give me a fellowship!)
Travel: months somewhere, perhaps Hawaiʻi, perhaps California, perhaps Massachusetts. All would be great, and whichever one I end up with will lead the dissertation in a different direction. The key is to be open-minded, patient, and accepting of whatever comes my way!
I should go out there with a cardboard sign: "Will research Hawaiian history for $."


Fall 2013:
Teaching Assistantship (unless I have secured funding to be somewhere else doing research)
Chapters due by November 1, 2012: 1 (on Pacific World); 2 (on the body)


Winter 2014:
Hopefully there is no need to travel anymore at this point, because I will have swept all the archives clean of every morsel of data relevant to my dissertation. But if there is still funding, then I will travel. Indeed, if there was funding for five years for this project, I would take five years to do it.
Travel? If not, then I hunker down in my cave below the noisy streets of NYC and meditate upon the dissertation in its entirety. I will try and visualize the thing in my mind and hold it altogether like a ball of energy. I will see the interconnectedness of every chapter, every page, every word, every character, every pixel, until I am the dissertation and the dissertation is me.

...

Spring 2014:
Showtime.
At some point early in the semester, I submit the full draft, including the introduction and conclusion, to my committee.
I schedule the dissertation defense.
I get ready to graduate.
I continue to make whatever changes are necessary to graduate.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

...

My Reactions to the Dissertation Plan

Students burn loan documents in an act of civil disobedience

1T Day [the day when student loan debt in the U.S. reached 1 trillion dollars], April 25, 2012 

Union Square, New York City

It's crazy.
It's impossible.
I'm gonna go broke and have to wait tables.
Good reason to just give up now.
I'd be better off occupying Wall Street.
Or occupying the SUNY administration building.

"I call for a general strike of all dissertators!"

"Ph.D. students of the World unite!"

No. Really, it's an okay plan. One problem I already foresee is that when Spring 2014 comes around, and I submit the dissertation, defend it, and graduate, if that's the plan, then what? I haven't scheduled anytime in there for going on the job market, interviewing, getting that awesome tenure-track job lined up for Fall 2014. And do I really want to receive the Ph.D. without any plan for my future? Some people do it. They adjunct for a year while devoting all their energy to playing the job market.

Certainly if I am close to finishing by Spring 2014, I could then hit the brakes and slow it down to take an extra year - although I will still have to adjunct to make $ either way - and then take my time working the job market. So, I guess there isn't much difference between these two options. No matter what, in two years I will need a job. Some kind of job. Any job.

Help?


Any readers have suggestions for me? Do you already have a Ph.D. and want to offer some sage advice? Or are you in the same boat and want to offer your alternative proposal? Or do you perchance know of an awesome grant or fellowship for dissertation research in Hawaiian or Pacific history? I'd love to receive your comments.

Best of luck to all dissertators. "And may the odds be ever in your favor...

Dirty and Dangerous Work in American History

Last summer I taught an undergraduate history course titled "Pacific Islands: Histories of Paradise." I blogged both before and after the course, reflecting on my expectations and observations over the course of planning, executing, and evaluating the course.

This summer I will be teaching again, so if you are an undergraduate student, or you know one, and you need or want some college credits, or in particular need to fulfill either or both the K or 4 DEC requirements at SUNY-Stony Brook, then keep reading!!! Yes, this summer I will be teaching a new course, an amalgam of labor and environmental history, and it will be awesome. The course is called "Dirty & Dangerous Work in American History."

As I did last year, I'd like to use this pre-course blog post to think through some of my plans for the course, and I'd be thrilled to receive any feedback from other history teachers out there with helpful ideas.

The Course

The course is a six week course, with two class meetings per week. That means there are only twelve classes in all. Each meeting lasts three and a half hours - yes, three and a half hours! - and, lucky me, my three and a half hours are scheduled for the evening, from 6pm to 9:25pm. Those will be late nights for me, but 6pm is probably "mid-day" for undergraduate students, so they might like that!

The structure of the summer course raises certain pedagogical issues. What can an instructor do in three and a half hours to keep things interesting, and make the most of students' time in the classroom? How much homework or readings can an instructor assign when students have only six weeks to complete it all? In my teaching of summer and winter classes here at Stony Brook - both use the three and a half hour format - I have discovered that the key is mixing things up. A little lecture here, discussing readings there. In-class group work here, and then, now and then, watching a film. And, of course, at least one big break in the middle of the three and a half hours is absolutely necessary for both teacher and students!

