scholarly journals Digital Stories as a Creative Assignment for Studying World Religions

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 644
Author(s):  
Charles S. Chesnavage
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Spiritual But Not Religious ◽  
The Status ◽  
Digital Stories ◽  
Education Courses

The incorporation of creative assignments in the form of digital stories and artistic assignments in undergraduate and graduate World Religions courses has resulted in positive feedback from the students, and these courses were considered the favorite of the semester. They have given students, many of which identify as “spiritual but not religious”, or “non-practicing”, an opportunity to connect themes from various world religions to their own life stories, implicitly or explicitly. The purpose of this article is to encourage educators in both a secondary and a college/university/seminary setting to consider digital stories as a creative assignment that deepens their understanding of world religions within the context of a World Religions course, or other religion and religious education courses. This article will present the institutional support provided by Mercy College (Dobbs Ferry, New York) and the context for the World Religions class in which the digital stories are assigned. It will be followed by the process of making a digital story, the directions given to the students, the different platforms that students can choose to make the digital stories, and examples of digital stories created by the students. The paper will conclude with a summary of comments made by the students about the assignment and connections with additional articles on the benefits of digital stories to increase empathy and replace the dominant stories that cause oppression and injustice, like racism and white supremacy, with stories that offer resistance and counter the status quo of oppression and injustice.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
John Vilanova
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Drum Circles ◽  
Acoustic Device

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.

Race

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Business Regulation ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Status

This chapter examines the status quo before the start of the civil rights realignment, showing that civil rights was simply not viewed as part of the standard “liberal program” as of the early 1930s. Although African Americans were vocal in attacking Franklin D. Roosevelt's weak civil rights record, they were largely alone. When whites on the left pushed Roosevelt to be a more forthright liberal or progressive, they criticized him for inadequate support for labor, weak business regulation, and insufficient recovery spending—but not for his failure to back civil rights. At this early stage, the “enemies” of a liberal Democratic Party generally were not identified with the South but instead were probusiness Democrats from the Northeast, associated with Al Smith of New York. Economic questions were the key battleground in the eyes of white liberals, and civil rights did not figure in these debates.

A Wide-Open Town?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
The Status ◽  
The City

This chapter interrogates San Francisco’s mythical reputation as a town where “anything goes.” Pairings of men of color with white women occurred in the city press without the violent rage that it provoked in nearly every other part of the United States at the time. Homoerotic imagery and writings also proliferated with little to no controversy. While the acceptance of these activities might signal an embrace of the diverse people and lifestyles, it in fact pointed to the opposite. Precisely because of overwhelming and unquestionable dominance of white supremacy and heterosexuality, narratives of interracial mingling and same-sex love that might otherwise challenge the status quo served merely as entertaining anecdotes without any threat to the existing social order.

‘Have a Quiet, Orderly, Polite Revolution’: Framing Political Protest and Protecting the Status Quo

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 733-751
Author(s):  
Tamara J. Lynn ◽  
L. Susan Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Print Media ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
The Status

This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo – social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as ‘print capitalism’) utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as ‘outsiders.’ Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant ‘mainstream’ political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government.

Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Branch Davidians ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Harm ◽  
Self Immolation

Suicide in the forms of martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and self-immolation is mired in controversies regarding religious roots, nomenclature, motives, and valor. Although the admiration ebbs and flows, at least some idealization of such elective deaths is discernible in every religious tradition treated in this volume. Traditional support ranges from tales of ascetic heroes who conquer personal passions to save others by dying, to tales of righteous warriors who suffer and die valiantly while challenging the status quo. While the lionization of elective death is a persistent theme in world religions, just as persistent are disputes about the core notions that justify it, such as altruism, heroism, and religion itself. This volume offers critical analyses by renowned scholars with the literary and historical tools to tackle the contested issue of religiously sanctioned suicide. Three chapters treat contemporary phenomena with disputed classical roots (chapters on Salafist Jihadists, on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, and on the Branch Davidians and Heavens' Gate), while eleven focus on classical religious literatures which variously celebrate and disparage figures who invite self-harm to the point of corporeal death (chapters on Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Sikh, Tamil, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions, as well as on their diverse branches and special expressions). Overall, the volume offers astute scholarly insights which counter the axiom that religious traditions simply and always embrace life at any cost.

No Votes for Women

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Goodier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Public ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conservative Women

This book explores the complicated history of the suffrage movement in New York State by delving into the stories of women who opposed the expansion of voting rights to women. The book makes the case that, contrary to popular thought, women who opposed suffrage were not against women's rights. Instead, conservative women who fought against suffrage encouraged women to retain their distinctive feminine identities as protectors of their homes and families, a role they felt was threatened by the imposition of masculine political responsibilities. The book details the victories and defeats on both sides of the movement from its start in the 1890s to its end in the 1930s, analyzing not only how local and state suffrage and anti-suffrage campaigns impacted the national suffrage movement, but also how both sides refined their appeals to the public based on their counterparts' arguments. Rather than condemning the women of the anti-suffragist movement for accepting or even trying to preserve the status quo, the book acknowledges the powerful activism of this often overlooked and misunderstood political force in the history of women's equality.

Battling Silent Chaos: The Refrain and Decolonial Potentials

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-378
Author(s):  
Xhercis Méndez
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The State ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Sense Of Home

This article examines some of the ways in which Black and Brown young women and men within the context of the US are consistently confronted by the silences around state-sanctioned violence enacted on our bodies with impunity while even our playful sonoric outbursts are reconfigured as threats to the state. I argue that, different from Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation where the refrain functions to keep chaos at bay, the refrain produced by a group of Black and Brown youth at a ferry station in New York brings to the fore and into confrontation the very Codes that create a sense of ‘home’ and ‘security’ for some at the expense of their well-being and often lives. However it is from navigating, what I refer to as, silent chaos that this article seeks to explore the decolonial potential of the sonoric ‘disruptions' produced by these Black and Brown young women and men, in particular by examining how they challenge the status quo and highlight the urgent need for new systems of valuation that would serve to reconstitute their collective worth.

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