ETHN 100 Theoretical Framing: Experience, Context, and Perspective

1. ETHN 100Theoretical Framing: Experience, Context, and Perspective Monday, September 24th

2. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

3. Last Session • Discussed four historical events and social movements that led to and shaped the focus of ethnic studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. • Sketched the goals and approaches to Ethnic Studies. • Ethnic Studies is interdisciplinary. It borrows from numerous disciplines. • Concerned with theories and practices that address questions of power, social movement, freedom, liberation, community, culture, and history.

4. Today’s Session • Build from our observations in Frontline: A Class Divided and thoughts on Steinberg’s chapter to: • Introduce a theoretical framework rooted in critical philosophical thought. • Discuss the crosscutting themes on which we will focus this semester to sketch out our “cases” of ethnic experiences in the US.

5. Frontline: A Class Divided Introduce yourself to another classmate. Discuss the two moments you wrote about in your Week 2 online session submission.

6. Patterns in Week 2 Online Session Submissions • Most ETHN 100 student submissions focused on: • Behaviors of individuals • The deceptiveness of the teacher • Meanness of those with privileges • Reactions to unfair treatment by those without privileges • Emotions they observed in students • Shift in the relationships between students (from friends to enemies). • Very few focused substantively on the context that engendered these behaviors. • We are conditioned to think of discrimination, bias, and prejudice through the lens of individualism, even though we know behaviors occur within social contexts.

7. Two Challenges of Our Course • How do we methodically, fairly, and purposefully distill the social dynamics surrounding what individuals and groups experience? • How do we effectively represent our thinking on racial and ethnic relations via written text?

8. Everyday Usage of the Word “Experience” • Common views on “experience” often focus on the collection of memories or lessons learned from the past. • Accumulation of skills (i.e. work experiences) • The word “experience” has philosophical roots that are important to our study of race and ethnicity.

9. Five Fields of Philosophy • Ontology is the study of beings or their being — what is. • Epistemology is the study of knowledge — how we know. • Logic is the study of valid reasoning — how to reason. • Ethics is the study of right and wrong — how we should act. • Phenomenology is the study of our experience — how we experience.

10. Phenomenology • Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience from the first-person point of view. • Scholars who work from a phenomenological orientation are concerned with the relevant conditions of “experience,” or what shapes experiences.

11. “Experience” from a Phenomenological Perspective • Experiences are not only sensory (what you see, smell, touch, and taste). • Experiences are related to intentionality – what is the conscious goal of the engagement. • Experiences are situated in contexts. That is, they are shaped by the social environment. • Experiences are socially constructed.

12. Context Experience Perspective

13. Experience, Context, and Perspective • We are positioned differently in social contexts. This makes understanding other people’s experiences difficult. • African American Experience • The American Experience • The experience of contemporary gay men • The experience of high school drop-outs • Our goal is to be reflexive—to be mindful of our own positions in contexts in our effort to understand the experience of others.

14. What was the experience of the students in A Class Divided? • How do we begin to describe their experience? • We are, each of us, part of the system that shapes experiences. Therefore, we have to understand the centrality of perspective and context.

15. Key Assumption: Experiences are Socially Constructed • If experiences are socially constructed, then they can be deconstructed. • There are numerous positions on the constitutive elements of experience. • This class focuses on four theoretical orientations to understanding experiences. These are derived from key ideas in ethnic studies. • Power, Culture, Structure, and Identity.

16. Four Theoretical Orientations to Analyzing “Experience”

17. Theoretical Orientations to Experience Later in the semester, we will go into greater detail on these important ideas. • Power – Emphasis on power by consent and power to shape perception of others. • Structure – Focus on patterns of social interaction and organization. • Culture – Values, attitudes, rituals, and traditions. • Identity – Emphasis on dialectical nature of defining ourselves in relation to others.

18. Steinberg, Ch. 1 • Look over your reading notes from Steinberg. • What is his thesis? • How does he organize his thinking on race and ethnicity? • How would you situate his analysis of ethnic experiences of US minority groups on the theoretical framework?

19. Four Theoretical Orientations to Analyzing “Experience”

20. Next Time • Omi and Winant – Defining race and ethnicity. • Overview of crosscutting themes and inventory of key terms. • Introduce the first writing assignment.