Friday, February 28, 2014

Freeman Hrabowski, Educator and Mathematician

Freeman A. Hrabowski III is a prominent American educator, advocate, and mathematician. In May 1992 he began his term as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), one of the twelve public universities comprising the Maryland university system. Hrabowski has transformed a no-name, commuter university into a research institution recognized as one of the most innovative in the country. His administration continues to build a campus that’s first-rate in research and instruction, and that prepares students of all backgrounds for career success. Under his adept leadership, UMBC has been ranked the #1 Up and Coming University in the USA for three consecutive years (2009, 2010, and 2011) by U.S. News and World Report magazine.[1]
Hrabowski is the co-author of the books, Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males (1998), and Overcoming the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Young Women (2001). His research and many publications focus on science and math education, with a special emphasis on minority participation and performance. His leadership, expertise and vision are integral to programs world-wide in science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM), and are used by universities, school systems, and community groups around the country.[2] Hrabowski chaired the prestigious National Academies’ committee that produced the report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. In 2012, President Barack Obama appointed Hrabowski to Chair of the newly created President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.;[3] and he was also a candidate for Secretary of Education in his administration.[4] He has been called one of America’s Best Leaders,[5] one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World,[6] and one of America’s 10 Best College Presidents.[7]
In 2011, Hrabowski received the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award, one of the highest honors given to an educator. The award included a $500,000 grant, which he has directed to support and promote a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship, and student success at UMBC.[8]


Early Life and Education[edit]

Hrabowski was born in 1950 in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of busy, hard-working parents, both of whom were educators.[9] His mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used the young Hrabowski as a guinea pig at home. His father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, as Hrabowski is quoted as saying, "frankly, he could make more money doing that." Frequently asked about the origin of his unusual surname, Hrabowski explains that he is the great-great-grandson of Eaton Hrabowski, a Polish-American "slave master who lived in rural Alabama”, and his wife Rebecca McCord.[10] In a CBS television interview, Hrabowski recounted that he is the third Freeman Hrabowski; his grandfather was the first Freeman Hrabowski born a free man, as opposed to having to be freed.[11]
When he was 12 years old, in 1963, Hrabowski saw his friends readying for the Children's Crusade march for civil rights. He convinced his parents to let him join in as a youth advocate, but soon into the march he was swept up in a mass arrest. Birmingham's notorious Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor spat in his face,[12] and he was incarcerated for 5 days. The jail guards locked even the youngest freedom marchers in with hardened criminals. Hrabowski spent five terrified days and nights shielding other youngsters and comforting them by reading his Bible aloud or singing songs. After being reunited with the adults, Hrabowski remembers the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King telling them, “What you do this day will have an impact on generations as yet unborn." King's words resonated with Hrabowski, and ultimately rang true as the national outrage at the brutality against Birmingham children helped build the pressure for laws banning racial discrimination. That outcome gave Hrabowski a life mission, and he has since been a staunch and tireless campaigner for equality, education, and excellence.
When he was 19 years old, Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with high honors in mathematics. During his matriculation there he spent a year abroad at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received his M.A. in mathematics and four years later his Ph.D. in higher education administration and statistics. Hrabowski focused his education on math and science in part because he was worried that the American economy would suffer if other countries continued to graduate more technology experts than the United States. He wants to ensure smart, dynamic students of all backgrounds continue to be amongst the graduates from STEM programs.

Career[edit]

