World-Making: DIP Class Glossary Guides Learning
Community-based transformational learning requires more than a common understanding of goals and values. We also must share a common language with which to critique and unpack the ways that racism and sexism are maintained socially and institutionally. We began building a common language over the course of the first couple weeks by revisiting two readings from previous DIP seminars: The Sociology of Racism by Matthew Clair & Jeffrey Denis followed by Beyond Education by Eli Meyeroff. We used seminar time to draft a class glossary of difficult terminology, intended as a living document to return to throughout the semester.
One new glossary term that resonated with some seminar attendees was world-making. Guided by this resonance, we selected Malka Older’s article What we believe about our Institutions as a springboard for analyzing our institutions, assessing how their functioning supports or undermines our goals, and imagining institutions that would better meet our needs. Older is a faculty associate at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She explores themes of democracy and surveillance in her works of science fiction. She has also written on the US government, an institution which, she argues, has never been and was never designed to be truly democratic.
This week we explored barriers to world-making with Tracy Ownes Patton’s paper In the Guise of Civility: The Complicitous Maintenance of Inferential Forms of Sexism and Racism in Higher Education. Patton explores how attempts to transform institutions by women and people of color are often met with calls for civility from people in power. Patton defines hegemonic civility as “an organized process which results in suppressing or silencing any opposition, in favor of the status quo.” This definition challenges the association of civility with virtuous and moral behavior and contrasts with “civility that supports a common good for an inclusive collectivity,” (Patton, 2004, p65).
Our readings and discussions this month have led us to an interrogation not only of UMass and its administration, but of DIP facilitation itself and how it may better meet the learning and community needs of our attendees. In the coming weeks, we welcome further creative tension among attendees and facilitators to direct the evolution of the DIP space toward a better version of itself.