Skype Interview with Adam Banks

Adam Banks is a really smooth speaker, and we had a great discussion about community work, critically discussing race in the classroom, integrating useful technological practices, and how to make class spaces accessible.

Here are some quick highlights:

I see my main responsibility as helping my students to claim roles for themselves as intellectuals. To see themselves as doing intellectual work right here right now, not waiting until someone busts them with a piece of parchment, or a degree, that they can only access those conversations once they’ve graduated, but to take the responsibility that intellectual work requires now.

This says a lot about both Banks’ role as an instructor and as a community leader. As someone who does community work and values the intersections between academic and activist work, Banks’ emphasis on his students as intellectuals is very telling for how he sees them as agents of change.

We get the sense that access means we embrace everything. NO. We have to consciously ask the question, “What makes sense and why?”

In response to how he tries to use technology to create the “transformative access” promoted in Race, Rhetoric, and Technologies, Banks told us that the main point to remember with bringing technology into the classroom is that we have to think critically about those choices. That is, we can’t just bring in technology because something’s shiny and new; it has to be relevant and useful for students.

These different language varieties are strengths rather than something that somehow has to be accounted for, dealt with, something that’s just a challenge.

One of the texts we have discussed throughout this course is Students’ Rights to Their Own Language. Banks spoke against taking a viewpoint that encourages students to embrace their own voices throughout the writing process yet penalizes them on the final drafts. He argued that we are not in charge of employing a “linguistic poll tax”; rather, we are in charge of teaching students how to be rhetorically agile and flexible.

If there is any area of the academy that is severely tokenized and placed into its own space, disability studies would be it.

I want to on this note because it’s part of the response to the question that I posed before: What intersections are there between African American rhetoric and the rhetorics of other students who are often cast in liminal spaces within the classroom? Banks spoke about looking at the intersections of different rhetorics as they relate to our particular interests–in his case, African American rhetorics. Banks explained his work as an attempt to move black rhetorical traditions away from the tokenized inclusion where they usually fall, which is where he saw the connection with dis/ability.

We covered a lot of ground with this discussion, and speaking with Banks was a great experience. Next week? Jonathan Alexander!

 

Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground

Recently, I read Adam Banks’s Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. According to Banks, this book’s project is not to answer either/or questions about technology, society’s development, and exclusion; instead, it traces the technologies used within the African American rhetorical tradition to unseat racism and exclusion based on technological practices (2). Very generally, then, this argument is one of access: access for African American to the dominant technologies of society in ways that are ethical.

Banks defines AA rhetoric as “the set of traditions of discursive practices—verbal, visual, and electronic—used by individuals and groups of African Americans toward the ends of full participation in American society on their own terms” (2-3). Here, Banks emphasizes technology and autonomy because, according to him, “technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations” (10). These opening points really resonated with me because I often explore access in terms of rural populations, across lines of gender, and (more recently) through the lens of dis/ability. Like others in comp/rhet, who Banks blasts for ignoring the “convergence of race a technology” (15), I have not paid due attention to these drastic inequalities.

When people first started talking about the Digital Divide, it was discussed in terms of material access. For example, rural populations didn’t have access to internet technologies. Neither did poor urban populations nor minority populations. White middle- to upper-class males were most privileged to this access. Since the early 2000s, studies have been published that have noted a balance in terms of gender and many other inequalities. However, as Banks notes, material access is only a single facet of a wider access:

The problem with the Digital Divide as a concept for addressing systematic differences in access to digital technologies is that it came to signify mere material access to computers and the Internet, and failed to hold anyone responsible for creating even the narrow material conditions it prescribed. 41

Banks breaks access into five separate parts: material, functional, experiential, critical, and transformative.

• Material access: “equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse” (41);
• Functional access: “knowledge and skills necessary to use technological tools effectively” (41);
• Experiential access: “access that makes the tools a relevant part of [the users’] lives” (42);
• Critical access: “understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary” (42);
• Transformative access: “genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion” (45).

