Reflexivity

Ever wondered if abstract concepts can be discussed with signed languages?

Here’s proof.

Ever suspected Deaf people may not be very smart?

Find out just how wrong that view is!

The video is forty minutes long, so settle in and plan to give it your full attention. (Ryan suggests gourmet snacks to accompany viewing.)

Popularity: 1% [?]

and how will we cope?

“Ideas about changing the organization of society in the long run are clearly needed, quite apart from strategies for dealing with an immediate crisis. I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a “new world”–to use the other term mentioned at the Paris meeting–that would take a different form?”

“The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.”

“Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes’s rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes’s time.”

“Pigou not only wrote the classic study of welfare economics, but he also pioneered the measurement of economic inequality as a major indicator for economic assessment and policy.[7] Since the suffering of the most deprived people in each economy–and in the world–demands the most urgent attention, the role of supportive cooperation between business and government cannot stop only with mutually coordinated expansion of an economy. There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

There is only one scene that is too tidy in Gran Torino. It seems unlikely to me that after committing murder, gang members would hang around waiting for arrest by the police. But this is part of what gives the film its essential Americanness: in the midst of tragedy, the glimmer of a happy ending.
Gran Torino is a study in control, depicting the redemption of an old man who – as a young man – lost self-possession at a crucial moment and did a terrible thing. All the characters cope with the consequences of history in contemporary U.S. society, from the mass displacement of the Hmong because of allying militarily with America against communism in the 1960s to the showmanship of angry young disenfranchised men playing it cool and dangerous on the street. The verbal aggression is shocking, especially the “man talk” of white men that is typically protected from such blatant public display. Parallels with ways of talking that are stereotypically associated with racial minority groups are not difficult to draw. Racial and ethnic labels can – and are – used to express affection just as readily as disdain.
Using anti-politically correct language is not an automatic barrier to developing relationships of trust and respect across cultural difference. Not surprisingly, young people are most adept at recognizing and codeswitching among distinct forms of address. For immigrants, this is well-documented: bilingual children interpret for their parents and grandparents, bridging differences of language while undergoing irrevocable transformations in identity. The little girl who interprets her grandfather’s request to remove a wasp’s nest is no different from the hearing children of deaf parents, except that her family has no recourse to professional interpretation services. The home maintenance scene is innocent enough, unless one knows the range of situations children can be forced to handle.
Adults cope as best they can, relying on traditional rituals of communication that may or may not translate across contexts and perceptions. Cultures are in contact and conflict: the contrast between the Kowalski’s midwestern family dynamics and those of the Hmong family is stark. Despite, for instance, Walt’s grotesque violation of cultural norms, family members and friends trust a teenage girl’s intuition about inviting this crotchety mean old man for food and beer at a social/ceremonial event. Sue explains some of the cultural differences to Walt, whereas his own son fails to recognize his father’s call for help. Walt’s personal style of complaining about everything is mirrored in his son, and his self-centeredness is mirrored in his granddaughter. She has her eye on inheriting some of his belongings, and he has his eye on the physical decline of neighbor’s houses spoiling his view from the front porch.
Annoyed as he is by feeling imposed upon by his Hmong neighbors, Walt finds a use for the regard he has unexpectedly earned. Grudgingly, but not unwisely, he also allows himself to change, to grow into the opportunities that the situation affords. Circumstances unfold, as they always do, along a mix of predictable and unpredictable contours. In the end, Walt generates the only possible peaceful outcome. He is able to do this not because he is skillful at anticipating or manipulating the passions of others, but because he understands intimately – from the inside out – that fear and threat combine explosively under certain conditions.
The story is a compelling achievement on many levels. As contemporary film, it captures all the volatility of race-based nationalism within increasingly transnational societies. Xenophobia is hardly unique to the United States, and the random violence that once seemed particular to the States is spreading even to Belgium. As a potentially culminating work of art, Clint Eastwood does not offer a one-size-fits-all solution, but he does illustrate a complex set of realistic models from which we can glean inspiration.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Luiza could not believe her ears. “We’re on the grounds of Fontainebleau!”



“What now” is a question I borrow from curricular design, social justice style. First cover the what, then the so what, and finally now what. What is the subject matter? Why should we care about it? How are we going to use this knowledge?


I was ready for three days in France, away from the halls of the European Parliament and the concentration of stimulation. “Scientists,” Luiza quoted the director of her thesis, “throw away the most interesting stuff!” I needed the change in place for perspective, knowing that whatever I encounter has the potential to enhance or distract my focus from the essential elements and determinative dynamics of the system of simultaneous interpretation in such a concentrated center of global influence. “What do you think of France?” she asks me. I cannot give a discrete answer: I am treading water, immersed in a sea of history, currents of contemporary discourse, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. The evidence, I think, displays a need to worship and the desire for control.
This is not unique to France, of course – it is the story of Europe, perhaps of homo sapiens.

Upon return to Luiza’s mod flat, I retreated from the day-trip’s high-speed (time)travel to recharge my introvert self. I soaked up the smell of melting then baking chocolate, absorbed the sounds of Dvorak’s cello concerto and Yann Tiersen’s juxtaposition of strings and piano (Sur le fil), wondered at the juxtaposition of Flemish musical history with Romania’s inability to develop (so-called) high culture (”we were too busy being invaded”), and read:

‘Is it to be believed . . . that an island abundant in all things necessary has been leveled to this wasteland through the making of a Stone God and then by his destruction?’ (2007, p. 133)

Who builds in stone wants to be remembered; no other monument lasts so long or so well. Yet people (governments, organizations, groups of all kinds) also try to fix social reality – relationships, communication itself – as if hardening the rules will determine outcomes, enabling the assertion of final control by banishing all possible space for anarchy.
We hash over linguistics while we eat: attempting to digest the cognitivists, distributionalists, generativists, structuralists, psycholinguists, and sociolinguists all at one go. We sleep. (No one reports dreaming.)
The Islamic Arts Department of the Louvre is closed, so I opt for Near Eastern Antiquities. I learn about the land “between rivers” (Mesopotamia), known to us through the “archeological fortune” of remains from Girsu/Telloh and Mari and (particularly) the reign of Gudea, who poses in all statues with hands piously held across his heart. In one statue, Gudea holds a “gushing vase” from whence stream fish, invoking Geshtinanna, “the goddess of the reviving water.”


