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transienttheologyproject · 1 year ago

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i hope my followers & others keeping up & supporting this project know that whenever you leave a kind message on my post — whether it be something as simple as a tagging your reblog of my posts with ‘!!!’ or as personal as sending me a message to the effect of ‘this type of work means so much to me thank you for doing it,’ you are helping me keep my momentum going.

bit of a whole big rant below, sorry for the length, but tl;dr i’m just immensely grateful for what support this project has received because the backlash it has gotten has taken way more of a toll on me & my mental health than i anticipated, and your kindness has helped in motivating me to not just completely wipe this whole thing from the internet.

today yesterday kinda sucked. a lot of the past couple weeks have sucked, especially since pushing more of an online presence with this zine, because of course, with something like this you’re naturally gonna attract a range of Christians, from those ‘gender-criticals’ (whatever that means) who think I’m misguided, to those who begin their messages by calling me & my work perverted, to those whose vitriolic transphobia manifests in sending me Gospel verses weaponized as straight-up death threats. and obviously i knew this was going to happen, and it did, even from as early on as when i was posting the calls-for-art.

and at first i handled it well — i deleted whatever i felt wasn’t worth my time responding to, and if i could meme a hate-comment into a promotional tiktok, then i kept it around to do exactly that. and that worked. i told myself i wasn’t going to get defensive and bound up in keyboard wars because the purpose of this specific project, this specific platform isn’t for debating or dialoguing with Christians who don’t affirm trans+ identities — it’s to serve those who are trans+ and Christian, and I didn’t want this intra-community effort to become an inter-community debate forum. dialogue is a perfectly necessary thing, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a time & a place for everything and this project wasn’t meant to be it.

as the weeks went on, however, the negative attention this project was receiving began to take a toll on me. it didn’t help that in addition to the anticipated pushback from Christian peers, some of the trans+ folks i knew gave me a hard time for ‘bootlicking the oppressor.’ i was, and still definitely am, having the most intense experience i’ve had to this day of the exact type of ostracization that inspired me to pursue this project in the first place — too trans for the Christians, too Christian for the trans folks.

receiving comments calling an academic research project i dedicated my entire summer to “perverted” made me doubt everything i had worked so hard on. accusations of “heresy” and “blasphemy” i had expected and received plenty of, but perversion was not something i had anticipated. comments like “you make me sick” made me second-guess everything i had done leading up to that moment — am i sickening? i was falling for the false narrative that exists as the backbone of much of today’s transphobia — that trans+ people are inherently groomers, monstrous predators. i was perverting my body, they said, and scripture, too — and i began to wonder if they were right.

receiving comments like “enjoy your insanity! I hope the boot still tastes good when they've taken away all our rights so you could feel like ‘one of the good ones’” made me doubt my identity as a Christian. yeah, it’s no secret that the anti-trans legislation running rampant and scaffolding an era of fascism in the United States is the result of neoconservative Christians who represent more the Rome that Jesus mocked & condemned than Christ’s mission itself. i began to worry if calling myself Christian identified me with the oppressor and if talking about transness from a Christian perspective was really a helpful endeavor or if i was essentially stabbing my trans+ community in the back.

you’d think that given the nature of this project, i would be better about not letting those sorts of interactions wear me out. because i’m conducting a project that’ll say “hey, trans+ Christians, you don’t have to choose between those two facets of your identity because they’re not mutually exclusive,” you’d think i would’ve had that mindset confidently internalized. or maybe you wouldn’t think that, but i guess i thought so myself. and i guess i thought that expecting the petty backlash & having done enough research to dismiss it was enough to be prepared for it. not really.

from the beginning, i told myself, “don’t let the mean ones get to you, you’re smart and have done your research and know what you’re talking about.” but there was such a separation between myself and my work this summer that i never truly internalized what i was writing about — i believed it, but i didn’t necessarily believe it for myself.

this project has been a labor of love. and i definitely think the labor part got the best of me this whole summer. the literary review was a drag. writing up the annotated bibliography was immensely frustrating and took me way longer than i would have liked. same with the zine’s section prefaces. and i had planned and hoped to meet with and interview several professionals in the various fields examined in the zine — and i totally dropped the ball because of… something that felt like burnout, which actually made me feel like i had committed the biggest blunder of my professional career before it had even begun. I’m still recovering from that.

the mental and emotional toll this has caused me, the academic, spiritual, psychological, and physical strife this whole endeavor has proven to have been has resulted in me sort of dissociating from the project; i talked about it as though it was a passion project of mine — which it is — but as i was working on it, i felt so disconnected from the material. as if it were akin to a homework assignment in a class i couldn’t care less about.

i’ve been in a tough spot regarding mental health for a long while now (for various other reasons besides this), and i’ve reached the point where i’ve wanted to pull the plug on something to just try and break whatever vicious cycle im trapped in, whether that something be as large-scale as dropping out of university, or as low-scale as shaving all my hair off, or maybe…well, maybe since i can pinpoint these online interactions and this research pursuit as a whole as contributing substantially to my poor mental state, maybe i should pull the plug on the zine. screw it, delete the social media pages & the website, make sure artists get their copies & be done with it.

