October 2006 Archives

"Commence the defense."

With these words, the game was on. Quite entertaining it was, too, as we munched on chips and witnessed the thrust and parry of analytical debate regarding the extent to which national/ethnic markers are essential (or not) to identity. There was the personal test (it matters to girlfriends) and the literature test (programmatic and ideologic). "You'll agree," our friend would say, catching his Chair chuckle out of the corner of his eye, "or maybe you won't," he continued, eliciting laughter in the face of adversity.

How communicational is this thesis? Do the frames drive the data or does the data drive the frames? What is the data? Are the frames internal or external? Is there a mind or a discourse at work within the frames? Is there a cat under the bed? How about some soup on the table? Why not more rhetorical criticism? Couldn't you have started with power? Descriptive or critical? Social science or humanities? Which came first, the "ism" or the "ness"? Tack back-and-forth, does it matter, what's the heuristic, no I mean the other one, there's an overlap no it's a tension, separate the wheel geez what a bum deal aren't you done yet what about resistance the counterpoint counterframe subversive deliberate debunk, we're talking slam dunk! You're excused from Bourdieu, hurry up "thank you", what about stereotypes why do we need them can't this be flattened "I quote not enough I know I quote" this is not specificity it's a discourse of specificity. Large arguments loom worried about someone's doom a metaphor no a metonymy what about methodology in the beginning was ideology. 200 pages "the longest confession" all to watch the paradox of a strong minor bridge use his smarts to wiggle out of anything orientalist although perhaps slightly balkanist western interlopers stymied by Mitica intercultural communication four years later what constitutes the elite?

Master Frodo. The limb hangs from a nation-like-a-family, under a father (damn good soup), identity as difference.

"It is done."

I see the Intuitive Acupuncturist this afternoon; I'm curious what she'll read in my body. Three weeks ago, I teased her about the pain - so not my thing. I don't recall the gist of the conversation, now, in terms of what was actually said about my psychospiritual being. (Note: "psychospiritual" is a term from the Alexander Technique. Kate would always ask, "How's your psychospiritual being today?" I don't know if the IA would use this concept herself.)

Actually, now that I pause (considering how to return from that digression, haven't seen Kate for a year or more), it might be this was the day the IA mentioned shame. It didn't resonate for me at the time and she said, "Sometimes I speak too soon." My puzzled question at the time was, "Is that for me or for me with others?" (I recall Spare Man telling me, "You make people feel bad." gulp)

That day (only three weeks ago!) the IA put needles only in my left side, ankle and wrist. The one in my ankle nearly sent me off the table, literally. Thank god the pang is brief. She left me "to cook" for however long, and what ensued was an intense awareness of "action" in my body. I explained it to her when she returned. "It felt as if the entire left side of my body filled with light. Not only was my entire internal space bright and clear, I was also light in mass." What was particularly striking was how transparent, clean, and open my left side was in contrast with my right. The right half of my bodily interior was dark, heavy, opaque. Nothing going on; no movement whatsoever. Still. When I became aware of the sharp bisection I started trying to draw light from the left side over to the right, to permeate the darkness.

"See, you're good at this shit," the IA teased back. I told her I still blog about her, and she said she thought it was an interesting bit of synchrony that her initials were IA, since her field of study is called Integrated Awareness. (Related (?) article on somat awareness.) I've been having more synchronic moments in the past month or so than ever in my life.

Adam and Eve "We're just an old couple" showed up with their son, Rastaman. They were late, however, beaten to the game by Boy Scout and Den Mother, who brought City Kitty and Rascal (no surprise the dawg won the donut-eating contest). A (recently married) couple of aging hippies appeared, tailed by a Counter-Terrorism Agent (who flashed a pizza cutter at my throat to extort two votes in the pumpkin contest). Spare Man arrived without Hot Stuff :-( - his teeth still glowed.

A slew of strangers arrived. Walter? Andrew? (Who snuck out before performing; a return is now required.) They swore they knew Dracula, who was apparently delayed by blood feasting. A Russian Vulcan who didn't know Spock clearly needed reconstructive surgery for those reverse ears, but the closest we had to a doctor in the house was a plant cell biologist. The Goddess-of-the-Empty-Cornucopia wielded no more magic than the Witch-of-the-House, whose Dark Ally mirrors reflected a lack of glue.

