Reflexivity

North American Summit on Interpreting
Arlington, VA

“Intelligence is tactile”

Luis was describing the difference between teaching and learning. “Teaching,” he said, “is finite. Learning is infinite.”

One hundred and eighty language service providers have gathered at the 2nd North American Summit on Interpreting for the purpose of learning how to gather our collective intelligence and generate an intercultural revolution. Barry Olson calls us to engage:

Ask

Why not!

and

What if!

Most of the participants are interpreters; some are owners or representatives of businesses that provide language services, and a few are technical gurus who design the communication technologies that increasingly re-shape the limits of what interpreters can and cannot deliver. Nataly Kelly (of Common Sense Advisory), used excerpts from science fiction films to expose the confusion most people have between “translation” and “interpretation.” I reflect on these processes with an engineering analogy in a blog entry about paradigm consciousness. If you read that entry, you’ll get a taste of how I think about these things and understand that

I’m still processing yesterday’s amazing series of Summit events.

I can offer teasers, though! Over the next week or two, watch for entries on:

• Contextualizing this moment in interpreting history, building on Nataly Kelly’s challenge: “The idea is not to resist the tools, but use them to do more.”
• The What? Factor (independent contractor or employee model?)
• Cheerleading for the new social movement (inspiring riffs from Barry Olson)
• How the Deaf community might be leading the way….

Meanwhile, the interview Nataly had with Ray Kurzweil captured my imagination. I’m not sure if I got his statement verbatim, but I’m pretty sure he said:

“The most high level work one can imagine,
the epitome of human being,
is our ability to command language.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Dialogue: Identities
Whiteness (Race), Gender, Culture…

Do some suicides matter more than others?

It just so happened that our third dialogue session on identities came on the second anniversary of an 11-year-old’s suicide. Some high school students from Springfield offered a trenchant analysis of why the 2009 suicide of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover received less sustained public attention than that of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince in 2010. In contrast with the perception that “people are always bullied” in Springfield – where Carl lived and died – “South Hadley always gets good press.”  The novelty of “something bad happening there” drew the media spotlight. Kamari, Noelani, Tiffany, Jerrico, Allie, Ashley and Tory had no difficulty naming stereotypes associated with area high schools, including those held by others about them.

Frustration and humor poured out of these young people in equal measure, spinning out in multiple directions and toward a range of targets. These high school juniors are in a bind and they know it. Refreshingly, they sense that high school students from other schools in western Massachusetts are also bound up in their own situations. The strangeness of social hierarchies based on assumptions about identity clearly exasperates them; telling jokes to keep each other laughing is a social coping strategy.

Naming the superficial

Most of the contact between high school youth occurs through sports. “You see what people in other towns think and it’s not very nice.” I was discouraged to learn only negative stories, mainly about South Hadley. I suspect South Hadley topped out the stereotype list both because they are hosting the multi-high school Dialogue Summit on April 30 and because of disparities of public interest in the two suicides.

Some stereotypes about students at South Hadley High School are

• “notorious” and “known for being effective at bullying;”
• “bad” in competition, swearing loudly despite the presence of young kids in the bleachers;
• “They gave me attitude – crazy attitude;” and
• “are always talking junk” and “yelling swears.”

The stereotype scenario became more complicated when we asked how these students at Renaissance High School think they are viewed by others. It depends upon where those other high school students are located. There’s one view from outside of Springfield that lumps all Springfield High Schools together: “ghetto thugs, everyone wearing do-rags, swearing, using guns, smoking dope and selling drugs – both at the same time.” This list was generated with the dull verbal tone of routine and placed in context: “This is what is shown in the media.”

Specifically, these Renaissance high schoolers imagine that their peers from South Hadley and Amherst probably assume they’re

• “loud” and “obnoxious;”
• “fight” and “steal;”
• will “kill them;” and
• “Dress like hoochies.” (“How do you spell that?” I asked. “H-o-o-c-h-i-e-s. You can throw an extra ‘o’ in there if you want.”)

These youth face a different set of stereotypes from their contemporaries in other Springfield high schools. This view came up when asked what they wanted others to know that contradicts the stereotypes. “I don’t think we can technically defend our school,” said Tory. Huh? I didn’t understand – “technically”?

“They always have a problem if you go to Renaissance:
‘you’re smart and stuck up.’”

Interestingly, these Renaissance youth don’t display extremely negative attitudes toward the other Springfield high schools. “All the bad schools have something good about them.” For instance, “Sci-Tech is good, it’s just loose.”  Loose meant “30 kids outside” without administrative/adult supervision: “that would never happen here.” Commerce has programs like 1B and 9th Grade Teams (among others), and a legacy. “My dad went to Commerce when it was good… they didn’t play.”

