Micro-level conflict studies Sunday, Dec 2 2007

My day at the UN is over, and it was incredible. There were so many great ideas being shared, in a relaxed and collaborative environment, among people who clearly care deeply about peace. I felt very privileged to be able to participate, and I think my input was well received. It was an amazing day.

I also am really happy with the new friends I’ve made through my graduate school and the New School…I was able to spend some time with Amr this weekend, and had so much fun talking with him – and bouncing ideas off of him while I prepared for my discussant remarks on Friday was really of great help to me. I look forward to many more long talks with him.

The papers I was discussing on Friday all relate to microeconomic causes and effects of conflict – why do conflicts start, and what are their effects on households. All of the papers say “first draft: do not cite” so I won’t, but the authors really did some great work, and have some very insightful things to say about conflict – for example, the rather obvious-but-oft-neglected fact that the causes of conflict are complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause for all conflicts, that greed and greivance are not completely distinct.

Many of these issues relate to choices – my intellectual obsession. People are making choices continuously, trying to survive and trying to do the best they can. In conflict countries, this is happening in an environment of restricted opportunities and high risk, and not everyone is facing the same incentives – some people stand to get rich, some are barely able to survive. Many people have tried to model conflict countries, typically in game theoretic models, either with homogenous agents or with two (a principal and an agent), and they fail to do so adequately. This summer, assuming I am able to go to Austria, I hope to explore these modeling issues in greater detail.

Unfortunately, this trip to the UN was not without cost. My car got towed by the City of New York and the price of ransom was high…I suppose this is the blood price for my formal introduction into the UN system.

And now, this week, is going to have to be mostly devoted to teaching….I have lectures to prepare and papers to grade, and furthermore I haven’t had class in almost two weeks and the semester is almost over. I also have exams to write. At least the semester is almost over…a race to the finish…perhaps a marathon…

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180 Degrees Tuesday, Nov 27 2007

Last week was all about family…cooking and cleaning and having guests in my home, connecting with people I care about and celebrating the winter holidays.

This week, it seems, is all about work.

Today, I am giving a lecture at UMass about my dissertation work on after school programs, and then on Friday, I’m going to a UN meeting about conflict to act as a discussant. I finished my paper on Sunday, and my presentation about a minute ago, and I also need to read more than 150 pages of articles for Friday as well as a book I’m teaching in Gender in the Economy (The Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America, by Alice Kessler-Harris). Of course, as a radical graduate student, this work-focused week also includes hanging out with other radical graduate students, but even that to me feels more like “work” than “home.”

I realize that this is how my balance works…I need some time to focus on home and then I can focus on work because I feel grounded. I need some time to focus on my career, and then I can enjoy focusing on home because I feel like I’m accomplishing my goals. I sometimes need to work for seven days straight without much of a break, and then I can let myself take three or four days off – just off, relaxing and not worrying about obligations I haven’t met.

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Thanksgiving Saturday, Nov 24 2007

I hung out with my friend Lettie the other night, who is a third year law student…we hadn’t seen each other in a while, and met at the coffee shop where we proceeded to talk and be silly rather than read, which is what we were ostensibly there to do. He then offered to drive me to Albany to pick up Fabian, a friend from graduate school coming for Thanksgiving. This was especially nice because the bus was more than half an hour late, so Lettie and I hung out in the car singing along to his CDs and whining about the bus being late. Then Fabian got there, and we drove up to Saratoga. He says to me, “I wasn’t worried about coming up here on the holiday, because I thought to myself, Maeve will have a plan, and I will just go with it.” I love Fabian!

After Lettie dropped us off, we got him some food at the local Irish pub where I was pleased to know the bar tender who happened to be working (made me feel like a local in front of my out of town guest ), and then did some last minute grocery shopping which basically involved wandering around the grocery store checking off whatever was left on my list. We stayed up until 3am talking, comfortably getting into discussions (some might call arguments) without ever getting angry at each other about everything from the relative values of quantitative and qualitative research to what the word “flirting” means and how you can tell if someone is doing it. Hanging out with him reminds me so much of my first year of graduate school, when he and I were very close and decided we would be each other’s brother and sister. I learned this weekend that he had taken that pronouncement as seriously as I did – it feels very nice to have such a brother. He spoke to me in Spanish (at least when I begged him to ), and I am gradually learning to understand his Argintinian accent, and read me Spanish poetry that I don’t think I would have understood in English. He asked me to play music for him, and let me discover that he is an excellent cook – in the end, he was really the chef for Thanksgiving dinner and it felt nice to give control of that over to him.

Andre came and helped, calmly accepting jobs both Fabian and I gave him – he being the one among us less comfortable with cooking – and doing many of the tasks that made the meal actually happen. Washing potatoes, taking out the trash, cutting vegetables, moving furniture, sweeping the floor. My mother was banished from the kitchen once the god-forsaken turket was in the oven, but then went behind my back and cleaned my bathroom (for which I am eternally grateful).