As usual, I am structuring the course mostly chronologically, rather than thematically. As explained in the course description,

"This course examines the relationships between work and environment in United States history from the colonial period to the present day, with emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

So there is actually not that much to cover here; well, at least not when compared to my earlier Pacific Islands class ("6,000 years of history in six weeks") or my Chinese history course ("3,000 years of history in three weeks"). This time it is only three or four hundred years of history in six weeks. That's much better!

The Textbooks

Last summer I assigned two books for my course: a more textbook-y chronological maritime history of the Pacific Islands, and then a book of collected plays by a Samoan author. The use of local literature worked well, but I won't be doing that this time. This time I plan to find my balance between a textbook-y overview of, and introduction to, environmental history, alongside a collection of case studies of intersections between work and environment in historical perspective.

The former book is Ted Steinberg's Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History. This book is frequently assigned for introductory American environmental history courses, and since I suspect that most students this summer will not have any background in environmental history, it will be a necessary text. Steinberg moves chronologically from indigenous American history (the pre-contact period) to the twenty-first century, attempting to highlight the most important people, places, and processes - as well as methodologies and sub-disciplines - in the field of American environmental history. But Steinberg is not necessarily interested in understanding workers' perspectives on the environment, or the role of class in environmental history. Work environments are definitely mentioned in his book, but this is by no means the primary focus of his narrative.

That's why I am complimenting Steinberg with Chad Montrie's recent Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States. Montrie's got a good introductory chapter that brings up some of the major interpretive problems that we will be grappling with throughout the course. He follows this with six case studies from American labor history, from early nineteenth-century Lowell Mill Girls to late twentieth-century migrant farm workers. Once the course gets going, we'll be tackling one of Montrie's case studies each day for the middle three weeks of the semester.

There will be only a few supplementary readings. If I have learned anything from teaching these courses, it is that only so much reading can be done (and done well) in six weeks. For us to really rip apart these two books will be enough of an achievement, in that the process of really reading these books closely will instill a basic toolkit for investigating American labor and environmental history in students' skillsets, and will also hopefully provide enough firm ground for students to stand on as they build their own research projects.

The Films

I usually show four films per semester. The three and a half hour structure allows us to watch films in their entirety and then even discuss them afterwards. I have found from students' evaluations that usually two-thirds of students like watching full films in class, but the other third really despises it. They find it boring to sit around for hours and passively watch a screen. I have to agree, but at the same time I find the benefits of watching films in class to outweigh the discomforts of it all. What I am trying to do is to teach students to "read" films as they would read a text. Watching films should not just be "passive" entertainment, but it should be a dialogue where the viewer, armed with his or her knowledge, critiques the interpretation of the filmmaker and attempts to understand what the film is attempting to say and how that jives with what we think we know about what actually happened in the past. For me, that's what makes history films so much fun to watch and think with.

I am having trouble, though, narrowing my film choices down to four. But I think that narrowing is definitely necessary here. I usually avoid historical documentaries, because students are more likely to watch those and just accept whatever the "talking heads" say. I prefer to show feature films about history, instead, for it is easier to read these as interpretations, and not as statements of fact. But, of course, teaching that documentaries are just as interpretive as feature films would be a good lesson, too. But I'm not sure I can do that in six weeks!

I couldn't find any feature film, though, that focused on workers' relationships with the environment in the colonial period. So for now I'm thinking of pairing some excerpts from Marcus Rediker on seamen's experiences of nature on 18th century ships with some or all of Ric Burns' 2010 documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World. In effect, this section of the course lumps the colonial period with the early Republic up to 1840, so the whaling focus will work here. (Burns' documentary focuses largely on the nineteenth century.) This will be an opportunity to talk about the Pacific Ocean, too, where indigenous Pacific Islanders encountered the environment in new ways through participation in American trans-Pacific extractive industries (like whaling, for example).

