Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Women in Music Education

Women in Music Education is the focus of the latest issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review. In “Women and the Work of Music Education,” the focus of volume 17. number 2, the fall 2009 issue of Philosophy of Music Education Review, women’s perspectives on the situations in which labor are examined.  As Estelle Jorgensen, the editor of the journal, asserts in her introduction to the issue, “[T]he work performed by women is often under-appreciated, if appreciated at all, and they are rendered invisible when they focus on those things that are important to them but may not be regarded as significant by the gatekeepers of the profession….[T]heir work is often conducted on the fringes of what is regarded as most significant by the field.”  The contributors to the issue posit divergent approaches to the work of music education. The lead article by Julia Eklund Koza, “My Body Had a Mind of Its Own: On Teaching, the Illusion of Control, and the Terrifying Limits of Governmentality,” is the first of a two-part study. In part one, she examines the moments in which the body seems out of control and in which “bodies seem to have minds of their own.” In addition, she addresses the lack of materials on issues of power and governance, considers the “limits of power and the incompleteness of control of either self or of others,” and suggests that the notions of control that dominate educational discourse are problematic and limiting.

In “Women Working in Music Education: The War Machine,” Elizabeth Gould describes the implications for university women when they challenge the prevailing beliefs and practices of academe. Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, in “Philosophy of Music Education and the Burnout Syndrome: Female Viewpoints on a Male School World,” considers the issue of female fatigue in a male-dominated environment and its resultant loss of teachers.

Other articles in the issue include Sondra Wieland Howe on “A Historical View of Women in Music Education Careers,” an examination of the invisibility of women in the historical record; and June Boyce-Tillman on “The Transformative Qualities of a Limited Space Created by Musicking,” an analysis of the transformative power of luminal spaces in musicking. Closing the issue is Mary J. Reichling’s review of Robert E. Innis’ Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, which was published in 2009 by Indiana University Press, a review of particular significance to this issue of PMER because Langer’s philosophy concerning feeling is considered by some of her critics as “soft” and beneath serious philosophical notice.
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Clemency power and responsibility

Bidding Not-So-Fond Farewell to Willie Horton

For OpEdNews: Race-Talk.org - Writer
By Andrew Grant-Thomas, Ph.D., Race-Talk.org Contributor

I'll guess that most Americans, if they think about clemency at all, think it happens way too often and benefits the wrong people. That's because high-profile cases of clemency, or even requests for clemency, are almost invariably unpopular. Dick Cheney asked that his buddy, Scooter Libby, be pardoned for his role in the Valerie Plame affair. Bill Clinton caught major grief for Marc Rich's pardon (illegal trading, tax evasion). President Ford's pardon of former president Nixon for any crimes associated with Watergate was probably the signature moment of his presidency – and not in a good way.

You may have noticed some hoopla going on right now over the case of one Maurice Clemmons. Clemmons is suspected of having recently ambushed and killed four police officers in a Washington state coffeehouse. Turns out that Clemmons had been serving what was effectively a life sentence in Arkansas until nine years ago, when then-governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence.  Read more.

Andrew Grant-Thomas is Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute. He directs the Institute's internal operations and oversees much of its US-based programming. His substantive interests include structural racism and implicit bias, alliance-building between immigrants and African Americans, African American males and gender dynamics within the African American community, and the promotion of systems thinking through videogames. Andrew serves as Associate Editor of the Institute's journal, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts. He also edited Twenty-first Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary America, published in 2008 by Temple University Press. He is a regular contributor to Racewire.org and WOSU radio and sits on the boards of several nonprofit organizations and various social justice initiatives. Andrew came to the Kirwan Institute in February of 2006 from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University where he directed the Color Lines Conference and managed a range of policy-oriented racial justice projects. He received his B.A. in Literature from Yale University, his M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

Call for Papers: Women in the Responsa Literature

The theme of issue no. 21 of Nashim (Spring 2011), under the consulting editorship of David Golinkin of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, will be “Women in the Responsa Literature.”

The responsa literature -- compilations of legal opinions written by rabbis and rabbinic judges in response to specific queries or cases -- is one of the largest branches, if not the largest branch of Jewish literature. Indeed, a new bibliography (Shmuel Glick, Kuntress hateshuvot hehadash, I--III, Jerusalem, 2006–2009) lists over 4,400 books or series containing responsa. The responsa are a fount of information about Jewish women on a host of topics, such as marriage, divorce, agunot (women who remain “chained” to missing, disabled or separated husbands in the absence of a religious divorce), widows, child-rearing, and women in business, starting from about 500 CE and continuing right up to the present day. This vast literature was utilized for research on women’s lives in studies by Israel Abrahams (Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, London, 1896) and, more recently, by Avraham Grossman (Rebellious and Pious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, Lebanon, NH, 2004) and Ruth Lamdan (A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century, Leiden, 2000), but it is still only beginning to be tapped.

