Social+Studies+-+Worlds+Within+Walls

Back to Theme toc General Information Explore peoples and cultures in contained environments: the different social dynamics in homes, schools, companies, and even cults and secret societies,past and present. Is it natural for students at schools to divvy themselves up into subgroups—what some call cliques—and, if so, should educators try to stop it from happening, or to otherwise change how students and even their instructors interact? How do companies successfully, and unsuccessfully, manage the transition from one leader to the next? Do some of the world's most successful companies share characteristics with cults, and, if so, is that something to criticize or to to emulate? Does the meaning of "home" vary from place to place, or from time to time? Should more organizations follow the lead of success stories like Google and Pixar and redesign their offices to encourage collaboration? Or is collaboration necessarily better than individual work? Looking toward the future, we'll ask how social dynamics remain the same or change in online settings—such as social networks and even MMORPGs—and whether those online dynamics can have unanticipated real world impacts.

> ==Framing Questions== > ==Don’t Answer the Door: The Interior as Refuge== > ==Inside the Room: Where Things Get Done== > ==No Exit: Behind Lock and Key== > ==The Pantless Future: From the BBS to the MMORPG== > =More Questions to Discuss= = Invisible walls =
 * 1)
 * What role do walls serve in society?
 * What keeps people inside walls? What keeps people out?
 * What is the history of each of the “worlds within walls” below?
 * How do you expect these "worlds within walls" will change in the future?
 * What happens when the walls come down?
 * 1)
 * Houses and Homes
 * Castles and City Walls
 * 1)
 * Schools
 * Secret Societies
 * Companies and Organizations
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 * Prisons
 * Cults
 * Reality TV
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 * Social networks
 * Online gaming
 * Virtual offices
 * 1)
 * How do enclosed environments affect social dynamics?
 * Does the meaning of "home" vary from place to place, or from time to time?
 * Is collaboration always better than individual work?
 * How does the presence of an observer change a group?
 * Do students naturally split into cliques—and, if so, should educators stop them?
 * Are there ideal ways to organize groups of people?
 * Should cults be limited, regulated, outlawed, or embraced?
 * Why do secret societies exist, and why do they choose to be secret?
 * Does leadership work differently in organizations—behind the walls—than in society at large?
 * Do the world's greatest companies share characteristics with cults—and, if so, is that something to criticize or to emulate?
 * Should more organizations follow the lead of success stories like Google and Pixar and redesign their offices to encourage collaboration?
 * Is collaboration necessarily better than individual work?
 * Can online social dynamics can have real world impacts?

The wall of language:
I speak two languages: one I use in my own community and family and one I have had to learn in order to communicate with formally educated middle-class people ... We must begin to honor each other's languages and accept different voices if we are going to build a winning movement ...

The wall of assumptions of knowledge:
People often wrongly assume that others have the same understanding and information about a problem or issue that they do ... When I first became active in the peace movement, I always left meetings feeling stupid because the group seemed to share information that I did not have ...

The wall of simple logistics:
Physical accessibility ... transportation ... child care ... time of meetings ... membership fees ...

The wall of meeting format and organizational structure:
Structure is critical to people's ability to participate and feel included ... In many groups, a lack of explicit structure means that only those people who feel comfortable talking (usually people with privilege) will do so. It's not that low-income people have nothing to say, we just feel that we don't have a way in ...

Moving Walls 15
Moving Walls 15 aims to visually represent the transitional condition of open societies and the promotion and maintenance of democratic values. It is an artistic interpretation of obstacles—such as political oppression, economic instability, and racism—and the struggles to tear those barriers down. Moving Walls 15 includes six photographers covering a range of social justice and human rights issues of significance to the Open Society Foundations. ** Chris Bartlett ** creates portraits of Iraqis who were detained by the United States military and its surrogates and, according to their first-person accounts, subjected to torture and abuse and then released without charges. By juxtaposing descriptions of treatment at Abu Ghraib with straightforward portraits and biographical information, Bartlett reminds us that behind the dehumanizing and anonymous images of torture—such as the infamous photograph of “the man on the box”—are dignified individuals who are not merely victims. Abuse of power is conveyed quite differently in ** Philippe Chancel ** ’s photographs of North Korea, perhaps the most closed society in the world. Chancel offers a window into that country and shows how the leadership’s pervasive misuse of power and depth of narcissism manifests itself in the everyday life of North Koreans. His images, while beautiful and striking, paint a haunting picture of absolute control. ** Lesley Louden ** focuses her camera on Lesotho, a country that has been devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She profiles the work of the African Library Project, which uses literacy and the teaching of English as a way of providing orphaned children with hope and lessons in HIV prevention. ** Shehzad Noorani’s ** photographs of the extreme pollution of the Buriganga River in Dhaka, Bangladesh, depict the suffering of those who make their homes and living on the river. The consequences of environmental problems such as pollution and global warming are spreading in countries marked by prosperity as well as places mired in poverty. The last 16 years since Soviet rule ended in Azerbaijan have been characterized by rapid economic growth and, on the surface, prosperity. With this prosperity comes an ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots, including an increase in slums, pollution, corruption, and displacement. ** James Pomerantz’s ** images reflect this disconnect in society between a vanishing present and an uncertain future. Drawing from his experience growing up in Germany and photographing the fall of the Berlin Wall, ** Kai Wiedenhöfer ** aims his lens at another border, the one separating Mexico from the United States. His images pay witness to a failed U.S. immigration policy which fences and walls cannot fix. The Open Society Documentary Photography Project looks at the nexus between photography and advocacy. Through the Moving Walls exhibit, workshops, grantmaking, and public programs, the project explores how photography can shape public perception and effect social change. [] []