UMBC was a relatively young school in a Baltimore suburb when Hrabowski arrived in 1987 as Vice Provost, then Executive Vice President, and finally President in 1992. From the very beginning he had big plans to turn the mid-sized, unremarkable campus into a place where "it is cool to be smart." It seems Hrabowski's civil rights and administration experiences, his doctoral studies, and his enthusiastic advocacy for education led him seamlessly to UMBC’s presidency.
Within his first two years at UMBC, he had raised enough money to set up the comprehensive tutoring and financial aid programs of the Meyerhoff Scholars.[13] Initially designed to help smart black males become scientists and engineers, the program he co-founded with Robert Meyerhoff quickly expanded to include students of all races and both genders, "who are interested in the advancement of minorities in the sciences and related fields." The Meyerhoff program has since become a national model for colleges and universities everywhere.
Freeman Hrabowski at the opening of the Performing Arts & Humanities Building at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
It was Hrabowski’s background that empowered him to take several bold administrative actions, such as disbanding an Africana graduate studies program and refusing to field a college football team in favor of funding math undergraduates and a championship chess team. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of technologically advanced graduates of all races and genders. Hrabowski frequently writes about minority participation and high performance in the sciences, math, and engineering fields. He advises President Obama on educational issues and consults for the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the National Academies. Hrabowski is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Hrabowski holds over 20 honorary degrees, including those from Harvard University, Duke University, the University of Illinois, Gallaudet University the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Binghamton University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, Haverford College, Harvey Mudd College, and Goucher College. Hrabowski is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and Sigma Pi Phi fraternity. He serves on the boards of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, France-Merrick Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation (Chair), The Urban Institute, McCormick & Company, and the Baltimore Equitable Society. He has served on the boards of the Constellation Energy Group, Mercantile Safe Deposit & Trust Company, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Maryland Humanities Council (member and Chair). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Leadership and Innovation[edit]

Hrabowski is a respected voice in the discussion on innovation in science and engineering, who strives to ensure America's readiness in the arena of global competiviness. Under his dynamic leadership, UMBC has become a powerhouse in higher education and has gained a national reputation as one of the nation’s premier universities. The University honored the 20th anniversary of Hrabowski's presidency as hundreds of supporters and friends, faculty and staff, students and alums gathered for a celebration of his leadership and innovation.[14]
The outpouring of support from people across the state and nation recognizes the tremendous contributions the entire UMBC community has made to the social fabric of the region, to Maryland’s economy, and to public education nationwide. The enthusiasm is palpable for the model UMBC has created for excellence in teaching across the disciplines under President Hrabowski's administration. His work continues with the launch of The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation[15] in honor of his anniversary and his many contributions to the university. UMBC has established the fund to permanently endow the initiatives launched with support of the Carnegie grant the president received in 2011. The Hrabowski Fund for Innovation will enable the President’s Office to invest in faculty, staff, and student initiatives such as course design and redesign; development of unique classroom learning environments that support active learning, team-based learning, and entrepreneurial skill development; lab-and-project-based capstone courses; faculty fellowships; and peer-learning initiatives. This fund will sustain and drive UMBC’s culture of innovation.

Quotes by Freeman Hrabowski[edit]

  • “It's hard work that makes the difference. I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. Smart simply means you're ready to learn.”
  • "The more we expect from children, the more they can do."
  • "I guarantee the people who study are going to be successful. Nothing can replace hard work."[16]
  • “Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they form your character. Watch your character because it shapes your destiny.”[17]
  • "Success is never final.".[9]

Awards and Honors[edit]

President Hrabowski has received numerous awards recognizing his prowess in leadership, education, innovation, science, and engineering, some of which are listed below:
  • TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence
  • Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award
  • Top American Leaders by The Washington Post and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.
  • McGraw Prize in Education
  • U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring
  • Columbia University Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service
  • GE African American Forum ICON Lifetime Achievement Award
  • Marylander of the Year
  • Heinz Award in the Human Condition category
  • Fast Company magazine’s first Fast 50 Champions of Innovation in Business and Technology
  • Technology Council of Maryland’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
  • Inaugural inductee into the STEM Solutions Leadership Hall of Fame.
  • William D. Carey Award, American Association for the Advancement of Science’s named a
  • Black Engineer of the Year (BEYA) by the BEYA STEM Global Competitiveness Conference
  • Educator of the Year by the World Affairs Council of Washington, DC

Selected Media Appearances[edit]

