Ryan McGuire | University of California, Los Angeles (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Ryan McGuire

This repository is centered on the street life and history of Los Angeles through the lens of the... more This repository is centered on the street life and history of Los Angeles through the lens of the visual culture many take for granted. By doing this, we will study how politics, social struggle, and commercialization have been inscribed in our built environment. By studying history in this way, we will be seeing how race relations, politics, social struggles of different minorities (including the Chicano peoples), and commercialization's contribution to the visual culture. This project will create a repository for giving downtown and the greater Los Angeles area an historical background in the context of its visual culture.

On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young frie... more On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young friends grazing Riverbank Park along the West Harlem landscape. The twenty-eight acre park is home to an Olympic-sized pool, an athletic complex with a gym, tennis and handball courts, a cultural theater holding eight hundred people, and a covered skating rink where people can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. This place did not come about from the plans of elected politicians. Nor is it the product of any philanthropic interest looking to extend their name into new territory. Riverbank State Park was built precisely as a result of what lies underneath this haven of green, a water treatment facility servicing some one million residents of Upper Manhattan—North River Water Treatment Plant—and the surrounding residents’ response to this being built in their backyard.

Public higher education has seen a drastic shift in the makeup of its professoriate over the last... more Public higher education has seen a drastic shift in the makeup of its professoriate over the last several decades. Whereas in 1975 contingent faculty made up 55% of all professors in America, that number rose to just over 75% by 2011. This disinvestment in tenured faculty has concrete consequences for the working conditions of the professoriate, given that contingent faculty often work under conditions that erode traditional practices and norms of academic life, including shared governance, academic freedom, and the exercise of peer review to name a few. My question is this: which policies, practices, or institutional arrangements have been most effective for improving the working conditions of contingent faculty on public college and university campuses? I hypothesize that contingent working conditions will be most positive at universities and colleges that have unionized non-tenure track faculty and whose members are actively involved, where faculty and administration have worked cooperatively for change, and where the administration has taken action to transition adjunct positions into tenure-track positions. In order to test this, I will take two cases and assess the active policies taken to address the issues of contingent faculty, followed by a discussion of each one’s manner of implementation. In the end, I hope to provide a model of the prevailing best practices alongside the most feasible manners of implementing them.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, ... more Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, although not everyone functions as an intellectual. With this definition, Gramsci conceptually divides the intellectual, firstly as one who has the capacity to critically engage with one’s life situation, and secondly as the one who functions as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was”. Such a problematic aim, I will argue, is rooted in Gramsci’s dated framework, which I will reveal through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity-based politics.
En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics. Ultimately, this study should be read as an update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual-governing activity for modern times.

Audeamus Honors Journal, Jun 2013

In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with addressing these topics: reasserting, in synchrony... more In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with addressing these topics: reasserting, in synchrony with much contemporary literary theory, the ambiguity of the author—or “founder”—of autism discourse; giving one brief genealogical account of the first articulators of autism; the underlying definition of autism as it is understood through this lens and one other; and lastly I will draw on a few possibilities that this paradigm opens up for personhood in the 21st century.

Conference Presentations by Ryan McGuire

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, ... more Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, although not everyone functions as an intellectual. With this definition, Gramsci conceptually divides the intellectual, firstly as one who has the capacity to critically engage with one’s life situation, and secondly as the one who functions as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was” . Such a problematic aim, I will argue, is rooted in Gramsci’s dated framework, which I will reveal through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity-based politics.
En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics. Ultimately, this study should be read as an update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual-governing activity for modern times.

This repository is centered on the street life and history of Los Angeles through the lens of the... more This repository is centered on the street life and history of Los Angeles through the lens of the visual culture many take for granted. By doing this, we will study how politics, social struggle, and commercialization have been inscribed in our built environment. By studying history in this way, we will be seeing how race relations, politics, social struggles of different minorities (including the Chicano peoples), and commercialization's contribution to the visual culture. This project will create a repository for giving downtown and the greater Los Angeles area an historical background in the context of its visual culture.

On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young frie... more On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young friends grazing Riverbank Park along the West Harlem landscape. The twenty-eight acre park is home to an Olympic-sized pool, an athletic complex with a gym, tennis and handball courts, a cultural theater holding eight hundred people, and a covered skating rink where people can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. This place did not come about from the plans of elected politicians. Nor is it the product of any philanthropic interest looking to extend their name into new territory. Riverbank State Park was built precisely as a result of what lies underneath this haven of green, a water treatment facility servicing some one million residents of Upper Manhattan—North River Water Treatment Plant—and the surrounding residents’ response to this being built in their backyard.

Public higher education has seen a drastic shift in the makeup of its professoriate over the last... more Public higher education has seen a drastic shift in the makeup of its professoriate over the last several decades. Whereas in 1975 contingent faculty made up 55% of all professors in America, that number rose to just over 75% by 2011. This disinvestment in tenured faculty has concrete consequences for the working conditions of the professoriate, given that contingent faculty often work under conditions that erode traditional practices and norms of academic life, including shared governance, academic freedom, and the exercise of peer review to name a few. My question is this: which policies, practices, or institutional arrangements have been most effective for improving the working conditions of contingent faculty on public college and university campuses? I hypothesize that contingent working conditions will be most positive at universities and colleges that have unionized non-tenure track faculty and whose members are actively involved, where faculty and administration have worked cooperatively for change, and where the administration has taken action to transition adjunct positions into tenure-track positions. In order to test this, I will take two cases and assess the active policies taken to address the issues of contingent faculty, followed by a discussion of each one’s manner of implementation. In the end, I hope to provide a model of the prevailing best practices alongside the most feasible manners of implementing them.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, ... more Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, although not everyone functions as an intellectual. With this definition, Gramsci conceptually divides the intellectual, firstly as one who has the capacity to critically engage with one’s life situation, and secondly as the one who functions as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was”. Such a problematic aim, I will argue, is rooted in Gramsci’s dated framework, which I will reveal through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity-based politics.
En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics. Ultimately, this study should be read as an update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual-governing activity for modern times.

Audeamus Honors Journal, Jun 2013

In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with addressing these topics: reasserting, in synchrony... more In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with addressing these topics: reasserting, in synchrony with much contemporary literary theory, the ambiguity of the author—or “founder”—of autism discourse; giving one brief genealogical account of the first articulators of autism; the underlying definition of autism as it is understood through this lens and one other; and lastly I will draw on a few possibilities that this paradigm opens up for personhood in the 21st century.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, ... more Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, although not everyone functions as an intellectual. With this definition, Gramsci conceptually divides the intellectual, firstly as one who has the capacity to critically engage with one’s life situation, and secondly as the one who functions as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was” . Such a problematic aim, I will argue, is rooted in Gramsci’s dated framework, which I will reveal through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity-based politics.
En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics. Ultimately, this study should be read as an update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual-governing activity for modern times.