The dinner itself was amazing…so much delicious food made with excellent fresh ingredients, good friends, family. The women quickly picked up tasks and helped, without needing much instruction, and Fabian entertained the men for a while (no TV) until I invited him to let them entertain themselves and come cook with us. The children spend the evening in the music room making what could be called alternatively “noise” or “atonal music” – it certainly sounded like music to me…well, until they found the practice chanter for learning to play the bagpipes. That sounded like a dying duck.

After dinner, Fabian and my mother and I, with the addition of Andre who came back for dessert, hung around and basked in the warmth of the evening. It felt very good to be reminded that I have a family, and to be reminded how special family can be.

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Irish Music again Tuesday, Nov 20 2007

I went to a session last night that was absolutely fabulous – really excellent musicians, and I got to play with them!  It was on campus, withs everal guests, a few students, me and one other non-music faculty member, and some of the local folk music people.  I brought my drum, and for a while I was the only person playing a drum which was terrifying – and they played the tunes FAST (the way I like them, but hard on the drum!).  Then, the guy who really got me started on the Bodhran showed up and that made me feel better.  At the end, I took out my penny whistle and they picked a tune from a book of tunes someone had brought, so I played along on that one too – the penny whistle sounded so pretty above the violins and guitars, and then the other musicians started playing harmony, leaving me to carry the melody.  It was so pretty!  I talked with the other faculty member, a biologist, and found out that she plays classical guitar, so she and I are going to get together and play some guitar and flute pieces.

 I love folk music and the energy that comes with it.  People are encouraged, everyone is welcomed into the circle, and we raise our voices together.

I’ve been playing music so much lately, every day, especially since my piano got tuned…I am being reminded of how much I love playing music, the challenge of figuring out the patterns, hearing something someone wrote so many years ago come out through your instrument, the joy of tapping into that celestial music of the spheres and feeling it flow…

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Defining Women’s Work – according to my students Tuesday, Nov 20 2007

Not all women do “women’s work,” but the work that can be considered women’s work is done primarily by women - this is what makes it women’s work, not that all women do it  

“women’s work” is support work – creating and maintaining the support structures that allow other people to do their work

Women’s work is the work that maintains a balance between traditional values of family and community and modern values of wealth and power

women’s work is work that requires empathy, caring for other people, and that creates a home or other safe environment for the person being cared for

 This is all my students – what they say about women’s work, in their essays.  I am so proud of them.

If anyone is reading – please comment, especially on posts like this one!  What do *you* think of “women’s work”?

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Hair Tuesday, Nov 20 2007

I cut my hair yesterday….took a pair of scissors, and chopped it all off, all the hair I had been growing for more than a year.

 This isn’t the first time I’ve cut my own hair, but the first time I’ve given myself a full haircut (not just a trim).  I have to say, I’m rather proud of it.  I looked in the mirror, and thought, “I want it to look like this” and I cut it.

 I started growing my hair after my hairdresser made some homophobic remarks when I insisted on the way I wanted the back of my hair cut (short and tapered like a man’s short hair cut, not blunted like most women’s short hair cuts).  It can be very hard to get a good, queer haircut – and very empowering to give it to yourself!

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Dissertation: poverty, violence, and kids Saturday, Nov 17 2007

I’m working on a paper that is the latest incarnation of the current work I’m doing on my dissertation…I will be presenting this paper the week after Thanksgiving.

Poverty often persists in a community over a long period of time, across generations. Poor communities are home to both adults and children, who are cared for by their parents and other adults, engage in independent activities and activities with peers, and participate in the life of the community in both constructive and destructive ways—engaging in volunteerism and starting community-oriented projects of their own on one hand, and participating in youth gangs and rebelling against adult culture on the other. Young people are not passive consumers of care and education, but rather are actors, continuously creating change in their lives and the lives of those around them for better or worse, and this capacity to act can be encouraged by adults, empowering young people to participate in the development process in the community.

(says I)

These are the big questions:

Why does poverty persist over time within families and communities?
In what ways can young people be assets in the development process?
What is the role of youth programs in this process?

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Farmer’s Market and Small Farms Saturday, Nov 17 2007

Carrots in three colors, potatoes in four, onions in two, kale in three or more…brussel sprouts, three types of squash, homemade cheese, yogurt, apple cider…

I don’t want to add up how much I spent (the potatoes were an especially big purchase), but I just did all my Thanksgiving vegetable shopping at the Farmer’s Market. The vegetables are all fresh, organic, and grown by people who love what they are doing with their lives – or at least they seem to.

A young man named Ben (maybe 17?) helped me at the one stand where I bought most of my stuff, growing increasingly incredulous as I added to my order. When I asked him if he lived on the farm where all this food was grown, he told me his life story in a charmingly un-self-conscious, juvenile way…he lived on another farm, but they weren’t running it as a farm any more “because it didn’t work very well,” and so his dad went back to what he was working at before living on a farm, but he, Ben, worked for the people who owned the farm selling the produce, which was near where he lived in Vermont. A sweet country boy who liked being outdoors and getting his hands dirty – and, unfortunately, like for so many small-scale farmers, his farm ‘didn’t work very well,’ which probably means they weren’t able to earn a living wage by growing food that is actually enjoyable to eat.

