David just added a destination to my European travels this summer, Molvania. I'll go there after Budapest, and before I head to Brussels. I'm sure I'll be able to find some interpreters there to be part of my research, even though they seem more invested in pop culture than citizenship and transnational identities. :-)
group dynamics: March 2005 Archives
I beat Raz at ping pong tonight. I'm sure it was an aberration. He took revenge swiftly, beating me three straight and I never got out of the single digits (well, maybe once). :-) That young woman he hangs out with kept saying something about his "masculinity"....??? (gasp!)
I was surprised when I won but I think our favorite young man was downright shocked! He'll deny it of course, humble guy that he is. :-) I won't go into the details of the other young man at ABC who thought he had a chance at stealing his girl away from Raz. That was the most amusing part of the evening!!
one of these days I have to follow up and deal with my sheer clumsiness - www.replacements.com.
Donal held up his own very well last Thursday, when a handful of us met to continue discussing the merits of the debate between these two titans. Click and scroll down for a summary of our last (the first) discussion.
The way I see it, the basic conflict comes to whether one assumes race, gender, other social identities, are always relevant to communication or not. Donal recognizes that they could be, but reserves the ideal that they may not be and proceeds on the assumption of either possibility. Fiske assumes they always are, and its just a matter of how we bring our epistemological frames to bear that determines whether or not we can identify their inflection(s) on the communicative practice.
A dozen COM department graduate students descended upon the bargaining session between our union (GEO) and the university administration's team this past Friday morning. First, we were bluffed into the wrong room, thus arriving late (not our plan) but perhaps the late en masse entrance was a precursor to the tension that erupted periodically throughout the session?
Erin, a.k.a. Betty Crocker, put on an amazing spread. For the first time, there were hardly any leftovers! ! ! We chowed! Lynn was especially in heaven over the tuna casserole. (The secret is mayo.) Elizabeth's green bean casserole was delish, and Flora's vegetarian chili and cornbread well enjoyed.
Bill (or was it Bob?) called me Sally. I'm not sure if that's a reference to any particular 1950's housewife or gourmet....? probably not, since the German Chocolate Brownie bars were a bit "chewy", as folks said. (But the Hoosier bars were perfect, despite the accusation from my Indiana buddy (tsk tsk, calling to throw me off in the middle of the soiree! tsk tsk - not!) that we were "making stuff up." Ruth was right though, that we weren't drinking Bud and watching basketball, but the Nebraska folk would be watching football....so - no universals in midwestern land!
John sent this paper critiquing functionalism, and it coincides nicely with the discussion I (mostly missed) today among some of the departments' social interactionists. "Holism on a grand scale is difficult, if not impossible, to verify, but the way systems work is not." Donal argues, I think, that systems can be understood from the inside out...maybe this is what Bakhtin refers to as centrifugal? A centrifugal forces pushes things away from the center. Donal often uses the term "cohere", so he's arguing that the discourse around a certain practice is centripetal (a pulling inward). But what if the pulling in is in reaction to, or predicted upon the condition of possibility that other discourses are pushing out?
David's motivation to get us social interaction folks talking with each other is very welcome. :-) I still have to finish reading Donal's response, but the gist of this dialogue in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1990-1991) is framed two ways. By Philipsen, as an example of two different ways of doing ethnography, and by Fiske, as consensus vs conflictual applications of social theory. Fiske is cogent on several of the questions I have about Donal's approach, but there is also something quite compelling about Donal's insistence on approaching ethnography with one's assumptions bracketed. While I lean toward the conflictual versions (surprise? - not!) I also think they carry a huge risk of reifying the very thing they seek to change.