One of my students arrived (wtf?) as a member of Cleopatra's (underage) entourage. [FERPA censors - no illegal consumption of beverages was allowed.] Cleopatra, by the way, won the random door prize and the Dark Ally won best costume (suckin' up to the host, you gotta watch these people!) Boy Scout, a.k.a. Pyro, repeated his pumpkin-carving victory from two years ago. (Actually, Pyro took credit for a second victory but the record shows someone else actually won...???) ;-)

The Cheshire Cat approved the Woman-of-Flowers (especially after coaching on how to hack a pumpkin). All wine was drunk, most food eaten, nothing broke, and the mess will be cleaned up before the landlords return.

What a party!

Pagan beliefs intrigue me. I'm struck by parallels between the 'white/european' celebration of Samhain and the Mexican tradition of The Day of the Dead.

"Laughter showed the world anew in its gayest and most sober aspects. Its external privileges are intimately linked with interior forces; they are a recognition of the rights of those forces. This is why laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free weapon in their hands." - Mikhail Bakhtin (see Three Dialogues).

After detailing the grotesque body via the illustration of "the finger" as an erect penis, but before "c_cks, c_nts, sh_t, p_ss, c_m, s_liva et cetera in [Performance and Public Culture]", I commented, "I've been waiting to blog about this class." "You haven't done it yet?" a colleague teased. No. I hadn't. "I'm finally learning something!" said Spare Man amid the general clamor. I must have been waiting for the professor to perform Jung's breakthrough (see Footnote #1): balancing on her chair, posing as God on the toilet, dropping a huge turd on her ass-wiping mentee (the world). We laughed hard and often last night.

"I keep trying to figure out what my hesitation is with the blog," Spare Man confided during break. "It's not that I don't trust you to know what is ok to say or not....it's taking something live out of context and giving it back in alien form." [Quoted from memory.] We discussed again how whatever I write comes back to those I mention in mediated form - not only via the record of written text in public cyberspace, but also as skewed through my particular lens. I have extracted the live from its performance, selected elements of influence or desire, and packaged them from my peculiar point-of-view.

Here, playing the boundary between the embodied performance and the inscribed record, I laugh: at you, at me, at us. :-)

The carnivelesque was (circa the Middle Ages & Renaissance) a socially sanctioned and structured "safe" space in which humans could not only indulge the pleasures of the body but do so with full knowledge of being seen in so doing. The carnivalesque is public space for the performance of private self. You wanna find ways to transgress? You wanna make a difference? Then stretch the edges of institutionally-constructed roles, rules, procedures, forms, and etiquettes. Hot Stuff raised the question about whether there is any authority left that we respect enough (or revile enough, added another classmate) to want or need to mock so much as to upend social norms and create new paradigms. Those scenes which appear to approximate the carnivalesque (raves, for instance) are colonized by legal structures for the purposes of commodification and profit. (Illegal raves can't be carnivalesque because they are, by definition, already outside the accepted social structure.)

Part of what used to enable carnivalization to occur, I think, is that it was bounded. The annual season of carnival was preceded and followed by the rigid structures of everyday and official social practices. What carnival allowed was the expression of energy repressed throughout the other months of living within societies' constraints. It is this energy that, dialogically, opened the potential for new spaces and thus the capacity for lasting social changes. The openness of Bakhtin's dialogism is the fulcrum of change, not the atmosphere of the carnivalesque. The climate establishes certain necessary conditions (which are not usually available during the everyday - or so we tend to assume). It is the quality of intentionality to act-with-abandon that establishes the collective social relations of trust and respect which then generate momentum toward transformed practices and ways of being with and for each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. This is where a lever to the democratic can be forged.

This I believe: the only transgressive zone in our de-authorized world is personal risk.

In case you were wondering, communication technology and quantum physics beat out poetry.

Every time.

Just ask Nadia.

Watch Ari squirm.