Going in with a Clean Slate

While the students were talking about these stereotypes, I was wondering how addressing these stereotypes directly might unfold during the upcoming Multi-High School Summit. Dialogue co-facilitator Taos asked the important question about how they want to approach the Summit. Kamari responded instantly, “I’m going in with a clean slate.”  They are excited! A little nervous but eager nonetheless.

From their point-of-view, neither South Hadley nor Amherst High School are very diverse. By “diversity” the students meant “not predominately one race” – then they had a bit of debate about whether Renaissance is diverse or not. From one view, “Springfield is 75% minorities,” which “isn’t very diverse.” When asked about the label, “minority,” Noelani smiled:  “We’re the majority here, but not everywhere else.” The slightly more-detailed demographic breakdown (provided by the students) is 36% Hispanic, 25% Black, 26% White, and .03% Asian.
Those block percentages suggest cultural homogeneity, but most of the Renaissance youth participating in these dialogues have parents who do not share the same ethnic profile with each other.

My hypothesis is that growing up in a family where everyone doesn’t look like the same ‘type’ or even behave – culturally – in the same ways has provided these youth with a neat ability of balancing differences. The evidence is threefold (at least):

1. there is no uniformity of identity among students in the dialogue group (most of whom hang together much of the time);
2. their ability to perceive beyond stereotypes, and also to ‘understand’ and be able to explain why people from outside Springfield seem unable to exercise such insight in return; and
3. their refusal to demonize their contemporaries living in Springfield, even though the vise of being misunderstood/misrepresented both from without and within must suck.

Identities are fluid

The communicative skillset demonstrated by these Renaissance juniors suggests an intuitive comprehension that “identity” is not a single, solid, unchanging thing.  We’ve just begun to explore if it is helpful to separate stereotypes associated with the body from stereotypes associated with the mind. Specifically, does learning how to recognize when one is ‘trapped’ by a stereotype based on body help one make the shift to perceiving another based on the consciousness of their brain?  Generalizations about awareness and intelligence can lead to troubled relationships, too, so I am not posing this as any kind of universal answer. I am suggesting that recognizing when a shift from body to brain would enhance a relationship, and then practicing enough to be able to pull it off when it matters, are crucial skills for navigating the increasingly complex mixing and blending of cultural ways-of-being in society today.

Please Note:

A fundraiser for an anti-bullying scholarship in memory of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover will be held this upcoming April 16, 2011. Walker’s mother has become a national leader in the struggle to curb bullying in school, recently meeting with President Obama because of her activism, locally and nationally, to eliminate bullying in schools.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Amherst, MA

Boundaries or Identities?

Lately I’ve been wondering which comes first, or if this is a classic chicken-and-egg dynamic. Talking about whiteness raises interesting identity questions about belonging – to whom, when and where, how much. The privilege of being known on the basis of mind rather than body is one of the core features of whiteness: white people (like me) might notice attractive white people but would consider the physical as an extension of the mental. In contrast, white people (like me) might notice attractive brown people and stop there, as if the physical is the entire package.

You can see how this works by watching the strategic representation co-constructed by Director Hype Williams and Rihanna, as she is featured in the Kanye West video “All of the Lights” with Kid Cudi and a host of others: Charlie Wilson, John Legend, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, The Dream, Ryan Leslie, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis. The reflection of whiteness back at itself is heavily dosed with gender, too.

The Rihanna thing is intense. The mournful tones of the introduction frame an ominous future for young girls growing up in a body-centric world. Not that the prospects for men are so much better – read the lyrics. We are all under surveillance of one kind or another most of the time, it’s just that the surveillance is so unobtrusive we can ignore it. Ignore it routinely enough and you’ll forget it’s happening!

My Hip Hop Education

I learn through interaction, talking about ideas and observing responses until I locate a stance that reflects the kind of ethos I want to project into the social world. Teaching allows me to test and assess some of the effects of acting consistently within that ethos, especially where it rubs against conformity. This semester, at least a third of the students in a Communication course on Media and Culture are proactively engaged in cultivating their own ethical stance in today’s fast-forward society. Together, we are all working to develop collective intelligence.

My hip hop education merged with my teaching in a surprising way. The cultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer Micheal Wesch – described as the “Head Honcho” by one of my students – commented on three videos submitted as midterm projects by students in my class to his call for “Visions of Students Today.” In one of his comments, it is obvious that he misunderstood something about hip hop, which I – roughly six hours ahead of Professor Wesch on the learning curve, haha! – was able to recognize.

