Barbara Ehrenreich Research Articles

Tribute to Barbara Ehrenreich: Fighting for Labor Through Critical Research Journalism.

This is a short commentary to accompany the article "Hospital Workers: Class Conflicts in the Making" by Barbara Ehrenreich and John H. Ehrenreich. The article was originally published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1975, and is being reprinted in the current issue of the International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services due to its continued relevance and significance in the twenty-first Century.

Writing Trauma: Rita Dove, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison

Case Study ResearchCultural Poetics identifies literature as a social text or discourse. My paper argues the significance of the works of Cather, Morrison and Ehrenreich as models for cultural change. Literature is a social text or discourse which dynamically interweaves multiple strands. My creative approach to teaching blends metacognition and hermeneutics with a concentration on social justice as a paradigm for the English classroom which resounds with tension and resolution dependent upon the silent resilience of the individual. Through student-directed pedagogical model, writing class fuses into a learning community for reflection, discovery, and peer editing for student motivation and success. We actively engage students to explore archetypical universes created by current imaginative writers. Mythological Literary Criticism and Film Theory as a lens into archetypes. We also engage in analysis of personal essays on identity. Metacognition and a student-directed pedagogical model. Through the paradigm of active learning, we engage in reading key articles by scholars in the field in blogs, wikis, web sites, books, pamphlets, newsletters, or journals or other material demonstrating techniques of close reading in order to explicate a text with terms of the literary scholar that apply to writing across the curriculum and differentiating among major literary genres to converse, to analyze, and to use cultural heritage. Students possess qualities of memory based upon human every day experiences similar to those experiences within literary works they read. I play pod casts of sample student essays that show how students recall events or conditions based upon the relationship of reading to memory. One of my students recalls her own beliefs in mercy killing and relates her heritage based upon family and cultural beliefs in the right to life. Students use life story writing next to recount experiences that may help them find thesis. We write for a global multiethnic and ageless audience. Stories can indeed reach all readers. To write, we engage memories of readings, life experiences and imagination. Accordingly, these three patterns compose voice on the written page. But, writing is an essential skill needed for human dignity.My claim emphasizes the importance of reading, writing, and analysis of short stories by Toni Morrison and Willa Cather as well as poetry by Rita Dove as a doorway to practicing social justice in your community and to developing a consciousness and awareness of social justice praxis. I perform case study research on a single subject, myself. Dove was born in 1952. She is an American poet and fiction writer. My model in writing is Hélène Cixous. A visionary, Hélène Cixous (“The Laugh of the Medusa”) realized that we are writing to find ourselves. Applicable to the study of Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Barbara Ehrenreich, the writing of oneself represents our search for words to describe situations. Based on the study of Aristotle’s Poetics (free online text), a good companion work to interpret “art as imitation”, I argue that Cather, Morrison, and Ehrenreich use language in specific modes of discourse, such as fiction, essay, and dialogue, for the purpose of reaching readers. In doing so, they absolutely attempt to motivate and to teach us. In fact, through the art of poetics as a practice, they capture emotions or actions. Then they apply language as metaphors of our actions, ethics, and attitudes. The works portray the human condition. Cather, Morrison, and Ehrenreich create the poetics of language essential to the significance of the messages. In this context, all three writers portray actions and indicators that are significant to us as readersFirst, the significance of the message of Willa Cather is suffering, in her book, My Mortal Enemy. My readings signify the message of Cather as a writer who designs poetics as the cause of the work. Recent research in the area of stylometrics…explores the ways in which the voice of Cather, in her correspondence, differs from the voice she used in her public writing. Conclusions point to similarities between Cather’s novel, My Mortal Enemy, a work noted for both its economy of style and autobiographical features, and her recently published letters (Dimmit et al.). The researchers acknowledge that Cather was very private. She did not want her letters shared with the public. Only recently have her letters finally been published. Arguably, in the model of Hélène Cixous, we suggest that the writing of the work certainly brings a new voice that carries the message of the feminine myth.