(Maybe you had to be there?) :-)

My head has shrunk. Seriously! I noticed it some ten days ago or so. I was washing my hair in the shower. My head never had a size before, it was just there while I did my thing. One day, it was small. Or maybe my hands have grown? When I was a young soccer player, new coaches would scoff at my claim of being a goalie. They would take one look at my little hands and say, impossible! I am not tall; perhaps I would have caught more balls if my hands were larger. I was quick, though, had good judgment regarding angles, and launched my body into the path of oncoming players with abandon. Most of my best saves I don't remember. It is as if the moment between anticipating a shot and feeling the ball on my fingertips occurred too quickly for memory to capture.

The size of my hands hasn't changed. I'm pretty sure my head isn't physically smaller, either. Yet, the perception signifies something...

I remember the one time I dropped acid. I remain a coward in regard to drugs; addiction runs in the family and being out of control has never appealed to me. I was curious, though, and I had gotten to known this guy who did acid frequently. I trusted him. It was a mellow trip. I was awake for some 20 hours with no hint of fatigue. I wasn't speeding, just alert. The sound of the cicadas in the springtime trees that night occupied my attention for a long while. My body still remembers standing in a Taco Bell parking lot, listening.

Eventually we ended up back at my parent's house, where I was staying during a break from college. I was amazed that I was still so awake, come 4 or 5 am, but also wondering what the big deal was - I hadn't had a single hallucination. Then I looked down at my hand on the arm of the lounge chair. It slowly morphed into a dinosaur claw. Creeped me out! I was sure my hand would never look the same again.

But it does. Same ol' small hands. Just like my head is really still the same size, even though the rest of my senses seem to be finally catching up with my mind.

Disability comes in all shapes, sizes, modes, and effects. There are legally-recognized versions and emotional varieties. These, or any number of indeterminate cognitive and psychiatric peculiarities, can interfere with intimate relationships and social interactions. For instance, people look at me and see a woman with a mullet who appears physically fit. What do they know? No, I don’t meet the federal criteria of “impairment of a major life function” (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990). I can breathe, walk, grasp, talk, feel, think, and otherwise function within the range of physicality deemed normal. Who decided to limit “normal” and impose such a measure for judging character or the potential worth of one’s contributions to society? Individuals will not claim responsibility, of course. Such boundaries and markers of difference are established ‘out there’ by impersonal forces of culture. The representations are propagated through the media, religion, and a disturbing range of incidental, informal taboos and negative sanctions. Questioning these norms is often considered problematic, disruptive, or unpleasant. When I do wonder about the so-called normal, people situate me clearly: I am deviant.

Fitting few standard stereotypes, I have learned to live through language. Sentiments not spoken affected me first. Often, the untold still wounds me. The silence of non-recognition echoes in words I hear and reverberates in perceptions left unsaid. The speech of my family was self-focused and therefore distancing, functional not relational, unaware and unreflective. My parents opposed each other on gender's fulcrum: mom never swore, dad often did. Anger was the palpable emotion of my formative years. I checked out, merely passing as present. When I woke up, twenty-seven years of my life were gone. How can one speak from pain without blame? I yearned for a language I did not know.

I needed words I could feel, a language that would bring me into my body. I sought belonging among lesbian communities and found that we were not much better at handling distinction than the dominant heterosexual society was at accepting us. Our bodies, full of longing, could not manage questions of dis/ability: our own aesthetics, potentials, possibilities. What is valuable if the body itself is constrained? I have never consistently been able. I fail much more frequently than I succeed. I celebrate small triumphs with all the gusto of athletic championships. Why not?! Yet I notice how the smallest movements can invoke urgency, feeding speed, haste, a rush to . . . where? Meaning constructed by assumption, cues missed, opportunities lost: wisdom becomes elusive. How much have I learned from friends' contemplating solitary visual horizons, or analyzing power’s most intimate nuances? Stillness inspires depth. I lament how long it has taken me to learn to enjoy listening for its own sake.

I cannot explain the random movement of the universe (or the privileges of being white and middle-class) that brought me into contact with Deaf people and American Sign Language. I spent years training to interpret others’ words, to translate their meanings into sensibility for those who could not see. Through signing, I discover my own emotions, investigating the boundaries of my expressive capacities. This practice, of sensing and conveying the intellectual and emotional meanings of others, prepared the ground for me to expand my range. Through this visual-gestural language I excavated buried wounds and static ambitions. The embodied kinesthetics of signing ASL allowed access to hidden and repressed parts of myself.