For this issue of Nashim, we invite submissions about women in the responsa literature, focusing on a broad topic, a specific geographical area or a specific set of responsa. How are women portrayed? What can we learn about their lives? How were they viewed by rabbis and by their societies? Can we hear their own voices in the testimony they gave before religious courts (batei din)? How did and do these rulings affect their lives? And how can we interpret all of this data using the tools of women’s and gender studies?

Proposals for submissions of up to 12,000 words, not previously published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, should be sent to Deborah Greniman, Managing Editor of Nashim, by February 1, 2010, by email (preferably) to nashim@schechter.ac.il; or by fax to +972-3-7256592. Final date for submission of articles: May 1, 2010.

All scholarly articles will be subject to peer review. Academic Editor of Nashim: Renée Levine Melammed.
Nashim is published jointly by the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Indiana University Press.

Call for Papers: Modernism in 1911

The Journal of Modern Literature welcomes articles on various aspects of modernism in 1911. What was “modern” in 1911? What was “modernism” before the name had been coined? This question includes literature, with possible essays on the young Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Pound, Stein, as well as less canonical writers for the field of modernism (for instance, can Maurice Maeterlinck, the recipient of the Nobel prize in 1911, be called a modernist?). We also welcome essays on culture, politics, architecture and the other arts.

Please submit essays via e-mail to laurelwgarver@gmail.com, following the Advice to Contributors in the most recent issue of jml, no later than June 1, 2010.

Writing Slavery In(to) the African Diaspora

Special Issue: Research in African Literatures 40.4
Prompted by the bicentennial of the British abolition of slave trade, Research in African Literatures has trained its focus on both the literary and the cultural flowstreams that slavery blocked as well as the newer channels it opened up. It includes articles that show how to read both the tragic deformations that the slave trade nurtured as well as the creative triumphs that developed in spite of it.

Special Editors Adélékè Adéèkó, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, and Natasha Barnes

The table of contents includes these articles:

Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther—Adélékè Adéekó

Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries—Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi

Obstacles in the Way of Love: The Enslavement of Intimacy in Samuel Crowther and Ama Ata Aidoo—Laura Murphy   

A Legacy of Trauma: Caribbean Slavery, Race, Class, and Contemporary Identity in Abeng—H. Adlai Murdoch   

The African Oceans–Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture—Gabeba Baderoon   

The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House—Brenda Cooper   

In the Shadow of the Castle: (Trans)Nationalism, African American Tourism, and Gorée Island—Salamishah Tillet

Africa and Its Diasporas: Remembering South America—Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Iranian Jewish Women

Special Issue: Nashim 18

Special Editor Farideh Dayanim Goldin

Research into lives and cultures of Iranian Jewish women is relatively new. Information gathering on Iranian Jewish life accelerated after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the mass exodus of Iranian Jews from their ancient homeland. Jewish existence in Iran, some researchers believe, dates back to the destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile, and the freedom granted the Jews in 539 BCE by the king of Persia, Cyrus the Great. Others assert that Jews settled in Persia (Media) earlier in two waves of exodus from the Holy Land in 727 BC and 721 BC, during the Assyrian rule. Even though Iranian Jewish population shrank from 100,000 before the Revolution to approximately 20,000 in 2009, Iran still hosts the largest numbers of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel.

The Islamic Revolution accelerated the pace of research, information gathering and recording data about the Iranian Jewish culture that many scholars feared could be soon lost. The resulting series of books on Iranian Jews do include some information about women, their lives, cultures, and lifestyle. They foster a sense of pride and appreciation in the earlier generations’ resiliency and cultural achievements

Examining this new scholarship, I personally have learned  to appreciate my own heritage, and to reclaim it. In my research and in my personal life, I now look for wonders of the Iranian Jewish life that had been bestowed upon me. Once, I believed that my grandmother Tavous was a superstitious woman because she was illiterate; now I know that her wisdom was beyond any formal education;  and I regret that I don’t have the knowledge of her herbal remedies. Through her recollections, she taught me the history of the Jews of Shiraz as well as the art of storytelling.