As president of UMBC, Hrabowski is a frequent feature in various media venues[18] such as:
  • President Hrabowski Discusses Workforce Competitiveness on NBC News’ Education Nation (10/8/13)
  • “UMBC Carving a Singular Niche in Cyber, STEM Education” – Q&A in the Baltimore Business Journal (9/27/13)
  • “Ideas for Improving Science Education” in the NY Times (9/2/13)
  • “Oral Histories: Freeman Hrabowski,” C-Span’s American History TV
  • President Hrabowski Discusses the Importance of a Liberal Arts Education on NPR’s Tell Me More (6/6/12)
  • Five universities that really are up-and-comers in the Washington Post (3/21/12)
  • Andrea Mitchell Reports, MSNBC (1/27/12)
  • “Freeman Hrabowski on Job Creation” on WBAL (12/9/11)
  • News Coverage from White House Meeting on Higher Education (12/5/11)
  • Talk of the Nation (12/5/11)
  • 60 Minutes (11/13/11)
  • WBAL Editorial on President Hrabowski and Academic Leadership
  • President Hrabowski in Diverse Issues in Higher Education (pdf) (11/13/11)
  • President Hrabowski in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7/11)
  • President Hrabowski, and Anthony Johnson and Elaine Lalanne of CASPR, in Physics Today(3/11)
  • President Hrabowski on Midday with Dan Rodericks, WYPR (12/9/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski and Richard Forno, Cybersecurity programs, in the Gazette of Politics and Business (11/5/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski on C-SPAN: The College Board Forum on College Completion (10/28/10)
  • President Hrabowski in the Chronicle of Higher Education (10/10/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski in Diverse Issues in Higher Ed (10/1/1)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski on C-SPAN: The College Board Forum on College Completion (10/28/10) (Archive not available)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports (10/1/10)
  • President Hrabowski on WYPR’s Maryland Morning (9/28/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski on NPR’s Tell Me More (9/15/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski in Black Enterprise (8/24/10)
  • President Freeman Hrabowski in U.S. News and World Report (pdf) (8/10)*
  • President Hrabowski in U.S. Black Engineer & Information Technology Magazine(Fall/Winter 2009)
  • President Hrabowski on the Today Show (9/09)
  • President Hrabowski on PBS “Charlie Rose” Show (6/7/06)
  • President Hrabowski Interviewed by “Kids of America” (3/14/05)
  • President Hrabowski on “The Today Show” (8/02)
  • Hrabowski discusses changes to the SAT on PBS’ “Newshour with Jim Lehrer (video) (7/02) (video not available)

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Jackie Ormes, First African American Woman Cartoonist

Just listened to a report on Marketplace about the first African American woman cartoonist. It can be found at:
Then I looked her up on Wikipedia and read the following:
Jackie Ormes (August 1, 1911 – December 26, 1985) is known as the first African-American woman cartoonist, known for her strips Torchy Brown and Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger.
Jackie Ormes was born Zelda Mavin Jackson in the Pittsburgh area town of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Ormes started in journalism as a proofreader for the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly African American newspaper that came out every Saturday. Her 1937-38 Courier comic strip, Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, starring Torchy Brown, was a humorous depiction of a Mississippi teen who found fame and fortune singing and dancing in the Cotton Club.
Ormes moved to Chicago in 1942, and soon began writing occasional articles and, briefly, a social column for the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, a weekly at that time. For a few months at the end of the war, her single panel cartoon, Candy, about an attractive and wisecracking housemaid, appeared in the Defender.
By August 1945, Ormes's work was back in the Courier, with the advent of Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, a single-panel cartoon which ran for 11 years. It featured a big sister-little sister set-up, with the precocious, insightful and socially/politically-aware child as the only speaker and the beautiful adult woman as a sometime pin-up figure and fashion mannequin.
Ormes contracted with the Terri Lee doll company in 1947 to produce a play doll based on her little girl cartoon character. The Patty-Jo doll was on the shelves in time for Christmas and was the first American black doll to have an extensive upscale wardrobe. As in the cartoon, the doll represented a real child, in contrast to the majority of dolls that were mammy and Topsy-type dolls. In December 1949, Ormes's contract with the Terri Lee company was not renewed, and production ended. Patty-Jo dolls are now highly sought collectors' items.
In 1950, the Courier began an eight-page color comics insert, where Ormes re-invented her Torchy character in a new comic strip, Torchy in Heartbeats. This Torchy was a beautiful, independent woman who finds adventure while seeking true love. Ormes expressed her talent for fashion design as well as her vision of a beautiful black female body in the accompanying Torchy Togs paper doll cut outs. The strip is probably best known for its last episode in 1954, when Torchy and her doctor boyfriend confront racism and environmental pollution. Torchy presented an image of a black woman who, in contrast to the contemporary stereotypical media portrayals, was confident, intelligent, and brave.
Jackie Ormes enjoyed a happy, 45-year marriage to Earl Clark Ormes. She retired from cartooning in 1956, although she continued to create art, including murals, still lifes and portraits. She contributed to her South Side Chicago community by volunteering to produce fundraiser fashion shows and entertainments. She was also on the founding board of directors for the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Ormes was a passionate doll collector, with 150 antique and modern dolls in her collection, and she was active in Guys and Gals Funtastique Doll Club, a United Federation of Doll Clubs chapter in Chicago.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Stuart Hall, The "Godfather" of Multiculturalism