Through friendships, relationships, teaching and parenting I have observed the effect of words to inspire or deaden, enliven or thwart, create or sunder meaningful relationships. Uttered words (signed or spoken) leave their imprint yet vanish into insubstantial memory. Written down, words are a commitment. I mean this, right now. Writing was not, at first, something I felt called to do. It does not come easily, as signing usually does. The labor of compressing four-dimensional geometrical perception into one-dimensional linear text remains a challenge. I practice daily. When I write, I feel the energy of my being streaming out into the world. I am here. I matter. I want to make a difference. I care.

I sign to know myself. I write to live.

Just read a piece, How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua, about Chicano identity and language.

"Los Chicanos, how patient we see, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. we know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we've kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the aeons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mesitizas and mestizos, will remain."

A link to an education course (Arnetha F. Ball, Stanford) premised upon Anzaldua's dialogic claims neglects the "at home" (meaning domestic US) language of American Deaf Culture. It is a common omission, glaring in the fact that even the prestigious (?) Associated Press fails to recognize the difference between "deaf" and "death".

I've got to serious about mapping conferences for the next year or two. Haven't known about this one until now, am intrigued:

INGRoup, the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research, will hold its second (?) conference July 12-14 in Lansing (oy). Proposals due January 15. See CFP.

OH HOW WE MISS YOU!

(Imagine sappy music in the background; the lyrics rhyme, keeping time with sniffles.)

There were tears and gnashing of teeth at Dr. Pu's farewell party this past Tuesday. People were shocked to find he was not yet gone. Alas, the celebration continued regardless. :-0 Puruman was mildly surprised. "Dada must be in the shower," he mused while unlocking the apartment door. "What's this?" he asked, noticing the spread of food on the table after turning on the lights. Then he noticed the shoes and began naming their respective owners. Eventually, giggling was heard from the bedroom. (No one knows what went on in there!)

Most people came for the meal.

Smita and Fugu prepared "fast food", Aloo Tikki with Chole (that's potato cakes with chickpea curry), accompanied by tamarind chutney and yogurt (see my third helping). Dada contributed bread (and random noises from his laptop). The meal was devoured. Apparently the biggest surprise of the evening was how eager Ambu was to get to the mall. Dr. Pu applied his legendary caution and painstaking criteria to the selection of a perfect pair of shoes for his father. There was much traffic in and out. No Satya, Puru is not going to buy you a pack of cigarettes: not now, not ever. That white shirt did look spiffy, though. "Puru is generous," Dada explained, "only when he's leaving." Sourya scored a kurta (he's still waiting for his second drink). Smita "got twenty bloody hangars." Hey, don't complain! The rest of us just got dessert.

The woman nicknamed for a poisonous delicacy assured Satya there were no eggs in the bananabread. Several folks still turned it down, even though "Smita made it from the ground up!" It was a nice combo, I thought, warmed and served with vanilla ice cream.

Rajesh spent time perusing The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, which this literate crowd mused was named as a play on The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Depayan won the "who has the worst TA" contest, but Ambarish was deemed the "Banana Bread Queen." A hard title to beat, though Satya flirted with being the Off-Color King. (He was also told, "Don't die in my car.) Shiva manned the camera. Krishna ate. So did Chris.

Talking to the hand" did not lead to any change in Dr. Pu's plans.

On Wednesday night, the final feast at Bueno y Sano was attended by some of the same crowd, Hema (who's down with "Dr. Pu"), Giri, Rmaya, Ravi, and Sarbjeet. All kinda folk been droppin' by the apartment too.

The good news is I finally got my laptop back from the IndiaBorg Collective.

Language as action. Vernon carried on in his inimitable way about Dewey and Wittgenstein during yesterday's New England gathering of scholars in Language and Social Action: Meaning in LSI Research. I missed the morning sessions :-( but attended the presentations of Bob Sanders and Anita Pomerantz. Vernon missed the mild fireworks among Bob, Donal (who organized the event) and another member of the audience whose name I didn't catch.

It was entertaining and instructive to witness the negotiation of meaning - particularly agreement and disagreement - among these heavyweights in the field. Bob came under fire for his interpretive lens on the elaborate ceromonial ritual of how nobility treats "a guest" of the Queen. I'm not sure if it was his own framing of insider/outsider that created the opening for this particular critique, but a critique was engaged as if there is no relation between the outsider perspective (on extreme excess) and the insider perspective (of representation and proper treatment).

