Wednesday, March 28, 2018

A00924 - Linda Brown, The "Brown" of Brown v. Board of Education

Linda Brown Biography

Activist, Civil Rights Activist (1942–2018)
Linda Brown was the child associated with the lead name in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the outlawing of U.S. school segregation in 1954.

Who Was Linda Brown?

Linda Brown was born on February 20, 1942, in Topeka, Kansas. Because she was forced to travel a significant distance to elementary school due to racial segregation, her father was one of the plaintiffs in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, with the Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that school segregation was unlawful. Brown continued living in Topeka as an adult, raising a family and continuing her desegregation efforts with the area's school system. She passed away on March 25, 2018, at age 76.

Early Life and Historic Case

Linda Brown was born on February 20, 1942, in Topeka, Kansas, to Leola and Oliver Brown. Though she and her two younger sisters grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, Linda was forced to walk across railroad tracks and take a bus to grade school despite there being a school four blocks away from her home. This was due to the elementary schools in Topeka being racially segregated, with separate facilities for black and white children.
In 1950, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked a group of African-American parents that included Oliver Brown to attempt to enroll their children in all-white schools, with the expectation that they would be turned away. Oliver attempted to do so with Linda, who was in third grade at the time and barred from enrollment at Sumner Elementary. The strategy was for the civil rights group to file a lawsuit on behalf of the 13 families, who represented different states.
With Brown's name happening to alphabetically top the list of plaintiffs, the case would come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education and be taken to the Supreme Court. The lead attorney working on behalf of the plaintiffs was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Winning 'Brown v. Board of Education'

An aim of the case was to bring down the precedent set up by the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned the idea of "separate but equal" facilities for racial divisions. In 1954, this aim was achieved when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, disavowing the notion of "separate but equal" and concluding that segregated facilities deprived African-American children of a richer, fairer educational experience.

Life After Historic Case

By the time of the ruling, Linda Brown was in junior high, a grade level that had been integrated before the 1954 court ruling. The family moved to Springfield, Missouri, in 1959. Oliver Brown died two years later, and his widow moved the girls back to Topeka. Linda Brown went on to attend Washburn and Kansas State universities and had a family. She went through a divorce and later became a widow after her second husband's death, before her marriage to William Thompson in the mid-1990s. She also worked on the speaker circuit and as an educational consultant.
By the late 1970s, Brown spoke of feeling exploited by the amount of media attention given to the case, with there being limited awareness that she was a human being as opposed to a lofty historical figure. Nonetheless, she continued to speak out on segregation and reopened the Topeka case with the American Civil Liberties Union in 1979, arguing that the district's schools still weren't desegregated. It was eventually ruled by the Court of Appeals in 1993 that the school system was indeed still racially divided, and three new schools were built as part of integration efforts.

Death

Brown passed away in her longtime hometown of Topeka on March 25, 2018. Although her family wouldn't comment, Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer paid tribute to the woman who sparked one of the landmark cases in American history:
"Sixty-four years ago a young girl from Topeka brought a case that ended segregation in public schools in America," he tweeted. "Linda Brown's life reminds us that sometimes the most unlikely people can have an incredible impact and that by serving our community we can truly change the world."