Stuart Hall, Trailblazing British Scholar of Multicultural Influences, Is Dead at 82

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Stuart Hall, a pioneering Jamaican-born British academic who argued that culture is in fact multicultural — not high or low, good or bad, or black or white, but a constantly shifting convergence reflecting the range of people who create and consume it — died on Feb. 10 in London. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Catherine, a professor of modern British history at University College London, who said he had had kidney disease for many years.
Division and blending were lifelong themes for Mr. Hall. Born in colonial Jamaica to mixed-race parents who worried that his dark complexion would be an impediment to ascending the island pigmentocracy, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship to study literature when he was 19. His politics at the time, he later wrote, were “principally anti-imperialist.”
He quickly concluded that he was seeking something there that he could not attain.
“What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it,” he recalled in a 2000 interview. “I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.”
That experience, along with the societal transformations he was witnessing in postwar Britain, prompted him to help create a new academic field: cultural studies, which would explore, as he put it, “the changing ways of life of societies and groups and the networks of meanings which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another.”
Setting aside his dissertation on Henry James, he was drawn to an eclectic variety of subjects and the relationships among them: the rising leftist movement in postwar Britain and the softening of the country’s rigid class structure, but also the weakening of the working class, television, youth, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, immigration, feminism and racial diversity. All of it, he concluded, was changing the Englishness he had found alien.
Traditional measures of identity in Britain and elsewhere — “our class position or our national position or our geographical origins or where our grandparents came from,” he said in one of many televised interviews he gave — were losing their relevance, he said, and “I don’t think any one thing any longer will tell us who we are.”
In 1960, he helped found the journal New Left Review. In 1964, he joined Richard Hoggart at the newly founded Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, considered by many to be the birthplace of the field. By the early 1970s, Mr. Hall was its director.
He became known for developing a theory he called encoding/decoding, which analyzed how those in power spread messages through popular culture and how those who receive the messages interpret them. He later moved to the Open University, and remained there until he retired in the late 1990s.
Mr. Hall was a very public intellectual: He wrote numerous books, gave frequent speeches and appeared often on television. He advocated disarmament and objected to British involvement in various military conflicts. He was particularly critical of the conservative social and economic policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and he is often given credit for coining a succinct and, when he used it, derogatory term: Thatcherism.
Stuart McPhail Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on Feb. 3, 1932. His parents’ ancestors were English, African and Indian. Fearing appearances, they prevented him from playing with dark-skinned children.
“I’m the blackest member of my family,” Mr. Hall once recalled. “You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.”
He studied English at Jamaica College before moving to England at a time of rising Caribbean immigration.
In addition to his wife, the former Catherine Barrett, whom he married in 1964, his survivors include a daughter, Rebecca; a son, Jess; two grandchildren; and a sister, Patricia.
Cultural studies long ago expanded beyond Britain as a common academic discipline, one with plenty of critics. Some view it as a politically correct assault on Western culture. Others say that, taken to extremes, it regards every element of popular culture as worthy of a doctoral dissertation.
“If I have to read another cultural studies analysis of ‘The Sopranos,’ I give up,” Mr. Hall said. “There’s an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies.”
For him, the discipline was about power and politics and understanding the forces that shape them. Race was one of those forces.
“Race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted,” he said in a 1996 speech.
He was often sought out by black artists and intellectuals. “The Stuart Hall Project,” a documentary by John Akomfrah, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last year. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently called Mr. Hall “the Du Bois of Britain.”
In 2009, asked what he thought of the election of Barack Obama, Mr. Hall emphasized the president’s grasp of the fluidity of identity. Noting Mr. Obama’s racially mixed heritage and his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, he said the president was “not in a classic sense a black African-American.”
“He’s a black politician because of what he symbolizes, not because of the color of his skin or the history,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s because he’s learned to speak on behalf of a tradition to the rest of America.”
***
Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.[1] He was President of the British Sociological Association 1995–97.
In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as director of the Centre in 1968, and remained there until 1979. While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists.[2]
Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University.[3] Hall retired from the Open University in 1997 and was a Professor Emeritus.[4] British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists".[5] He was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London.