Given a penchant for using my own mistakes to extend the learning process for myself and possibly others, I engaged:

Michael Wesch, thank you for joining our conversation! I am going to drag you into this lesson, too. An interesting coincidence of timing occurred with your comment to Jamar’s video “My Life, My Eyes, My World” and me learning about Hip Hop. I juxtapose our mistakes (!) to see if there is anything to be learned from them.

I shared all the gory detail with my students because it allowed me to provide them with an immediate and non-academic example of the communication phenomena of juxtaposition and articulation.

Juxtaposition and Articulation

In the All of the Lights video, Rihanna’s adult female body – the physical manifestation of her person – is juxtaposed with rousing lyrics and an exciting musical beat in a saccade. The combined visual and auditory stimuli articulates the dark female body as an object of desire. Because the body is foregrounded, considerations of mind fade from consciousness.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Vernal Equinox

Full Moon Stories

On the night before Equinox I met The Milkman, a non-brown person appearing strange in rural Central America, now sharing lessons with me from Zen Buddhism.  Senor Leche shared a specially strategic communicative move with me from his years of arduous spiritual training, emphasizing:

“They hit you with a stick until you get the nose insertion technique correct.”

I was impressed by how long he could hold the pose. “Practice,” he encouraged me. “Years of practice.”

The Rihanna thing?

The Rihanna thing is a quick reference to an earlier conversation about Beyonce and Alicia Keys.

When I first came upon Beyonce, [in that There-and-Then context], I was figuring myself out as a woman. She was girl/woman/sexy/curvy but still a side character. Then I came across Alicia Keys, who is seductive and very strong.

Her songs are about love and loss…

Alicia gives nothing of herself away.

Alicia is the actor in her videos and the guys are decoration.

Make your move.

Word, word… twice in a lifetime.

“Alright.
I have lyrics.” [study]

So says Talib Kweli
performing with
Jane Doe, Wordsworth, Punchline, and Mos Def of
Black Star.

“Hi-Tek is the guy who
provides the
music in the back.”
[acknowledgement]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tribute.

All grown up and ready to lead, shake it up!

Make it real – compared to what?

Getting shot at, it’s all left up to us.

The hip hop generation, our generation

We’ve got the longevity, educated enough to know

No time for sorrow, gotta share all the love

Love the way it should be.

Not let our minds get trapped in time.

We can change how the world turns.

A remix of lyrics from songs performed by John Legend and The Roots, from the album “Wake Up!“

Credits:

Salamishah Tillet, Digital Booklet, Wake Up! Sept 2010.

Eugene McDaniels “Compared to What”

Leon Moore “Our Generation (The Hope of the World)”

Mike James Kirkland “Hang On In There”

Lincoln Thompson “Humanity (Love The Way It Should Be)”

Bill Withers & Ray Jackson “I Can’t Write  Left  Handed”

Billy Taylor & Dick Dallas “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”

John Stephens “Shine”

Ahmer ?uestlove Thompson “Wake Up Everybody”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Professional Development/Certification Maintenance Workshop
New England Home for the Deaf, Danvers MA
30 January 2011

There were many things talked about at the same time during Stephanie “SC” Clark’s and Rebekah Barkowitz’s workshop, Navigating Through Social Networking with Confidentiality and Ethics. Not that they need my approval, but they did a great job with some tricky material. The reality is that the massive spread of social media over the last decade changes everything. We are not living in the same world that spawned the original (1960s) RID Code of Ethics, nor even the recently updated RID Code of Professional Conduct.

No one knows what recent changes in communication mean for our relationships with each other or where they will lead in the future. How can we know what to talk about now?

SC and Rebekah gave background information about some legal cases as well as precedents from employers who have policies about what employees can and cannot say about their work in online social media like Facebook. As workers, interpreters fall into a middle category (the always gray zone, as Sharon described it) which includes some of us being staff employees while many more are “freelance” – self-employed independent contractors. As SC and Rebekah proceeded with the workshop, responses and questions from the participants were welcomed. Slowly a “picture” of the issues as they concern professional sign language interpreters began to emerge.

I want to start with my last Aha, because it took some hours of reflecting and a helpful conversation with a colleague who didn’t attend but debriefed with me. The most striking feature of the talk during the workshop, viewed in historical terms, is that only a few people seriously questioned whether interpreters should not post comments to Facebook that are in any way related to an interpreting assignment. When someone did suggest that interpreters choose not to (even though we “can”), there was no uptake: in general it was assumed that interpreters will post about work on FB just like most FB-users do.