but i have folks who have been legitimately looking forward to this — not even just people of the intended audience! i have cis Christian friends on my college campus who had never met a(n openly) trans+ person, let alone a trans Christian, before they had met me who have demonstrated such a genuine eagerness to learn from the expressions of faith and gender from myself & others like me. i know a Catholic mother — the sweetest woman — who is ordering a physical copy of the zine so she can try to understand and support her two trans+ daughters, and any other trans+ people she meets, better. i’ve had countless people — strangers — message me “this work you are doing is incredible and incredibly needed. thank you for doing it.” i’ve seen several people, folks just scrolling through their tiktok for you page who don’t even usually follow after leaving me comments to the effect of “yknow, this is a strange crossover episode, but i’m here for it, this is cool!”

there are people who want this work out there. and what’s more is that there are people who need this work out there. and i guess every time someone goes out of their way to extend some kindness towards me and gratitude for this project, i am reminded that i am among those who need this work. those little moments ground me in the purpose and mission of this project — to serve my trans+ Christian community, particularly those who may be having trouble reconciling their intersection within those identities especially within the current socio-political climate. and like, that’s me!!! i am a member of my community, i am a part of the people i am hoping to serve.

everything i was (and truthfully, still am) anxious about, everything that was (and is) weighing on my heart is everything that this project hopes to challenge. all the doubt i’ve been experiencing as of late is exactly what inspired me to do this work in the first place.

and the kindness and gratitude so many of you have extended towards me in the past few weeks, especially within the past few days, have truly helped ground me. i’m still struggling to get back on my emotional feet per se, which is why i will ask that if you find a moment, you keep me in your prayers — but i genuinely mean it when i say that every positive tag on a reblog, every share on one’s story and every kind comment serves as a reminder to me that a.) there are people will be genuinely served by a project like this, and not only that, but b.) i am one of those people. you all remind me to take a look at what i’ve done from the perspective of a trans Christian, not of a student researcher or a graphic designer or a social media moderator or any of the other practical roles i had to take on this summer. you remind me to look at this project as the type of person it’s meant to serve. you remind me of my initial hopes and goals with this endeavor.

you remind me to allow myself to be transformed by the work i have done.

when you share with me how inspirational this project is to you, you remind me to let myself be inspired by the work i’ve done. when you share how much this zine means to you, you remind me to let myself take meaning in it.

and i think it’s sort of ironic in a very beautiful way — so much of this zine focuses on the idea of entanglement and the interdependence of many facets of our lives, and it wasn’t until this project became entangled with you all so much that your experience with the zine is no longer just dependent on mine, but that ours are interdependent on each other. the positivity you feel at learning about this project is poured back into my cup, giving me the breathing room to finally allow myself to feel positively about it, too.

so truly, from the bottom of my soul, thank you. thank you for your kindness and your support, and for making it this far in my ramblings if you have. i know it was quite disorganized and probably very repetitive but this is my first time sort of articulating what i’ve been feeling so heavily recently. so, thank you again — i hold each and every one of you always in my heart, mind, and prayers!

<3 - Soup

(the man behind the curtain)

#tw transphobia #wow this is a lot #thanks for reading #i love yall #transgender christian #trans christian #trans and religious #trans and christian

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simdokki · 9 months ago

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lilith kim. lili. tiefling. fighter (or barbarian).

im back n im in my d&d era 🥹😭🙏 ive been watching d20’s fantasy high and i wondered what kind of pc id make if i were to join a fantasy high-esque campaign (manifesting 🙏), n i thought of her !!! n im gonna yap about her so

lili grew up in a household full of overachievers (imagine a typical strict Asian household) where everyone from her mom, dad & 2 older siblings r incredibly gifted in the academics with her parents being respected figures of the arcane world. unfortunately, lili here isn’t the sharpest tool in the box (n i mean … she’s lk kinda stupid) so she’s always had a hard time with to keep up with the rest of her family, and her parents noticed that.

but because they can’t stand a kim being not best at ,,, well anything, lili’s parents scrambled to look for activities that would best fit their youngest, so they enrolled her in almost everything: piano - can’t differentiate which chords r which, swimming - couldn’t rly float on water, they looked for almost everything under the sun, but to no avail… until they made her train as a fighter at a young age as a last resort because of a family friend.

but that didn’t deter lili. born w a sunny disposition, lili’s what u can say a positive force in the lives of many people, she always has a smile on her face and it instantly lights up the room. she never thinks bad about her current situation n always tries to see things w the glass half full. n she aims to share this w the people around her, even when her family has completely set her aside because she didn’t meet their standards (bc apparently fighting w melee is ,,,, uncivilized (not said indirectly but very much implied))

lili’s favorite weapon has always been this axe her first teacher ever gave her. it was a huge ass axe, practically half her size. she also adorned it with flowers bc it’s pretty.

but yeah … she’s my baby i love her sm

#d&d #d20 fantasy high #sims 4 cas #sims 4 cc #create a sim #fantasy high oc #d20 fantasy high oc #sims 4 custom content #sims 4 alpha #sims 4 maxis mix

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dutydreamed-a · 3 years ago

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pick five tropes for your character!