Biography[edit]

Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle-class Jamaican family of Indian, African and British descent.[5] In Jamaica he attended Jamaica College, receiving an education modelled after the British school system.[6] In an interview Hall describes himself as a "bright, promising scholar" in these years and his formal education as "a very 'classical' education; very good but in very formal academic terms." With the help of sympathetic teachers, he expanded his education to include "T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry," as well as "Caribbean literature."[7] Hall's later works reveal that growing up in the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than much of his family, had a profound effect on his views of the world.[8][9]
In 1951 Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he studied English and obtained an M.A.,[10] becoming part of the Windrush generation, the first large-scale immigration of West Indians, as that community was then known. He continued his studies at Oxford by beginning a Ph.D. on Henry James but, galvanised particularly by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and Suez Crisis, abandoned this in 1957[10] or 1958[6] to focus on his political work. In 1957, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife.[11] From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a London secondary modern school[12] and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, concluding around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean.[10]
After working on the Universities and Left Review during his time at Oxford, Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with The New Reasoner, launching the New Left Review in 1960 with Hall named as the founding editor.[6] In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting-place for left-wingers.[13] Hall left the board of the New Left Review in 1961[14] or 1962.[9]
Hall's academic career took off after co-writing The Popular Arts with Paddy Whannel in 1964. As a direct result, Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow and initially at Hoggart's own expense.[9] In 1968 Hall became director of the Centre. He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, including Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972) and Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). He also contributed to the book Policing the Crisis (1978) and coedited the influential Resistance Through Rituals (1975).
After his appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979, Hall published further influential books, including The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Formations of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). Through the 1970s and 1980s, Hall was closely associated with the journal Marxism Today;[15] in 1995, he was a founding editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture.[16]
Hall retired from the Open University in 1997. He was made a fellow of the Royal Academy in 2005 and received the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award in 2008.[17] He died on 10 February 2014, from complications following kidney failure a week after his 82nd birthday. By the time of his death, he was widely known as the "godfather of multiculturalism".[18][19][20][21]

Ideas[edit]

Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the socio-cultural production of "consent" and "coercion".) For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled".[22]
Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis". The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.[23]
Hall's works, such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media, have a reputation as influential, and serve as important foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies. He also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic identities. Hall believed identity to be an ongoing product of history and culture, rather than a finished product.
Hall's political influence extended to the Labour Party, perhaps related to the influential articles he wrote for the CPGB's theoretical journal Marxism Today (MT) that challenged the left's views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, although Hall later decried New Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism".[20]

Encoding and decoding model[edit]

