Scholarly Essays

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Moen, Darrell.

"Discussion-Based Critical/Engaged Pedagogy: Teaching to Question"
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 40 (2008): 139-146.
 
[PDF version].

Abstact
My Ph.D. is in cultural anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1995. My primary topical area of interest is new social movements, nnd how people united in grassroots-based organizations are working to effect the basic structural changes necessary to transform society to be more participatory and inclusivee, democratic and equitable. I consider myself very fortunate to be in a position to introduce Japanese university students to socially relevant topics that help them to start to question the accepted dogma and engage in critical analyses of pressing social issues. In this essay, I will offer some thoughts concerning the use of a critical/engaged pedagogy in the classroom. I'll be using the term critical/engaged pedagogy (or pedagogies) not as some prescriptive set of practices, but rather as a heuristic around which those of us who share certain pedagogical and political visions can group..


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Counter Hegemony in Action: Venezuela."
Tsuda College IICS Bulletin. Institute of International and Cultural Studies. December 20, 2006: pages 25-41.
 
[PDF version: 193kb]
(This PDF version preserves the original text and pagination but with slight format changes).

Abstact
In January and February 2006, I participated in Global Exchange Reality Tour to Venezuela in which we attended the World Social Forum in Caracas followed by visits to various social missions in the state of Lara as well as in Caracas itself. I visited and talked with many Venezuelans involved in the various government-supported social programs addressing issues of health, education, housing, land tenure, and civil and political rights with the tour as well as on my own. This brief encounter with the people involved in the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has prompted me to write this essay reflecting on the insights I gained into the process of counter hegemony and the importance of our giving full support to the success of this process so that "another world" based on universal principles of peace, social justice, and human rights can indeed be created.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Radicalism in the Midst of Conservatism: Organic Farmer's Groups in Nagasaki Prefecture."
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies: Vol. 34. No. 2. December 2002.

Abstact
An increasing number of Nagasaki Prefecture's population is becoming directly involved in the organic farming movement with far-ranging political and economic implications. This growth and diversity in participation owes much to Japan Communist Party and New Left groups. The combined presence of these turn have given the Japanese organic farming movement a more radical character with social transformative potential.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Denying Freedom and Opposing Democracy: In the Age of Pax Americana."
Tsuda College IICS Bulletin. Institute of International and Cultural Studies. December 2002 (pp. 9-24)..

Abstract
Since 1945, the world has witnessed the devastating impact of the consolidation of power and control under Pax Americana, or the American World Empire. In contrast to the political order imposed by Pax Americana, I argue that true democracy is possible: but only if we build coalitions at home and abroad with people who share our interest in creating a decent and socially equitable society, in promoting peace, and protecting the planet from the ravages associated with uncontrolled greed for power and wealth.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Radical Actions by Radical Farmers: Regional Revitalization in the Okitama Basin of Yamagata Prefecture."
Critical Asian Studies 34:3 (2002), 435-458.

Abstract
This report describes the ways in which a group of organic farmers in Yamagata Prefecture have been able to effect basic structural changes that contribute to the social transformative process of counter-hegemony. Members of the Okitama farmers' League (OFL) have initiated a regional revitalization plan that is based on the concept of eco-circularity in which local household food wastes and other organic materials are converted into compost for use by area organic farmers. By forming organic farmers' collectives, members provide farm-related work in rural areas during the long winter months. The women farmers in the group formed a support group for farm wives to fight collectively against female subordination within the household as well as to improve the overall position of women in the Okitama area. They are challenging the dominant culture's values and social assumptions, and are engaged in creating new cultural values and definitions of self in relation to others. The OFL offers a vision of a noneconomistic, democratized, and environmentally sustainable society centered on universal principles of human rights, social justice, and popular participation in the reformulation of the meanings attached to work, authority, culture, family, community, gender, and consumption.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Grassroots-based Organic Foods Distributors, Retailers, and Consumer Cooperatives In Japan: Broadening The Organic Farming Movement."
 
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies: Vol. 32. No. 2. December 2000.
[PDF version only, large file: 1909KB]

Abstract
Integral to the success of the Japanese organic farming movement are the networks of grassroots-established organic foods distributors, retailers, and consumer cooperatives that are often able to work together to achieve common goals. The phenomenal growth of the organic farming movement in Japan since the early-1970s has enabled these grassroots-based organizations to complement each other's spheres of activities and areas of interest in ways that have given added strength to the movement as a whole. The very diversity of the organizations integral to the Japanese organic farming movement described below has attracted and loosely unified a wide cross-section of Japanese society that would otherwise be separated from each other. Many of the organizations involved in the buying and selling of organically-grown food in Japan have been influenced ideologically by the Japanese Communist Party and New Left groups. It is their combined presence in the Japanese organic farming movement as a whole that gives it its radical character and social transformative potential. It is their combined influence that has allowed the movement to attract such a diversity of the nation's populace. Based on participant-observation research as well as open-ended interviews, my research indicates that the JCP-influenced organizations and the New Left-influenced organizations directly involved in the organic farming movement in Japan have indirectly influenced and strengthened each other.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"The Postwar Japanese Agricultural Debacle."
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies: Vol. 31. No. 1. July 1999.

