The Negarponti files

Women and Iranian Cinema

2011-10-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

My first Persian language interview for television: A bit bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I'd say, but here's my hopeful take on Iranian cinema and its representation of women under the rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran... I take a little peek in the crystal ball and talk about what I see as the future of Iranian cinema as well. (Persian only. No subtitles.)

Transforming consciousness: "When I move you move...just like that"

2011-10-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

The post-election crisis in Iran in 2009 ( #iranelection ) inspired many around the world in support of the Green Movement. A symbol of that uprising is now in Liberty Square as Occupy Wall Street ( #OWS ) gathers steam and people move onto the streets in protest all over the world...from Madrid to Sydney.

G. I. Gurdjieff once wrote that: "The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and "consciousness" cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and "will" cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and "doing" cannot be the result of things which "happen.""

Revolution is always first a creative transformation of consciousness and this transformation is always incremental. Each instance of transformation inspires the next with creativity and will.

The video presentation below reflects on the uprising in Iran in 2009 and the waves of uprising that have followed on its heels ever since. Once again I draw on the commanding words of Ludacris which presaged the movement toward social transformation when he said: "When I move you move...just like that!"

Here's to the 99% that have risen tonight to Occupy Together

TechPowerTalk from Melanie Plageman on Vimeo.

(My gratitude to Melanie Plageman for organizing an excellent conference on technology and social movements from which this video derives.)

Video traces of our tribute to the silenced filmmaker Jafar Panahi at Asia Society

2011-07-31T03:29:00.001-07:00

My colleague Hamid Dabashi and I had the idea early this year to create, with the exquisite La Frances Hui of Asia Society in New York, a tribute at Asia Society to the silenced Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

I am only just now getting to the task of collecting the videos that were produced during the course of the month long tribute, thanks to the very capable staff of Asia Society.

These are mostly introductions to the films, but there is also a final panel discussion which includes remarks by Hamid Dabashi (Columbia University-Moderator), Hadi Ghaemi (International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran), Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University), Richard Peña (Film Society of Lincoln Center/Columbia University).

Hamid Dabashi on Crimson Gold.

Negar Mottahedeh on Offside

Negar Mottahedeh on The Circle

Reflections on Jafar Panahi's life, work and sentence by Hamid Dabashi (Columbia University-Moderator), Hadi Ghaemi (International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran), Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University), Richard Peña (Film Society of Lincoln Center/Columbia University).

It's either me or the beer, boys. Giving all y'all a piece of my mind.

2011-04-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

~There's something about the video that reminds me of my state of mind. "It's either me or the beer, boys."

I value eye-contact when it comes to finding a romantic partner and believe me, that's been quite a mission for me, and it has been a mission for quite some time. I'm not the easiest person to really get to know. I'm on the go, I'm always working, I'm headstrong, I'm independent, I rarely back down and although I'm open, I don't make myself vulnerable very often. Quite the contrary. Actually, I have to make an effort, a real effort everyday, to connect and be real. I see it as my work.

I'm not going to talk about being real though. I'm being real, and it's my "eye-contact" I'm interested in this time...That's the thing in the movies that tells us that the two people in the story are going to get together. In film studies lingo it's called the eye-line match. In real life, I have no idea how to maintain it with a guy who I don't know across the room without wanting to bury my head in the sand. So, yeah, I have resorted to online dating.

What surprises me online is how many guys choose profile pictures of themselves with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. I suppose there's an unspoken tradition here, one that says, "I'm laid back, 'cause look at me, I drink beer." Or, I'm a super star aficionado. 'Cause, look, I drink this wine." I don't know. I don't know what it all means.

Frankly, I don't drink and I never click on profiles where the first photo is the guy holding a glass, no matter what it is. But my big question is, why do guys do that? Why do they think it's attractive?

I think I want to investigate that next. I'm going to stop it with all the judgments, get curious, and just ask. "What's up with the beer photos, guys?"

I'm guessing, that in the online tradition, it must be something akin to a tradition in painting where businessmen decided at one point that they were getting wealthy and powerful, and as a result wanted to show off their possessions. They had achieved a state of being they wanted to project in the world. (See page 13 in John Berger's Ways of Seeing on this tradition in oil painting. Google Ways of Seeing for the Pdf.)

In the case of the guys I am making "eye-contact" with online, the "wine-in-hand tradition" is a sign of a state of being too. What is the state, though?

Wouldn't you like to know? Maybe not, but I do.

And that is my mission. Speak up if you have something to say about it!

(I posted this on "Negar in NYC" because I want to eventually write a magazine article about my investigations, but I think the blog actually belongs here, where I like to discuss the intersection of technology and the human with you, my friends.)

The Wind in Film: Kiarostami's Five (for the Iranian film Blogathon)

2011-02-27T18:02:00.000-08:00

I am reposting this short piece on Kiarostami and movement for the Iranian Blogathon Feb 21-27, 2011:

I never tire of watching Abbas Kiarostami's Five. The combination of natural, elemental forces, and the human and technologically mediated incident simply bring me to life and charge me with wonderment and delight.

I have for some time now enjoyed my exchanges around art, books, photography, music, philosophy, literature, technology and the wonders of our age with my friend Darius Himes. And we have, off and on, both remarked on our love for Kiarostami's work. Then suddenly yesterday, amidst the hustle of the Duke-at-work-Saturday, I discovered that Darius had used one of our favorite Social Media tools Qik.com to make a short film about the book and the wind. I love it. It reminds me of passages in Kiarostami's Five. Elegant and elemental. Wind and paper ... then, movement, the essence and object of cinematic fascination from the start. (Remember the rustling of the leaves in Lumiere's The Baby's Meal [Repas de bebe, no. 88, 1895]?**)

** In Lumière’s Repas de bébé, of 1895, it was not the relatively repetitive activity of feeding the baby that captured the attention of the audience, but the small matter of leaves rustling in the background, moving discontinuously in an otherwise imperceptible breeze. A small matter perhaps, but for an audience familiar with the closed circuit of mechanical illusions of motion (via such devices as thaumatropes, zooetropes, phenakistascopes) the discontinuous demarcated the territory of the real, and confirmed the verisimilitude ceded to the camera. --Thomas Zummer "Arrestments: Corporeality and Mediation"

Film Series: A Tribute to Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi

2011-02-18T06:02:00.000-08:00

Film Series: A Tribute to Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi

I'm very excited to have been involved in the making of this film series at Asia Society. It starts Friday 25, 2011. Also, there will be a panel discussion focused on Panahi's work on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, 6:45 pm at Asia Society.

The panel highlights the cinematic achievement of filmmaker Jafar Panahi and explores the current state of creative expression in Iran.

Speakers include: Hamid Dabashi (Columbia University-Moderator), Hadi Ghaemi (International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran), Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University), Richard Peña (Film Society of Lincoln Center/Columbia University).

A Revolutionary Consciousness: When I move you move. Just like that.

2011-02-06T08:28:00.000-08:00

This post is about the ingenuity and creativity of revolutionary consciousness and less about technological savvy and mass uprisings. But that is where I will start.

I started thinking, once again about my research on the Iranian uprising after the presidential election of 2009, and found Mark Colvin's recollections of that period at the 2009 Media 140 conference above useful. Something I had missed: #iranelection as a hashtag (or search topic) on Twitter emerged at the same time as the hashtag #CNNfail. In esssence, #CNNfail testified to the problem the world encountered with traditional media (such as CNN) as masses of people were struggling for their rights under a repressive regime.

In the past few weeks, the world has been a witness to revoutionary uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Gabon and Egypt. Masses of people have bravely risen to demand basic human rights, freedom and democracy. Alert to the possibilities opened up by the Wikileaks crisis, our attention has been hooked on the online stream of information: on Al-Jazeera's online broadcast, as well as the tweets and blogs that reach our shores from the ground as new events unfold.

Now, as taken as I am with the uses of new technologies in bringing about change in the context of mass uprisings, I am equally, if not more, fascinated these days, by the poetics, that is, the ingenuity and the creativity of the revolutionary consciousness, a consciousness that, in its receptivity, creates the possibility for transformation all around it.

The German literary critic Walter Benjamin spoke of this consciousness in terms of childhood, (because it shows up with greater clarity in childhood than in adulthood) where the child's mimetic faculty sees correspondences between things --and in the revolutionary context, between past and present events-- "by means of spontaneous fantasy". In this way, this consciousness opens up new possibilities while also constructing the contexts for the child's own entry into the world. This gallery of photos of the helmets of the Egypt uprising shows both the symptoms and the signs of this revolutionary consciousness to my mind.

As Susan Buck-Morss suggests: “The revolutionary ‘signal’ which ”proceeds ‘out of the world in which the child lives and gives commands” is the capacity for mimetic improvisation “…of perception and active transformation”. This mimetic consciousness is a revolutionary consciousness, by means of which “new forces and new impulses appear..."

Of the child's drawers, Benjamin writes: They must become arsenal and zoo, crime museum and crypt. “To tidy up” would be to demolish an edifice full of prickley chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tinfoil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem-poles and copper pennies that are shields.” [See Susan Buck-Morss's brilliant piece on Walter Benjamin: Revolutionary Writer for these quotes)

This ability to see correspondences --say, between past and present-- shifts consciousness into another temporal dimension of 'now-time’ -- a potent attentiveness in the present--"in which both revelation and revolution" occur.

This transformation in consciousness is the revolution that is (there on the streets and squares, but also here in our minds and in fact, ) everywhere. To quote Ludacris on this matter, because frankly, he put it most succinctly : When I move you move. Just like that.

Building Iran: a review

2011-01-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

My mother, Faezeh Seddigh, is a very talented architect and artist. I admire her. I always have. And I always wanted to be just like her. As a child I used to hang out at her studio,where she and other architecture PhDs worked under Houshang Seyhoun's supervision. I wanted to be them. They were so much fun to be around when I was a toddler. Many of them are still my friends.

Forty years have passed since those days in Tehran and I still remember my mother vividly in the light of that space. I also remember the sparkling amber color, and the scent, of the brewed Persian tea that was served as these young architects created their designs for Iran.

Then, sometime last April, I met Talinn Grigor. She's a Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis and a critic of Iranian architecture. When we met at an academic conference where we both gave papers in Austin, she was writing this book which is in part on the legacy left by Houshang Seyhoun in his work as an architect under the Pahlavis. I'm thrilled to have reviewed it for Iranian Studies. It is absolutely brilliant and reads like a detective story. I suggest you run out and buy it.

Talinn Grigor's Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs
Grigor Review

Negar in NYC

2010-12-27T06:18:00.001-08:00

Since I lived in New York in 2001, I've had one dream and one goal only (besides writing my books, working on being a great educator and practicing my yoga), that dream was to return to New York (triumphant) and have a place I could call my own. Last year, around this time, that dream came true. I came back to New York with tenure at Duke University, and thanks to my great broker, Michael Villani, I bought my own little place close to the Hudson, on hallowed ground. (I have to tell you more about the "hallowed" part some day).

This year, I am going for another dream, thanks to the love and encouragement of my powerful coach Hildie Dunn at the Handel Group, and that is to write articles in magazines, like Elle and Vogue and who knows, maybe someday, The New Yorker.

I am designing this dream playful and joyfully and with a huge dose of focus and intention. So to start things off in a fun way, I've created a Tumblr account where I will keep track of ideas for things I might write about.

My new play space is called Negar in NYC.

And..... wait for it!

Here's the tagline:

I love New York and I still live my life in Gotham with a sense of wonder
~ Like Amelie ~
Negar in NYC is New York City's Amelie in Paris.

I AM sooooo excited! Join me in designing your own dreams! Dream along with me! Come explore the City with me! Give me feedback on my writing! And let's live like there's no tomorrow!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Skyping everything

2010-10-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy week of Skype and activism.

This week, was the six month anniversary of Brainquake. To continue our celebration of women's lives which commenced with Brainquake on April 26, 2010, Golbarg Bashi and I started the Brainquake Channel on Youtube. We will be posting interviews with spectacular women who inspire us and everyone around them in the months ahead. First up, is Liss Nup, one of my favorite online activists and the powerhouse behind One Million Voices for Iran Campaign

I also Skyped in to the CIANTEC conference in Brazil and gave a paper on the Iranian post-election crisis entitled: "Green is the New Green" Here's the view in Brazil of me giving the paper:

and here's my view Sorta! I love Skyping everything now!

Oh, and Khakestar, my lovely little Booj, was very well-behaved through it all!

The Relationship Revolution

2010-09-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

As the school year begins, I would like to share this wonderful piece by Melinda Blau on the internet and the Relationship Revolution. Thanks to Cathy Davidson for bringining the piece to my attention.

http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/magazine/currentissue/1094-the-relationship-revolution?start=1

What defines a Woman? How do we continue the debate generated around feminism by Brainquake and Boobquake?

2010-05-04T19:04:00.000-07:00

I don't think that a sustained discussion of what defines a woman and what the character of feminism is today would have happened had both Boobquake and Brainquake not happened. The question is, how do we sustain this discussion once it's been generated in social media in the cracks and crevices created by two duelling quakes?

As Lina Srivasta writes, "social media in its present forms is limited in its ability to create a sustained, long-term effective movement." Social media is great for bringing together like minds across the globe, great for testing ideas, great for ephemeral debates, but if we want to sustain a focused educational discussion or an educational campaign on a global scale, what do we do? Where do we go next? That's where my thinking stalls today.

Perhaps as my colleagues Ed Webb and Lisa M Lane write, we'll be just fine without permanence, "let the data flow past, focus on the now, the experience, rather than seeking to hold on to anything."

Or maybe as my brilliant friend Liss Nup put it in her postmortem on Boobquake and Brainquake: "We came for the boobs, stayed for the smarts." And we'll keep the smarts coming!

Meanwhile the Brainquake team is still uploading photos and biographies of amazingly talented, creative, intelligent and dazzlingly capable women on the Brainquake Fan Page and on the Brainquake Tumblr site. Check it out and keep sending up your stories and uploading important news; keep sharing your comments and ideas and keep putting up your photos of women who made a difference in whatever way, large or small.

Future of learning to be determined by students, panel says

2010-05-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

Though they discussed a wide array of topics, the Future of Learning Panel centered its conversation on one theme articulated by session Chair Cathy Davidson: “How do we make the most of traditional institutions and unite worlds that are not always part of our institutions as traditionally conceived?”

The panel consisted of five professors from Duke University:

* Cathy Davidson, co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory
* Laurent Dubois, a historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean
* Negar Mottahedeh, a highly respected academic author who staged the first-ever Twitter Film Festival
* Mark Anthony Neal, the author of four books, a frequent commentator for National Public Radio and contributor to several on-line media outlets
* Tony O’Driscoll, author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration,” with Karl M. Kapp.

