Harley Shaiken received the U.S.-Japan Leadership Foundation fellowship from the Japan Society. The fellowship recognizes his work on Japanese workplace organization, and will make it possible for him to pursue a study of the relations among workplace, firm and state in Japan.
Carol Padden won the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Community Service, in recognition of her work on American Sign Language and deaf cultures. Padden serves on the board of directors of Gallaudet University and has recently been involved in developing an innovative video-disc program intended to help improve the reading and writing skills of hearing-impaired children.
Robert Horwitz's book The Irony of Regulatory Reform won the annual Ethics and Policy Award for Communications Research of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center.
And Dan Hallin won the $15,000 first prize in the 1990 Woodrow Wilson Center Media Studies Essay Contest, for his essay, "Sound Bite News: Television Coverage of Elections, 1968-1988." The results of this study were first reported in ComNotes last Spring. The essay will be published by the Wilson Center and later will appear in Blurring the Lines: Elections and the Media in America, to be published by Free Press. The contest was judged by James David Barber; professor of Political Science at Duke University, Peter Braestrup of the Library of Congress and formerly a reporter for The New York Times and the The Washington Post; Katharine Evans, former editor of the Washington Journalism Review; and Sanford Ungar, dean of the School of Journalism at American University.
Judith Williamson: A lot of my work is as a writer earning my living. I don't actually work as an academic and give papers at conferences. In fact, if you have read Consuming Passions, everything except the introduction was written for a magazine in Britain. So it is a collection of essays that were actually written to be in print in fairly large circulation magazines rather than academic journals. And for two and a half years-between 1986 and 1988-I had a column on the cinema in The New Statesman, which is a British national leftist magazine. And then, the last year I've had a regular column in The Guardian, which is a British, sort of liberal national daily paper. So a lot of my work is writing, but for a pretty big audience and that's also how I pay my rent.
ComNotes: What do you usually write about in your weekly column?
Judith Williamson: Well, I talk about popular culture, politics, cultural issues-really the brief is very wide. The column is in the review section of the paper, and I can write about what I want, I suppose, given that it is meant to be broadly cultural, and ultimately anything and everything is linked to a cultural issue. And I might write about something quite specific as a cultural phenomenon, like I wrote a piece on Ninja Turtles, I wrote a piece on the Simpsons craze. But I've also done broader things. I wrote a piece when I came back from San Francisco last year about earthquake culture, about being in an earthquake area. I've written pieces that haven't been about items of culture, but about things like language. I wrote several pieces last summer, at the beginning of the Gulf crisis, about the kind of language that was being employed by politicians, and people in the media. So, it's really very very open. The deal of the column is this: that I get to write about whatever I choose-it's my thing, I do it, and nobody interferes with it as long as I write to the right length, which I do, so nobody cuts it. I really value it, it's like a space that's just my outlet.
ComNotes: Can you talk a little bit about your pieces on the language of the war?
Judith Williamson: I wrote a piece last August about disgust, the language of disgust. I don't know what it was like here, but in Britain, it was fairly striking to me that the language that was used by the Prime Minister and by government spokespeople about Saddam Hussein and about what was happening after the invasion of Kuwait, the words used were words like repellent, nauseating and repugnant. You know, there is a whole language that you use for condemning things, like "atrocious," or "this is outrageous," or "this is appalling," or "this is wrong." But it seemed to me that the language of moral outrage was somehow too weak, it was perceived as too weak, like it wasn't enough to say that this was wrong, this is a terrible thing that has happened. The language of disgust had to be mobilized. If you had the radio on while you were doing things at home, every few minutes you would hear somebody say "this is really repugnant," "this is totally nauseating" and you got the feeling that somebody was getting sick, like there was some kind of horrible smell or something. It's very much physical language.
And then I wrote about the flip side of that, which is language like "surgical strikes," "mopping up" operations, "flushing out"-I've heard that on the radio in the last week here, I think Bush talked about air raids to "flush out" military personnel. And I wrote about physical disgust being used to replace moral outrage-leaving aside whether or not I would agree with the moral outrage, which is a separate issue. It seems to me perfectly to be expected that people would publicly make declarations about moral issues. But using language about disgust and cleansing is a completely different thing, and it's almost like it's so familiar to us that until you start to think about it, it doesn't all piece together.
