In a new documentary film about America’s Universities, Award-winning filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney’s new documentary film Indoctrinate U examines the atmosphere of America’s institutions of higher learning.

“When we think of college, we think of intellectual freedom. We imagine four years of exploring ideas through vigorous debate and critical thinking,” Maloney said. “But the reality is very far from the ideal. What most of us don’t know is that American college students surrender their rights to free thought and free speech the minute they set foot on campus.”

For two and a half years Maloney investigated incidents of what he calls political persecution. The documentary film hopes to show this persecution - as aimed at professors and students - by exploring more than twenty schools across the country including the Ivy League, state universities, as well as community colleges.

According to their press release, the documentary examines “in the name of education, schools from coast to coast ruthlessly compel conformity of thought. Focusing on the experiences of students and faculty who risk harassment, censorship, and even their futures when they dissent, Indoctrinate U makes the campus culture wars — often treated as an abstract battle of ideas — intensely personal and unforgettably human.”

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[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Historian

http://www.understandingrace.org/ is a project by the American Anthropological Association which hopes to provide insight on the history of race as well as how our idea of race is formulated. The website is the project’s online presence, while the traveling exhibit set to touring mostly East Coast Science museum exhibits throughout 2007.

The site has several interesting and useful resources, namely stories and historical overviews as well as some multimedia installations that tell race narratives. Here is a snippet from the site about us page:

We expect people to look different. And why not? Like a fingerprint, each person is unique. Every person represents a one-of-a-kind, combination of their parents’, grandparents’ and family’s ancestry. And every person experiences life somewhat differently than others.

Differences… they’re a cause for joy and sorrow. We celebrate differences in personal identity, family background, country and language. At the same time, differences among people have been the basis for discrimination and oppression.

Yet, are we so different? Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people we see are natural variations, results of migration, marriage and adaptation to different environments. How does this fit with the idea of race?

Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race. The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people.

To learn more, visit the site by clicking here.

By Nathaniel Hansen

“Cultures are most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances. […] A performance is dialectic of “flow,” that is, spontaneous movement in which action and awareness are one, and reflexivity, in which the central meanings, values and goals of a culture are seen “in action,” as they shape and explain behavior. A performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures. We will know one another better by entering one another’s performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies.”

Anthropologist Victor Turner

It was a Thursday night, almost nine o’clock. The Noumea market scene was brimming with tourists, merchants and performers all stirring together under the blinding lights of a nearby Club Med. A brisk ocean breeze kept hands shoved deep into pockets. The smells and sounds were at once foreign and somehow familiar - I recognized the atmosphere, a droning social hum that filled the air. An orchestration of music, conversation, traffic, crashing waves, aggressive vendors, buzzing neon lights all back-dropped by tall buildings, hotels and pulsing lights. I had come to New Caledonia to film Kanak performances. Best I could tell by my immediate surroundings I had found the right place. As the evening progressed I saw groups from Wallis and Futuna, Tahiti, France, but nowhere had I seen any group representing Kanaky. Without warning I heard a voice above the noise, “Nathaniel, Nathaniel!” it was Mme Pecqueux-my host mother, “Come, quickly, Kanak children are preparing to dance.”

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(via Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba)
Open access publishing has been operating successfully within the sciences for over 15 years now. Yet whereas other online movements and practices, such as creative commons, free software, open source and peer-to-peer, have variously been regarded as providing models for new regimes of culture, new kinds of networked institutions, even for the future organisation of society, the open access movement has had comparatively little impact on the humanities to date.

By making the research literature freely available to researchers, teachers, students, investigative journalists, policy makers, union organisers, NGOs, political activists, protest groups and the general public alike, on a worldwide basis, open access is seen as having the potential to break down some of the barriers between the university and the rest of society, as well as between countries in the so-called ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ worlds. It is also held as helping to overcome the ‘Westernization’ of the research literature through the creation of a far more decentralised and distributed research community.

So why, given the often radical nature of the content of their work, have those in the humanities, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, been so reluctant to challenge what John Willinsky in The Access Principle refers to as the ‘complacent and comfortable habits of scholarly publishing’? Why have those in the sciences apparently proved the more institutionally, socially and politically progressive in this respect?

In an attempt to go at least some way toward addressing this situation, we are continuing to seek contributions to the CSeARCH open access archive for research and publications in cultural studies and related fields: communication and media studies, continental philosophy, literary, critical and cultural theory, new media, visual culture, psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory and so on.

You can find CSeARCH, which stands for Cultural Studies e-Archive, at: http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch

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