I am also failing to locate a good feature film on the nineteenth century. Sure, I thought about using any of the great films made about American slavery - a topic we will be reading a lot about - but I couldn't find any film that I think really highlights workers' experiences of their environment. Any ideas out there?

So skip to the early twentieth century. When we talk about American westward expansion, we'll examine how the U.S. West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not some romantic land of individualistic white male pioneers, but rather was a heavily industrialized and ethnically diverse work environment. We'll highlight this with two films I really love: Picture Bride (1995) about Japanese plantation workers in 1910s Hawaiʻi, and Days of Heaven (1978) about poor white youths from 1910s Chicago who take up migrant farm work in the Plains. I like how both films focus on migrant labor - yet in very different ways and circumstances - and shed light on the larger discussions we'll be having about the relationships between cities and countrysides, metropoles and peripheries, capitol and labor, men and women, etc., in turn-of-the-century imperial America.

As we move into the twentieth century, we will start talking about the history of labor unions and how unionization and struggles between employers and employees reflected new relationships between working-class people and their environments, at home, at work, and at rest. Our readings will focus on mines, slaughterhouses, fields, and factories. But the two films I have chosen focus on union activity specifically in American mining. We will start with Salt of the Earth (1953), a half-documentary/half-fictional film from the early Cold War that was famously blacklisted by the U.S. government for being "communistic." It focuses on the lives of Mexican-American mining families in the 1950s as they struggle for decent wages, homes, and health and safety protections. We will compliment this with the award-winning documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) about striking miners in 1970s Appalachia. Both movies, to varying degrees, demonstrate the many ways mine workers related to their work environments, and perhaps also can speak to the role of environmental issues in shaping American labor activism.

As you can see, I am actually showing more documentaries than I would like to, but the two movies above, because they reflect now-historic events - in the 1950s and 1970s - can be "read" as primary sources, and I like that quality about them.

So that's five movies so far. In the last week of class we will discuss contemporary issues, because I always feel like students will get more out of a history class if they have the opportunity to discuss relationships between current events and historical ones. I am interested to see what interests my students will have in labor and/or environmental issues. To round things out, I think it would be great to watch a film about contemporary work environments. I am considering either Which Way Home? (2007), a documentary about the amazing journey of child laborers from Central America to the United States, or perhaps a newer film - although it doesn't appear to be available yet - Skydancer (2011), about Mohawk Indian steelworkers building skyscrapers in New York City. Either film would present the opportunity to not only reflect on work and environment, but also the significance of race, class, and nation in today's complex conditions of migrant labor and globalization.

The Assignments

I usually like to ask my students to visit museums and think about objects and visual representations of the past as part of their study into how to "read" history. Whatever I can do to convince students that texts are only a small part of knowing the past - that images, objects, films, etc. are just as important - I think I can convince students to have a better appreciation for what history actually is all about.

But I have found it hard this time around to think about work and environment through objects. Surely there are some museums that would work - like Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum or Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, both on Long Island - but these collections would only relate to the very early material in this course, so I'm not sure about this.

Instead, I have decided that assignments will focus on exploring real worksites, and making sense of contemporary relationships between work and environment in our own lives, and those of our friends and loved ones, and then doing our best to contextualize our experiences within a larger history of work and environment. Therefore, students' first assignment will be to write about their own experiences of work and environment. I might ask them to focus on one particular job they have had and, by using some of the theoretical approaches we will have discussed at the outset of class, place their experiences of work and environment into historical perspective. Hopefully this assignment makes us all question our own class identities and class consciousnesses, and will serve as a basis for the remainder of the course as we compare our own work and environment experiences to those of historical ancestors.

A second small writing assignment is more straight-forward. We won't just be watching four films, but every student will have to write a review of at least one of them. So that's that. I just have to decide which four films... :)

And finally, there will be a final project assignment. This assignment will ask students to investigate a present-day worksite and put the current conditions of work and environment at that site into historical perspective. They will need to both visit the site - or go to work, if it is their own worksite -, talk to workers about their experiences, but also use historical sources that speak to the history of that type of work or worksite. I will be giving students the opportunity to either write up a big paper with their project results, or write a shorter paper accompanied by some kind of multimedia project: a podcast, a documentary film, a website.

