Call this ACTION LEARNING!: July 2009 Archives

Sven thought it appropriate to frame our first meeting with a bio-fact he'd just learned from the local dinosaur museum. I'm not a biologist, so I don't know the life chances of tadpoles, but I certainly hope the light of our collaboration isn't so bright that we get eaten by bats!

Things happen.
Things happen and we make up their reasons.

We never know if others perceive phenomena in the same way that we do; all we have are references points of presence, perception, and language. Today, gazing upon the Saw Mill River, I wondered if I hadn't been alone, if someone was with me, would they have been as immersed in the gentle rumble of these quick shallow rapids as I was? And what of previous shared experiences - do we remember them similarly? If we both/all recall the event, are the same or different features highlighted in memory? How did we interpret it at the time, and has that interpretation become more fixed and rigid, or has it softened, becoming more fluid with the expanded lens of hindsight?

At any junction history stretches back, a biographical momentum that imbues each person with impetus for being in the present moment of shared spacetime. Until the moment of meeting, each person is on an independent course - a course shaped by previous relationships and experiences but as yet unaffected by the now-unfolding encounter. What will come from contact is unpredictable, yet not beyond the ken of knowledge, intuition, and intention. What do we want to result from mutual exposure, from the mixing of our life trajectories?

Upon return to Amherst I stumbled into another beginning - a friend's dream project, well underway. Could these two beginnings, initiated so close in time albeit on opposite sides of the Atlantic, complement each other? And if they could, what would be my role? I've been thinking (metaphorically, as I do) that I want to be part of a pile supporting bridges over deep water. I'm not "a" bridge, myself, and the support I can offer is insufficient of itself to keep any bridge aloft and protected from scour. But, perhaps, from the relative stability of my own perch . . . this web of inter-relations connecting mentors, colleagues, friends, professional contacts . . .

and meanwhile, as always, the river flows on.

Re-reading this entry, "no mother tongue" (inspired by yesterday's thrilling conversation with Rhona and Katya, grin) what re-jumps out at me, post-fieldwork, is "how language makes human interrelations visible."

Yes. That is what my dissertation will strive to show. From the basis of choices that Members of the European Parliament make to use or not use the simultaneous interpreters (or, to minimize and under-utilize the system of simultaneous interpretation instead of embracing and maximizing its culture-creating potentials) one can describe the current structural/power relations. From a clear picture of 'here-and-now,' and the judicious use of institutional and cultural theories, I suggest one can also project the continuing or resultant outcomes of these power relations into the future.

But - and here is where I continue to experiment with action research - if I spell out the projection, then I contribute to its manifestation. Instead of giving more power to an already established momentum of what seems pre-determined, I aim to present the logic of language choice with a scattering of openings that invite readers (as interlocutors) to choose among alternatives. Rather than writing in such a way that interlocutors are compelled by the (presumed!) power of my voice to accept/resist or otherwise engage only with a single, central, fixed point of argumentation, a variety of modes and unfoldings of communicative interaction should not only be possible, but actually occur.

Then we enter dialogue, and have a chance to reconfigure discourse.

"It was not because of Ah Fatt's fluency that Neel's vision of Canton became so vivid as to make it real: in fact, the opposite was true, for the genius of Ah Fatt's descriptions lay in their elisions, so that to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining."

Index: references to Ghosh in Reflexivity

• talking turkey, making tools (US Thanksgiving with Fulbrighters and other Americans in Brussels, 2008, includes a quote from an essay by Ghosh on the perils of comparing the November terrorist attack in Mumbai to 9/11 in the US)
• Comps (Question #4: "dissertation area") (already two summers ago!)
• The Hungry Tide (a beautiful and inspiring novel)
• Ghosh on Interpreting (quotations from The Hungry Tide)
• What Saar would teach (a quote from Ghosh that illustrates, by metaphor, the kind of discourse diagnostics that motivates my being)

"I would produce my secret treasure, a present sent to me by a former student - a map of the sea-floor, made by geologists. In the reversed relief of this map [the students] would see with their own eyes that the Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along the floor of the bay. The map would reveal to them what is otherwise hidden under water: and this is that the course of this underwater river exceeds by far the length of the river's overland channel.

'Look, comrades, look,' I would say. 'This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. Put them together and you have what is by hard the greatest of the earth's rivers' (181).