In addition to discussing the future, the panelists talked about some of their individual experiments with technology in the classroom. Mottahedeh spoke about her experiment with the Twitter Film Festival in her introduction to film studies class. Students posted video clips to a class blog and Tweeted about them with links to analysis. The effort attracted more than 300 followers from all walks of life.

Dubois is currently working on a project called the Haiti Lab that will link Haitian students with faculty through the Internet to continue education while the country is still in a state of disrepair.

WWW 2010 - "The Future of Learning is the Web." From left to right: Laurent Dubois, Negar Mottahedeh, Mark Anthony Neal. Photo by Elon University Relations photographer Kim Walker.

“There’s a need for the university to be a space of rapid reaction,” he said. “Haiti needs an immediate plan and action.”

Davidson drew national press attention by writing a blog post titled “How to Crowdsource Grading,” which encouraged educators to use peer learning to evaluate students’ work and make it public. Now that the end of the semester is approaching, Davidson said her class did surprisingly well, producing a high caliber of work and motivated by the fact that it will be published.

O’Driscoll is teaching a class in which students put all deliverables into the creative commons and evaluate one another’s work. He said students held one another accountable for the material they produced, even asking to use his criteria to assign grades.

Neal has used his classes to take students’ knowledge into the Durham community through live webcasts, one of which drew 10,000 viewers. He also posts prompts to his exam questions publicly to employ generative learning.

Much of the panel’s spirited discussion was generated from audience questions, addressing issues like the use of Twitter during class, the ways technology affects student attention, and computer games as motivational learning.

“To allow students to be on their blackberries and computers is giving up a lot of power associated with being in ivory tower,” Anthony said.

WWW 2010 - "The Future of Learning is the Web." Cathy Davidson. Photo by Elon University Relations photographer Kim Walker. Creative Commons rights

Though some argue that electrons distract students rather than enhance their experiences in the classroom, Davidson pointed out that just because students stare at their instructors does not mean that they are paying attention.

Some of the panelists felt that the use of social media during class could actually enhance the student experience. O’Driscoll said he uses a class hash tag to monitor student interest and questions, as a replacement for the “note card technique” of collecting questions. There are even filter applications available to help determine the most relevant questions.

“Teaching does not exist in a pristine way,” Davidson said, noting that learning will continue to change as technology advances.

O’Driscoll said he hopes that more educators will follow the example of a game-based school called Quest to Learn that uses the “magic circle” method to enthrall students. He said teachers need to find “the magic between solid instructional design and the magic circle, and ground it deeply in good, solid pedagogy.”

Mottahedeh ended the discussion by noting that it isn’t the technology that will determine the future but the students.

“Students are the difference in the world, and we’ll figure out together how they will make that difference,” she said.

-by Rachel Cieri

Thanks Rachel! Here's the original story

Yup...once again I tweeted through my entire panel!

#Brainquake and Boobquake: Reflections on two feminist social media campaigns

2010-04-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Brainquake-- a response.

I've had a chance to think through how the Boobquake and Brainquake campaigns went down in social media and in traditional media and wanted to take this opportunity share some of my thoughts with all of you.

I think it is clear that the Brainquake campaign on Facebook and #Brainquake on Twitter was a response to the Boobquake campaign which was started by Jen McCreight. In other words, in my thinking anyway, there have been plenty of pronouncements of "the Sedighi variety" on women and women's bodies to which we could have responded with any number of campaigns, but we haven't and we didn't.

Brainquake was a direct response to Boobquake and an effort to celebrate the lives and achievements of women in Iran and elsewhere. In my thinking, again, and I cannot speak on behalf of Golbarg, there is a lethal cultural context which harbors a blatant orientalism (a notion of backwardness vs. progress) in which Boobquake was born. Combine this with misunderstandings of the Iranian women's movement and Iranian feminism & its historical, social, political and cultural contexts and mix in boobs and what you have is --wow-- explosive.

Now take this batter to social media venues such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook where anyone can say anything, anything goes, and what you have is a total dissolution of a campaign with potential.

This was the subject of a very lively discussion on Twitter between myself and a group of social movement/social media strategists last night. Lina Srivastava summarizes our discussion really well in her blog on Strategies for Social Change. We all benefited from seeing how both Boobquake and Brainquake played out and devolved to the lowest common denominator on April 26, 2010: Boobs and frivolity on one end, and violent explosive anger on the other. Kendall Thiessen really said it best: "Once you introduce boobs, you KNOW the kind of response you are going to get. Clearly the message was lost."

I want to point out the little known fact that Jen McCreight and I have been in close contact throughout both campaigns and that I have been in support of the #boobquake hashtag on Twitter and in support of Jen herself personally. I told her, though, flat out, that I was dong Brainquake. This, because it was very clear, early on, that what she had conceived and what happened were going to turn out to be two different things.

Hers was a scientific experiment and a 3rd wave feminist response to a cleric's suppositions. She's an atheist, a soon-to-be-PhD-student, and a skeptic and she wanted to test out Sedighi's claims regarding the correlation of quakes and women's immodesty. Her curiosity is precious and I cannot look askance at that as a university professor myself. In addition, anyone who was on social media in the last week, knows that while the #boobquake hashtag brought attention to the situation in Iran and the post election crisis (and I saw this as an excellent development from where I stood), it also brought with it the hordes of heterosexual men egging women on for a cleavage show on Monday. Add to that, the commodification of breasts, cleavage & women's skin in the global context of the media, and the campaign, sure enough, became a piece ripe for porn magazines. Playboy of course picked it up.

All this put a great deal of stress on the direction of the Boobquake movement and lay the burden on those who understood what Jen was up to... well to explain it, defend it, and sometimes fight against the very things it was promoting, for example the exposure of women's bodies, in the context of commodification and commercialization. And a healthy scientifically minded skepticism aimed and religious fervor and superstition, in the context of a racist and orientalist culture that either willfully misunderstands and misrepresents or unknowlingly conceives of everything Middle Eastern as backward.

Also, while Jen was taking orders for Boobquake t-shirts that would make money for earthquake rescue charities, capitalism and commodity culture dictated that a tongue-in-cheek social movement become a money making scheme for a sex - hyped-downturned economy, to the extent that just today, the University Store at Purdue where Jen studies, started selling "Boobquake t-shirts" without Jen's permission.

All this to say that while I understood Jen's mission and stood by her as a woman, a student, a skeptic and a scientist, I also could see that the combination of Orientalism (notions of backwardness vs progress) + misunderstandings of the Iranian women's movement / feminism & its cultural social and political contexts + boobs was doomed to a total failure.

Why not have a Brainquake then and quake some brains to freedom? And why not celebrate the lives and achievements of women? Why not celebrate individual lives instead of meat? These were my thoughts as I watched a science experiment devolve into frivolity, commercialism, and the commodification of women's bodies in social media and traditional media

My efforts and Golbarg's, as I see it, was to enable the stories of women to be heard. And if you look at the Brianquake Twitter feed and the Brainquake Tumblr site or even the photos put up on the Facebook Brainquake page you'll see this celebration in action in the midst of a battle ground that is determined to turn Golbarg, Jen and myself into rabid cats. We didn't succumb to this. Neither did we misunderstand or misrepresent the other's intentions knowingly. A critique of the direction of the campaigns themselves were taking, one as a response to the other, one major and one minor, was inevitable.

I hope this helps and inspires others to do better and achieve greater things on behalf of all of us. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and I am humbled by all the things I have seen and heard from each of the participants in the Brainquake campaign. I leave you with this quote from Dawn.com by Rafia Zakaria

"In socio-cultural paradigms where women’s bodies symbolise familial and national honour, as in Iran or Pakistan, their covering is seen as corresponding directly to the piety and righteousness of society. Consequently, there is a brutal and obstinate disregard for women’s autonomy and their status as human beings equal to men.

Conversely, in western societies, a similarly reductionist calculus construes the exhibition of the female body as a sign of liberation, with an equally stubborn blindness to how such sexualisation debases women. Both versions are replete with untruths perpetuated by men. And just as a woman in a burka is complicit in the lie that the female form is the source of discord, so is the woman who displays her body complicit in demeaning it to a mere sexual object"

#Brainquake: A Celebration of Women's lives April 26, 2010

2010-04-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Wow! Yesterday's Brainquake was a fantastic celebration of the lives and accomplishments of women everywhere. As I was introducing these amazing women to peeps on Twitter and posting their bios, I was filled with feelings of awe and total humility at the magnitude of our collective capacity to transform the world.

I'll post more about the press and discussions around Boobquake and Brainquake later on this week. But, meanwhile, check out Brainquake women's awe-inspiring pictures and biographes on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr and become a fan of the Brainquake page on Facebook!

I love my collaborator Golbarg Bashi for her warm friendship, her ingenuity, vision, courage and smarts. She is a force of nature and the brains behind Brainquake.

Here: Listen to her podcast with MideastYouth as she discusses Brainquake

#Brainquake: Why I won't be joining #Boobquake

2010-04-23T22:04:00.001-07:00

When Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi made his stupid comment that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, he of course joined fellow fundamentalist religious preachers such as Pat Robertson who have made similar claims about marginalized groups, women, the poor, third world nations, etc being responsible for natural disasters. In the case of Pat Robertson he went so far as accusing Haitians of having made a “pact with the Devil.”

The Sedighi comment was no news to Iranian women, nor was it a funny joke. For over 3 decades the Islamic Republic has used and abused women's bodies and women's socio-economic and political rights in shaping and defining its repressive policies. Iranian women have fought back in various ways, one of which has been to dress “subvervily” but as it is evident in the Green Movement (the name the Iranian opposition is known by) , it is not their “beauty” or bodies that they have utilized in fighting against a brutal theocracy but their brains, their creativity, art, writings etc.

Golbarg Bashi and I are saddened that Jen McCreight (a blogger at Blag Hag), and the so-called feminist response has been “showing off some cleavage for ‘Boobquake’ this Monday”. This campaign has aroused the evidently insatiable enthusiasm of the web community, male supporters in particular who can’t wait to see “regular” girls and women, many their direct friends to “showing off their tits”.

Her own words suggest a lighthearted mockery, a statement on women's rights and a desire to scientifically test Sadeqi's claims.

Everyday women and young girls are forced to “show off cleavage” and more in order simply to be heard, to be seen, or to advance professionally. The web is already filled with images of naked women; the porn industry thrives online and many young girls are already vulnerable to predatory abuse. Violence against women and girls has consequences for the sexualisation of women and girls. The extent of their sexualization is evident in the hundereds of replies that pour into the “Boobquake” Facebook page where women write, apologetically: "I don’t have boobs, not fair" or "Hey, I only have a C cup… ” and “what about those of us who no longer have a cleavage? they sag too low.”

World-wide, the sexualisation of women and younger girls, as young as pre-schoolers is a genuine problem and as mothers, feminists, and young women ourselves we believe that it is time to move away from this “bare it all” mentality.

Let’s create a “Brainquake” and show off our resumes, CVs, honors, prizes, accomplishments (photo evidence), because the Hojatoleslam and the Islamic Republic of Iran are afraid of women’s abilities to push for change, to thrive despite gender apartheid (Did you know that over 64% of students studying at universities in Iran are women?) Let’s honor their accomplishments by showing off our abilities, our creativity, our ingenuity, and our smarts on our blogs, on Wikipedia, on Twitter, on Youtube, on Flickr and all over Facebook. And remember to use hashtag #brainquake on Twitter.

Join the Brainquake Facebook event page here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100832899962032

Here's some inspiration:
Why I won't be joining the "Boobquake"

UPDATE: So here's the first Youtube video for #Boobquake. I guess we could say this is the first response to #boobquake & #brainquake's call to action in one swell package, well kinda?!? Rock the ayatollah!

Some research on Social Media and the Iranian Post Election Crisis, 2009

2010-04-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

I've had the privilege of connecting with new friends to discuss my research on the uses of social media in the Iranian post election crisis, 2009.

This piece Green is the New Green on the activities of the Green Movement in calling for civil liberties and human rights in Iran will be published in the journal New Politics shortly.

Green is the New Green: Social Media and the Post Election Crisis in Iran, 2009

And then there is this podcast which apparently blocked Iranian access to MideastYouth.org (I'm joking of course!)

Finally, Rachel Cieri of the FutureWeb blog did an interview on our Future Web 2010 panel in Raleigh where I will join my friends and colleagues Cathy Davidson, Laurent Dubois, Mark Anthony Neal, and Tony O'Driscoll and speak on the uses of Social Media in the Iranian post-election crisis of 2009.

I hope you'll find this material useful in your own research. Let me hear from you!

Karbala Drag Kings and Queens: A history of female ta'ziyehs.

2010-04-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

This article is a draft of research I have done on female performance traditions in Iran. It is soon to appear in the volume entitled Eternal Performance: Ta'ziyeh and Other Shiite Rituals edited by Peter Chelkowski.

Karbala Drag Kings and Queens

Green is the new Green!

2010-04-10T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Persian language blogosphere is a rich, varied and dynamic sphere of over 60,000 frequently updated blogs. In 2005, out of the 100 million blogs registered around the world, 700,000 were registered Persian blogs inside Iran and in the diaspora. With over 20 million Iranians connecting to the internet, and over 600,000 Iranians signed up on Facebook by the Presidential elections of the summer of 2009, the Iranian cyber community is by far the most dynamic community in the Middle East, and one that is unambiguously diverse. Of the over 60, 000 Persian language blogs, three quarters may be characterized as non-political in content, interested rather in questions of religion, poetry, and sexuality.

Shortly after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president in June 2005, there were clear indications of a campaign for the centralization of state power over traditional media. During the first two years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, more than 100 newspapers and other periodicals were banned. 70% of the press outlets were run by active supporters of Ahmadinejad. It is important to note that what remained of the opposition's news outlets was banned or put under strict surveillance in the aftermath of the June 12th Presidential elections in Iran in 2009. On the eve of the 2009 election, foreign reporters were either imprisoned or expelled from Iran. This, in part led to the rise of online “underground” papers, such as Kalam Sabz ( Green Word) and Khiaban (The Street), and more urgent uses of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the Iranian social media site: Balatarin.com

According to Nasrin Alavi, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the Vice President for the reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi in the Presidential elections of 2009, was the first Iranian on Twitter to call the Presidential elections of June 12th, 2009, a fraud. He was by no means the last. Elham Gheytanchi describes the days following the election:

Immediately after the results of the election were announced showing Ahmadinejad’s “landslide victory”, protesters poured into streets. For three consecutive days, masses of Iranians marched peacefully onto the streets in silence asking one question written on their placards “Where is my Vote?”

As the results of the election were announced, a twitter message from Bandar Abbas, a port city in the south of Iran, read (Raye ma ra dozdidand, bahash darand poz mida) “They have stolen our votes and they are flaunting our stolen votes!”

