A Public-Sphere Teaching Site,
Dear Habermas
Daily Site Journal
All underlines represent HOT LINKS. Just click on them.
University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH)
Created: December, 1998
Latest update: June 29, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP.
Our Mission - Turning Ethics and Justice and Transparency and Accountability into Governance Discourse, that someday we may have the public-sphere that Habermas posited.
Our Goals - To Learn that Bullying Lives well beyond the Schoolyard and to Understand that Humans Can Rise Above Their Basest Instincts
Who Are We? - Women Who Cared Enough to get Ph.D.s and Then to Believe in Them - in what we learned, that is.
Dear Habermas. Site is being updated, all links both internal and external being checked and dated for more efficient operation. To follow our progress in this reconstruction, daily reports can be found at What's New?. . . . . . Dear Habermas, a journal and forum created and maintained interdependently with faculty, students, and community folks interested in sharing community-focussed activities while engaging in conversation on local-to-international social and economic justice issues that matter to us all. The site's founders and moderators, Jeanne Curran and Susan Takata, are committed liberals, equally devoted to social and economic fairness and justice, and to Juürgen Habermas' overriding concern that we humans should learn to live without killing one another over our differences: ethnicity, color, technical superiority, geographical origin, theology, philosophy, or nation-state allegiance, or all the other differences we seem to be able to dream up. Dear Habermas, dedicated to that Habermasian principle, is devoted to furthering understanding and respect for all of us, through our public sphere conversations, both within the academy and in our everyday encounters. comes from default.htm
Daily records of changes and/or additions on Dear Habermas, mainatined for purposes of site history, research projects, and keeping all the various community projects up to date. jeanne (webmistress) comes from siteadd.htm
Template for Weekly Newsletter from Dear Habermas, A Public-Sphere Teaching Site designed to provide community projects to develop good governance discourse." Comes from template: jcls380x.htm
"Retired Cal State univ. professor, engaged with website co-author in cross-country research on using public-sphere activities to disseminate information on current issues that matter to all of us.
"Various kinds of activities are designed to appeal to both males and females across age groups. The activities were previously activities were in our classes, and resulted in public-sphere Exhibitions and sharing.
"Issues that matter include the economy , social safety nets in relation to capital accrual for reinsertion in the community, education, both of children and of all of us in the interest of staying informed and alert. The website permits us to see that facts are checked for accuracy and that many perspectives are explained." From OMM 365. jeanne
Here's the material we've been working on, with jeanne's brief explanations of what she's changed or added and why. Jeanne is our webmistress. From these comments you can follow how Susan and jeanne are adapting their universities' projects in research and evidence-based understanding of complex social and justice issues to a much broader project of community-building through evidence-based discussions on issues that matter to all of us in future governance discourse at multiple levels. Comes from siteadd.htm.
butflynbusc13.jpg
Kept working on this image. Would love to have some real art software, but this will have to do for now. Buscaglia is the balance to Habermas' view of governance discourse. Granted I have had little experience of first-rate schools, but I sense that Buscaglia's love and respect for the special education children he specialized in makes all the difference for most of us. My theory is that adding Buscaglia's humanity and love of the Other to Hirschman's sense of evidence-based reasoned argument on issues,, might just get us to the public-sphere governance discourse Habermas and so many of us sought. jeannejclstmpl.htm
Weekly Online Materials that serve as background for theory and methods notes, and that follow our discussions as we develop them.Volume 9, No. 11, Week of August 6, 2001."A Joint Declaration on Collaborative Sites
by Olivier Urbain and Jeanne Curran
Transcend Art and Peace Site
Dear Habermas Site
"Here's the material we've been working on daily, in chronological order, with jeanne's (webmistress) brief explanations of what she's changed or added and why. From the comments you can follow how Susan and jeanne are adapting their universities' projects in research and evidence-based understanding of complex social and justice issues to a much broader project of community-building through evidence-based discussions on issues. From siteadd.htm, 06.16.2011.
06.15.2011: Shhh!!! There are so many people disrespecting others, failing to be responsible for knowing what they're supposed to know to fit their titles, and failing to make an honest effort to add creativity and caring for each other to their efforts at whatever, that we've begun to despair. So it's time to work on our Public-Sphere. Habermas would almost certainly agree with us that we all need to practice listening in good faith, practicing our humanity in its fullest meaning. And so it's to tune Dear Habermas in to our communities, local, national, cross-national, internet, virtual and real, and set up practices in each of these communities on how to behave when you're a human, and how to grow the skills that fit you best, share them with as many others as you can, and then collaborate on building a better world for each and every one of us. You'll find both theory and practice, real groups and virtual, liberal and conservative efforts here, always free to all those who want to join us, right here on the site, and available to you free for the taking into your own communities. from an old version of jcls3803.htm
jeanne and susan
From CSUDH in 2009:
Welcome to our weekly journal, Dear Habermas, named after one of the great 20th Century thinkers, Jurgen 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 a validity claim.
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 "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 an academic 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 answerable 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 our site, for inclusion is one of the paths to participation and legitimacy for all.
Online Reference Sources for Conversations that Matter
- 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? Does that make them a tad schizophrenic? Not unless we all are. None of us humans are completely inflexible. Sometimes we think like liberals, and sometimes we think like conservatives, and sometimes we just plain forget to think before we speak.
Luckily, journalism has worked hard at maintaining a thoughtful and rational standard that we be honest and fair in what we report. Today we need to think on this a little more, because some popular media are more concerned with reporting "opposing" than "fair" perspectives, and are terribly careless with the meaning of "facts." jeanne 06.25.2011
Liberal Newspapers:New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Washington Post
The Boston Globe - The Chicago TribuneConservative Newspapers:The Wall Street Journal - The Washington Times - The New York Post
Manchester (N.H.) UnionLeader - The Oklahoman- Los Angeles County Library. Online service.
- World Cat Online search for finding books available in your local librairies. This may have become far more essential as funding for librairies is being cut. Check it out.
- PolitiFact.com
PolitiFact.com will give you extensive information on what's truth and what's rumor and what's not in news reporting and viral vidoes and e-mails. This is offered as a Public Service by the St. Petersburg Times, for which we thank them profusely. These are times for checking your facts.
- Farlex Free Online Dictionary:
The script that lets you double click on any word you want defined is not working properly. But the dictionary works very effectively if you type in a word and enter it, either here or on its own site. I'll try to fix this some time this summer, but for now, we've placed it on the Home page and on the first page of each issue. That's so you can always get to the dictionary by going to Current or Previous Issue, or by going to Home. Susan and I need this tool always available. We hope you do too. jeanne and Susan.