So that was one column I wrote. I had been on holiday at the beach, and I brought back all these shells and things, and some of them weren't empty and they were sitting in my bathroom getting more and more disgusting, and that was a really hot summer in London-very very hot-and the garbage chute in my building was blocked off and there were all these flies. So I wrote about things that really are disgusting-like that-and issues that aren't and I was also trying to complicate the point, which is that beyond a certain level-I mean, I would rather not sit around smelling rotting garbage-but beyond a certain level, extreme disgust is like a form of denial, you know it's like "yuck," it's too horrible, a sort of paranoiac anxiety on that level it seems to me, to some extent, to be a sort of denial of material reality.
Partly why I'm interested in things like language is because sets of attitudes are attached to language and they creep into people's general currency. And I think several things came together in this moment. That language was already present in the Vietnam War, endless "mopping up" seemed to be going on. I just remember every day on TV you saw some new mopping up operation. Surgical Strike was used about the bombing of Libya. So I think that it isn't specific to this war at all, and I do think it is quite deeply embedded in lots of kinds of military behavior.
ComNotes: What are the differences in reactions to the war between students in England and students here?
Judith Williamson: Everything about it seems more real in London or in Europe, which is partly just geographical closeness. It's also belonging to a culture which is very close to other countries and a much more intimate history of interaction with other places. For example, the newspapers actually do carry an awful lot of news about other parts in the world. I buy The New York Times here, and I feel as if I'm in a kind of cage, like I don't know what's happening anywhere else.
So you feel more cut-off, and everything feels like it's blown-up, it's like a kind of fantasy world. I don't mean that people's responses aren't real, but it's like shadows being thrown very large from something real, but then that becomes the thing that is blown up. People become very obsessed with the positions they're taking up, for example-all kinds, including people whom I respect greatly and who have positions on the left which are pretty much the same as my own. Those things matter, but what really matters is what's happening in the Middle East, and this almost seems like a compensation for a feeling of powerlessness or remoteness or distance from where things are happening, or distance from sources of power here- you know, its very hard to feel that you're influencing the government, although actually big anti-war marches carrying on clearly do frighten the government, so it seems to me completely worthwhile to do that kind of thing. That's valid, but there is a sense of distance, and I know that this is a rather contentious thing to say, but I really feel-just from phoning friends at home or getting mail from people at home, and my students there as well-that there is less ego, I don't feel like my friends are all obsessed with their reactions to this thing. I feel that they are all talking to me or concerned about it or wanting to discuss what is actually happening, and there isn't so much a sense of people being really really involved in their reactions to it.
Judith Williamson is a visiting professor in Communication and teaches at Middlesex Polytechnic University in London
The usual left response to this position is that opposition to bilingualism is really a way of keeping people from Spanish-speaking backgrounds under the thumbs of the English-speaking majority. Americans who have already made it want immigrants from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba and Central America to lose their culture or fail in school. English-only education is a form of internal colonialism, a system of social control that disadvantages those from Spanish-speaking households.
These two positions frame the issue of bilingual education entirely in terms of the link between language and culture. Learning English will make new immigrants Americans, or having a bilingual education will preserve ethnic cultures for groups that will be demoralized and politically victimized without their heritage.
There is another way to frame the issue that I think is particularly important to the American case. In America, being bilingual has often been a sign of low social class. The lower class immigrant populations coming to this country have been so huge that voices on the streets speaking foreign languages have more often than not been of lower social rank. Code-switching in second-generation immigrant families has also been partially stigmatized, if not in the communities of the bilingual working class, at least in the assimilationist families that were looking toward a future of full acceptance as Americans. Bilingualism has been a mark of families in the ghettos where poverty has been on-going and immigrant languages have remained useful.
The situation has been quite different in many parts of Europe where bilingualism has been a mark of educated members of the higher social ranks. Think of Russian aristocrats learning French and educated Swiss learning French and German, if not more languages. In many parts of Europe, Spanish and French are required parts of upper class schooling. In multi-lingual areas of Europe (of which there have been many) only the lower classes cling to a single language.
There are also European countries which have instituted policies of multilingual education in the school systems, even insisting that Ph.D. dissertations be written in a second language (English in Sweden). Educated Dutch have long been fluent in English in part because of the closeness of England and Holland, and because of the commercial value of speaking the language of English empire. There has been opposition to this kind of enforced bilingualism, but it has not been of the sort found in the United States. In the U.S., there is anxiety about the cognitive function of children working in a second language. Where knowing a second language is a sign of higher class, there is no such anxiety. Language training is seen as good for the mind rather than bad for it.
