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Doing the Right Things
Get PDFThis paper was presented at the 2020 Schools of Thought Conference hosted by the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.In John Tabita’s essay “Doing Things Right versus Doing the Right Things,” he discusses two different approaches in the business management world: tactical thinking and strategic thinking. This opens up an interesting debate between creating the vision and implementing the vision. He offers a fair argument for both approaches. They are beneficial to tackling a problem and fundamental to success in business. Yet there is a critical tension between a tactical thinker who tends to “do things right” and a strategic thinker who is inclined to “do the right things.” “If you do something ‘right,’ but it is the wrong thing to do, your efforts will be futile. Conversely, if you do the ‘right thing,’ but you do it wrong, you will also fail miserably” (Tabita 2011, n.p.). How can we apply this inquiry to architectural pedagogy? The current model of architectural program curricula is based on the tactical approach, predominantly skill-based design education. Therefore, the measure of success in architectural pedagogy of NAAB-accredited programs tends to be solutions for tackling a design problem. While the tactical thinking process is needed and essential, how can we implement the strategic thinking process into our current architecture curricula to promote the idea of “Doing the Right Things”? The research paper is rooted in an upper-division special topics course, Data-Driven Research Methods, and will showcase two projects. The first, Spatial Network Analysis for Oklahoma City Streetcar, is focused on the infrastructure of the streetcar and its effects on the urban environment. The second project, Interactive Podium, uses embedded computing technology to create a visual platform for interaction between users. By developing diverse perspectives of the research process, the architecture curricula can nurture an effective decision-making process and proactively seek the “right things.”Ye
Buddhist Poetics, Beat “Cosmo-Politics,” and the Maker Ethos: Asian Americanist Critiques of Whiteness in Midcentury American Beat Writing
Get PDFBuddhist Poetics, Beat “Cosmo-Politics,” and the Maker Ethos: Asian Americanist Critiques of Whiteness in Midcentury American Beat Writing employs Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “ruin”—which is not just a noun or notion, but also a verb, a mode of criticism—to intervene in the ostensibly well-trodden ground of what is known as “Beat literature.” The project broadly argues for the “ruination” of Beat literature, where ruination means not destruction or annihilation, but a return to an unkempt state (as in the image of a ruined building) that more accurately reflects this literature’s many layers of cultural, interpersonal, and transpacific exchange and extraction. Though many have rightly suggested that Beat literature is broadly Orientalist and transpacific in nature, I reveal the specific cultural appropriations, adaptations, and translations that occurred in this period and in these literary texts: the broadly East Asian cultural materials (like Zen Buddhism) so valued in Beat literature and its social communities were derived not solely from “the East” nor from translated Chinese and Japanese texts, but also from the Asians in America with whom Euro Americans were friends and worked alongside. My chapters on Asian diasporic poetry, letters, and autobiographical writing highlight Beat literature’s connections to ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, applying an interdisciplinary approach to text and culture and bringing forward the cultural productions and expertise of Asian/Americans during this midcentury period. Because I am suggesting the work of Asian/Americans be read alongside other canonical Beat texts, their work destabilizes or “ruins” Beat literature, which has been seen as a body of texts that articulate a political, anticapitalist critique of post-WWII and Cold War-era America, but which I show to be reflective of a specific, European American identity grounded in a politics that does not accommodate the effects of settler colonialism and imperialism. The seeming stability and coherence of the category of “Beat” has only been possible because the work of Asian/Americans in this period was erased, unacknowledged. My project’s major intervention may be found in its combination of critique—where I show how whiteness influenced Euro Americans’ artistic choices and cultural appropriations—and recovery, where I reveal from whom and how these appropriations occurred. Further, I suggest that we begin to analyze American Buddhist writing beyond the limited rubrics formerly available to us in “Beat” and avant-garde literatures and in their communities of reception