The key here will be to check-in with students every week on their projects. I will give them firm benchmarks when project statements, bibliographies, research plans, drafts, etc. need to be in. Because the worst outcome would be waiting until the last day and then discovering that students misunderstood the assignment or otherwise produced substandard results.

One other reason why I must meet with students about their projects from the get-go is to make sure that every student has chosen an appropriate worksite to investigate, and that they have secured permission to visit that site and speak with its workers. As I remember from my public history days, consent forms will be needed if students are going to produce an audio or video recording of site conditions or interviews with workers. I will do everything in my power to help students investigate the most fascinating sites on Long Island or in New York City wherever their interests lie. But together we might hit roadblocks if we attempt to investigate factory farms or something of that nature. The key as the instructor is to be involved in every aspect of the planning stage with students. This way we can ensure that every project is not only relevant but also doable and also safe.

Conclusion

This course will need at least fifteen enrollees to run. So please spread the word!!!

And now I must attend to my own work environment, where I am cruelly forced to hunch in front of a small, bright computer all day and write essays, conduct historical research, and grade papers. I thought of going on strike today because it was over 80 degrees out, but my union informs me that it is illegal for public employees to go on strike in New York State. So, like the Lowell Mill Girls who came before me, I guess I will just open my window and gaze out at the pre-modern world I have left behind while I toil indoors in pursuit of meager wages. ;)

Reflections on ASEH and Madison

Last night I stepped off an Amtrak train at Penn Station after 26 hours of straight travel. I left Madison, Wisconsin at 4:30pm on Saturday and arrived in New York City at 6:30pm on Sunday. It was an adventure.

The reason I had been in Madison was to attend the American Society for Environmental History's annual conference. I had attended the conference two years prior in Portland, Oregon. In fact, it was immediately after returning from ASEH - Portland that I decided to start this blog. (Thanks, Anna, for the inspiration!)

Madison provided similar inspirations as Portland had. And this, of course, is the whole point of attending academic conferences. Yes, it is nice to present a paper, receive feedback on it, and put an extra line on one's CV, but the real intellectual (as well as social and emotional) development takes place outside of the structured panels. This is where the inspiration comes from: in breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, cups of coffee, and on long walks, one gets to know just about as many kind and interesting people as one likes. It is amazing to have "ASEH friends" - that is, people I see only once a year or less at these environmental history conferences, but who I consider to be dear friends. Perhaps I can count them on my fingers, but I wouldn't want to lose any of those fingers!

Anyway, for the purpose of decompressing everything I learned this past week at ASEH - Madison, here are my reflections on the conference:

Day 1: Arrival in Madison

I left New York City at 3:45pm on Tuesday afternoon. We arrived in Chicago at 9am-ish. Then I took a bus from Chicago (10:30am) to Madison (2:30pm). I had expected Madison to be "college-y," as the one thing I have always heard about Madison is that its culture is dominated by the University of Wisconsin campus and its tens of thousands of students and faculty. It is a liberal/progressive urban oasis in a relatively conservative, rural, agrarian state. This is, of course, an oversimplification. But something about Madison, while I was there, did smack of utopianism - its in the very design of the city, based on DC's street plan, where all roads lead to and from the State Capitol building. The Capitol grounds are truly public, open to various uses all hours of the day and night. The Capitol building is open to the public throughout the day. There are no security check-points or X-ray scanners (like at the NYS Capitol). One can just hang out in the Capitol building all day. This is a city built, it seems, for open and public government and participatory democracy.

The Wisconsin State Capitol

There is one other important street downtown: State Street. It is over one mile long, restricted to just pedestrian and bicycle traffic (and the occasional public bus), and it connects the Capitol building with the center of the University campus. Now what flows on this road between the University and the State is, I'm sure, money, power, and influence. Let's not fool ourselves. But when one walks along the street he or she only sees the happy college students lounging, walking, skateboarding, spending their money at (mostly) local establishments selling (mostly) local products.

State Street, looking towards the University

I went to college in a city where there was a real town-and-gown divide: Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. We always talked of the "Bates Bubble": our little protected, progressive world where students spent 99% of their time, ignorant of what life was like for the rest of Lewiston's inhabitants. I don't think Madison suffers from the same bubble, as the town and gown here appear as one, at least when you spend the whole week downtown that's how it seems. There must be a border between the Madison bubble and the "real world" beyond it, but I cannot place it. I do not think it fair to wholly condemn such bubbles. Better to have a bubble where people can experiment with democracy, sustainability, what have you, than to have no bubble at all. But it is important that those inside and those outside the bubble are always communicating and sharing with one another.

