serendipityoucity

How Women Built the Law: By examining judicial milestones for women, Fred Strebeigh inspires questions about the legal pioneers themselves. by Alyssa Rosenberg

This book review reminded me of the importance of working within!  As has been the case for women in science & engineering, women and law have had a hard go at it.  While we see more female lawyers than ever, they remain outside law firm partnerships.  As a result of women practicing law however

women now have the completely uncontested right to practice law, or to receive disability benefits when they take time off from work to give birth or recover from an abortion, or to go to work without wondering whether their employer will feel free to grope them at their desks, does not mean the struggle to win those rights was any less significant than the fight to win the right to an abortion. That reminder of Roe’s place in a pantheon is a bracing—and worrisome—reminder of the magnitude and number of challenges women faced—and still face— as they struggle for legal equality.

After reading this article I came across this one about Susan Sontag: Why Can’t Mothers be Intellectuals edited by her son.

What struck me most about it was the fact that we expect her to be talking about nappy duty in her diaries, but we never expect men to do so in their biographies.   I also appreciated her candid - and it should be candid as it was from her own diary - feelings about her ambivalence toward motherhood.  I liked the article, precisely because it highlighted how she does not meet our womanly expectations and how uncomfortable that makes us feel - or more precisely how comfortable it made me feel.

Whazzup with Saturday morning feeds!  I should quit while I am ahead.  The New York Times delivered this article that ties in with both of the above Obama Set to Undo ‘Conscience’ Rule for Health Workers.  The Conscious Rule was

a last-minute Bush administration rule granting broad protections to health workers who refuse to take part in abortions or provide other health care that goes against their consciences.

Translated it means refusing access based on ‘religious beliefs or moral convictions’ to the day after pill at the drug store, refusing access to an abortion, refusing the sale of birth control, and refusing emergency contraception to rape victims and any other reproductive right services or products, including sterilization in federally funded medical institutions. 

Via Polymeme, The American Prospect, and the New York Times most emailed list.

My friend Bryan still lives in the first place I called home, Fujino.  He has become a bit of a celebrity as a silk worm grower and master weaver.  The documentary is about Bryan’s work.  There is also some great footage of the village I called home, images of a space I walked through daily and where my eldest son spent his formative years. 

Master Sericulture

A documentary about a Canadian man who is earnestly devoted to silkworm raising deep in the mountains. He was captivated by silk when he saw a farmer’s wife weaving a kimono from silk, and ever since he has raised and hybridized silkworms, and even made his own indigo dyes. A story of Japanese culture told by a foreign man.

There are days where i wake up late, sit in front of the computer looking pictures in online newspapers, watch and listen to audio slide shows in the NY Times, fire up the RSS feed 2-3 times in a row fishing for something new.  It is idling, eating peanut butter pumpernickel toast and drinking jasmine tea!  But alas there are times when I come across some great articles and this was one of them!

Why can’t a woman write the Great American Novel? : Female authors hold their own on the bestseller lists, but Elaine Showalter’s provocative new history wonders why they get so little respect.

I always said I would be way smarter if I had a husband that acted like a 1950s wife, and well it seems, that has been the fate of US female writers vs British female writers.  Two days ago Naomi Klein said the same thing, basically, she can do what she does because she has a feminist husband, and suggested that we need way more of them in her Warwick Prize speech.

Via: Polymeme

Wonderful! Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine wins first Warwick Prize for Writing

What! Getting inspired by the history & philosophy of science, mathematics, & statistics!

Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought this was to be my fate! But alas here I am digging up papers and books on the issue and can’t wait to get out the pillows, a blanket, get on the sofa with a pot of tea on a Friday night to read these juicy academic accounts of numbers, methods, models, categorization and the unique arrangement of scientific factoids shaping and being shaped by us!

Yesterday I attended a great lecture by David N. Livingstone : Cultural Politics and the Racial Cartographics of Human Origins, where he discussed his investigation of expressions of genetic narratives and how their resulting mappings are culturally appropriated, made real and considered ‘objective’ science.  In his lecture he made reference to Theodore Porter’s work on the history of statistics.  I did some digging and can’t wait to get my hands on The Rise of Statistical Thinking & Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life - sounds like wonderful socio-technological imaginings stuff.  And as previously mentioned elsewhere my discovery of Ian Hacking’s work, and his paper Making Up People which discusses the power of statistical categorization and how socially constructed nomilazations are made ‘real’ and make ‘real’.  Making ‘real’ is important, since once the category exists, as Livingstone pointed out in his lecture yesterday, a community emerges.  He made reference to the discovery that there are quite a few 25 year old gentleman who marry 75 year old women!  Where is the movie I wonder? We normally only ever see the older (usually unfit fellows!) with young babes in films. But I digress!  Benedict Anderson, in Imagine Communities also makes clear how the colonialists institutions of Map, Census and Museums in Asia, said something about the subjects they counted, categorized, rendered in images and organized into collections but also say much about what the colonialists were thinking and potentially less about the subjects they were studying - creating - imagining - manufacturing.

This is wonderful stuff, and inspiring as I am embark on the study of the history of Canada’s Census, the mapping of Canada’s territory, the infrastructures associated with these, but more trying to understand how infrastructure, mapping and statistics make us up, how they help us imagine ‘us’, their import in state formation and the absence of citizens in that process, and what does it mean when citizens, the doers of citizenship do not have access to the means to do citizenship - do not get to help with the story telling, questions the stories being told - or what happens when geographic imaginings are only governmental.  I want to understand who gets to count, map, make categories, judge and enact policies that are performed daily and how they got the mandate to do so.

It is also about placing in conceptual space, the pragmatic work I have been diligently doing for quite some time, helping me frame it in a broader context, how I have been implicated in ‘making stuff up’ and not necessarily in a critical way, not in a bad way, but mostly not thinking about the implications of that work, just doing it.

The 19th century Victorian Era Edward Carpenter (2, 3, 4) and the Fabian Society (2, 3, 4)!

This is an interesting series that appears in the Ottawa Citizen.  I normally do not read this paper, but with the recent scare that we may actually see a bus on the road had meet perusing it.  Speaking of Transit, I just got back from Toronto and think I will scrapbook my TTC transfers as it felt rather novel to be taking public transport rather than late night freezing cold 5km walks to work.  I reminded fellow passengers of their good fortune, especially since Toronto is a tropically toasty climate compared to Ottawa! But I digress! 

Here are the series of articles being published on surveillance in social media and in our cities:

• The surveillance society
• Part I: A very different world: Since 9/11 the use of close-circuit TV cameras has exploded
• Part II: Devil in the details: When it comes to social sorting, you are what you eat, buy, surf, post
• Part III: Social networking or social spying?
• We spy, ‘they’ spy, we all spy.