The grey matter of decolonial activism, or, socially engaged art as professional-managerial class

According to Yates McKee, socially engaged art reached its Situationist moment of sublation when the participants at the 2011 Creative Time Summit joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in Zuccotti Park. However, like the ‘Bernie Bro’ left and the Corbynistas, OWS was criticized for its ‘class reductionist’ focus on economic inequality. Through various affinity groups like Decolonize This Place (DTP) and actions like Strike MoMA, post-Occupy artists have increased their commitment to intersectional demands and the effort to decolonize museums. Making use of the Barbara and John Ehrenreich concept of the professional-managerial class (PMC), this article extends the PMC critique from the social democratic left to the realm of activist art, where the question of political representation is both assumed and avoided in calls for Black reparations and Indigenous restitution.

Cave art reveals human nature

Summary Prehistoric artworks have been discovered on numerous cave walls around the world. They tell us about the minds and lives of ancient humans as well as about their relationship with the now extinct megafauna that surrounded them. Michael Gross reports.

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature

This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today’s breast cancer discourse—with its emphasis on stoicism and ‘positive thinking’ in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to...

Paying it Forward

Think of a person in your life you're grateful for—why are you grateful for them? This is a standard prompt for one of the oldest and most reliable gratitude interventions ever studied: the gratitude journal. A few years ago, right around the holidays, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a New York Times op-ed declaiming the perils of gratitude journals, gratitude letters, and other exercises designed to strengthen your appreciation muscle. “All you have to do is to generate, within yourself, the good feelings associated with gratitude, and then bask in its warm, comforting glow,” Ehrenreich observed, skeptically. “If there is any loving involved in this, it is self-love….” New research shows that, in fact, the emotional experience of gratitude is complex.

A Dose Of Reality

Book Review Health AffairsVol. 37, No. 11: Patient Safety A Dose Of RealityRick Mathis AffiliationsRick Mathis ([email protected]) teaches health policy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a health researcher in information delivery at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, also in Chattanooga.PUBLISHED:November 2018Free Accesshttps://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.1098AboutSectionsView PDFPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsDownload Exhibits TOPICSDietary habitsCancerGovernment programs and policiesThere is a certain sense of regret that those of us over fifty may feel when reading the popular literature on healthy living. Much of this genre advances lifestyle changes purporting not only to make us healthier but to extend life as well. But what about all of the years we’ve spent not following these recommendations? Are we not going to live healthily into our eighties and beyond because we failed to adhere to a certain diet or engage in mindfulness practices when we were younger? Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book is a good if somewhat sobering antidote to this kind of despair. Ehrenreich, who has a PhD in cellular immunology and has written several books related to health care and medicine, questions our tendency to become obsessed with lifestyle fads in hopes of cheating illness and death.In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich effectively lampoons the modern tendency to see death as more of a choice than a combination of unfortunate circumstances and natural processes. We subject anyone who dies at anything less than extreme old age to a kind of “bio-moral autopsy,” asking whether the person smoked or drank excessively or ate too much fat. We wonder, for example, whether David Bowie would have lived beyond what once was considered the respectable age of sixty-nine if he had never smoked. Instead of seeing death as the natural end of life, we see it, in a sense, as suicide.Undergirding Ehrenreich’s argument against this perspective is the fact that increasing infirmity is part of the aging process. She also notes the randomness of biological processes in the development of such conditions as cancer. Further, cells once thought to improve healing are now seen as capable of turning on their hosts and exacerbating illness. Our bodies are best characterized as battlegrounds of conflict rather than sites of harmonious processes capable of being trained toward perfect health. We may influence this conflict through personal habits and medical technologies so that immune cells act more responsibly. However, we cannot completely control the conflict, and we certainly cannot forestall its inevitable outcome of death. Moreover, efforts to prolong life often result in a poor quality of life toward the end. “The price we’re paying for extended life spans is a high rate of late-life disability,” writes a New York Times columnist whom Ehrenreich quotes. Or, as the late novelist Philip Roth wrote, “old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”Although this attempt to inject a dose of reality into popular thinking about health is certainly laudable, Ehrenreich at times overstates her case. She observes, for example, that most of the medical screenings she has been advised to undertake lack evidence. As an example, she cites the recommendation that women in their forties and fifties get a mammogram annually. Yet she doesn’t provide enough evidence to make the case convincingly not only against annual mammograms but against all screenings. Since she is a breast cancer survivor, one wonders how she would assess her own diagnosis and treatment. She also mentions some notable people who died prematurely in spite of slavish devotions to diet and exercise: Jim Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running, died of a heart attack at age fifty-two, and Steven Jobs, a strict vegan, died of pancreatic cancer at age fifty-six. As intriguing as such observations may be, they are individual reports and hardly rate as scientific evidence.That being said, the very readable Natural Causes serves as a knock on the head for those of us who are easily swayed by the latest lifestyle fad that promises to extend life and prevent chronic disease. It can also help assuage concerns. While I was reading this book, a female friend who is my age expressed concern about a diagnosis of osteopenia, or mild bone thinning, and wondered what she could have done to prevent this. I was able to cite Ehrenreich’s comment that osteopenia is not so much a disease as a normal feature of aging. In health and health policy, as in life in general, it helps to remember not only that we age, but also how we age—and adjust our expectations accordingly. Loading Comments... Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. DetailsExhibitsReferencesRelated Article Metrics History Published online 5 November 2018 Information© 2018 Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.PDF download

