blog.shimer

It Begins...

"I wasn't always a feminist. In fact, I used to think feminists were sexually undesirable and perpetually angry. (Boy, was I wrong. Feminists are perpetually desirable, and I am sexually angry.)" Anastasia Higginbotham, "Chicks Goin' At It"

     So, the school year is wrapping up.  This week is final conferences and then registration.  The graduating seniors have their senior dinner Wednesday night and Commencement is on Saturday.  Soon it will be only summer, summer, summer.  Which of course means something different for everyone.
     For those of us who are already "real" adults, the same jobs that we have worked for years will continue on.  Some of us who don't have jobs now, maybe we'll pick one up for a few months.  Some of us may even continue working Federal Work Study at Shimer for the next few months.  Some of us will be leaving this place forever, scattering in the wind to the four corners of the world.  Some of us will work internships whether they are paid, unpaid, or paid through Shimer.  Some of us will go home to families that we haven't seen in months.
     As for me, I will be remaining in Chicago all summer.  I have: begun my internship at the Chicago Dramatists, started my FWS job, registered for a summer class, commenced the sad process of looking for new roommates, and started the reading for my thesis (which is where I found the introductory quote).
     Some people have told me that I am crazy for starting my thesis so soon, but people have started sooner than I!  I have a little under a year to complete my project, which is already looking daunting.  Currently, I am halfway through the first book on my reading list, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. It is pretty wonderful so far, I would recommend (at least the first half of) it to anyone interested in knowing a little more about feminism.

Hello from Oxford

Hello all. 

I write from Oxford, where I am finishing both my thesis and my last semester at Shimer. My thesis, convoluted and broad as it is, has shaped up nicely, and I hope to defend it before graduating in May. When you break it down, the thesis argues that theory on political oppressions should utilize non-normative thinking and be, rather than overly abstract, grounded in particular contexts. In my view, the best theory is that which engages in particulars and, in so doing, uncovers potential areas of change. Theory that is contextually grounded breaks down the problematic binaries that follow from normative thinking, as well as the separation between theorists and non-academics. My argument references, utilizes, and/or critiques the work of 'canonical' thinkers such as Rene Descartes, John Locke, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. But because I am most interested in post-structuralism, feminism, and contemporary political struggles, I focus on the work of Michel Foucault, Carole Pateman, Jane Flax, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Cornel West, Chandra Mohanty, Joy James, and Angela Davis.

But instead of boring you with all of that (and continuing to name-drop rather than actually explain my thesis), I will share some pretty pictures with you. 

An Oxford street around 7 A.M. Amazingly, I tend to wake up early here.

Cornmarket Street, Oxford. 

Pub scrabble, complete with the back of my head. 

 

Doin' the tourist thing.

Weirdly delicious English snacks.

Paddington Station, London. 

The Underground, an urban transit system that puts Chicago's to shame.

The London Eye. 

Visiting the British Museum, which is full of Egyptian artifacts that should all be in Egypt. 

Warning: English pubs are not one-size-fits-all. 

A street in London. 

Renting a car and struggling to drive on the left side of the road, my brother Joel, Kieran, and I drove up to visit Heath Iverson ('10) in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Left to right: Heath, me, Kieran, and Joel)

Edinburgh is gorgeous.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures.

 

The wonders that arose from my Shimer thesis

Hi, I'm Jessa and I graduated last May. I've been doing some pretty cool stuff that has come, in part, out of my thesis work at Shimer. At Shimer, everyone writes a thesis during their senior year. It is a big project, with a lot of writing to do, and you work on it for the entire school year.

I titled my thesis "The parallel universes of mental health care professionals and patients" (you can read it here) and it is about the gap in perspectives on mental health care between professionals and patients. After I graduated, I bound several copies of my thesis, gave them paper covers, and sent them off with letters to several mental health care professionals I have met in the past. Only one of those professionals responded to me, but it was a very positive response, so I was happy with that. I posted my thesis in a few internet communities of professionals. There I got a lot of negative responses from professionals who were offended that I compared historical mental health care to slavery and current mental health care to racism (you'll have to read my thesis if you want that juicy detail).

I also gave my thesis to a few professionals I still see on a regular basis. One of those professionals was my psychiatrist. When I summarized my thesis for her, she told me that there was a Family Patient Advisory Council getting started at the hospital where I met her. I tracked down the person who was organizing this council and now I am a member. We've only had two meetings so far, but I have already been pleasantly surprised at how well my challenges to the norms in mental health care have been received by the professionals in the council. (When I introduced myself and mentioned my thesis and Shimer, someone had actually heard of Shimer! Turns out he is a professor at IIT, though he still calls us Shimmer.)

At the most recent meeting of the council, one of the nurse administrators invited me to give a presentation in a training/continuing education session for the hospital staff on the topic of building rapid rapport with patients. I was so excited for that opportunity that I completely forgot to be scared. (People who know me will know this is highly unusual. For the rest of you: I was, not so very long ago, so shy that I had to be taught how to make eye contact, at this very hospital. I had to be taught that eye contact does not prohibit blinking and that one should not copy the blinks of one's eye contact partner. I was told that is creepy to copy blinks.) In my presentation I talked about the biggest rapport killer I experienced, being invalidated by the professionals, and that invalidation can be mostly eradicated if professionals communicate with their patient in an assertive, direct, and respectful communication style, the same one they teach their patients to engage in within their own social circles. When I finished speaking, I let the professionals ask questions, discuss things with me, and I offered them a few situations that I have experienced, ones that were handled badly when I was involved, so that they could brainstorm ways of handling these situations better. It was a very positive experience; the professionals allowed me to challenge them and they challenged me back, but in a "help us understand you better" way rather than an invalidating way.