01. BADASS BOOKWORM

These characters are quiet, smart, and seemingly physically unimposing, but with Hidden Depths of formidable physical and practical skills. They are Brains and Brawn, with brains dominant, if not quite Strong and Skilled.

Their physical abilities might result from applying their genius to solve physical challenges like they were math problems. Their attention to detail might also result in a Diagnosis from Dr. Badass. While some badass bookworms are surprisingly strong, others might be Weak, but Skilled, relying on flawless technique or supernatural abilities. Sometimes a bookworm can lack any special physical traits, but has access to an Impossibly Cool Weapon or enough firepower to make toe-to-toe combat, as they say, academic. A favorite weapon of the bookworm might even be what's always close at hand.

Elderly examples are often Old Masters who have spent decades contemplating philosophy and punching trees in half. Another common type is the Adventurer Archaeologist, who spends as much time studying in the University as that type does evading the poison-tipped arrows of angry natives. If the bookworms are a bit ditzy or talented but lack common-sense/etc, expect them to be Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass. If they prefer not to fight, doing so only when they must, then they have Minored in Ass-Kicking. They are very likely to wear Specs of Awesome. In a Five-Man Band specializing in Brains, a Badass Bookworm might as well be The Big Guy.

The trope is the converse of Genius Bruiser. A Badass Bookworm looks like your standard geek, but then displays a surprising amount of physical prowess, whereas a Genius Bruiser looks big, strong, and tough, then unexpectedly shows off an intellectual side. See Muggle with a Degree in Magic if their bookworm side is what's making them impressive.

02. SPIRITED YOUNG LADY

There is a certain kind of character commonly found in historical fiction set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (though she can appear earlier or later, too). Her literary ancestress can be found in some of the best-loved novels of the Regency and Victorian eras. She is the girl who bends the rules just a little. Oh, she can dance a country dance or pour tea with the best of them, but she may also be a good walker or horseback rider. She may be the most intelligent girl in the story, and she is almost certainly the wittiest and the most outspoken, sometimes earning her the title of spitfire. She may be talented in more practical ways, as well: if given the opportunity, she may turn out to be a wise investor, and she may harbor talent for music, writing, or art that goes beyond drawing room entertainment and might become a means of financial independence if necessary. In rare cases, she may even solve a murder. Though she occasionally runs into some trouble, especially if she fails to obey the powers that be, she usually comes through in the end. She will be the Veronica of a Betty and Veronica love triangle, and the hero is likely to find her more enticing than her more docile sisters.

The Spirited Young Lady has the same grace and style as the Proper Lady plus an added spark of attitude or rebellion that is missing from her more-prim-and-proper literary cousin. This is what makes her such a popular character today: she is the character modern audiences can most admire or relate to. In historical fiction, she is likely to be a proto-feminist. In nineteenth-century literature, she may not speak out for women's rights generally (a few examples do), but she will speak out for her rights pretty clearly. Her willingness to say what she wants is part of what makes her stand out.

03. UNDYING LOYALTY

A character characterized by their loyalty. Can be a trait of both heroes and villains. Most of them are supporting characters, intended as sympathetic. Indeed, if used on a villain, it can sometimes be used to flesh them out and give them redeeming qualities. Alternatively, it can be negatively portrayed as a threat to conscience.

When given to a main character or one in an authority position, expect it to manifest itself in protective instinct: as a Papa Wolf or The Caretaker or someone who is A Father to His Men. When given to a Sidekick, expect it to be an unselfish willingness to support the main character. It can also be given to friends who, despite their differences, are genuinely fond of the other, and bonus points if it works both ways.

Should the object of this loyalty die, expect generous helpings of Due to the Dead as the loyal one works to honor the fallen one's memory.

See also: My Country, Right or Wrong, My Master, Right or Wrong, Thicker Than Water, I Will Wait for You and I Am Spartacus. An Act of True Love will often be used to prove how loyal one character is to another, by having them perform a great sacrifice to show that they'll put someone else's needs before their own.

Similar to but not to be confused with Blind Obedience, where a character follows unquestioningly believing their liege to be infallible. A loyal character isn't necessarily defined as a perpetual Yes-Man, and may know when to defy or contradict the subject of their devotion, especially if it's as much for their well being as their own. At times this trope might actually come at the expense of those they follow, since they will generally not obey an order that comes at their expense or abandonment.

04. STRANGER IN A FAMILIAR LAND

A character returns home after a long absence and finds that they no longer fit in, either because their home has changed too much over time, because they themselves were changed by their experiences or both. In the second case, it can lead to a But Now I Must Go sentiment. In less extreme cases, the character may eventually settle down again with some effort.

Prominent real-life examples are usually based on soldiers returning home, most commonly from World War I or The Vietnam War, or prisoners who find after serving their sentences that they can't adapt to life "outside". This is also relatively common among anthropologists and related fieldworkers who come home after a long stint in another society only to realize how bizarre their own culture really is. Another common case is people who were raised in another culture who travel back to their family's homeland — despite sharing cultural ties due to their family's past, they experience Heritage Disconnect and find themselves alienated due to their foreign upbringing.

