I'm Josephine Biokubets, Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, formerly at Floyd Atlantic University. Our book, Global Feminist Technographies during COVID-19, Displacements, Disruptions, is co-edited by Melanie Heath, Akoswa Dakwa, Josephine Biokubets and Vandana Pokaisa. This book is our witness to living history as we sociologists in the academy or sociologists associated with the academy struggled to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just assumed my term as president of Sociologists for Women in Society when COVID-19 happened and I was confronted with how the organization could assist our members at that time who in various ways were being impacted by the pandemic. For example, loss of jobs, online teaching, adjusting to that, working from home, caring for the family, disruption of field work for graduate students, researching as well as faculty at home and abroad. So in association with the executive officer of SWS, Barrett Katuna, we put together some town hall meetings to find out about the concerns and needs of our members. And one of these town hall meetings included looking at the issue from a global perspective and what the concerns of our networks, our associate organizations, sister organizations and our global partners within SWS, how they were coping. And it was a very lively discussion and we decided as a result of that to document our experiences and challenges and ways of coping by collaborating globally in the form of a call for papers for a proposed book. And so this is how the book started and there were various questions that came up that we wanted to look at. For example, what has changed or intensified during the pandemic? In what ways were we hurting? How do our analysis challenges, the struggles, the trauma we all experience helped us understand intersecting inequalities that are being enhanced today. We also asked questions about what new challenges were being contended during COVID by people of color, heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and men, gender, non-binary individuals, all within the academic world. So this book is a global reflection of life through academia during the pandemic. And we organized it thematically into three sections, disruptions, displacements and distress. And the contributing authors represented various countries and regions of the world. Some of the countries included Ghana, South Africa, India, Canada, Finland, United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. And also within that, within the United States, for example, represented various regions. But also some of the contributing authors represented the diaspora in various ways. For example, Nepal, Iran, Taiwan, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and so on. And so this is how we try to develop a global perspective and looking at this issue at that time in real time. Thank you. Okay, I will take it from there. I'm Melanie Heath and I'm an associate professor of sociology at McMaster University in Canada. And so I am also one of the co-editors of global feminist auto ethnographies. And Josie had introduced the three sections of our books. And this was really the three themes that came out of the various stories we gathered from academics across the globe. So displacements, disruptions and distress really characterized for us how feminists on a global level are coping during the pandemic. And our book ties together these different accounts to explore how structures of empower intensified and reached, I would say, really deeply into our lives. By sort of having greater control of the time spaces in which we're positioned. So by focusing on academia to record these kinds of disruptions and displacements, we were able to showcase the major structural changes underway in higher education. So even those systems of education, including of course, higher education, are supposed to play a key role in the production of education as a public good. These institutions are rapidly shifting towards producing a commodity for profit, which is knowledge in education. To enhance profit, there are growing number of professors in temporary positions, graduate students on fellowships that do not provide living wages, and the less vulnerable workers who provide support services, such as cleaning of buildings, but who are rarely acknowledged as the academic labor force. So the idea of displacement really comes from scholars who study migration to indicate one level of disruption that has affected our lives. This term emphasizes really both the geographic space, time disturbance of patterns of people's everyday lives, but it also looks at the severe disruptions of social networks, especially where they exist and ultimately the nature of those kinds of ties. So if sets of tasks were carried out at home or in public spaces at certain times of each day prior to the pandemic, these routines were variously disrupted as people were displaced to spaces where boundaries between home and work shrank. The lives of refugees or internally displaced people who are forced into camps constitutes a strong, stark and harrowing example of this kind of displacement. Typically forces outside their control compel people to move. At the individual level, refugees experience severe stress, one could say even trauma, related to leaving familiar faces in people. And these displacements force people to learn new ways of life amidst uncertainty about political, social, economic conditions in new places and in new situations. And each day new ways of living must be relearned and established. And this kind of new normality can really lead to distress overall. So while the conditions of refugees are significantly more distressing than many of our own, nonetheless we use this idea of displacement for reflections as a way to think about how the pandemic can no longer rely on established, during the pandemic, we can no longer rely on daily practices within the institutional structures that we have become familiar. And we use the term distress to indicate the suffering people have experienced during the pandemic, but the term itself encapsulates a continuum from distress to trauma really. In our book we gathered accounts of extreme distress as parents and loved ones passed away as people struggled with their own loved ones health problems, not related in fact to COVID, and during times where resources have been diverted to address COVID as jobs and ability to work as before are made precarious. Added to this is the high stress experience by those who have been imprisoned by, I say imprisoned by immigration and travel restrictions, experiencing the toll of solitary lives or severe disruptions to hopes of joining families, and we're seeing this of course right now in China. We emphasize that intersecting structures have positioned some people in ways that they endure longer periods of suffering, including violence directed at their communities. So each essay in our book highlights different aspects of coping amongst these disruptions. The reality of the pandemic repeated confinement and strict restrictions on travel have meant that new institutional policies of nursing homes of hospitals and other such care providing places which supplemented our family responsibilities have simply added more layers of rules to our family lives. How we are doing family every day by providing support for everyday care, how we are trying to increase their support when family members in the households or far away are becoming ill have become ill, and how we cope with loss and grief as loved ones passed away. This is all involved navigating new social terrain shaped by these multiple institutional new rules. Adding to the escalating job precarious and inequalities which have enhanced our distress, we found that we're coping with loss of our face to face nurturing relationships was key. Not all emotions can be affirmed through words via phones or computers. And with our loss of embodied support, we lost many social rituals that brought us solace. The loss of ability to travel thus meant dealing with loved ones illness and grief from far away. So the auto ethnographies in our book offer a record of these displacements disruptions and distress to help us grapple with these kinds of critical questions and inequality about inequality that are being heightened by the pandemic. And I would say for answers, we'll have to take heed of the new social order that is unfolding now. Thank you. Thank you. And I am Bandinapur K. Astha and I'm a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut in the U.S. Josephine Buchbets talked about one of the inception of this book and Melanie Heath talked about the overall, you know, what did we find from various accounts. I want to draw your attention to a somewhat different and difficult issue that we encountered and we hope you all are grappling with as you try to do your work in, you know, this decade of the 21st century. And that is about decolonizing. In academia, decoloniality, decolonizing efforts, all of these have become words that we encounter every single day. But as we were doing this book with the best intentions in the world and all of us are absolutely committed to it, whether we are in the global north or we are in the global south, we encountered in real terms the gaps between our intentions, our practices and where we end up with the whole process. So I want to share a couple of ideas along those lines. One thought is that when we talk about decoloniality now, our emphasis has been on, you know, be inclusive in your citations, use theories from the global south, use theories from scholars who have not been, you know, represented in a big way. But the other part of the challenge is the methodological one. But when you make some decisions about, you know, how some work will be done, to what extent is it still embedded in those global north frameworks and what can you do about it? So we initially sent out the scroll using all of our networks on, you know, that we wanted to do a global auto ethnography. And very quickly, it became apparent to us that, you know, people began asking us, like, what exactly did you mean by that? And our first intention was, oh, we'll send you some writings, but the writings were all from the US. And so very quickly, we got to a position that if we really want to confront our own power, we needed to refrain from sending these examples of auto ethnography and let people tell their experiences in their own way, whether that ultimately became storytelling or autobiographies or auto ethnographies did not matter. The objective was to document, you know, particular a particular period of time of great social change with heightened racial biopolitics, you know, emerging at the global level and within countries. And so people ought to be able to write the way they wanted to. The second aspect of this was we had to let people write in their own style. If again, the global north has a style template. And the issue was to get away from that template. So to let people decide on the order of their writing, the emphasis that they felt was important, and never mind what we were looking for. And also importantly, what they felt should not be written for a whole variety of reasons within the local context. So because it was a very cooperative and fulfilling process for us at least, we were able to, as we moved along, keep on saying that just, you know, write it the way you do. And of course, for the global north scholars, we had to keep challenging them. You're using all of these words, explain yourself. None of this may make sense to somebody in another country. There's no taken for grantedness about what you're saying, write it in a way that it is understandable. That said, we encountered a lot of other challenges as well. Reviewers, particularly based in the global north, having seen the term auto ethnography, wanted a different product. So we had to embark on some fights in that direction. So there were a lot of other issues that went into something that we thought was primarily a methodological and theoretical issue. In the end, as we write in the book, we fought some of the fights, we tried to, you know, really stay open. And I think collectively, all of the authors stayed open to the rest of the authors and the rest of the audiences. But we still feel there are months to go. And it's a process that will take a lot more effort and a lot of cooperation and collaboration as we keep moving forward, both writing together, as well as being supportive of each other. So I'm going to end there. