Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

When it is a writing space:

Office door of Columbia University professor, Madonna G. Constantine:

A hangman’s noose was found pinned to the door of an African-American professor’s door at Teacher’s College, administrators wrote in an e-mail today.

The noose was discovered this morning and was reported to the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, members of which are currently investigating the incident. Police and University officials declined to name the professor, who the police described as a 44 year-old black woman, but students identified the victim as Professor Madonna Constantine, who is in the Psychological Counseling department and is known for her work on racism.

The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in doing so have continued to refine the characteristics of peace. By locating efforts to fight global warming and climate change within the peace category (instead of, say, chemistry or economics), the Foundation is supporting Gore’s (and others) argument that fighting global warming is a moral issue, as well as a rhetorical issue and, I would argue, a spatial issue. The geographical spaces that are going to be most affected (or have been most affected) by climate change are going to become war zones, where people fight for scarce resources:

“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

Yesterday, in another act of classifying, the House Foreign Relations Committee, in a non-binding resolution, voted to label the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as “genocide.” The Bush administration countered by calling the atrocities “historic mass killings.” (Update: Ira Schorr noted possible political reasons for the creation of the resolution.) As usual, The Daily Show offered the most meaningful assessment of the ironical and political ramifications of such a vote:

While in Rochester, NY, over Labor Day weekend for my cousin’s wedding, I had the opportunity to go to the George Eastman House gallery. It was the final weekend of an Ansel Adams exhibit. I had seen one of his exhibits when some of his work was displayed at the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin. The exhibit in Rochester was bigger and more thorough than the one in Austin and, as always, it is great to see master photographs up close.

The images that stuck with me from my time at the Gallery, however, were by Robert Polidori of Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster and New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. What struck me of these large-scale photographs was the similarity of the decay–and how the decay has completely redefined the spaces themselves:

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As I have written about in prior posts, my students are writing in collaborative blogs and have also created individual netvibes accounts. I, too, have a netvibes account, and have been using it as a RSS feed host for my students blogs.

I’m exhausted, so not a lot about this, but to say that I really like seeing all their posts in one place. Other times when I have asked students to create blogs or have their own forums, I would have to go to each individual site. Though we would talk in class about creating interconnectivity among the blogs or forums, having to go to go each site to see what was there often worked against that idea. Now, however, because I can see all of their ideas converging into one writing space, I can begin to more readily see connections among their ideas, places where discussions of the texts overlap and contradict one another, how the discussions of their professional, personal, and educational interests merge. This new space allows for the perception that there is a more seamless ecology of ideas flowing through the blogs, mapping their ideas as they emerge over time.

Two CFPs have been announced that ask participants to consider “space” or “place”:

7th Annual Louisiana Conference on Language and Literature: On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture

and

Special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly: New Technological Spaces: Mastering the Literacies of Thinking and Doing across Multiple Modalities.

Descriptions below.

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Today, as part of International Day of Peace activities, Rowan University’s College of Fine Arts hosted an exhibition of Pinwheels for Peace (1 of 4 such exhibitions in Glassboro, NJ) on the lawn between Science and Westby Halls.

This non-political organization aims to provide an alternative to the violent images that bombard children via TV, video games, and the movies. The organization web site says that it is their “hope that through the Pinwheels for Peace project, we can help the students make a public visual statement about their feelings about war/ peace/ tolerance/ cooperation/ harmony/ unity and, in some way, maybe, awaken the public and let them know what the next generation is thinking.”

I walked over to the exhibition with Sandy Tweedie, expecting to take a few pictures of it for an old friend who is an elementary school art teacher, and then be on my way to the Amish market in Mullica Hill. I didn’t expect there to be a table outfitted with markers and pastels so that passers-by could make their own. Some of the pinwheels were exceptional–amazing colors, wonderful patterns–and clearly took a lot of time and thought. On the other hand, my pinwheel (front and back):

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