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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 2, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: August 2, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Reading Photographs

1. Introduction Why I chose to share this reading.
2. Focus: Main point of this reading.
3. Reading Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.
4. Concepts: Concepts and Key Words.
5. Discussion Discussion questions.
6. Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses What this has to do with our class.

* * *

Shared Reading: Honoring Ethnic Roots

Introduction:

• These photos were included in because I wanted to give you the flavor of those readings. Now, I would like you to turn to reading the photographs themselves.Suppose I told you nothing but what you have here with the titles given to the photos by the website and the NYTImes, and the title of the Shared Reading itself: Eliciting Photos as a Component of Postmodern Identity.

Focus:

• I would liike you to come away from this reading more aware of how photos may be as biased as words, of how postmodernism captures identity that is interdependent with many interpersonal relations and structural contexts.

Concepts and Key Words:

• setting: location identifiable/not identifiable
• background: draws/doesn't draw attention
• people: age range, amount of photo given to people, activity/no activity, posed/not posed, mood
• color: bright, earth tones, black and white, feelings
• shapes: proximity, relation, conveyance of mood

Reading:

• 
  (Left to right) Princess Kimi Nakaba, Miss Tomodachi Kristi Higa, First Princess Ellie McFatridge
  Nisei Week Queen Nicole Cherry
  Princess Linda Hatakeyama, Princess Eva Hosoda
  From Nisei Week
  This is one of the traditions , the court, that has been part of the celebration since 1934.
  
  Photo by Monica Almeida/ The New York Times Japanese-American families prepared costumes before a traditional dance at the Obon Festival last month in Culver City, Calif.

  
  Photo by Monica Almeida/ The New York Times
  Minoru Nishida, a student at U.C.L.A., practices with a Japanese taiko drum group in a rehearsal studio on the U.C.L.A. campus. They perform in traditional dress at local cultural festivals.

Discussion Questions:

1. Which of the photos is most posed?

   For me, the Queen and Princesses of the court.

2. What can I conclude sociologically from this photo?

Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:

• Agencies:
  Sample linking: Art and cultural agencies have a lot to do with preserving ethnic and national heritages. These are often privately run with contributions from the corporate sector and varying amounts of governmental support. Consider for example the importance of Self-Help Graphics to the cultural legacy of East Los Angeles.

• Criminal Justice:
  Sample linking: Ways in which some groups are underrepresented in the unstated assumptions of our theories. How does this reading serve to illustrate adversarialism, mutuality, retribution, revenge, illocutionary understanding, the definition and operation of the criminal justice system?

• Law:
  Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?

• Moot Court:
  Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?

• Women in Poverty:
  Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?

• Race, Gender, Class:
  Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?

• Religion:
  Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?

• Love !A:
  Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?