The fact that Facebook is a public space and the profession’s traditional confidentiality rules apply as they would under any other circumstances has been overwhelmed by the emergent social interaction made possible with online communication technology. My imagery might not be the best, but its like the gold rush, or any colonizing movement of people who “discover” a “new land” and rush to stake their claim. Interpreters – along with nearly everybody else – dove headlong into this new exciting territory and began to play there (more-or-less just like everybody else). It needs to be noted that the majority of veteran interpreters attending this workshop rarely if ever post anything remotely job-related to Facebook or other online social media. I emphasize this observation because we (the profession) need to understand our position vis-a-vis the new social reality. The point is that the older generations of interpreters could not assert the traditional value of confidentiality in the new timespace of social networking.

“Thank god my FB name isn’t my real name!”

Mikey got us laughing in the discomfort zone of wondering about the new boundaries. The conversation unfolded around what kinds of things would be “okay” or “not okay” to post. In other words, a surrender to the new communication technology has already happened. We are behind the curve, playing catch-up. The evidence from our talking with each other during the workshop is that “confidentiality” – in the ways we used to understand it – is gone, or at least seriously compromised. What this hard fact suggests is that our elected representatives and national office staff need to formulate questions that lead us toward answers that serve the profession and our clients well – all of us: Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and non-deaf (”hearing”). This is similar to the question that Jo asked when she was talking about Facebook as a “tool” for new generations. Rather than treating FB and other social media platforms (such as Twitter), as sites for interpreters, the Deaf community, hearing interlocutors, and institutional representatives need to police each other, is it possible to ‘go with’ the new flow and put the tool to productive use?

The strategy that Rebekah and SC used to stimulate our thinking was to ask us to consider the viewpoints of three potential audiences to status messages posted on Facebook: the Deaf community, professional colleagues, and the hiring/paying agency. Then they gave us several actual status messages to evaluate. Opinions varied quite a bit on what was acceptable and why, or not acceptable and why not. “It depends” remains the interpreter’s favorite answer! What we demonstrated is that meaning is always in the eyes of the beholder.

There were some observations that might be useful. For instance, in the first batch there was a categorization based on

• naming the institutional site of a job and
• comments that humanize the interpreter and the interpreter’s relationships with interlocutors and colleagues.

The second batch broke down into

• comments that cast the profession overall in a bad light, and
• a relational comment (that could be considered humanizing or insulting depending upon one’s predisposition and/or knowledge – or lack thereof – of the circumstances that inspired it).

Roughly, one could say (based on the given samples) there are two dimensions to consider: the institutional/macrosocial level and the interpersonal/microsocial level. When, how, where, and to what extent can Facebook be used as a means to leverage institutional respectability for the profession, as well as to draw interlocutors more actively into the processes of co-constructing understanding across cultural differences?

What do we want to protect for the future?

You’ll have to forgive some of the references here, but let me play a little bit. I’ve actually always had some resistance to the extent of the confidentiality rule. It has been repeated my entire career that interpreters used to tell their spouses, “I’m going out for ice cream,” whenever they received last minute requests, as if interpreters are on par with international spies. It reminds me of a few scenes in Fair Game, when Valerie Plame insists to her husband that she is “going to Detroit” (instead of, for instance, Afghanistan or Darfur) and “works at [such-and-such fake company]” instead of for the Central Intelligence Agency. As if he doesn’t know. (But then, he doesn’t know the specifics, but generally, he knows!)

The two prompts that we were given early in the workshop as a warm-up for the small group exercises referred to the screening and rating systems by which interpreters become certified. I didn’t know that these people’s identities are kept secret! I’m interested in the rationale, having just learned that the people who rate movies are also essentially undercover. This Film is Not Yet Rated documents the search for these raters who have incredible influence over what movies get advertised, distributed, and seen in the US.

SC made an important observation about modern-day compartmentalization, in which a person’s different identities belong to different physical places and are performed with particular people associated with those places – rarely if ever to meet. This is of course what is radically changed by participation in cyberspace: work, family, friends, activism, school, hobbies…. all our varied aspects can be brought together. Young people are mashing-up all these previously-separated spaces and we’ve got no choice but to react. The heart of the matter for RID is if we can move beyond gut-level reactions to proactive responsiveness.

Some of the resources shared by SC and Rebekah are definitely worth checking out, especially if you are a Massachusetts’ state employee. There’s a quiz about ethical behavior, which can be used to assess conformance with the MA State code of conduct Chapter 268A. They also shared some resources on making your Facebook page “nearly invisible” and otherwise learning how to take advantage of privacy settings. If you’re interested in some theory about challenges with understanding/interpreting online text (including email, SMS, etc), you might want to look at social information processing theory, which describes internet-based communication as “cues filtered out,” but is one of the first theories with a positive take on the kinds of relationships that can develop in cyberspace that are not possible face-to-face (for all kinds of reasons).