P. Sainath spoke yesterday at the Labor Center regarding the growing inequality of the rich and the poor in India. Not about you, you say? Sainath discussed the rate of inequality being faster in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty, and being "so carefully constructed." He argues that the rich have seceded from the nation, that mass media is in cahoots with big corporations, and the intelligentsia is skilled at disassociating ourselves from the ugly downside of neoliberal capitalism.

He detailed the negative realities of the effects of global restructuring which are systematically diverting government resources from the poor and working classes (which, I clarify, includes much of the so-called middle class) to the wealthiest class. Explaining in precise language with poignant examples exactly how free trade creates certain market conditions which systematically deprive small landowners of sustainable use of their own property, resulting in an appalling suicide rate and the slow transfer of private land to corporate ownership. [NOTE: Bernie Sanders describes a crucial difference between free trade and fair trade.]

Proceeds of his book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, go to a fund for the support of families who have lost their primary wage earner to suicide.

We should not be so surprised, Sainath suggests, at the level, depth, and extent of atrocities committed by humans against one another. It has been the case throughout history that the elite pleasure themselves at the expense of the poor. Sainath cited the example of "Empress" Victoria who, in 1877, held a huge public feast in her own honor from which the starving poor were brutally banned. Then he discussed Nero, who had much earlier promoted a huge feast to distract people from the devastation of the Burning of Rome. At this feast, according to an entry made by the historian Tacitus, people were burned at the stake to provide light for the festivities. No one protested.

The Burlington Free Press didn't cover the historic debate held on the campus of the Austine School for the Deaf last night between Bernie Sanders (Independent), Pete Diamondstone (Liberty Union), and Rich Tarrant (Republican), moderated by Dr. Anne Potter, Director of the Austine School. As far as anyone at the school could determine, a political debate of such stature has never been held on a deaf campus before, and certainly never been moderated by a Deaf person.

The Brattleboro Reformer announced the event, but apparently didn't cover it? Perhaps they are holding the story for the weekend edition? The debate was recorded and will be shown on Brattleboro's public television channel.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act deals with student records. I guess that all of the students whom I teach at the college level are 18 or older but it is possible a few 17-year olds sneak in once-in-awhile. The age distinction means the student gains the rights previously granted to their parents. These rights are described in the language of eligibility: seeing the records and requesting copies of the records. Schools are in general not allowed to share these records with others without consent, although there is quite a list of exceptions.

According to a September 25 memo from the UMass Registrar: “Students have the right to have some control over the disclosure of information from the records. Educational institutions have the responsibility to prevent improper disclosure of personally identifiable information from the records.”

I wrote this piece, Language as Motion, as an example of the "Self-in-Contradiction" essay that is one of the options for the "personal/identity narrative" assigned to students in the introductory level writing course I'm currently teaching. There are a couple of friends who will recognize themselves in this piece (thank you), and I have to give some credit to Just-in-Time, who got us lost in traffic yesterday in Boston. While we were discussing writing as a craft, another part of my brain was mulling this attempt.

I am also conscious of the timing. Language set-in-motion through the last several semesters of blogging and constructing public writing environments for students is coming to some kind of turning point. The theory of language-as-action meets with (a) practical reality of language-in-use.

Che Guevera, who once said, "at the risk of embarassing myself, let me say that a true
revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love," was captured 39 years ago yesterday and summarily executed within 24 hours.

Thanks, Amanda, for the email.

"Alec had an accident on the trampoline. He did not survive. He passed away." My brother's tone on voicemail was steady but laced with agony. I faltered, walking from interpreting linear algebra to a course director meeting. "We don't know what we're doing yet. It just happened six hours ago. We're calling to let everyone know."

What can I do? I observed myself struggle. Sit down? Stop? Really? There was no doubting the certainty or emotion in my brother's voice. Alec was gone. Just like that. An accident? Images of blood and gore flashed through my mind. What happened? It didn't make sense. What should I do? More to the point, what could I do? I had to teach in 3 hours. I had to meet with my peer teachers and Course Director in 20 minutes. Bail? Obligation....keep moving...I need those printouts. I ask a colleague in the computer lab, "Can you help me find Word? The icon is gone." I try to think through the fog.