The view through my hotel window (at the Lowell Center, University of Wisconsin). The State Capitol building is omnipresent here, fostering an unusually vibrant culture of civic engagement and participatory democracy. On the other hand, under the rule of a despot (...Scott Walker?), who would want the state to be all seeing and all knowing, lording over the city like this?

At ASEH's opening reception I met up with some old friends and made many new ones. We went out for dinner and beers afterwards, and then I walked back to my hotel (on the UW campus) under a moonlit sky.

Walking through downtown Madison under a moonlit sky

Day 2: Four Panels and a Plenary

Woke up at 5:30am. Yup. Didn't mean to, but the birds starting chirping, and I couldn't fall back asleep. Had continental breakfast at 6:30. Then walked to the Monona Conference Center where ASEH was holding its conference.

The Monona Terrace Conference Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

View of Monona Lake from the Monona Terrace Conference Center, Madison

In the morning I attended panels on 1) Labor and Environment, and 2) Extractive Resources/Commodities. Both topics are of great interest to me, as my own dissertation looks at the way in which workers engaged with diverse environments through participation in extractive industries!

[Just FYI, I am not going to comment on anyone's specific paper presentations here, for I feel that that would be rude and unfair. If I had anything to share, I should have raised my voice during the Q & A sessions during the panels.]

Then I went out for yummy Nepalese food for lunch, but because I was presenting my own paper at 1:30pm, I had to leave the restaurant just as my food was served. So I jogged back to the Monona center with a spicy tofu dish in tow (which I did not get to eat until two hours later! But it was still good! Thanks to my professor for treating me to this yummy lunch. I'm sorry I had to "run and eat").

In 2010, when I presented in Portland, there was a glitch with my powerpoint presentation. See, I usually keep my laptop set to fall asleep after just 60 seconds of idleness. I do so to conserve energy. Two years ago I forget to reset those settings, so that during my presentation, almost every 60 seconds the computer kept shutting down and the powerpoint screen went blank! What a disaster! It meant that as I was talking I had to constantly twittle my fingers on the mousepad of the laptop to keep it engaged and awake. It was like having a narcoleptic computer! I should have brought smelling salts to hold under my computer's nose. :)

Of course I share this story because something bad happened again this time! This time, I suffered from too much preparation. I had practiced my presentation on my fiancee before leaving New York. I wanted to make sure the presentation wasn't too long, so I "rehearsed" the timings on powerpoint. I did not know that when you "rehearse" the timings, those timings are saved, and on future runs the powerpoint automatically advances slides based on the recorded timings!! So there I was in Madison starting to present my paper and suddenly the powerpoint started advancing on its own! This happened at least three or four times during the presentation - which means I was actually going a bit slower than I had rehearsed at home. Just like in 2010, it was very distracting because while I read my paper I also had to keep a constant eye on the powerpoint screen to make sure I was on the right slide. Damn you, powerpoint! :)

Otherwise, the panel went great. I got to meet a bunch of really kind and intelligent and creative scholars who I shared the panel with, and I think the audience was stimulated by our presentation. The theme of the panel was "Extreme Work Environments." I received important feedback from the scholars and advisors I most sought feedback from. So, all in all, it was a very productive experience.

Following my presentation, I ate my cold but still spicy Nepalese tofu dish (yum!) while attending a presentation featuring three wonderful friends presenting about the "health" of cities, and the people in those cities, during the Progressive Era in the United States.

Another view of the Wisconsin State Capitol

View of Lake Mendota and the University of Wisconsin campus (at left). This spot was one block from my hotel at the Lowell Center.

The Plenary

The ASEH conference plenary featured a talk by Jenny Price. Not only is she the author of the delightfully engaging book Flight Maps, but she is also a Los Angeles Urban Ranger, a blogger, and in many ways a "public intellectual." I have long admired her work in LA, where she gives walking tours of the concrete LA River. She seems extremely engaged with her local community. And she has eschewed the academic world in many ways, for she has a Ph.D., she is a trained historian, but she is not a Professor and does not spend all her time within the bubble of academia.