Getting nerdy

Finally, I want to describe two “discourses” that struck me as the main junctures of discussion during the workshop. First, note that I am making a technical distinction between conversation (in which we “share verses with” each other) and discussion (in which we bounce off each other’s utterances as if they were billiard balls). Conversation is generative – it can lead to new knowledge, new relationships, new possibilities. Discussion maintains the status quo (especially hierarchies of dominance and entrenched disagreements).

Discourses are patterned ways of talking: they represent particular attitudes or approaches to a topic and every human being is caught up in them, one way or another. Whatever we say, every time we say anything (and even when we say nothing), we are participating in one or several discourses. It is the cumulative action of discourses (many people saying similar things) that shapes social realities.

One of the discourses in the workshop represents our professional conditioning: it is habitual and traditional – one could say it is the ‘dominant’ perspective on interpreters’ professional conduct. This discourse was foreshadowed by the workshop title, which emphasizes “confidentiality and ethics.” The second discourse questions this historical inheritance – some might call it critical or challenging, but if we’re interested in accuracy, I think it is a transitional discourse: it is the one we need to have until we figure out how to be in the new social mash-up where the old categories get all mixed up with each other.

The great benefit of Stephanie Clark’s and Rebekah Barkowitz’s leadership on these issues is that they invited and welcomed both discourses to be co-present in the room. For the most part, the two discourses bounced off each other, discussion-style. Conversations did occur, however, along the sidelines in small groups and during lunch. Hopefully as professionals we can make conscious choices toward conversation in order to mobilize our collective intelligence toward strategies and positions that enhance the profession by improving the intercultural communication service we provide.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
College of Engineering
University of Massachusetts Amherst
13 December 2010

Dr Kshitij Neroorkar’s defense was so smoothly delivered you’d have thought he’d done this a thousand times already. Who knows? Simulation of Flash-Boiling in GDI Injections with Gasoline-Ethanol Fuel Blends might be the kind of hard science topic where 1000 experiments are needed before you get to defend the phd! Being the lone, non-family-member representative of the social sciences present, “How much did you understand?” was the question-du-jour, post-defense. Here comes the test, huh? At least enough to recognize that Dr Neroorkar’s subject matter seemed very similar to Dr Shivasubramanian Golapakrishnan’s dissertation topic, which I distorted metaphorically in a previous blogentry: Language is a Fluid.  A big thanks, btw, to Dr Blair Perot, who read and questioned the two-way utility of my analogy:

“Since I understand the fluids, this analogy certainly helps me understand what is important to linguists. I am less sure about if it will help the other way around. Does it really help linguists understand/describe linguistics better to think in terms of fluids?” (I like how he cuts right to the chase!)

Foundation

The site of Dr Neroorkar’s study is in the nozzle part of a fuel-injection system, so its a pretty small physical space.  Inside that wee tunnel all kinds of things are going on, one of them being flash-boiling: the violent explosion of liquid into steam (a gas). The better this explosion is controlled, the more usable energy one gets, but it is tricky to maximize the energy potential because, well, all kinds of things are going on! There’s a pressure drop where the fluid enters, certain processes that generate the growth of nucleation bubbles which start out teeny-tiny and expand until  they touch each other, and then these bubbles bursting into spray in a process called atomization. The art is to manage the rate and speed (measured by a non-dimensional number – one of those deeply held math secrets engineers bandy about like social scientists bartering philosophical theories). The particular number in this case (that describes nothing in the physical world) is quite effected by the slightest change in temperature. Changes in temperature affect the rate and there’s a whole bunch of modeling that needs to be done to get this whole puppy optimized.  Or something like that.

“Then we do some mathematical tricks”

Turns out that with 8-hole injectors, the plumes of vapor generated from each hole merge in a way that needs to be taken into account, and this hasn’t actually been done before, or not so well/thoroughly or otherwise unequivocally established through parametric study. What is the difference, someone asked, from what Dr Gopalakrishnan did before? “Shiva didn’t couple them.”  Couple what? The nuances were definitely over my head here, but the two of them did use the same HRM model, which (as Dr Neroorker explained to me later) “assumes the liquid-vapor mixture is one substance, not separate.” Treating the fluid-gas mix as homogeneous rather than heterogeneous (as explained here right at my level) enables an epistemological framework in which the system will relax to equilibrium if given enough time. There are (apparently) problems with the assumptions of cavitation, and the degree of superheat figures in some crucial way, not to mention the influence of specific geometry (90% symmetric) and the composition of the periodic boundary conditions (sounds an awful lot like “context” to me).