If assimilated Americans hate bilingualism because it represents an awkwardness and lack of assimilation, then there is an irony in the American rejection of bilingualism. We may have become particularly poor at second languages because of the extent of our multicultural heritage. Too many poor Americans knew other languages so now our children are not supposed to know too many.
The undertones of class anxiety in the discussions of bilingualism are quite apparent, once you stop to examine them. Bilingualism in the schools is supposed (according to opponents) to make kids less competitive. They will not be as literate. They will learn less math, science and social studies because they will use up too much of their brains and school time learning languages. Brains used up this way would presumably not be able to acquire the middle class skills that would keep their fragile hold on their parents' social rank. Terrible things could happen. They could code-switch in public, making strangers suspect them of having an ethnic identity they did not have. They might speak equally well to both rich and poor. They might have the wrong friends. Worse, their parents might not know which friends were good or bad for them. This kind of worry is probably less racism than class anxiety in a middle class that is precariously close to its own immigrant past.
The problem with this kind of anxiety is that it turns language learning into a means for social stratification. We not only make it hard for kids to learn second languages at an early enough age to make it easy, but we stigmatize bilingualism as a kind of therapy for those with a learning handicap (knowing a language beyond English). If bilingual education is adopted in school because Spanish- speaking kids are treated as not smart enough to learn English quickly, then we make Spanish (like earlier immigrant languages) the language of ignorance and stupidity. Teachers will be pushed by the definition of the situation to see less promise in kids who speak Spanish first, and the Spanish- speaking kids who learn English will learn at the same time to feel ashamed of their bilingualism. Those who think we are not communicating American culture in bilingual schools should feel heartened. We are teaching the same lessons of social class and language that we taught turn-of- the century immigrant children arriving here through Ellis Island. Students learn that to be Americans, they must forget language skills that they already have or be stigmatized for their cultural flexibility.
The issue (to my mind) is not whether we should or should not have bilingual education. The issue is whether we can disentangle language policy in the schools for this heritage of class anxiety. Only when we recognize the social meaning of language use in our political culture can we think more helpfully about whether or not American children would be better off speaking one or more than one language.
Chandra Mukerji is the chair of the Communication Department.
But I wasn't going to a place where I could freely use the language that comes most naturally to me. I was moving into a world of Spanish-speakers where the speaking of English takes on a very different meaning than in San Diego, California. I discovered that, whether I was using English or Spanish, I was suddenly confronted, in a very real way, with all of the other stuff that language contains and reflects-politics, history, status, class, gender, morality, humor.
The story of me and my Spanish-speaking students is one of a lot of laughs, misunderstandings, confusion and, during the really good times, flashpoints of communication. Although they came to class to learn a very functional form of English to help them get better jobs, what they were confronted with was me, with my often complicated explanations of how to speak English. It wasn't that I didn't want to give them dictionary definitions; I just found myself unable to pare language that thin. (I guess that means that my tuition last year was well spent).
One of the things my students liked was that I used a lot of slang and I usually spoke very informally. In other words, I didn't sound like the language tapes they'd been listening to for years. The experience, however, of being confronted with the way I talked was, well, downright Bakhtinian. M. M. Bakhtin writes about "the diversity of social speech types . . . and individual voices." My voice, my way of speaking, is a variation of the national (and increasingly international) language of English, one part of the "social dialects, characteristic group behaviors, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups. . . " Each time I explained how to use words and phrases I was also exposing a little more clearly to my students my sets of experiences and positioning within my own society.
I often used articles from national news magazines or newspapers to build vocabulary. When I brought in a report on the U.S. workforce, I found myself explaining U.S. economics, history and sociology. How do you just define "white-collar," "blue- collar" and "pink-collar" workers without telling part of the history of work within the U.S.? When my students asked me why I used "chair" or "chairperson" instead of "chairman," I spent the rest of the class explaining the emergence of non- sexist language, and, obviously, a (short) history of sexism. When I introduced housing and architectural terms, my students, whose context is very urbanized Buenos Aires, were puzzled by my choice of vocabulary; family rooms, dens, driveways and suburbia hardly make sense outside the U.S.