This is to say that Jenny Price is a real inspiration to me. Indeed, I mentioned her and her work in L.A. in my application letter for the Ph.D. program at Stony Brook.

Her talk was about Rachel Carson, for it is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Carson's landmark book Silent Spring (1962). She expressed her admiration for Carson, but also criticized Carson - in a way that made some in the audience appear a bit uncomfortable. But this is partly because Price was criticizing us just as much as she was criticizing Carson. She criticized our heroicization of her; she criticized our hagiography rather than historiography of her. The main thrust of Price's argument was that Carson's approach to the environment is no longer relevant to today's environmental challenges. Price believes the greatest challenge for current environmentalism is the class divide between those who can afford to be "green" and those who cannot. She argues that Carson has little to contribute to these issues, and if anything she reinforces some of the old ways about thinking about the environment that have held us back from dealing with the issue of class.

Price's book Flight Maps dealt with the history of how Americans have known nature through consumption. Price's plenary talk continued this theme with a biting critique of "green consumerism." She criticized this 21st-century phenomenon of what she called "virtuous" consumerism: purchasing "green" cars, "green" homes, "green" food. The problem, she contends, is that only relatively wealthy Americans can afford to be "virtuous"/"green" consumers. I certainly cheered Price on - at least on this point. She is right to read "green" consumerism as "virtuous" consumerism. She used ample evidence to show us how corporations are even using the "green" brand to make consumers feel good about their consumption. For example, I use a stainless steel water bottle instead of drinking bottled water, which makes me feel good about myself. Same thing about biking around Manhattan. Same thing about taking the 24 hour train ride from New York to Wisconsin. She is absolutely right. I love bragging about these things, because I feel like I am doing the "right" thing, but how often do I check my class privilege - that class privilege that allows me to make these "virtuous" choices?

This is of course a huge and controversial issue, and one that we need to discuss - not just amongst ourselves, but in cross-class conversations. Class is a funny issue of course. For I make only about $20,000 a year, which puts me squarely in the lower 50% of Americans. And for living in Manhattan (which makes me appear "high class"), my income bracket is actually quite "low class". This shouldn't be too surprising. Just down the road from us is a public housing project where most households make under $40,000 a year. But the majority of people there are people of color. And I'm white. Something about being white and living in Manhattan makes people think I am upper class. But if I was black and told you I lived in Manhattan, you would just assume I live in Harlem, right? The interesting thing here is that even though I make only $20,000 a year, I still try very hard to buy organic (and thus more expensive) foods, even though people of the same income bracket a few blocks away may never buy those same kinds of foods. We may think so differently about food, but we make the same income, so are we of the same class or of different classes??

And this is my little beef with Price's talk. "Class" is not as stable and defined as she makes it sound like. For I am absolutely the "green"/"virtuous" consumer she criticizes, but I do not have the type of wealth she expects one to have in order to be this kind of consumer. This is partly because class is not just a reflection of one's own present standing in the world, but also that of his or her upbringing and heritage. Perhaps it is because I grew up in an upper-middle class suburban home that I am "green," whether or not I can afford to be so now. And this kind of class, based on heritage, maps in very important ways on top of race, nationality, language, etc., as well. And all this needs to be unpacked and carefully thought over.

Anyway, Price's suggested solution to 21st-century environmental problems is that, since everyone should benefit equally from environmentalism, no matter their race, gender, or class (and of course I agree), we cannot make a better world simply through better consumerism. Because not everyone has equal access to consumer power, and thus the choices made by the "green"/"virtuous" consumers result in consequences that are not equally advantageous for all people. And can we really rely on the world's rich people to invest their money in such thoughtful ways that all people, regardless of class, will benefit equally? I don't think so. Think about all the "green"/"virtuous" Apple users in the U.S., for example, who are using less paper yet facilitating the exploitation of young migrant workers in Southern China.

So, Price says we need to change laws and regulations and policies, not consumer behaviors. But I wonder if we will confront the same problems here as well. For class also determines one's access to political power. One person, one vote, yes, but a low-income community in the South Bronx fighting an environmental injustice does not have the same political power as the Sierra Club or Nature Conservancy. Who is setting the environmental agenda but those with access to money and power?

