Anne Dalke's blog

Rethinking the Future of Learning Institutions....

There was a curious write-up of a curious book in the New York Times Book Review today: The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. The reviewer reports that Liz "was a pathbreaker for social progress and women’s rights — albeit ... an unwitting one." Her stepdaughter said that, while she could detect a “thread of feminism” in some of the movies, she “doubted Taylor had been conscious of it.”

So this is a puzzling thought for me, and I'd be interested in hearing what you all think of it: can feminism be "accidental"? Or do you see it (definitionally, or in actuality) as a conscious, deliberate choice?

There's an interesting piece in the Times "Week in Review" section today, called The Death of the Cyberflaneur. It locates the evolution of the internet--from its earlier days, as a place of wandering exploration, to its current structure, which is highly deterministic and commercially driven--in the longer history of the "flaneur," the 19th century wanderer who "did not have anything too definite in mind," as he strolled the streets of Paris, observing, sometimes narrating, the rich sensory experience he perceived there.

The key challenge here--to the celebration of collaboration that we've lately been engaged in--is "this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective"; it's an interesting take on "the tyranny of the social" that I think we might explore more fully together….

I've seen two articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week that testify to the shake-up that's happening around issues of open-access review and publishing. 

As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact describes an approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—that aims to "measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked .... Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented ... 'It's like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere ... That has the potential to really revolutionize how we measure impact' .... It's a way to measure the 'downstream use' of research."

I've mentioned twice already two essays by Katherine Hayles, which seem to me quite resonant w/ our conversations, and address directly some of the questions we've been worrying. So I've added to our password protected file both "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine" and "How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies" (both essays from a book forthcoming). Enjoy!

In connection with the world premiere performances of Fort Blossom Revisited 2000/2012 by John Jasperse Company February 24-26, Bryn Mawr College will host a Symposium on The Contemporary Performance of Sex, Gender and Embodiment on Saturday February 18, 2012 from 1-5pm in the Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall. Admission is free and open to all.

Fort Blossom (2000), choreographed and designed by Jasperse, is a 40-minute work in which the audience is invited to examine contemporary notions of how we experience the body as both owners and spectators. Simultaneously shocking and beautiful, it is being revisited and expanded into a 60-minute piece with lead support from Bryn Mawr College, funded by The Pew of Center for Arts & Heritage through Dance Advance. The slow, sustained angling and partnering of nude dancers in Fort Blossom present direct and un-commodified experiences of the body alone and in relationship. Jasperse wrote that the work "sought to dilute the transgressive impact of the body--to allow us to perceptually acknowledge the body in all its facets as simultaneously special, even miraculous, and ordinary.” To reflect on the questions raised by Fort Blossom, Bryn Mawr hosts this one day Symposium with presentations, panel discussions and video viewings.

Presenting scholars and artists: