“Made in L.A.” follows the remarkable story of three Latina immigrants working in Los Angeles sweatshops as they embark on a three-year odyssey to win basic labor protections from a trendy clothing retailer. In intimate verité style, “Made in L.A.” reveals the impact of the struggle on each woman’s life as they are gradually transformed by the experience. Compelling, humorous, deeply human, “Made in L.A.” is a story about immigration, the power of unity and the courage it takes to find your voice.

by lisa on Mar 15, 2009 at 2:36 am

JR is a photographer who takes pictures of ”women affected by poverty and violence, and then past[es] blown-up prints all over their cities.”  He “sticks his pictures to the sides of buses, trains, buildings, and pavement, transforming the towns in which these women live into testaments to their strength and forbearance.”  (Via Jezebel.)  Look carefully at this image:

We often talk about how workers are in jobs segregated by not just class, but race.  This series of pictures is from a San Francisco Chronicle article about flash mobs, or “an international fad, partly anarchistic, partly absurdist, in which a mob of participants suddenly materializes at a public place, engages in odd behavior [like pillow or shaving cream fights] and then disperses.” Diane notes: what would be interesting too is if the flashmob participants were primarily non-white…could black or Latino youth get away with this kind of thing?

The images show mostly white revelers, and then the all-too-familiar city-worker-of-color sent in to clean up the mess:

I also think it’s interesting that, though many of us see such workers in our everyday lives, they are very rarely made visible in news accounts of the world.  This article, specifically, was about the problem and expense involved in cleaning up these flash mobs full of frivolity.  Even so, a worker appears in only two images of 20.

The 8th International Conference on Transformative Learning will be held November 18 – 20, 2009 in Bermuda.  The conference theme, Reframing Social Sustainabilty in a Multicultural World, focuses on transformative learning theory.  According to Dr. Patricia Cranton:

At its core, transformative learning theory is elegantly simple.  Through some event which could be as traumatic as losing a job or as ordinary as an unexpected question, an individual becomes aware of holding a limiting or distorted view.  If the individual critically examines this view, opens herself to alternatives, and consequently changes the way she sees things, she has transformed some part of how she makes meaning out of the world.  Jack Mezirow (1991, 1997, 2000) developed the theory of transformative learning through a careful integration of theories, models, and ideas from a wide variety of sources.  The theory continues to evolve through the inclusion of new perspectives on adult learning and development.

For more information including a call for proposals, click on the following conference link:  http://www.transformativelearningbermuda.com/

Jeffrey Keeler writes a great blog called Silence and Voice that centers on reflective practice, adult learning, and positionality. With a keen eye toward the politics of power, culture, and race his work speaks to some varying contexts of popular and academic critical practice.  Check out: http://silenceandvoice.com/

...posted on Silence and Voice

For another read on positionality and leadership (and a good bib, too), check into Adriana Kezar’s “Expanding Notions of Leadership to Capture Pluralistic Voices: Positionality Theory in Practice” in the Journal of College Student Development. http://http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3752/is_200207/ai_n9120817

From Mayer and Tetrault (1993) in Frames of Positionality: Constructing Meaningnul Dialogues about Race and Gender:

By “positionality” we mean a concept articulated by Linda Alcoff (1983) and others, namely that gender, race, class, and other aspects of our identities are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities.  Knowledge is valid when it includes an acknowledgement of the knower’s specific position in any context, because changing contextual and relational factors are crucial for defining identities and our knowledge in any given situation.

Insider/outsider status and one’s positionality remains a commonly explored subject within the context of humor.  Consider:

“We teach multicultural and social justice education courses to predominantly White, female student teachers. In these courses, we have noticed a common inability among our students to recognize themselves as racially located. In an attempt to guide our students to “see” race, we have relied on an assumption that they recognize their gendered location, and can draw upon it to break out of a colorblind discourse on race. This analysis is our attempt to understand our students’ inability to examine how gender oppression influences their lives. We describe how our students locate gender oppression in the archetypal “ Muslim Woman” and suggest that this locating reinscribes the relations of inequity that we as teacher educators are trying to ameliorate.” – Drs. Ozlem Sensory and Robin Diangleo