In an unprecedented move, the political establishment decided to cut all SMS messages, the Internet connections and mobile phones in the week after the election results were announced. The next day, demonstrators in at least 20 different locations in Tehran gathered waving placards that read (Doroghgoo khaen ast va khaen tarsoost va tarsoo sms ghate mikonad) “The Liar is a Traitor and the Traitor is fearful and the fearful cuts the SMS.”

As news and images of the protests on the ground circulated in social media all over the internet: on Flickr, on Twitter, on YouTube and on Facebook, they were channeled back to Iran via satellite, broadcast largely by way of the then popular BBC Persian.

A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom had dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns. Iranian state owned television broadcast a series of lively debates among the candidates. This was a first, under the Shi’ih theocracy. During one of the debates, the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi put on green shawl to highlight his status as a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. A month later, on the days following the election, an all-embracing, spontaneous movement donning green armbands, finger-bands and headbands took to the streets to call Ahmadinejad’s victory a fraud—the color green thus became the symbol of the movement. The opposition was lovingly called the “Sea of Green", the “Green Wave”, or the “Green Movement”.

The silence of the street protesters was broken as the violence of the regime became palpable. Neda Agha Soltan was brutally shot and murdered on Kargar Avenue, at the corner of Khosravi and Salehi streets in Tehran on June 20th, 2009. The YouTube video documenting her death in the midst of a small crowd circulated on Facebook and Twitter immediately. Her name, Neda (“voice” or “calling” in Persian), became the rallying cry for the Iranian opposition.

Outside of Iran, around the globe, images of the spectacular crowds in green and the murder of Neda Agha Soltan captured the hearts of people everywhere. High school students in the U.S. would talk about “Going Iranian” against authority figures. Indeed, as Golbarg Bashi noted in the heat of the summer, “Iranian is the new black”. Hundreds of songs dedicated to Neda in English and in Persian, started circulating on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Her name became a search topic or so-called “hashtag” on Twitter (#Neda). It was the highest ranking hashtag on June 20th, 2009 indicating thousands of posts on the day of her death.

A corollary hashtag, #iranelection, continues to rank on Twitter. It was the highest ranking hashtag for weeks following the elections, dropping only momentarily after the tragic death of Michael Jackson. It ranked high as a search topic on the 30th anniversary of the hostage crisis Nov 4th, 2009 and on the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic on February 11th, 2010.

It may come as no surprise, then, that thousands of people on Twitter, put a green overlay on their avatars in solidarity with the Sea of Green in Iran. Many changed their location to Tehran and set their time zone to +03:30 GMT to protect people who were actually tweeting from the ground. This image of a Neda with a green overlay-- a Neda Soltan who was initially mistaken as the murdered Neda Agha-Soltan-- comprises of the many thousands of the green avatars of active Twitter subscribers in the aftermath of the summer elections in Iran. (Neda Soltan is currently seeking asylum in Germany in the wake of the publicity that the misuse of her image attracted.)

The thousands of supporters the Green Movement on Twitter and Facebook became nodal points of information for what was happening on the ground, in the absence of foreign news agencies and independent media in Iran. Many of these supporters continued to help spread the news about various online and in-person campaigns. Others came to the aid of Iranian protesters by identifying safe havens for the wounded on Google maps as word spread that the wounded were being picked up and imprisoned by military forces upon their arrival to hospitals around Tehran.

December 7, 2009, about 6 months after the Presidential election, Majid Tavakoli, a student at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University of technology was arrested after he gave a talk during the student protests. A photograph of him in a hijab (full Islamic veil) was published by official news agencies announcing that he had attempted to flee security forces donned in women’s clothing. Supporters of the Green Wave around the world, saw things differently. Cognizant that this photograph was an attempt to ridicule Majid Tavakoli, by associating his courage with “the weaker sex”, thousands of Iranian men all over the world, donned the hijab and posted their photos on the web, using them as their avatars on social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

In captioning their photos, the men claimed their solidarity with Iranian women who have no choice but to veil under the Islamic regime; they voiced their opposition to the Human Rights violations of Islamic Republic and called for the release of the imprisoned Majid Tavakoli. This global campaign is known as the “The Men’s Scarves Movement” or the “I am Majid” #IAmMajid campaign.

The international campaign eventually went live. A YouTube recording signals its impact elsewhere: A group of Iranian men calling themselves “Majid” pose, donning the hijab in front of the Eiffel tower.

This act of resistance to the violation of Human Rights in Iran had stunning reverberations: French men and women donned the veil in solidarity with the Iranian Men’s Scarves Movement, and in this simple gesture that went viral on the internet, showed their opposition to l'affaire du voile in France.

This is not to say that the effort to bring about civil rights and the fight against the violation of Human Rights in Iran has subsided in anyway, but to suggest that the circulation of the images and sounds of the post-Election period, their going viral on the internet, has had significant consequences for oppositional movements and global collaborations elsewhere.

The Iranian Political Crisis: Social Media Brought you the News!*

2010-03-31T16:26:00.001-07:00

The Iranian Political Crisis: Social
Media Brought you the News!

Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University)

3:30pm Main Library, Room 202

Many have remarked on how the 2009 Iranian post-election uprising for human freedoms entailed the unprecedented corporalization, by the protesters, of new media, SMS, and social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. The embrace of these technologies seemingly corroded the architecture of journalism, shifted the parameters of the archive, and forced us to think again about the structure of academic scholarship in the digital age.

The talk will describe the ways in which social media were used in the months after the crisis and the consequences of this merger of bodies and technologies in Iran and around the globe.

Sponsored by InterSect, the Comparative Studies Graduate Student Association, The Department of Comparative Studies, the Middle East Studies Center, and the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities

Iran and the Arab World: New Horizons

2010-02-10T17:15:00.000-08:00

I would like to invite you to come to Rutgers for the

Iran and the Arab World: New Horizons

On February 13th, 2010

PROGRAM:

~The Center for Middle Eastern Studies Proudly Presents~

Iran and the Arab world: New Horizons

Saturday 13 February, 2010
Rutgers Student Center
RSC Multipurpose Room A
126 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Conference: 10 AM– 5PM

PANEL ONE~ IRAN: SOCIETY, GENDER, CULTURE 10-11:30 AM

Saïd Amir Arjomand, SUNY at Stony Brook
“Iran’s New Political Class and the Green Movement.”
~~~
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania
“A Tale of Two Cities: From Cairo to Tehran.”
~~~
Negar Mottahedeh, Duke University
“The Iranian Political Crisis: Social Media Brought you the News!”

PANEL TWO~ IRAN & MIDDLE EAST: HUMAN RIGHTS 12-1:30 PM

Hadi Ghaemi, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran
“Iran’s Struggle for Civil and Human Rights and Its Impact in the Middle East”
~~~
Faraz Sanei, Human Rights Watch
“Shaping Popular Opinion: Arab Civil Society and Iran's Green Movement.”
~~~
Leili Kashani, The Center for Constitutional Rights
“The challenge of ethical solidarity at a time of internal repression and external threats.”

LUNCH~1:30-2:30 PM

PANEL THREE~ IRAN, US AND THE ARAB WORLD (2:30-4 PM)

Hussein Ibish, The American Task Force on Palestine; Foundation for Arab-American Leadership
“An overview of contemporary Arab attitudes towards Iran.”
~~~
Roozbeh Shirazi, CUNY
“Demographic Timebombs, Heroic Martyrs, and Knights of Change: Locating the Youth in
Contemporary Politics in Iran and Jordan.”
~~~
Stephen R. Shalom, William Paterson University
"Democratic Upsurge in a Region of US Hegemony."

A special screening of Shirin Neshat’s Award-winning Women without Men (2009) will be presented with selected scenes from the film, followed by a keynote speech delivered by Hamid Dabashi on “Shirin Neshat’s Women with/out Men: Gendering
Revolt in Iran, the Arab and Muslim World.”

USEFUL TRAVEL INFORMATION

If coming in by train from NYC: http://www.njtransit.com/sf/sf_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=TrainTo
(For “destination station” choose New Brunswick: Travel time from NY Penn Station is approximately 1 hour under normal circumstances)

If coming in to New Brunswick by private transportation:
http://search.rutgers.edu/buildings.html?q=rutgers%20student%20center
(Parking is available off of College Avenue by turning onto Senior St. then onto Sicard or from Bartlett onto Sicard, behind the Rutgers Student Center)

Please direct any concerns or questions to: Shehnaz Abdeljaber peaceingardens@comcast.net

Speakers’ Biographies

Saïd Amir Arjomand: “Iran’s New Political Class and the Green Movement.”

BIO: Saïd Amir Arjomand is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies in New York City. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Chicago. A pre-eminent sociologist, he is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to l890 (1984); The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988); and After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors (2009). Professor Amir Arjomand is the founder and current President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and founding Editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies. Many historians and sociologist concur that it would be difficult to understand the victory of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath and the role of political Shi'ism in Iranian political culture without the perceptive and extraordinary scholarship of Professor Amir Arjomand. In 1988, the American Historical Review described his comparative perspective on the Iranian revolution as “breathtaking.”

Hamid Dabashi: “Shirin Neshat’s Women with/out Men: Gendering Revolt in Iran and the Arab and Muslim World.”

BIO: Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his writings range from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His best known books are Theology of Discontent (1993); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1999); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).

In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Professor Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.

Hadi Ghaemi: “Iran’s Struggle for Civil and Human Rights and Its Impact in the Middle East”.

BIO: Dr. Hadi Ghaemi is an Iran analyst and eminent human rights expert. He is currently the director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. In 2008, together with a group of international human rights activists, he founded the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran which has become one of the leading groups reporting and documenting human rights violations in Iran and building international coalitions in defense of Iranian human rights defenders. Between 2001 and 2004, he worked with NGOs focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2004, he joined Human Rights Watch as the Iran and United Arab Emirates researcher. His work at Human Rights Watch focused international attention on the plight of migrant workers in Dubai, as well as repression of civil society in Iran. He came to the United States in 1983 as a student and received his doctorate in Physics from Boston University in 1994. He was a professor of Physics at City University of New York until 2000. His groundbreaking research in Nano-Physics has been published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and he holds four patents in this field.

Hussein Ibish: “An overview of contemporary Arab attitudes towards Iran.”

BIO: Dr. Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and Executive Director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership. From 1998-2004, Dr. Ibish served as Communications Director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the largest Arab-American membership organization in the United States. From 2001-2004 he was Vice-President of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Dr. Ibish has written widely on Hate Crimes and Discrimination against Arab Americans, civil liberties in the United States, race and human rights, and the Palestinian struggle for a nation state. A respected analyst and commentator in Arab and American media outlets, his most recent writings are “Race and the War on Terror,” in Race and Human Rights (Michigan State University Press, 2005) and “Symptoms of Alienation: How Arab and American Media View Each Other“ in Arab Media in the Information Age (ECSSR, 2005) and What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal (ATFP. 2009). He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Leili Kashani: “The challenge of ethical solidarity at a time of internal repression and external threats.”

BIO: Leili Kashani works at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City where she advocates for a just closure of the prison at Guantánamo and against illegal detentions more broadly. She is a senior editor at Arab Studies Journal and has a graduate degree from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Over the years, she has organized and participated in various NYC events concerned with social movements in Iran and strengthening opposition to sanctions and war.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet: “A Tale of Two Cities: From Cairo to Tehran.”

Bio: Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is a leading historian of the early modern period in Iranian history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the second Iranian-born woman scholar to achieve tenure at an Ivy League university. Professor Kashani-Sabet completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) is a groundbreaking study of Iranian nationalism in which Professor Kashani-Sabet analyzes and theorizes the significance of land and border disputes, with attention to Iran’s shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (later Iraq and Turkey), Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf region. Her book is being translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Tehran, Iran.

Professor Kashani-Sabet teaches courses on various aspects of modern Middle Eastern history, including ethnic and political conflicts, gender and women's issues, popular culture, diplomatic history, revolutionary ideologies, and general surveys. She is finishing a book entitled, Conceiving Citizens: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in Modern Iran (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2010). She is also completing a book on America 's historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world entitled, The Making of the 'Great Satan': A History of US - Iranian Relations (under contract with Princeton University Press). In addition to her academic work, Professor Kashani-Sabet has written several fictional pieces. Her first novel, Martyrdom Street, will be published by Syracuse University Press in 2010. Professor Kashani-Sabet has directed the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. She is a member of the Association of Iranian American Writers.

Negar Mottahedeh: “The Iranian Political Crisis: Social Media Brought you the News!”

BIO: Negar Mottahedeh is an associate professor of film, literature and women's studies and the co-curator of the Reel Evil: Films from the Axis of Evil and Aftershocks: 9/11 film series at Duke University. Her work has been published in Camera Obscura, Signs, Iranian Studies, Radical History Review, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her first book, Representing the Unpresentable on Iranian cinema and its relation to 19th Century visual history was published in 2008. Her second monograph, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema was also published in 2008 by Duke University Press. A perceptive theorist of Iranian visual culture, Professor Mottahedeh writes and speaks about culture, innovation and digital technologies.

Faraz Sanei: “Shaping Popular Opinion: Arab Civil Society and Iran's Green Movement.”

BIO: Faraz Sanei is a Researcher with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, where he focuses on issues related to Bahrain and Iran. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, he served as Senior Human Rights Lawyer and Program Director for IHRDC. Mr. Sanei received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his J.D. from the Vanderbilt University Law School.

Stephen R. Shalom: “Democratic Upsurge in a Region of US Hegemony."

BIO: Stephen R. Shalom is a professor of political science in William Patterson University in New Jersey (WPUNJ). He received his Bachelor's degree from M.I.T., his Master's from Northeastern, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University. He began teaching at William Paterson in 1977. He is the author of many books and articles on US foreign policy, neocolonialism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Some of his best-known books are The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism (1981); Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman, 2003) and Imperial Alibis: Rationalizing U.S. Intervention After the Cold War (South End Press, 1993), which has been described by Noam Chomsky as "lucidly argued and carefully documented, Stephen Shalom's study of the pretexts for intervention is an invaluable guide to the recent past and unlikely future." He is also editor of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy. Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar (Paradigm Publishers, 2007) and is on the editorial boards of Critical Asian Studies and New Politics, and writes for Z Magazine and ZNet. Professor Shalom directs the Gandhian Forum for Peace & Justice at WPUNJ, an organization that engages with “high school, college, and university students and teachers in innovative and practical ideas, actions, and programs that promote peace and justice through cooperative engagement, dialogue, and respect for opposing views and opinions.”

Roozbeh Shirazi: “Demographic Timebombs, Heroic Martyrs, and Knights of Change: Locating the Youth in Contemporary Politics in Iran and Jordan.”