I note references to Ishtar and Inanna, figurines of women, and circles. I am fascinated by the “oscillation tendency” of the city of Susa to be both “the eastern extension of Mesopotamia” and “the western expression of Iranian mountain civilization.” I am as repulsed by the ancient rite of hierogamy as Luiza was by the relatively recent public birthing of royalty. The art of engraving stones, by the way, is called glyptic.


Then, we tiptoed through the Tuileries, sauntered the length of the Avenue de Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, past Place de la Concorde, La Madeleine, Napoleon’s burial site at the Dome des Invalides, and Grand Palais. We failed to find socks but did stop for sweets at Paul, before heading to The Lab.

The Lab is a treat. Jose dives into musical history, demonstrating how each of the old instruments work and explaining the way scores were written. We even get to see one of the earliest precursors of today’s synthesizer. Then we walk through a quiet residential area, hearing birdsong en route to the Eiffel Tower – another impressive artifact of manmade worship. From viewing angles underneath, it looks like a spaceship. How many wonders can a single day hold?


We passed the Pantheon (smart dead people buried here) on the way to dinner (which was absolutely scrumptious), and afterwards the fountain at Place Saint Michel and Notre Dame. Charlemagne looks like the WitchKing of Angmar; there were many times these past few days when I felt as if the statues atop eaves looked down on us mere mortals with bloody demand. How does it come to be that a quote by Napolean accompanies Barack Obama on the cover of Vanity Fair? Riding the Thalys back midday, I read:

“the regrettable acts of war . . . to the broken and the dead, the wounded and maimed, to the exploded and shrapnel-shattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word” (p. 233-234).

I wondered where we were, as the train hurtled at top speed across a plain toward France’s border with Belgium. What “regrettable acts of war” had occurred here, and what can be done to ensure that such “regret” becomes a thing of the past rather than a recurring motif of human history? I know the notion is counterintuitive, but interpreters – professionally trained, ‘conference’ and ‘community,’ of any and every language combination – are poised at a liminal opening to societal self-organization that structures difference and equality within the most basic component structure: that of language-based interaction between human beings.

Continuing to gaze out the train window I see the first fresh hints of spring; the trees tinged bright green appear aglow. Earlier, Jose had noticed that the conductor addressed passengers in the language of their destination. The only way to avoid war will be to intertwine economies and social relations so densely that no class interest can benefit from disruption. To keep the system vibrant, differánce must be celebrated in core institutional processes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Back in the days of my Master’s Program in Social Justice Education, we spent a great deal of time studying how to facilitate our own, each other’s, and student’s growth along the continuum of social identity.
The core model in the program was Jackson and Hardiman’s (1992, 1997) model of racial social identity based upon “white” and “black” identification in the US context. A social identity model (SID) provides a paired rubric for processes that individuals undergo as members of the “target” or “oppressed” group who seek to become empowered, as well as the processes that individuals take on if they want to understand themselves as members of the “agent” or “oppressor” group. That model has been adapted to apply to many other “isms,” including for instance, sexual orientation. My emphasis tends to the “agent” side of the pairing – how do people who are members of dominant cultures come to grips with the reality of privileges (access to resources and ways-of-being which are not equally available to members of non-dominant groups) and the fact of unconscious collusion with systems of discrimination and prejudicial beliefs that work together to keep oppression real?
My own interests have moved beyond the US domestic context to inter- and transnational issues involving migration and especially the role of language in empowerment processes – those that enable individuals to develop agency and assert voice. I find social identity is still a useful construct, although I now understand identity as the result of communication patterns at multiple levels (the interpersonal, the level of groups such as culture, organization, and/or religion, and mass-mediated (e.g., via television, radio, the internet).
Presently, I’m working on a chapter for a book on media, education and dialogue. Some of the other authors are relying on social identity theory from Tajfel and Turner, which seeks “to understand the psychological basis of intergroup discrimination. Tajfel et al (1971) attempted to identify the minimal conditions that would lead members of one group to discriminate in favor of the ingroup to which they belonged and against another outgroup” (italics removed).
The difference between the two approaches (Jackson & Hardiman, and Tajfel & Turner), at least on this surface reading, is that the latter is geared to understanding while the former is geared to action. Debates during the mid-1990s involved whether or not social identity models are descriptive (i.e., distanced, theoretical, “what is”) or prescriptive (as in, this is the normal way people grow, through all of the stages and roughly in this sequence). I’d love to know of work combining these two different theoretical bases: what are the practical, applied uses of this kind of knowledge?
[Perhaps this 2005 overview by Briodo and Reason situates these two - and perhaps additional - approaches in relation to each other?]

Popularity: unranked [?]

Teaching is intertwined with learning: communication theory, sociology, and quantum mechanics all inform us that the interaction produces “reality.” “Meaning” is always a co-production: “teaching goals,” for instance, represents a professional ethic while also reinforcing historical power structures. The phrase conjures an institutionalized ideology of authorization and dispensation. Confronting the implications of language use – our very own talk – is the cumulative (and hopefully on-going) accomplishment of my pedagogic inclinations.
The main task I set for myself when I am teaching is to model agency so that students can learn by example. To act as an agent while teaching is double-edged: I try to maintain balance between

a) the authority of my role and the limits of the institution to constrain my freedom in the role, and
b) the power to unsettle students’ assumptions about the usual structures and expectations of a college classroom.

I want students not only to discern the difference between structural power and individual agency, but also to develop awareness about how to work constructively with this distinction given the peculiarities of their own particular life.

