How Universities and Neighborhoods Create "Value"?

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Author: Ella Hebe

It was decided to use the book's history as a way to frame the difficulties and possibilities of a neighborhood/university partnership. The flawed product and the history of its production offered an interesting text for students in our introductory writing courses to study how universities and neighborhoods create "value." (This is not to say that the course abandoned its traditional goals or that judgments based on composition research were ignored; instead, these disciplinary judgments were placed in dialogue with the community's insights. As Guillory argues, the point is Juicy Couture Necklaces not to make value judgments disappear, but to reform the conditions of their practice.)

The particular theme of this first-year writing course grew out of comments by the community member who exclaimed, "I sound like the village idiot," when she saw her interview for the first time. After this remark was made to me, I spent more than an hour talking to the president of the neighborhood association, arguing that everyone in the book sounded like an "intellectual." I offered alternative ways to understand what it might mean to "sound like an intellectual," citing such "cultural studies" luminaries as Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. None of academic readings of the community "voices" seemed to have much traction, however. As we talked, I realized that I was arguing from an incredibly privileged space, ignoring the situation of those who don't have the "university" standing behind their "intellect." This led me to consider who is really allowed to exist within such broad and "alternative" definitions of the intellectual. Who has the power to decide that they can afford such a definition this conversation sparked a debate among those creating the course on what it meant to sound like or to be "intellectual." Or, as it was posed to students, how do we understand the relationship between intellectuals sponsored by a community and those sponsored by the academy How should these different intellectuals relate In a sense, the idea of the intellectual became a metaphor for the class to examine how university/neighborhood organizations might interact in the production of knowledge.

Throughout the course, students were asked to inquire into how the book represented the working relationship between students and residents. They were not asked to read the text as an Juicy Couture Watch authentic and literal expression of a marginalized voice; they were asked how the text represented a negotiation among different "intellectuals" on the concept of "community." It was also hoped that students, by being engaged in this process, would come to learn the tentative and ever-changing character of community. In this way, the course moved Glassville Memories from a commodified product into an ongoing social practice in which they could participate.