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Rituparna and I teach Sociology and Interpress College for Women University of Delhi. So the chapter that we co-wrote was written by Metri Chaudhry, myself, Dipali and Dinesh. So four of us were located in JNU, a university in March in the news, recently for all the wrong reasons. But it has also had its own highlights and moments of prominence over the years. Now, when we saw the call for the book that came out, our immediate thought was to put into writing what we were experiencing as very unique experiences and moments of disruptions and distress, particularly with the pandemic and even before that. So our chapter refers to some of the ways in which because of political reasons, the university has been in turmoil for the past few years. And education as a public good, which Melanie was talking about was actually being challenged at the highest level. So there were movements that students led against a proposed fee height in hostels and in the mess, as well as challenges to thought how research is being done, as well as teaching being conducted. So there were these several issues that all of us were confronting. Metri Chaudhry as a professor and the three of us as students, research scholars to be specific at different levels. I was on the verge of submission before the pandemic. And once the pandemic came, my submission was completely thrown out of the window. And actually, a university at the national Indian level did not have the mechanism to facilitate students and their submission for several months, even within the pandemic. And as everything was continuing, it also meant that there was no institutional zoom or Google Meet account to hold classes on. So many students and teachers actually made do with their free account of zoom, which would be for 40 minutes and then get cut off, as well as in Google Meet, where you did not have the advanced features. So education as a public good had reached its limitations. There was no library access. The nation particularly comes from a marginalized background face several issues in terms of his scholarship money, this buzzer, as well as mere survival. We two faced issues in our scholarship and were asked to vacate the hostel without the university making any alternate arrangements. So in that sense, our ethnographies were very similar, yet dissimilar, owing to the social locations that we came in, but because of our presence in chain new. So this chapter is about our experiences, our theorization of the lived experiences during the pandemic. And we rely on auto ethnography as a primary method that helped us sort of collate the experiences of four people. And the next speaker, Diwali will speak more about the importance of the method and why it helped us. Thank you. Thank you, Ritu Panna. My name is Diwali and I'm currently teaching sociology at the Department of Sociology in Ranchi University, India. To take forward what Ritu Panna has just mentioned about our chapter in the book, I begin by a line from the chapter, the introduction to our chapter, which says that while post colonialism is respectable in global academia, the subaltern, subalternity of non Western experiences remain largely invisible. And I think this line is very key to what we are trying to do in this chapter. And this book gave us the platform to sort of put forth our argument as those located in the global south and share our experiences using auto ethnography as a method as a methodology, which would sort of decolonize how knowledge is produced. In fact, auto ethnography has for long been argued to be a method which allows people to challenge the colonial ways of knowledge production. So in our chapter, we've tried to take into account our own experiences. And as Ritu Panna was mentioning, the four of us who co wrote the chapter are writing our own experiences, we are reflecting on what we felt, what we thought, what we went through as four people associated with the public university, and yet with very different backgrounds. So this whole process of writing the chapter using the auto ethnography method was key in not only making data available, but also in challenging what is talked about the global south or the you know, a university in a global south during the pandemic. In fact, what was extremely interesting for us was, as previously Professor Porcaesta was mentioning, that we as authors or co authors had the freedom to choose what we said about ourselves or what we wrote about our experiences in the pandemic and how we spoke about it. In fact, even the language that we chose was of our own, we were able to choose what or how we communicated in the chapter what we wanted to. So in this whole process of writing this chapter for the four of us, the self became the site of research. And that again helped us reflect on what was happening around us and where we were placed as those or scholars in the global south. And what were the challenges that we were facing the challenges not only of an ongoing pandemic, but also as people who are located under a very specific regime. So our whole idea the idea behind the chapter was to put forth an argument from the global south about how we have experienced the pandemic and at the same time try to challenge the traditional ways in which knowledge is produced, especially about the global south. And I think in our small attempt while writing this chapter using auto ethnography of auto ethnography methodology we've been I'd say have made this small effort to do the same. And I'd say that often when we've as early research, early career researchers say Ritu Panami or Dinesh or as Professor Chaudhry who's a senior scholar in the global south are challenged more or as scholars writing from the global south is often to fit in our I'd say stories into the narratives or the ways in which knowledge is already created. But this in this chapter we were able to do it how we were comfortable talking about it. So think this is what I would like to say about our experience of writing this chapter using auto ethnography method. Thank you. Thank you everybody and I'm going to try and just draw some strands of what you said into some concluding comments. And the comments are as and particularly as Dipali and Ritu Panami pointed out and we also experienced and understood we all faced you know disruptions dislocations and distress. But reading everybody's chapters together wasn't real lesson for us and it was a real lesson to see how differently the dislocations and disruptions and distress played out depending on local and global circumstances. That was an important lesson for us but equally important was was important is the rapid rate at which academia changed supposedly for pandemic purposes to handle the pandemic we needed to do this and this and this and this and we happen to now be in a perfect moment where the pandemic even though it survives seems to have gone away from many official discussions yet those pandemic induced changes have not gone away. So the question moving forward is where are we now and where are we going to be because the pandemic also opened the doors for very deep incursions of states and other entities into our most private lives and our most private lives frequently across nation state boundaries just as much as it has within countries. So those are the strands the book is a record and we hope it is a meaningful record both for the people who are right who have written and the people who are going to read it. The book is also a kind of warning about the future that if the pandemic related conditions actually survive we are in the middle of a change which is similar to the enormous changes that took place when industrialization became normalized in societies a lot of changes a lot of disruptions and most importantly a lot of uncertainties of about who we are as humans and what will our futures look like. Thank you.


A huge conversation going on globally right now is for a global minimum corporate tax rate. I understand where this is coming from, but the new rules cannot be set by the G7 countries alone. It really needs a multilateral consensus amongst all countries. There is a tsunami of money being directed at ESG investment. This is not a sacrifice. We can put the good money into the good behaviour and good future. How long will it take to declare a victory? I'm going to put out and say, you know, by June of next year, we're going to see a pretty similar place to where we were. Consumers are gaining more confidence as more vaccination is done. Where are the opportunities that you see? These services are focused on these new startups that are starting to raise money and start scaling their businesses. How has the pandemic changed the way we may be commuting in the future? Atoms driving will be one of the main ways of future mobility.


Hey everybody, welcome back to magic orthodoxy. My name is David and this is the rules to magic That's right today in this video. We're gonna look at the rules of magic. You're like there are rules Yes, there are rules because you're a magician and the magician is all about keeping and retaining Secrets and so the rules to magic are to limit exposure now. What is exposure exposure is when? Somebody figures out how a trick is done Okay, when the lay world figures out how a particular magic trick is done and exposure takes all shapes all forms And then so the top three rules the top three Codes of conduct that we live by as magicians are to limit the amount of exposure out there in the world All right, so you're ready for the rules number one never tell how a trick is done That is the first and foremost rule of magic never tell how a trick is done Well, what if my mom asks? What if my sister asks? What if my best friend really wants to know? The number one rule of magic is never tell how a trick is done Okay, never ever. Well, what if there another magician? Never tell how a trick is done. That's how it works That's how it works.   Your job is to keep secrets Your job is to retain and protect the art that you love So you should do everything in your power to keep those secrets Okay, magic is an art form and it's reserved for the people who have chosen to be magicians and so your first Duty is to protect that. Okay, so never tell how a trick is done Number two never perform the same trick for the same audience That means you show a trick to Billy on the playground and he says come on Let's show it to Sally and the two of you run over and that you show it to Sally But Billy gets to watch again No, you never repeat the same trick for the same audience again, it's exposure Okay, because what you're gonna do is you're gonna do the trick the exact same way The way you did it before with the same pattern the same routines and the people that watched it the first time They're not gonna be looking where you told them to look They're gonna be looking someplace else and they're gonna be watching for you To mess up. They're gonna be watching for those slides. They're not gonna watch your left hand anymore Now they're gonna watch your right and they're gonna pay very careful attention to the things that they missed the first time When you repeat the same trick for the same audience again, you are letting secrets out You are exposing those secrets when somebody says hey, show me that again You need to have another trick ready to go. Okay, most times when you perform magic You should be doing at least three tricks. Okay, you should never just do one trick and that's done And I'm walking the class because you're always gonna leave them wanting more. They're always gonna be excited They're always gonna say hey do that again So you would say well, I won't do that one again, but here. Let me show you something else Okay, that's an easy way to move them off that topic Sometimes you have to perform the same trick for the same person because you're practicing Like I show my wife the same tricks over and over again because I'm practicing but that's different Okay, if this is your audience a good magician uses the same tricks But