BIO: Dr. Roozbeh Shirazi is currently a member of the faculty of the School of Education at CUNY-City College. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative International Education with a disciplinary focus in Political Science from Columbia University. His dissertation is a critical ethnographic investigation of secondary schooling for boys amid national and international calls for education reform in Jordan. His research interests include the cultural production of schooling, the pedagogy of citizenship and national belonging, the Iranian diaspora, and the politics of representations of "youth" in the Middle East. Dr. Shirazi has extensive experience as an educator and researcher internationally and domestically, and has published articles examining the history of US involvement in education reform in Afghanistan, as well as the politics of education reform in Jordan. His forthcoming publications examine the construction of Iranian identities in diaspora, as well as the gendered production of schooling in Jordan.

Conference convener Golbarg Bashi

BIO: Golbarg Bashi joined the Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) in September 2009 where she teaches Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies. She holds a First Class B.A. (Honors) in Middle Eastern Studies from Manchester University, a M.Sc. in Women's Studies from Bristol University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on a feminist critique of the human rights discourse in Iran. Her research interests include the theories and practices of human rights in Iran and the Muslim world, modern Iranian social and intellectual history, and women’s rights movements in Iran/Arab world and in a comparative context. Her publications include, Feminist waves in the Iranian Green Tsunami? (2009); From One Third World Woman to Another: A Conversation with Gayatri Spivak (2010) and Eyewitness History: Ayatollah Montazeri (2006).

Conference organizers:

Shehnaz Abdeljaber: Outreach Coordinator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies and English and Africana Studies major at Rutgers.

Farah Hussain: Undergraduate student; Department of Comparative Literature and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Rutgers and researcher at ArteEast in New York City.

Art work:

Poster designed by Shahin Haghjou, student of graphic design at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Barcelona, Spain.
Program designed by Bahareh Sehatzadeh, Publicity Officer, Center for Middle Eastern Studies and PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Planning, Rutgers.

Iran and the Arab World: New Horizons is sponsored by CMES and by the College Avenue Dean, with thanks to Rutgers University Global Programs.
Special thanks go to CMES director Dr. Charles Haberl for his gracious support!

Representing Iran in Film and Social Media to be Discussed in Live Webcast, Jan. 29

2010-01-28T07:40:00.001-08:00

So many of my friends on Twitter and Facebook have commented recently about how they always see me online, but that they rarely see me in real life. It's a bit scary frankly, but that doesn't mean we're any less connected. Luckily, I still see my students during office hours and my colleagues too: at talks and meetings. Yes, believe it or not!

This week though, there's a twist. Tomorrow, that's Friday, I'll hold my office hours online and EVERYBOY can tune in and ask questions and participate. The plan is to talk about the role of social media in the Iranian post election crisis and about Iranian cinema on the 31st anniversary of Islamic Republic of Iran. I consider this an open forum, so join in with your thoughts.

As I spoke with James today about the flow of the questions tomorrow, I also thought it would be important to address the way that social media have impacted activism, journalism and Humanities scholarship. Also, my hero Walter Benjamin, "The Reel Evil Films from the Axis of Evil Film Festival" that I curated in 2003 and the continued persecution of the Baha'is in Iran are important topics for discussion tomorrow.

So let's chat, 12 noon EST. Tweet your comments and questions with hashtag #dukelive Or email them to live@duke.edu or post a comment on Duke's Ustream page on Facebook

Representing Iran in Film and Social Media to be Discussed in Live Webcast, Jan. 29

Posted using ShareThis

UPDATE:

Boy was that ever so much fun! There were about 277 people tuned in at one point. Another 100 have now watched the program online. Best office hours ever! Won't ever top that! Thanks everyone for tuning in and for asking great questions.

Ditto that!

2009-12-14T18:00:00.000-08:00

I remember it vividly. About exactly a month ago, I woke up to the image of a sheet of carbon paper left over from some dream in the early morning hours and, too, to the smell of fresh school copies made on cranked copiers. Strange nostalgia! I don't remember ever seeing one of those machines -- whatever they were called-- and I had to ask around if anyone remembered them.

As a kid, I was always suspicious of a test if the page didn't stain my fingers with that warm, light blue or purple ink. It wasn't fresh enough, was it? But more importantly, no hand-out, no test, was really that important or that good, if it didn't have that intoxicating smell you remember if you are of my generation. The ditto sheets, made by spirit duplicators, belonged in our childhood classrooms. We did our French verb conjugations on them. Churches had them too, if you were so inclined. And, yes, it may just have been "the spirit", yes that intoxicating smell of alcohols in the solvents used as "inks" that eventually banned the "Banda" machines from schools. As much that, as the "high-volume xerox copiers" that displaced them. The memory of those spirits still excites us.

But why all this nostalgia?

Just reading the Wikipedia entry on the ditto sheet, had my friend Chris and I nearly in tears.

For my part, at least, looking back, there was an atmosphere surrounding those ditto sheets that never really returned after I was done with school. I remember the sheets in my college classrooms, too. Vaguely. But it was the collective ritual of raising up the sheet and smelling the spirit of the verbs to be conjugated; the ritual of standing outside in the school yard in the freezing cold, wrapped in our hats and gloves, and feeling the wet snow pressing through our leather boots and our thick woolen socks and talking and talking and talking endlessly over the answers to the questions on the test, as some smoked and some cuddled and massaged, or jumped up and down to stay warm... It was that whole sense of belonging to each other, to that place, to that light, to that piercing northern air, and to that moment. All of that was summed up in the fragrance of the ditto sheet. And as strange as this sounds: There was aura there, reproduced over and over and over again, as my world turned.

I clung to every single one of those sheets we got in school, put them carefully in my folder, and kept them perfectly neat through all my years in Norway.

Today, even the most important xeroxed papers get left behind after my faculty meetings. I insist to have the URL of the website to "what-ever-it-is" rather than lug another pile of paper home, folded, soiled with chewing gum and torn up here and there for a to-do list, an email address, or a book mark.

The generation before ours doesn't really have that nostalgia for the ditto sheet. Not really. They remember cutting, I mean literally cutting and pasting paragraphs together to write their essays with scissors and glue. That generation gets worked up by the sound of the typewriter. And frankly it doesn't care much for our texting habit.

Of Veiled Men & Revolutions

2009-12-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

Most upheavals and revolutions have failed in their attempt to achieve their goals once the so-called "opposition" has come to power. This is as much true for the Algerian War of Independence of the 1960s as it is for the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s. Women took to the streets, shoulder to shoulder with their men in both revolutions and when the war was won, those very women were forgotten. Once again, banished to their apartments. Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade speaks about this in a poetic language that still haunts me now almost 20 years on.

In the Algerian War of Independence, men donned veils to hide weapons and women walked "naked" in the streets of Algiers to accomplish various missions "dressed" like European women in the Quartiers. So the use of the veil as a technology, as a weapon of war, is not new. In Iran it dates back beyond the Babi movement of the 19th Century.

In our time, in our upheaval, Twitter, YouTube, Flicker and Facebook are the technologies by which global involvement in the post-Election crisis of 2009 in Iran has been accomplished. Much has been exchanged and acheived in the last 6 months since the June 2009 election in these very media: images of Neda's martyrdom were circulated on social media, videos of student protests were distributed and then, later, appropriated by traditional media networks, and global pleas for Human Rights were voiced and campaigns launched through them.

But had you told me yesterday, the day before the six month anniversary of the election, that I would see my male friends and colleagues veil to support a tortured and humiliated student activist (Majid Tavakoli) in Iran -- a man photographed in a veil in Iranian State news because of a speech he gave in public, I would never have believed you.

Last night and today my friends, my heroes, and my colleagues appear in social networks in green and black and blue and multicolor headscarves, acknowledging the plight of both men and women in a State that does not recognize the rights of a people to be free.

Here are some of them:

Babak Takhti (the son of the great wrestler Gholam Reza Takhti)

Hamid Dabashi (the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field.) Photo credit: Golbarg Bashi

Pascal Uccelli (The great French poet and writer who also loves Beth Hart)

And the many many hundreds of Iranian men and boys on social media who call themselves Majid. They veiled. They caught us completely off guard. And stunned our senses in the most revolutionary ways!

UPDATE: Pascal Uccelli has translated this piece into French. Awesome!

UPDATE 2: To suggest, as some have, that these gestures are mere acts of "postmodern transvestism" is to disregard their function within the long history of forced veiling and forced unveiling in Iran and to ignore the many roles played by the Iranian chador in the nation's uprisings from the Babi movement to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

This archival video from March 1979 shows the early demonstrations by women against the imposition of the veil (hijab) on women in Iran:

(My deepest gratitude to Golbarg Bashi for drawing my attention to this archival footage. Golbarg Bashi is a Swedish-Iranian feminist and a Professor of Iranian Studies at Rutgers University)

Placed in the proper light of history and in the blinding glare of a bloody struggle for civil and human rights in Iran today, only fools would call this quiet show of strength and resilience in the face of brutal force, a gesture of "postmodern transvestism". In one stroke these brave "Majids", have openly shown their resistance to an enforced gender apartheid, their opposition to a State that consistently violates Human Rights, and voiced their desire for civil liberties. In this, they have just now arrived to stand proudly next to their sisters who have been at the forefront of the movement for basic rights for all since the early years of the last century. In looking at the photographs below, I am reminded of the words of the great Persian modernist, `Abdu'l-Baha : "...let it be known once more that until woman and man recognize and realize equality, social and political progress here or anywhere will not be possible. For the world of humanity consists of two parts or members: one is woman; the other is man. Until these two members are equal in strength, the oneness of humanity cannot be established, and the happiness and felicity of mankind will not be a reality."

UPDATE 3: BBC World Service's The World and Woman's Hour and CNN's Fareed Zakaria follow up.

I <3 my Tweeple!

2009-11-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

That's me in awe of the "devastatingly charming" @mbhulo! He set off a lot of bells and whistles at Heathrow.

What I love most about being on Twitter is the unbelievable mix of amazing people I get to meet in real life. In the last two weeks I met a number of the people I adore on Twitter on a trip to Europe. I met @redjives and @seddigh at a conference in Leiden, @mbhulo at Terminal 5 in Heathrow, and @marxculture in South Kensington. While in England, a friend @dariushimes to whom I was initially introduced through my Twitter friend @toddicus, suggested I go and visit the Hackelbury Fine Art Gallery. There, a favorite photographer of Darius and mine, Masao Yamamoto, was showing his newest work.

It was also on Twitter that I met @secondcinema a while back and had the opportunity to give an interview on my work on Iranian Cinema at the Carolina just before I headed to London. I love the Second Cinema interview which I have embedded below. But what thrills me more is that I can now say that I am iTunes downloadable. And you know what? THAT rocks!!!

Here is a video I captured of the Masao Yamamoto exhibit:

Here's a video from the conference on Iranian Cinema that @redjives & @seddigh attended and which I spoke at

And finally here is my interview with the sparkling Hilary Russo @secondcinema on Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

Counsel Returns

2009-09-21T05:44:00.001-07:00

A few weekends ago, I met my new friend Andre Blackman at Madhatter for a brief breakfast and exchange. We were first introduced by Jody Ranck who I have only met on Twitter . Both Andre and Jody tweet on public and global health issues and though my work has very little overlap with the work that they do, I am invested in following their work and interests online as well as in "RL".

Andre told me about his vision for public health and his idea for using Social Media in the context of global health that morning, and as he was doing that, I decided to turn the microphone on and ask him to say some of the things he was telling me to my friends on Twitter. Here's the recording.

To my surprise, as we were getting ready to go, Andre asked if he could ask me some questions on camera about the uses and influences of film and social media on public health. Here is his interview with me on video.

Interview with Prof. Negar Mottahedeh - Impact of Film from Andre Blackman on Vimeo.

As I say in the interview, the fact that I've been working on the films of the Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, brought his 2001 film A B C Africa to mind.

In A B C Africa, Kiarostami captures a documentary focus on issues related to AIDS in Uganda with a celebratory joy that permeates the lives of the people he encounters throughout.

To me, this film is a document of the possiblities of social media. It is Kiarostami's first digital film, one in which he handles his own camera and thus experiences the camera's democratization. But A B C Africa is also a film which combines important "information" regarding a global threat with something which I refer to as "counsel"-- the imparting of lived experience, of wisdom, of life. Walter Benjamin has suggested that "counsel" or "wisdom" "is less an answer to a question than a suggestion about the continuation of an ongoing story" ("Storyteller"). Counsel is the gesture of weaving experience into the fabric of life. To tell stories while creating things with our hands is a form of counsel that contrasts with the dissemination of information-- which according to Benjamin is devoid of the aura of a lived life and largely the function of newspapers and some forms of documentary film.

As I was talking to Andre, I saw how social media can functionally transformation a world dominated by information. In fact I realized that social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, allow us to broadcast moments of our lives and experiences --counsel-- as we share critical information about a world that concerns us. Knowledge, once again, is imbued with life experience in our time.

UPDATE:

Andre followed up on our conversation this week with a post of his own on "The Promise of Film and Online Video for Public Health" in his blog Pulse + Signal. Check it out! Here.

Elegant and Elemental

2009-09-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

2009-09-08T06:44:00.001-07:00

I presented this essay as talk in Toronto for the 40th Anniversary of Iranian Studies.

The essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by ﬁlm technologies. It argues that Khomeini’s aim was to produce a transformed and Shi’ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of ﬁlm technologies. I thought you would enjoy reading it.

Sensory History

Press Pass to Picasso and the Allure of Language at the Nasher

2009-08-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

It's pretty incredible to think back and remind myself that I started The Negarponti Files only last semester, and that I started writing it with the intention of thinking through social media and frameworks for social action in the context of art, culture, politics, education and innovation.

The Negarponti Files received its very own press pass today to go to the preview of "The Picasso and the Allure of Language" at the Nasher Museum of Art. It was also the first time that the Nasher invited bloggers to come to their press previews, and that was all Wendy Livingston's doing.

She and I connected via Twitter when I posted a note on the upcoming Picasso exhibit at the Nasher, an exhibit I became aware of when a friend and professor at Duke put it on her Facebook feed. All this to say, that none of what happened today would have happened without our ability to collaborate and connect through social media networks, across disciplines and between institutions at Duke.

The Picasso exhibit is truly inspiring! It opens on August 20th,2009 at the Nasher. It has already showed at Yale where it was originally curated by Susan Greenberg Fisher.

Focusing on the writers that influenced Picasso and those he represented in his paintings, in particular, the exhibit itself blurs the lines between writing and painting and highlights collaborations that just happen to happen between artists because they are friends: Picasso's many heads of Balzacs (1957), his illustrated letter to Leo and Gertrude Stein (1906), his glowing illustrations of Pierre Reverdy's Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead, 1948)

In her opening remarks, curator Fisher discussed a little piece, a collage, that represents the kernel of the exhibit:

The little collage by Picasso was created out of a calling card left by his long-time friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tokias, one day when Picasso wasn't home. Fisher asked us to notice the fold on the top right corner of the card, a fold which people apparently left on the card if the person they were calling on wasn't home. The collage includes a pack of cigarettes, a reminder of Alice B. Tokias smoking habit.