Somehow, Dr Neroorkar put all that together in the first validated 3D simulation showing the geometry region, the residence time dominated region, and the vaporization time dominated region, and got a volatility distribution curve showing stuff that matters. With important limitations of course: laminar flows, empirical time scales relevant to one fluid not others, so on and so forth.

Party!

The best part (of course) was the celebration, where I got to pretend to blend in with the relaxing homogenous crowd of Indians (”convenience store not casino” as distinguished by Russell Peters) at Sneha & Kshitij’s cozy apartment. Except for Nidhi (who delivered all her laugh lines in Hindi so I couldn’t understand them), everyone stepped up to being blogged. Partha gave in pretty easy: “We aren’t cited that often.” I had a great conversation with Vikram, who informed me that “helium is helium,” and Upen, “Math is not context-dependent.” Bhooshan mildly admitted that there “are not so many more fundamental reactions to discover [in chemistry]“, which Upen amended, “until they are discovered!” I would have followed up on these topics except Ruchita chimed in, ” This is not the conversation I want to be having!” Oh alrighty then!

Sandeep, meanwhile, was focused: “Where is the biryani?” Pritish arrived a little late and took awhile to catch up, “She’s gonna use my name somewhere?” You know I was amused when Sneha told us “people used to think I was a boy.” And did I ever learn some gossip about somebody’s Victoria’s Secret!

The meal was awesome, the company grand, and the event momentous. Kshitij himself did the honors on the decadent chocolate mousse cake, announcing: “My job is done.”

Popularity: 6% [?]

Womensphere with Newsweek Global Summit
Manhattan (NYU Kimmel Center & Goldman Sachs)

“I am honored and inspired and intrigued.”

Nina summed up the third Global Summit from her role as a member of the event team. Sarah described how positive everyone was behind the scenes, which was elaborated upon by Nancy as “so much energy and spirit put into action….[this event] was about doing, not just cheering.” Vanessa emphasized everyone’s generosity and authenticity, summed up by Robin as “passion with a splash of compassion.” Was it Aidan who was so eager for the final round of acknowledgments to end? She also made sure that Claude received special recognition for superb orchestration of the nuts-and-bolts of a flawless large group event for several hundred women who just want to be allowed to row.

“Loving good, boys!”

The Maud Scientist shared her version of “Good boys, good!” with us while introducing the Innovation Roundtable after the first morning’s series of keynotes. Shelly Lazarus had told us about a presentation she had attended about the rowing team at Cambridge, which was studied for five months by cultural researcher Mark de Rond en route to beating historic rival Oxford for the first time in seven years. A mere ten days before the ultimate competition, the team made the unprecedented replacement of the male coxswain with a woman.

In 2008 Cambridge was coxed by Rebecca Dowbiggin (a Ph. D. candidate in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic) who tips the scales at a slight 102 pounds and stands 5’4” tall. Her teammates were all a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier.Rebecca is not capable of making a meaningful contribution to the speed of the boat through the water by pulling on an oar. But then, that’s not what she’s in the boat to do. She has a different purpose. The rowers sit in the boat, oars in their hands, with their backs to the finish line. The cox sits in the stern and faces forward, the only member of the team who can see where the boat is going, who can adjust for wind or current or course. The cox shouts encouragement, and coordinates tempo and teamwork. She can’t win without strong oarsmen, but they can’t win without her either. Without mutual trust and respect the team will surely lose, if not drown.

Shelly told us that Professor de Rond attributed the team’s risky group decision to three factors:

• the breadth of nuanced calibration of the team,
• the depth of trust established on the basis of intimacy generated by cultivating the capacity for such finely-tuned calibration, and
• the distinct difference in leadership style of each cox.

In a phone conversation earlier today, Professor de Rond clarified these lessons, explaining that the palpable difference between the two cox – as felt and experienced by the rowers – was that the male cox made the rowers nervous by exhorting them too much, generating a sense that something was off. Rebecca demonstrated more trust, synchronizing with their experience, and keeping focused on technical calls which allowed them to feel as if everything was proceeding according to plan. She had used the special call, “Good boys, good!” once during practice and – noticing the extremely positive response, did not use it again. Instead, she held that call in reserve, until at one very strategic and challenging moment in the race, she let it out. And the boys responded. No gender claims are being made based on this tiny sample (although basic heterosexual biology probably played some role). Professor de Rond did say, however, that “She used her femininity in a very clever way.” The strategic use of praise, tucked within a superb performance of technical calls that kept the team settled and steady, provides a strong undergirding for the main point made for us gathered at Womensphere. In the words of Shelly Lazarus,

“she just let them row.”[i]

“Leaders come in all sizes.”

