Subculture Unit

Transmissions from Camp Trans
The claim is that the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is a place just for women to enjoy themselves.
Type of Argument= Classical

Dark Webs Goth Subcultures in Cyberspace
The claim is that through cyberspace goths are able to use the internet just like everybody else is to find information and communicate through the use of cyberspace.
Type of Argument= Toulmin

The Truck Stop as Community and Culture
The claim is that truckers can be viewed or compared to cowboys. In such ways that defend their community and and strong independent men.
Type of Argument= Classical

House for the Homeless
The claim is that homeless people are just like everyone else and should be treated as human beings.
Type of Argument= Rogerian

Right now I am at the process where I have information and I have went to my field site but I still feel like I need a little bit more information from each, my field site and research. When I first began my research I just looked up basic information about my subculture but when I need to research the information I found out about from the field site about my subculture. There also needs to be another visit to the field site before I begin writing my paper to gather a little more details. I plan on going back to my field site this weekend to get the last bits and pieces that I can get before the first draft is due. As for peer review the main thing I wanted people to look at is how well I introduce my field site and claim into the paper.

Inside The Jail

JAIL

My subculture is "Women Behind Bars. " The field site I choose to observe was Clayton County Jail located at 9157 Tara Blvd in Jonesboro, Georgia. This jail houses men and women. As you enter the front of the jail area there is a very nice court house and right behind the court house is the jail. It looks like your average jail, with grey cement walls and little windows. You could see from the outside where the inmates had wriitten saying on their windows. As we entered ther jail house we had to go through alot of security and had to show ID. Unfortunately, we got there around the time that visting hours are over. So the inmate, which is my cousin, we could not get to interview. But the plus side was that i was able to interview an officer that worked at the jail. I was extremely nervous because i already knew that i was just going to get basic answers that were not going to be that detailed. I was able to find out that there are a total of 768 inmate cells. There are also about 2000 beds. I plan on going back to the jail sometime within the next week to get the interview with my cousin so i can get more details about what actually goes on behind bars. The whole experience overall was a great one. I really enjoyed learning about what is involved in this subculture.

List of Terminology
Inmate
pods

Prison Performing Arts

What makes this a good field site?
This is a good feild site because the author actually went to the prison and could observe what goes on into putting a play together with prisoners. This is also a good site because the prisoners could relate the different characters of the play to other people who werr in prison. The prison also had a mixture of races so the listener can get different points of view.

What observations does the author make that gives us a better understanding?
Straight from the beginning the author starts by describing the prison from when he first walked in. He describes what the prisoners are doing and even what tattoos they have. Also by listening to the actual prisoners recite the play it informs the reader just how diffcult it is to put a play like this together because the prisoners can barely pronounce the words. He also decribes that every prisoner must be stripe searched before entering the room and he also describes how the room looked and felt like. He said that it was extremely hot.

What interview techniques work to help us understand the subculture?

Not only interviewing the prisoners but also interviewing director and the assistant director give you a better understanding of exactly what the subculture entitles. Each of the prisoners interviewed gave you their personal feelings about the play and it helped me to understand more about prisoners performing this play. Big Hutch described how he felt in a way which the listener could relate to. He made the whole interview worth wild. The author is constently referring to what the outside world views prison as. Like when he talks about gays and straight people in prison.

What are the norms and values of the subculture?
All the people that play the same person form together as a group and are often found hanging around each other. One of the norms that I also caught was that even though the prisoners are performing a play there are still levels of hiearchy as referred to by Derek "Big Hutch" Hutchinson. The prisoners value what they do because they are able to relate the play to real life situations. One prisoner describes how the director lady made them feel human even when they had to bend over butt naked and have someone look up their butt.

Women Behind Bars

Topic: Women Behind Bars

Sources:
Huneven, Michelle. "Susanna Moore: Women Behind Bars." Prison life in The Big Girls (2007):

Rathbone, Cristina. A world apart : women, prison, and life behind bars / Cristina Rathbone.. New York: Random House, 2005.

Rubio, Tena. "Lockdown on Life: Stories from Women Behind Bars ." National Radio Project (2007):

Talvi, Salja. Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System. California: Seal Press (CA), 2007.

Young, Vernetta. Women behind bars : gender and race in US prisons / Vernetta D. Young, Rebecca Reviere.. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006.

Reflection: I choose "Lockdown on Life: Stories from Women Behind Bars” by Tena Rubio because I felt like it was the most interesting source that I found. This source was actual audio and video of real life women behind bars discussing their lives. I felt like this source would be the most useful because I would be able to quote different things from the women’s stories. This source was one in which I could listen to the women and actually hear the pain in their voice. This source really kept me interested and I actually wanted to keep learning more about women behind bars.