Hall presented his encoding and decoding philosophy in various publications and at several oral events across his career. The first was in "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), a paper he wrote for the Council of Europe Colloquy on "Training in the Critical Readings of Television Language" organised by the Council & the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester. It was produced for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Paddy Scannell explains: "largely accounts for the provisional feel of the text and its ‘incompleteness’".[24] In 1974 the paper was presented at a symposium on Broadcasters and the Audience in Venice. Hall also presented his encoding and decoding model in "Encoding/Decoding" in Culture, Media, Language in 1980. The time difference between Hall’s first publication on encoding and decoding in 1973 and his 1980 publication is highlighted by several critics. Of particular note is Hall’s transition from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the Open University.[24]
Hall had a major influence on cultural studies, and many of the terms his texts set forth continue to be used in the field today. His 1973 text is viewed as marking a turning point in Hall's research, towards structuralism and provides insight into some of the main theoretical developments Hall was exploring during his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Hall takes a semiotic approach and builds on the work of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco.[25] The essay takes up and challenges longheld assumptions on how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication.[26] "The ‘object’ of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse".[27]
According to Hall, "a message must be perceived as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully de-coded before it has an effect, a use, or satisfies a need". There are four codes of the Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning full and straight and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, it operates inside the dominant code". The second way of encoding is the professional code. It operates in tandem with the dominant code. "It serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, ‘professionalism’ etc."[28] The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule".[29] The fourth way of encoding is the oppositional code also known as the globally contrary code. "It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way." "Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded."[30]
Hall challenged all four components of the mass communications model. He argues that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.[26] For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee that audiences will decode it to feel sympathetic towards the asylum seekers. Despite its being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary form itself must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.[26]
Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a "failure" of the producer or viewer. There is a "lack of fit", Hall argues, "between the two sides in the communicative exchange". That is, between the moment of the production of the message ("encoding") and the moment of its reception ("decoding").[26] In "Encoding/decoding", Hall suggests media messages accrue a common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of "9/11" (as an example; but there are others like it within the media) a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only simply plausible and universal, but is elevated to "common-sense".[26]

Publications (incomplete)[edit]

1960s[edit]

  • (1960). "Crosland Territory", New Left Review, no. 2, pp. 2–4.
  • (1961), with P. Anderson. "Politics of the Common Market", New Left Review, no. 10, pp. 1–15.
  • (1961). "The New Frontier", New Left Review, no. 8, pp. 47–48.
  • (1961). "Student Journals", New Left Review, no. 7, pp. 50–51.
  • (1964), with Paddy Whannell. The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson.
  • (1968). The Hippies: An American Moment. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

1970s[edit]

  • (1971). Deviancy, Politics and the Media. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
  • (1971). "Life and Death of Picture Post", Cambridge Review, vol. 92, no. 2201.
  • (1972), with P. Walton. Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures. London: Human Context Books.
  • (1972). "The Social Eye of Picture Post", Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 2, pp. 71–120.
  • (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
  • (1973). A ‘Reading’ of Marx's 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
  • (1974). "Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’", Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 6, pp. 132–171.
  • (1977), with T. Jefferson. Resistance Through Rituals, Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson.
  • (1977). "Journalism of the Air under Review", Journalism Studies Review, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 43–45.
  • (1978), with C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, B. Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. London: Macmillan Press. ISBN 0-333-22061-7 (paperback) ISBN 0-333-22060-9 (hardbound).
  • (1979). 'The Great Moving Right Show', Marxism Today. January.

1980s[edit]

  • (1980). "Encoding / Decoding." In: Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138.
  • (1980). "Cultural Studies: two paradigms". Media, Culture and Society. vol.2, pp. 57–72.
  • (1981). "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular". In People's History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge.
  • (1981), with P. Scraton. "Law, Class and Control". In: M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan & J. Pawson (eds). Crime and Society, London: RKP.
  • (1988). The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
  • (1986). "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity", Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 5–27.
  • (1986), with M. Jacques. "People Aid: A New Politics Sweeps the Land", Marxism Today, July, pp. 10–14.