I don't know what it was, but more than the flow of images and words, it was Picasso's poetry that stuck with me on a Wednesday morning. This one in particular delighted me:

"...and later now ten minutes to three my fingers still smelled of warm bread honey and jasmine." ~Pablo Picasso

If you can get to Nasher, I encourage you to also visit the "Africa and Picasso" exhibit which showcases some of the Nasher's holdings of masks and figures from colonized territories in West Africa. I made a little video in that room and it is below. Be forewarned: my reading of this text (captured below with my phone camera) and my filming of the objects in the exhibit is awful.

But if it is awful, you should know that I'm just learning to love my new camera phone.

Picturing Ourselves: 1953, 1979 and 2009

2009-07-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

1953

Picturing Ourselves: 1953, 1979 and 2009

A Conversation with Negar Mottahedeh

By GOLBARG BASHI in New York | 12 July 2009
Published Tehran Bureau

[TEHRAN BUREAU] The surge of stunning photos and videos from Iran over the past month have gripped the attention of much of the world, prompting comparisons of protests there with the Tienanmen Square uprising of 1989 in Beijing and other historic moments in the past century. Most of the pre-election images were captured by professional photographers bearing the familiar logos of the Associated Press, Getty, Life, and others. The majority of post-election images, however, have been taken by ordinary people using their cellphones and small digital cameras.

The outpouring of these images via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, amplified by an intense two-week long media coverage of Iran, have had an incredible impact on the popular imagination; they have moved even icons such as U2 and Jon Bon Jovi to immediately express their solidarity with the green movement in Iran. International human rights organizations such as Amnesty International immediately responded as well, with extensive reports on the brutal police crackdown on peaceful protesters. Many Iranians living outside of Iran have been embraced by friends and colleagues desperate to find ways to help.

Some of the most poignant images have been of girls and women numbering in the hundreds of thousands participating in the pre-election campaign and in post-election protests, giving many a crash course on Iranian women’s studies in a matter of days. To wit, CNN anchorwomen and anchormen corrected each other on the 63% statistic of female university graduates in Iran.

As a friend jokingly said, “Iranian is the new black.”

Even seasoned journalists who have covered the most atrocious and spectacular events on our planet have been moved to the core when they found themselves in the midst of Iranians singing, dancing and marching to the voting booths, and later protesting what they believed was a fraudulent election, and for which they were brutally beaten, arrested, tortured and in some instances even killed. These journalists reported seeing people courageously rescuing one another, even members of the riot police. And again, it is the images of women that they report having carried home with them.

In a moving column in the New York Times by Roger Cohen, he writes,

“No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt. I confess that, out of Iran, I am bereft. I have been thinking about the responsibility of bearing witness. It can be singular, still. Interconnection is not presence. A chunk of me is back in Tehran, between Enquelab (Revolution) and Azadi (Freedom), where I saw the Iranian people rise in the millions to reclaim their votes and protest the violation of their Constitution… Never again will Ahmadinejad speak of justice without being undone by the Neda Effect — the image of eyes blanking, life abating and blood blotching across the face of Neda Agha-Soltan.”

2009

As someone who grew up in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, I have very different memories of the public perception of Iran and Iranians: Sally Field in the role of Betty Mahmoody, the battered and imprisoned American woman trapped in Iran by her abusive Iranian husband, men pounding the air with their fists, and Ayatollah Khomeini. The images conjured by Roger Cohen’s columns were those I was desperately looking for when I was a 13 year-old kid confronting Iranophobia in Sweden.

There is more, much more, in the flood of pictures coming from Iran than the tragic end of a young woman’s life who has become the face of this defiance. To gauge the meaning of some of these images and their significance, I turned to Professor Negar Mottahedeh, one of the most perceptive theorists of our visual culture.

I opted for a comparative analysis and shared with her pictures from three successive uprisings: 1953, on the heels of the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry by Prime Minister Mossadeq, which resulted in the CIA-engineered coup that ousted him; massive street protests from 1977 to 1979, which resulted in the Islamic revolution; and finally the June 2009 presidential election. In these three iconic periods, we are witness to three generations of Iranian women participating in the democratic aspirations of their motherland. If indeed pictures do speak more eloquently than words, then what is it exactly that they are telling us?

GOLBARG BASHI: Thanks Negar for agreeing to this conversation. In two previous books, Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (2008) and Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008), you have laid a solid theoretical foundation for our study of the relationship between visual and political regimes — particularly in how the central issue of visibility, or public visibility to be exact, is definitive to the cultural production of modernity. Now, I would like to ask you to look at these pictures, from 1953, 1979, and 2009, and tell me what comes immediately to your mind? In what ways have we changed – regressed or progressed, if these are in fact accurate concepts — in our public presence? What do you see, how do you feel, when you look at these pictures, these three consecutive takes in our modern history?

NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH: Thanks, Golbarg, for the question and for the amazing images.

What strikes me immediately is, of course, the camera’s attraction to what brings wonderment. And it is precisely the presence of women in the public sphere in these photographs that continually amaze and attract the camera gaze in 1953, again in 1979 and again in 2009. I bring this up because it is important to understand that the history of camera technology — its ability to capture the present — corresponds globally with the transformation of the public sphere and the threat of the feminization of power. The camera’s important historical role has been to disseminate modernity and modernity’s impact on the transformation of the public sphere globally from a largely homosocial sphere to a heterosocial arena in which women participate, produce and consume. Even in its attempt to capture the quaint cultures of the other, the camera has been used to contrast quaint representations of fading traditions and customs to images of European modernity. This is as true for the 19th century photographs taken by Antoin Sevruguin in Iran as for orientalist photographs collected by Malek Alloula, where Algerian women were photographed to suggest that they lead leisurely lives in the colonies while modern French women worked shoulder to shoulder with men in factories and as carriage drivers in 19th century Paris.

So in all of these photos, what the camera is drawn to, reflects the camera’s own role in the production of culture, namely its part in the fabrication, circulation and consumption of modernity. Hollywood images are the best example of this from the early days, because Hollywood understood the historical role of the camera, and, hence, the efficacy of American movies worldwide. The effects of Hollywood’s empire were economic and ideological, certainly, but they were most importantly sensate and intimate. While the processes of modernization, urbanization and industrialization as well as social movements (such as the impact of Western feminism) shifted both social and gender relations, modern technological developments — trains, automobiles, and cameras — produced new ways of sensing, seeing, and organizing vision, new ways of thinking about time, space, architecture, changes in the urban environment, in advertising, and in fashion. Photographs as part and parcel of these developments in culture have as their role to frame and circulate this modernity and it is clear in these photographs that that’s what they’re doing. What’s modern and therefore attractive to the camera is these photographs, particularly, is the presence of women in the public sphere.

Photographs are thought of as documentary evidence, but in fact what they document is a moment. In other words, they are indexical of a momentary exposures to light.

Speaking to their chronology, what all these photographs mark indexically is the important and integral role of women in social movements in Iran over time. By recording light in critical moments in history they show us that the active presence of women in the civil rights movement of 2009 is not something new. Period.

In the photographs from 1953, women in chadors walk shoulder to shoulder with women wearing dresses mildly influenced by the Western fashions of the time. Some men wear European hats. Women’s hair is Rita Hayworth-esque in style through and through and little wonder. These fashions arrived and had a mass circulation via the camera, through fashion magazines, newsreels and Hollywood movies.

While men and women of different backgrounds and ideological persuasions participated in the 1979 revolution against the Shah and revolted against his forced Westernization of Iran, the fashions are very much reflexive of 1970s Western fashions. This is especially evident in the second of the two photographs from 1979.

While we witness a certain uniformity in the coiffure and dress of the 1950s and 1970s photos, the uniformity in dress of the photos from 2009 feels very different. Here, the young women especially, show a desire to alter a set uniform — a state-enforced hijab — playing with hair, headbands, colored headscarves and alternative ways of tying them. By contrast in the 1950s and 70s, fashion dictates a conformity in culture even as the women protest Western intervention in national politics and economy.

Again, these photographs are indexes of moments that pass and that are followed by new moments in time; but there is a joy, a hope, a radiance — clapping, chanting, the waving of green flags, balloons and posters, playfully tied wristbands, headbands and tied green rings — in other words, a communal conviviality and creativity, that emanates from the photographs from 2009. This is quite absent from the LIFE photographs. But then again, to be fair, the 1953 photographs are long shots, and people behave differently vis-à-vis the camera close-up. The bottom two photographs from 2009 in particular capture a multigenerational presence of women, again shoulder to shoulder with men. We think of the public sphere in the Islamic Republic as a largely male, homosocial sphere, and yet, the camera insists in nearly every shot to capture the heterosociality of this sphere just as it did in the earlier moments.

GB: I am very intrigued by a number of things you see. Let’s begin with this notion of “wonderment”. If you were to look at these pictures chronologically, do you see the same visual registers of wonderment — is camera as amused by the presence of women in 2009 as it was in 1953? Do you see perhaps a sense of “normalization” about the public presence of women at all, so far as the camera is concerned. Notice also the changes in technology, that today mobile phones and digital cameras seem to have less an intruding presence than the old fashion cameras with their monumental gadgetry. In 1953, the camera stood outside the crowd, today it is joining the demonstration. And then a related question is the transformation that you see from a homosocial to a heterosocial space where modernity is taking place. What do you make of this shot in 1953, where women are encircled by men holding hands by way of what it seems to be a gesture of “protecting them”. Protecting them from what? They are already in public? There seems to be also a secondary kind of heteronormativity at work where veiled and unveiled girls and women are mixed together, which might be accounted for by class, generation, or some vague conception of piety. Your thought?

NM: It strikes me that the camera is just as preoccupied with the presence of women in 2009 as it is in 1953, and as you say it’s the technology itself that has become more manageable, and journalism has, perhaps by necessity, become more participatory. It strikes me though, for the number of cameras and mobile phones that we see in YouTube videos of the events in 2009, there is only one camera present in this set, and it’s in the first image. It’s pointed in the direction of the women’s gaze. While the photographs from 1953 inscribe the distance that separates “us” from “them”, the photographs from 2009, inscribe an immediacy and accessibility that is unmediated and exclusive to “our camera”. In fact both the second and fourth shots flatten the distance between “us” and “them” bringing the events closer. “Unmediated” and “accessible” are really how the post-Election events felt to those of us living elsewhere: their struggle became immediate to those who chose to pay attention. Internationally, all the songs written for Neda and in honor of the struggle for freedom and civil rights testifies to ways that digital technologies have flattened this distance that separates us from them in 1953. The photographs inscribe this historical fact in their framing.

Yes, I noticed the men holding hands to protect the protesters in the photographs from 1953. Do you think it has to do with “gheirat”, with shame and the unseemliness of women’s presence in the public sphere? Perhaps so. Then again there is that big truck full of men in police uniforms sitting on the alert in the second photograph. That is cause enough for concern. That, and other men. The thing is, and I’m glad you bring this up, regardless of the ways in which modernity is marked by the presence of women in the public sphere globally, what constitutes heterosociality and perhaps even heteronormativity is remarkably different nationally and locally. It’s the men that are holding hands in public, not men and women in the 1953 photographs. So while women are present in public, national notions of heteronormativity call for the protection of their honor, be it by the inclusion of pious women or by the presence of men whose function is to be protective shields. Also while the photographs from 1953 emphasize the presence of multiple classes and generations in the struggle side by side in one frame, the photographs from 1979 show these groups as insular. That generational, class-based and gendered insularity is shed in the photos from 2009. The photograph that frames the old lady with a look that has rarely met the camera testifies to that deep sense of national unity.

GB: I want now to turn your attention to the element of militancy. Compare the “proper manners”, the pretty dresses that women are wearing, sporting nice sunglasses, etc in 1953 with the young woman about to throw a stone in 2009. This is not to disregard the extraordinary evidence of festivity in the 2009 pictures, but the undeniable elements of raised fists, coming face-to-face with the security forces, and even throwing stones. What seems to me happening here is a bodily defiance in the public space that is quite new. Here of course we need to remember the presence of young women in such militant guerrilla movements as Cherikha-ye Fada’i Khalaq or Mujahedyn-e Khalq in the 1970s and 1980s. But nevertheless, here we are watching ordinary young women who are throwing stones with manicured hands. Your thoughts?

NM: The Islamic Republic gained its distinction and identity by addressing itself to the senses. In Displaced Allegories I try to show how Khomeini’s revolution was a revolution under the skin. Khomeini’s regime sought to create a new national body and it did so by aiming its regulations, its system of modesty, on the body of women. The manicured nails, the threaded eyebrows, the strands of hair, are all markers of bodily defiance in public space and these acts of physical defiance have been practiced, regulated, and reinvented over and over again since 1981 when the system of modesty and veiling finally became mandatory for everyone. So, a stone in a manicured hand is certainly a violent response, but in terms of bodily defiance to a regime that inscribes itself minute by minute on women’s bodies — to cover up your arms, to lower your gaze, to move through public space unnoticed — the physicality of the response of a generation brought up under laws that address themselves to the senses, to eyes, ears, mouths, voices, to hands and bodies, is far from surprising. Part of the function of restrictions is that they make us acutely aware of the tools we possess, don’t you think?

GB: Let me now turn to what you rightly call “national body”, but in its specifically female dimension, or what we might call the figural representation of Iranian women. If you look at the unveiled women in the 1953 demonstrations you see the ideal-type of a typical urban, educated, suave even, “modern” woman, a figure that later on, after the coup of 1953, during the Pahlavi period was perhaps best represented in the way the former Queen Farah Diba appeared in public — in a way as if she had just walked out of a Christian Dior catalogue or stepped down from a catwalk in Paris. Now, as you well know and in fact have demonstrated in your Displaced Allegories, that image was radically revised over the last 30 years, since the Islamic revolution, whereby a veiled and as you rightly say regulated female public persona was projected. That veiled figure later repeatedly appeared and consolidated in the mass media, and later on particularly on the cover of a number of books patently critical of the repression of Iranian women under the Islamic republic, as on the cover of books by Betty Mahmoody, Azar Nafisi, Mahnaz Afkhami, or even most recently Janet Afary’s Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, where we invariably see the face and visage of an incarcerated woman, a woman in jail, a woman behind bars. What I believe we are now witnessing in the face and figure of Iranian woman in these demonstrations categorically challenges such projections and their political assumptions, for these pictures in fact show politically defiant, socially assertive, and beautifully self-confident multiplicity of characters from within the social experiences of the last 30 years. In other words, they are neither going back to the former Queen Farah Diba’s public persona nor are they arrested and incarcerated virgins in a Harem waiting to be liberated. Do you see this new public bodily register, a new and totally unaccounted for comfort zone for the feminine public persona? Don’t you think that the assumptions people have projected of Iranian/Muslim women have in fact been seriously challenged throughout these past couple of weeks?