By deliberately embodying agency, I convey an attentiveness to self that elicits heightened self-awareness from students. The personal is thus contextualized as a reflection of the social, bringing the interplay of status and identity into immediate relevancy because the concepts are grounded in our shared social interactions. These maneuvers enable recognition and reflection on the ways features of personal biography interlink with roles granted or imposed by history and circumstance. In other words, I seek to cultivate skills of critical phenomenology, so that students can increase their perception and comprehension of the complex historical forces that bound – and bind – everyone’s supposedly-separate actions with the actions of others.
I justify my ambition along the continuum of time, accepting myself as one among many with the passionate desire to shift humanity away from the vise of violence. Although not a direct curricular component, keeping the complexities of time and timing in mind is a constant practice. Developmental trajectories are unique for each individual: people simply know what they know at any given moment. And, each moment is an opportunity for change. Learning, by definition, is a change in the state of one’s knowledge. The trick of timing is to identify when the potential for change aligns with the contingent conditions that enable realization. Attuning to these subtle juxtapositions is a matter of experimentation. Consequently, I work to reduce the fear of risk. As much as I feel compassion for varying shocks of recognition, I also exercise the conviction that we are capable of finding creative solutions to conflict.
Ultimately, I see my role as a teacher as one of strategic coordination with the learning needs of students projected into the future. College education today must involve much more than topical competence; it must prepare students for intensive competition and increasing interaction with people holding different worldviews and mindsets, premised upon as-yet un-invented technologies and un-diagnosed needs. Depending upon the subject matter, I can be more or less overt concerning the relationship between the content of the course (its specified objectives and subject matter) and the relational process of learning – i.e., working – together. The relationship between content and process, however, is always present, even when undiscussed. Every classroom composes a particular global microcosm. Each lesson conveys messages not only about the subject but also about the normative orientations held concerning the place or position of that subject within large cultural and institutional systems. Success within this participatory paradigm is measured by the extent to which I am able to bring students’ attention to the relationships, rather than conceiving of facts and phenomena in isolation.
Accomplishing such a shift would be a cultural achievement, hence not something I generate on my own. To this end, I recognize the necessity of institutional support and the essential willingness of students to cooperate. The tensions of un-learning inherited habits-of-thought and customary modes-of-interaction in order to enable new ways of relating is an uncertain tightrope from which to launch projects of domestic and transnational social justice and global peace. We need a lot of practice! The small contribution I offer are stimulating courses that sustain dialogue throughout, inclusive of all the dynamics that arise, as a means of instilling respect for the power of discourses that we create together to generate substantial progress on the long road of human life. On the basis of such respect, we can more effectively collaborate to invent and institutionalize economic and political mechanisms that promote the life chances of every person on the planet.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Language use both reveals and motivates human behavior; utterances invoke the past and foreshadow the future. I dubbed my dissertation research project SI(squared) as soon as I landed on the title: Simultaneous Interpretation and Shared Identity in the European Parliament. I am actually working three-dimensionally (SIcubed) at the juncture of social interaction, shared identity, and simultaneous interpretation. The fourth dimension of time is the lynchpin: we know that the future is predicated on the past, that language bespeaks social constructions of reality, that rhetoric is not merely verbal flourish for the moment but can set in motion massive institutional forces. We also know that words alone are insufficient for addressing the cavernous structural inequalities limiting human happiness around the world.
The heart of the social problems facing humanity today involves the integration of several types of knowledge into institutional structures that will generate a transformation of historical injustices into a new type of society that balances just enough predictable control for large-scale security with systematic mechanisms that preserve diversity through the guarantee of wide-ranging freedoms. My thesis is that simultaneous interpretation composes a cultural communication practice that – understood and utilized as a mode for co-identification – accomplishes this crucial equilibrium between similarity and difference. However, the zeitgeist of our era – with its inherited predisposition for speed – devalues the co-construction of shared understanding through the use of two or more languages. Participants in interpreted interaction, as much as they recognize and value the skill of simultaneous interpreters, tend to view the practice overall as a kind of necessary evil with a host of undesirable characteristics that must be simply tolerated. I suggest that this attitude is monolingual, monological, and monocentric. My dissertation will identify and critique this attitude in the discourse of language choice by Members of the European Parliament regarding the use of simultaneous interpretation.
Through the tools of critical discourse analysis, group relations consultation, and action research, I aim to craft an argument that counters the common sensibility of interpreters being ‘in the way’ of communication. Rather, simultaneous interpreters make more obvious the processes of interpreting each other’s intentions and co-generating meaning that always and continually occur during communication – even when they/we are using the same language! No matter how precisely I choose my diction, you – reading this – are forming an impression of me based on the ways my ideas are expressed. You are putting my representation of meaning through perceptions of comparison and contrast with the needs of your school, your personal and professional interests, what you already know about the theoretical and practical dimensions of adult pedagogy, and the proposals of other applicants.
These generic processes both intersect with deeper intrapersonal motivations that will be unique to each person reading this and reflect – in complex and complicated ways – macrosociological processes that we may or may not be able to apprehend. At best, we can approach the dynamical interactions through considered analysis and experimentation, hopefully generating reliable hypotheses over time and acting upon our educated suppositions in ways that further the social justice goals we seek. As a Master’s student in the University of Massachusett’s Social Justice Education program a decade ago, I became concerned with ways our overt pedagogical attempts to address various oppressor/oppressed dynamics sometimes served – in subtle yet palpable ways – to reify the precise role and status relationships we were intending to undo. Unlike most of my peers at the time, I was more interested in deconstructing my primary agent identities (white, non-disabled, middle-class) rather than my strongest target identity (lesbian).
As a graduate student then in my thirties, I had already worked through individual and group level empowerment processes by coming out culturally and politically in the Midwest in the late 1980s. I co-chaired a resurgence of lesbian and gay pride activities in Kansas City, MO and became a delegate for Jesse Jackson to the Democratic National Convention, where I convinced the Kansas State Democratic Delegation to support a resolution in favor of gay rights. I became involved in a national level political organizing effort of and for lesbians, where the apparent effortlessness of my until-then effective leadership skills was challenged in direct and indirect ways. I began to wonder: how had I managed to be so successful? Why did people follow me so willingly and with few – if any – questions? I began to listen differently, and to understand my own actions in more nuanced ways. This is also when I met members of American Deaf Culture, and began to learn American Sign Language.
Over the next few years, I pursued opportunities to become fluent in ASL, eventually earning the credential of a nationally certified interpreter. My involvement with a revolutionary group of Deaf educators and activists shaped my understanding of being an ally in profound ways. As my experience with interpretation accrued, I came to witness the workings of power through language use and social interaction in minute and intimate detail. Situated at the crossroads between Deaf persons with varying degrees of empowerment and non-deaf people with an equally wide range of (lack of) awareness as to how to deal with a bilingual, intercultural interaction – almost always in contexts where the dynamics of oppression were barely recognized and hardly ever acknowledged, and the professional role explicitly constrains intervention – my own immediate and everyday choices fell under pinpoint scrutiny. I continued to develop self-understanding as both the reflection and embodiment of other’s perceptions of who (and what) I am.
Understanding my own self as a locus of the institutional forces of racism, heterosexism, and audism (in the U.S. context) guided my quest for agency during my Master’s degree program. My teaching philosophy comes largely from experiential models developed from Paulo Freire and Augustus Boal, as well as from my lived experiences at several group relations conferences organized by the A.K. Rice Institute (often referred to as Tavistock, which is the British counterpart). These conferences establish “temporary institutions” with an assigned task but few guidelines for accomplishment. Uncertainty and doubt inspire participants to act out the full catalog of human emotions, including overt and subtle manifestations of all the isms. Learning to navigate the swirl of insecurities and phobias unleashed in these structurally-contained events has matured my ability to act proactively with respect for others as well as enhanced my capacities to interpret other’s actions generously without reacting along pre-formed lines. Or, at least if I do react in a limited/limiting way, I have the wherewithal to recognize and work constructively with the consequences.