Books: Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of Control: Malign Macrophages and the Madness of Mindfulness.

Barbara Ehrenreich Granta Books, 2018, HB , 256 pp , £16.99, 978-1783782413 Barbara Ehrenreich is an American writer with an enviable breadth of knowledge, an acerbic wit, and a willingness to tackle the big issues of contemporary society — as the subtitle of her latest book attests. She has a PhD in cellular immunology, and the genesis of this book lay in her shock on learning that macrophages play an apparently dual role in the body, on the one hand encouraging inflammatory responses to …

I Was a Retail Salesperson: An Examination of Two Memoirs About Working in Retail

This article considers Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (originally published in 2001) and Caitlin Kelly’s Malled (2011) as representational narratives of working-class retail workers. The display of working-class experience in each work is considered in the context of the authors’ lives and experiences, considering use of language, events and broader expectations of the working life of retail salespeople. Using Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘Other’ (2013) as a theoretical key point, the article also considers, for an American perspective specifically, how these workers are constructed in the broader ideology of the nation state.

The Making of Nickel and Dimed: Barbara Ehrenreich and the Exposé of Class in America

This article examines the career of journalist and critic Barbara Ehrenreich. Born to a mining family, Ehrenreich’s experience of upward mobility formed the biographical context for her critique of professional ideology—a critique at the heart of her entire career. Her diagnosis of the New Left’s failure and the New Right’s triumph emerged from her analysis of the “professional-managerial class.” Her journalism amounted to an effort to translate across the cultural gulf between the proletariat and the professional class in which she counted herself a reluctant member. Her bestseller Nickel and Dimed was the culmination of this project.

Extended Book Review: Honneth’s social-democratic turn?