A00923 - Saba Mahmood, Muslim Female Voice in Western Academia

Saba Mahmood: The Muslim Female Voice in Western Academia


Saba Mahmood: The Muslim Female Voice in Western Academia
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Mehrajud din Bhat
Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley and whose work raised certain challenging questions about the relationship between religion and secularism, ethics and politics, agency and freedom died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 56.A brilliant intellectual, academic activist and intellectually engaging female voice of the Muslim world—someone who positively and critically engaged with Eurocentric epistemological assumptions and engaged with certain daunting questions of our time. Professor Mahmood’s work focused, inadvertently with the relationship between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies and focused primarily on the issues of sovereignty, subject formation, law, and gender.
Amid progressively shrill scholarship denouncing Muslim societies, Mahmood — a native of Lahore, Pakistan born in 1962—brought a nuanced and educated understanding of Islam into discussions of feminist theory, ethics and politics. Her publications and presentations are credited with profoundly shaping the scholarship of a new generation of scholars as they develop a thoughtful, knowledgeable and critical approach to religion in modernity. Mahmood held a Master’s degrees in Political Science, Architecture, and Urban Planning She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the University of Chicago. The gifted scholar received various awards and fellowships, including an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, the Carnegie Corporation’s scholar of Islam award, the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Mahmood held visiting appointments at the American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, and Leiden University. She taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Venice School of Human Rights, and Institute of Global Law and Policy.
Her remarkable academic contribution and interest in diverse fields, especially in feminist studies, anthropology and Eurocentric liberal secularism and its influence on Islamic worldview opened a new discourse in the western academia. Her book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, received the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association and was an honourable mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Award from the Middle East Studies Association.
Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal assumptions by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries?
Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, liberalism and post-colonialism. A study of a grassroots women’s piety movement in Cairo, questioned the analytical and political claims of feminism as well as the secular liberal assumptions on the basis of which such movements are often judged her Book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report received the 2016 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.
Mahmood’s work equally constitutes an important intervention at a point in time when secular feminist discourses are increasingly instrumentalized across the political spectrum in anti-Muslim discourses in the ‘Western’ world and in Europe. In the 2006 debates on the Danish cartoons caricaturing Mohammad (SAAS), Mahmood said those who saw the images as merely offensive missed the nature of the injury itself. Within Islam, she argued, in her Is Critique Secular “the attack on the divine image is the same as the attack on the living and embodied self”.
Her most recent book, “Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report”, was featured in a 2016 book forum on TIF. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality. In her introduction to that discussion, she wrote: “My suggestion is not that religious conflict is solely a product of secularism or an inevitable one. But insomuch as secularism is one of the enabling conditions of religious conflict today, it behoves us to understand its paradoxical operations so as to mitigate its discriminatory effects.” The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe.
In the volume, “Is Critique Secular?”, she joined Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown in re-thinking and re-engaging the questions posed by the events like Danish cartoon controversy, the conflict between blasphemy and free speech, and between secular and religious world views. Her remarkable contribution lies in inquiring into the evaluative frameworks at stake in understanding the conflicts between blasphemy and free speech, between religious taboos and freedoms of thought and expression, and between secular and religious worldviews. Mahmood persuasively explored that this narrative largely misses the point in almost every respect. It misunderstands Islam; it misunderstands the liberal political order; and it misunderstands the complex common genealogy of Christianity and secularism. Is the language of the law an adequate mechanism for the adjudication of such conflicts? What other modes of discourse are available for the navigation of such differences in multicultural and multi-religious societies? What is the role of critique in such an enterprise? These are few among the pressing questions addressed in this intellectually engaging work.
Her work has conveyed insightful implications for the philosophical and empirical study of sovereignty, subjectivity and feminist agency, and has led many scholars to reconsider dominant approaches to the law and the modern state, particularly with respect to how religious subjects and groups are governed and defined. Transcending the disciplinary precincts in the humanities and social sciences, her academic contribution has streamlined theoretical and ethnographic inquiry into religion and freedom in modernity, as well as the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and secularism in contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. Mahmood was currently working on a comparative project about the right to religious liberty and minority-majority relations in the Middle East.
Darren Arquero, a former student of Mahmood’s, said: “She was by far my most challenging professor at Berkeley, but also one of the most supportive scholars I encountered. I can’t describe how meaningful her work around religion, gender, and sexuality has been to my work and research. Outside of the classroom, she made herself available in discussing larger goals. The fact that she was able to see me as a holistic person was something I truly admire.”
Saba Mahmood’s scholarship has reasserted the position of women in academia and her intellectually engaging erudition has added a new dimension to diverse narrative in the intellectual discourse of our times. Her death has left a deep void and she will be remembered through her scholarship. Her engagement within academia is applauded and her commitment can be equally inferred from the statements of her contemporaries. As Wendy Brown, a campus professor of Political Science, who previously co-taught a course with Mahmood said “teaching with her was an extraordinary experience”. According to Brown, Mahmood possessed a certain willingness and curiosity toward new ideas that made the classroom a place of “live thinking.” According to Milad Odabaei, a campus anthropology doctoral candidate, Mahmood was known around the world for her contributions to anthropology, critical theory and feminist theory. Her works shaped scholarly debates on modern Islamic politics in addition to feminist theory and practice across the humanities and social sciences, Odabaei said “(She) left an incredible legacy, (and) shaped the life of many young academics profoundly,” Steele said. “I will never be able to teach without it. That legacy of care is going to live on.”
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Saba Mahmood (1962 – March 10, 2018) was an American anthropologist who was the professor of anthropology at University of California, Berkeley.[1] At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.