NM: From what I gather from the conversations I witness amongst folks on Twitter, in the news media and in my local community, yes the assumptions people have had of Iranian/Muslim women have been seriously challenged and there has been a shift perception. This shift in perception has extended to the way that people relate to Iran as a nation. In truth, much of the West has received notions of what a Muslim or Iranian woman should look like and these are reinforced by images that equate female veiling with images of incarceration. To me, language too says a lot about how we are thinking and what we are thinking. This whole confusion that has occurred that equates all gestures of veiling with the burqa suggests in fact that contemporary Western, and especially American, conceptions of veiling derive from a very specific and highly mediated visual encounter — the encounter with Afghanistan post-9/11. The confusions of the terms of veiling has then become generalized and extended to our perception of all Muslim women… But Golbarg, we’ve talked quite a bit about the photographs from 1953 and 2009, and I am curious how you respond seeing the photographs from 1979. What do you see? How do they make you feel? How does your response to them compare to your response to the other photographs?

1979

GB: I see very similar expressions in the 1979 pictures to those I see in 2009. In fact I see more anger, but no stones. Obviously the technology has evolved and in 2009 the camera is far more intimate and in fact amidst the crowd, in the hands of the protestors themselves (the picture of the old woman seems to have been taken with a cell-phone or a small digital-camera). Again I see a multiplicity of classes in 1979, but one thing that may differ from the 2009 images is that in 1979 women seem to be visibly segregated from the men. You see in the first image, three women and a child, they seem to be related and are walking along in a female procession, whereas in 2009, women are mixed with men. What I feel when I look at the 1979 pictures is sadness. I see a genuine struggle against autocracy and I see women as an integral part of that struggle. But fast-forwarding 30 years later, I see that the little girl who must have been my age in the picture with her mother and aunts has not seen the fruits of their struggle. The women in the second picture very much look like my mother, her friends and my female relatives, most of whom were professional, with their (Farah Fawcett) hairdos, the polo-shirts, etc, and in this way I see a huge loss on part of my mother’s generation. In 2009, I see my little sister and cousins and their friends in Iran (all of whom have university degrees, are incredibly creative–they are trained and exceedingly talented DJ’s, bloggers, filmmakers, poets, painters, engineers, doctors–but very few of them hold a steady job) and I see that our mothers’ heartache and pessimism have not prevented them from entering the streets and creating a public space and presence for themselves. Ultimately, I see my grandmother in 1953, my mother in 1979, and my little sister in 2009.

But perhaps most importantly, what today we see in the pictures of 1953 and 1979 is through the sad lenses of our maternal generation not achieving what they fought for, whereas even after this violent crackdown we still look at the 2009 pictures with a sense of hope. The obvious question is how will my own children, my little daughter Chelgis see in the 2009 pictures two decades or so down the line.

But let me now ask one last question regarding mediation — you and I are both on Facebook, as friends, and as you know much of what we are now sharing, including these pictures, is mediated through social networking. Do you think that mediation has an effect on how we are looking at these pictures? There is a cyberspace socialization through these pictures, which would have remained matters of library archival research for scholars. But they are now almost instantly subjects of comparative visual chronology, we can see how we were and how we have become. I am also very much aware of the limitations and drawback of internet-based social networking — so perhaps you could open and examine this connection.

NM: I so enjoy having you as my Facebook friend, and in all honesty I think social media have created modes collaboration and interaction that mark the future of scholarship in the digital age. I think what we see happening on Facebook is the future of scholarship. People have remarked that the whole architecture of journalism fell apart in the course of the Iranian post-election uprising because news arrived on Facebook and Twitter, not on CNN. I think we’re seeing the future of scholarship in that decay as well. Already, my colleagues with any interest in Iran, be it through sports, social movements, news media, film, video, photography, new media, politics, gender, human rights, you name it, they’re all turning to blogs, Facebook , YouTube and Twitter to put together their sources. The immediacy with which these media allow us access to events elsewhere and to each other and the ways that they allow us to build on each other’s contributions — using the share button and the comment area — really suggests the future of scholarship in the digital age, where contemporary Web 2.0 technologies by their very centrality will demand our consultation and collaboration on levels that especially the Humanities has yet to witness. In part, this will mean the opening up of the university and I am all for it.

But I digress. Digital photographs like the ones we are looking at circulate often without captions. We add the captions and date them; we personalize them and attach meanings to the images, meanings that others may not have found. We cannot underestimate the power in that and the impact that the personal value we bring to each photograph has on our circles. Just think how different it would be if we were poring over newspapers together like the two girls who then become the cover of Nafisi’s Lolita. We’d see a photograph of protestors confronting the police. We’d notice the date on the top of the paper and read the caption the newspaper gives to the photograph. We’d realize that when we were out shopping together at Saks, people elsewhere were demanding basic human rights — Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Community”. Now the same photograph shows up on our Facebook feed with the caption “The day that Neda died” or “My friend Ali is standing to the right of motorcycle” and just think how that changes the impact of the image on the hundreds of people who we “friended” at some point, people we played with in kindergarten and never saw again until they showed up with an “it’s complicated” status on Facebook. The photograph we post with our caption reflecting its part in our life becomes an integral part of their life. There is an intimacy there… Our captions to photographs on Facebook and Twitter have a different power and immediacy that has to do with personal relationships in real life. We may look at a photograph of crowds in the streets of a foreign city, a photograph we also saw on CNN that same night. But when we read the caption: “I grew up in that neighborhood” on our Facebook feed, we are pulled in immediately. The event becomes ours, it’s woven into the fabric our life.

Thank you so much Negar for this conversation. I have learned so much as I am sure our readers will too.

Thank you so much, Golbarg. I’m such an admirer of your work and your interviews and it’s been lovely discussing these amazing photographs with you. I have also learned a great deal from our conversation.

Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota in 1998. In 2008, Duke University Press published her book on Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema entitled: DISPLACED ALLEGORIES. Her first book, REPRESENTING THE UNPRESENTABLE, on visual history and reform in Iran from the 19th Century to the present, was published in 2008 by Syracuse University Press.

Golbarg Bashi is a regular contributor to Tehran Bureau, where she writes on women’s issues and feminism. She teaches Iranian Studies at Rutgers University. She recently completed her doctoral thesis on a feminist critique of the human rights discourse in Iran.

Tehran: A city transformed by love and silenced by force.

2009-06-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

Before my baby brother, Kasra ,was born, and before I fell in love with the English language, leafing through a small dark-blue Oxford English dictionary; and actually, long before my family moved to Norway and I became acclimated to a different climate and culture, I spent my days on my grandmother's kitchen floor in the Yousef Abad neighborhood of Tehran, waiting for a taste of her divine fereni simmered perfectly, and flavored with rose water and pistachios.

The radio was always on, as I remember it, perhaps to drown out the din of the streets outside.

My heart skipped a beat every time I heard the radio announce: "Inja Tehran Ast. Radio Iran" ("This is Tehran. Iranian Radio Broadcasting") as if that next hour would be the defining one in my tiny life. I remember that I loved Persian music very much. The little turntable- gramophone I carried around everywhere, along with a handful of singles, played my favorite tunes over and over, until it drove the whole household up the wall. I loved Haji Firooz who came around sometime around the Persian new year, Naw Ruz. The Muharram ceremonies were captivating to me, too, if they were allowed by the Pahlavi regime, and if I was allowed, by my parents, to go outside and watch them on the streets of Yousef Abad.

Tehran, the city of my childhood, is a city I cannot recognize from the cry of the roof-top poet who asks "Inja kojast?" ("Where is this place?"). Tehran is a transformed city. A city transformed by love and silenced by force.

As I listen to the fleeting cries of Allah-o-Akbar from the roofs and balconies of the city of my birth on YouTube, I am reminded, that this fleeting call, this ephemeral voice, though etched in tradition, has the power to transfom our consciousness and call us to action in a different way worldwide, in part because of the digital structure of a world that connects.

I learned the lesson of the transformative power of the digital and ephemeral from the arts and the tromp l'oel movement of light on a structure, captured in this video and posted to Facebook by one of my friends.

This week, in the aftermath of the Iranian 2009 elections, another fleeting image of young Iranian student protesters helping a beat officer to safety (at 2 mins into this video)--a fleeting image captured on an ephemeral online video with an Italian voice-over-- changed the way I saw Tehran, forever. I realized in a flash and amidst a pool of tears, that these courageous men and women, whose phone-camera videos and pictures we continue to click and forward, whose cries we hear from the rooftops and the city-scapes of cities unknown to most of us; these courageous ones, are brothers and sisters --comrades --who shared the same bread and cheese, who were trained in the same schools, who studied the same books, who received their military training in the same army, who slept in the same barracks, who listened to the same music and who called to a power greater than themselves with the same sigh rising from the depths of a heart wanting to be free.

It was in this fleeting moment of comeraderie, a moment of love, steeped in the tethers of the old (that bread, those barracks, those school books) and the words Allah-o-Akbar, that I realized that one thing and one thing alone will bring about the freedom and change that the city of my birth is calling into being. And that one thing is love.

Another work of art, a ceramic piece that my friend Leili Towfigh made, taught me an important lesson

about our efforts to create in the world. I learned from it and from her blog that what we want to see in the world has to match what we hold in our hearts and minds. The inside and the outside must match.

If we fail, no, if we fail at that, what we end up creating, Will. Crack.

In the world of ceramics, it's called "dunting". In the world that we are fabricating breath by breath from the weave of our lives, anything less than love, anything less than a conscious return to the loadestone of justice, respect, and collaboration is doomed for failure.

For there to be love --for there to be justice--for there to be peace--for there to be freedom in this, my world-- I declare myself into being as that love.

And so, for that vision, I sew these words into the fabric of my being:

"You should be the change that you want to see in the world." ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul, If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain." ~Sa'adi

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always." ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

UPDATE: I just received this file. A video from Kerman, Iran. Protesters bringing flowers to the police. Such sweetness. Such love. Where is this place, Iran?

She returns on June 20th to wake God up: Listen Closely

(For captions click on the bottom right corner)

We are afterall, humanbeings first, not humandoings.

2009-06-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

I have been, of late, exploring a conceptual framework for action within my own disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, I have come realize that one of my "unshakeable" beliefs-- a framework out of which I act -- is that every human being is born a contribution to the planet. Something like a spiritual principle, this notion of "human being as contribution," governs my views on Web 2.0 and collaborative learning as the core of my work in the college classroom.

Yet, as I foreground this principle and my reliance on a mechanism by which I bring the principle to life, I want to make a distinction between what makes up an initiative and what constitutes a vision.

As new media initiatives are being introduced into the educational environment in the Humanities, my colleagues at Duke University are slowly warming up to the possibilities that these technologies provide. The much publicized iPod initiative at Duke garnered faculty involvement, as did the Duke Digital Initiative. While the digital initiatives have clearly generated interest in Duke as an institution and have produced inter- and intra-institutional collaborations, I feel moved to ask the following:

Where is the people factor here? Where is “the who” that is in collaboration? How are people interacting and how are they bringing about changes? If collaboration is important, is collaboration being applied as a model throughout the system, or is part of the system, of change in particular, moving forward in an adversarial or confrontational or monopolistic manner? (These are some of the most provocative questions asked by Michael Karlberg in Beyond the Culture of Contest.)

As I see it, it is the competitive nature of grading in the educational system (for students) and the accolades that accrue in doing research and writing as individual scholars (for faculty) in the Humanities that often force members of academic Humanities to shy away from collaborative work. (The defeat at the University of Maryland of the vote to institute an open access p olicy for research by its faculty is an instance of this resistance to open collaboration).

So let me ask: Bottom line: What does it mean to collaborate?

To collaborate is to be in relationship. It is to place consultation at the core of our interconnectedness. To collaborate is not about the doingness of a project, but the being. It is the attitude, the vision of interconnectedness that we bring to the process, first and foremost.

We are afterall, humanbeings first, not humandoings.

It is in consultation, within a dialogic back and forth of reflection, discussion, and application, and repeated reevaluation --a consultation in relationship between the individuals involved-- that we as individuals and our institutions gain in identity, grow, learn and generate knowledge. Within projects, consultation is the basis for collective growth and the safe-guard for justice in human relations. Consultation also protects knowledge from the orthodoxy of any truth. For any discourse that establishes itself as an orthodoxy is stagnant and dangerous.

As I see it, no one institution, and no one individual scholar is self-sustaining. Establishing greater networks of consultation for academic institutions supports a vision that says that we envision the world as a place where we gain new levels of consciousness, together, in an interconnected way. As Isaac Newton once said: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

New technologies are presently available to generate a conversation on a grand scale that would allow us to think as a global community about any local or global concern, especially those that might impact and address the future of humanity, its knowledges, its cultures and its well-being. As a recent Time article on Twitter suggests, “We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.”

Much of this kind of work, this interconnection and constant consultation takes place as a necessity in the Sciences, but in the Humanities, we cling firmly to old and outworn traditions of scholarship and teaching, refusing to include both our students and scholars at other institutions in our day to day work, to involve them in our research, our thinking, our applications, our questions, our writing and our teaching. Also, truth be told, don't we work with the assumption that all scholarly contribution has its beginnings and finds its end-point in the academic institution itself?

What would happen if we provide for mechanisms that allow for an open exchange of ideas to whoever wants to be involved in the evolution of knowledge? What would happen to Humanities scholarship then? How would we change as scholars? Who would we be? And who would we become?

What are we really afraid of?

The Wing of a Butterfly That Died.

2009-05-09T05:30:00.000-07:00

I was granted tenure on May 6, 2009 in the Program in Literature at Duke University. That's almost ten years after I defended my dissertation at the University of Minnesota's Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and went on my first job interview. I made this Facebook video to acknowledge the events, the people and the forces that have shaped my life and to recognize this moment of transition as marked by a sweet gift from a young filmmaker who has immersed herself in the world of collaborative learning, collective action, and social networks, a world we call Web 2.0.

The Twitter Film Festival: It's a wrap!

2009-04-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Twitter Film Festival which the Intro to Film class at Duke launched April 4-5, 2009 was a wonderful success. About thirty students in the class planned the festival around a loosely formulated assignment for an end of the semester group project. This was required of them along with weekly blogs and Wiki entries as well as traditional paper assignments. The students had been tweeting on and off between classes and sometimes even during class time as we watched and discussed films together. But the festival was the first time many of them spent thinking about constructing a tweet in a way that would be both smart and fun. They took the festival seriously and did an amazing job. Many of them have emailed me since, celebrating a new innovation in film analysis using Web 2.0 technologies. They loved the assignment and had a great time at the festival itself even if it meant hours and hours on Twitter. Some of them wish they could do it again next semester!