Let's leave it at this: the relationship between class and environmentalism is an unresolved and extremely problematic issue that we must address. But how?

Day 3: Field Trips!

One thing I love about ASEH is that the conference includes a day for fieldtrips. Most environmental historians like exploring environments, so interest in fieldtrips is very high among our membership. I attended a fieldtrip led by Anna Zeide, a University of Wisconsin grad student, food blogger, and all-around thoughtful and inspiring person, oh, and also, a great friend.

But I started the day with my own little fieldtrips: to the State Capitol, and to the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Historical Museum.

8:15am, Wisconsin Historical Society. After being told numerous times to go see John Muir's clock, I did. And here is a view of part of it. I have known some study-nuts, but I can't even imagine being John Muir's roommate at the University of Wisconsin with THIS THING in the room!

Wisconsin Historical Society

Inside the dome of the Wisconsin State Capitol

Looking up within the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol

Third floor view of the Rotunda inside the Wisconsin State Capitol

Wisconsin Supreme Court room, inside the State Capitol

This mural was on the wall in the Supreme Court at the Wisconsin State Capitol. It shows an early meeting between an Indian nation (the Menominee, perhaps? I don't remember) and Euro-American settlers. Funny to have a picture like this on the wall in the Supreme Court, for "justice" back then was pretty informal, based on the power of might, not necessarily right. Perhaps the mural is a reminder of how far we have come, and hopefully not a model for how we should proceed.

Another room at the State Capitol. I can't remember what the room is used for, but the colors are just beautiful!

Four murals in the room highlight transportation "progress" over time. This one shows transportation as Wisconsin's Indians knew it, before Euro-Americans brought "progress," with automobiles, steamboats, railroads, and airplanes, as depicted in the final mural. Notice the beautiful skylight on the ceiling.

The Senate Chamber at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Notice how all the desks face the center. That's unusual, I think. Apparently the majority party sits in the outer row and the minority party sits in the inner row. I know splitting up the parties is common, but I don't understand it. Wouldn't we all get along better if senators just sat alphabetically and made new friends?!

Anna's Fieldtrip

At 12:30pm we - about 30 participants - gathered at the restuarant L'Etoile in downtown Madison. The fieldtrip began here, with a local-foods lunch, and presentations by local food and farm enthusiasts. I willingly gave up my veganism for the afternoon in order to try a delicious sandwich with provolone on it. Yum. In fact I had two!

We heard from the head chef and owner of L'Etoile, who inspired us with stories of just how far he will go to source local food for the restaurant. He has contracts with hundreds of local Wisconsin farmers for the ingredients that we were then munching on. Thinking of our fancy lunch and all the farmers we were supporting through our "green" consumerism, I thought back to Jenny Price's plenary talk about "virtuous" consumerism. Were we really making life better across the board for people and nature in Wisconsin by eating these local foods, or were we merely feeling good about ourselves for being "green"? This important question remained unsolved for the moment.

We also heard from a local food writer, who explained to us that Wisconsin cuisine is more than just cheese and beer. That's funny, because everywhere we went on Madison evenings, menus contained more cheese and beer than I could ever imagine. I wondered: how much is the association of cheese and beer with Wisconsin the product of food marketing versus the reflection of real, local traditions? We learned that Wisconsin's number one export is cranberries, but how come we don't see Wisconsin sports fans wearing big cranberries on their heads rather than blocks of cheese? This whole association between food, agriculture, culture, and identity is a fascinating nexus. For someone who dislikes both cheese and beer, could I ever really be a Wisconsinite?

Finally we heard from a gentleman who runs an urban farm/community farm/CSA/farm education project on the outskirts of Madison. It is called Troy Gardens / Community Ground Works. More on that later...

Anna leading the field trip orientation at the lunch location

After lunch we got on a bus and traveled to a Community Center that offers alternative high school programs for at-risk teens and also houses a food pantry for low-income Madison residents.

