Throwing Voices

This book is a search for the promises of public education and the places where
these are broken by critics feeding at the academic and professional trough. This book is a
venture in critical auto-ethnography, exploring critique through this ethnographic technique
has allowed me to bring stories to the reader that work to illuminate the personal nature of
educational ethics. It works to fill the gap in education critique where self-examination is
missing. It is a cultural study of five different educational environments. Research in
cultural studies attempts to account for cultural objects under conditions constrained by
power and defined by contestation, conflict, and change. Cultural Studies grapples with the
volatility of cultural happenings. Throwing Voices emphasizes self-reflexivity; an awareness
that scholars and their scholarship are themselves caught up in the social currents and in the
global circulation of meanings being studied. In taking up questions from this perspective,
cultural studies both draws on and develops key strands of contemporary cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction and
poststructuralism, dialogics, subaltern and postcolonial studies . The field also draws on and develops a number of innovative
methodologies: autoethnography, blurred genres of writing, and other new forms of critical research.
Within, I pay homage to satirist Lenny Bruce, and it earned me a one way ticket to scholarly palookaville. I had
actually, not virtually transgressed, in a conference forum where virtual radicalism trumps reality routinely.
I sold cars and write and the intersection between values in education and in this pinnacle of American commerce.
Here is a chronicle of time spent as evaluator in a small Native American school, with an effort to draw attention to the world
of social class, yet catalogue my own complicity in the evaluation game.
And here are my decisions as a state education department bureaucrat, set against the moral universe of the Chicago
poetry slam. Finally, is work to find the truth in a critical race theory, and hopes for solidarity in art, in jazz and in the world of
New Orleans music. All follow the breadcrumbs back through a career to find the source of compassion for working people
and their children, and potential solidarity through a clearer more honest language than the language of higher education and
administration.