When I wrote my thesis, I knew I wanted to write about some of the objections I have to the way mental health care currently works because I knew this was my only chance to do so in an academic setting (I do intend to go to grad school, but for library conservation) which I thought might lend me a little more credibility and which I knew would help me write a better paper. Perhaps I would have done the rest of these things anyway, but I'm definitely glad to have written my thesis and have something to give people that says, "This is what I think of mental health care." I'm ecstatic at the opportunities I've had so far to share my thoughts on mental health care with professionals and I am looking forward to creating more opportunities to do this.

Also, I've since started my own, very little, blog. It is called Made with Awesome and it is mostly on various topics concerning mental health care with a little bit of arts, crafts, and library conservation thrown in for good measure.

Thininking Theses

       

I've mentioned already that I am a junior at Shimer, however most of the other Shimerians here with me in Oxford are in their last year and are thus working on their Senior theses. The idea behind the thesis is that it affords Shimer students a culminating opportunity to really do substantive work on a project or idea that we are passionate about in a way that draws on everything we've learned while at the college. Among some of the really interesting things my comrades here are doing are theses involving research projects, recording music, or translating poetry. All of this puts me in mind to start pondering what I think I'd like to do for my own thesis next year and just this week I think I've begun to develop an idea that I am really excited about.

       I've always been really interested in vision, the visual arts and all the fertile connections there are to be made between them and philosophy. I am especially interested in the way that our ideas about seeing get used as a kind of metaphor for both knowledge and illusion. These kinds of associations can be traced back at least to Plato, who, in his famous “Allegory of the Cave” in the Republic used the play of shadows cast on a cave's wall to illustrate the deceptive world of appearances on earth and the symbol of blinding sunlight to represent the eternal truth of the forms.

But I think what I would particularly like to explore in a thesis is the way slightly more modern philosophers use the model of sight to try to understand the problems of human consciousness, or, more specifically what many 19^th and 20^th century German philosophers would begin to call 'false consciousness' or 'ideology.'

    Take, for example, Ludwig Fuerbach's musing on the eye in his book The Essence of Christianity.“The eye looks into the starry heavens [and] gazes at that light [and] sees its own nature and its own origin. Hence Man [sic] elevates himself above the earth only with the eye.” Without going into to too much detail about his philosophy, I can say that Feuerbach uses this model of the human eye, seeing it's own divine nature in the heavens, to propel an argument that challenges Christian doctrines. Not that he wants to get rid of religion, in fact, he actually places a high value on it, because he thinks it expresses, though in an inverted form, humanity's idea of its true essence. Feuerbach argues that though religion represents human creativity as if it depends on God, in reality God is just the projection of an ideal image of humanity's own capacities. Feuerbach goes back to optical metaphors to try to explain this inversion and the projection of human potential into the idea of God saying it is like “the double refraction of the rays of light.” Feuerbach thought that if he could get people to change the way they interpreted their own nature—to stop inverting their own potential through a prism of false consciousness—then many of humanities problems could be solved.

    Karl Marx, who came along shortly after Feuerbach, thought all this talk about ideals and essences was flaky. Writing about Feuerbach, Marx famously said “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marx, the character of human life doesn't come from contemplation of starry abstractions; it comes from real-world activity. Marx thinks that Feuerbach makes a big mistake in trying to improve human conditions by simply getting people to think differently. In fact, for Marx putting ideas before action (or in the lingo of philosophers, theory before praxis) obscures our consciousness of our relationships to the world and each other. To summarize the disagreement more succinctly: Feuerbach thinks that abstract ideas determine human the nature of human existence; but Marx thinks human actions produce all our ideas. The problem of false consciouness as Marx see it, is that people (and I think he would include Feuerbach here) fail to see the role active production plays in the formation of our ideas. But what is so interesting to me is that Marx picks up, and even elaborates on the optical tropes used by Feuerbach to make this point. In The German Ideology Marx writes that “men [sic] are the produces of their conceptions, ideals, etc. [...] If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera-obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

    Wouldn't it be really interesting to trace these and other strains of thought linking vision to false consciousness in relation to the development of optical technologies such as the lens or the photograph or film?

    I think this kind of thesis would raise another question: is there something fundamentally deceptive about seeing? Or on the contrary can vision, or different visual technologies, ever reveal things about our existence that are otherwise hidden? (Walter Benjamin makes a really interesting argument to this effect in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he claims that film can reveal an “optical unconscious”... more fodder for the thesis, I guess)

    Anyway, just in case this post isn't long enough already, Marx's mention of the camera obscura lets me segue neatly into something really cool here in Oxford: The Ashmolean Museum of Science.

They have a whole collection of neat optical devices ranging from ancient telescopes to early microscopes and primitive photographic projectors. The coolest thing they have, however, is a functioning camera obscura. 

The name is Latin for 'dark chamber,' and it's basically a way to project an image onto a surface. Lots of Renaissance artists used them as drawing aides and Aristotle used a primitive form of the principle to watch an eclipse, the old pinhole in a dixie cup from grade school. This is a more advanced application of the same idea, using lenses and mirrors (which is why in the image I show below isn't inverted in the way Marx mentions).

This is the aperture:

It looks out the window on to Broad Street.

And to see the image, you poke your head under the sheet. 

I really dig the ghostly quality of the camera obscura image. I feel like its a bit of a precursor to the appeal of sitting in a dark theater and watching a movie. If you ever get a chance to get into one, I recommend it.