Pirandello

The word I choose was Pirandello. At first I had no idea what the word was or could even mean. But after going to library and learning some different research skills I was able to figure out what the word Pirandello actually meant. From the first source I was able to figure out that my word Pirandello was a person. His name is Luigi Pirandello. Just by looking up the general information as in what books were actually about him I learned things before I even read or started looking up information. Also from the first source I learned that he was born I 1867 and died in 1936. I also learned that he wrote during the romantic period. (Baisin) From the second source, which I am not too sure how I found it, I was able to find different quotes from Luigi Pirandello. One quote was “"A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don't need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero?” (Six Characters) Another source I found was from a teacher I believe that wrote an analysis on one of Pirandello’s stories. He stated that, “Nevertheless, this epistemological-and by extension aesthetic-problem proved significant for writers such as Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.” (Lamb) The fourth source that I found I found it the most interesting because it actually interpreted the stories that Pirandello wrote about. From the story Right You Are (If You Think You Are) the source I found stated that the story has” No sex, no death, but there's plenty of passion in this play about identity and relative truths.” (Nichols)

I started my research on Ludacris the same way I start all of my research, by going to ask jeeves. I don’t know why but it seems like whenever I am looking for something I always start there. After typing his name in, of course a whole lot of wrong results came up so on the left side there was a tap that helped narrowed my search to find out just about Ludacris and not all the other random things it popped up. From here I clicked on the third topic and it gave me all the background information on him. I found out where he is originally from, his real name, and other basic background information. After I found this information out I started searching for different songs he wrote and the ones I found interesting I went to AZ lyrics to get the exact words and find out what the songs were really about. Just by finding out what his songs were really about and the environment that he grew up in the information help me out a little with writing my paper. Looking at the lyrics I felt that it was an advantage because I was able to see he his point was behind his music. This helped me to figure out what the argument could be for my paper. There was a disadvantage with me using Ask Jeeves as my starting point. By using it I had to do some extra researching to make sure that the information I found was true. Once I continued or at least seen that the information was in at least two other web sites I believed that it was true. I guess by doing this blog entry I did get some useful information for figuring out an argument for my paper.

Gansta Rap Music

“Clearly, offensive racial name-calling has been generally (but not entirely) stigmatized in dominant American culture. But, by this measure, we can then disown our national culture of racial hierarchy and power and point at the only racists who seem to remain: those who believe in and openly admit to holding and supporting racist ideas and behaviors.” Tricia Rose

After reading the source list from the reading “The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Hip Hop: A Cultural Sociology of Gangsta Rap Music” I decided to choose the book “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” written by Tricia Rose. Ms. Rose has a PhD in American Civilization from Brown University. She lectures to audiences about topics such as music, gender, and black culture. Ms. Rose has been on television, in newspapers and magazines such as Essence. I believe the book Ms. Rose wrote was a good source to use for this reading because she discusses what hip hop is viewed as through the media and different critics. She also looks at the deeper meaning of the lyrics in certain rap songs and not what the videos are being viewed as. Rose starts of the book with, “Rap Music and Contemporary Black Cultural Production Public Enemy's "Can't Truss It" opens with rapper Flavor Flav shouting "Confusion!" over a heavy and energetic bass line. He could just as easily be describing the history of rap.” She is basically trying to show that lyrics can be interpreted differently to people.

Hip Hop Culture

I choose Panjabi MC whose real name is Rajinder Singh Rai. He got his name Panjabi MC from the language he uses in his music. Rajinder uses music from tv series like Knight Rider and combines it with a mix of bhangra. Rajinder said that, "One of my main goals is to fuse the two worlds. I would love to link everybody up, for sure." From reading about Rajinder i could tell that hip hop was not a major thing in his country and most of the people contested the music of Rajinder. Panjabi MC continued to produce, remix and collaborate on different songs. You could tell the it was going to be hard for him to convert his music to his people. The hip hop culture is not much different in over here in america, because Jay Z remixer his music to Rajinder's song and everybody in America loved it so his music will hopefully end up in hit in his country.

peer review

Today during peer review i felt like everything went ok. My group read the papers first then we answered the questions that were on the paper. After answering all the questions we then discussed each others paper. I did learn some things about my paper that helped me to fix my paper and make it better. I still felt like after reading over some of my group member's papers it was hard to give them advice on their paper because their paper was not fully done. The only thing that i would change would be that we get to take the papers with us then the next day of class we would have time to talk about different things in the paper. This way we can read the papers throughly and we would be able to give a better review of the paper to our group members. We seem to always begin to start discussing the papers and then time is up, so taking the papers home to read gives more time in class to discuss. Overall the peer review went ok, things could have been better or it could have been worst so i just today was just an ok day.