The CD meeting unfolds around me. "Let's open with a freewrite, since it's something we ask our students to do.” I write. They move on; I keep writing. Have to get there...start sending emails, practical info only. This happened; I need to come. Can you pick me up at the airport? Can I stay with you? Search airfares, schedule. Bits of my peers’ conversation drifts into consciousness, "How do I get my students engaged?" I am no use to any of them today. Finally the meeting ends. I have two hours; it is a beautiful day. I call my sister-in-law. "This is a voice I've been waiting to hear," she says.

Yesterday I relaxed. Spent time with friends. Walked in the woods. Ate good food. Saw a decidedly unedifying movie. Stayed up too late. Have been considering when to post about Alec - my experience of hearing the news, the moments that bit the worst . . . etc.

It is beautiful late summer/early fall: shorts-weather yet the trees begin to burst with color.

Dr. Purushottam Kulkarni celebrated the successful defense of his dissertation in characteristic fashion: 12 ounces of hot sauce with a bit of Salvadoran burrito from Bueno y Sano, casual worship with friends at a Durga Puja, and a cup of calming tea from Rao's.

The fact of the full moon and the encouragement of dear friends was insufficient to entice him to take even the smallest sip of any new beverage.

I wasn't planning on it, Wanda Toots BOSS, but then - after you showed up LATE to our job, and then became DISTRACTED and DIDN'T INTERPRET, I was still gonna let you off the hook. I mean, we're all human and it's not like I haven't been late once or twice, or gone to the wrong place, or (heaven forgive me) totally FORGOTTEN I was supposed to even work. But THEN I learned through the grapevine that you totally decomposed, with a student, in laughter, in front of an entire classroom of sleeping math students. What kind of a professional demeanor is this? Of course, the thing that weirds me out the most is how all the non-deafies ignored the event, as if Deaf folk and interpreters are operating in an alien dimension which cannot be comprehended and therefore shouldn't be disturbed.

Communication, anyone? :-/

"We'll pass Steph eventually," they joked about my comps defense, after grilling me for two hours and deciding I needed to clarify a few things. "I want to pound this point in," says one of my esteemed professors. "Not to pile things on," says another. Yeah, right! My chair tried to make me feel better: "People take comps at all levels in this department. The questions you've taken on are humongous." There was a sidebar at one point, about how I tend to experiment in real life...

I still make too many assumptions about shared understanding that makes the reader have to work too hard. This is part of what invites so much interrogation. The interrogation itself isn't bad, although it is hard! Being questioned so intensively feels hard but it is "the ideas that fight," as my favorite antagonist clarified when I said, "You know I like fighting with you." (This, after kicking me a few times.)

Some would argue that it is not politic to experiment with comps. The stakes are rather high, eh? Yet, while we were there, I was aware that I'll never have such an opportunity again: three brilliant minds focused exclusively on whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking about and guiding me through weaknesses, confusions, and potential pitfalls. They push hard because I reach far.

We were supposed to include Robin by videoconference but the universe has decreed speaker phone. How old-fashioned! :-(

Question 1 (on theory) related Poststructuralism, Language and Power: "How and to what extent are power and language related in poststructuralist thinking? How does the concept of 'dialectics' figure in this relation beween power and language? Feel free to address the questions from any angle you choose. Be specific and precise in your discussions."

I will (so I say!! Did I really do this?!!)draw from a select corpus of continental philosophy to respond to this question: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Bakhtin’s Discourse and the Novel, Althusser’s essay, “Three Notes on Discourse,” and Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology.

Question 2 (on a speciality area) regards Critical Organization Communication: "While there is increasing emphasis among critical organizational communication scholars on intercultural communication in the workplace, there is little to no attention paid to the uses (or heteroglossic forces) of language in multilingual spaces. In this question I want you to: a) discuss the epistemological assumptions about language (its function, usage, etc.) in critical organizational communication scholarship; b) note the impact of these assumptions on our understanding of the dynamics of intercultural/multilingual workplaces, and c) explicate the possibilities for utilizing problematic moments as an alternative epistemological stance from which a theory and methodology of language use in multilingual organizational contexts might be derived."