always finds a new audience if your audience never changes that means you need to find new tricks constantly, okay, and An easy way around that is to buy magic books magic books have hundreds of tricks in them So if you're the kind of magician that has the same audience repeatedly then you need to buy more books and less All right, and the third rule is practice practice practice why practice well because again If you're showing tricks before they're ready if you're showing tricks before they're done, there's the possibility That you'll mess up There's the possibility that you'll screw the trick up and when you do that You expose it never perform a trick that you don't know perfectly Okay, you practice a trick you do it several times without making any mistakes when you're just about Sick of it. That's probably when you're ready to perform it when you can perform it without shaking when you can perform it without making Mistakes when you can perform it without dropping the cards When you can perform it without looking down when you do the slight that's a big one practice in front of a mirror practice until it's perfect, okay, it has to be Perfect if you don't practice then you're gonna end up like these kids Hi All right, that was a joke, but just practice okay, you practice so that you don't expose magic Alongside of that. Let's just put that underneath is you don't steal magic Okay, you don't download free tricks off the internet that again is Exposure, okay, because you didn't pay for the right to have that trick some magician out there has created that trick to make money Of course of course and to broaden all of our magical experiences when you steal that trick You are diminishing the creative process that the inventors have okay Well, what if I trade a trick what if I give him one and he gives me one You're only trading if you no longer have the trick In other words if I have a video download and he has a video download and we swap videos But then you keep the video that you traded you didn't trade You just stole a trick and he just stole a trick that's not trading and even if you really did trade You would have to agree not to perform that trick ever again if I'm gonna give you a trick and I'm giving it to you Then I can't perform it anymore Okay, that would be the right way to do it the right way to do it is to purchase your tricks From a dealer from a magic dealer or from the internet or if you sell those tricks Then you're agreeing that you're not going to do it anymore You shouldn't make money or profit off of another magician, right?  There are also YouTube channels out there that say that they're teaching you magic But a lot of them are actually Exposing magic because they are exposing magic tricks that they didn't invent The only magic tricks that anyone can give away for free are the tricks that they invent themselves Anything else is considered to be unethical. It's not illegal Unethical you shouldn't give away a trick that isn't yours Unless you ask the creator permission, okay, but never tell the secret All right So those are the three rules of magic never tell how a trick is done Never perform the same trick for the same audience and practice practice practice Like I said all of those rules are set up put in place so that we don't expose Magic a magician keeps secrets a magician doesn't tell secrets So think about that think about who you are as a magician and your own character And think about how you are helping to preserve the secrecy of magic


Egas-Fiontech vs. Maria Sikari is the fourth quarterfinal for the women's French Open for 2021. Both players have had different roads to the quarterfinal stage. Sikari entered the tournament as a 17th seed and took on the qualifier, Zavatska, in the first round. Sikari was very impressive winning in straight sets, 6-4, 6-1. Her second round opponent was against Paulini, and again a very impressive performance, winning in straight sets again, 6-2, 6-3. Her third round opponent was against the 14th seed, Mertens, and after a tight second set, Sikari rebounded in the third to win 7-5, 6-7, 6-2. Her fourth round opponent was against the fourth seed, Sofia Kenan, who was the defending finalist from last year, but it didn't seem to affect Sikari at all as she won in straight sets 6-1, 6-3. Sfiontech, the defending champion, came into the tournament as the number 8 seed, took on Juvan in the first round. And after a very easy first set, the second set was a little tighter, but Sfiontech got through in straights 6-love, 7-5. Her second round opponent was against Pedersen, and Sfiontech was getting back to her form from 2020 French Open, winning in straight sets, 6-1, 6-1. Her third round was against the 30th seed, Contavate, and after a tight first set, Sfiontech blew Contavate out of the water in the second, 7-6, 6-love. Her fourth round opponent was against Kostjak, the unceded player, who had beaten Mugarutha in the first round, but Sfiontech didn't care as she got through in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4 to get to the quarterfinals. These two have actually never met before, which is kind of strange considering how well they've played during the 2021 season, they've never crossed paths. If Sakari's gonna win, she's gonna need to keep her composure. She's gonna need to be aggressive and try and get on the offense before Sfiontech does, but she's gonna have to be composed as well, because sometimes she can get erratic and she can miss a lot of shots. If Sfiontech's gonna win, she's just gonna have to keep doing what she's doing. Big serves, big forehands, big returns. If she can get Sakari a little bit frustrated as well, she's probably gonna get the win. This is Sakari's first quarterfinal at a grand slam, so it's gonna be very tough for her to come through, especially with the crowd being involved. Sfiontech's been here before. She loves playing at this court, and I think she's gonna win this one in three sets. It's gonna be a close one.  Let me know down in the comments below. Who do you think is gonna win this one?


Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Traditionally, in Western cultures, middle class and upper middle class women have stayed home taking care of children, and men have been breadwinners. Because children are the keepers of the culture to the extent that they will continue traditions and cultural norms, this traditional arrangement seems to provide a pretty powerful position for women to occupy. However, traditionally, women have taught children to occupy gender roles in which men are powerful and women are domestic. Domestic work remains unpaid work, and usually evokes dependency upon the person or persons in the family who are paid. So while it would seem that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, history has shunned this knot to be true. In the 1960s and 70s, a number of women in North America and Europe began questioning their roles as homemakers and mothers. These women rejected the tradition and went into the workforce, becoming no longer dependent upon men, including their husbands, for their livelihoods. For a while, these women concentrated on sisterhood and daughterhood and their analyses of society. They saw motherhood as holding them back in the quest for equality. But what if the power to change the world really were in how one reared a child?  What if equality could be achieved by bringing up girls who were more assertive, girls who developed to their potentials, girls who were honest with their brothers rather than passive-aggressive and manipulative in their struggle for power? What if the hand that rocked the cradle really could change the world? As part of her dissertation research, Christine Buble, now an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, spoke with a number of mostly middle-class women who could be out on the workforce earning money and chosen not only to stay home and take care of the children, but to take care of them in a particular way. These women strove to be organic in their child-rearing, often providing vegetarian and whole foods, a simpler lifestyle, a social conscience, and homeschooling. Buble called these women natural mothers. We talk with Chris about her book, The Paradox of Natural Mothering, this week on First Person Plural. As we explore how parenting and education have the potential to create social change and social justice, in an episode we call The Mother of All Socialization. All right, so tell me a little bit about your research. We'll start with you telling me the name of your book and how you went about doing the research and writing this book. Okay, the book is titled The Paradox of Natural Mothering, and a little later on I can explain to you why I chose that rather strange title. I interviewed, ultimately I interviewed 32 mothers who I defined as natural mothers. I spent time, what sociologists and anthropologists call in the field, beforehand getting to know women so that when I approached them for interviews they'd be more inclined to say yes. So I spent about a year and a half to two years attending potlucks, hanging out in food co-ops, going to clay groups, and just getting acquainted with my local community of mothers who were practicing what I called alternative lifestyle, which involved home birthing, homeschooling, extended breastfeeding, the use of natural medicine, consumption of natural foods. And so, like I said, after I spent a period of time getting to know folks and establishing some trust and sort of getting a little clear about who exactly I was interested in studying, then I approached moms. Almost all of them said yes, they'd be interested in being interviewed, which was, you know, a great thing. And so I sat down and talked with them, most of them in their own homes, with their children, you know, circling around, and many of them nursing their babies as we spoke. And I talked with each of them for at least an hour and a half, some of them two or two and a half hours, about their lives. And the interviews were extremely open-ended. I decided that I would approach things very organically, sort of like the mother's lives, and not ask very pointed or directive questions. I opened every interview with, so tell me how you got to this place. And so their lives unfolded. I didn't collect demographic information. I didn't have them fill out surveys or questionnaires. So I had to do a lot of, you know, guessing about, okay, she said she was born in 1963. That means she's 39. And so it made the research, I hope, let me back up, I think it produced an interview that was more sort of authentic and less sort of my agenda being shoved on their throats and more of them telling me what was important to them and their lives. And I take it that this had kind of a narrative approach to it. The idea was that you were collecting their story. That's exactly right. And I approached it that way. When I approached them for interviews, I said, I'm interested in your story of how you chose the parent in this relatively unconventional way. So they would, some of them started with childhood, some of them started with that two years they spent in the Peace Corps, started with, well, you know, I became a mother and everything changed. So they all had different starting points. So I didn't hear a different, I didn't hear the same pathway for everyone. You said something I think is interesting. You said that this is an unconventional parenting, but in some ways it's very conventional, isn't it? I mean, these are women who are basically choosing over a career to be with their children and to nurture and provide for their children and so forth. I'm assuming that the word paradox is going to show up here. You're absolutely right. That's a real good point and one that is raised often. They're unconventional only in this contemporary context, only in the setting in which most women of their privilege, most of these women, all of the women were white, most of them are partnered, many of them own their own home. They were college educated by and large, so they enjoy an awful lot of social and economic privilege. And women of that peer group, if you will, tend to combine, if possible, career and family, sort of go for that have-it-all lifestyle that so often talked about, you know, at personal and public levels. They rejected that. Instead they were doing what their grandmothers did and some of their mothers, by being all-time stay-at-home mothers, rejecting the paid workforce, relying on their partners, as I said, most of them are partners, most of them married, relying on their partners to earn the bread. And they poured all their creative and intellectual energy into parenting. And so you're right, in a lot of ways, what's unconventional about that, that sounds very traditional, but it was untraditional in that, well, number one, that they were not doing what many of their peers were encouraging them to do, like, gee, you've got a college degree, many of them had advanced degrees. Why are you at home full-time with your children?  