group dynamics: February 2008 Archives

The living room of the eleventh floor apartment in graduate student housing has the air of place accustomed to lively debate and rough teasing. Good Neighbor Sergei barely escaped to his own apartment with all of his fresh whiskers. He was double-teamed by Sangria Girl and Tatiana to go ahead with a practice presentation to colleagues this Friday. Sergei’s topic is wicked cool: how a social movement in Spain was created against a government policy on dam-building, through the proactive merger of seeking out embracing persons with the resources to complement a burgeoning discourse of resistance and critique. His study seems to me to be “language as action and performance” in the real world: discourse as – simultaneously – outcome and effect.

Sergei’s hesitation stems from the quantitative bias of his department. He has not (yet?) run an envivo content analysis, nor hitched his analysis to a single theoretical foundation. Rather than framing discourse as an independent variable (apparently a traditional approach in economics – or is it violin?!), Sergei wants to pose discourse as a dependent variable. A functionalist emphasis on controllable experiments with imposed (and necessarily limited) boundaries resists the interpretive move of how people manage the complex range of factors that influence both the conditions of daily life and their (perceived and actual) range of motion/choices within those conditions.

Sangria Girl, in the meanwhile, just rocked some of her peers with a report on effects of an experimental “game” that community participants described as life-changing. What happens when science in the lab is shifted to application in real human lives? From the campesinos perspective, the arrival of a development team with its “external” aims and objectives is simply one more variable in their own routines of community survival. How they are “internally” affected must be the result of interaction between their own ambitions and claims for the present and future with the opportunities presented (or closed off) by the institutional initiative.

Tatiana’s personal library was an asset to our comfortable conversation over wine and chips. Social Movements and Organization Theory (2005) popped up, and was I ever tickled to find Vangie listed in the references! (2001. Complicating Gender: The Simultaneity of Race, Gender and Class in Organizational Change(ing).” Center for Gender in Organizations Working Paper No. 14; and with Creed Briefing Paper on Working Across Differences Project, both for the Center, Simmons School of Management, Boston.) Not only this, but Tatiana also wanted me to take it easy (!) on the EU “newcomers” when I return (as I earnestly hope) next year to interview Members of Parliament on their uses of interpreters/conceptions of interpreting. Bulgaria apparently doesn’t have what I’ve heard experienced EU interpreters describe as a “culture of interpretation.” Spain is a different story. Sergei studied in Catalonia for some time, where he could understand Catalan but never learned to speak it because in conversation his interlocutors consistently code-switched to Spanish and on exams he was allowed to write in Spanish. Ah….perhaps I’ll soon be recruiting them to my cause, eh? :-)

Note to self, re: etiquette: Sangria Girl did not complain when I ate half her dinner without offering even a bite of mine. (For shame!)

Research Note from the blog: Adequate Information Management

Others will speak of her love for her sons, her steadfastness as a friend, and her unwavering loyalty to the Deaf community.

I can best describe Evelyn Thompson as a mentor.

College degrees were being offered in American Sign Languages Studies and Interpretation.

Evelyn had been signing since she came out of the womb; she certainly didn't need anyone to verify her fluency.

Humility ran deep in Evelyn, as deep and serious as her compassion for the Deaf community. She never hid her rage against the injustices piled upon those whose eyes mean more than their ears, whose gestures and bodily expressions convey so much more than the tongue and voice usually do. Being a professional interpreter meant seeking out every bit of linguistic and cultural resource imaginable - even the theory of formal school and practical training from individuals who may or may not have known as much as she.

I was new: a sign language learner, idealistic, naive. I wanted the best, and Evelyn was it. Still relatively young herself, Evelyn had been interpreting for decades when we met. She was already "an institution" in her own right. We met in an introductory level interpreting class and soon enough I'd written her a letter asking if she would accept me as a mentee. We were into being formal. She wrote back.

Maybe not, her response implied! After all, interpreting puts one in very intimate situations. There were differences between us that might be too much to handle: my being a lesbian and her being a christian just might not be amenable to the intense collaborations required in a mentoring relationship.

We had a long lunch one day, and - somehow, I passed the interview. Just as Evelyn would not pretend differences don't matter, neither would she let them get in the way. We talked about everything, and she pushed me to excel.

My first real jobs were undertaken with Evelyn present, nodding encouragement, maintaining eye contact at certain moments when I was most tangled up, refusing to let me off the hook. Her perception of the degree of challenge I was prepared to meet always confounded my own. No no, I'd plead, I'm not ready! "Yes you are," she'd calmly state. "You can do it." Well, sometimes I really couldn't - quite. Other times I was possibly close. But she would gauge the audience, the topic, and the latitude she could give me to screw things up in order to build my confidence and develop my skill. Her judgment was uncanny. There were dozens of jobs that I was positive were beyond my abilities. She'd get me to take a turn for five or ten minutes, which would somehow stretch to fifteen or twenty.

There are so many fond memories it is impossible to recount them all. In addition to the passion with which Evelyn undertook the mission of communicating for mutual understanding and equitable relationships, she had a funny bone that could catch you by surprise and keep you laughing for days. One of my assignments in a class on the linguistics of ASL involved a series of interviews to demonstrate the immense flexibility of American Sign Language. I had to pick an expression and investigate how many different ways there are to express the same thing. I interviewed several people.

Of course, I couldn't tell them I wanted to know how they would sign 'getting out of a car.' Instead, I asked them to describe their commute to work (hoping that at the end they would actually indicate getting of the car). Evelyn gave the longest response, schooling me in the art of driving in rush hour traffic on a major interstate highway. I can tell you, I wouldn't want her commute to save my life! She had a tiny car back then, she described the hazards of construction, constantly dodging all those orange barrels, bumping along the rough ride of grated road while being passed by zooming 18-wheel tractor trailers and avoiding head-on collisions, sometimes slamming on the breaks when some jerk cut too closely in front of her.

I don’t remember if Evelyn got out of the car at the end or not, I was too busy laughing at her perfect rendition of this crazy, dangerous, and yet wonderful world.

Evelyn taught as much by example as by direct instruction. Probably she thought the assignment had to do with a particular linguistic feature of ASL, such as classifiers, or non-manual markers, or the use of space. She loaded her answer with as much as she possibly could

The most intensive period of our connection spanned a brief three years, but the memories and influence linger on.

Note: The family asked me to read this at Evelyn's Memorial Service. They shared the photo (above) with me, and gave me a Star of Bethlehem (Omithogalum umbellatum) from the floral arrangement as a remembrance. Thank you.

Alas, there is no such thing as moral purity:

"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Nonetheless, if Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton could just manage to put institutional change above personal ambition...!