Present in Western literature as early as in Homer's The Odyssey, making it Older Than Feudalism.

Related to You Can't Go Home Again, Never Accepted in His Hometown, Going Native, and possibly So What Do We Do Now?. This experience may be part of causing the character in question to go From Camouflage to Criminal. Occasionally overlaps with Where It All Began. Contrast Home Sweet Home — although this trope may also make the character realize that his home is no longer the place where he used to live. He may find that his old bed is too soft and he now Prefers Rocks to Pillows.

05. I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO

Sometimes a decent person has to do something bad because it is the only way to prevent something worse from happening. 'I Did What I Had To Do' generally involves an after-the-fact justification for morally questionable actions. The culprit presents this statement when he's confronted with a "What Were You Thinking?" or "What the Hell, Hero?" reaction from someone (particularly The Heart) to whom he owes an explanation.

The questioned character will generally say, "I did what I had to do." And, more often than not, nothing else.

The consequences of such an action vary, of course, depending on the work's place in the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism. A character who sincerely regrets the 'necessary' action is likely to regard it as Dirty Business, suffer Past Experience Nightmares, or try to forget through chemical means. Someone who realizes they don't feel all that bad about the 'necessity' may be suffering from Start of Darkness. A character who was already rather amoral might say this only because they're upset that they had to get their hands dirty.

Generally associated with OOC Is Serious Business. Compare Well-Intentioned Extremist and It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. When the character's motivation is her responsibility to those under her command, see The Chains of Commanding. If the consequences shown actually justify the action, then The Extremist Was Right. A character growing too comfortable with 'doing what I had to do' is guilty of a Reverse Slippery Slope Fallacy. Can be a Moral Event Horizon if it was particularly cruel or if they're particularly callous and nonchalant about it when confronted. If invoked large-scale by a Visionary Villain, it's Utopia Justifies the Means. Also, see Just Following Orders.

TAGGED BY: @standbetween

TAGGING: @edithmaslow @wclfdreamt @papilosomnia @inqisita @highaever and you, yes you reading this right now

#there are many names in history (codex).#well-intentioned extremist also applies post-trespasser :)

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careergoalsasapsychologymajor942 · 4 years ago

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folukeifejola · 5 years ago

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Preface: I have been trying to get this published on one of the university’s pages for a while. As you can see from the text, I wrote it over a year ago. I have decided to publish it on the blog for a couple of reasons. One of which is this: the EHRC’s report (Tackling racial harassment: universities challenged) came out quite recently. It misses the opportunity to dig down into exactly what constitutes institutional/systematic racism and how that manifests. The University of Bristol has also released a response to the report. This post, the EHRC’s report and the response should also be read in conjunction with my earlier post exploring how and why universities in the Global North should acknowledge and act in the face of evidence of their entanglement with the history of the trade in enslaved persons and imperialism. All the above should also be read in conjunction with the university of Bristol’s own pages as to how that history is being acknowledged (it is estimated that 85% of the wealth used to found the University depended on the coerced labour of enslaved people). It seems at the moment that the content and focus of the EHRC report (i.e. racial ‘harassment’) is being considered something separate from that history.

At the FSSL Learning and Teaching Conference in June 2018, I convened a workshop where we examined what decolonisation meant to colleagues across the faculty. It was very nice to be able to share my work on decolonising curricula and the university with faculty colleagues as we explored what decolonisation means for us in theory and in practice.

Decolonisation requires an interdisciplinary lens, and the conference provided a perfect forum to explore the university in that sense. Decolonising the university would ensure that we, as an academic community, build the type of university that we want and the world needs. To be a decolonial university we must critically assess the impact of our curriculum – explicit, hidden, null – and our research on our students.

Decolonisation, in particular, requires us to be intentional about engaging with Britain’s history of very active participation in slavery and colonisation, as well as the complicity of academics and universities in enabling, benefiting from and not properly acknowledging that history. How we deal with this history is fundamental to how we carry out our decolonial practices. Therefore, it is important for us, as a university, to think carefully about our specific history, and exactly who we want to be, considering who we are now and who we have been. This is important, especially as we seek to engage with communities in Bristol through the development of Temple Quarter – communities that have been affected in varied ways by British history and present. It also seems clear to me that our students want us to engage with the possibility of being decolonial, we do them a disservice by being selective with the history of our disciplines, our sector and our university. So, we must first be clear about things decolonisation is not. Decolonisation is not diversity measures, equality data, inclusivity schemes, or representation statistics. Decolonisation is about us as a whole, not a focus on ‘helping’ marginal groups. EDI measures also, very often, confuse embodied difference with epistemic difference.(Raghavan, 2018). Yes, diverse knowledges are more likely in a diverse staff body, but not guaranteed.