It is my hope that the collection of essays in this issue of Nashim, devoted to Iranian Jewish women, will intensify this  sense of connection and appreciation of Iranian Jewish heritage, that it will spark and intensify further scholarly work, and that it will help to create a network among the scholars of Iranian Jewish women.

Special Issue, Bridges 14.2: The Bridge of Translation

Special Guest Editor Faith Jones

Translations from German, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, as well as essays about translation and reflections on particular translation projects, come together in this collection to illuminate feminist Jewish practice. Translated material includes stories, poems, letters, diaries, and fables in a rich blend of genres, styles, and subject matter. This diverse collection speaks to the centrality of translation for creating an inclusive Jewish feminist movement. It explores a variety of ideas about the historical pressures resulting from the multilingual nature of Jewish culture, with careful attention to how women’s use of language(s) is marked and meaningful.

For twenty years Bridges has published translations in nearly every issue; this issue's introduction highlights the reasons for doing so.The desire to bring a particular woman writer to light; to make our vision of Jewish life more complex; to engage with painful or important histories; to honor women’s knowledge and participate in the transmission of women’s knowledge; and to recover what has been dismissed, minimized, or hidden from view are some of the reasons being explored in this issue.

Writers whose work are translated include historical women such as German feminist Bertha Pappenheim; Polish Orthodox poet Miriam Ulinover; Soviet writer Shira Gorshman; Hungarian Holocaust survivor Borbála Szabó; and Brazilian writer Rosa Palatnik. Contemporary women include French novelist Marlène Amar; and Israeli poets Nurit Zarchi and Agi Mishol. A series of Holocaust-era family letters show everyday people struggling to find the language to reflect their lives. Essays by translators from German, Hebrew and Yiddish each discuss the specific issues related to the language they work in and to their translation practices in the light of Jewish feminism. Original poetry in English and visual art explore themes of language, speaking, listening, disclosing new worlds, and excavating meaning from wordless experience. Book reviews of recent translations highlight the variety and complexity of work underway in this field, and provide a starting point for those wishing to immerse themselves further in this fascinating, emerging area of study.

FAB 2010 Congress, Call for Panel and Paper Abstracts

The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics is pleased to invite proposals for panels and papers in the 2010 Congress. The Congress theme is "Mobilities and Inequalities".
Papers on any topic in feminist bioethics are welcome, although the plenary sessions and some of the parallel sessions will be devoted to the Congress theme.
The theme of Mobilities and Inequalities should be interpreted broadly. Topics may include, but should not be limited to:

·      Trafficking

·      Women, War and Refugees

·      Migration of Care Workers

·      Global Movement of Food and Food Security

·      Minorities and Barriers to Migration

·      Medical Tourism

·      Reproductive Tourism

·      Communication Technologies in Healthcare

·      Assistive Devices in Disability

The conference organisers welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including: philosophy, social sciences, mobility studies, gender and migration studies, development studies, and others. We particularly encourage submissions from early career researchers. For more information visit the FAB site, http://www.fabnet.org/announcements.php?announcement_id=31&from=congress.

Read for Free in November

Every month we invite you to access some of our newest content at no cost to you. Explore the depth and importance of research available at IU Press/Journals.

Gabeba Baderoon, The African Oceans—Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture, Research in African Literatures Dec 2009, Vol. 40, No. 4: 89–107.
 
Rita Falbel, Family Letters, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Oct 2009, Vol. 14, No. 2: 6–14.
 
Bahar Davary, Miss Elsa and the Veil: Honor, Shame, and Identity Negotiations, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Oct 2009, Vol. 25, No. 2: 47–66.
 
Martin Mhando, Keyan G. Tomaselli, Film and Trauma: Africa Speaks to Itself through Truth and Reconciliation Films, Black Camera: An International Film Journal (The New Series) Jan 2009, Vol. 1, No. 1: 30–50.

Ronald Broude wins Jo Ann Boydston Award in Textual Cultures

The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) announced on October 15th that its Jo Ann Boydston Award for 2009 has been presented to Ronald Broude for his article "The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition and the Full Scores that Never Were." The award is presented every two years for an article that has been published during the preceding two years and that best addresses the aims and methodologies of sound documentary editing. Broude's article was published in Volume 3.2 of Textual Cultures, the journal of The Society for Textual Scholarship. It deals with the problems of preparing a full-score critical edition of an opera from a complex of sources, no one of which provides all of the necessary information. Broude expressed satisfaction that the award recognizes the unique problems posed by musical texts and that it has been presented to a piece in this relatively young journal.