And it's unusual because the way they were mothering, they were not choosing caesareans when caesareans are, you know, climbing in current. They're not choosing bottle feeding. They're not choosing convenience foods. They're not even drying their clothes. They're hanging them up on the line. They're organic gardening rather than going to stop and shop or Kroger. And so in all those ways, it's very unconventional. It's very radical. Radical to breastfeed your child until she or he is three, four or five years old, when only about half of American women, at least, even initiate breastfeeding. So that's how it's unconventional in those two ways. I'm also thinking that this compares to, and I'm not sure if you address this in your book, you might be able to address it on the cuff, compares to some of the commitment that women on the far right are doing.  And so they end up doing a lot of the same kinds of things, homeschooling, devoting a lot of time to their children, that these women that you interviewed to. So can you kind of maybe compare and contrast those two kinds of mothering as well? Yeah, that's a really good observation and one that struck me as well. In fact, when I give you a brief story, I went to a La Leche League meeting, which is another place that I met a lot of these mothers. La Leche League is an international breastfeeding organization. And I went to a meeting and I sat down. It was winter and a woman next to me, I think on my left, took off her coat and she had on a pro-choice t-shirt. And I thought, oh, very interesting, you know, forever the sociologist. Oh, very interesting. The woman to my right takes off her coat and she had on a very virulent anti-choice t-shirt. I thought, oh, very interesting. And I saw this often where these sort of unlikely bedmates sort of find themselves in the homeschooling group and the breastfeeding support group and the food co-op and so on. The same ones at the homeopathic medicine 101 workshop, you know, sponsored by the local natural health clinic. What interested me about the moms I studied is I intentionally chose moms who didn't cite religion as their motivation because I thought, and maybe this was naive. I'm sure any scholar that studies religious motivation would tell me I'm being naive. But I thought that their motivations were a little clearer and I was interested in women who didn't cite the Bible or God's teachings or their faith as the reason that they were doing this very sort of gender-conventional lifestyle. I was interested in women who identified as feminists. Most of them did identify as feminists. As sort of liberal feminists, maybe not radical feminists, but definitely at least at one point in their life felt very, very attached to the women's movement. And I thought, well, that's an interesting population to choose this, you know, dependent on male breadwinner kind of lifestyle. What's going on for them? You know, is it about back to the land? Is it Neo hippie? Is it using your motherhood as a site of social change? Is it radicalism in a new form once you have kids?  You know, what's going on for them? But there is an awful lot of connections between the, if you will, the religious right natural moms and the moms I studied, which are harder to sort of name. And that is that they rely on nature to guide their practice. So they both believe that mother nature, whether that's, you know, shaped and endowed by God or by, you know, mother nature herself, is a better guide for social practice and parenting practice than anything else. That you're better off listening to your body than you are hooking yourself up to a fetal monitor during labor and delivery.  That nature is going to show you the way. And that's shared in both communities very clearly. Did you find among the women that you talked to that they were citing a kind of affecting social change by rearing children in a particular way as one of the reasons that they were doing what they were doing? I mean, I've often thought, and I was intrigued when I saw your book, because it's something that I had thought about before, that it's women who sort of get first crack at socializing children. And that that could be a spot, a place, if you will, that could turn into a very radical place in which we kind of teach our children what we had hoped we had learned when we were young and protect them from a lot of the, pardon my French, but crap that we were taught when we were young. And here's, I mean, are these women motivated that way? Are they thinking in those kind of terms? Yes, they are. It's variously in terms of their self-consciousness. I mean, I heard from women ranging, I had these kinds of responses. One, everything I do is political, one woman said. Another said, when I posed the question, do you consider your lifestyle moving toward social change in any way? She said, well, I hadn't thought about it, but now that you mention it, yes, I guess so. So I heard that, that was sort of a gamut, but no one denied that what they were doing was radical in some way. They may not use that word. They might say challenges in mainstream, swims upstream, but they all, they all acknowledged that what they were doing had some consequences socially. Not only for their individual children and their family, but for the culture at large, many of them spoke in terms of witnessing, which is a religious concept of what, you know, missionaries do, communities where they are doing their work. They live the lifestyle that they profess, and that is supposed to be the strongest teacher of all. Kind of walking the talk. Exactly. So by homeschooling, you are witnessing to your neighborhood that there's another way to educate your children. You don't necessarily have to march on Washington or lobby your legislature, but you need to live that lifestyle, you know, congruent with your values, and that's a powerful tool of social change. They all believed that their lifestyle was changing the world one child at a time, one family at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and they opted for that style as opposed to what many people think is more conventional social change, you know, like, you know, rallying and lobbying and picketing and so on, because they thought this was a more powerful means to make change, and it was one in which they could exert control, because, hey, you know, they're in charge of their children, they're in charge of their families. That's one place that they can actually make a difference. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. Do you think they were being successful? You know, people ask me that all the time, and it's so difficult to answer. I have to say that, you know, I got to know their families, many of their families, relatively well, because I did spend so much time getting to know folks before we actually had the interview. The interview was kind of the end of this time in the field. And the kids were, by and large, really delightful, well-adjusted. The family seemed very cohesive.  But it did seem, at least, and I took that snapshot, that things were going pretty well. Kids farewell that are homeschooled, they actually test very well on different various batteries of academic indicators. The kids and the families tended to release speak of self-confidence and self-esteem. They weren't caught up by sort of conventional social, measuring rods of social success. They were wearing what they wanted, when they wanted. The clothes didn't match, the hair wasn't combed, and that was fine. They were reading crazy books and doing wild projects, and we're proud of that. Most of the homes didn't have televisions. Many of them didn't have internet access. They used the library instead of, you know, Disney, and they seemed comfortable with that. But I didn't do a study that looked at them down the line, and many people have said, please do that, and I want to know how these families turned out. And I think that would be very interesting to examine. Yeah, we did a radio show a few weeks ago with a woman who is actually the sister of a sociologist, and she was raised as a red diaper baby. Mm-hmm. And are you familiar with that term? I am. And it was interesting in talking to her, and I mean, she's, you know, in her mid-50s now, and has lived a life of activism to a certain extent in one way or another. It was interesting in talking to her and researching the red diaper babies to see how many of these children who were, you know, children of families who suffered because of their beliefs and because they were trying to affect social change went on to grow up and instead of rebelling against their parents' values, were actually leaders in pursuing many of the values. I mean, not all of them identify as communists, but they do identify with social change and social justice issues. Well, that's helpful. So there is one little case study that's indicative. Well, that's interesting. Yes, I wonder, because many people have asked, do you think these kids are going to rebell, and as soon as they can, they're going to have, they're going to eat exclusively McDonald's, watch only Disney films, you know, where Nike and Tommy Hilfiger every chance they get, you know, certainly didn't look like that with the trend. I mean, not only are the parents teaching their children to resist, but they're teaching them to think for themselves. So I think that certainly lends itself to an alternative adult life. One of the differences, I guess, between them and their more conservative counterparts, I would speculate might be because the agenda is not so much to instill certain agendas in the kid, but rather to teach the kids to find their own agendas. That's exactly right. Are you familiar at all with unschooling as opposed to homeschooling? I've read a little bit about it on the Internet, but go ahead and tell me about it. Yeah, well unschooling deviates from homeschooling in that unschooled children don't follow a curriculum. Many homeschooled children are schooled in the home much like they would be in an institution. It's almost as if school comes home. Mom, usually about 90, over 90% of homeschooled families are homeschooled by mom. Mom is now the teacher, and there is a curriculum that is used, and we sit down after breakfast at nine, and we have school till three, and then we break. Unschooled children are encouraged to develop their own interests and follow their own passions, and parents operate or the homeschooling facilitators, let's say, usually parents, facilitate that. So they follow the children's interests. So if the child finds that they're very interested in insects in the spring, then they do projects on insects, and they go out into the wild, and they go to the library, and maybe they go on some sort of field trip to study them more in depth. And if the interest shifts then to contemporary art, then that's what they do next. And so it's very free-flowing. It's very child-driven. The idea is that children are natural learners. They're naturally inquisitive, and if you give them space, time, and resources, they will learn. And so unschooling, that sort of philosophy, is very indicative of the philosophy of natural mothering, which is to let the child let it develop naturally. That's very different than maybe a more right-wingish natural mother derivative, I think, because it's not as rigid and prescribed. It's much looser than that. And I would suggest, too, that there might be other, even not to rail too much on the right, that there might even be leftist agendas that still try to train a child up in a certain way. Oh, sure. And the idea here, from when I hear what you're telling me, is that children are given a chance to think for themselves, find their own agendas, and that that's the way that it's radical, rather than radical in the sense of teaching them a certain politic. That's very true. In fact, the interesting side note about the word radical, when I was casting about for language to describe these moms, I originally settled on radical mother. So when I started interviewing moms, I'd say, how do you feel about this language? And I heard, repeatedly, I don't like that at all. That sounds too strident. That sounds too militant. That's not me. So then I settled on natural mom, and it was obvious after a while, gee, why didn't I think of that first? This nature-drives practice theme is so prevalent. That's what it's got to be. And people felt comfortable with that, Monica. The notion of radicalism or political-driven parenting, that didn't really resonate for them. Some were more politically-driven than others. But I'd say, by and large, they were driven by nature in their own sense of intuition to parent differently, and they hoped that that would make the world a better place. They were sure it would make their families healthier.  