Small farms produce many benefits large farms can’t produce. The food can be grown without chemicals, and the land tends to be more productive. The small farms can experiment with exotic strains, like the purple carrots I bought to add color to my root veggie dish or the heirloom rice varieties grown in Bangladesh, and therefore help to preserve genetic diversity. The closer the food source to your table, the more nutritious and tasty the vegetables, and it also saves on the fossil fuels necessary to preserve and ship the food.

But, the deck is stacked against them. Machinery and mortgages are expensive, and family farms are often not eligible for the subsidies given to large, corporate farms. It’s not easy to distribute your produce to stores when corporations have deep pockets to pay for marketing budgets, and it can be difficult to find people who are willing to work on a family farm, or to find the money to pay them. Because you can grow all your own food, it can be cheap to live, and family members are the most viable workforce – as it has been for as long as humans have been engaging in agriculture. I’ve learned that there are still farm boys (and, presumably girls), who are kept out of school for long periods of time, engaging in varying balances of ‘homeschooling’ and working on the farm, growing into adults with varying degrees of marketable skills that will allow them to choose their own life, rather than following in their parent’s footsteps because they have no other options.

Farming is like some other occupations that can be enjoyable, but aren’t when the compensation for them are so low compared to the demads, and there is neither enough money nor enough people who have enough help doing the job – nursing, teaching children, caring for small children, and I would say also many trade like being an auto mechanic (of course, some of these are more highly compensated than others). This translates into an important question that needs to be answered in every economic system – how do we get people to do work they don’t want to do, how do we solve the ‘labor discipline’ problem? Since the people with the money aren’t willing to use high wages as incentives for most of these positions, they resort to other means. Slavery and racism, and restrictions on women’s access education and the professions are two of the most unjust ways of solving this – by setting aside categories of people who have no opportunities but to do the type of work set aside for them. Structuring the institutions such that farmers and other working poor are on the edge of survival, and do not have the resources to invest highly in their children’s education – but instead need to rely on their children to contribute economically to the family as well – is another way, because it perpetuates the economic roles of the parents through generations, onto their children.

Everyone invovled, parent and child, could be making rational decisions, doing the best they can, and yet the children of the poor tend to be poor and the children of the rich tend to be rich…there is a threshold, when parents enter the lower-middle-class income range, where their children become more likely to have more education than they did, and will therefore experience upward economic mobility. The problem is that we need farmers, auto mechanics, and other skilled and unskilled laborers – if the current group of poor experience mobility out of certain categories of labor, other people will be found to fill it – for example, as black women in this country stopped working as domestic servants, they started to be replaced by women who were illegal Latina immigrants.

Multigenerational poverty is not due to a culture of poverty where the poor engage in behaviors that get them caught in a trap across generations – it is due to a global culture of inequality where the labor discipline problem is solved by restricting the ability of certain groups of people to access the resources that will open up new economic opportunities to them. The choices individual poor people make, and the choices their parents made for them, have a role to play, and people should be held responsible for their choices – but, not for the context within which those choices are made.

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Cleaning Friday, Nov 16 2007

When I get busy, my apartment gets messy and my fridge becomes an ecosystem. This semester, I haven’t done much cleaning or cooking, and never really finished unpacking from when I moved in (I came close…). I had to move into the apartment the day before the first day of school, and it was just too litte time to actually get things ready and set so I felt at home.

But, today, that is going to change. I have a cleaning day planned (with help, thankfully). Every once in while, this is just something I need to do. An entire day devoted to cleaning, purifying, refreshing the energy…I’m guessing this day might end at a bar (to celebrate the successful cleaning….which is not actually something I like to do…).

On an unrelated note, I’m watching Arrested Development last night omg that show is funny. I’ve been watching a few shows this year, on DVD on my computer since I don’t have a TV, but Arrested Development is my favorite right now (Ugly Betty was for a while but has started to go down hill). The acting in Arrested Development is so good…especially the kids!

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And again… Thursday, Nov 15 2007

I got another acceptance of sorts – I’m going to be a discussant for a UN meeting about violent conflict at the end of November. My dissertation supervisor is presenting a paper, and it seems like a lot of big deal people working on the political economy of violent conflict will be there – and I will be the junior junior junior participant who still doesn’t really exist in the academic world…BUT – I will be there!

I met someone who works for the Economic and Social Council at the UN, and I think he wants to recruit me away from academia towards a career in the UN. I’m not so sure how I feel about this…I guess, I would love to work for the UN for a year or two after I finish my PhD – especially if it could be on a peacekeeping mission – and then go back to academia, and teach and consult for the UN, traveling to work for them in the summers, occaisionally during the semester, and for longer periods whenever possible. I don’t know if I could ever give up teaching to work for them full time…

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