The material is the foundation for all other types of access, and as we progress through these different categories, we (ideally) gain privilege to the transformative access that allows us to be part of the networks of power. In order to make it there, Banks writes, “We must know how to be intelligent users, producers, and even transformers of technologies if access is to mean anything to our individual lives, the lives of our students, or those of the communities we live, work, and play in” (138).

In order to gain that ultimate access, Banks asserts that writing teachers must take the initiative to teach students how to use technology, both as writing tools and also as systems of knowledge-making. For those unfamiliar with how to do this, Banks offers steps:

• Start slowly.
• Only use technologies to meet your curricular goals.
• Let (or make) your students teach you.
• Don’t be scared of recreational uses of technologies.
• Don’t just produce customers. 139-40

I’m interested to know what intersections Banks sees between African American rhetorics and feminist or dis/ability rhetorics, and whether he sees these classroom practices as applicable to a wider range of traditionally-marginalized student populations. Luckily, he will be Skyping into our class tomorrow, and I imagine he will have much to say about his own pedagogy!

Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006. Print.

 

Krip-Hop Nation: Disability in the Hip-Hop Mix

Syracuse University's Event Flyer

This afternoon, Syracuse University’s Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee (BCCC) sponsored “Krip-Hop Nation: Disability in the Hip-Hop Mix.” According to their official Myspace page, Krip-Hop Nation is a group of disabled hip-hop artists who aim to “educate the music, media industries and general public about the talents, history, rights and marketability of Hip-Hop artists and other musicians with disabilities.”

At the panel today, Leroy Moore (co-founder of Krip-Hop Nation), Keith Jones (co-founder of Krip-Hop Nation), and Kalyn Heffernan (rapper and member of Wheelchair Sports Group) performed and critically discussed social constructions of disability.

On Activism:

Leroy Moore identifies himself as a poet, an activist, and an organizer. He was born with cerebral palsy, and he is a public lecturer on the intersections of race, disability, gender, and police brutality. During today’s panel, Moore said, “We use krip-hop with a K instead of a C to take back our language in a cultural, activist sort of way.” Moore sees himself as a poet, returning to the days when hip-hop resonated within the slam poetry community. Moore said, “I’m not looking for an MTV contract; I’m looking to change our community.”

Keith Jones, who was also born with cerebral palsy and used his feet to operate his iPad and Garageband during today’s performance, agreed that “the goal, really, about krip-hop, is social justice.” Jones mentioned that when you’re performing on stage, you get to “dictate the discussion” about disability, that through music, krip-hop artists try to show humanity by opening a discussion about dis/ability, race, and social stereotypes.

On Public Outreach & Education:

The panel began with a recording. We heard, “Like the Black Eyed Peas, let’s get retarded. No. Let’s get some disability education.” The organization’s largest aim is public education. Heffernan said, “Disabled people are the biggest minorities out there,” and both Moore and Jones cited shocking statistics about disability unemployment rates (82% unemployment).

Jones said, “In media, and certainly in hip-hop culture, they overlook disability.” Later, he mentioned that you can be black, or you can be a woman, but when you add disability to that mix, everything changes in terms of how you’re perceived. All three speakers stressed the importance of changing this type of thinking, emphasizing that Krip-Hop Nation is not only about bringing awareness to ableism, but also to racism, sexism, and homophobia.

On Sexuality:

One final discussion from today’s panel was that of disability and sexuality. Often, persons with disabilities are seen by others as asexual beings. On this, Jones said, “People think that when you have a disability, you don’t need an education. You don’t need relationships. You don’t have a sexual identity because you can’t possibly have sexual feelings.” Jones proudly proclaimed that he has two children. He stressed the importance of bringing disability into discussions of sexual education: “When you talk to kids about sexuality, you have to let them know that it’s okay to date someone with a disability.”

Overall, this afternoon’s panel was a great one. Threaded throughout the discussion were important conversations about social constructions of disability, public education, and the importance of solidarity to fight for change. To see some of what Krip-Hop Nation is about, check out Moore’s YouTube channel: KripHopNation. Moore can also be found @kriphop on Twitter.