Stanford University Press Blog

The Creator’s Journey

The creative process is about much more than the “aha!” moment.

by MATTHEW A. CRONIN

Public domain via Pixnio.

If there is a part of the creative process that captures people’s imagination, it is the moment of inspiration. Stories of creativity via a sudden spark of inspiration abound; I am sure you, dear reader, can think of some as you are reading this. These stories trace the emergence of some fabulous invention or discovery back to a single fundamental insight—some breakthrough idea that grows out of a serendipitous, revelatory moment that others could not imagine. Not to be a killjoy (for we so love these stories), but it turns out that this fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality. But on the positive side, there is a better alternative—one that may be more useful if you actually want to take the creator’s journey.

Kepler—a case study in creativity

An example that illustrates the journey, and how it can be overlooked, was astronomer Johannes Kepler’s seventeenth-century “insight” about planetary motion. At the time, the universe was all about circles, which were both perfect and heavenly. Orbital paths were modeled as “circles-within-circles.” Once Kepler had had his say, however, he had literally changed the universe, or at least how people saw it. His insight could be summed up in a single idea: planets moved in elliptical orbits at a varying speed, not in circular orbits at a constant speed. But while Kepler’s journey may have ended at an idea, it did not start there.

The fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality.

Christian Theology’s Economy of Conquest

Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the American church’s capitalist God of war.

by DEVIN SINGH

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

As an extension of his fight against racist laws at home, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly critical of US policies abroad. Indeed, many speculate that King’s progressively strident critique of US militarism and intervention, particularly in Vietnam, and his challenge to American market priorities were factors that accelerated plans for his assassination—the 50th anniversary of which we recently marked as a nation. Among his many detractors were white clergy who, already incensed at King’s challenge to segregation and Jim Crow, were dumbfounded that he would move to oppose US warmongering and to call out the evils of capitalism. As King’s confrontation revealed, their theology was not only implicated in their racist vision of society, but also in a worldview that prioritized economic supremacy by any means necessary.

On April 4th, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was murdered, King gathered with other religious leaders to protest the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, where he delivered his famous sermon, “Beyond Vietnam.” As he began, King addressed his critics, those who asked, “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?”; “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” To such complaints, King responded: “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

China’s Political Paradox

The hallmark tensions in Chinese politics today first took shape in the 1911 Revolution.

by XIAOWEI ZHENG

Public gathering in Chengdu on November 27, 1911, for the Great Han Sichuan Military Government. United Church Archives, Toronto.

In the winter of 1911, legendary revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen returned to China after years of exile and found the country in the grip of a sweeping transformation. Between October 10, when junior officers in the Hubei New Army mutinied in Wuchang, and November 22, when the Sichuan constitutionalists declared independence from the Qing, fourteen provinces had severed their ties with the government of the Manchu dynasty.

Political elites throughout China were defecting from the court en masse. Among the most influential were the constitutionalists from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, who proposed a plan for uniting all of the southern forces into one polity under the banner of republicanism. It was they who initiated the truce between the Qing Beiyang Army and the revolutionary armies in Wuchang, elected the southern delegates to negotiate with the northern leader Yuan Shikai, promoted Sun Yat-sen as the first provisional president of the republic, and penned the abdication edict for the Qing court.

 

Imperial edict for abdication. Public domain.

 

This edict, which claimed that “the power to govern is now transferred to all in the country (tongzhiquan gongzhu quanguo)” and that “a constitutional republic is now the state system of our country (gonghe lixian guoti),” signaled the end of the monarchy and the birth of the Chinese republic. This seismic political shift was premised on the belief that “republicanism had been accepted by public opinion (yulun) in China,” and the constitutionalists looked to the federalist system of the United States as their model, vowing to “immediately emulate the United States of America in calling upon a national convention, regarding it as our temporary authoritative legislature.”

Crowdsourcing American History

A free, open, online history textbook offers a democratic alternative to the American past.

by JOSEPH L. LOCKE and BEN WRIGHT

George Caleb Bingham, “The County Election,” 1852.

Exploding costs plague higher education, and textbooks are at the center of this crisis. Over the past forty years, textbook prices have jumped fifteen-fold—three times the rate of inflation, and the College Board has found that the typical student now spends $1,200 every year on textbooks and supplies. Community colleges and other educational institutions catering to nontraditional or first-generation college students still rely heavily on traditional textbooks, which means that the very students least able to afford these ever-increasing costs are the most likely to bear them. Moreover, many students forego buying their textbooks altogether— found that two-thirds of students reported not buying a book because of cost, and nearly all of those did so knowing that this would affect their grade. As our campuses ring with calls for authentic assessment, we are left to wonder how authentic our assessments can be if over sixty percent of our students determine that they cannot afford to earn an A.

Our goal was not simply to create a free textbook. We also wanted to collaborate to make a better textbook.