We ended up standing by the community center's compost pile for an unusually long period of time. But ASEH folks had so many questions. I think we were just mesmerized by the size and color of the pile. The assortment of undecomposed vegetables on top were fun to look at. And when the gentleman scooped up some of the bottom layer compost and we saw how hot and steamy it was, everyone had an audible reaction. It's kind of funny when you think about the relationships between humans and nature, and that a group of environmental historians/academics might get most excited about a big pile of compost. But perhaps it is because so few of us every spend the time to actually watch things decompose.

A beautiful compost pile decomposing before our eyes

Then we traveled on to Troy Gardens...

Troy Gardens exists adjacent to a housing development that originally threatened to swallow up the whole parcel of land. But community groups were able to fight to protect some of the greenspace, which they then converted into the CSA farm and community garden plots. The housing project appeared like a nice place to live. Many houses had solar panels, and unlike most suburban-style developments, residents appeared free to use their lawns and properties as they pleased, growing food, hanging out laundry, etc. We were told that the majority of units were priced for low-income homeownership. But the impression I got from the place, just from the outside, was that it was a little suburban haven for "green" consumers - the ones Jenny Price criticized. People here live close to the land, yet while still maintaining their "green" houses and cars. All the kids of diverse backgrounds who take advantage of Troy Gardens, where do THEY live? Can they hang out at the farm whenever they want, or are they bused in? What kind of "community" participates in the community farm? What are the demographics? These are all important questions, but I could not put them into words at the time. They just hung out in the back of my mind.

The Youth Garden plots at Troy Gardens

I really enjoyed our time at Troy Gardens. After I graduated from college, I interned for a community gardens non-profit in New York for a summer, and had a pretty happy time just hauling, digging, and plowing stuff. I loved exercising my body in the outdoors. The community gardens community was an open and friendly one, although of course a bit strange in that those funding and administering the operation were largely white and well-off (the "virtuous" environmentalists, as Jenny Price might say) and those using the community gardens were decidely more diverse, with many low-income families and people of color. This issue of race and class with gardening and farming can be a touchy one. One participant on our field trip asked the guy from Troy Gardens if anyone ever questioned the idea of encouraging young black urban kids to "connect with nature" through farming, because, of course, their ancestors had been enslaved and forced to work on farms in the United States for centuries. I am not sure if this is a useful question. But I am even less sure that there exists an adequate answer to this question.

Walking through restored tall-grass prairie at Troy Gardens

Academics in nature. Somehow strangely strange.

That evening I attended the Graduate Student Reception and won a raffle again! (I have won a raffle at every ASEH conference I have ever attended. I swear it is not rigged.) I got to talking with old and new friends, and drank locally-produced rum. Yum.

A group of us went out for dinner and drinks and stayed out until midnight. Of course these are the best moments of academic conferences, and for me, they seem to only happen at ASEH. Grad students in environmental history are truly a lovely group of people. I don't know what it is about us. But I am thankful for all the friends I made in Madison. :)

Day 4: Departure

Very tired this last day. But I still managed to attend two more panels, have lunch with a new friend and mentor, and even purchase some locally made cheese to bring home to my cheese-loving fiancee. I didn't take any photos my last day. It was one of those days when you wake up and feel like "I've had enough of Madison."

And so I left Madison in somewhat of a hurry, rushing to catch my bus out of town at 4:30pm. I had stopped looking at the Capitol building everytime I walked past it. It was already becoming less interesting day by day. I imagine people who live in Madison don't even notice it anymore, except when 100,000 people are gathered there to protest legislation that would strip away the collective bargaining rights of public employees. (Remember that?)

For me, the New Yorker, Madison was a quiet and thoughtful place to be for four days. This environment of mellow spaces and kind people fostered very intentional and thoughtful connections between conference participants. I thought to myself that if the conference had been held in New York City we probably would have been a lot rougher with each other and I would have spent a lot less quality time with old and new friends. So, I thank Madison and ASEH for the rejuvinating conference experience! Here I am back in NYC, and when I finish these reflections, I will close the book on Madison and open up my dissertation again. I feel ready to jump back into my scholarship, thanks to the many wonderful professors and grad students I spent time with in Madison who encouraged me to "add oil," as the Chinese say, and keep pushing forward! ("Forward!": the state motto of Wisconsin.)

The iconic "Forward!" statue on the ground of the Capitol faces State Street on a rainy morning.