AMORY STARR

The first critical book about Tango intended for a commercial readership as a Popular Culture reveal, Until Forever is informed by roughly 2000 conversations with dancers in 5 countries.
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Interviews with entrepreneurs in 6 countries reveal that as they have delivered work from labor and industrial logics, artisans have likewise redeemed materials from their status and calculus as “inputs”. Instead of villainizing consumption, the artisans suggest we can instead define a heroic form of consumption, one which is about quests and stewardship, repair and restoration, and collaboration with craftsmen.
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Local food is a successful social movement that is transforming food from a commodity into a community. Local food and underground restaurants are ways that people are seeking to recover quality and meaning in their commercial exchanges. This book explains how this yearning can transform our unsustainable and terrifying economies.
Order
The first critical book about Tango, Until Forever is informed by roughly 2000 conversations with dancers in 5 countries.
Order
Interviews with artisans in 6 countries reveal that as they have delivered work from labor and industrial logics, artisans have likewise redeemed materials from their status and calculus as “inputs”.
Order
Local food and underground restaurants are ways that people are seeking to recover quality and meaning in their commercial exchanges.
Order
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  • Political Economy
  • LuxeWorks
  • Syntax of Power

Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds

25 June 2000

Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives (2000: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham) by Jeff Schmidt, a physicist and former editor for Physics Today. In the first months of graduate school at UCSB, Professor Tom Scheff told me that i needed to write down who I was “because you’re going to lose her and you may want her back some day.” I heeded that advice. I also held on to it as a warning about what would happen in the graduate program. As a professor, I have passed on this advice to many young friends, still not fully understanding it. Until I read this book I was completely mystefied by what was happening in graduate school and why. Schmidt explains that the most important function of graduate training is to enforce ideological discipline NOT over the personal political viewpoints of professionals (which have little impact on the world), but over their willingness to conform to professional hierarchies (which has much more serious consequences). He begins the book by noting that “professionals are fundamentally conservative” in the workplace even though most are liberals in their social views. [4] While many of us complained

why is the third world poor?

25 June 2000

Amory Starr why is the third world poor? key concepts debt: Most 3rd world countries are highly indebted. That means they owe a lot of money. In 1990, they were paying collectively $110billion/year in interest payments alone. They pay a high percentage of their GNP (Gross National Product: everything produced in a country in a year) just to keep up and most have no hopes of ever being out of debt. In order to pay the debt, countries must export in order to earn foreign exchange (dollars). What do they export and at what cost? Forests & fish at rates that are causing permanent environmental devastation, extinction, etc; High-value agricultural crops, like snow peas, which require use of land, water, and labor that then is not available for domestic food needs; Peoples’ health, by wooing foreign corporations to open factories which operate with no regard for worker safety. The International Monetary Fund & the World Bank give loans and reschedule or refinance existing loans. These are semi-public, semi-private non-democratic institutions that operate independently of any government. This means they are not accountable to any citizenry or constituency and their records are secret. when and why did the debt start?: In

thinking out white

25 June 2000

thinking out white Adam Bishop, Amory Starr June 2000 Abstract: This paper attempts a grounded contribution to race theory, drawing on classroom experiences and theoretical analysis. It is guided by two goals: the practical implications of race theory for dismantling racism and their usefulness for teaching white American college students about race. It articulates a new theory, and postulates some pedagogic moves. Wondering how our whiteness is letting us down,  we explored the new American “white studies”.  This paper documents our questions about how whiteness studies itself may be letting us down. We also apply our findings to conceptualizations of anti-racism and to undergraduate education. conceiving whiteness While some whites are actively white supremacist, race theorists have long agreed that ordinary whiteness also reproduces racial hierarchies. One of the main goals of scholarship on ordinary whiteness has been to expose it as a historically specific, socially constructed, phenomenon — “infinitely more false” [Roediger 1991] than Blackness.[1]  Reginald Horsman [1981] documents the social, cultural, and political machinations that produced American whiteness and doctrines of manifest destiny. David Roediger’s history of whiteness [1991] documents white working classes’ perplexing choices for whiteness over union strength (even at moments when social revolution was within

Cincinnati TABD November 2000

18 April 2000

Amory on Cincinnati for the Snout, UpRoot Newsletter While the Continental Direct Action Network exhorts us to do anti-oppression organizing on local issues in lieu of mass direct actions, it is clear that we can in fact do both. We have done a lot of local organizing lately and we were able (with the aid of our financial supporters) to participate in the Cincinnati mass action. DAN-C is obsessed with a false dichotomy. We are needed and can be in both places. In Cincinnati at first I was concerned that the anarchist look wasn’t a real effective organizing tool. But then I became aware that only that bloc grew in its commitment to dogging secret corporate meetings since the April IMF/WB meetings. Where was labor? Where was big environment? Where was that big consumer rights group — the one that taught me about the TABD? Props to anarchists for being better organizers than they sometimes seem… Overall, I found the actions in Cincinnati unsatisfying in that we didn’t mount direct action to blockade or disrupt the meetings. I understand that other kinds of things happened which were empowering and meaningful to various people in various ways. Although I was disappointed

Confronting Globalization

14 April 2000

Confronting Globalization for Communities Confronting Capitalist Globalization University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 14-16 April, 2000 14 April, 7 pm, Corwin Pavilion. Hello. I’m very happy and very honored to be here with you tonight. And, of course, I am tremendously honored to be speaking with such distinguished activists. So, thank you. (we are winning) On Monday as I was frantically trying to finish writing this talk in my office before leaving to come here, I got a string of hysterical telephone calls from community members saying “NPR did this terrible story that the people in DC are all vegans who don’t shower.” And what I said was “well, yes, that’s because we’re winning.” When I arrived in Seattle on November 26, I sat with the weekend edition of the main Seattle newspaper. “The WTO Pull-Out Guide” included, to my shock, our arguments against free trade – pretty accurately! And then went on to say “it’s going to be very hard to park”. And the newspaper boxes had these on them. “WTO Guide” Realize that this is an organization that worked very hard to be secret. We have, as Lori Wallach says, “drug it out into the open where everyone