This emphasis on un-doing the attitudes of privilege and re-learning how to respect and value differences continues to shape my interest in communication at the level of language and social interaction. I tend to notice irony and paradox – thus I was drawn initially to the Deaf community and ASL: why could we non-deaf not learn the relatively easy rules for using an interpreter? Eventually I was struck by the disparate provision of services: the Deaf now have an institutionalized system of language access (since the Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990) but no such system is available for speakers of other minority languages in the U.S. Why not? Is this a sideways manifestation of ableism? Further, I was stunned to realize that the kind of interpreting available for the Deaf as a language minority (typically labeled “community interpreting”) is not extended to other language minorities even in Europe – where multilingualism is vaunted as a continental treasure!
The prevailing logic of the European Union is extraordinarily cosmopolitan. If you move to another country, learn the language. Of course there are – and will always be – people from all classes who will and do learn languages – but the transnational working classes, refugees and asylum-seekers who most need language services are much too immersed in the daily business of survival to devote the time and concentration necessary for language learning, especially if they do not have a natural or cultivated aptitude. The failure to provide professional interpreting for language minorities is an institutional guarantee of exclusion except for the tiny few whose circumstances and talent converge in precisely the right ways to generate a successful climb to secure socioeconomic status. Alternatively, the creation of an interpretation infrastructure would generate a new professional class open to persons from all ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.
Equalizing the field of language access might guarantee more effective use of voice (as conceptualized by sociolinguist Jan Blommaert) by everyone in a society. As such, it may arguably be the most significant field to equalize in a reconfigured political economy, because more effective assertions of individual rights and needs will lead to more effectiveness in gaining the resources necessary to live the kind of life one desires. Such an infrastructure would certainly not be a dead-end financial investment, as all members of this class – interpreter trainers, educators, and researchers (e.g., language academics) and practitioners (including certifying agencies) would be full participants in the global economy. The ranks would be open to anyone with sufficient fluency in necessary language combinations – thus opening up avenues of upward mobility for immigrant families as well as maintaining a cosmopolitan option for the established upper classes.
With such an ambitious goal, taking the time to ground the dissertation in historical fact, contemporary discourse, and relevant theory is necessary. I have already prepared drafts on the history of the profession of simultaneous interpretation in its two key variants, conference and community interpreting, and am currently conducting fieldwork (thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship) on the contemporary discourse of Members of the European Parliament, where the most elaborate experiment with simultaneous interpretation is conducted daily in twenty-three languages. Much of my graduate level coursework and comprehensive exam were geared to the exploration of relevant theory and the possibilities of application to corporations, governments, and other social movers (such as NGOs, scientific research facilities, and the military). What remains to be completed is supplemental research based on new information, the detailed development of relevant theory (including the necessary elimination of interesting but tangential currents of thought), and the overt linkage of academic concepts with the practical realities encountered in the field and expressed in the discourse of subjects.
My work has attracted some attention already. I have been invited to present this spring on research in progress at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and at Vrije University in Antwerp. The presentations I prepare will pose hypotheses concerning the quality and relevance of findings to date. Deliberately elicited feedback (through design) from participants at these presentations will inform the development of the dissertation. I imagine that input from faculty and students at your institution will serve the same purpose. Rather than envisioning the dissertation as a final word on the subject, I view it as the text of a book with potential to act as an intervention in an ongoing, flowing discourse – a discourse of which we are all complicit to varying degrees.
Regardless of the success of the ultimate textual product in effecting the transnational economy, the process of engaging such a complex discourse (about the value and scope of simultaneous interpretation) is an active learning process that I hope presents and enacts a model of collaborative knowledge generation that can inform processes of socially just policy formation on any dimension of institutional/social need. In this regard, the “how” is as important as the “what,” the end product itself a further enactment of an ethic put into practice. The intentional openness of fieldwork (for instance, using my weblog to report tentative findings to subjects and keep the conversation open and available to a potentially interested public) both challenges and clarifies the boundaries of the study, mirroring some, if not all, of the meaning-making elements under study.
The discourse about simultaneous interpretation is a reflection and a confirmation of the way simultaneous interpretation is currently used. As a mode of cultural communication, there is a ritual element (James Carey) in the roles and habits of participation and a structuring of values in the discourse about participation. The ramifications of these values as a force acting on the future is most apparent when subjects choose not to use simultaneous interpretation, preferring instead a lingua franca of variable fluency. This move to the same language (usually a form of English) is an homogenization, a centering, that seems in the moment merely a matter of convenience but over time constitutes practices that eliminate diversity through the imposition of a singular, common way to express knowledge.
As I endeavor to inject relevant academic theories into an institution (785 elected politicians) with the power to craft legislation influencing billions of people, I am constantly stimulated to revise my assumptions and renew my hypothesis in a deliberately dialogic manner. My knowledge is no more fixed than theirs, arguably less so: I am one individual with an intellectual opinion. The Members of the European Parliament have inherited an accumulated tradition and collectively generated common sense, i.e., ‘this is how we do interpreting here’ (not an actual quotation, but illustrative of the lack of questioning regarding the use and/or outcomes of using simultaneous interpretation).
My hope for next year is to continue to engage my topic in a dynamic way through presentations and conversations with interested others, as well as to continue to test, assess, and challenge findings and conclusions through comparison and contrast with other projects. In particular, what does it mean to do action research, with an openly acknowledged interest in generating change? How does one decide when, and how hard, to advocate for a certain position? Can one hold a strong stance without being co-opted into a role that perpetuates pre-existing institutional/social forces or does the task require identifying how one is used in these ways because such incorporation is inevitable?
Becoming a member of an actively-engaged social justice education community strikes me as ideal for my own purposes, and I do believe I would bring worthy contributions to your program, overall, and any specific projects I am invited to join. My weblogging, for instance, is a deliberate strategy for promoting dialogue within groups. I have used it very effectively in my teaching, combining the advantages of online communication with face-to-face classroom interaction. From the years I’ve spent teaching online only courses, I learned that students (if properly structured and facilitated) will speak much more openly, thoughtfully, and in-depth regarding difficult topics than they usually do in a face-to-face environment. Also, the requirement of participation generates a kind of leveling effect, moderating the tendencies in a regular group for a few people to dominate airspace and the quieter folks to refrain from sharing their perspectives.
My most ambitious attempt was with a junior-level course on Group Dynamics in the spring of 2008: writing directly to the students my observations and reflections of group dynamics as they occurred in our face-to-face classroom interactions enabled a highly engaged group and very powerful learning experiences. The following summer session, in an online-only course on Interpersonal Communication, I created assignments taking us back to the work of students in the Group Dynamics course – providing grounded learning opportunities for current students to apply theories currently being learned. I have also created ways to use student blogs interactively, such that I was able to guide online students through a similar kind of group developmental process as happens in regular face-to-face classrooms. These kinds of linkages and cross-pollinations generate new possibilities for critical and continued learning. Whenever I teach, I convey the required content, however I use the content as a hook for getting students to develop critical thinking skills and practice putting them to use.
The greatest failure of most pedagogy is that it emphasizes the subject matter at hand to the exclusion of the social processes and relationships occurring among the people gathered for the purpose of learning about that subject. The skills I have acquired and continue to hone involve never taking one’s attention from the interrelational elements of the immediate interaction. I practice this when I write blogposts concerning my social life, coursework, political events, general thinking, and especially the current fieldwork. Framing is all. If I were to be invited to join your campus community for a year, I would anticipate blogging about my experiences there, making these blogposts available particularly to people present at the events of which I write, and hoping a dialogue would grow. There is no way to predict, of course, what I might sense, but I know that the mutuality of giving/receiving is crucial to the way I want to write this dissertation.
The result of our (imagined, projected) experiences together will inform the ultimate dissertation: the interaction can only enhance collective wisdom about effective intervention in a global system rife with problematic attitudes toward differences of all types.
Thank you for your consideration.