Decolonisation is about how and why diverse knowledges and epistemologies, ways of knowing and being known are being kept out and the effect that has had on actual people. Scholars who have written about epistemicides – the superiorization of one body of knowledge to eliminate another – have emphasized the need for us to confront this history and the complicity of universities in normalising and reproducing this hierarchization of knowledge. (Grosfuguel, 2013: 74-75) Decolonisation is understanding that the episteme became a weapon, a war machine; the justification for dehumanisation that followed epistemicide. By consigning other knowledges to inferiority, it was possible to consign the humans who held those knowledges to inferiority. And we have not undone this consigning. That relegation is evidenced in what we name our buildings, what we teach, what we research and what we value. It is also evidenced in what is missing, the silence – what we do not name our buildings, what we do not teach, what and where we do not research, what and who we do not value.

Decolonisation is about ending the remnants of Empire, or what writers such as Mignolo and Maldonado-Torres call coloniality. According to Torres, coloniality ‘refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.’ (2007; 243) He goes on to explain how coloniality is ‘maintained alive in books,’ and ‘in the criteria for academic performance’, how ‘we breath coloniality all the time and everyday’.

Decolonisation is not diversity then, because it does not ask for marginal voices to be ‘tolerated’ or suffered within the hierarchized structure of knowledge. Decolonisation asks for the structure of knowledge to be opened to resurrect what has been marginalised, to re-centre the world, such that the centre is not the ideological West, but all of us. To achieve this, we should acknowledge how theorising – as the basis of all the research of all academia – has had a history which wrongly sought to determine and decide who qualifies as human. Therefore, decolonisation, to have any positive effect, must account for the entire process by which colonising, in all its forms – trade in humans, settler, internal, external, intellectual – was achieved, and what it would take to unravel its epistemic and socio-political effects.

This means having an understanding of the history of knowledge, of how universities came to be what they are, and how our disciplines have contributed to that history – from the use of law to establish colonies, the history of economic formations, understanding how high diabetes levels of Caribbean inhabitants is linked to diets of enslaved peoples, to acknowledging that black and brown people were used for medical research, without their consent. A decolonial university needs to be decisive today about what these histories mean for the future, and what impact we want our students to have on all our tomorrows. If the world is to survive extinction…

How Can the University of Bristol be Decolonial?

A decolonial university is willing and ready to teach the hard histories of our disciplines. A decolonial research-focused university is willing and ready to fill in the missing pieces our knowledge(s), while acknowledging how much of history we carry within us, how much of it is present in everything we do. (Baldwin, 1998; 723) A decolonial university is willing to acknowledge its own complicity in the inequalities in society and is ready to undo it.

One of the ways which we have sought to decolonise within the Law School is to introduce a new unit, Law and Race. I co-designed this unit with Yvette Russell, we were helped with a lot of input from past and present law students. The unit sits within a paradigm that speaks to decolonising the legal curriculum specifically and decolonisation of knowledge generally. Yvette and I understand, however, that the introduction of a single optional unit at the end of a course of study in woefully insufficient as an attempt to decolonise an entire discipline. Decolonising the curriculum should seek to repurpose our study of law, so that it listens to the voices of those who have historically been silenced. Thus the overarching aim of this unit is filling in with our students, the missing pieces of the puzzle of what the world has become and how it has become so. For example, within the unit we revisit the effect of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, a statute which is often lauded for ending slavery. This glorification of the statute does not mention the fact that the Act implies that the enslaved were ‘property’ worth £47m; it is this implication that made compensation possible. [The full and correct title of the Act is: An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves.] The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that held people in slavery for the loss of their ‘property.’ The balance of £27m was paid by the enslaved themselves in unpaid labour. The £20m was paid through a Treasury loan and collected back in taxation. Which means the formerly enslaved and their descendants also financially contributed to ‘compensating’ the people who held them in slavery. Missing histories.

Importantly, decolonial staff must be supported by a decolonial university and a decolonial sector. Gatekeepers abound across the sector, both for staff progress and student entry. With rising tuition fees and entry requirements skewed towards those who are able to afford private school, the descendants of formerly enslaved are still serving at the behest of the descendants of the slave holders. We are still breathing coloniality.

The remnants of the University of Bristol’s entanglements with the slave trade and the practice of slavery can also be found the University’s logo and arms. The three symbols of the logo represent the University’s founders and benefactors – sun for Wills, dolphin for Colston, horse for Fry. There is also a picture of a ship. The arms which dates from 1569 also include the same images. The ship which is a symbol of British trade in this era, is almost synonymous with the trade in kidnapped Africans. According to the Bristol Museum, British ships carried an estimated 3.1 million enslaved Africans in total. Bristol traders were probably responsible for shipping about one-fifth of the total of enslaved Africans carried on British ships. The families represented on the arms and logo of the university were certainly involved in this trade. Edward Colston is suspected of being responsible for at least 80,000 abductions of Africans for enslavement. The families of Wills and Fry amassed their fortunes in cocoa, sugar and tobacco using enslaved labour. Every time we write an official document or place the logo or arms on a PowerPoint, we remind ourselves, that the university was built on enslaved labour, human suffering and blood, for which there have been scant acknowledgement and no retribution, no restoration and no reparation. We still breathe coloniality.

