Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change by Jeff Grabill
The Walking Dead Season 5, Episode 11
Carol: You really think we are going to find out what we need to know just by watching?
Daryl: It’s where we start…
While munching on chips and watching, they talk to each other, discussing how they are now compared to how they use to be. How they have changed. Their perspectives from the inside – of themselves – and other’s perspectives. Carol reflects on when she was a mom and an abused wife and how the zombie experiences have changed her… She starts to talk about herself almost in past tense until Daryl inserts, “Hey… We ain’t ashes…”
Charting Maps
The Walking Dead Season 5, Episode 11
Carol: You really think we are going to find out what we need to know just by watching?
Daryl: It’s where we start…
While munching on chips and watching, they talk to each other, discussing how they are now compared to how they use to be. How they have changed. Their perspectives from the inside – of themselves – and other’s perspectives. Carol reflects on when she was a mom and an abused wife and how the zombie experiences have changed her… She starts to talk about herself almost in past tense until Daryl inserts, “Hey… We ain’t ashes…”
Charting Maps
While reading Grabill’s text, I kept wondering what is the difference between mapping and postmodern mapping? After considering how he discusses it, I dug a little deeper to see how others have used and discussed maps and mapping. In chuckling irony, I charted what I learned about maps (above).
Overall, I came to the conclusion that Bourdieu discusses maps as nouns, Grabill and others discuss them (postmodern maps) in terms of verbs. Postmodern mapping offers tools to examine and disrupt space, which is inherently social. There is potential (good and bad), (dis)agency, (re)imaging, (re)presenting… in the act of mapping, much like there is in doing research. Your process and its intention and/or product(s) could be used by others in many different ways, so it is important to be mindful of what those possibilities may be and intentional about what your research means to you.
1 Question and 2 Ideas
Is Grabill’s use of postmodern mapping just an example of what Bourdieu discusses as a objective, disinterested stance formed without practical mastery?
Grabill seems to be saying we should give up and accept outsider status… you can use service learning as an ‘in’.
Subjectivity rather than role/identity dynamism, multiplicity, and fragmentation of people and positions – way to ‘see’ a form of subjectivity, build a new conceptualization
We ain’t ashes.
It’s an interesting and appropriate statement that could be useful in considering some our role as researchers.
Carol and Daryl aren’t ashes; they aren’t dead. But, in their context, the dead aren’t ashes either. They aren’t walkers or biters or however one refers to the undead on the Walking Dead. Carol and Daryl and us… we are still participating in meaningful ways. And as long as we aren’t ashes, that is what we will do: act in meaningful ways.
Being alive doesn’t mean sitting and watching… on the sidelines and getting an idea or outline of what it means to be living. We will be involved in life in messy ways. Meaningful research reflects the idea that we ain’t ashes.
Overall, I came to the conclusion that Bourdieu discusses maps as nouns, Grabill and others discuss them (postmodern maps) in terms of verbs. Postmodern mapping offers tools to examine and disrupt space, which is inherently social. There is potential (good and bad), (dis)agency, (re)imaging, (re)presenting… in the act of mapping, much like there is in doing research. Your process and its intention and/or product(s) could be used by others in many different ways, so it is important to be mindful of what those possibilities may be and intentional about what your research means to you.
1 Question and 2 Ideas
Is Grabill’s use of postmodern mapping just an example of what Bourdieu discusses as a objective, disinterested stance formed without practical mastery?
Grabill seems to be saying we should give up and accept outsider status… you can use service learning as an ‘in’.
Subjectivity rather than role/identity dynamism, multiplicity, and fragmentation of people and positions – way to ‘see’ a form of subjectivity, build a new conceptualization
We ain’t ashes.
It’s an interesting and appropriate statement that could be useful in considering some our role as researchers.
Carol and Daryl aren’t ashes; they aren’t dead. But, in their context, the dead aren’t ashes either. They aren’t walkers or biters or however one refers to the undead on the Walking Dead. Carol and Daryl and us… we are still participating in meaningful ways. And as long as we aren’t ashes, that is what we will do: act in meaningful ways.
Being alive doesn’t mean sitting and watching… on the sidelines and getting an idea or outline of what it means to be living. We will be involved in life in messy ways. Meaningful research reflects the idea that we ain’t ashes.