Over the course of a few hours of planning in class, they generated a Twitfilm Film Festival site where all the festival clips were uploaded, created a Twitter account (@twitfilm) where festival participants would follow their tweets and a Facebook Event site where they invited over 400 hundred friends to join the two day event on Twitter. Their tweets went out almost flawlessly every 15 minutes on Saturday. They followed up with a discussion of all the films on Sunday using the hashtag #twitfilm.

There was quite a bit of hype around the festival and for good reason! A press release went out thanks to the amazing Andrea Fereshteh (@skirubbi) at the office of News and Communication at Duke, followed by articles in Duke Today, USAToday.com and the Newsobserver.com A fellow tweetie, Jeff Cohen, (@dgtlpapercuts) who had once taken the more traditional Introduction to Film Studies course taught by Jane Gaines at Duke interviewed me for his blog. (The interview gives the back story for the festival, in particular my discussions with Jen Myronuk (@jenmyronuk), and my colleague, Cathy Davidson (@catinstack). (You can also find Cathy's blog and collaborations at HASTAC.)) The class inspired many and as a class, we learned that we all have the capacity to teach the world as we, ourselves, are learning.

If you didn't have a chance to watch the festival live, check out some of these amazing discussions of film at the Twitfilm site and click on the URLs to watch the clips discussed in the tweets.

UPDATE: We just made it into The Chronicle of Higher Education, yo!

UPDATE 2: Wait a minute! Twitfilm in German! And on Duke's CIT page.

UPDATE 3: My friend and acclaimed art critic Darius Himes writes a review of the festival on his blog. This is an honor.

Wheelies in the O.E.D.

2009-03-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to say with any precision, how it really started. Especially since I was late in entering the conversation. Twitter's always like that, though. You're always fashionably late. Which, on second thought, makes your entrance always rather glamorous.

Anyway, I digress.

I was telling you the story of a day in the life of words on Twitter. I don't know much. And maybe what I don't know is not so important. What I do know, is that I woke up to a tweet about Muddy Waters and a trash can metaphor.

Garbage Man - Muddy Waters

And then this conversation took place a million miles away between two birds on a wire somewhere between a library and the London officescape. Fascinated by a conversation about making it a mission to put "wheelies" in the O.E.D.(Oxford English Dictionary) I decided to transcribe it verbatim and turn it into an animated film about two cute bears talking in a painted Japanese landscape. The transformation of human-to bird-to bear follows no logic. Nor, for that matter, does the trash can-to "wheelies"-to mission-worthy-word. And yet the words that speak here are truly a work of art. Let me present to you: the Best Ever Repartee on Twitter. Watch it and weep!

UPDATE: Scene Two: Same Bear. New Dame. Shaving Penguins. ( I mean... words). A staticky remake of Double Indemnity.

Twoir: Shaving 28.

(Here's the French title 'cause the Frenchies wouldn't understand the British version: Never Trust a Dame: A Twitter Noir)

UPDATE 2: Scene Three: Little bear has a Suitor Case.

Twitmatch: The Suitorcase.

Featured characters: Little Bear, Dame lo-fi, Dame sladner

Got Whuffie?

2009-03-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

This article in Forbes has haunted me for a few days now. It suggests the ways in which the interwebs are becoming a social nervous system of sorts, connecting us, alerting us of world needs, and driving our actions.

I was doing some thinking last week about the concept of justice; its distinction from social equality more specifically- and Rawls came to mind.

Anyway, what happened, was that I was talking to myself loudly on Twitter when one of my peeps, Ed Webb, chimed in and agreed that maybe this, the notion of rational, self-interested behavior which social justice modifies in Rawls, isn't really workable. In fact, some time earlier, another one of my peeps, Sam Ladner, remarked that recent studies by George Lakoff show that rationality, what we may call rational behavior isn't rational at all-- at least not in the Descartian sense. Reason is in fact shot through with emotion, with images, with metaphors; conceptual blends. In fact new scientific studies show that-- an emotional response to others--kindness is hardwired in our "brains, bodies, genes and social practices":

As Dacher Keltner says in this interview, we are born to be good:" “Born to be good” for me means that our mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion—emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices."

I read the interview with Keltner and I was floored. But the evidence of this everywhere.

Let me give you one example: Just last week, Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) tweeted this at 7.15 pm. An hour later there were over 20 responses to The Coldest Story Ever Told.

Remarkable! I can't imagine many of those writing and stretching out a comforting hand over the interwebs even know Madness in real life.

It's irrefutable that we've come of age in ways unrecognizable to many of my generation, nor to many in my profession.

The new generation Generation G is repulsed by corporate greed and is all about generosity. In the current economy where money seems to be all but "a figment of our imagination" the new currency is the Whuffie: It's all about building friendships, supporting others in their projects and creating something useful or beautiful that others too can enjoy.

Tara Hunt's The Whuffie Factor is recommended reading.

UPDATE: I think Madness felt all that love. Take a look here. Sweet!

Poetry and Code on a Sunday afternoon

2009-02-19T13:27:00.000-08:00

Click for animation

This Thursday, I had the opportunity to participate in a talk given by Stephanie Strickland on Digital Poetry. This is a poetry that does as Strickland herself would put it. In an essay entitled "Poetry and the Digital World*," she writes:

"Born-digital poetry is a “next staging” that has arrived, an infant art, practiced throughout the world and now affecting print itself. Known variously as electronic, digital, cyber, hypermedial, hypertextual, ergodic, or net literature, it can be searched out using the full set of these terms."

"Electronic poetry differs from traditional work in several respects that make it a “next staging,” and not simply a recapitulation onscreen of the important experimental poetry techniques of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Digital poetry does things rather than says things. It can be a poetry of performative signs. It often requires that one operate it like an appliance or play it as one would an instrument or game. Sometimes what it generates or displays is unpredictable and irreproducible—only the productive rules able to be known." (p.1)

On Thursday, I wanted to capture the spirit of the poetry by returning the words and images back to the digital world as she spoke to her audience gathered on the second floor of an old building on Duke's East campus. As we listened to her speak the words of her poems in Zone: Zero, and watched the animated images of nature, Strickland encouraged us to embrace the text in order to find its referents. Poetry in this form, has no beginning or end. So start anywhere. Read the words that appear on the water surface, or let the words be read by the water. Move with great rapidity like a frog, or play in the Vniverse. Enjoy!

My live blog of the presentation is below with more links to Strickland's digital work. Just Click on the file and hit Replay.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;altcast_code=9e5abb1eb8" &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Poetry and Code: An Interactive Digital Reading, by Stephanie Stricklan&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

*Poetry & the Digital World, English Language Notes Special Issue:Experimental Literary Education, forthcoming 2009

Pascale Casanova: Translation as a weapon: language, value and literary capital

2009-02-12T13:24:00.001-08:00

This was my first attempt at using CoveritLive. This talk was so much fun to live-blog and link, not just because it was very smart and strangely engaging, but also because Fred Jameson translated quite a bit of the Q&A. The very point of the talk played itself out in practice. Except, oddly, enough the linguistic capital derived from a US context.

Pascale Casanova:"Translation as a weapon: language, value and literary capital"

Get over it!

2009-02-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

I agreed to do a podcast for Duke University Press which just published my second book: Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema.

The Press wanted something current, like a discussion of the Oscar winning Iranian films for 2008 and a section on how current Iranian films are representing the 30th Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. I've been studying the film industry and Post-Revolutionary Iranian films since the early 90s, flying out to film festivals all over the world just to see the latest Abbas Kiarostami or Rakhshan Bani-Etemad feature film. But this assignment seemed quite difficult. Maybe it was because it would go public on Youtube, I don't know... Or maybe it was my being conscious of the fact that Iranian films that are popular with audiences in Iran rarely make it out of the country to the international screen in the first year of their production. It felt awkward to only speak to the foreign reception of Iranian films and not on topic, on what was going on on the ground.

Stretched for time between classes and my responsibilities as a faculty member in the Literature Program at Duke University, I was doing research late at night and all day long.

What I found was fascinating. The Islamic Republic celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the Revolution in high fashion, staging the arrival of the spiritual and political leader of the revolution from exile at Mehrabad airport alongside a full string orchestra!

Lots of parades and glittering honors.

I also found that an inspiring collection of films were actually being screened at the annual International Film Festival which commemorates the ten days of the Revolution. The film Walking My Life by Japanese director Satoshi Isaka won the Crystal Simorgh Prize for best film of Seeking the Truth (Competition of Spiritual Cinema) of the 27th International Fajr Film Festival. And Director Rashid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday won the special Moustapha Akkad Prize. The audience vote and Crystal Simorgh Prize went to Bahram Bayza'i for his While We Were All Dreaming and I have to say that I was thrilled.

A lot of what I discovered didn't end up working for the interview which was a scene of its own: The two interviewers and I laughed at the amateurish setting...

the lack of fill lighting, the camera equipment (yes believe it or not!)..Finally me: I laughed at my hair, baggy eyes and whimsical last minute choice of clothing and accessories. I got my numbers wrong. (Veiling ends with the Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1936 and compulsory veiling begins with the Islamic Repubic in 1982. And there were more that 227 films competing in the 27th Fajr Film festival.) My mind went numb, obviously. The camera battery died half way. I decided to take a photo of it, tweet it, and check my facts while the camera battery recharged.

The whole event went down in less than an hour. It started late, stuttered, and went live before the day was done. We made it fun together.

...And in the end, the interview did what it needed to do, which was to highlight the importance of the film industry in the making of a theocratic state. It also highlighted a little known, but very important film industry and an international film festival of proportions.

My lesson: Get over it! Get over it and just do it!

Art: In collaboration

2009-01-27T11:39:00.008-08:00

I suppose I could have made different choices about the flow of the last 24 hours but I don't think I could have choreographed a sequence that would be so completely coherent, composed harmoniously out of so many divergent threads.

I returned a few hours ago from a talk by Allison Clark on a virtual collaborative environment called OurComixGrid. The talk was put together by HASTAC on the Duke Campus at the Franklin Humities Center. In her talk, Clark described the OurComixGrid environment as digital collective space in which artists, students, teachers and researchers collaborate around what Clark calls "mulitmodal learning". --A learning model based on the comic strip, which combines text, visuals and sounds-- and all this sometimes within a digital environment.

As my tweets from the talk show, the OurComixGrid project is still a theory, not yet even a Beta that artists can test out. But the idea behind OurComixGrid is shamelessly progressive: Artists and educators can come to this site to hold meetings, much like what goes on in Second Life, but here in the OurComixGrid environment they come to "bat around ideas on images, text, logos, storylines and sounds"-- They log on to collaborate and to create art. Anyone, even a curious visitor, without any knowledge of how to create comic graphics or online art can use OurComixGrid to generate powerful graphic art.

As Clark explained in the Q&A, the project is in part focused on underrepresented groups who have had little access to representational tools and /or digital technologies. Arguing that hip hop is IT, Clark suggested that one entryway into the collaborative artist space may be by way of turntablism in hiphop where artists sample, scratch, splice, overlap and edit, but in the domain of sound and music rather than that of image and text.

The talk was my first live feed experience, as I challenged myself to tweet for an as-yet-unknown audience. I wanted to contribute to the collaborative spirit of the project somehow. So it was the content as well as the generative ideas behind OurComixGrid that motivated my live tweets. But truthfully, I came to the talk already inspired by a fearless move that I had witnessed the night before in another big room with a screen at Duke...

Returning home late last night after a long day with students in a workshop on Narrative Cinematogrpahy, a workshop that was conceived out of a new collaborative model of teaching film and digital media at Duke, and then after the workshop, a screening of the brilliant animation of the Ramayna, Sita Sings the Blues, I realized how much my consciousness had shifted in the last two months. I also realized that that shift had opened up a world that I could only guess at, but that I had never really experienced before. Only a scavenge of words could describe the experience in that moment-- as a world of collaboration, a world absorbed with the concerns of the present, a world alive to the abundance of possibilities that an as-yet- unknown-future would hold.

Having faced copyright restrictions on the music for her Sita Sings the Blues, director and animator Nina Paley decided about 3 months ago to turn to audience distribution and open source to broadcast her animation far and wide. --Neither term is fitting here, I notice. Both 'distribution' and 'broadcasting' are responsive to older media and to capital-centric modes of production. --But there shes was, the director of a most stunning reinterpretation of the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayna, in animated form, suggesting to a room full of over 100 mesmerized viewers that anyone would be welcome to rip, share and give away copies of her animation; "Yes!" she said, to everyone's surprise, "Go ahead!"

It seemed to me a rather trusting move, but my was it inspired! I really "got" Nina Paley's fierce fearlessness vis-a- vis her art. I saw, too, in a flash that in a world "gone 2.0" --from education, to business, to parenting--this, the surprising ecstasy of contribution, co-creation and serendipity--a passion symptomatic of an abundant consciousness --is precisely where we are heading, all of us, if our lives are lived entirely with the stream of life itself and artfully.

7 things about me, 7 People I want you to meet

2009-01-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve been tagged by Michael Anton Dila in a kind of social media “you’re it.”

The Rules for This Particular Meme

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
* Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I've only done one other meme in my life and there are really two reasons for me doing this one. The first is that Michael Dila is my hero. He has been my hero since age 19 when we were both in college, he at Earlham and me at Mount Holyoke and we were both in love with Nietzsche. My other reason for going along with this game is an awakening I have had of late as I spend time with tweet-peeps I have only met on the wire: Where most of my friends who haven't spent much time on Twitter and Facebook, shy away from the publicness of the life on social networks and find it somewhat creepy-- too much information thankyouverymuch-- I have come to see from these interactions that our humanity, that raw everydayness that is human, is quite a cherished gift and worthy of the moment to moment share. The more I get acquainted with this humanity, the less inclined I am to respond carelessly to whatever is going on in the lives of others whether it be violence or tragedy or joy or a moment of celebration. So it is with this intention to give myself away in that raw-everydayness kind of way that what follows follows. Also, I want you to get to know the blogs of some of the tweet-peeps I read and admire.

1. I had a best friend in Birklea British school in Norway called Fiona Young. When we did sleep-overs, her parents played classical music real loud. I wasn't used to that at all. We ate British sweets and savories-- Marmite, Drumsticks, and Refreshners --all the time and we had many many secrets. Mostly about boys. I lost her friendship to a Scottish girl named Tarla Duff who seemed to have a never-ending supply of British sweets to share with Fiona. I was too bossy to be part of the two-some suddenly.

Do you see the Refreshners? I loved them:

2. I had my own little gramophone before my brother was born and even though I didn't know how to read I knew how to find the one and only record I loved to listen to. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh and there it was in the middle of a pile of records. The song I loved started with the word "Banafshe...." in Persian. Do you know how it goes? Tell me if you do.

3. When I see a violet, I think "she" looks like my mother. If I'm by myself, I say "Hello." Friends don't always understand....but of all the things that are possible isn't it quite possible that my mother was a violet?