Career[edit]

Mahmood was born in Quetta, Pakistan in 1962. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998.[2] She also held master's degrees in Political Science, Architecture, and Urban Planning. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the University of Chicago.[1]
Mahmood held visiting appointments at the American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Leiden University. She taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Venice School of Human Rights, and Institute of Global Law and Policy. She was a co-convener of the Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine. Mahmood served on the editorial boards of Representations,[3] Anthropology TodayL'HommeComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Journal of the American Academy of Religion.[4]
Mahmood was the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University,[5] the Carnegie Corporation's scholar of Islam award,[6] the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Her book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject received the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association and was an honorable mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association.[7] Her book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report received the 2016 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.[8] Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.[1]

Overview of work[edit]

Mahmood's work has carried profound implications for the philosophical and empirical study of sovereignty, subjectivity and feminist agency, and has led many scholars to reconsider dominant approaches to the law and the modern state, particularly with respect to how religious subjects and groups are governed and defined.[9]Crossing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences, her work has shaped theoretical and ethnographic inquiry into religion and freedom in modernity, as well as the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and secularism in contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.[10]

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005)[edit]

In Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood offers an ethnography of the women's piety movement in Cairo, Egypt, which is part of a larger Egyptian movement of Islamic political revival and reform. Drawing on this ethnography, the book interrogates the liberal and secular epistemologies that inform dominant understandings of modern Islamic politics, freedom, and agency. The book's key theoretical interventions include examining Aristotelian discourses on ethics as they are taken up in both the Islamic tradition and continental thought; critically engaging anthropological theory on cultural and embodied practice, including the work of Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault; and intervening in feminist theory on agency, gender and embodiment, and particularly through the work of Judith Butler. In these ways, Mahmood interrogates the relationship between bodily practices and bodily form, on the one hand, and ethical and political imaginaries, on the other, while at the same time questioning the presumed separation of the domains of ethics and politics.[11]

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2015)[edit]

In this book, Mahmood challenges liberal conceptions of secularism as religion's opposite as well as celebratory views of secularism as the solution to religious discrimination. Drawing on the intertwined history of secularism in the Middle East and Europe, and extensive fieldwork on the experiences of Copts and Bahais in Egypt, Mahmood explores the conceptual, discursive and lived paradoxes of political secularism. Mahmood concludes that "political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices."[12]

Death[edit]

Mahmood died from pancreatic cancer on March 10, 2018. [13] On her behalf, the Department of Antropology of the University of California said: "Saba Mahmood was a brilliant scholar, cherished colleague, and dedicated teacher and graduate mentor. Along with her ceaseless political passions and trenchant analyses, she keened to the beauty of the wilderness, the poetry of Ghalib, the delights of cooking and sharing excellent food. She cultivated with joyous attention her relationships with family and friends.  She mentored her students with remarkable care and intensity, demanding their best work, listening, responding with a sharp generosity, coming alive in thought, and soliciting others to do the same. In her final months, she affirmed the values of thought and love, leaving now a vibrant legacy that will persist and flourish among all whose lives were touched by her life and work.  She is survived by her husband, Charles Hirschkind, her son, Nameer Hirschkind.[14]