Introduction
My intention in this paper is to demonstrate the importance in considering historical factors, at the local, national, and international levels, in an attempt to analyze the present circumstances confronting the Japanese farmer, and to explain the postwar historical context for the rise of the organic farming movement in Japan as a response to government agricultural policies that hit Japan's farmers hard. My historical analysis is deliberately limited to the years following Japan's defeat and surrender to the United States in 1945. The reasons for my decision to delimit the historical time frame center on what I consider to be a historically-specific occurrence of a realignment of international capital and military alliances in the immediate postwar period. I contend that the importance of the U.S. role in helping to shape the postwar Japanese state needs to be emphasized in order to understand the rationale behind Japanese agricultural policy shifts that led to the decline in the farming sector. Without a historically-based comprehension of the geo-political factors at the international level and the political economy at the national level, a socially-relevant analysis of Japanese agriculture today would not be possible. . . .


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"The Agricultural Free Trade Debate: Poisoning the Planet and its Inhabitants."
Journal of Policy and Culture: Vol. 4. March 1999.

  
Abstract:

Pending.

Keywords:

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), social movement, agricultural trade liberalization, political economy of food, chemical residues

Contents:

Introduction, Globalization of Agricultural Production and Marketing, The Rice Issue and its International Socio-political Dimensions, Conclusion.



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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Analysis of Social Transformative Movements in Advanced Capitalism: A Neo-Gramscian Approach."
Journal of Policy and Culture: Vol. 3. March 1998.

 

Abstract
Since the 1960s throughout the world, people have been uniting at the grassroots in an enormous number of diverse social movements in attempts to effect basic structural changes. Participants have created new cultural values and social relations, and are offering alternative interpretations of social reality that challenge the dominant culture's social assumptions.

In this paper, I briefly introduce a theoretical approach that directly addresses the issues that arise in the analysis of the process of grassroots cultural production in advanced capitalist societies. I contend that such analyses necessitate a careful examination of the relations between power and domination, social control and ideology, and resistance to the dominant culture's values and norms of behavior. I propose that the concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony developed by the Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci are heuristic concepts that should be central to such analyses.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"The Japanese Organic Farming Movement: Consumers and Farmers United."
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars: 29 (4) 1997.

Introduction
Part of a global proliferation of alternative strategies for environmental, social, and personal transformation, the Japanese organic farming movement has its roots in the social upheavals of the 1960s against war, pollution, corporatism, and sexism. A diverse cross-section of Japanese society, movement participants are transforming social relations and creating new cultural values, self-identities, redefinitions of gender, and socio-political assumptions. Previous village-bounded studies of Japanese rural society emphasized cultural continuity, the masterful blending of modernity and tradition, and the stoic acquiescence of villagers to externally-imposed change; I found organic farmers' groups revitalizing rural economies; forming direct-marketing relations with urban consumers; linking up with farmers in the Third World; opposing Tokyo-directed golf course and resort development plans; and uniting in a variety of new social movements. . . .


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"The Japanese Organic Farming Movement: Counter Hegemony in Process."
Journal of Japanese Scientists. Vol 31. No. 5 May 1996: 33-37. Translated by Yumi Hirakawa.
 
[PDF version ONLY. Large File! 6 megs.]

Abstract
Pending.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"Influencing Foreign Policy Forumulation through Grassroots Level Citizen Involvement."
Journal of Japanese Scientists. Vol 29. No. 2 February 1994: 34-39. Translated by Yumi Hirakawa.
 
[PDF version ONLY. Large File! 11 megs. ]

Abstract
Pending.


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Moen, Darrell Gene.

"A Personal-Political Journey: My Year of Duty in the Vietnam War."
Bunka Hyoron (Culture Critique) No.384., 1993: 156-167.
 
[PDF version ONLY, large file: 5573 KB]

Abstract
Japanese version only. This article is an expanded version of a talk I gave at the Kunitachi Civic Center in 1993 about my experience in the Vietnam War and how that experience opened my eyes to the startling fact that I had been lied to by everyone who had had a hand in raising me to believe in my country. My yearin the war (Feb. 1969 - Feb. 1970) taught me that the United States did not defend freedom and democracy as I had been taught, but rather supported brutal military dictatorships opposed to freedom and democracy.


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