Popularity: 3% [?]

23:30 pm, November 4: My colleagues (ahem) made up in a single evening, all the time that I’ve been late to events so far this year. It was nice that most of them eventually did arrive! Volunteering at the American Club’s election eve event was the way to go; at least we were guaranteed entrance! In 2004, somewhere between 900-1200 people attended. This year, more than 2000 tickets were sold before the doors were essentially closed – well before polling ended on the East Coast and prior to a single projection! I enjoyed selling tickets at the main entrance, but checking those precious wristbands at the side door was not as much fun. One drunk guy didn’t miss a moment all night to glare at me for turning away friends he tried to usher in without having paid.


After a month and a half in Belgium, attending a half-dozen more-or-less official events, the expat crowd begins to seem familiar. Faces seem recognizable, even if the names blur. I keep seeing look-alikes of several friends who I know are State-side; biology turns up similarities even across oceans! At this moment, the roar in the ballroom is near deafening. Some blokes on stage are shouting in debate at each other, critiquing the truthfulness factor in claims made by candidate’s advertising. CNN is on projection screens stationed at intervals throughout the first floor of the Renaissance Hotel, without audio so far. A rock band, The Wanderers, has been playing covers at intervals throughout the evening. 93% of the people who have so far filled out the lottery form have selected Barack Obama as the deliverer of this quote:

Only seven percent imagined that John McCain could have said this, including me and Alyssa. (We were correct.)
01:30 am, November 5: The women’s bathroom is extremely entertaining. Earlier, there was a woman on her cell phone frantically scheming to get a friend without a ticket inside. Just now, an international trio including “a Swedish girl and a Canadian girl” (so they self-identified, if I recall accurately) were discussing whether a guy who looks pretty must be bi. “He has a pretty nose!” I really could not weigh in, although I did venture that “gay” is a cultural construction that may not apply uniformly in all parts of the world. This shifted us to a discussion of learning English via Michael Jackson and Madonna in Bulgaria.
In general, the crowd has thinned to half or even a third. A noticeable reduction occurred as soon as the band stopped. The buzz, however, is still achingly loud. It is hard to know if we’re getting down to only the diehards. Cheers go up each time numbers are posted showing an Obama lead (even if its only on 1% of polls reporting). The Republican table was unstaffed, although a few staunch supporters were undeniably present.


