This page is designed to make you aware of the concepts that matter greatly to me as your teacher. The university expects me to use my best professional judgment in selecting that portion of knowledge we will cover in this class. I am open to the inclusion of other concepts, and certainly of other perspectives. But those covered here provide us with a common ground for discussion and analysis. Be careful to link your work and your class contributions back to the class focus by using these concepts, by showing how they fit or do not fit with your view of the world. No view has special privilege in the classroom. All views should be given a forum.

This page is new. The idea of providing you with links to help you focus is just aborning. Notice that it transfers from the idea of links on the Web. Interdependence. Isn't that neat? Where this approach doesn't help, let me know. Where it does, let me know. We'll keep the best parts and revise the rest.

1. To provide a reference list of the concepts that matter to me, and hence to class focus.

   One of the objectives of a university course is to provide you with a database of knowledge, concepts you should recognize, understand, and be able to discuss. This is a little like knowing what the answers are for Trivial Pursuit.

2. To provide class discussions and interactions that help you translate these concepts into your personal experience and thoughts.

3. To practice recognizing and respecting different perspectives.

   I expect you to learn where reason ends and value judgments begin. Learn to recognize that there are many perspectives on value that go beyond what we have been fond of calling the "core" values we all share, our common humanity, and which no one has ever successfully gotten us to agree upon. This is one the many points of contention between modernists, who believe such values can be discovered, and postmodernists, who believe that our efforts would be spent more productively in learning to tolerate the ambiguity of many perspectives.

   I also expect you to learn that decisions are not always "rational." Affect and ethics count, too. People may have perfectly good cognitive reasons for choosing a given path, and yet do just the opposite. Why? Who knows? But I expect you to take such patterns into account, especially in topics that relate to criminal justice.

4. To practice recognizing the "laying on of alternatives" when it occurs.

   When we pass on knowledge or spiritual understanding, we often include the ritual of "laying on of hands" to symbolize the actual passing of that knowledge and understanding. People who wish to help other people, and that includes lots of us in sociology and psychology, tend to unconsciously adapt that ritual to helping. They see many alternatives, say to suicide. They are convinced that they can somehow "lay those alternatives" on the desperate one, and that somehow the problems will disappear and all will live happily ever after.

   One reason for the emphasis I place on narrative and on the respect for multiple perspectives is to make us aware that our alternatives may not be alternatives for the other. If I have just lost my job, I may go out and distribute a thousand resumes, do seventy three interviews, and know that with each I come closer to my new job. When I offer this plan to an Other, and the Other refuses, that does not seem rational. Nor is it. It's a good plan. It would work in some contexts, in some stories. But this Other is caught in a different story, a different narrative, in which my wonderful plan simply doesn't fit. Only by listening for the Other's story, by accepting that alternatives are contextual to a given story, and by seeking alternatives that might fit the different context can I help the Other.

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• forgiveness

  Forgiveness becomes an issue whenever we undertake public discourse. Past deceptions, past bad faith, past refusal or mere insensitivity to hearing claims in good faith make us unwilling to trust. A belief that ours is the "only possible right way" makes it hard for us to trust. And often those who have different validity claims have never been taught to express them in ways that we can hear past the wicked little unstated assumptions of privilege.

  Thus, forgiveness may take many forms in our class focus:

  • A willingness to grant that the Other does have some claim in which he or she believes, even if we cannot understand it as presented. (Forgiving the Other for lacking skills of communication in which we have been trained, and which we assume are shared by all. We weren't even aware of the training. See Peggy McIntosh's list of ways in which privilege advantage us. pp.207-216 in Images of Color.)

  • A willingness to understand that we may not be able to understand another's claim because of unstated assumptions we are making. (Forgiving ourselves for the advantages we unwillingly, and without the asking, possess.

  Other references on forgiveness: Forgiveness

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• good faith

  Good faith, as we use it in the discussion of public discourse, means a willingness to leave aside our unstated assumptions, to listen for clues that might help us understand the context and meaning of the Other's validity claim.

  Good faith does NOT mean that we have to agree with the Other's validity claim. We may hear it in good faith and still disagree. But in the interest of legitimacy, and of allowing each citizen to have a voice in the system of law by which he/she must live, we must make a genuine effort to understand.

  Good faith DOES mean that we make a genuine effort to help the Other express the claim he/she is trying to make. Often, when battling what we consider to be the unjust exercise of privilege, the only language available to us is the language of the law and legislature. So we try to express our claims in a form as much like that of prevailing claims as possible. In just this way, lawyers try to express their arguments in words as close as possible to those arguments that have won in the past. But those past arguments, and that language evolved from a context that operated on the assumptions of privilege. See Minow. Good faith suggests that we might be able to help reword the claims in language that privilege can understand. Peggy McIntosh (p. 214, in Images of Color) has specified ways that she can do this: "co-presenting on white-skin privilege with persons of color to share podium time and honoraria, . . . trying to listen and then respond as an ally to participants of color in mostly white organizations, . . . doing homework on, taking seriously, and disseminating words and works by those who do not have white privilege. . ." How's that for starters?

  Old notes from

  Other references on good faith: Good Faith

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• forums

  The co-optation of forums is so common that we have learned not to see it. "You may not speak. You are not a member of this body." What powerful words! And where, then, may I speak and be heard by these people who are making the decisions that govern my life?

  It is often more subtle than that. A woman speaks. The dialog seems to skip right over her voice. Then, minutes later, a man speaks - the same idea. The dialog turns with praise for his ideas. What does the woman do? Carp, and be considered jealous? Go in silence, and be not heard? These are terrible dilemmas.

  A forum is co-opted when permission to be heard in good faith is controlled by a given interest group. Where may you speak? Where may you publish? And what controls access to that forum and to that forum's ability to reach the community?