Honneth's social-democratic turn? Christopher F. Zurn Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015; Viii + 257 pp.: ISBN 9780745686806, AUD$30.99 (pbk) Perhaps the most peculiar thing about Zurn's book on Axel Honneth is its cover--the terracotta warriors of China. Neither Zurn, nor Honneth, nor the Frankfurt School, nor critical theory, nor the theory of recognition or 'freedom's right' have the remotest to do with China, warriors, armies, ancient rulers, and terracotta. Nonetheless, Zurn retells Honneth's version of critical theory in minute detail, outlining Honneth's 'struggle for recognition', his diagnosis of social pathologies, recognition and market, as well as social freedom and recognition. With the struggle for recognition, the social-democratic Hegelian Honneth has surely established himself as the main representative of the 'third generation of critical theorists' (p. 1) after Adorno, Horkeimer, Marcuse, and so forth being the first, and Habermas the second. In his brief biography, Zurn notes that Honneth was born in Essen, growing up in the 'bourgeois milieu' of Horst Honneth, his father a 'medical doctor' (p. 2) even though medical doctors are hardly bourgeois--perhaps petit-bourgeois. Essen's unchallenged bourgeoisie remains the staunchly reactionary war mongering, Nazi supporting, and Jewish prison labour using--and abusing--Krupp family. But soon the 1949-born Axel Honneth moved from Essen to nearby Bochum and later to Berlin and Frankfurt to become the 'director of the Institute for Social Research' (p. 3)--critical theory's main institution. Zurn writes that critical theory must also have a practical purpose' (p. 5) even though one might be somewhat hard pressed to find such a 'practical purpose' in, for example, Adorno's (1944) seminal masterpiece 'Minima Moralia'. Beyond that, Zurn notes that Honneth 'has consistently tied his recognition theory to issues of political economy' (p. 9), albeit political economy remains rather marginal in Honneth's recognition work and even more marginal in his Freedom's Right. On the latter, Zurn emphasizes that Freedom's Right is a 'monumental book' attempting nothing less than a contemporary re-actualization of Hegel's 1820 ambitious project, the 'Philosophy of Right' (p. 10). Surely, anyone aiming to measure up to Hegel has set himself a most formidable task. Yet this does not seem to have created an awareness that Hegel--unlike Honneth--was not only aware of the current literature on the political economy of his time but also--again unlike Honneth--critically reflected on it. If Hegel himself would have undertaken such a 're-actualisation (Honneth) himself, he might have included at least some of the political economy literature that occurred since 'Philosophy of Right' (1821) in a book on 'freedom's right'. One author that Hegel would most likely have included in such a project could have been that of one of his prime pupils by the name of Karl Marx and perhaps Karl Polanyi, Keynes, Schumpeter, Immauel Wallerstein, Leo Panitch, Kenneth Galbraith, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Harvey, Joseph Stiglitz, and so forth. But despite Zurn's claims, Honneth's work remains weak on this. Nevertheless, it remains true that 'the most influential single thinker for Honneth is undoubtedly Hegel [as Honneth] follows Hegel's lead rather than Kant' (p. 12). But stating that 'Hegel seeks reason and morality in the space of social interactions between persons' (p. 12) may be overstating Hegel as the latter was at least equally, if not more, interested in reason and morality inside institutions; with the state being among his prime institutions and perhaps corporations being minor institutions (Klikauer 2015a). It beggars belief to claim that 'humans actually come to have an understanding of themselves only in and through social interactions with others' (p. 16). As if this was the 'only' (Zurn) way we understand ourselves, perhaps indirectly also indicating that institutions like kindergarten, schools, universities, the army, the police, and even down to your local taxation office have no impact on how we understand ourselves. …

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich (review)

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich (review)

The Rites of War and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

This essay uses Samuel Hynes and Eric Leed to argue that Jake Barnes’s journey in The Sun Also Rises , culminating in the violent act of the bullfight, manifests a structural replication of his war experience and, additionally, of what Barbara Ehrenreich theorizes as the origins and passions of war. This replication ultimately proves salubrious. Moreover, Jake’s ringside position as spectator and mediator literally re-enacts the role of aerial observer, while also speaking to the transitional nature of modern total warfare toward a paradigm that Jan Mieszkowski has described as placing center stage social mobilization, spectatorship, and narration rather than combat.

Feminine Peace and Peaceful Femininity: Jean Elshtain’s Problematic Theory of “Problematic” Peace

