On Storytelling, Privilege, Individual Pride, and Yes, Finally, a Work Presented in Chicago

Be warned at the outset that this post will be quite the mishmash. (The one-sentence takeaway: go hunt down Marisa Zapata and her Chicago paper; they are both very much worth engaging with.)

To start with an anecdote from the PhD Jamboree in Vancouver last year (which is how I met Jason and annalise): as a prelude to Ken Reardon's discussion of his community-empowerment work in St. Louis and New Orleans, Leonie Sandercock played a tape of an African-American woman singing a song of lamentation. Afterwards Leonie explained that the song had been recorded by a New Orleans native (if I remember correctly) after Hurricane Katrina hit, and that she herself thought the song's observation -- that, essentially, nothing had changed and the position of African-Americans in the US was just as lowly and brutalized as it had been since before the civil rights movement -- was spot-on. In the audience, I bristled. This was due less to their being wrong than to personal events the week before the Jamboree having left me in superdefensive mode. But the immediate reason I bristled was I felt that what Sandercock and later Reardon did -- compare New Orleans 2005 with Oxford 1962, and find essentially no difference -- was to conflate two different instances of societal failure, and to do so somewhat smugly. Not that I get to make the last call on the narrative of Katrina and the position of African-Americans in the US; but I wasn't willing to cede it to them, either.

I thought of that when I read this essay by Charles Johnson (via A&LD), calling for a "new narrative" for African-Americans. Johnson's argument rests, not solely but largely, on the accomplishments of individual African-Americans: doctors, lawyers, CEOs, PhDs, actors, engineers, writers, and presidential candidates. He does not mention New Orleans 2005 in his argument, and while I haven't yet gone looking for counterarguments (and The American Scholar doesn't post trackbacks), I would guess that the aftermath of Katrina figures pretty highly in the arguments of those who would tell him that the old narrative appears, unfortunately, to have a lot of life left in it.

The tension here seems to be that between celebrating individual accomplishments and acknowledging the larger obstacles facing the individuals as a group. Does the average African-American child born in 2008 have a better chance of becoming the next scientist, lawyer, artist, philosopher, politician, or CEO than he or she would have if born in 1948? Either you say "yes," because so many legal and societal obstacles have fallen, or you hesitate, because so many societal and economic obstacles still exist. Your answer will spring from the narrative you subscribe to. The groups who usually hold power in the US (I originally wrote "the US" and then realized I needed to be more specific) have a long history of privileging stories of individual accomplishment; and those stories can be very useful and inspiring -- not least because it's easier to get relate to the story of an individual than of a group, on average. But one can point to, in discussions among Americans at least, a tendency to use narratives of individual accomplishment to dismiss the narratives of discrimination against the group.

Then today I read this and this (courtesy of Megan McArdle, an ex-co-worker of mine) and thought the two posts together wonderful, for the author's frank discussion of the fact that narratives of individual empowerment are... well, empowering (I did this) and when you start placing such narratives in the larger context of the group (you did this, but in part because you benefited from certain privileges that you lucked into, and not everyone gets those same privileges, and you can't swear that you would have been able to accomplish that same thing without the privileges) will almost certainly meet resistance.

When I wrote earlier that storytelling is dangerous, I was speaking from a fairly self-serving point of view. Here is a larger point: if storytelling is to become an effective planning tool, American planners (I can't speak for other cultures) will bump up against this tension time and again. A good many of us will want to tell stories to bring attention to underserved communities. But to tell such stories in ways that inspire helpful, rather than defensive or guilty, reactions, is tricky. Including stories of individual accomplishment can help inspire, but may also seduce the audience into thinking that things aren't so bad after all. And the underserved community itself may be divided as to which stories should get privileged.

I want to conclude by pointing to Marisa Zapata's work, because I got to see her presentation at Chicago and many other people didn't (it was in the last session of the last day). One point she made at the end of her talk about a planning process that deliberately sought out people from different cultures was that at the end, the white participants felt depressed and worried for the future, while the Latino participants were energized. Zapata suggested (I may be putting words into her mouth here) that this was a reflection of different cultural norms: that the Latino participants were much more comfortable with a process that focused chiefly on problems and not on easily implementable solutions. I suspect that this tension was similar to that between individual-focused and group-focused narrative; and if I'm right, that may suggest that, one, such longing for the individual-focused, inspirational narrative is not universally subscribed to in the United States, and two, there are ways to introduce other narratives, other approaches.

Finally, I will say that, to avoid overgeneralizing, I end up talking a lot in ways that put a white woman front and center ("I bristled... I felt... I read... I got to see"). Such is another danger of storytelling; but that one's more easily solved -- by making sure that other stories get space as well.

On Olympicized Beijing

In the runup to Chicago -- and don't forget, if you're coming to Chicago, to RSVP for the Tuesday night students' reception -- I am repeatedly distracted by interesting articles: this one, a New Republic book review, focuses on China's political culture in the run-up to the Olympics. It is only tangentially related to planning, in that the first book discussed focuses on the modernization of Beijing and the resulting changes in its urban fabric. But Andrew Nathan is a major figure in his field (not for nothing was he a coeditor of this book) and if you are not terribly familiar with Chinese politics, this could be a very useful introduction to how the state currently works, and how the central government can absorb blows such as the Tiananmen protests, the criticisms over Tibet, and the continuing efforts of pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and yet keep on going.

(The other reason why I was so quickly distracted is that of the three authors of Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City, one was my undergraduate advisor and chief academic mentor, and another taught me about the Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers and is responsible for my continued love of red bean cakes. So reading Andrew Nathan's praise for their book leaves me tickled pink.)

