Visions of the San Joaquin Valley

15 Jan

I spent time yesterday looking at Barron Bixler’s photographs of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley.  He’s arranged his photos into a beautiful slideshow set to music called A New Pastoral: Views of the San Joaquin Valley.  I’ve formed my own vision of the San Joaquin Valley over the last few years, and it’s fascinating to see how someone else views and presents the region.  Some of Bixler’s photos depict scences familiar to me – stark  landscapes of row-crops, orchards with factories in the background, agricultural machinery, railroads and storage facilities.  I loved seeing these familiar places through his eye. Others show places I’ve never been, like the inside of an industrial milking facility.

Bixler’s photos are entirely devoid of people – they depict industrial agriculture through the landscape and built environment it creates.  Matt Black’s photos, on the other hand, center on the immigrants and farmworkers living and working in the San Joaquin Valley.  They are entirely human. I enjoyed checking his captions to see if the small towns he has depicted were places I’ve spent time in too (mostly not).  He has also created a powerful digital project about the birth defects in Kettleman City.

David Bacon’s work doesn’t focus on the San Joaquin Valley per se, but he has a number of photo collections of farmworkers, immigrants, and UFW advocacy set there.  See his work here and here.

Finally, Ken Light’s new photographic book, Valley of Shadows and Dreams, will be published soon by Heyday Press.  I saw some of his work on this project when I took his documentary photography class several years ago at UC Berkeley, and can’t wait to see the finished product.  Check out the photo on the book’s cover, it’s gorgeous.

And, here’s a link to my own humble efforts to photograph the San Joaquin Valley.  I try to show the grave environmental health problems facing this region, but also the hard work being done by its residents to change things. I also try to convey my sense of this under-appreciated part of our state as beautiful in its own right. An updated version of this collection will be online soon, as well as a nifty new collage that combines new photos with oral history.

Meet Greenaction’s newest board member… me!

17 Dec

Last week I was formally voted onto the board of directors at Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. I’ve been interested in board-memebership ever since I first started working in the non-profit sector, so I’m looking forward to this new role.  Greenaction is an environmental justice organization that works with poor communities and communities of color threatened by high pollution levels. I see them as a sort of “green” version of the Red Cross that works with communities in distress to help them get relief.

I first began working with Greenaction when I was conducting my master’s research at UC Davis.  I approached Greenaction’s executive director, Bradley Angel, as well as leaders at a number of other organizations active in the Central Valley, to pitch them my research project and ask for help finding people to interview.  Bradley became a member of the advisory committee that later helped me develop the 25 Stories from the Central Valley project, and we’ve stayed in touch since.

My new role on the Greenaction board will provide interesting new opportunities and challenges.  The risk for scholars who are actively involved with the populations that they research is that they might find it difficult to step outside the group’s dominant views on their research topic to pursue their own analysis.  On the other hand, more intimate involvement often provides researchers access and insight into their research topic at a level that far exceeds what is available to more distant observers.  So far I’ve felt that the benefits outweigh the risks in my own work.  I’ve been explicit with my new colleagues that the opinions I express in my writing may not always agree with their own.  Certainly activists groups are very familiar with internal disagreement, so in a way this is nothing new.  Still, UCSC Prof. Flora Lu and I are the first scholars to ever sit on Greenaction’s board, so we’ll be taking things one step at a time.

Greenaction just celebrated their 15 year anniversary, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the rich history of West Coast environmental justice activism of which they’ve been an integral part. I’m also excited about this opportunity to give back to the community that has shared their lives and stories so generously with me.

Greenaction board members, staff and friends. Dec. 9, 2011.

Teaching classical sociological theory through the media

4 Dec

Each quarter I try structuring my classes differently so that I can experiment with a variety of teaching styles. This quarter I worked as a teaching assistant for my department’s “Classical Sociological Theory” class, which covers changes in European and U.S society that occurred during and after the Industrial Revolution.  I required each student to sign up for one week in which to turn in a relevant media piece and an accompanying one-page essay.  Here are the instructions I gave them:

Each of you are responsible for finding a news article, short video, cartoon, photo collection or other piece of media relevant to our readings once during the quarter. Your assignment is to select a media piece (10 min. max) that will help the rest of the students relate what we are reading about to current events, or help them understand one of the week’s theories better in its historical context.  E-mail me a link to this item the Friday before discussion section, along with a one page type-written paper describing how you suggest using the item in class and what its strengths and limitations are for understanding the relevant theory. 

I really liked this assignment.  I designed it primarily to give me ideas to use as a starting place for what to do in class each week, but it has educational value for the students too.  Each week I had between 5-8 one-page papers to skim for ideas.  I didn’t always end up using something that the students suggested, but they always got my mind moving in the right direction.

Sometimes I organized the entire class around one or more media pieces, and other times they played much more marginal roles.  I used them in a variety of ways:

  • showed the media piece and asked the students to identify which theory it best illustrated
  • showed the media piece and asked the students what a particular theorist would think of the events depicted
  • prepared an ungraded quiz in which the students first watched a series of media clips, then individually responded to written questions that asked them to identify which theory the clips best illustrate
  • played the clips while the students came into class or while I took attendance to set the tone for class
  • showed clips to give students a sense of the historical context in which a particular theorist lived

When everything works well, the media pieces help make theory less abstract and more memorable, help students relate to theory by showing its relevance to current events, and test the boundaries of student understanding of theory by asking them to apply it in a new context and identify what parts of the theory fit and what don’t.

Next time I use this approach, I’d like to spend more time discussing the limitations of using the theory in question to interpret the media piece.  I expect this would help the students understand the theories in a more nuanced way, but I often ran out of time to do it.

Mini media library

Here are my favorite pieces. Some of these were submitted by students, some I found myself, and some are from other teaching assistants and faculty.  I did not use all of them in class.

Feudalism

Marx

Weber

Durkheim

  • Mechanical society: Baraka clip

The enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment

Foucault

← Older Entries