And get eaten alive. Yeah. Do you think that these kids are being prepared for adulthood well? Well, that's a great question. And the defense of the, and by the way, not all the natural mothers' homeschool, but most of them do. There's all sorts of variations, but I'd say if I wanted to stereotype a natural mother, I'd say she's homeschooling her kids. And in those cases, the homeschoolers defend themselves very easily. They say, you know what, my kid is not isolated. We, you know, Susan's and the Girl Scouts and John's on the skating team, and you know, they're very much integrated into the social fabric of our local community. They just don't go to an institution for school. And they're developing such strong self-concepts and such great critical thinking skills, and they're so self-confident that they're ready to manage the world. And there is data that tracks homeschooled kids, and they do fare well. Did the mothers talk about addressing that kind of pressure from the outside? Daughter comes home from Girl Scouts and announces that she's discovered, you know, beanie babies or Barney or whatever, yeah. Exactly. Well, one of the strategies is that the moms often joined groups to support one another. So there'd be a homeschooling group or a breastfeeding group. One of the groups I studied, everything of course has pseudonyms, and I gave a pseudonym to a group that was very important in my study, and I called them Creating Stronger Families. And it was a group of families who many of them homeschooled, not all of them, but all of them identified with aspects of this alternative parenting lifestyle. And they got together regularly, and they supported each other, and they talked about things like, how do you deal with the love of Barbie? Do you really just tell, or a topic that comes up with all kinds of parents, what do you do when your kid wants to play a gun? Do you say absolutely not, and then they, of course, covet it? Or do you say, okay, bring it in the house, and then you feel like you're living a double life? And so what they did is they spent a lot of time talking to each other and supporting one another and trying to connect with other families that were like them, so the kid didn't feel so weird, so they weren't the only vegetarian, organic family in their lives. They weren't the only ones without a television or the only ones that had dinner together every night at six, no questions asked, and so that seemed to help some. And many of them had very honest conversations with their families, with their children about those kinds of things, so they tried to create an open dialogue where it's okay to come home and say, you know what, I'm the only kid that doesn't have a Nike sweatshirt. Sometimes they'd make confessions like, okay, one Nike sweatshirt, but we're buying it at the thrift store. Right. So I heard all different kinds of strategies, but no one pretended that there wasn't another world out there that you're having to compete with. Let's take this to a more theoretical level for a minute if you don't mind. Sure. We'll be sociological together. Oh, I'd love to. What do you think that this, we'll call it a case or these cases, teach you about how social change is affected? I mean, I think that we're talking about people making choices on a very micro level, doing a lot of constructing of their lives in a certain way, and then having to deal with something at a social level that kind of intrudes on that in terms of advertising, in terms of, you know, all sorts of ways in which the culture kind of seeps into the situation and doesn't go away just because they wish it. Is there something that we can learn as sociologists from looking at the ways in which these women are trying to do what they're doing? I think there's lots we can learn. One thing that was really clear to me and the work of Barbara Katz-Rothman, who's a sociologist, helped me a lot. I actually shared with her my early interest in this population and as somebody who studied midwifery for years, she knew exactly who I was talking about. And she said, you know, Chris, they get capitalism and technology and they resist both of them vehemently, but they don't seem to get patriarchy. They don't resist conventional gender script. And that helped me understand why this movement felt to me paradoxical, that it was progressive and that it resisted quite directly the ideology of capitalism, of materialism, of consumerism, of careerism and the ideology of technology, which is, you know, the more high-tech, the better life through more technology. But they did not challenge or question how gender structures social reality. And so to me, that suggested a movement that resisted but not too much, kind of pushed but not too hard. And so it kind of took a couple of steps forward and one step back. And that's why it's paradoxical to me. It's simultaneously progressive and regressive, kind of gets it in some ways and gets it in another way. And the moms defended themselves. In fact, many of the moms that, you know, read the book and they responded to me, they said, you know, I really don't like your conclusions because I don't feel like I am conforming to conventional gender script. I feel very rebellious in the way that I'm living. So they may not see it that way, but I'm as a sociologist, of course, interested in how the culture sees this style of parenting. And if it professes to be an agent of social change, then it needs to be read that way by everyone. And many people regard this lifestyle as very regressive. Like, well, gee, you know, bottom line is is that you're modeling to your children that mom stays home and dad works in the public realm. One wonders if it doesn't model at least, well, actually to both gender children, there is this model here that this is what mom does and that this is what dad does. Right. Yes. And no matter how much they try to explain what they meant by that, they still are seeing this model and that model is reinforced in the greater culture. Indeed. The other lesson about social change is that we have to pay attention always to who's constituting the movement and what kind of privilege do they enjoy. In other words, do you have to be privileged with natural mother? And I would argue, yeah, that it takes money, it takes race privilege, it takes cultural capital, a term that probably many of your listeners are familiar with, that means the social and often economic resources sort of move fluidly through the culture. And so, you know, many of these families turn their backs on much material privilege by having only the one income, they have one rusted out car, they dispense with a lot of the sort of social trapping, but they do that by choice and they could, if they wanted to, beat the dual earner families and live in a big house or live in an SUV, if they chose, they have the material resources to do so or access to the material resources. Again, remember, many of them are college educated, many of them grew up middle class, they're partnered, they're white, they're heterosexual, so they have all this status at their disposal and they turn their back on much of it to live a particular lifestyle, but they could also turn right around and claim it. And you can't do that if you're poor or you're of color or you're queer. So, I believe it's very important to look at how far can a movement go, if it depends on only privilege to make it work. Right. And so, I challenge the notion that this is sort of the next wave because if it's the next wave then it needs to sweep more folks into it. And at this point it really looks very exclusive.  Absolutely. Right. It's like, stay home, work. Absolutely. And that's been the big blind side of the feminist movement is to recognize that women of color and poor women have always worked. And in fact, privilege to them means not having to work. And so, looking at it through a different lens is really important. I think that's the case here is that if we're talking about natural mothering, we have to pay attention to who's natural mothering and how it's possible that they do so. I did interview some less privileged women including a couple very poor women who natural mothered and they talked explicitly about how much harder it is for them to do it. One woman talked about taking her child to the emergency room when he had an injury and she didn't want to give him the antibiotics because she felt very strongly that antibiotics were unhealthy in the long run. But she felt pressured by the ER doc and she was afraid that if she resisted too hard he might report her to social services as an unfit mother. A privileged woman with a husband, her shoulder would not feel that way. But this woman did. She also talked about working in a food co-op and people making assumptions about her lifestyle because she worked there and consumed the goods there.  I have to work here to buy the food here. Oh yeah, it's much more expensive. Sure, and if you want to use herbal medicine, that's all out of pocket. Your HMO is not going to pay for that. Sure, going to the naturopath and seeing the chiropractor and all of that often isn't covered by any kind of insurance. So who can do that? Well, people with privilege, people with resources. Well, Chris, I very much appreciate your time. Thank you for asking me to talk about this work. And good luck on the book and we will put links up on the website so that people can get a chance to check your book out. Thank you, Patty. And I look forward to talking to you further in the future. Great, and I look forward to seeing you at an SWS event. And thanks again. Yeah, thanks and thanks to Carl too. Okay, I'll tell him. Bye-bye. Take care. Okay, let's start with this idea. Culture is invented by human beings. We like to think of cultures happening before us and before any particular human being it is. I mean, we're all born into a history. We're all born into a society. We don't come out of the womb, figure out what we think the best world would be and then create it. On the other hand, we then create the world for the next generation. We don't do it from scratch, obviously. We do it within the context of our history and the context of the resources that are handed to us. But nonetheless, it's human beings who are doing this as a group. It's people who are creating culture and culture has its advantages. Okay, you're setting up a model of culture here that relies on culture being collected and being collectively subjective and iterative and marked by one's tendency not to reinvent the wheel in all cases. