This project had two round of pre-drafting materials. The first was my initial proposal which is found below:

Initial Proposal- Project 2

The NAC- Newtown Athletic Club

The NAC is a very swanky, upscale fitness and lifestyle center in my town. I think that it combines very modern and global elements such as the training techniques and fitness classes available there with familiar staples of Newtown such as products in the café from local farms and summer staffs made up largely of local high school kids. Entire families are often NAC members because the fitness center offers something for people of all ages and especially caters to the demographics of the town- usually younger families or older couples. It is also constantly planning, fundraising for, and constructing expansions which could suggest further attempts to modernize. I think that the NAC has the best interest of the locals but is by and large one of the more modern and consistently updated buildings in my town which suggests a conflict in local and global perspective.

Question: Is the NAC successful in balancing local and global interests for its own profit and also the interest of its members? What evidence suggests this?

Newtown Borough

For this topic, I would delve into the history of my town and connect it to the effects on consumerism and modernization in the Borough. Newtown had some significance during the Revolutionary War and as a result there are strong preservation efforts and laws in effect there. Most prominently, buildings in the Borough, whether they are businesses or private homes, are not allowed to make changes to their exterior without consulting with the historical society in order to preserve the appearance. The town has also done a lot to eschew large chains from coming in and prefers supporting small businesses for food and boutiques. Finally, a lot of small businesses overtly try and work the angle that they are authentic to the town’s roots and fashion themselves to have a patriotic, classic, all-American feel in order to attract customers. I think that Newtown, specifically the Borough, makes a lot of effort to preserve localism.

Question: Are the efforts and work put towards preserving the historical and traditional aspects in a small town such as Newtown worth it to anyone but the locals?

Professor Van Kley also provided feedback on this initial proposal and his feedback is found below:

The NAC looks like a potentially interesting case, Amrit. The localist leanings of the club (provisioning; community building; user-owned) make it relate pretty clearly to Hess (and maybe Smith and Kutz). I’d be interested to hear what you archive is. I could see the project becoming difficult if you don’t have access to a rich pool of information. Some of the questions you ask about the Borough seem a bit too broad. Questions about the town’s ID and the users relationship to older narratives about what that ID is sound like questions that connect to the debate about regionalism. I’d rather see you focus on questions that have to do with contemporary social patterns. If there’s a controversy about a specific building or a zoning ordinance, that could be a potential topic around which to refocus.

The second step of our pre-drafting materials was a revised proposal. I drastically changed directions in this second proposal and we not only had to refine our proposal but also include the beginnings of our archive for the project. This newer proposal is found below:

Note: This idea is not one of the two from the initial proposal. I was inspired by the brief discussion in class yesterday about the Occupy movement and wanted to attempt this see if I could fit this controversy into a discussion of localism. If there are any issues with this topic, I can come into office hours Monday morning to try and hash them out. I could also go back to the drawing board later this week/weekend and have a revised-revised proposal. This topic does interest me and I wanted to try and make this argument. 

TOPIC: My topic is the Carry that Weight movement, started by Emma Sulkowicz, a recent Columbia graduate. She was raped in 2012 by a classmate and since then has spoken out about campus sexual assault and rape culture. As a part of her senior project, she carried around her dorm room mattress going through all of her daily tasks to emphasize that the weight of living beyond sexual assault is oppressive and never leaves you. Throughout her time, students would help her carry the mattress across campus and it also sparked many protests nationwide with students leaving their mattresses on President’s lawns and large common spaces at various universities in a show of solidarity. Her cause and protest gained national attention and eventually her attacker countersued the university for being “complicit” in slandering him by not stopping Sulkowicz’s protest. Her attacker was never actually charged with any wrongdoing, legally or by the university, but his legal suit still stands. They graduated together and Sulkowicz carried her mattress all the way through commencement. I think that this topic pertains to local culture because I feel like a protest like this could only happen at an establishment as open as an Ivy League school. Sulkowicz’s project had to be approved by at least one professor, which it was, and since then she’s made multiple other projects about sexual assault and rape and her expression has not been stifled by any administration. While this movement originated at a very open place, some schools that hosted protests were very different, such as large state schools, but because the movement originated elsewhere they were able to adopt it and support the message. Overall, I want to say that the strength of the place and environment that begins a movement could allow it to transcend perceived national boundaries to the protest spreading.

Archive:

Andrews, Caroline. “‘Carry that Weight’ National Day of Action at Columbia and Beyond.”    University WireOct 30 2014. ProQuest. Web. 28 Jan. 2016 .

Izadi, Elahe. Columbia Student Protesting Campus Rape Carries Mattress during Graduation.           Washington: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post, 2015. ProQuest. Web. 28  Jan. 2016.

Kaplan, Sarah. Columbia University Sued by Male Student in ‘Carry that Weight’ Rape Case. Washington: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post, 2015. ProQuest. Web. 28          Jan. 2016.

Conversation:

Right now the conversation about the Occupy movement is probably the closest scholarly conversation I would draw from because it inspired me to look into this topic and try and adapt it. I’d probably use similar ideas about how the movement draws from a local incident and can use the power from it to spread.

Questions:

About the case- How have the people and administration at Columbia divided over showing support for/siding with Sulkowicz or her assailant and why have they divided in this way?

Broader question: How did the local culture at Columbia allow for a movement like this to grow and give it the freedom and publicity to spread and make the impact that it did?

Professor Van Kley provided both verbal and written feedback on this proposal as well. Below is his written commentary:

Hi Amrit, We chatted in class about this project. It’s definitely viable. Hannah has a related project; so I tried to re-create a part of our in-class chat to help her think through what she might do with her project. I’ll modify that note to her slightly here in order to re-iterate what we discussed in class: Sulkowicz operated locally, but she and the larger CtW movement are very much invested in re-shaping global/national trends and perceptions. So, they don’t seem like a localist movement in the traditional sense. However, their activism relies on manipulating public space. Sulkowicz “occupied” that public space in a particular way that disrupted the everyday experience of that space (the CtW activists operated similarly). In that sense, I think their activism is local (if not localist). What you might do to help yourself generate clear questions about the local elements of their work is to find a critical conversation about similar sorts of locally embedded activism. The following search terms might put you in the right direction: occupation protests/activism | guerrilla art/activism | performance art protest/activism | graffiti activism | activism/protest and public space | spatial disruption and activism/protest