Enter The American Yawp, the first massively collaborative, open U.S. history textbook produced by scholars of American history. We conceived of the project while teaching at community colleges in the greater Houston area as graduate students at Rice University. Frustrated at the high costs and occasionally uneven quality of existing U.S. history textbooks, we were shocked to find that an open alternative didn’t yet exist. And so we went to work. Our project was designed to achieve two goals: the first was to address the soaring costs of textbooks by creating an open alternative; the second was to experiment with new collaborative methods to build a textbook that was not only cheaper, but better.

The Promise of Peer Coaching

Helping relationships between peers can lead to significant breakthroughs.

by ILENE C. WASSERMAN and KATHY E. KRAM

Public domain via Pxhere.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts a small educational nonprofit called Breakthrough Greater Boston is changing the academic trajectories for underserved middle school students. The organization, which offers year-round, tuition-free instruction outside of regular school hours recruits college and high school students to teach in the program and act as coaches for the younger students. Breakthrough calls this its “students teaching students” model, and the resulting success of its programs have been phenomenal: the high school graduation rate for its students is 98 percent. Better still, college-bound students at Breakthrough—which has strong partnerships with local universities likes Tufts and MIT—have a college graduation rate of over 95 percent.

Peer Coaching at Work » delivers a hands-on guide to a powerful relational learning technique.

What the success of Breakthrough teaches us is how valuable peer coaching can be. We define peer coaching as a focused relationship between individuals of equal status who support each other’s personal and professional development goals, like the student teachers and their pupils at Breakthrough or that colleague you collaborate with closely at your office. Whether in not-for-profit entities such as Breakthrough, in learning circles to support CEO development, or in health care, business, or government sectors, people are forming collaborative relationships to support their growth both in and outside of the workplace. These helping relationships involve two or more individuals who supportively learn from, actively listen to, and judiciously question each other, which leads to breakthroughs that otherwise may lie dormant and prevent growth and effectiveness. In today’s turbulent, globalized, and complex world, collaborative relationships with peers are an important resource for tackling the challenges we face.

The Origins of the U.S. Surveillance State

In the U.S., carrying out military interventions abroad has undermined freedom at home.

by CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE and ABIGAIL R. HALL

Photo by Jonathan McIntosh. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have been met with outrage in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they themselves recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration. These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s.

The Secret Society and the Sociologist

What can the fieldwork of a plucky sociology student reveal about rural Chinese history?

by DI WANG

Today's Chongyiqiao (Hope Township). Photo by Di Wang.

In 1939, residents of Hope Township, a rural village close to Chengdu, watched Lei Mingyuan, a leader of the local chapter of a secret society called the Paoge, execute his own teenage daughter on the strength of a mere rumor that she and a young tailor who worked for his family were having an illicit affair. Despite the brutal and brazen nature of his crime, however, Lei did not face any charges; lynching was prevalent and the rule of law was problematic at the time. Six years later, in the summer of 1945, Shen Baoyuan, a female college student in the Department of Sociology at Beijing’s Yenching University, arrived in Hope Township to conduct fieldwork and research on the social organization of rural secret societies. She met Lei and his family and documented rare insights not only about the tragic murder but about the inner workings of the Paoge. This work never became published or recognized—at least, that is, until now.

I had wanted to write a book on the Paoge as early as the 1980s when I worked on a social history of Qing Sichuan. About a decade ago, a friend of mine found Shen’s report and offered me a copy. I realized that Shen’s report was useful, but as I was concentrating on another project at the time, I gave it no immediate thought, and the report languished on my shelf for years. During the spring of 2009, while teaching history at Berkeley, I poured over all “cultural and historical materials” (wenshi ziliao) from provincial and county to district administrations in Sichuan on the shelves of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. This provided me with rich background information on the Paoge, and in 2014, with another book nearing completion, I began to give serious thought to a project on this influential and longstanding secret society. That summer, I taught a graduate seminar at East China Normal University in which I used several classic works of micro-history such as The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. These works inspired me to attempt a micro-history of my own, based on Shen Baoyuan’s investigation.

The Dreamers’ Fight

A syllabus for understanding the challenges facing undocumented youth.

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, September 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted provisional work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented youth, has been at the center of a maelstrom of political debate. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012 and rescinded by President Donald Trump in 2017, the DACA program and those who are protected under it have been sent into a tailspin of uncertainty as Congress remains gridlocked on long-term immigration reform. This stalemate triggered a government shutdown in January, and though President Trump gave Congress a March 5th deadline to hammer out a new policy, no progress on a legislative solution has yet to be made.

In the meantime, challenges from federal courts in New York and California have issued injunctions against terminating the program, allowing those young immigrants who already have DACA permits to continue applying for renewals. This stay, however, is only temporary. If no long-term solution is reached, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could find themselves unable to legally work and eligible for deportation.