Sunday, March 25, 2018

A00922 - Gary Lincoff, Authority on Mushrooms

Photo
The mycologist Gary Lincoff pointed out a resinous polypore fungus in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx on a mushroom foray in 2011. CreditAlan Zale for The New York Times
Gary Lincoff, a self-taught mycologist whose contagious enthusiasm turned him into a pied piper of mushrooms, died on March 16 in Manhattan. He was 75.
His family said he died after a stroke.
Mr. Lincoff, a philosophy major and law-school dropout, wrote a field guide to North American mushrooms that sold more than a half-million copies. He led mushroom hunts as far afield as Siberia, India and the Amazon and as near to his home as Central Park, two blocks away, where over the course of decades he counted more than 400 species.
Mr. Lincoff taught for more than 40 years at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and instructed Martha Stewart on dredging puffballs in panko bread crumbs to bring out their flavor. He wrote peer-reviewed journal articles and poems and songs about mushrooms, and helped found the countercultural science and fun fair in Colorado known as the Telluride Mushroom Festival.
He was a fungus fanatic who championed the mushroom as food, medicine, soil decontaminator, psychotropic portal and essential link in the eternal cycle of decay and rebirth.
“Just to name mushrooms — after a while it gets sort of boring,” he told an interviewer in 2015. “To know what these mushrooms are doing, that drives me. That keeps me thinking. Every plant I see, every tree I see, I know that there are mushrooms totally involved in the health of those trees.”
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Mr. Lincoff loved exotic fantastical-looking mushrooms with names like violet-branched coral and eyelash cup and bearded tooth and wolf’s-milk slime, and he loved nondescript little brown blots that sprouted on dead sticks. He was often asked which mushroom was his favorite, and he invariably replied, “The one that’s in front of me right now.”
“He inspired literally thousands of people to overcome their fear of fungi,” said Paul Stamets, another member of the tiny cohort of celebrity mycologists. “No matter how dumb your question was, he never humiliated you, he never put you down. He never believed there was such a thing as a stupid question.”
Gary Henry Lincoff was born on Oct. 3, 1942, in Pittsburgh to Leonard Lincoff, an optometrist, and the former Bette Forman. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 with a bachelor’s in philosophy, a passion for Thoreau and an unfulfilled sense of purpose.
He left law school at George Washington University because “he didn’t admire his professors,” his wife, Irene Liberman, said. She met him in 1967, when he was doing graduate work in English literature in Pittsburgh.
Photo
Mr. Lincoff, who led mushroom hunts as far afield as India and Siberia, examined the day’s haul after the 2011 Bronx foray.CreditAlan Zale for The New York Times
In addition to Ms. Liberman, a graphic designer, Mr. Lincoff is survived by their son, Noah, and a younger brother, Bennett.
The couple moved to New York in 1968, and Mr. Lincoff set out to write a novel about a draft dodger who waits out the Vietnam War living in Central Park. In his research he got hung up on a question: What would the protagonist eat?
“I took six months off to learn everything there was to know about survival in the city — wild foodwise,” Mr. Lincoff told The New York Times in 1978. “I began to see that every tree, every weed, wasn’t alike. I got into minutiae.”
He and Ms. Liberman led forays to gather edible plants for suppers of acorn burgers, pokeweed shoots and Juneberry pies. In 1971, the couple went on their first walk with the New York Mycological Society. “I said, ‘Let’s promise not to eat anything,’ and we ate nine wild mushrooms that day,” Ms. Liberman recalled. Mr. Lincoff had found his calling.
He steeped himself in mushroom studies and eventually persuaded the New York Botanical Garden to let him teach despite his lack of formal credentials. In 1978, he published a book on toxic and hallucinogenic mushroom poisoning and was soon recruited to write the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, which was published in 1981 and is in its 31st printing. He served for nine years as president of the North American Mycological Association.
(Mr. Lincoff had never tried hallucinogenic mushrooms when he wrote the poisoning book, Ms. Liberman said, but when he finally did, in the 1980s, “He was delighted.” At least once, he found the hallucinogen Gymnopilus junonius, known as “laughing gym,” in his beloved Central Park. “I came out of the park with a big cluster of it and I walked smack into three cops,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is it.’ But they just said, ‘You better be careful if you don’t know those.’ I said, ‘I’m going to take these back and study them.’ ”)
Mr. Lincoff helped found the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 1981. It was conceived by a Denver radiologist and mushroom-lover, Emanuel Salzman, as an alternative to stuffier mycological conferences.
“We had an ‘Edibility Unknown’ party every year that would horrify serious professional mycologists,” said the alternative-medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil, another festival co-founder. No one ever got sick, Dr. Weil said, though the pioneers discovered that one species tasted like old tires.
Mr. Lincoff was in demand as a tour leader and headed expeditions to more than 30 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. When he was back in New York, he served as lecture coordinator and animating presence of the New York Mycological Society. Three years ago, he decided that unlike other mushroom clubs, the society should hold walks year round.
This past New Year’s Day, with the mercury around 10 degrees, he led a walk in Central Park.
“We walked for two hours and found almost 50 species,” said Vivien Tartter, one of Mr. Lincoff’s many acolytes. Someone found a cluster of Eutypella scoparia — tiny hairlike tufts too small to be seen without a loupe — growing on a twig. “Gary was very excited.”