Seattle WTO 30 November 1999

30 November 1999

Subject: urgent: report from seattle (fwd) Dear Friends, I just returned from a week in Seattle with 20 students. Members of our group were all over the city every day during the week. This letter represents our collected experiences and our collective analyses. We are concerned about massive misrepresentations in the media and ask that you please share our perspective with your friends and allies. Summary: The media seem willing to tell ANY story (including police brutality) but the real one, which is that an unprecedented array of groups collaborated to shut down the WTO on Tuesday November 30. This action was completely successful and non-violent. The movement is international and includes farmers, unions, students and youth, indigenous people, consumer groups, and environmental groups. Our analysis is multi-issue and we are learning from each other. The leading scholars of the movement and a number of elected officials from Seattle and the US Congress were with us in the streets. We attended a perfectly peaceful rally of small-scale farmers from all over the world, which was the largest Farmers Rally in the US since 1971. Quote of the week on Seattle local TV news Tuesday night: “I was in Birmingham Alabama

why are people of color poor? (United States)

25 June 1999

why are people of color poor? behavioral vs. structural explanations compiled by Professor Amory Starr what we are trying to explain: more white people are poor than people of color, but a higher (“disproportionate”) percentage of people of color are poor than of whites sources: Holly Sklar, Chaos or Community 1995 Stephanie Coontz, The Way we Never Were 1992, Maxine Baca Zinn 1989 culture of poverty claims research responds people are poor because of their culture/values:  culture determines values values determine economic success so groups on the bottom must have cultural weaknesses people of color face discrimination lower pay for the same work job ceilings “structural unemployment”: good-paying jobs they worked in 1940s-1960s no longer exist (deindustrialization) Latinos don’t do well in school because the culture doesn’t value education African Americans value education highly, but kids are still tracked into special ed. schools in lower income communities spend far less $ per student urban schools are segregated and unequal [Kozol, Savage Inequalities 1992] African Americans don’t have a strong “work ethic” when jobs were available, African Americans worked. the problem is that there aren’t jobs.  1979-1984: ½ of Black workers in manufacturing jobs lost their jobs 1930: 8% of Black

notes on what to call people of color

25 September 1998

There are scholarly terms, like ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘oppression’, ‘racism’ and those ones are the ones that scholars and citizens debate about. Then there are political terms which have been articulated by people in the process of making political struggle. It wouldn’t be fair for us to redefine those terms. Those include the words ‘Chicano’, ‘Latino’, ‘Asian American’, ‘feminist’. So I’m going to introduce a few terms of the second type. ‘Chicano’ was a term that was created by people living in the Southwest US and the Northwest part of Mexico to describe themselves. It makes reference to territory ¾ a territory which denies the US-Mexico border and also to the fact that there is a cultural mixing between the indigenous indian people who lived there and other groups from Spain and from other parts of Mexico with whom there was cultural mixing. This term was created in the 1960s as part of the Mexican-American youth movement. The word ‘Latino’ is a more recent creation, which was forged politically as a way to include all the people from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Chicanos who came from those cultures which are mixes of African, Indigenous Indian, and Spanish. So it is

Article rejected by ZMagazine, 1998

24 February 1998

Note: Not so long ago, ecological economics and alternative models were anathema to the US Left. In 1998 I tried to show how various movements around ecological sustainability did express values of the Left. Both Z Magazine (in 1998) and Dollars & Sense (in 2000) rejected this article. Sustainability Update One of the most vibrant international social movements today is sustainable development. Under this conceptual umbrella, new multiracial and cross-class alliances are being built, technologies discovered or relearned, and spaces of resistance organized so as to be as independent as possible from corporate capitalism. Some of the most vigorous advocates of sustainability are found among the movements resisting free trade. The National Alliance of People’s Movements, India, protests the World Trade Organization (WTO) and “anti-sovereign agreements” and asserts “the right to have the land, water, forest, mineral, and aquatic wealth localized in each village community, to have local eco-socio-economically decentralized planning for equity and sustainability” including indigenous technology, local markets, and non-consumerist living. The fisherfolk movement Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas demands that the Philippine government withdraw from the WTO and regional free trade agreements and envisions “reorient[ation of] our food production and market to feed the Filipino

Snake oil or salvation: Repositioning Sociology

25 June 1997

Snake oil or Salvation?: Reconstructing Sociology Amory Starr & Tony Samara, c. 1997 Abstract: In this paper we attempt to respond to community activists’ critiques of academia, and of sociology in particular, focusing primarily on our political inactivity and the seeming contradiction between this inactivity and our rhetoric about our profession. Our concern is with the reasons for our inactivity, and we explore three possible approaches to explaining it. The first section focuses on our product. The next section examines working conditions. The final section explores the division of labor.  “We don’t need any more theoreticians and paper, we need people who are committed to saving the young folks.…We need people at 10:30 this foggy Friday morning to go out to the corner and work with these youth.…I don’t see many adults committed to kids, to Black male African youth. I don’t see people with passion to go out and save these young brothers.…I’m very impatient with the media and folks who want to talk.…So many people who want to analyze, theory, the paperwork, words, philosophy. What we need are people that go out and do rather than talk.…You know by your actions, not words. You’ve got a lot of

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