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's the beauty of culture that we don't have to reinvent the wheel in all cases. I mean, it's the way that history gets collected and remembered and it's the way in which we could learn from the past. This is one that has always been a point of confusion for me personally. On one hand, you can learn things from books. On the other hand, books sometimes lie. Moreover, those who accumulate books from my perusal sometimes do so with less than pristine motives. Yes. And that's hard to reconcile. Only if you are a vacuous receptor that is stuck with whatever goes in. Well, I must be quite vacuous then because I see no way of reconciling the conflict. No easy way anyway. I disagree with you. I see you reconcile the conflict all the time. You have a great critically thinking mind which assesses the truth value, the legitimacy, the believability, the usefulness. The implications. As long as we're saying good things about me, let's throw in the implication. Yes, of what you read. I'm very good at deciding what is feasible. I think that analytical ability is possible, at least to the extent that one assesses what one is told and notes the contradictions that ensue and does something about it. I think that that kind of development is possible and I think to assume that everyone does develop is misleading.  Yes. There are also people who believe the first thing they're told and simply reject everything they hear after that that contradicts it because they quote, just to know better, close quote. Right, they grab hold on to the first idea and that's the standard by which they judge everything else. And the latter type do understand what contradictions are. They're just not very picky about where they get their axioms. And that's the danger of culture. So I'm telling you that, yes, I think culture is a wonderful invention, but if culture becomes too rigid, if people take the ideas, the first ideas that they hear and judge everything else in the world based upon those first ideas, those first exposures, then culture's not doing what it was intended to do. Intended? That sounds teleological. Don't worry about being too picky about the jargon. Well, at some point or another, some human being started all of this. Maybe not in a direct sense, but certainly in a, hey, you know what, I think if we write this down, we're going to remember it since. Or if we tell this to each other or to our children who remember it, written language has only been around for about a 20th, I think, as the figure as long as spoken language. So that leads us all to where parenting fits in and all of this. Westerners, especially in North America, regard parenting as the place where culture is passed on from one generation to the next. And I would guess that in order for organic parenting to work, you have to start with that assumption. And I think that's an assumption that we're wondering about right now.  And that sort of suggests that kids get a lot of ideas from other places and not just from their parents. It establishes that what we're really dealing with and the assumption that parents and culture at their children is a presumed right or privilege by parents in Western culture. Yeah, in fact, the language their kids is a really important part of that. Parents own children in Western society. Yes, it's probably an exaggeration to say that children are slaves. But if it is an exaggeration, it isn't much of one. Not on a de facto practical level. And people talk a lot about raising their children properly and making sure that they get the best chances in life. But then they would say that, wouldn't they? There are very few people who are willing to come out and say, my children are my property. I hit them because they can get away with it and they'll do whatever I tell them because when you get right down to it, it's convenient having slaves.  And because I know I can get away with it, surprisingly, yet quite a few parents act as if that were the case. When push comes to shove, they regard not just the children, not just the physical person that is the child, but the right to inculturate that child, to program that child any damn way they wish as immutable. Yeah. Which is one of the things that encouraged me about the women that Chris interviewed because a lot of them didn't say, I want to inculturate my child. I want to teach my child a certain type of thinking, but rather they were interested in teaching them a certain style of thinking. And that is critical thinking, getting them to question things. You don't spend a lot of time telling your kid what he ought to know. You spend a lot of time telling your kid how to find out what he wants to know. I think it would start even further back than that. I think it must start with the realization that the parent is not the only one who inculturates the child. Certainly parents have a tremendous influence on them, but they're not the only ones and they are going to be. And I think that that has to be the basis of all intelligent parenting and indeed all intelligent public policymaking about parenting. And not just about parenting, but also about education. We keep talking about this as if parenting is the only influence and I know we're recognizing that there are other influences, but there are other influences that are directly aimed at children. Like we can talk about advertising and we can talk about the children's programming on television. We can talk about their peers, who they meet and who they talk to. But you have this whole other institution besides parenting that is directed towards kids that has a philosophy and definitely has a public policy to it. And that's the education system and it interests me that one of the things that this natural parenting does is it looks at the educational system and it says I don't want my child to go there. And so in a way it's suggesting that the educational system needs some serious reform. You know, Chris mentioned no schooling and I remember reading about some of this last year when we were talking about some education stuff. The no schooling concept is in part a parenting concept and it's also in part an education concept because it's arguing that schools are too directive, that they are regimented and that this regimentation and routine is aimed at creating good little workers who don't think very well rather than good citizens who understand how to think critically for themselves. Okay, if I could be hypersensitive about the terminology here, you're using the word intent or the word intention and I don't think intention is pertinent. It may be, well, noteworthy for other reasons but what's pertinent here is the effect. Sure, now we're doing role reversal, aren't we? I'm the one who's always saying it doesn't matter what they thought they were doing. What matters is what they are doing. I suppose so. But yeah, you're right. I know a lot of teachers who intend well but when push comes to shove, they have limited resources or they believe they have limited resources and they get into routines that are much easier for them than they are for the kids and even though they intend to do well by the kids, it ends up that the kids are still being rootinized, being regimented, being controlled. We could blame a number of people for why Johnny's teacher can't read and resent Johnny trying to learn to do so. We could blame teachers, parents, the children themselves, school administrators, governments. We could blame them all. And you know how I am. I'm a sociologist. It's some combination of all of that. First person plural, your source, pursuing sounds of sociological sagaciousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ, the corporate media, to control ordinary people like you and me. I want to pick on one of the things you said. You're talking about people pulling their kids out of schools as evidence that the school system needs to be reformed? No, I meant evidence that they believe that the school system has to be reformed. Okay, I still don't agree. I think it's the opposite of that. I think it's evidence that they believe that the school system is not worth the time in trouble to reform and they rather just start their own system. Oh, well, I'm not sure that that's antithetical to what I was saying. Mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am old enough to remember how the middle class whites in the southeastern United States screened a bloody murder when integration came into being. And we're talking about, I don't need school integration. I'll learn my kids at home, that sort of thing. And that still gives me chills. On the other hand, I feel that other school systems have to be developed.  And that's not because your terminology is imprecise. On the contrary, it's quite precise. The is the keyword here. Yeah, and it's not any singular thing. And it's why I read a report by a group out of Harvard last week that says that public schools are more segregated than they were in 1954.  Many white families can afford to do this and they're pulling their kids out of public schools and putting them either in private schools or homeschooling them in order to avoid contact with people of different classes and people of different races. And what is being left over is an impoverished public school system with impoverished people. Brown versus Board of Education changed the separate but equal law not on the basis of legal precedent because there was plenty of precedent for separate but equal in the United States at that point. By the 1950s, there had been something like 80 years of precedent in the law. But because a sociologist did a study that demonstrated that segregation was in fact leading to an unequal opportunity for the students who were in the poor schools. And it still holds true today. And as the public schools in the United States are becoming more segregated again and especially as they are becoming more economically segregated, what you have is the same system being perpetuated over and over again. That kind of brings us back to one of the problems with the organic mothering that Chris was talking about towards the end of the interview and that is that there is a definite socioeconomic dynamic to this. And these are privileged people who are pulling their kids out of public school and even though their intent may be very good, one wonders if just the act of pulling them out of public school and away from certain parts of the population will not teach the kids a lesson that wasn't intended. Well they're pulling them away from certain parts of the population but they're also pulling them away from the influence of certain other parts of the population not to put too fine a point on it. Yeah but one, I mean you could work for education reform rather than pull your kids out of school is what I'm saying. I mean the choices, they've made a choice. The choice is I'm going to take my kids away. That presumes that they haven't already tried to work for education reform and found it to be a thankless task. I'm sure it is a thankless task. I'm not arguing intent. Okay. Remember, you brought this up, not me but I love the topic. That's fine, I don't resent your saying so. There is a good intent on the part of the parent.  