I began, "Addressing the question of language use in multilingual work spaces remains a challenge."

Question 3 (on a research method) concerns Participatory Action Research: "For the following question you will assume that you are applying to a major foundation for a research grant. Although the foundation has previously funded proposals for qualitative research, the funded projects have been fairly conservative in their approach (i.e., providing hypotheses or research questions, criteria for validity and reliability, and a more deductive than inductive approach to the study). Your project centers around the use of participatory action research to study the interpreting process of the EU Parliament. In addition to clearly defining the participants and constituency for your research, (i.e., who is involved in the process and who will benefit from the research), you will need to present coherent specific arguments for the criteria mentioned above as well as specific need for the research and sustainability of the project."

What do I know? "Concerns with qualititative research have primarily to do with scientific rigour, particularly in the realms of reliability and validity."

Question 5 (a research tool) on applied interpretation theory: "Taking “Encounters with Reality” as illustrative of a variety of indigenous concerns related to the act of interpreting between hearing and non-hearing cultures. Recalling your responses to the questions about Critical Discourse Analysis, briefly describe what the status of such a book would have as data in your project. (specific scenarios inserted later)"

"This text is an example of what Ebru Diriker (2005) calls a de-contextualized meta-discourse."

Question 4 (my dissertation area) on Critical Discourse Analysis. "In the time allotted, please consider the relationship between Critical Discourse Analysis and what you imagine to be its utility as a tool for your project.

Part 1: Theory: What is it about discourse analysis that is particularly illuminating of the moment in which the EU finds itself? Using the discussion presented by your choice of two different theorists, address what critical discourse analysis offers to your project that a purely textual reading of what people say through translators does not (i.e., what does HOW people say things reveal that WHAT they say does not)? How do the former and the latter complement each other and what ontological status does each have as data?

Part 2: Application: Turning more specifically to your project, how do you seek to collect the two types of data and what do you think they will reveal about your concerns around power and democracy?"

Ha ha! I actually answered this! :-) "The two theorists I’ve selected for this response are Jan Blommaert and Mikhael Bakhtin."

Question 6 (a speciality area) on Democracy. "Ziarek notes that

“The ethos of becoming poses and redefines the question of agency and freedom of historically constituted subjects: no longer seen as an attribute or a possession of the subject, freedom is conceptualized as an engagement in praxis.”

Using this quote as a jumping off point, provide some reasoning first for the use of dissensus in radical democracy, potential critiques of this approach and an example, via the EU Parliament, of how agency and freedom might be enacted."

Uh oh. Longest run-on sentence in the world? "Dissensus, a term chosen by Ziarek (An Ethics of Dissensus) because of its “carnal implications” and implication of both “meaning and sensibility,” enables the inclusion of both primary forms of human living (being) in the political, decision-making realm: that of co-constructed social meanings (the relational) and that of intrasubjective phenomenology (the experiences and perceptions of/by “self” ~ however conceived). Her direct argument involves the necessity of embodiment and its valorization as a source of knowledge."

Today, the hometown newspaper ran a spread on Alec.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FAMILY
Often, family members would find Alec Kent (left) huddled over one of his sketchbooks. He is shown here at a birthday party with his brother, Austin Kent.

The Rev. Bart Hildreth credited one of Alec’s uncles with saying he could make friends with a doorknob. It was one of many comments that elicited laughter from everyone gathered to commemorate Alec’s life. A bunch of people liked my words,
but there is no doubt that Charlie gave the best speech.
(If you've ever listened to him playing videogames you might be amazed at his range.)

I told one of my best friends that it was as hard to come back to Amherst as it was to go to Kansas City. “It crashes in, I know,” she said. The long slog of adjustment begins. Our lives will always be different, now. It isn’t just the fact of Alec’s death that causes the change, it is the meaningfulness his death creates, a meaningfulness possible only because of his life. “Were you close?” another friend asked on learning the news. A reasonable question, since most of my friends know my family hasn’t been all that tight. I couldn’t muster an answer at the time; it seemed a “yes” required an explanation and I didn't have the energy or the words. Now, I respond with confidence:

Yes, and we're closer now than we were before. Besides, a couple of the girls who spoke at the funeral said Alec told them "he grew out his hair because it annoyed people." Obviously we are kin. :-)