Analisa Balares made the comment teasingly as she stepped onto the speakers’ box that had been removed to accommodate Shelly’s height. Womensphere is Analisa’s brainchild. It is not surprising that she pulled together a team, including an impressive alliance with Newsweek, and designed this Global Summit exemplifying Shelly’s recommendations for effective and powerful leadership: hire strong people, mean the questions that you ask, be generous – know that you cannot say thank you often enough, invite people who work for you into the decision-making process, share the glory, make problems bite-sized, celebrate successes and problems together, be passionate, and act in faith that the better people are then the less they want to be managed.

As I intuit my way through the upcoming series of blog entries attempting to distill the vast reserve of wisdom pooled during this incredible gathering, I keep thinking about the influence of the researcher on the Cambridge rowing team. Shelly told us that team members, in the beginning, kept trading technical competence for social competence. In other words, like all groups, the early stages of development are composed mainly by politeness and gravitation toward similarities. Usually, no one wants to be the first to rock the boat. Many groups never acknowledge, let alone resolve the roots of various tensions, choosing instead to try and leapfrog over them, as if by ignoring differences they will either go away or – at least! – not interfere with the ultimate performance or outcome of the group’s goal. Is it possible that the fact of being studied encouraged the team to become more forthcoming and bond so well that they could disregard conventional wisdom about the timing of crew changes and (possibly) even violate gender norms of male/athletic comraderie?

Passion: Collective Consciousness and Coordinated Action

It is impossible to overstate the achievements of this Summit. Analisa spoke of “socializing ideas” and the laws of physics, especially the laws of attraction and inertia. What we experienced is the constitutive power of language: together – the members of the event team, presenters and moderators, and all of us participants – we spoke a culture into being. Kavita Ramdas put it like this: “I just made a community of sisters.” Those 48-hours composed an instance of planning coming alive, as expressed by one of the event team members (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch).

The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin recognized the centripetal and centrifugal forces of language in use. Centripetally, Analisa gathered us together, attracting and holding us in orbit around a central core in order to share vision and perpetuate faith in our potential to collectively come together and generate solutions to crucial problems in order to preserve the planet for ourselves, our children, and theirs. Now, centrifugally, we scatter to the ends of the globe yet remain connected by the extent to which we claim the identities and relationships forged through the cultural communion of living by a common code. One of the beauties of this code is its inherently inclusive nature. Mustafa exhibited this in droll fashion: “I’m not your typical womensphere woman.” Then he exhorted:

“Keep in touch. Stay with the program.”

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[i] FYI, I made an interesting discovery while searching for a cool link or two to embellish Shelly’s story. I spent about twelve hours worrying that Shelly had been hoodwinked!  Or perhaps heard what she wanted to hear? (Only because I’ve been known to be guilty of this, myself: its that desire thing. Ahem.)  I found myself in the uncomfortable position of finding several references to this research – none of which mentioned the female coxswain. Yes, the team chose social intelligence over technical competence, but in generic reports the emphasis was on the replacement of one of the rowers, two weeks in advance of the race. In a brief article in the Cambridge’s journal, Research Horizons (2007, p. 30), a “socially gifted oarsman” was chosen over another who was technically closer to the ideal individual performance because of the team’s “unremitting search for rhythm.” This video of the researcher, Marc de Rond, explains how social intelligence – being able to both cooperate with & compete against each other – is crucial to team performance. No mention of Rebecca.

What to do? Embarrass Shelly? Upset everyone? Rewrite the blog so as not to include any mention of this theme or its impact upon us?  Imagine my relief when I read Professor de Rond’s response to my inquiry this morning, explaining the details and clarifying that Rebecca’s role on the team “came out in my teaching more than the actual book.” I am even more intrigued, now!  It seems to me the struggle of leadership is one of calibrating rhythm, tempo, and unexpected perturbations. We need more men like those Cambridge rowers, able to choose the group’s goals ahead of the individual. And we need more publicity and public discourse about mixed-gender accomplishments!

The whole story is presented in de Rond’s account, The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew. Professor de Rond and I spoke a bit about why Rebecca’s part of the story was less emphasized, and I think there are important points to be learned from this, too.  The two men who were replaced were quite disappointed – as anyone would be who has trained long and hard for one specific purpose. The replacement of the oarsmen was more controversial – and informative, in de Rond’s view – of the importance of social competence even for teams with one hard linear goal: to win The Boat Race. In other words, the omission in the media isn’t only about sexism. There’s care for those who didn’t make the cut, too.