I want my kid to have this more organic life instead of this regimented life and I want them to have a chance to think critically instead of being turned into an automaton but they're also withdrawing their kid from certain parts of the world. They talk about how they give him a social world but do they give him a social world with multiple colored people who come from multiple socioeconomic levels? And can they give them a freestanding social world, one that can in fact be put together in a de facto contextual vacuum or are they conversely stuck with the influences of the monoculture that they are trying to flee? Well, I can't answer that obviously, but that's the question. That's the problem at hand and because it is a phenomenon that only a certain kind of family can afford it brings with it all that baggage. So it's definitely contextualized by class in ways that I think that the homeschooling in this organic mothering have no basis to address with their kids. That's the beauty of the reason that public school, I mean I'm old enough to remember rhetoric about public school that talked about how this was where citizens were made not workers but citizens and that whole idea just seems to have died and I don't see how homeschooling can save it. Well, the whole idea of citizenship has died in the United States they simply don't use the word anymore. Yeah, it's the public good, the public mind civic mindedness. Civic mindedness has come to be synonymous with being a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Yeah, they use the word taxpayer something like the same context that they used to use the word citizen yet in an entirely different context inescapably paradoxically. Never mind that there's a lot of unmarked taxpaying what they mean when they say taxpayer is somebody who pays money in income tax or property taxes. The truth of the matter is quite a few people are not marked as a taxpayer who pay taxes and the second truth is it's not a basis of simply paying your taxes. There's a lot more in a citizenship than paying taxes and to reduce it down to taxpaying is to lose quite a bit of an understanding of what's good for the group may be good for me and it might be a good idea to keep the group, the community, the school, whatever the group may be going in order to take care of my future and the future of my community and so it gets right back to that loss of culture in a way. Do you think that it's a recoverable loss? I hope so. I'm just wondering if homeschooling is going to be the way that will recover it. I think alternative schooling would be. I think it would be really nice. One of the things that Black Panthers did in Chicago in the 1960s and that SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did in the late 50s and early 60s was create citizenship schools schools in which people could learn more about their community could learn how to read and write could learn how to think critically about the world around them. I mean there was a real recognition in those efforts that educated people were needed in order to make a better world and that that education needed to be broad based and it needed to encourage critical thinking and that was an alternative to the public schools which were segregated and which were regimented. I guess what I'm saying is that I have my doubts that homeschooling alone would do it. I think that if homeschooled children would come together from different racial ethnic socio-economic levels and create some alternative schools to the public school system that they might have a chance that they could become the new public schools and in that sense they could support parents who are raising up citizens instead of indoctrinating their slave class. You have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters. First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural is performed composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson. Except where noted. For more information about First Person Plural Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com


So, new NBA All-Star game format. You ready? Yep. Both NBA All-Star teams will play for Chicago-based community organizations as selected by team captains, Giannis and LeBron. The teams will compete to win each of the first three quarters, all of which will start with the score of 0-0 and will be 12 minutes long. Everyone following? Yep. Restarting the score in each of the first three quarters. At the start of the fourth quarter, the game clock will be turned off and a final target score will be set. The final target score will be determined by taking the leading team's total cumulative score through three quarters and adding 24 points, the 24 representing Kobe Bryant's uniform number. Once the final target score is set, the teams will play an untimed fourth quarter and the first team to reach the final target score will win the NBA All-Star game. For example, if the cumulative score of the first three quarters is 100 to 95, the final target score would be set at 124. To win the NBA All-Star game, the team with 100 points would need to score 24 points in the fourth versus the team with 95 points needing to score 29 points. I like it. It makes the first three quarters important. I'm not sure what that's going on. But the thing is, if you're already up 22 points, let's say, you're up by, it's a blowout, which happens in All-Star games. A lot of times it tightens up late. You're up 22, they're adding 24 to that. And then it would take 46 points. So the team losing has to decide how hard they want to go in defense.  And you're not phoning in any quarter. You've got to put it all up because you don't want to be back by 20 points heading into the fourth quarter because you've got to make up 44 points. And then how embarrassing would it be if you're not even playing close in the fourth quarter? And I mean, 24 points in an All-Star game could take two and a half minutes. I just had numbers a bit low. I know it's nice for Kobe. Maybe they should have done 24 plus eight, 32. 24 is low in an All-Star game. I like the aspect of honoring Kobe, but it just seems like a lot. Like, if you turn that game on, like a lot of people will, not really knowing about the format changes, think they're going to see a game, I don't know what's going on. You're going to have to repeat that quite a bit. That would be confusing for sure.


Many people across the state experience barriers to meeting basic needs. Due to a history of marginalization, some populations have less access to resources necessary for meeting such needs. As a result, access to food, housing, transportation, health care, and dependent care are barriers that many WTCS students face. Students who experience barriers to meeting their basic needs often report lower energy levels. Depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. Such barriers also affect the students' ability to achieve academically and reach their career goals. Many colleges have resources to address these needs. For example, colleges may provide bus passes or shuttles, campus food pantries, and health care clinics, and support for students applying for public benefits or emergency assistance. As the people who interact with students most regularly, faculty play an important role in helping students access these important resources when needed. Use the following strategies to make a difference for your students. Educate yourself about barriers students face in your community. Know the campus and community resources available to your students. Integrate resources into your class. For example, some WTCS faculty include information in their syllabi. Share flyers, make announcements, and invite student services or community resource providers to talk to their class. Build flexibility into your course policies to support a variety of student needs. Check in with students individually when you have concerns and connect them to relevant resources. By addressing these barriers, faculty can help students stay healthy and achieve their academic goals and objectives. Now more than ever, it is crucial for each WTCS employee to understand resources and be able to share them with students when they need them. Are you aware of all the resources available in your community and on your campus?


Welcome to One Shot Wednesday. Today we're taking a look at the brain hemorrhage and you might be wondering why we're releasing on a Friday. Well, that's because I think a certain someone might have had a brain hemorrhage. Or three or four. Huh?  Some people prefer this chilled. Either way we'll do. Next we're gonna layer in a little bit of Irish cream. And by a little I mean a decent bit. Probably about a good quarter to a third of the glass. You're gonna want to leave a little bit of extra room at the top.  And hence the name of brain hemorrhage. And last but not least we're gonna be adding grenadine. Now I pulled out a dropper because if you use a full-on grenadine bottle you're gonna put way too much grenadine in here. You can also use a trick of using the cap to add just a little bit at a time but if you've got a dropper handy it tends to work really well. And there you've got the drops for the brainstem of the brain hemorrhage. Feel free to add more grenadine if you want it a bit sweeter but it is peach schnapps so the whole thing is pretty sweet. And a shot video wouldn't be complete without our joke. Hey Mike what does a clock do when it's hungry? No idea. It goes back four seconds. Yeah I agree with the crowd right now. No? Okay. Hey. If you like this show please remember to subscribe and tell your friends and if you have a shot that you'd like for us to check out please leave the suggestion in the comments below. Cheers for Drinks Made Easy.


Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live at theCUBE at Moscone North in San Francisco for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, talking to all the top executives, top people here at IBM. Getting the scoop on cloud at AI. Our next guest is Jason Gardner, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Hybrid Cloud at IBM. Managing this key product, which is the part of the IBM Cloud Private. Big part of the announcements. Big cloud story here, it's multi-cloud. It's hybrid, welcome back. It's hybrid, multi-cloud. Thank you for having me back. CUBE alumni been on, is really going back as 2012. Now one big event. I can't believe it's been that long, but yeah, I know I'm happy to be back and I can't believe it's been that, I've been on CUBE for that long. So talk about your new role and you had previous roles within IBM, dealing with the kind of clients and the integration. Your role now as Worldwide Sales, you're taking this cloud private offering, bringing the customers, being as the linchpin for integration. Talk about what you do and some of the engagements you have. Yeah, previously I was really focused in on development and offering management on I'll say point products and how they help clients move to the cloud. Things such as our pure business, our spare business. And now I've actually been able to move into a much more horizontal role. Where I have the portfolio across the cyber cloud integration side. So everything from our web sphere family, which includes IBM cloud private, through to the integration challenges that that brings as well as our digital business automation portfolio. You know, I have a personal joy. Stu knows I'm fanatic about Kubernetes. And when I heard Jenny Rametti say Kubernetes twice in a CNBC interview, you know it's made it. Kubernetes is a big part of the cloud native containers really now has created the connective tissue to make cloud and multi-cloud viable. This is a key part of it. I want you to talk about the context of these trends and unpack this cloud private offering because it's instrumental. It seems in the news. What is this about? It is, it really creates that ubiquitous layer. I think that we've all been searching for that next generation of virtualization and connected tissue as you call it. And as you begin to unpack that it really kind of starts with the rise of microservices and the need to be able to pack them very tightly into containers. And that's really the burst of Kubernetes, right? Was the ability to orchestrate those containers. And so Kubernetes becomes that ubiquitous layer in there. But IBM cloud private takes that and takes it to the next level, right? And really what it is, it's the services on top of that, the cloud services, which enable those containers to work together. And it is a lot of open source capabilities such as Helm, Prometheus, Kibana, as some of those core services that those microservices require in order to be able to run efficiently. So Jason, we know it's a multi-cloud world. Everybody out there would love to say, oh yes, there's one cloud, I can simplify it. I'd like to get to a nice scalable model that's simple. But the reality is customers choose lots of different solutions because they have different needs. The private cloud piece is not really well understood. I'd love you to take us inside your users because they say, okay, I'm using Amazon. I'm using Microsoft business services. There's certain data things that Google has. IBM has AI and business productivity and database offering. That cloud private, what are the services, what are the use cases, what are the reasons where they say why I'm buying this and being part of my overall portfolio? Yeah, you know, Jenny called it cloud 2.0, right? 