For a more detailed look at the recent political and cultural history that brought us to this moment, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that explore the rhetoric, policies, and activism around the present US immigration debate.

Tribalism in the Classroom

How British educational policy exacerbated social fragmentation in Palestine.

by SUZANNE SCHNEIDER

Inside a classroom in what was then British-ruled Palestine, circa 1925. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 1946 the Director of Education for the Government of Palestine, Jerome Farrell, penned a lengthy memorandum about the state of Jewish and Arab education. Directed to the Colonial Office in London and written during the waning days of the British Empire, Farrell’s memo came in the wake of two commissions (the McNair Commission and Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry) that examined the role of education in producing Palestine’s impending political crisis. One of the recurring themes in both commissions’ reports was the improper politicization of Palestine’s school for nationalist ends, a matter about which Farrell found himself in total agreement. What he could not agree with was the recommendation—found in both reports—that the government should grant both Jewish and Arab communities increased educational autonomy going forward. As he wrote,

if unselfishness, peace and goodwill are principal aims of education it will be difficult to reconcile the two relevant recommendations which each Report in effect makes and which, bluntly stated, are (a) that a ‘fiery nationalism’ shall be eradicated from the schools, (b) that control of education shall be vested in fiery nationalist politicians.

The attempt to keep politics out of the classroom did in fact represent a very real form of colonial power, one which labored for the preservation of British rule.

Caught in the Political Churn

DACA beneficiaries stand on unstable ground as March 5th deadline passes without action.

by ALEXIS M. SILVER

Demonstrators protest the recission of DACA in Los Angeles, September 5th, 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration announced the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set a date of March 5th, 2018 to begin phasing out the program. DACA, implemented under President Obama as an action of prosecutorial discretion in 2012, offers protection from deportation and work permits to approximately 700,000 young immigrants, often referred to as the DREAMers, who were brought to the United States as children. No new applicants were accepted after the September 5th announcement, and beneficiaries began to lose their protections as Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement offering a legislative replacement for DACA. However, in January and February of 2018, two separate federal courts in San Francisco and Brooklyn blocked the termination of the program, allowing beneficiaries to renew their protected status under DACA.

Despite widespread public support for DACA beneficiaries across the political spectrum, a legislative fix seems unlikely in the immediate future.

The protections provided by the court decisions offer beneficiaries some breathing room, but they are hardly a long-term solution. When the Supreme Court declined the Trump administration's request to take up the case directly from the lower courts, it ensured that the March 5th expiration date would not mark the definitive end of the policy, but it also foreshadowed a continuing battle over the ultimate fate of DACA. In the meantime, beneficiaries remain in a state of uncertainty as to what their futures may hold: a career and a sense of membership or civic disenfranchisement and the threat of deportation. Depending on where they reside, moreover, beneficiaries already have access to dramatically different opportunities.

The Dead Negev Doctrine

By manipulating law and geography Israel is dispossessing the Bedouins of their historic lands.

by OREN YIFTACHEL, AHMAD AMARA, and ALEXANDRE KEDAR

Photo by Physicians for Human Rights. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

"When will the state understand that we are here to stay? These are our lands for hundreds of years; everybody knew this—the Ottomans, the British and the Israelis. These lands are our soul, our life, our identity. Even if they demolish Araqib 100 more times, we shall return". (Sayach Altouri, Shaikh of 'Araqib, January 4, 2018).

These words were spoken at a special event convened in the small village of ’Araqib following the release of the shaikh from a short period of custody for "trespassing" on his ancestors land. It also followed the 124th demolition of their village by the authorities, and the reconstruction of its modest homes by the Bedouin residents.

’Araqib is but one of many flashpoints in the protracted conflict over land in the Negev, where dozens of indigenous Bedouin communities, numbering 110,000 people, are still living in localities that are not recognized or planned, with their residents subject to more than 1,000 house demolitions per year (that’s four times the number of demolitions that occur in the occupied West Bank). The indigenous communities, who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, are denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads or schools.

Borders and Barriers

Economically anxious countries are tightening borders and imposing trade barriers but to no avail.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Mexico-US border wall at Tijuana, Mexico. Photo by Tomás Castelazo. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was hailed as the beginning of the end of all walls and barriers separating individuals and peoples. Yet as of 2007, just eighteen years later, Europe and its Eurasian margins saw the creation of about 16,600 miles of new political borders, which means that for every mile of one dismantled border (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new borders have been built.

Why so? Because the new international disorder, precipitated by the dissolution of the Cold War, has led to more wars, more walls, and a more disunited world. It has also accelerated the shift of power from the old industrialized countries to the “emerging” nations: starting in the 1970s, the countries that used to dominate the world witnessed the rise of an increasing number of new international competitors. The top global companies of the Fortune 500 between 2001 and 2017 reveals the trend: the number of North American and European companies that make the cut have declined, while Asian-based companies (from China in particular) have steadily filled the breach.