Europe's Declining Fertility Rates, and What They Imply for Cities

Another interesting article, from the New York Times Magazine. It's more broad than deep, surveying some of the literature on why fertility rates in Europe are dropping so fast (and not reaching any definite conclusions, though some of its hypotheses surprised me), but gets particularly interesting for city planners about halfway through, discussing the plans of some German cities to shrink their urban footprints. As a bonus for those of us insular Americans: it will give us something to talk about with our new European acquaintances in Chicago, beyond "That Sergio Ramos is something, huh?"

Some Interesting Climate Change Speculation

I know: we the DSUP cabal have been neglecting you quite seriously of late. Some of us have been looking for jobs; some of us are finishing our dissertations; and some of us have been caught up in a combination of various offline events and changing our operating system three times. (Somewhere, Commenter Nick is laughing.)

So as not to neglect you, I bring your attention to Sustainable Energy--Without the Hot Air, a work-in-progress by David MacKay, a Cambridge professor. There's also a blog and an article in The Register -- the two are related, as MacKay uses his blog to correct some of the impressions a Register reader might get. The nice part about MacKay's work is that he puts it all online, so you can download it, examine it, and argue with it at your leisure. Note that you cannot just read the four-page executive summary and get his full conclusions that way; I tried that already.

(Link originally found at Arts & Letters Daily, though, strangely, not at its sister site, Climate Debate Daily.)

Plug: Lisa Schweitzer

UCLA professor Randall Crane (whose blog you have in your RSS feed just before or after ours, right?) has posted a profile of Lisa Schweitzer, who got her PhD at UCLA, spent some time at Virginia Tech, and is now at USC working on issues of environmental justice and transportation. I got to hear Dr. Schweitzer present in Milwaukee last year, and although she admitted straight off that she was presenting on research (on hazardous waste-related disasters and environmental justice) she'd just begun, it was still a very interesting presentation. Her presentation style was relaxed, friendly, and confident, which can be difficult in a conference setting; that style may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it worked well for me.

And since the Chicago schedule is now posted online, I can now tell you that Dr. Schweitzer will be presenting at 9:45 am on July 8th, moderating a panel on measurements and techniques later that day, and helping with a roundtable on environmental justice (alongside Ann Forsyth) first thing Friday morning the 11th. Even if you are neither a transportation person nor an EJ person, I would recommend you check her out at some point.

(Standard doctoral-student disclaimer: Dr. Schweitzer is not on any committee of mine and is not reviewing any papers I have written.)

On Telling Stories and Looking Professional Online

At least some of y'all read the Emily Gould Times piece and thought, "Clearly, not a graduate student." At least, not a PhD student in a field where, despite a great deal of work about storytelling, said PhD student still has to worry about the word "overshare" being used during a prospective job evaluation.

This is something I have wrestled with for years. If you were to go to my website -- and I am most deliberately not giving you the URL -- you would find a badly formatted, sparsely updated blog I gave up on a couple months ago after being informed that no matter what tweaks I made to WordPress, the only people allowed to comment, apparently, were spammers. Clearly, it would benefit me more to have a richer and better-looking online presence, to decrease the risks that a search committee would be spending time raising their eyebrows at the number of friends I have zombiefied on Facebook.

But to be less flippant about it: the idea of "telling stories" as a method of distributing and accumulating planning knowledge is extremely attractive to me, as someone who wanted to be a writer long before she wanted to be any variety of planner. Stories are powerful. Emily Gould's story, particular as it is to her place, time, and socioeconomic situation, inspired so many comments the Times first had to close the comment thread and then had to open it back up again. Telling stories can invite confidence; open up space for similar or complementary narratives; communicate more effectively than other methods. The story can serve as warning, as inspiration, as exemplar, as lesson. Granted, it's not the easiest thing in the world to teach from story when every planning situation is unique, but people are working on it, and God bless 'em for it.

However: for women working -- not just women working in planning, or women working in academia, but women working, period -- telling stories is also dangerous. To take an example outside of planning academia, to tell a story that begins, or ends, with "I had a miscarriage" is pretty potent stuff. It can inspire sympathy. It can inspire discussions about how and why miscarriages happen, and how the American (or what have you) health care system should respond to miscarriages. It can also make your colleagues uncomfortable, and suggest that your mind is simply not on your work. (And for all we talk of work-life balance, I would suggest that any one of us wants our colleagues to have a work-life balance only up to the point that it does not harm our own work-life balance. Forgive my grammar.) And I think the negative repercussions of such storytelling-gone-awry are greater for women in the workplace than for men.

I am generally more inclined than not to tell stories about my personal life: because I'm seeking advice; because sometimes hiding the information is more trouble than just coming out with it; because sometimes I hope to be able to entertain or enlighten; because someone else has just told a story and I want to offer empathy with a similar story; because I just like telling stories by habit and inclination. But it means I am constantly running the risk of becoming Madame Overshare. And online, where oversharing once in 2002, or even 1992, will still be in Google's memory in 2010, the risk is even greater.

So for a while I have been wrestling with what I want a personal website to be. Because it is one thing to be "personal" and yet quite another to be "personal" while still being "professional." I wonder if other people feel they've been able to find a happy medium, or whether they would counsel me to screw the imagined search committee and tell all the stories I see fit, or wonder why this is even an issue.

More on Womanism (in a Different Context)

For those following Annalise's posts on womanism and planning, the "XX Factor" blog on Slate has recently begun a discussion of womanism in relation to the Clinton-Obama fight. The term is introduced in this post by Kim McLarin and the discussion continues here and here. Obviously one cannot pick up the idea of "womanism" under discussion in that context, which is considerably less formal, and snap it into planning methodology as if it were a Lego block. But it might be interesting to those just getting to know the idea.