4. Adding "...of it" to the end of any sentence makes me laugh. So, for example: "It's the Sunday of it." {Ok... so... I agree that wasn't terribly funny. But try it. It'll crack you up in the long and the short of it.}

5. The words I regret the most? That I told my auntie to tell my parents that they could, "Throw him in the dustbin!" when they called from the hospital to tell me I had a little brother. I wanted a sister. I was 5.

6. When we lived on a farm outside of Tehran, I had a little tin wind-up toy that moved about awkwardly and looked like he took photographs. I still wish I had him. I still wish we had wind-up toys made out of tin ...and monkeys with cymbals.

7.I fell in love with Griffin, my cat, 16 years ago when he crawled up on my lap and started massaging my velvet black skirt with his little baby paws. He had me at "hello." His photo heads this edition of The Negarpontifiles.

My 7 people are:

Gerry Canavan

Juan Cole

Cathy Davidson

Amanda L. French

Rahaf Harfoush

Miss Rogue Tara Hunt

The Bloggess Jennifer Lawson

Give me some change AND I'll touch you.

2009-01-08T09:00:00.001-08:00

The decision to move to the United States in the mid '80 and to start college at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts was an easy one. It was the transitioning into American culture and knowledge that was difficult. Growing up in a wealthy social democracy like Norway, didn't help I have to say. I knew virtually nothing about poverty. I had traveled a lot, of course, but living the extremes of wealth distribution is something very different.

I am not saying that money makes or breaks a person, but in a social democracy you "get" that no matter what you do, no matter who you are, no matter what you think, or how big or small you are as a social entity, you matter, you count, and you make an impact. To me, that consciousness can be the only explanation for the fact that so many Norwegians read 2-3 newspapers a day. And, why, despite its size, the country offers so much foreign aid and serves as a site of asylum for so many refugees and exiles. In fact every news event creates a stir in Norway, as if the nation could be at risk or could possibly be involved in some measured way. 9/11 and the Anthrax scare, I remember, had the Norwegians taking extraordinary precautions. It was almost as if they believed that the global hierarchy of national importance went something like this:

1. United States of America

2. Norway

But I am all the way at the end of a tangent here.

I remember coming to Mount Holyoke for the first week of school and becoming friends with women whose cultural context and drives were very different from mine. There was literally a fight for attention. A competitiveness-- an assertiveness with a hard, sharp edge--seemed ultimately to define "the mattering" of my fellow students. There were hungry beasts all around, uncaged suddenly, as if the absence of men, they who were the source of all oppression, they, them, their absence would finally mean my presence as woman. We called it feminism. But our culture refers to it more broadly in terms that coin the concept of individualism.

"Mattering," it seems to me, goes beyond this form of individualism. Because, if you know you matter; if you know you are a contribution merely by being a living, breathing, conscious entity on this planet, there is an ease to the ways in which you move, the ways you interact with and impact the world and those around you. That ease of the "I" as "resource- centric" stands in stark contrast to the " I-or- them-centric" culture we know as American individualism. (My hunch is that all the self-debilitating, the cutting doubt people carry, on the one hand, and the self-aggrandizing chest beating of the massive egos we witness in our global culture, on the other, stem from this "I-or- them-centric" cultural stance.)

As second semester starts at Duke University, I remember a button my Mount Holyoke friend, Sunny, wore on her coat. Scribbled hobo writing on a tiny round button read: "Give me a quarter or I'll touch you". I thought it was funny then, though I didn't really understand it. The button, now, 20 years later, takes on a new meaning as I embark on a new semester.

My biggest challenge this semester is not the new class, a new syllabus, or the new tools for learning. I have put together a syllabus that requires students to participate through social media networks, blogs and Web 2.0 in the generation of pubic knowledge. Keeping abreast of these networks and the technologies that allow them to function is a challenge, certainly, and strange as it is to me, I have come to realize that I am the one teaching my students how to create a blog, how to sign up for and follow conversations that shape-shift our perceptions at lightning speed on Twitter. I talk to them about how to connect, to learn and to communicate responsibly in public space. And adamantly and passionately argue alongside my amazing colleagues for participatory learning in the Humanities (I swear, by the way, now that I keep going off on tangents anyway, that I'm getting a Cathy Davidson tattoo right next to my Joan Copjec one! It is going to have her Cat-in-the-Stack avatar smack next to it again !)

As I look out at the faces of the students in my classroom I realize that it's not the technology nor the networking that is daunting, though overwhelming to start. I know that if I can learn to be a bird on a wire and twitter tweet tweet o_O, so can they.

Dimming the lights enough for them to see the screen, I look into their eyes one more time and it's like a jolt of electricity going down my spine. I suddenly realize that my challenge is not the material. My challenge is to have my students get that they are a contribution: "Give me some change!" *" I'll touch you" Odd or even: each one of them is a contribution. I am that I am the difference.

So, here I am picking up Paulo Friere. once more.

Ps. Check out these stunning contributions to participatory learning and knowledge production and exchange in Humanities:

Cathy Davidson's 3 part blog http://www.hastac.org/node/1866 on Digital Media and Participatory Learning (Humanities 2.0) and Twitter at the MLA

Matthew Gold on the Rise of the Digital MLA http://mkgold.net/blog/2009/01/03/mla-2008-recap-part-1-the-rise-of-the-digital-mla/

John Jones on the MLA Twitter panel: http://www.hastac.org/node/1876

Gleanings from the Baha'i Conference in London January 2009

2009-01-03T06:00:00.001-08:00

I am watching the London Conference tweets on Twitter. The tweets are coming out of the historic Baha'i Conference held in London this weekend, January 2-4 2009.

My family and many of my long time friends are there. I thought I'd share what I'm glimpsing from that conference with you on the Twitter fountain.

As the day unfolds, some of the audience members are posting pictures on TwitPic. Here are some by Barney Leith

Here are photos from Day 1 and Day 2 talks and workshops by Bibhas Chandra Neogi:

Late night writing: Barney Leith reflects on the conference's first day:

http://www.leithjb.net/blog/2009/01/03/london-regional-bahai-conference-day-1/

In the morning he tweets that he is too sick to attend the conference. Thus begins Day 2.

Photos from Day 2 of the conference by Rosalie Williams:

Norwegian and Finnish Baha'is performing on stage.

A little girl singing a prayer.

Conference workshop.

Meeting of the Greater London Cluster.

Closing remarks by member of the British National Assembly

Conference close.

Rosalie has more photos from the conference on her blog:

That's it folks. The conference attendees are packing their bags and heading home. 13 IPGs promised in response to the House's request for 6 to be formed this year.

Sadly, Barney Leith got sick for Day 2 and won't be posting an update on the day. I feel like I got a taste of what so many of my friends and family experienced this weekend. Thanks Barney, Bibhas, Rosalie and Afshin for your tweets, FB photos and Twitpics!

Landing the Wild Geese

2008-12-25T06:47:00.000-08:00

On my way back to Norway this time, I did what has become a favorite pasttime of late: I watched my fill of TED talks on my iPod and then watched some more on my MacBook at Heathrow until it too ran out of juice. The talk given by the chef and co-owner of New York's Blue Hill, Dan Barber, was among those that stayed with me. It left me with a question that has centered me through the festivities this year.

I left Norway years ago saying that I'd be back. But apart from the odd visit in the summer when the sun doesn't set and, in winter, to keep my mother company, I haven't really given a return to Norway much thought. Durham, North Carolina suits me. The heat of the summer charges my body with utter delight and the sound of the rain on the tin roof reminds me quite simply that I would have never dreamed a life so exotic when I made that childhood wish to live in America when I grew up. How did the US land me?

So there I am on American Airlines watching TED on foie gras and the Spanish goose farmer, Edouardo Sousa, who rather than gorging his geese to harvest foie gras, allows the geese absolute freedom to roam. The resulting foie gras is apparently unlike any foie gras known to us mortals. And yes, I did say Spanish foie gras. Barber talks about the mouthwatering taste of herbs, of salt, and pepper -- he even speaks of the infamous yellow tint of the foie gras--all products of the plants the geese freely graze on on Sousa's farm.

Sousa, Barber says, creates the conditions that are conducive to life, to happiness to such an extent that even wild geese flying South in winter, land and stay on Sousa's farm. This of course goes against everything we have always assumed to be programmed into the very DNA of wild geese. (Barber talks about witnessing this strange phenomenon at 10 minutes and 30 seconds of screen time).

As I landed in Oslo Gardemoen airport, I continued to think about this moment in Barber's talk. I thought about the way that Sousa achieved the yellow color of his foie gras without having his geese gorge on corn, too. But this, his having generated conditions for which even wild geese land, nest and thrive, has me wondering what ingredients would need to be present in a life for it to be a pad on which others land, nest and blossom. Do I create these conditions in my life? If not, what ingredients are missing? And what can I add? Do my friends blossom in that terrain I call my life?

What are the ingredients that make up the terrain of growth and happiness for you? Tell me!

I have a team!

2008-12-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

I guess "having a team" isn't such a big deal in the world of scientific research or business, for that matter, but to suddenly realize, as a scholar, an academic in the Humanities, that you have a team and that it's not the kind of team that is focused on one H-net topic or exists for the singular purpose of your getting a post at the next academic institution, is quite a revelation.

Yesterday my team mate, Cathy Davidson, posted a blog from The New York Times on organizing tools for downloaded articles and it led to an important

exchange between academics near and far on Facebook on the pros and cons of Endnote, Zotero, Connotea, Yep and Leap and on the headache of accessing academic journal articles if you are not in fact affiliated with a University.

Cathy has been working on developing an undergraduate course on cognition and Web 2.0 technologies, a course which is inspiring me to use blogging and "public writing assignments", such as Wikipedia entries, as requirements for my own courses in Film Studies at Duke.

Another of my team mates, Liz Dorland, posted a Facebook link for a FORA.tv presentation by Philip Rosedale on Second Life this week. Her post finally inspired me take action on a promise I had made to myself and my buddy Michael Dila, of Toronto's Torch Parnership and a writer and strategist on design solutions for businesses. I made this promise almost a year ago... to think about ways that I may use Second Life in my teaching. IBM afterall holds its business meetings in this environment and for good reason: as a parallel reality, it allows us to step out of the rote, everyday, and look critically at what we do not see in what we see right in front of us. For me, movies have that ability, and perhaps that is why I still work within the field of Film Studies as someone interested in critical thinking. But to my mind, at least, film's visual and aural planes have become such prosthetic extensions of our habitual seeing and perceiving that most of us don't actually see, or let me put it differently, don't actually choose to see lived reality from a distance, critically, through the lens of the film camera. Thus Second Life, a space of creation and innovation allows, at least for now, the possibility of reflecting on our habits of thought and action and, from a distance, of questioning the ways that these habits help and hinder us in our lives.

To this latter point, the question of how we get in the way of our own success, a blog post by new friend, the mighty New Media maverick Rahaf Harfoush on Anthony Robbin's presentation on Ted which I reposted immediately to Facebook this week propelling me into a discussion with an old friend, a regional manager and trainer in Holland Jaap van Joolen, about how useful Robbin's talk has been in his experience in management training.

There you have it: I have just introduced you to some of the most active members of my team. In all honesty, maybe I haven't yet found a way to collaborate with my team on content based, Humanities centered, questions apart from the occasional discussion around a recent book review or a movie, but the collaborative spirit that is emerging out of the social networks that we have created over the past couple of years, shows a glimmer of what is to come.

This brings me to what really, really excites me about my team and how it works to keep me on my toes:

Peter Kim, a social technology consultant and analyst, recently shook the social media tree to see what predictions social media bloggers had for 2009:

SocialRank algorithms on Facebook, Social Shopping, and increased activism: some horrifying and some really interesting possibilities which I would be delighted to discuss further with you. But here are perhaps my favorite key predictions for 2009--ones that I think apply to the concept of team and the utility of social media networks in the Humanities-- predictions from the Jedi Master himself, Yoda, channelled by Amber Naslund: "Unlearn what you have learned", "Adapt or Perish", "Fear not criticism: Canned is for green beans", "Size matters not: Who wants to play alongside you does".

I have a team and I admit that have fallen in love with my team mates. In 2009 I am devoting myself to growing up as a team!

A Family's Facebook journey.

2008-12-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

When I talk to my colleagues at Duke about my intrigue with social media networks, I get two responses: 1) Vague interest: You'll have to sit down with me sometime and show me your Twitter account. 2) Disparaging disbelief: It would be interesting to track the number hours you spend on Facebook.

Well... yes, it's true I should do both: Show you my twitter account and track the hours I spend on Facebook, but probably not for the kinds of reasons that generate the comments I've been getting-- comments that don't really acknowledge the implications that social media networks have for a lives lived in exile.

My mom who is in her sixties and lives in Norway was the first to friend me on Facebook two years ago and since then my entire extended family from South Africa to China, from Oslo to Alicante has connected, and frankly in no insignificant ways. I Facebook message my cousin in Essen, Germany from Durham, North Carolina or New York City, USA and even if she is not in Essen and is working instead in Johannesburg, South Africa there is no question in either of our minds that she'll get back to me immediately for whatever it is I need: a tet a tet , a quote, a piece of information, encouragement, a chat, really whatever, and vice versa. Our family shares photos and updates. We keep up with eachother's lives and get to know eachother's friends at a distance. We plan trips together and include those who couldn't make it in on the fun online.

In the last year alone, I have been to Spain, to Turkey, to Chile, to Kenya, and to Norway. The connections I had or made in each place created spin offs: the stories that were generated from my impression of the food, the colors, the events, the art, the music continue virtually on Facebook.

Let me give you an example:

On my last Thursday in Santiago, I discovered a whole branch of my family in Chile at a party I happened to go to with my Norwegian/ British Facebook friends. My Facebook friends had just moved to Santiago from Peru. At the party we discovered that we were all on Facebook. We friended eachother and posted our first collective picture the next day. My mom posted a comment about the photo that encouraged me track the family connection further. My brother commented too and reminded me that he had run into "my Chilean" second cousin in a bus terminal in the Middle East not long ago. My father, now in his seventies in Spain, had a chance to see photos of his relatives who he had last met some fifteen years ago in Santiago. I now follow my two Norwegian/British Facebook friends and my whole Chilean family as they get together at parties, community events, and as they celebrate business successes. I share in their enjoyment of eachother, the food and the music, and the culture they live and breathe. I "go on trips" with them and "watch them" dress up for special events and "see" them pose for photos along the way. These daily feeds continue to inspire me from a distance and affect my quotidian life.

That's just one example; one story from a Thursday of my life. There are at least ten others I could share from the last month alone. I cannot imagine a more vibrant life at the moment without social media networks. And the hours I do spend on them (which frankly aren't that many) are more than worth the years of separation and distance that has been my family's story for over thirty years.