  Added on October 4, 2004:

  When we speak of transforming dominant discourse, one of the transformations we seek is the good faith hearing of every member of our community. Consider, for example, the extent to which we have silenced the "immigrant." You can't tell by looking whether an Arab or a Mexican or a Cuban or a Korean or any of most other nationalities are citizens or not. This is the source of the terrible emphasis on "profiling," stopping people for investigation because they "look like" they might belong to a suspected group. Consider the driver's license. Every one of us who drives in this country uses our driver's license for identification. We have one; we pass. The refusal to allow illegal immigrants a driver's license withholds from them one simple icon of making us real, including us. Yet employers continue to employ them. Cheaper labor, but emphasis on their exclusion. Dominant discourse for "driver's license" is "legal." And many groups are fighting desperately to preserve that dominant discourse. What if we changed "driver's license" to "responsible and insured to drive," (which it would seem to logically mean) in the dominant discourse? Wouldn't we be safer? Wouldn't we be sending a more open message to those who come into this country to do the jobs we need done?

  There is presently no community forum where we gather amicably to talk about these issues. When we speak of transforming dominant discourse we mean that we need to create our own forums in our local neighborhoods and gathering places where we encourage awareness and discussion of these issues. Transforming dominant discourse at this level is a way of creating forums where there have been none. And each forum facilitates human connections where there have been none. The media represent grand and expensive forums that only the corporations or the government or the rich can gain access to. But those forums are not interactive. They don't permit you to ask questions, think it over, and debate it; they just spend billions convincing us that VIOXX is good for us and won't kill us. If every time they prove to be so deadly wrong about the information and directions they pour forth at us, we talk about the uncertainty that pervades their truth as well as ours, we are creating interactive forums. Interactive forums are what we need to exercise our voices for governance discourse.

  Other references on forums: Forums

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• interdependence

  "The concept of Open Society is based on on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth." This is the motto of the Soros Foundation Network. The interview with Soros in the current edition (Today is January13, 1999.) of the New York Review of Books deals with the current global financial crisis. As a billionaire engaged in buying and selling other currencies, part of this crisis was attributed to him. He has turned his attention and his wealth to the Soros Foundation, through which he now tries to promote global peace and growth. This has to be a remarkable example of interdependence: he earned his wealth through market activities, and he now recognizes publicly, in his work and in his writing, that unfettered markets could be the greatest danger we face. He specifically says in the New York Review of Books interview that when he acts as a businessman, he acts as an individual with his own self-interest as central, but when he acts through the foundation he acts in the community interest. The old tension Habermas describes. And Soros believes that we have lost the emphasis on community that once balanced those interests.

  Interdependence means that what we do influences the system, and that the resulting system configuration, in its turn, influences us, so that we then act and once again alter the system configuration. None of us can react in a vacuum. We all affect the system and the system affects us. When we set up Dear Habermas we learned to use links on the Web. Now, one year later, we find ourselves applying that concept in real time, real life to the teaching of academic discourse and critical thought. Thus we have a Feedback link on which we discuss how students can "link" their knowledge to other knowledge from other sources, creating "connected knowing." We begin to move beyond the limits not only of disciplines, but also of media.

  Anthony Giddens once described the sociologist's job as that of making people aware of the social system. As they become aware, they alter their behaviors, to make the system work better for them, and that, in turn, alters the system. Then the sociologist must study the system again, for it has changed, and we must make people aware of those changes so they can function more effectively in the system. Sociologists just might be the legitimate input Habermas was looking for to turn a non-learning system (one that keeps marching on punishing people who break the rules without wondering if the system needs changing) into a learning system (one that is reflexive). It was Anthony Giddens who said that Habermas was one of the 20th Century's greatest thinkers.

  Other references on interdependence:
  Recreation, Environmentalism, and the New Global Community
  "They Ain't Us

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• diversity

  Diversity is often used interchangeably with difference. We chose to locate diversity as an element of discourse, defining it as the existence of multiperspectives. Although theorists and real people both bicker over the extent to which reality is "real" or a "social construction," few in the world today can successfully deny that our world, real or constructed, includes many and divergent perspectives.

  It is in this sense of the many perspectives that must "get along together" for us to have effective public discourse that we are using the term, diversity. Public discourse must not exclude any who are governed by that discourse.

  Martha Minow's work focusses on difference, which we would here define as any visible or hidden stigma that permits discrimination against the person having the stigma. Gender, race, ehnicity, disability, age, time in prison, financial success, all stigmatize, all permit discrimination. In Making All the Difference, Minow explains how that difference links to the diversity of public discourse:

  "As developed by lawyers and theorists during the mid-twentieth century, rights analysis itself cannot remedy the exclusion and degradation of people defined as different by experts and majorities in this society. Despite its liberatory rhetoric of inclusion and fundamental entitlement, the analysis of rights, as developed in constitutional and statutory judicial doctrines in this country, runs aground on the shoals of the two-track system of legal treatment. One track offers basic rights to self-determination and participation for those who satisfy the criteria of rational thought and independence; the other offers special treatment and, quite often, social and political exclusion. . . .

  "Under a renewed commitment to provide the same treatment to all, [rights analysis] reconfirms institutional arrangements that deny special accomodations. The result may make those with any kinds of "difference" worse off in light of existing institutions. Thus efforts to elliminate gender bias in divorce law have removed alimony and child custody provisions that preferred women, and some observers attribute to these reforms the increased impoverishment and worsened bargaining position of women following divorce. Rights analysis offeres release from hierarchy and subordination to those who can match the picture of the abstract, autonomous individual presupposed by the theory of rights. For those who do not match that picture, application of rights analysis can be not only unresponsive but also punitive."

  Other references on diversity: Diversity

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