University of Bristol logo

University of Bristol arms

Being decolonial is not a fixed state, but a personal and context-dependent constant process of reflecting, rethinking, learning and unlearning. Nonetheless, I have a few suggestions for moving towards decoloniality:

Recommendations

Engage in curriculum review to ensure inclusion of histories of disciplines, with particular foci on race, empire, slavery and how each discipline navigated these. Such inclusions should start from first year units;

Encouraging development of new units that discuss race, empire, colonization (on every degree program);

Introduce citation policies for reading lists which recommends a percentage of marginal scholars are included in reading;

Actively recruit scholars from the Global South and under-represented demographics (Black British women belong to one of the most underrepresented groups in academia);

Disaggregate diversity data, and avoid using terms like BME or BAME; [I write about why that is important in great detail here]

Ensure that our buildings project an accurate picture of who we want to be and what we value.

Take direct action to engage with our history of using slave-profited money [This is being done at Bristol…].

Engage in community-based research with marginal communities in Bristol [Linda Tuhiwai Smith says not to write research questions for communities, but to ask them what they need];

Collaborate equally with universities from a wider range places [not just universities] in the Global South.

‘Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.’ [Freire, 2005, 34]

Postscript: As I mentioned in the preface, I wrote most of the above, over a year ago. Since then, my scholarship in decolonisation has really moved on. In relation to what decolonisation means in HE, in practical terms, I have been researching concepts such as Lewis Gordon’s Disciplinary Decadence, Gurminder Bhambra’s Methodological Whiteness, Sperlinger, McLellan and Pettigrew’s work on alternative ways for structuring more just higher education systems. I have also organised a conference on decolonising the law school and I am currently editing a special issue arising from the conference. This year I have had the privilege of having conversations about decolonisation with many, many, many colleagues working in this area – among them Professors Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Gurminder Bhambra and Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni – to name just very few. I also wrote most of the above, before teaching on the first year of Law and Race. This academic year I am also teaching what could be considered decolonial material on Rich Law, Poor Law (exploring how the commodification of land as property was racialised and resulted in racialised inequalites materially, epistemically and pyscho-socially) and on Health, Law and the Body (exploring how the unscientific creation of racial categories has health and justice implications for the racialised Other.) So while I do end the essay with a list of recommendations on being ‘decolonial’, I am also left with a lot of questions as to whether doing the above can actually make any university truly decolonial.

One of the questions that has really been a main concern of mine is, ‘what happens after decolonisation?’ Several people have mentioned the fact that decolonisation is a negative, it is an undoing of the colonial. But what next? What would the decolonial world look like, when these after-effects have been undone? And would ‘decolonial’ be the right world to describe it? It seems to me that what our present actions may just be able to produce a situation where we are still a colonial world, but with fewer people bearing the brunt of it, or with lessened colonial pain. And that is unacceptable, if the colonial structure remains, it can be rebuilt, re-formed… reinstated, given new life, new teeth… it may yet bring new nightmares. So maybe, we do need to look for new words, new strategies, new visions, new dreams, new terms… but in the words of Dr Joel Modiri (met him this year too!) ‘Decolonisation entails nothing less than an endless fracturing of the world colonialism created.’

https://folukeafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/snippet.mp4

References

Baldwin, J., 1998. Collected essays (Vol. 2). Library of America.

Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nisancioglu, and Dalia Gebrial. Decolonizing the university. Pluto Press, 2018.

Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Brexit, Trump, and ‘methodological whiteness’: on the misrecognition of race and class.” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (2017): S214-S232.

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge, 2015.

Freire, P., 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Continuum)

Gordon, Lewis R. Disciplinary decadence: Living thought in trying times. Routledge, 2015.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the sociology of self-knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013):

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 240-270

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. “Decolonising the university in Africa.” The Thinker 51, no. 2 (2013): 46-51.

Raghavan, P. (2018). Curriculum Reform in UK Higher Education. [Blog] LSE: Engenderings.

Rutazibwa, Olivia U. “On babies and bathwater: Decolonizing International Development Studies 1.” In Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, pp. 158-180. Routledge, 2018.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd., 2013.

Sperlinger, Tom, and Josie McLellan. Who are universities for?: Re-making higher education. Policy Press, 2018.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012).

Decolonising the University of Bristol Preface: I have been trying to get this published on one of the university's pages for a while.

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transhumanitynet · 5 years ago

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Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Threatens Democracy

Cathy O’Neil is a math Ph. D. from Harvard and a data-scientist who hopes to someday have a better answer to the question, “what can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?” In the meantime, she wrote a seminal book titled Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. In my view, this is a must-read book for anyone who thinks that algorithms are by definition a fair and unbiased way to produce a given result. As O’Neil notes in her TED Talk: “the era of blind faith in big data must end.” (Yuval Harari calls this belief a new techno religion – aka dataism.)

During this 90 min interview with Cathy O’Neil, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: Cathy’s path to and love of Math; Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism and why we don’t count the dead With God On Our Side; how and why she became a hedge-fund quant; trusting and fearing the authority of math; why her book is titled Weapons of Math Destruction; Andrew “Boz” Bosworth’s ugly memo that Facebook’s actions were ‘de facto good’ – even if they led to deaths; Mark Zuckerberg’s good for the world but not good for Facebook email; the inherent biases and flaws of PredPol and other Minority Report type of predictive software; AI and the singularity; why intelligence is more than information retrieval; techno-solutionism and why technology is not enough; ethics and accountability; a Hippocratic oath for data scientists and engineers; why I believe that Instagram is among the worst weapons of math destruction; why technology is a magnifying mirror.