Is wall synonym of limits for societies?

// Walls: Travels Along the Barricades //
Marcello Di Cintio did not set out to write a book about politics. His book was intended as a travelogue – a collection of personal stories about the people who live in the shadow of the physical barriers that human beings have constructed to block themselves off from one another. But the Calgary writer’s journey though Morocco, Israel, Palestine, India, Cyprus, Montreal, Belfast, the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere is much more than a collection of vignettes about lives that have been dictated by the proximity of a wall. It is a denouncement of the stone, steel and barbed-wire structures that have been created to separate peoples on the basis of religion, ethnicity and social class. Mr. Di Cintio said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail that he is thrilled to be one of the nominees for this year’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and also surprised that a travel book was considered. But it is clear, he said, that the nature of disputed boundaries and the walls that define them is very much political. ** What is it about walls that fascinates you and where did this interest begin? ** I was first drawn to the topic after seeing firsthand the wall around the West Bank. I saw it in 2004 for the first time. I had read about it in the media like everyone else but standing in the shadow of this audacious structure it really struck me. And I wondered what was it like to actually be somebody who has to live in the shadow of this thing. After returning home from that trip I started to do a little bit of research and I realized how many of these walls we have built as human societies and how many we are continuing to build. There seems to be an acceleration of the building of these things. That struck me too, because we should be living in a borderless world. For everything else there are no walls ... There are no walls for our economy so we can trade with anyone else around the world. There are no walls around communications. I can pick up my cellphone and call someone in Cairo if I want right now. There are no walls around culture. The same movies and music that are produced in one part of the world are played in the bars and the pubs in another part of the world. ** How did you choose which walls you went to for your book? ** What I wanted to do was to go places where there were so-called ‘important’ walls, walls that people talk about. So Israel-Palestine, of course, and the U.S.-Mexico border, as well at the walls that people don’t talk about so much, the western Sahara being one, and the Indian-Bangladesh fencing along that border being another. And then I wanted to go from big national borders to things more intimate. So going from the U.S.-Mexico border to Belfast where the walls carve the city up into these tiny little enclaves. ** What have you learned about the Canadian experience, then, seeing the walls around the world and seeing the ones here in Canada? Is there something that speaks to Canadians about walls? ** What I wanted Canadians to see is that we have the luxury of standing far away from these things, to see the walls as symbols and as representations. The wall is a symbol of fear, a symbol of hatred, a symbol of failure, all this sort of stuff ... And yet, these places are not representations, they are human societies. For the people who live there, the walls aren’t symbols, the walls are walls. The walls are made of concrete and steel. They are something physical that is standing between them and where they want to be, or a physical structure keeping them out. ** What can you say has been common to all the walls that you visited? ** In every case, the walls fail. They fail to accomplish what they set out to accomplish. Or, at least they fail to accomplish what people have been told they were built for. Every single wall can be defeated and, in my book, I show you ways that people have subverted the walls. I tell those stories all the time. The walls also almost all act as theatre. The walls often project a sense of security which is different to actual security. In every single case the walls create an enemy, they create an us and a them or create an other. And the walls suggest everywhere that whoever is on the other side of this wall is my enemy. Whoever is on the other side of this wall means to do me harm. Even if that’s not true, there is a suggestion that there is something wrong with the people on the other side. I was on the India-Bangladesh border talking to a farmer. And forever that border has meant nothing. At certain parts along that borderline, the people who live on one side and the people who live on the other are the same people. They are in the same families, they speak the same language, they eat the same foods and worship the same gods and read the same poetry. And they never noticed the border before. Now, all of a sudden, there is a triple layer of barbed wire fence on that line. And I heard these farmers telling me “Oh we shouldn’t associate with the people on the other side any more.” And I said: “Why?” And one of the guys said: “They are becoming more Bangladeshi.” And I said: “What does that even mean?” And they didn’t know. And, to me, what was really shocking was how a structure as simple as a fence – what’s more simple a technology, what’s more simple an architecture – but even something as basic as that has the ability to constitute strange emotional effects and complicated emotional and psychological effects on the people living near them. [] [] secret societies [] [] [] cults [] [] [] reality tv and society [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

Resource from Shivang Seth