University of Wisconsin, Parkside
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: December 1998
Latest update: February 28, 2009
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
patriciaacone@yahoo.com

In these times of great change on both a global and local level, the community becomes a focus of support, empowerment, and collaborative work in adapting to the challenges of the Twenty-First Century. Long ago tribal cohesiveness nurtured the local community. And creative individuals who sought the freedom to take risks and seek new knowledge and paths were held back by community consensus on just how much change how fast was acceptable. Today technology and the accumulation of knowledge leave many of us searching in vain for the tradition and culture that once anchored us to our human community.

I barely manage to learn a new software program before a new version makes me start anew. In the blink of an eye I am behind, no longer current. Just as I am secure in the knowledge and understanding that the world is flat, astrophysicists question that, not in the immediate sense of our planetary system revolving around the sun, but in the sense that the whole universe may be flat, with other universes located on different planes. And this to explain why gravity is a weaker force than the physics we know would seem to predict.

Now imagine the frustrations of the astrophysicists if we try to slow them down to traditions and cultures that might anchor us in the chaos of today's world. The Twenty-First Century is a time of multiverses and multiculturalism. Cosmological Singularity and the Creation of the Universe

* * * * *

Back to the essay before the concentration this summer and fall on registration, voting, and the issues that matter. Will continue to work on the new one for Issue No. 8. jeanne

Welcome to our weekly (most of the time) journal, Dear Habermas, named after one of the great 20th Century thinkers, Jürgen Habermas, who has spent a lifetime theorizing the hope that one day we can all live together without violence, without exploitation, without imperialism, in a democracy legitimized by a system of law. The "DEAR" is our disclaimer to any knowledge of how Habermas himself would answer the questions our students and fellow thinkers tend to ask: "What would Habermas say about . . . " This is not a site on explicating and criticizing the philosophy of Habermas to further new theoretical positions. This is a site for those who, like ourselves and our students, seek a broad understanding of the major conceptual orientations of many disciplines to develop a manageable framework of theory, methods, and praxis that will guide us as we read the texts of daily events and governance issues in our lives.

We try in good faith to provide access to textual and visual material across disciplines that will clarify many perspectives of every issue, for critical thought is our goal, not the profession of any given position. Virtual publication permits us to leap temporal and spatial barriers, and our commitment to answerability facilitates participation for those who have a solid liberal arts background in writing and thinking AND for those who have not yet had that privilege. Our interpretation is that good faith demands that we share our collective editing skills, theoretical references, interpretive skills with those who are trying to present their own validity claim. Bakhtin's answerability means to us that we make a good faith effort to understand the position of the Other, not that we agree with the Other's position.

We cannot claim expertise in all of the many disciplines to which we allude in our discussions. You will need to delve further into the resource links and texts we and others proffer for such expertise. We invite others with greater expertise to enter the dialog and expand our collective knowledge. We are opposed to what we call the "arrogance of knowingness," the certitude that the bit of liberal arts and/or science knowledge to which we have been exposed provides "a right answer" to any of the issues that really matter in our lives today.

This is a learning forum, for dialog with our students at two State Universities, and with the community at large. The priniciple on which the site is founded is that we humans are curious, creative, competent creatures who choose to recognize and honor our interdependence with one another and with the infrastructure in which we are situated. We incessantly search for new and exciting discoveries to live a good life that harms no others, either presently or inadvertently in the future, and that concedes room for creativity, sensitivity and social justice. We believe that liberal arts learning furthers those interests and that a forum such as this enables that learning to take its rightful place in academic and scholarly dialog and with honor, amongst academy texts and out there, in the community to which we belong, and which we serve.

We believe that both the individual and the communal collective are free to follow creative paths and are accountable for their actions to Others who are affected by their decisions. And we believe that today the communal collective extends beyond our nation-states to the entire globe. We also believe that the discipline of sociology has strong roots in philosophy and aesthetics, and that those roots offer an opportunity to fruitfully merge the separate micro and macro perspectives that have permitted the arrogance of "knowingness" and "objectivity" to overshadow the humility appropriate to the ambiguity of knowledge, as reflected by the limits to human knowing.

All are welcome to this forum, for inclusion is one of the paths to participation and legitimacy for all. In our discussions we follow Bakhtin's priniciple of answerability in our belief that everyone has an interest in these issues, and that our mission is to try to understand the different perspectives. Our moderator asks that you refrain from disrespect, name calling, or fear mongering to badger opponents into agreement. We are in the process of building community and working to make this a more loveable world, not imposing our views on anyone.

 

Topics and Issues on the Site:

Topics Index with links to online lectures, review essays, comments, and discussion questions.

Sample Range of Topics: Social justice, economic justice, law, religion, war, torture, incarceration and restorative justice, theory, methods, statistics, qualtiatative analysis, visual sociology, visual criminology, feminist theory, health.

From a sociological perspective of: critical theory, postmodern theory, constitutive theory, feminist theory, philosophy, and answerability for the Other

 

Range of Online News Resources for Issues on the Site

• Newspapers: Labeling here is based on an article by Ashley K. Vroman on the impossiibility of labeling newspapers by ideology. I personally go along with the conclusion of the conservative Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell III: if the paper never met a conservative cause it didn't like, it's conservative, and if it never met a liberal cause it didn't like, it's liberal. But then, what about the Wall Street Journal whose news staff is considered liberal and its editorial staff considered conservative? jeanne

  Liberal Newspapers:

  New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Washington Post
  The Boston Globe - The Chicago Tribune

  Conservative Newspapers:

  The Wall Street Journal - The Washington Times - The New York Post
  Manchester (N.H.) UnionLeader - The Oklahoman

  The Ideological Labeling of These Newspapers:

  "To test my hypothesis that people cannot classify newspapers as liberal or conservative, I began searching for any source attempting to classify newspapers ideologically. The sole article I came upon was "Rating the Top 10, Left and Right" from Insight magazine, written by Keith Russell. Insight rates what they deem to be the top five liberal newspapers and top five conservative newspapers in the country. A possible explanation of why I could only find one article in this search is because people, including scholars and academics and most popular magazines, do not try to measure how liberal or conservative newspapers are. Some may know that they cannot do it reliably and validly because different methods yield different results. Perhaps others do not formulate methods or measures lest they expose problems of reliability and validity. Unsupported assertions may be politically and tactically superior to dubious investigations."

  From "Slandering" the News: How Labelers Cleverly Undermine the Reliability and Validity of Newspapers," by Ashley K. Vroman, May 5, 1999. Consulted by jeanne, May 28, 2008.

   

  
  FastCounter by LinkExchange
  The Counter that Disappeared
  Maybe we could find it at Hogwarts.

  Counter Statistics, Ending February 4, 2007: 280,214 When Our Counter "Disparated"
  Week of:	Total Count:	Week of:	Total Count:	Week of:	Total Count:
  August 29, 2006	269,338	October 27, 2003	274,262;	December 23, 2006	277,866
  September 4, 2006	269,627	November 14, 2006	275,407	January 7, 2007	278,470
  October 2, 2006	272,098	November 17, 2006	275,582	January 14, 2007	278,889
  October 7, 2006	272,631	November 25, 2006	276,073	January 19, 2007	279,151
  October 15, 2006	273,225	December 3, 2006	276,668	January 29, 2007	279,823
  October 20, 2003;	273,719	December 11, 2006	277,290	February 4, 2007	280,214

  
  

  • Record of Site Statistics since September 18, 2001 to February 4, 2007: 280,214 We figure that's a pretty good record for a teaching site. The counter we used simply went out of the free counter business. I'll look for a new one this fall, but it's too much effort for this Summer Break.

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