For many of my students I was the first North American they had met. While Buenos Aires is inundated with images of "American life" from movies to People magazine, the opportunity for Argentines to meet and talk with North Americans is rare. More than an English teacher, my students used me as a telescope, enabling them to see curiosities far away. But telescopes have limited circumferences, and my students' "telescope" was no exception, suffering from the same faults of selectivity and blurry vision. At least I know my students saw a flesh and blood version of America in addition to what they saw on CNN or in the latest hit in Buenos Aires theatres, Pretty Woman.
Cindy Baur is a Communication graduate student.
Dan Schiller is a member of the Communication faculty.
Modern Drama will publish "Drama and the Dialogic Imagination," by Helene Keyssar in its March, 1991 issue. And her essay "Feminist Theatre" has been published in Literature and Criticism, an anthology edited by Martin Coyle (Routledge).
Theory and Society has published Chandra Mukerji's "Reading and Writing with Nature: Social Claims and the French Formal Garden." Theory and Society has nominated the essay for an annual prize given by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, recognizing the best article by an American woman on a historical subject.
Carol Padden has published "The Acquisition of Fingerspelling," in P. Simple and S. Fischer, eds., Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research: Language Acquisition (Chicago).
Harley Shaiken has published "Japanese Work Organization in Mexico," in Gabriel Szekely, ed., Manufacturing Across Borders and Oceans, a publication of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UCSD. The article was co-authored with with Harry Browne, a graduate student in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.
Silvio Waisbord, a graduate student in Sociology who has worked closely with the communication department, has been awarded a fellowship at the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame University to pursue his research on the media and politics in Argentina.
At the beginning of the crisis, I was reassured to see my professors meeting about what they were going to do. They gave me strength to go into my own community of students and rally them to work against the war. Together we pulled off a successful teach-in that, despite the rain, had over 1200 students present. That day I believed we could accomplish something.
The night before President Bush's deadline found 10,000 San Diegans protesting outside the Federal Building. The energy and life that filled that crowd spurred everyone to make a firm commitment to stop the madness. I couldn't believe my eyes when CNN showed the pro-war demonstrators (all forty of them) as representative of San Diego.
The day the war broke out, I was furious that our government had actually gone through with a military attack. I felt confident the American people would not stand for such aggression. The rally we had at school was smaller, but the energy was still high. We carpooled back to the Federal Building, and I noticed this crowd to be predominantly young people, unlike before the war. Older people seemed to be dropping out of the resistance.
It was reported that Israel had been bombed, and the war had spread. I cried as I reflected how many of us had worked against this moment, how we had written letters, made phone calls. Our demonstrations had no effect if the media would not show them. What way was left to say, "I do not condone the actions of my country?" Every legal channel had been exhausted. It was with tremendous sadness and resignation that a group of UCSD students (many of us Comm majors) walked to the middle of the street and sat down. I felt sick when I discovered the only option left for me to be counted was to get arrested.
I watched the pro-war demonstrators with signs reading "Give War a Chance. . . Nuke'em and Watch them Melt" egged on the police who surrounded us on horseback and almost trampled some people. After my initial fear, I became stronger in my belief that I was doing the right thing. Hours passed. The police finally announced there would be no arrests and we could stay as long as we wanted. As no one had prepared to stay and many had to leave to use the restroom we decided to call it a victory and go to the candlelight vigil. But it was an empty feeling of victory.
The earth has supported life for millions, perhaps billions of years prior to man's domination over her. Yet in only a short period of time, he has managed to rape her of her strength, her secrets, her life. What is there left to be done? Is there any purpose in studying all this? If you, the faculty, can't meet my eyes and give me some indication that something different is possible, don't look down on our generation while they go watch sitcoms, play video games, go shopping . . . what choices are we left with?
Molly Mckay is a Communication Undergraduate
Ernie Larsen, a visiting writer and video and filmaker, will be teaching Media Stereotypes and Television Documentary.
Michael Latzer, will be visiting UCSD from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he is a research fellow. He will be teaching two courses, Transformation of Global Communication and National Policies in Global Communication.
Angeliki Nicolopoulou will teach a special topics course on Children and Narrative.
Roger Saljo, visiting from Sweden, will teach a special topics course on Human Cognitive Growth.
Dan Schiller, who joined the department last Fall, will teach The Information Commodity.
Return to Commweb Homepage.