Mar 27: Circulation, Ethos, & Affective Economy
Dear All Good Folks,
Here are some links we'll revisit as we reflect on our attempts to perform Gries's "iconographic tracking" and as we wrap up this unit of the course:
The following two links are websites that will serve as the basis for Tuesday's case study, so I'll ask you to give yourself some time to browse each site (particularly KIVA):
There are a lot of components to the organization of Kiva Microfunds, let alone to their website. Please give yourself at least 15 minutes to browse -- long enough to try to understand what a "microfund" is and how the website works. I'm asking you to try to notice as much as you can about how Kiva works, who lends and/or receives, and what kinds of things the website allows us to know or not know (i.e., who lends to whom, what motivates them to lend, who gets funded most frequently, etc.). What clues can this website give us as to how corporate humanitarian doxa actually circulate among us?
When we meet together in class, we may consider how DeChaine's article helps us to consider the following aspects of "circulation," "ethos," and "affective economy":
You might also be interested in the following:
Finally, if there is time, we might work the following lectures into our discussion, keeping in mind that they do reflect Euro-American and Euro-centric perspectives. Still, they provoke us to think in certain ways about a concept we most probably take for granted:
Enjoy, and see you on Tuesday!
-Prof. Graban
Here are some links we'll revisit as we reflect on our attempts to perform Gries's "iconographic tracking" and as we wrap up this unit of the course:
- a space for articulating a transnational rhetorical (TRN) approach to textual and imagistic study
- a space for applying Mao's "rhetoric of the Dao" to circulation
The following two links are websites that will serve as the basis for Tuesday's case study, so I'll ask you to give yourself some time to browse each site (particularly KIVA):
There are a lot of components to the organization of Kiva Microfunds, let alone to their website. Please give yourself at least 15 minutes to browse -- long enough to try to understand what a "microfund" is and how the website works. I'm asking you to try to notice as much as you can about how Kiva works, who lends and/or receives, and what kinds of things the website allows us to know or not know (i.e., who lends to whom, what motivates them to lend, who gets funded most frequently, etc.). What clues can this website give us as to how corporate humanitarian doxa actually circulate among us?
When we meet together in class, we may consider how DeChaine's article helps us to consider the following aspects of "circulation," "ethos," and "affective economy":
- access -- who can access what information in what formats
- profiles -- who gets funded? who does not? what do you think motivates people to lend?
- humanitarian doxa -- how the website challenges binary assumptions about "local" and "global" interests
- commonplace discourse -- how the website made you notice repeat patterns in its discourse and in your own discourse about what it means to "help"
- activism -- how the website appeals to both a collective and an individual ethos that reflects different notions of what it means "to act"
- gender mainstreaming -- how the website promotes or assumes a kind of gendered orientation to the world (or to humanitarianism)
- critical consumption -- how does the site make you aware that consumption of goods relies on consumption of discourses?
- universality -- how the website challenges (or doesn't) the universality of certain corporate or humanitarian concepts
You might also be interested in the following:
Finally, if there is time, we might work the following lectures into our discussion, keeping in mind that they do reflect Euro-American and Euro-centric perspectives. Still, they provoke us to think in certain ways about a concept we most probably take for granted:
- RSA Animate Lecture (by David Harvey) on "The Crises of Capitalism"
- Philosopher Slavoj Zizek pontificating on the ideology of consumption
Enjoy, and see you on Tuesday!
-Prof. Graban