There have been arguments concerning whether femininity is inherently peaceful or peace is in itself feminine. Whereas most radical feminists such as Sara Ruddick and Betty Reardon and anti-militaristic feminists such as Cynthia Enloe advocate the notion of peaceful women, equal rights or liberal feminists such as Barbara Ehrenreich and political realist such as Jean Elshtain reject the idea but with a different reason. Ehrenreich insists women are not peaceful and even war prone in order to prove that men and women are equal in their performances; Elshtain proclaims women can not be pacifists to advocate that war is functionally necessary to the sustenance of the state. Among many theories, however, Elshtain’s political thought related with gender, peace and war is under scrutiny here in this article, in that she has delved into these issues in a sustained and very controversial manner. As an exemplary proponent of political realism and liberal or “neoliberal” feminism in the arena of international relations, Elshtain negates the notion of feminine peace or peaceful femininity by providing examples of various women participating in the war around the world. The political realization that war has always been in the world and will not be “obsolete” makes her say peace is “problematic” and even “sterile,” because it robs a vital and driving force from the people and their history. In her ideal civic state where “purified patriots” do carry “necessary” just war against terror, no place is given therefore for the perpetual peace. Whether women are peaceful, bellicose, peaceful but warring if necessary (Johan Galtung, Christine Sylvester, Jan Pettman, and Dan Smith and Inger Skjelsboek, among others), one thing commonly accepted for all the feminists and IR theorists despite their political differences is that, ultimately “peace is better than war.” Elshtain’s theory of problematic peace, then, turns out to be “problematic” because she claims war has been inevitable as a vital force through which the world is constituted and thus peace, categorically passive and inferior, will politically never be actualized. For Elshtain, war matters, not peace. This article insists however that the notion of “negative peace” should be transcended by not positioning peace opposite to war in the world of nuclear war which in the end nullifies the notion of constituting war itself. A new notion of peace is thus desirable to move away from the outdated notion peace as an absence of war and from the obsolete notion of nuclear catastrophe, a structural and ultimate outcome of negative peace. After one massive nuclear war, there will be no more “deterrent” wars. The awareness that war’s opposite is not peace but ordinariness and “fullness of life”(Panikkar), and that ordinary “full” life is not achieved by war may relieve Elshtain from her relentlessly realistic but nevertheless idealistic conundrum, who is driven with the political notion of “homo homini lupus” and “bellum omnium contra omnes,” which should be negated in the civil society in vain.

Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst (review)

Mary Luckhurst. Caryl Churchill. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xiv + 208. $39.95. Caryl Churchill has been writing plays half century, during which time she has constantly experimented with dramatic form. Equally, as Mary Luckhurst amply demonstrates in Caryl Churchill, her plays have always responded to new social, political, and cultural challenges, especially as they affect women and those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Luckhurst's division of her book into chapters that focus on work decade by decade and her focus on one in production each decade illuminate both changing style and enormous range and versatility of her work. She never writes same twice. In part 1, Contexts, Luckhurst provides an overview of plays in to her life, her thought, and critical and historical contexts in which her work has been received. She notes well-known influence on Churchill of Brecht and of second wave feminism but concludes that while Churchill's significance to development of feminist political theatre is unmatched, her work is also informed by science, ethics, war, terror, climate and masculinity (24). Of particular interest is Luckhurst's discussion of an essay Churchill wrote in 1960, when she was only twenty-two: Ordinary, Not Safe: A Direction Drama? In this essay Churchill attacks new wave of Royal Court realistic drama by male dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and calls instead, in Luckhurst's words, for utopian quest to explore socialist agendas in ways that provoke change (12), using experimental forms and language, such as juxtapositions of song, prose and poetry, spectrum of emotional moods and cumulative effects of powerful stage pictures (13). Luckhurst demonstrates that throughout her career Churchill has followed her own agenda. In part 2 Luckhurst begins by reviewing Churchills early work, mostly radio plays, of 1960s, and also her six little-known plays television written between 1972 and 1981. Typical of political topicality of these plays is The Legion Hall Bombing (1979), documentary drama about boy accused without evidence of planting bomb in Northern Ireland. Churchill took her name off credits after BBC censored some of its content. Luckhurst's discussion of Churchills stage plays of 1970s begins with helpful account of The Hospital at Time of Revolution (1972, finally produced in 2013), based on writings of Algerian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, whose complex self-knowledge Churchill admired; dramatizes the colonised victim's dilemma of complicity (50). Analyses of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Vinegar Tom (1976) follow. Luckhurst is very good at providing succinctly historical information that is essential to our understanding of carefully researched plays: example, concerning English Civil War and various religious and political movements that inform Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Given Luckhurst's care in providing such instructive background material, it is unfortunate that in her discussion of Vinegar Tom she focuses on reliance on Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's polemical and essentialist Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which ties to 1970s feminism, and omits to mention at all use of Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which underpins play's still-relevant socialist understanding of economic dynamics at work among different kinds and conditions of individual women. Luckhurst does offer critique of her chosen key production decade, Cloud Nine (1979), suggesting that from perspective of more recent views about gender, it may have become a history play as relation between biology, gender identity and sexual orientation is no longer assumed to be straightforward (80). …

