Remasters of American Comics: Sequential Art as New Media in the Transformative Museum Context

This chapter includes a 2009 essay by multi-faceted University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Damian Duffy highlighting the curatorial philosophies that avoid confronting the conceptual challenge of bringing the comics medium into the museum by attempting to fit comics, to one extent or another, into traditional fine art frameworks, including as examples the 2003 Contemporary Art Museum Houston exhibition Splat, Boom, Pow!, Masters of American Comics 2005, UCLA Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Comic Release! from Carnegie Mellon University, and his own curatorial work in partnership with John Jennings on the exhibitions Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes. This chapter discusses new media, if we still need canons, comics versus fine art, comics as non-art, lone genius versus collaboration, display tactics, narrative, and racial inclusion.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how elite universities responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible, focusing on the University of Michigan (UM). Since the 1960s, UM has gained national recognition for its racial inclusion programs. University and college leaders from around the country began visiting Ann Arbor because they saw UM as a model of inclusion. For the same reason, opponents of affirmative action and racial sensitivity training targeted UM in op-eds, books, and lawsuits. Given UM's reputation, it was no surprise when the university found itself at the center of two of the most famous affirmative action lawsuits of the twenty-first century: Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). In the eyes of black students, however, UM has never represented a model of racial inclusion. Black students' share of the student body has never matched blacks' share of the state or national population, and the majority of black students have never reported satisfaction with the university's racial climate. Nevertheless, black students' critiques never stopped UM leaders from claiming that racial inclusion was one of the university's core values.

The Michigan Mandate

This chapter focuses on the Michigan Mandate, one of the most ambitious racial inclusion initiatives in the University of Michigan's (UM) history. The initiative responded to black student activists who, in 1987, led a campus-wide protest that threatened to shut down university operations. The Michigan Mandate allocated unprecedented resources to repair UM's racial climate and increase underrepresented minority students, faculty, and staff. However, the Mandate did not represent an institutional revolution; the Michigan Mandate represented a deliberate attempt to co-opt the student movement for racial justice on campus and gain administrative control of racial inclusion. Although the Mandate raised black enrollment and redistributed millions of dollars to inclusion initiatives, it sustained some of the most important pieces of co-optation. UM officials continued to protect the admissions policies that targeted middle-class black students living outside cities. Officials also continued to privilege the goal of combating white students' prejudice through interracial contact over addressing black students' social alienation. Diversity continued to serve as a key intellectual foundation in sustaining these priorities.

Controlling Inclusion

This chapter assesses how the five-year period between 1970 and 1975 changed the University of Michigan (UM). The university implemented the most ambitious affirmative action admissions policies in its history, increased the number of black officials on campus, and redistributed millions of dollars to inclusion initiatives. At the same time, UM administrators deployed new and old techniques to co-opt black campus activism. They added new disciplinary codes to deter confrontational activism; expanded the inclusion bureaucracy; and fought against black, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American activists who tried to build on the Black Action Movement (BAM) concessions. By 1975, BAM's revolutionary vision that called for a new institutional mission was nowhere to be found. The university still had not reached the 10 percent black enrollment goal, and the racial climate was still creating obstacles for black students on campus. The fact that black campus activists were not able to mobilize a campus strike that rivaled BAM's in response to these failures signaled that executive administrators had a firm grasp on racial inclusion once again.

Governing the multicultural city: Europe’s ‘great urban expectations’ facing austerity and resurgent nativism

This article analyses European discourses on ‘optimal’ urban inclusion policies, as they are embodied in EU-sponsored city networking initiatives. Drawing from the scholarships on multiculturalism and urban austerity, it builds an inclusion agendas matrix that identifies four ideal-typical agendas for ethnic and racial inclusion: multicultural, diversity inclusion, community cohesion and neoliberalised diversity. It identifies a shift from group-based to individual-based concerns (mainstreaming) and from a politicised to a depoliticised approach to inclusion (depoliticising). It argues that (a) this double shift should be understood as the result of the mutually reinforcing pressures of nativism and austerity, and (b) inconsistencies in network discourses and policy advice suggest a pragmatic-adaptive logic that challenges simplistic understandings of cities as either (only) sites of resistance or (only) sites of full-blown accommodation of nativist and austerity imperatives.

Changes in Diversity and Inclusion in Textbook Images Over Time

Images found in commercially published ELT coursebooks have been criticized for their lack of diversity and inclusion, specifically for their lack of gender balance (Cook 2005, 2015; Datzman, 2015) and for their lack of racial inclusion (Kim, 2012; Otlowski, 2003). Babaii and Ansary (2003) suggested that little changed in the 30 years from the 1970s to 2003. This study investigated the images in two general EFL coursebooks commonly used in Japan by comparing the ratio of gender balance and racial inclusion between the textbooks’ two first editions from the 1980s and 1990s to their more recent fourth editions from 2012. Results show that the images in both coursebooks have become more gender balanced and more racially inclusive. 商業用に出版されているELT教科書に見られる画像は、多様性の無さと受容力の無さについて批判されている。中でも画像に示されている人物の性別の偏り（Cook 2005, 2015; Datzman, 2015）と民族の多様性に対する偏り（Kim, 2012; Otlowski, 2003）が指摘されている。BabaiiとAnsary（2003）は、1970年代から2003年の約30年でほぼ何も変化していないと指摘する。本研究では、日本で一般的に使用されている2種類のELT教科書の1980年代〜1990年代に出版された初版と2012年に出版された最新版である第四版に使用されている画像の性別バランスの割合と民族の多様性について調査した。調査の結果、最新版に使用されている画像は、より性別の割合のバランスが取れ、より民族の多様性があることが判明した。