My favorite quotes that I will take away from Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction are:

“Algorithms are opinions embedded in code”

“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination. And that’s something only humans can provide.”

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is Cathy O’Neil?

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.

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Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Threatens Democracy

Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Threatens Democracy was originally published on transhumanity.net

#AI #big data #Cathy #math #ML #nikola #Singularity #ted #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

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eunsahn · 8 years ago

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Whose Right/Who's Right?

For followers of the Way, one of the big differences between the Zen of today and the Zen of the days of the Ch’an Patriarchs is access to the Dharma in all its forms. We may have an in-person, three-dimensional teacher, a two-dimensional on-line video teacher, academic courses, the internet, and writings from the past 2,500 years. That’s quite a bit to sift through, and other than random stumbling onto something, my experience is that one source has led to another. Sometimes they even come in chronological order, though that’s never been Buddhism’s strong suit. The Pali Canon was divided into short, medium, and long discourses, so skipping around is hardly anything that can really be avoided without a lineage scorecard that puts things in some semblance of chronological order, though even any list is not entirely complete. Each branch will have its own lineage--the Jogye and Soto lineages branch off in the Five Houses era, for example. On any given day, anyone can read anything from any source, hear about anything from any time, learn about the Dhammapada one day, Dahui the next, followed by a little Huineng, a First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma, capped off by a little ZM Seung Sahn, with maybe a little Robert Aitken Roshi on the side.

Back in a mountaintop Chinese temple in the Song Dynasty, the selection was a touch more limited, and not just because 1,000 years of writings hadn’t been written yet. I can’t really say for sure that the Abbott of this temple was as well-versed as a beginning poly-Buddhist is today. How much was translated, by whom, and at what year would be more of an issue for those Ch’an monks than it is for us. When did someone write it? Even if one were capable of reading all the scriptures, I doubt there would be any time left for any actual practice. Even a hermit has to plant, harvest, and eat. In a modern temple, there are other people with whom interaction takes place, chores, meditation, chanting, bowing, interviews with the teacher, and more chores. After all, dishes don’t wash themselves after food doesn’t cook itself. The rest of us in the marketplace have to do our marketplace things.

An undercurrent of today’s Zen practice involves what’s often referred to as “Engaged Buddhism.” If your sangha isn’t as actively involved as Zen Peacemakers or Upaya Zen Center, it may run a soup kitchen, run a hospice, maybe even meditate and chant for the benefit of all beings in the marketplace. All of them are valuable, not one more than the others. Some may have more immediately visible results, but the unseen results matter, possibly more. I say more, because when the result is just out there without my hand firmly controlling the soup spoon and my eyes seeing the gratitude expressed by someone who came in hungry and is leaving staed. It’s just out there. It’s kind of like mudita, the empathetic/sympathetic joy for someone else’s good fortune. I may have had nothing to do with the cause of the joy, the fortunate one may not even know I’m joyous for them. How not-validating! How not-instant gratification can it get? But that’s no reason not to feed the hungry or run a hospice. After all, I did say possibly more, not definitely more. Both types of actions put the benefit of others before our own, so it all generates merit that we can dedicate to all beings.

Where the Song Dynasty monk may not have heard much about the Eightfold Path while sitting at Linji’s feet, the monk received teachings nonetheless--teachings that were aimed at providing the opportunity to awaken, equally as much as the aforementioned Path. I daresay that the Zennist of today who didn’t know his Eightfold Path from a Six Pack would run the risk of being laughed out of the meditation room by the less charitable, and given some guidance in Buddhist basics from the more charitable. I wonder sometimes whether all the teachings in all their value and all their length and breadth may just be a distraction from the task at hand for the Zen practitioner who has taken the Bodhisattva Vows. The lay Precepts are based in the Eightfold Path. Right Livelihood, for example, mentions livelihoods that should be avoided: Trade in deadly weapons, trade in animals for slaughter, trade in slavery, trade in intoxicants, and trade in poisons. A couple Precepts are covered right there, and the other Seven of the Path follow suit in much the same way. Of course, in true Buddhist fashion, it’s a combination of what to do, and it’s what to avoid doing. If there are 84,000 choices of what to do, practicing Right Livelihood still leaves you with 83,995 other things to do. If we are living by the Precepts we’ve received and Vows we’ve taken, the “Rights” of the Path take care of themselves. If pondering the Path precludes practice, is it practical?