Illness and Innocence

Illness and Innocence

The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Theme Parks in Contemporary Transatlantic Fiction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I use “situational” to mean that there were no public spaces who bore this function full-time, given the scarcity of leisure time during this period, though sites like the village square could be transformed on occasion to meet this need at, say, the time of a major festival. To draw on Baudrillard's much-abused critical term, hyperreality is the experiential domain of the postindustrial developed world, one in which such successive degrees of the virtual and the simulation permeate our social space that the ontological and epistemological distinction between the real and the copy has become inextricably muddled. Or, as Miodrag Mitrainovic defines it, the “theatrical” staging of a “narrative that links together the domain of … a great variety of attractions” (114). Though in a slightly different register, these efforts were anticipated by such works of speculative fiction as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990), which dramatizes the resistance of nature and happenstance to humanity's hubristic attempts at environmental engineering, and Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park (1981). In a review of one of his collections, Stephen Amidon describes Saunders's America as “half theme park, half television advert” (65). Whereas the Situationist International called for spaces on unending carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense) possibility, the postindustrial theme park came to offer a mild variation on the consumption patterns, ruling corporatist ideologies, and entertainment figures already ruling late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century existence. Historian David Blight chronicles the strategic negotiations involved in the Civil War's entry into popular memory in his groundbreaking study Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. The unifying themes of Saunders's fictional theme parks are rife with implications for collective identity formation through historical consciousness—for instance, the American Civil War, in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline” is commonly seen as one of the defining moments of American history. In “Pastoralia,” the primitavistic envisioning of Neanderthal life testifies to how our imagining of our origins has all sorts of implications for how we culturally define ourselves as a species. This catering is often carried out in a particularly dehumanizing and poorly remunerated manner, as Barbara Ehrenreich illustrates in her magisterial participant investigative report, Nickel and Dimed (2001). In Bounty the gap between rich clients and poor workers is emphasized by the fact that the former devour lavish feasts while the latter subsist on black bean soup and little to no meat. Derivé, from the French verb “to drift,” is to actively reclaim urban environments through the act of wandering in search of what is novel, captivating, and personally useful. The flaneur is an idle urban wanderer who takes in and processes the sensations of the city and of losing him or herself in its crowds in a particularly artful manner. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael K. WalonenMichael K. Walonen is a specialist in transatlantic modern and contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature. He is the author of the book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature.

Curriculum and the Conscience of Parents

Despite Governor John Lynch’s veto and the outcry of teachers and education scholars, New Hampshire recently enacted HB 542, called the “Parental Conscience Act” by supporters. This bill was introduced by Republican and Tea Party officials in response to the reading of a book perceived to be anti-Christian and anti-capitalist in one school’s personal finance class (Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed). It allows parents to opt their children out of the teaching of any material or through any pedagogical style that they find “objectionable.” Additionally, the law requires that, at the expense of the parent, the teacher or school must construct an alternative curriculum that is suitable to the parent while still meeting state requirements in the relevant subject area. Unlike previous court cases that have protected parents’ rights of conscience on religious grounds, HB 542 does not require parents to provide any justification at all for their claim that school material is objectionable. While the word “conscience” itself was ultimately removed from the final version of the bill, the initial version and many of the discussions about it described parents’ objections in terms of violations of their conscience. Finally, parents are further protected by the law’s provision that parents’ names and any reasons they do provide for objecting to school teachings are to be kept out of the public record. HB 542 enshrines the protection of parents’ conscience into public school policy, regardless of the justification for parents’ views, discussion of the impact on their children, or concern for teachers who could face dozens of objections and obligations to construct alternative curricula at any one time.