02:40 am: CNN just called Pennsylvania for Obama. The crowd here burst into its loudest and most sustained applause yet. (I confess; I teared up.) Alyssa and I are hanging out at our back corner table with its questionable views – she’s studying Flemish in-between updates and I’ve been reading The Bulletin. Folks keep dropping by to buy food tickets and ask questions, but we only look official (we know nothing!) Chris, however, scored a set of campaign set buttons, and proceeded to explain a project, “mindset” and its “zero interest group” platform.


03:27 am: I finished reading the current edition of Flanders Today. The chatter is still loud. People have taken to the floors, sitting in small groups, although most of the remaining crowd (several hundred) remains standing. Wolf Blitzer just teased us with “a big projection coming up.”
03:35 am: Ohio! An eruption of cheers, upraised arms, flying objects, hoots and hollers. “No Republican has won the Presidency without Ohio.”
03:50 am: New Mexico! Way to go, mom!
Dead heat in the popular vote at the moment; would like to see a wider margin. Meanwhile, they dimmed the lights here at the Renaissance Hotel in Brussels a few minutes after the projection of Ohio. They don’t expect us to leave, do they?!


04:43 am: Folks have been slowly drifting out; the crowd is noticeable thinner as the night turns toward morning. There’s still over 200 people hanging in, waiting for the speeches. Did I mention popping out my contact lens in favor of old-fashioned spectacles?
05:06 am: They did kick us out of the main ballroom; fortunately we were all re-situated in the lobby when CNN announced

The din echoed off the ceiling for no short time; some groups further back in the hotel bar carried on for several minutes in hearty rendition of an Oktoberfest tune. Now, again, the constant chatter continues, and we wait . . .
05:29 am: McCain did alright with his concession speech. Three quarters of the stalwarts listened . . .


. . . and continued to listen carefully, while a handful kept trying to shush persistent chatterers in the background.
Finally – Obama’s turn.


09:00 am: I am a wee bit tired. We lingered for some time after President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech, basking in the relative quiet (finally! after the noise of the night and the entire election). Then, Alyssa and I walked in the pre-dawn mist toward the U.S. Embassy’s breakfast affair. At one point, ducking into a virtually empty metro station to confirm our destination and relative whereabouts, we were embraced by Queen. As we walked the quietly-stirring city streets, office lights glowing as if suspended in the ether without structures, the topic of fear arose. Michelle Obama explained some time ago the role of fear in the family decision that Barack would run for President. I agree with her wholeheartedly.
I should have snapped a photo of the BMW showroom gleaming brightly with red and white balloons before we entered; the cops wouldn’t let me later! (I thought he was pulling my leg, he was so friendly about it. “You’re kidding?” I exclaimed. “Please comprehend,” he asked. Sigh.)


U.S. Ambassador Sam Fox (to Belgium), U.S. Ambassador Kristen Silverberg (to the EU), and Rep. Kurt Volker (NATO) gave upbeat speeches.

Ambassador Fox extolled the election of Barack Obama, emphasizing the “peaceful transition of power,” and guaranteeing the continuation of strong trading relations. (BMW, Ambassador Fox informed us, manufactures cars in Alabama.) These themes were echoed by Ambassador Silverberg and Rep. Volker.

13:59 pm: On three hours sleep (!), I recall the loudest cheer during President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech. He said,

and the people roared. At least half a dozen times our soon-to-be forty-fourth President of the United States of America was drowned out by spontaneous cheers in the cozy hotel lobby. It wasn’t until a second listen at the US Embassy reception that I heard the list of ideals:

Popularity: 1% [?]

This post distills a series of thoughts from reading three different texts: The Heroic Model of Science (Chapter 1, Telling the Truth about History by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, 1991); The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen (2000), and an Interview with Ilan Stavans by Richard Birnbaum (@ 2003).
Three threads are primary: language, interaction, and science. “Language” is engaged theoretically and in practice, particularly the practices of interpretation. Although the references in the three selected texts refer mainly to written translations, I extrapolate ‘down’ to in-the-moment generation of understanding in everyday talking with each other, based on cooperation or agreement between people about meaning. I also extrapolate ‘up’ – or at least ‘over’ – to the interlinguistic skills that are most obviously evident in simultaneous interpretation. As to interaction, there are numerous levels from the microsocial to the macrosocial and the temporal to the ephemeral. The history of science is significant because of its influence on how people in western countries learn.
Why these three texts, beyond the coincidence of reading them more-or-less at the same time? Appleby, Hunt & Jacob (hereafter AH&J) investigate “what sorts of political circumstances foster critical inquiry” (p. 9). They write specifically in regard to the discipline of history by “examin[ing] critically the relevance of scientific models to the craft of history” (p. 9). I borrow their analysis as a way to explore the relevance of scientific models to other disciplines, particularly communication and the intersection of communication with political economy (especially governance), management (the organization of business), and culture (identity, ritual, and social relations).
AH&J challenge relativists and skeptics, sometimes lumping them together as postmodernists, arguing that in some ways they can “leav[e] the impression that the linguistic conventions of science have less to do with nature and more to do with the sociology of the scientists…in this way they have confused the social nature of all knowledge construction with the self-interest of the constructors, forgetting that all social beings participate in the search for knowledge and sometimes do so successfully” (emphasis added, p. 8-9). AH&J offer definitions for “skepticism” and “relativism,” showing how these attitudes form the substance of conflict with another historical attitude, that of religious absolutism. Tensions among these attitudes form the roots of the culture wars we see in the U.S. today.