1.0 was about lift and shift. It was about cloud native. And that really got us about 20% of the way there. And it's at 80%, that's the real challenge. That's really where the complication comes into play. And that's really what private cloud is about. And because not everybody can be able to take their applications, throw them away, build cloud native, or lift and shift them. If you think of the big regulated industries like banking, insurance, healthcare, government, they really need to be able to have that level of security and assurances that they need within there. And that's really where private cloud comes into play, is those really tough, challenging problems in the industry. Yeah, I love that. A trend I've heard from a number of customers, you talk about them getting to containerization and this multi-factor services is, step one is I've got to modernize the platform that's going to enable it. And then I can modernize the applications on top of it. Is that the trend you're seeing? Yeah, definitely, we've been building on microservices and modernization, it's a journey, right? And it's a journey of discovery, I think for a lot of clients out there and we'd all love to be able to say, okay, this is my platform and now I'm going to work on the applications. But really, sometimes the starting point may be one or another. And it usually comes in a space of a digital requirement. And so they begin to modernize the application and then realize, geez, I need to be able to manage all of this. I need to be able to deploy it all. And then that's when the platform comes into play and all the other services I should say that come along with it. I think Stu, you coined the term private cloud, I think. True private cloud. True private cloud. True private cloud. So the private cloud, again, it's all cloud operations. So I kind of disagree in this whole point about one cloud or multi-cloud, because I think, yes, multi-cloud, but you're seeing people use cloud for workloads, right? So pick the right cloud for the right application. So this basically says, okay, if you want to use Amazon, use Amazon, that's what you want, but if you're going to use 365, maybe use Azure, if you're going to use G Suite, use Google, you guys kind of have the business apps nailed down, right? If you're going to use your business apps, maybe IBM. This is your opportunity. This is our opportunity. Talk about specifically the kinds of apps that you guys will power with your cloud, because multi-cloud certainly makes sense for you guys, it's multi-cloud, you want to have that portability and interoperability, but the apps that you're going to power with IBM cloud, talk about what they are, how's it, how's it? If you look at, from a language perspective, over the last, jeez, it's been 23 years, I think, since the rise of Java, right? And, you know, 1995, when the first app servers came out, that, those app servers, that is really where the core applications really run on top of, right? And it's those core Java applications that are now needing that facelift, right? They need to be able to be injected with new forms of AI, new types of integrations, new types of, of really personalization of that digital transformation that's driving it, and that's really the core suite, right? And if I look at that core suite in there, and then, you know, what do you do to modernize a Java application? What kind of tools are available to you? How do you then manage, how do you distribute, and how do you scale those applications? It's very important. What is the adoption of the private cloud, or the cloud private product? Talk about some of the trends. How is it being used, specific on how customers are using it, what are the use cases? Yeah, so, so, so the primary use case is to increase the agility, lower cost, on, you know, the overall managing of them. And, but it's the increase in the agility, which is kind of really hard to measure, because clients want to be able to react very fast to it, and so, as they build up microservices, microservices then become independent with one another, you can then update ones very quickly and easily, they manage, and they run independently, they scale independently, and so, cloud private provides you with all those services to be able to run those microservices as containers, but then be able to tie them together in a much more comprehensive, you know, enterprise, you know, suite. You know, a core technology like Helm, I'm waiting for Ginny to say that one on stage, but a core technology like Helm really provides that, you know, robust enterprise class distribution for scalability and high availability of a microservice-based application. Yeah, Jason, can you bring us inside the organization that the customers you're selling to, you know, used to be, it was the refresh cycle, it's like, okay, my X86 refresh, or, you know, the budget cycles that I had, cloud's quite a bit different. Private cloud is kind of straddling between the old world and the new world. What are the dynamics you're seeing as to who controls the purse strings? Are they moving faster to that OPEX model? You know, there's no one person who owns the purse strings on it, but it does float between the infrastructure team, knows that they need to do something different, the developers or the application development team, and then really the strategy, you know, Chief Strategy Officer, you know, in that IT organization, is really where it's coming together, because one thing I think that we've all learned is that developers will find the easiest, fastest way to do something no matter what rules or policies we put down. And this is about providing them with an environment that has guardrails, you know, for them to be able to innovate as fast as they want, use the tools that they want that they're most comfortable with, and so really it's a grassroots kind of movement into these microservices led by the developers, but the purse strings are still held at the CTO side. That's always a fascinating interest because the developers, they're going to go do it, but they're not usually the ones with the budget, but when do the ops people get involved, the business people to make sure that IT manages it, gets rid of like stealth IT. And a lot of our clients have learned to listen to the developers because the early days of cloud, they didn't, and developers found ways through it no matter what, and so that's really what it's about, it's like a game of bumper cars, right? You got to make sure that they stay within the ring of what's safe, and especially in this day and age of the security requirements that are out there, it's more important today than ever before. Jason, can you share some data around just observations that you've noticed on trends around industry uptake, or is there any patterns in terms of the customer base? Affinity, obviously people aren't going to cloud operations. Just Jenny mentioned 60, 40, 80, 20, these ratios, what does that all mean? Can you just share kind of the trend data around adoption and patterns? Probably the biggest one in there is the 80, 20, right? That there's still 80% of the applications left in the world are still locked behind the brick and mortar, and that's probably the biggest piece of that opportunity and providing clients with a way to be able to lift them up and be able to modernize them. I think it's where the huge opportunity is, but then looking at where do they land, it's not all going to public cloud, right? And so private cloud is a huge business. I think underestimated, I think a lot of us underestimate how large that business really is. And depending on the industry, you'll see 50, 50, 60, 40, 40, 60 split, depending on the regulations within that industry, the country, the geography of where they really want to go to. And a lot of our clients are asking us for solutions around that private side, but yet be able to have the flexibility to be able to go over there. So you're seeing friction on the public cloud, mainly it's inherent from either regulatory compliance or just technical challenges. Is that kind of the fiber? That's probably the first one. I think is there's still that inherent regulatory requirements of data residency and how do I get my data to my application? I can build all the applications I want in the cloud, but how do I get my data there? How do I synchronize it? My lineage of my data? And so they really challenged around that. But then on the other side of it is around the cost, right? And if you wanted to rebuild all your applications as true cloud native from scratch, it will take you a very long time and be very, very expensive. And so there's also a cost element and speed. You can modernize something much more quickly and be able to get it to that same level of service without having to spend all the time. We had Irvin on earlier yesterday and I want to get your thoughts on the impact of the Red Hat Acquisition News, because if you look at what OpenShift is doing with cloud private, Irvin was saying yesterday that, Irvin Krishna, he's like, this is really enabling a lot of the acceleration for the modernization of the new cloud stuff and keeping the legacy stuff and or transitioning that on different timetables. Your thoughts on that? Absolutely, right? OpenShift is going to be a critical component for our overall hybrid strategy. I'm very excited about it and really looking forward to it and cloud private and the services that I talked about, run an OpenShift today. And that was part of our partnership agreement. I think that you guys were at that Irvin talked about at that time, but it provides the platform for all of those traditional applications which we've modernized. And the interesting thing is that we've actually modernized ourselves. We've modernized our middleware. We've modernized some of those products that are 10, 20 years old. Everything from WebSphere to MQ to BPM, they've all been modernized in that same fashion. Yeah, Jason, speaking of modernization, bring us inside your Salesforce a little bit. How do they keep up? What's the skill set that you're looking for on your team to sell in this? They need to understand Helm and Kubernetes and all these microservice architecture where five years ago it was a totally different world. Absolutely. I think if I look at, it's not a skill, but it's passion, right? And it's that never give up kind of mentality I think that we look for in a Salesforce and that never give up attitude really provides you with that foundation for never stop learning, right? If anything that you guys have noticed here over the last 10 years and your guys' journey is that this industry just changes so rapidly all the time. And so as a Salesforce, you can't just acquire skills. You don't go out and hire skills.  I've been going around. We've been doing our sales kickoffs. I've done two out of the three now so far.  They love it. They're energized about the Red Hat acquisition. It shows that IBM really gets it. They've been telling me, does IBM really get it? Now they're like, wow, we really do get it. And they're really energized because all the pieces are falling into place around this modernization and clients and we're hitting the timing. It's time to hit the pedals with the metal, put the gas on that. They always say there's no speed limit on sales. Exactly, okay, first of all, great, great conversation and thanks for pointing out our journey, Stu. I would say that the sales people are going to watch all the CUBE videos because all the best contents coming out of the CUBE here and great to have you on. But quick plug, I'll give you the last word. What's the pitch? Share the pitch for the hybrid cloud what your team's offering. What's the core pitch for your customers when you go to them? The core pitch is around modernization. It's the journey that clients are on from application development and how you build your apps and how you build the microservices, how you integrate those applications, what's your API strategy, how do you move that data around securely and then how you manage all of those pieces together in that new modern world. And then really looking at your overall processes and can you modernize your overall processes, add AI capabilities into that. And so it's that modernization journey. That's really what I talked to them about and you don't have to do everything, right? Start small, start as a pinpointed piece and we'll help you along that journey and it becomes a journey of self discovery and but we're there the whole way. We're a partner. That's really what it's about. Jason Gardner, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Hybrid Cloud at IBM. It's theCUBE bringing all the data here from IBM Think 2019. This is day three of four days of coverage here in Moscone live in San Francisco. We'll be right back with more after this short break.