A field guide for immersion writing: memoir, journalism, and travel

For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style immersion writing Robin Hemley offers new perspectives and practical advice for writers of this nonfiction genre. Immersion writing can be broken down into the broad categories of travel writing, immersion memoir, and immersion journalism. Using the work of such authors as Barbara Ehrenreich, Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Conover, A. J. Jacobs, Nellie Bly, Julio Cortazar, and James Agee, Hemley examines these three major types of immersion writing and further identifies the subcategories of the quest, the experiment, the investigation, the infiltration, and the reenactment. Included in the book are helpful exercises, models for immersion writing, and a chapter on one of the most fraught subjects for nonfiction writers the ethics and legalities of writing about other people. Field Guide for Immersion Writing recalibrates and redefines the way writers approach their relationship to their subjects. Suitable for beginners and advanced writers, the book provides an enlightening, provocative, and often amusing look at the ways in which nonfiction writers engage with the world around them. A Friends Fund Publication.

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera (review)

Reviewed by: Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera Joseph A. Domino Fight for Your Long Day. By Alex Kudera. Atticus Books, Kensington, MD. 2010. While Alex Kudera’s novel, Fight for Your Long Day, highlights the grave socio-economic injustices of a corrupt academic system, it is much more than a preachy manifesto. Cyrus Duffelman’s struggles are that of any of the economically repressed. But when college professors earn Wal-mart wages, it highlights a shocking disconnect between the hollow political rhetoric of the importance of education and the true reality. Cyrus inhabits a world of increasing impoverishment. This is the landscape of essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. It would be a cliché to call him a modern day Everyman. Cyrus is a real person with frailties, insecurities, yet with conviction and seriousness about what he does. He does represent a growing class of academic paupers in particular and the growing dominance of menial wages everywhere in America in general whether the work is menial or not. And, yet, it’s not little enough. Menial wages, that is. Another sad irony is that the adjunct is no lifetime indentured servant, but rather an endangered species as institutions of higher learning contemplate “satellite hookups and TVs in every classroom . . . with the finest Indian universities teaching virtual classes long-distance . . . The fifteen grand a year they were paying the graduate student [or adjunct] has become fifteen hundred for a hungrier South Asian” (207–208). Cyrus is doubly invisible. No one “sees” him—just as the adjunct inequity is on almost no one’s radar—and because Cyrus wields no power or status, he hopes not to be seen. He continues on not in hope of reward or changing the system, but in adherence to his own personal code of conduct, and he is his own harshest critic. Professor Kudera’s social criticism emerges from Cyrus’s quality of life conditions. Between classes, he kills time sitting in a train station, passing for one of the homeless ensconced there. Cyrus alternates between “ogling the ripe melons” of student Allison Silverman while anticipating a late-night tryst with said melons and contemplating Jewish writers in the 1920s who could smell Hitler and Stalin in the air. Cyrus knows enough to ask what kind of smell is in the air now? In our current educational environment, knowledge isn’t important; it may even be a rotting corpse which is perhaps what Cyrus smells. Despite his external invisibility, his inner hamster [End Page 184] wheel is always turning. The time-worn expression “life of the mind” becomes the “life of the grind.” So, ultimately, Cyrus’s fight is for his own standards and integrity in the face of humiliation and futility, a daily quest for survival and the strength to endure. In our “anti-progressive” age, Cyrus is emblematic of a devolving system: the itinerant medieval scholar traveling from one fiefdom to the next in tatters, hoping for a meal or bauble. If only adjuncts read this book, they would nod and commiserate; as a work of fiction, strongly rooted in social criticism, the general public needs in on it, for one, the parents paying skyrocketing tuition costs, because they should know where the money is going. And it is certainly not in the pockets of the Cyrus Duffelmans of academia. Joseph A. Domino Palm Beach State College Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association