“We view skepticism,” write AH&J, ” as an approach to learning as well as a philosophical stance…skepticism can encourage people to learn more and remain open to the possibility of their own errors” (p. 6-7).

Relativism, a modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making the statement” (p. 7). There is an important nuance to this definition: truth is not directly relative to the person, rather, it is relative to “the position of the person.” (Note: “modern” means the idea of relativism wasn’t around when the initial fight took place between the skeptics and the religious. “Relativism” is an outgrowth of that fight.)

Religious absolutism is “the conviction that transcendent and absolute truth can be known” (p. 15).

All of these stances can be overdone, hence AH&J propose a standard for knowledge, i.e., for what we believe to be true:

The last phrase, it seems to me, is most crucial. If we are interested in democracy and social justice – meaning a fairness for groups of people of varying types – then we must find ways of producing and valuing broad social, political, and economic structures that are acceptable to everyone, even those whose self-interests differ from our own.
Jonathan Rosen, in a section about the ways Judaism and Christianity have borrowed from and influenced each other through the ages, writes about “open fearlessness, that willingness to assimilate outside cultures into your own without worrying that they will corrupt your beliefs” (p. 83-84). One of the anchors he poses for the Jewish religion is the collective realization, a very, very long time ago “that only words were durable” (p. 79). The Talmud, he argues, “is a sort of cathedral built across the ages and spanning all the earth – or perhaps I should say it’s a Temple, or at least a translation of one, built out of words and laws and stories” (p. 81).
I want to make three points simultaneously: language as a power with literal force; the “extraordinary religiosity” (according to AH&J, p. 50) of early (and at least some contemporary) scientists; and the inescapable fact that scientists today are the inheritors, intellectual descendants, and cultural products of the heroic science born of the Enlightenment. Certainly I am. I want to both rescue and continue the project of “truth with a purpose: the reform of existing institutions” (AH&J, p. 41), while seeking to escape or alter additional repeat performances of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century culture wars.
Power of Interpretation:
Language is key. Rosen’s parallel between the Internet and the Talmud speaks to a proliferation of heterogeneous meanings that suggests an antidote to “the nature of books never to be quite right and of words always to elude our grasp” (p. 54). The refusal of words to mean one thing only, and to mean only that one thing always and forever, is precisely the juncture where understandings are forged or splattered. Words are durable while truth about what the words mean remains elusive. Rosen’s desire “to embrace contradictory traditions” (p. i) seems similar to AH&J’s focus on “the interplay between certainty and doubt” (p. 10). This enables Rosen to keep faith with “the business of life [which] is to learn, not to know” (p. 33). For AH&J that interplay “keeps faith with the expansive quality of democracy” (p. 10). Learning, democracy, science, and faith are inextricably intertwined: language is their confluent expression.
This is why Ilan Stavans can assert with conviction: “I find translators, in many ways, to be the real protagonists of culture . . . Translators are the underpaid heroes of culture.” Translators – and interpreters – are always in between. Rosen explains how the Talmud “devised a culture intended to be a kind of middle term between extremes – between destruction and new creation, between the dead and the living, between God and man, between home and exile, between doubt and faith, between outward behavior and inner inclination” (p. 131).
Interpretation is a form of communication that has to work within and between “the chaotic contemporary forms of communication that,” Rosen explains, “are so often accused of diverting us from what is true. The chaos and the incongruities, it turns out, are part of the truth” (p. 119). On that basis he compares the “interrupting, jumbled culture of the Internet” (p. 10) with “a page of the Talmud” (p. 19): “all those texts tucked intimately and intrusively onto the same page, like immigrant children sharing a single bed” (p. 10). “Those portions and their accompanying readings,” he continues, “swim in a sea of commentary . . . so large that it seems at times to expand [like the Internet] to include everything” (p. 30).
Language in History:
Before elaborating on Stavan’s thesis, let me summarize the discussion of language and its role in history provided by Appleby, Hunt & Jacob, because they present the discipline of linguistics in the creation of heroic science as an equal partner to the discipline of science. “The Enlightenment,” said to begin in 1690, “set the terms of the modern cultural project: the individual’s attempt to understand nature and humankind through scientific as well as linguistic means” (p. 39). Concurrent with the emergence of sciences and history as disciplines, “the European philosophes also developed new approaches toward old languages and texts. Reading old documents, indeed reading any document, is never as simple as it looks. Even picking up the local newspaper you ask, well, why did they run that story? Or, I wonder what party that journalist has joined?” (p. 37)
The discipline of linguistics began with criticism of written texts, called hermeneutics. It didn’t take long before “the language in a text, the words on the page, became too important to be left to clerical interpreters” (AB&J, p. 38). The Christian Bible was, at the time, the standard of absolute knowledge; it came under particular scrutiny. Ironically, clergy had originally invented hermeneutics, using the Bible as the reference point for all kinds of statements of absolute truth concerning the world and time. Now, AB&J continue, “The words had to be enlisted in the enterprise of creating wholly secular and scientific learning, but with consequences for … the present generation” (p. 38).
Stavans says, “Using language as a category is a way to say who we are in front of a mirror.” He goes on to illustrate how words change meanings over time, illustrating how the evolution of meaningfulness is what goes on socially, among and between people. When you, or I, use language – when we talk or write – we are “saying who we are” to ourselves.
When I wrote earlier that I am cut in the vein of heroic science, it is because I recognize how I think and talk in those terms. AH&J present a range of descriptions:

“Diderot described the follower of the Enlightenment as an eclectic, a skeptic and investigator who ‘trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, venerability, universal assent, authority – in a word, everything that overawes the crowd – dares to think for himself, to ascend to the clearest general principles, to examine them, to discuss them, to admit nothing save on the testimony of his own reason and experience’” (citing Diderot’s article on eclecticsm in the Encyclopedie (1751), p. 39).