logical fallacy

From watching the movie PCU I learned that the way college life is percieved is very different from the way college life actually is. One primary example that I found interesting during the movie was the part when there was a group of people protesting not to eat red meat that red meat is murder, and then the people that stayed in the pit went up to the top of this building and started throwing all sorts of meat down at the protesters. I thought to myself that there is no way people in college would do anything like this and get away with it. The part of the movie we watched in class seemed so exaggerated. The movie was very funny but overall it did not show what college life really is about. This logical fallacy would be "Red Herring."

McCandles

From reading the story about McCandless and all the things he went through I do not think that many people today exist like him, but I do think that there are still some people that are still like Mccandless. McCandless had everything that you could never imagine. He was a graduate student, for one, from one of the most highly honored colleges, Emory University. Just by getting into this college and graduating from this school lets you know that McCandless was an extremely smart person. He also came from a very wealthy background. His parents had $20,000 just for his schooling which he eventually gave the money away to a relief fund. McCandless had everything that anybody could ever want and he felt like he had everything and needed something that he has never experienced. I feel like when people have all the material things you could possibly have they feel like they have to do other things to get a since of satisfaction. Some famous people do things to get attention, too, like when Brittany Spears cut her hair off that was for attention because she has all the money and basically gets whatever she wants. In some ways Brittany Spears and other celebrities like Paris Hilton seem like the people that would end up doing the things that McCandless did. Society has changed drastically over the past 15 years to where our primary goals are affected by the economy. Everything revolves around money. If you don’t have money then life is going to be hard for you. It seemed like McCandless wanted to see what the hard life felt like. He went days without eating just to prove that he could make it. He did not want the help of anybody. For example when McCandless did not want to take the plane ticket offered to him by his friend Gallien. McCandless wanted to take the hard way of doing things. Money matters a lot in this world. If you do not have money you cannot afford to go to school, have a house, or even buy the things you need to survive. Society is going to continue to change drastically. For example the price of gas continues to increase. The economy is increasing all the time. McCandles would not be viewed as the “norm” of the society today. People during today’s society go to school then go to work as a way of living. McCandles did not do that he did go to school but like to do more adventurous things that did not involve money or the material things. He left everything behind and went off of what his heart felt. Now a day people cannot go off what their heart feels because their heart is not going to pay the bills or put food on the table. You have to work in order to survive in America or else you will die of starvation like McCandles did at the end of his short lived and creative life.

AD Campaign

I feel like the ad might have appealed to people in some type of way but not through buying clothes. To me this ad would have been better if it was campaigning something related to clothes but for clothes I do not think that it works. The picture would actually make me afraid to buy the clothes and the people in the picture are not even wearing the clothes so why would I want to buy from this company if the people are not even wearing the company’s clothes. When campaigning for people to wear your clothes you have to make the picture appealing where people are like WOW where can I get those clothes from. You should at least have the people wearing the clothes so that the costumer knows what they are going to look like. I really feel like this ad has anything to do with clothes it actually scared me the first time I saw it. If the ad was placed in a campaign to promote the prevention of AIDS I believe it would have been more affective, because people back then did not know a lot about AIDS so the picture would have showed them the AIDS can affect anybody in the world and that people need to learn about this disease to protect themselves from becoming infected. In some way I can see that the ad is trying to promote informing people about AIDS so that they know what you could possible look like but I am still confused on how it would help the company’s promotion of their clothes. In some ways I think that they ad was used to scare people of the effects of AIDS. Promoting AIDS the ad does a great job but the promotion of clothes I think the ad is suffering the promoters should have choose a different way to promote their clothes. I personally do not like the ad and I would have loved to see if the sales rate of the clothing company went up or down because of this ad. I really do not know how the sales would have been affected because some people may interpret the picture differently than I am some people may like how strong the picture is and really like what it stands for, but some people on the other hand, like me, probably would not understand what the ad has to do with selling clothes. It all depends on what you like and what attracts your attention to something to how you would view this ad. The ad does not get my attention to buy clothes mainly because I am not able to see what the clothes look like and the picture is really throwing my attention off from what they mean by the ad and the clothes they are trying to sell. I would strongly agree with the ad if it was promoting what it actually stands for and that is to inform people about what AIDS really is.

My new blog

My new blog!!

My new blog!!