In today’s society, where do Right and right meet the road, and where they do, is there a headon collision? One interpretation of Right Speech is not lying, slandering, using harsh words and gossip, and I’d add in speaking in a tone of perceived superiority to the list. In the US and elsewhere in the world, there is the right to freely expressing oneself, and this often includes “the right to freedom of speech.” This right to free speech often doesn’t equal Right Speech unfortunately. As a Zen Buddhist in the US, how do we deal with what we perceive as right and wrong, harmful and helpful, lovingkindness in speech and hate speech? From an Engaged perspective, how do we tolerate the hate speech, and as Americans point out the intolerance perceived in this expression of at least perceived malevolence? Third Patriarch said the Great Way was easy for those with no preferences, those who eliminate love and hate. But how do we not prefer Right over “wrong,” how do we not love “love,” and hate “hate?” How do we “man the barricades” without engaging in the same vitriol as our perceived opponent?

As per usual, we make it more difficult for ourselves. Differing views (as opposed to Right View) are simply an element of relative reality. We accept that. We don’t even have to think of the differences as creating the two sides of the coin, it’s all just speech and opinions that cover a broad spectrum of greys, even if it looks black and white. We accept it, but don’t have to settle and leave it as is. It’s said that Right View is No View. If we maintain the view that those greys have evolved from previous greys, and will change into the next shades of grey, it’s a more accurate View, maybe even No View. We don’t have to attach to our view/opinion as incontrovertibly the correct one. To this end, Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Courage--three great legs of the Zen tripod--are used, and not just one of them. Great Faith without Great Doubt is falling into the hell of relying on dogma. Grreat Doubt without Great Courage can lead to nihilism and inertia. Great Courage (or Great Determination it’s sometimes called) without Faith and Doubt can manifest as anger or thoughtless action rather than thoughtful acton. Faith, Doubt, and Courage can manifest as correct action through No Thought, or put another way, before thought. Living in accordance with our True Nature can’t help but be right or Right.

Is it unawakened intention or awakened intentioned our “view” supplies? Sencan’s nondiscrimination is manifested through looking deeply at our motives and intentions, and what leads up to them. Even clinging to an awakened view is still a view, and therefore negates the awakened nature of it. Not thinking this is Right or right, but just acting, speaking of doing them in accordance with our True Nature. We doubt that our mundane views are necessarily right or Right. We have faith in ourselves--more accurately our True Selves--are innate and don’t need force to emerge. And we have the courage and determination that this manifestation, this unveiling comes to be. It hasn’t gone anywhere, and doesn’t come from anywhere, it just is. No birth or death, just there. But where is it in a protest march? It’s with us all the time, but maybe in the heat of the moment doubt is pushed aside by faith in our virtuous cause. Torching a car or throwing a brick may seem to be a good idea at the time, but will it stay the same after some introspective investigation? Participating in injustice, even through inaction, is complicity with the oppressor. It is no more correct than actively denying food to the hungry or incarcerating someone who is innocent. Fear is most certainly the opposite of courage, and to be in a state of fear is not great. Quite often, fear is what drive the lack of determination.

Not having a preference does not mean not engaging. Somewhere between fighting a “just war” and passive pacifism is awakened action. This could even take the form of having the courage to point out to the “opponent” that their thoughts, words, actions, views, etc. are open to question-- their faith without doubt. Likewise the skepticism they express toward your stand may be their doubt in you and your cause, but no doubt in themselves. Their determination just to plow under the opponent and bulldoze the barricades may not be too courageous, just a manifestation of fear, hatred, or simply unawakened behavior. It shows disinterest in finding out what the awakened version might constitute. We don’t have to point out how unawakened “they” are and how awakened “we” are at the top of our lungs. Sometimes No Speech is Right Speech--silently man the barricades without engaging the other on their terms. If you’re on a football field, play football, even if the other team is cheating. We don’t have to play their game and cheat in return.

One thing Zen Masters have done is to allow their student to go down through their own path. They may see that the direction the student is headed will probably not work out so well, but having learned that heading South is not the shortest direction to North, but it is a way to get there. The teacher may give the student the compass of the Dharma, but if the student still decides heading South is the better course because directly North has an obstacle or two, the teacher will not forcibly turn the student around, just let them go, and “letting go” in more ways than one. The student has the right to be wrong in his or her own way. The teacher has faith that the student will right themselves eventually, and if he really crashes and burns, the teacher will be free to use the fire extinguisher of lovingkindness. We could take this approach with those whom we think of as going down the wrong path politically or socio-economically, but I have my doubts about this being Right anything. If one were to just let others cause suffering to another being, isn’t that being complicit in the harmful act itself. Even when justified by such maxims of freedom of expression or freedom of speech, letting injustice just happen because it might lead to the final goal of enlightenment may not be all that skillful if the reason behind it is fear or misapplied doubt.

In the final analysis, it’s a balancing act, as much of our work as concerned, engaged Bodhisattvas is. We must act quickly, decisively, and naturally as an awakened being would. That entails practice until instant where the awakening happens. It may be on the barricade, it may be on the cushion, it may be hearing a rock hit bamboo, or bamboo or truncheon being firmly applied to your shin or head. Awakening can happen if we peel away the firmly head beliefs about it, and everything else. We need to be able to discern whose right is being violated, and who’s right about standing up for the right. As I write this, it comes to mind that this may be the huadu of the barricade: Whose right/who’s right? Don’t know. Act from a stand of True Nature, there’s no knowing that matters.

#Zen #EightfoldPath #EngagedBuddhism

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