I am not an ideal type, but there is certainly a resemblance. How about this: “a new kind of person…hard to govern, suspicious of authority, more interested in personal authenticity and material progress than in the preservation of traditions, a reader of new literature, novels, newspapers, clandestine manuscripts, even pornography, all especially produced for an urban market” (p. 40). This description hardly marks me special, rather it describes today’s average western person. To wit, “a new cultural type who could be a pundit, prophet, fighter against tyranny and oppression, original thinker, elegant writer, sometimes pornographer, reader of science, host of salons, or occasional freemason” (p. 35).
The average western person today, as well as trained scientists and elites, however, is also subject to the culture wars that are the legacy of the original, historical figures of the Enlightenment who “battled with clergy and churches and at moments risked martyrdom” (p. 18). “In the culture wars of the present generation, language, with the many uses and abuses that can be attributed to it, has figured prominently in the arsenal of weapons” (p. 38). Today, continuing the trend of the Enlightenment when secular hermeneutics turned the scientific method on the Bible, all words are related to other words.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The quotes I pulled from this long NY Times magazine article show me some of what I think is Obama’s deep wisdom – he is not playing divides against each other, but trying to find the places where opposite sides can connect. It is this ability to see through to the worth of values, and find ways to honor and respect the differences in values that make up all of American culture, that attracted me to him in the beginning. He understands “diversity” from the inside.

What are the “cultural issues” he’s talking about?

There is a

…need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong . . .Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.

The article (also published by the International Tribune), is interesting and informative). The reporter harks back to Obama’s emergence on the national political scene at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. At that time and place, Obama spoke about a broad politics comfortable with “worshiping an awesome God in the blue states” and having “gay friends in the red states.” He elaborated to the NY Times reporter (Matt Bai),

“…that Washington’s us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. ‘If voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done.’”

Some of the insights I appreciate from the reporter include describing George W. as “more of a uniter [of the American public] than he ever intended” because of the vast disapproval with his policies, and, although not naming Hillary, the evidence of how her protracted fight for the nomination has helped Obama’s organizing in the long run. “In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.”
Of course the economy is crucial – it always was, even before this crisis – but Obama recognizes and keeps talking about the fact that “cultural issues matter far more in the rural areas than they do in the exurbs, because voters see those issues as a test of whether politicians respect their values or mock them.” (Emphasis added.)
This next is a longer quote, because it might be part of what unnerves some people about him – his lack of need for public adoration. Perhaps what is unsettling about this aspect of Obama’s character (his “organized unconscious” as David Brooks recently described it) is that the absence of a need for acceptance reduces public leverage on his decisions, which subsequently ups the ante of trust. Obama will surround himself with the best and brightest of varying points of view, and then he will decide based on the calculations of his own wisdom. What will do with a President not subject to manipulation? What I hope is that this quality of self-determination applies equally to the elites.

“It is often said in politics that a candidate’s strength is also his weakness. Obama’s greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin résumé and the resistance of his own party’s establishment, is his placidity. Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech (plenty of other candidates, from Ted Kennedy to Howard Dean, could do that), Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense of inner security that is highly unusual in a business of people who have chosen to spend every day asking people to love them. He does not seem like a candidate who’s going to switch to earth tones in his middle age or who’s going to start dressing up in camouflage to rediscover his inner Rambo.

Obama is content to meet the world on his terms, and something about that inspires confidence.And yet that same lack of pathetic neediness may in fact be a detriment when it comes to persuading voters who, culturally or ideologically, just aren’t predisposed to like him. I once heard a friend of Obama’s compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross. That image returned to me as I watched Obama campaign in Lebanon. Clinton wouldn’t have wanted to leave that gym until every last voter had been converted, even if that meant he had to memorize the scheduled sewer installation for every home in Russell County. Mark Warner, a similarly tenacious glad-hander, went to rural Virginia again and again because, deep down, he needed to change people’s perceptions of who he was. Obama doesn’t connect to the world that way, which is probably why his campaign has always preferred big rallies to hand-to-hand venues. Obama gives the impression that he’s going to show up and make his case, and if you don’t fall in love with him, well, he’ll just have to pick up the pieces and go on.”

Then, there is the matter of race/racism and whether the latent prejudice of whites will adversely affect Obama’s chances. I like the reporter’s critique: “The more important question is not whether race is a factor in people’s votes but whether it is a determinative factor — that is, whether Obama’s being black is the disqualifying fact for white voters that it might have been 20 years ago or whether it has now been reduced to one of those surmountable obstacles that any candidate has to overcome.” This merely calls for scathing honesty: is Obama’s mixed heritage the ONE reason to vote for/against him? Although there is, no doubt, a small subset of the population who would say this matters the most, this is obviously the wrong basis of evaluation. I am in agreement with the reporter’s conclusion: “it may be possible for racial prejudice to exist, as all the polls suggest it does, but for it to be only one significant influence among many, including voters’ views on the economy and on McCain as an alternative.”

Finally, I appreciate Obama’s candor.
“I’m not a familiar type.” He laughed. “Which means it would be easier for me to deliver this message if I was from one of these places, right? I’ve got to deliver that message as a black guy from Hawaii named Barack Obama. So, admittedly, it’s just unfamiliar . . . I’m different in all kinds of ways. I’m different even for black people.” (Emphasis added.)
In the end, I think this is what it comes down to: can you vote for someone unfamiliar? Of course you will feel the riskiness of it, but the only rational explanation for that sense of risk is fear. Not necessarily deep dread or panic, but uneasiness with the inability to predict what will happen. We never can, of course, but the uncertainty of tomorrow (even of later today) seems more manageable when you are working with the familiar. This is change at its essence: from something known to something new. The big changes that Obama might generate will be possible because of the small changes in the hearts and minds of people like us.

Popularity: 4% [?]