For growing sectors of the American population and, more generally, the population of the old industrialized countries, this shift of power translates into uncertainty and fear. This is not necessarily because their living standard has worsened; on the contrary, in terms of per capita product, the United States is the ninth richest country in the world—a distinction it held in 1999 at the pinnacle of the economically robust Clinton years. But compared against its performance in 1999, the United States slightly closed the gap between itself and the other eight richest nations in 2016, when it experienced an increase in its per capita product relative to those countries. What these populations feel, fear, and know, however, is that their living standards cannot improve anymore, and that sooner or later they may very well worsen.

Many of those same countries eager to close their borders and expel foreign-born residents could stand to benefit greatly from immigration.

The Prophetic Dreamer

A centuries-old story casts light on the cognitive potentials of our sleeping minds.

by KELLY BULKELEY

"View of Toledo" by El Greco, circa 1599–1600.

On May 25, 1590, by direct order of King Philip II, the Spanish Inquisition arrested a young, uneducated woman from Madrid named Lucrecia de León on charges of heresy and treason. She was brought to a secret prison in Toledo, interrogated, and tortured to make her confess her guilt. The evidence against her was overwhelming. She had been caught conspiring with known rebels, publicly slandering the king, defying direct orders from the church, and stirring up dissent against the imperial government.

Most damning was the collection of Lucrecia’s dreams, carefully recorded by a group of priests interested in apocalyptic omens who came to her house each morning to transcribe what she had seen the previous night. The dreams were filled with scandalous political and religious imagery, and Lucrecia had been openly sharing them with people at the highest levels of Spanish society.

The trial of Lucrecia de León is a story of a young woman defiantly dreaming truth to power.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. The Inquisition had dispatched thousands of heretics to their eternal fate based on far less evidence than this. And yet, Lucrecia’s trial did not end quickly. It dragged on for five years, one of the longest trials in Inquisition history, and the final verdict against her deviated in several ways from the normal process of punishment.

Why did the Spanish Inquisition, at the height of its brutally oppressive power, struggle for so long to resolve Lucrecia’s case?

Because her dreams had come true.

Exploring the Zohar

A syllabus for plumbing the depths of a multi-volume masterpiece of Jewish mysticism.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Ever since it emerged mysteriously in thirteenth-century Spain, the Zohar has enthralled, confounded, challenged, and enraptured readers. Composed mostly in lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar is a mosaic of biblical interpretation, medieval homily, spiritual fantasy, and imaginative commentary written in the form of a mystical novel in which a group of rabbis wander through the hills of Galilee, discovering and sharing secrets of the Torah along the way.

This immense compendium of writings, widely regarded as the apex of medieval Jewish mysticism’s intellectual and literary prowess, forms the centerpiece of the kabbalistic tradition within Judaism today and is regarded by many as sitting alongside the Torah and Talmud as a sacred text in its own right. Comprising twelve large volumes, the Zohar is virtually an entire body of literature, and after two decades of painstaking translation, all volumes are now available in an authoritative English translation (a limited edition collector’s set is also available). No longer bound by its ancient Aramaic vault, the English translation found in The Zohar: Pritzker Editions opens myriad avenues of religious and academic exploration to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

To help guide curious seekers through this monumental text, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that will help unpack the many subtleties, splendors, and mysteries of the Zohar as well as the history of medieval Jewish mysticism.

A Critique of the Critique of Finance

Critics of neoliberal capitalism rarely recognize the productive power of speculation.

by MARTIJN KONINGS

CC0 via Pixabay.

If there is one theme that unites the various critiques of contemporary finance, it is the emphasis on its speculative character. Financial growth is said to be driven not by the logic of efficient markets, but rather by irrational sentiment, “animal spirits” that do not respect fundamental values.

Capital and Time » advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments.

Emphasizing the role of volatility in contemporary capitalism (evident at the time of writing, as the stock market is experiencing a downturn) is important as an antidote to notions of market efficiency and equilibrium. But it is a mistake to think that it provides a sufficient basis for effective critique. Predictions regarding the limits or collapse of neoliberal finance have simply not enjoyed a good track record. Over and over, the contemporary financial system has proven capable of sustaining higher levels of speculative activity than anticipated. This has certainly been true of the past decade. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason is my attempt to make sense of this—that is, to understand what might be wrong or missing in the existing heterodox critique of speculation, and to advance a more accurate understanding of the role of uncertainty, risk, and speculation in contemporary capitalism.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value. Although “essentialist” (or “foundationalist”) modes of explanation have been under fire across the social sciences for several decades now, when it comes to the critique of finance they have had considerable staying-power: without a notion of real value, it often seems, we lose any objective standard against which to assess the speculative gyrations of capitalist markets.

At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value.