1990s[edit]

  • (1992). "The Question of Cultural Identity". In: Hall, David Held, Anthony McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274–316.
  • (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Legacy[edit]

Film[edit]

Hall was a presenter of a 7-part series titled "Redemption Song" where he examined the elements that make up the Caribbean, looking at the turbulent history of the islands and interviewing people who live there today. GB, Barraclough Carey for BBC tx BBC2 30/06/91-12/08/91 Series episodes were as follows
  • Shades of Freedom (11/08/1991)
  • Following Fidel (04/08/1991)
  • WORLD'S APART (28/07/1991)
  • La Grande Illusion (21/07/1991)
  • Paradise Lost (14/07/1991)
  • OUT OF AFRICA (07/07/1991)
  • IRON IN THE SOUL (30/06/1991)
Hall's lectures have been turned into several videos distributed by the Media Education Foundation:
  • Race, the Floating Signifier (1997).
  • Representation & the Media (1997).
  • The Origins of Cultural Studies (2006).
Mike Dibb produced a film based on a long interview between journalist Maya Jaggi and Stuart Hall called Personally Speaking (2009).
Hall is the subject of 2 films directed by John Akomfrah, entitled The Unfinished Conversation(2012) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013). The first film is currently (January 2014) showing at Tate Britain, Millbank, London while the second is now available on DVD.[31]
In August 2012, Professor Sut Jhally conducted an interview with Hall that touched on a number of themes and issues in cultural studies.[32]

*****

Stuart Hall, 'Godfather Of Multiculturalism,' Dies




Sociologist and public intellectual Stuart Hall, who helped shape conversations about race and gender in Britain and around the world, has died at 82. For decades, the Jamaican-born Hall was also a fixture in leftist politics.
Hall, who died in England on Monday, was diabetic and had been ill for some time.
NPR's Neda Ulaby filed this report for our Newscast unit:
"When Stuart Hall came on the scene in the mid-1960s, the study of culture, and popular culture in particular, was not taken very seriously. Hall helped change that. He was dubbed the 'godfather of multiculturalism' for the huge influence he had on academics around the world.
"Cultural studies had been around before Stuart Hall. But he brought to it a perspective based on his background in the West Indies' ferociously striated society.
"His mixed-race bourgeois parents forbade him from making friends with darker skinned children. Hall left for Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and later taught at Birmingham University, which he turned into a world renowned magnet for cultural studies.
"Hall's work considered how people are taught to understand each other in terms of race and class, gender and sexual orientation. In a notoriously combative field, Stuart Hall was revered for his commitment to exploring questions of equality, identity and social mobility."
Hall was also an influential thinker about politics, particularly in the 1970s and '80s. In that period, he frequently wrote for Marxism Today — even coining the term "Thatcherism" in a 1979 article, according to Britain's The Telegraph.
"The Conservative leader had been patronized by many on the Left as little more than a shrill housewife," the newspaper says. "Hall was one of the first to acknowledge that Britain was entering a new era of politics."
Writing about Hall's legacy for The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries notes that the scholar, who for years appeared on the BBC, viewed his presence in England in a way that might have surprised some. Jeffries quotes Hall:
" 'Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home,' he told the Guardian in 2012. 'I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.' "

*****

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/10/274789348/stuart-hall-godfather-of-multiculturalism-dies

