Anne Dalke's blog
Pull of Gravity: What Happens When They Come Home?
Dear women, now unwalled--
I realize that you are on spring break, so unlikely to be around for this event,
but it seemed so relevant to our conversations in-and-about The Cannery (and leaving it),
that I wanted to share. Perhaps you'd like to get hold of the video, if you can't
attend the screening and conversation?
Thinking of you all,
always,
Anne
Please join us on 3/14/13 at the Fitts Auditorium at UPenn Law School at 5:30 p.m. for a
Screening of this Amazing Philadelphia Documentary, Pull of Gravity:
http://www.pullofgravityfilm.com/
700,000 Inmates are Released Each Year in the U.S.
What Happens When They Come Home?
The film will be followed by a panel discussion with the Directors of the film, the Participants in the film, United States Magistrate Judge Timothy Rice (from federal reentry court), the US Attorney for the Easter District of Pennsylvania Zane Memeger and Professor Regina Austin of Penn Law School.
This is free and open to the public. The last two showings have sold out, so please go to www.pullofgravityfilm.com to reserve your tickets (for free).
Sponsored by the Women's Legal Assistance Project, the Prisoners Education and Advocacy Project and the Criminal Record Expungement Project
Walled Communities in Europe
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As some of you know, I was traveling in Northern Europe for a couple of weeks in late January and early February. I came upon a couple of walled communities which (of course!) made me think of you all. In Bruges, Belgium, I spent a peaceful morning in a begijnhof (or beguinage), dating from the 13th century, which once housed a Catholic order of single and widowed women, and today is home to Benedictine nuns:
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And then, Normandy, I visited the astonishing abbey on Mont St Michel, an island fortress with a cloister strangely reminiscent of--yet different from--Bryn Mawr's:
How an East Coast geological feature drove the course of the Civil War.
This put me in mind of what Prof. Crawford told us about the
effect of the fault line on the building of cities:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/the-fall-lines-fault/
What Walls Do We Build/Need/Break Down?--Our Final Presentations!
Welcome everybody! We're happy that you’ve joined us here to see what we've learned in our 360° this semester. A 360° is a cluster of interdisciplinary courses that look at one main theme. Ours is called Women in Walled Communities.
In The Rhetorics of Silence, we examined the many functions and meanings of silence: as a political tool, an imaginative space, and a powerful form of communicative expression--as well as the result of lack of agency and or the denial of voice.
In Learning in Institutional Spaces, we explored how the institutions of schools and prisons promote or inhibit learning. It was in this course that we looked most critically at this institution, Bryn Mawr College, and its own history of power and oppression, which sparked a lot of interest in Perry House as an embodiment of some of that history.
Continuing the Conversation: Women in Walled Communities Exhibition
Use this space to post thoughts, questions or reactions from the workshop.
"Value the opportunity to think unguided by the world"
I was reading my Meeting's newsletter this morning. It began w/ this
(so relevant!) quote: Don’t feel restricted by the silence; it is there
to set you free from the pressures of life… Value the opportunity to
think unguided by the world. Learn what you feel you need to know,
let other information pass. No moment of silence is ever a waste of time.
(Rachel Needham, 1987, Quaker Faith and Practice, The Yearly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends [Quakers] in Britain, 1995, 2.17.)