Monday, February 24, 2014

Anne Heyman, Rwandan Orphan Rescuer

Anne Heyman, Who Rescued Rwandan Orphans, Dies at 52

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Anne HeymanCredit Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
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When Anne Heyman learned in 2005 that the genocide in Rwanda had orphaned 1.2 million children, she saw a glimpse of salvation for the country in the experience of Israel.
“It popped out of my head: They should build youth villages,” she told The New York Times last year.
Ms. Heyman, a South African-born lawyer who had given up her legal career in New York to devote herself to philanthropy, was thinking of how Israel, as a new nation state in the late 1940s, had welcomed and cared for tens of thousands of children who had been orphaned by the Holocaust. The Israelis set up residential communities called youth villages to nurture them.
“Israel had a solution to the orphan problem,” Ms. Heyman, a supporter of Jewish causes, told The Jerusalem Post last year. “Without a systemic solution, this is a problem that won’t solve itself.”
Ms. Heyman knew no one in Rwanda and little about the country, but she plowed ahead, raising more than $12 million; recruiting expert help from Rwanda, Israel and the United States; winning the support of the Rwandan government; and acquiring 144 acres in a setting of lakes and hills in eastern Rwanda. She then built a village of 32 houses for orphaned teenagers, setting it high on a hill, she said, “because children need to see far to go far.”
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Anne Heyman, center, with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the 2012 Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village graduating class.Credit Jenna Merrin
She died on Jan. 31 at a hospital in Delray Beach, Fla., after falling from a horse while competing in a masters jumper competition at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Fla. She was 52.
The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by a head injury, said Marisha Mistry, a spokeswoman for Liquidnet, an Internet stock-trading company founded by Ms. Heyman’s husband, Seth Merrin. Ms. Heyman had homes in Florida, Manhattan, Westchester County, N.Y., and Israel.
When the village for orphans opened in 2008, a long line of teenagers, alone and shattered, stood in the blazing sun holding paper bags containing all their possessions. Entire families of some had been wiped out, and they had no photographs. Some did not know their birthdays, or even what their real names were.
At first, almost all who came had been orphaned by the genocide committed in 1994 by ethnic Hutus against the minority Tutsis and the Tutsis’ moderate Hutu supporters. Later, children of parents who had died of AIDS began arriving. Other vulnerable children were also taken in.
Ethiopian Jews who had grown up at a youth camp in Israel were the first counselors. Housemothers were hired locally to make the houses into homes, often the first the youths had known. Many of the women had lost their husbands and children to genocide.
Today the village houses about 500 youths, who go to high school, work on a farm, learn trades, record gospel music and, most of all, feel a sense of belonging.
The camp was named Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. “Agahozo” is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “a place where tears are dried.” Shalom is Hebrew for peace. Reflecting this thought, residents do not identify themselves along tribal lines.
Ms. Heyman, who made Hebrew the first language of her own children in New York, saw Agahozo-Shalom as an expression of her Zionist ideals.
“It is a way for us to share those values with the non-Jewish world,” she told The Jerusalem Report in 2007.
Emmanuel Nkundunkundiye, 21, a recent graduate of the village school, told the Jewish American newspaper The Forward, “The Holocaust is the same history that we face, the same tragedy.”
Anne Elaine Heyman was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 16, 1961, the second of four children, and was raised in Cape Town. She moved with her family to Boston at 15 and became active in Young Judea, a Zionist youth movement. She spent a year of high school in Israel in a Young Judea program and met her future husband there.
She is survived by him; their sons Jason and Jonathan; their daughter, Jenna; and her parents, Sydney and Hermia Heyman.
Ms. Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, then spent another year in Israel before going to George Washington University Law School. In 1984, she transferred to Columbia Law School and graduated the next year. After two years of private practice, she became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, prosecuting white-collar crime. She quit to devote herself to her family after her son Jonathan was born in 1994.
Ms. Heyman began her career as an activist and philanthropist while at home with her children. She volunteered for Dorot, a Manhattan-based organization that serves the elderly, and became its chairwoman.
One of her first steps in her Rwandan mission was linking up with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had set up youth villages in the Americas, Europe and Africa. Her principal model was the village of Yemin Orde, one of 50 youth villages in Israel. It has taken in orphans and other needy children from around the world.
She also built one of the largest solar energy plants in sub-Saharan Africa; it contributes power to the rest of Rwanda as well.
Ms. Heyman had plans to make the village self-sustaining, so that major western donors, like her husband’s company, would not always be needed.
Called “Mom,” “Grandmother” and an angel by the youths, she came to the village four or five times a year, staying for several days or more.
Agahozo-Shalom’s announcement of Ms. Heyman’s death quoted a Rwandan proverb: “Death is nothing so long as one can survive through one’s children.”