Popularity: 20% [?]

language & interpersonal communication
[supplementing the UMassWiki]

Our first reading assignment is by Seth Gore, The Buzz Buzz Boom.

I have posed some questions to begin to guide students through a process of discovery. Beyond the initial reactions, what more can we learn through careful consideration, asking & answering critical questions, and thinking together about the meaning potentials in any and every act of communication?

1. Who is in this story? (Name all the characters)
2. What are they doing in this story? (You may read this question as, “What are they doing in this story” or “What are they doing in this story.” Or both.)
3. How are they doing that in this story?  (“That” being whatever you answered in Q#2 .)
4. What have you already learned from this story? (Keep in mind the topic of our course, which is ________________________________________.)
5. What does your intuition suggest you can learn more about by thinking for a longer time, more deeply, about this story?
6. What questions does the story raise for you?

A total of three sets of questions need to be considered, in addition to this first one, before students draft thoughtful responses.  These are listed at the course wiki. The second set involves the possibility of connection between the students as readers, and either/both the author and/or real persons with similar characteristics as the fictional characters in the story.  The third set engages theory – what are the different ways a person can interpret the meaningfulness of the story, particularly if we take the interpersonal communication among characters as the point of focus?

Popularity: 6% [?]

indexical timespace
Region 1 Conference
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf
Albany NY

Where is your meaning?

Opening night at the Region 1 conference for American Sign Language/English interpreters featured two information-rich sessions on the strategic organizational development of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). The Government Affairs Program presentation by former RID President Janet Bailey illustrated RID’s progress in earning recognition as experts on interpreting with the federal government. The report from Tracey Frederick of the Strategic Challenges and Bylaws Review Task Force revealed intra-organizational schisms on issues such as the range and type of certifications authorized by RID, the extent of linkage between “certification” and “membership,” and the distribution of voting rights and limitations according to certification status. The question of control is at the core of both internally and externally oriented topics.

The historical inheritance of the sign language interpreting profession in the U.S. privileges the control of space over efforts to control time. The emphasis on controlling space parallels global patterns in communication technology since the invention of mail (the physical delivery of letters) and railroads (the industrial distribution of goods). Faster forms of travel (of material things as well as communicative messages) are a major contributor to the pace of today’s society. Control over territory (including the people within that area) is determined by the capacity to manage distance. Imagine a three-way chemical reaction: the further you can go, the faster you can get there, and the reliability with which you can go and return all interact to produce a desire for speed. The demand for speed is a result of attempts to control space.

Technological innovation changes everything

Janet Bailey gave a brief history of RID showing how, as an organization, despite funding ties with the Department of Education and some connections with Vocational Rehabilitation, we were essentially unknown to the federal government until video relay technology blasted onto the scene in the 1990s. The technological capacity to transmit two-way video signals in synchronous time allows the Deaf Community to communicate with each other as easily as non-deaf people have been using the telephone for the past century. Curiously, the obvious fairness of making communication access as available and everyday for the Deaf as it already is for the non-deaf is one of the institutional challenges of our era. Actually, I overstate the case. Deaf people have figured out very well how to use technology to communicate among themselves and with anyone who is fluent in a sign language. The serious challenge for RID is leveraging the intercultural communication skills of video relay simultaneous interpreting to helping people connect across significant language differences.

Building relationships is a matter of time

Connecting with other people is a function of understanding. Humans tend to become friends with the people we understand, and enemies (or emotionally indifferent to) the people we do not understand. If understanding comes easily we appreciate the flow. When understanding requires a process, most people do not seem to enjoy the interaction as much. Wait. Let me qualify that last statement: most monolingual people do not enjoy interactions that require effort in understanding. My evidence is both personal and professional. As a simultaneous interpreter, I am constantly under pressure to understand instantly with a level of accuracy possible only by telepathy. Failures to immediately grasp meaning are heavily criticized by all parties to the interaction. In contrast, anyone who seriously begins to learn another language develops individual capacity for handling difference. If you want to connect with someone who uses a different language, the first step involves accepting the fact of differences – whether they are cultural, grammatical, or perceptual. The second step in building a relationship with someone who is not the same as you requires learning how to manage the time of trying to understand them and their ways.

Recently I was privileged to attend a wedding between two amazing people whose combined network of family and friends is a microcosm of diversity. During quieter activities before and after the main event, I observed the bride and groom’s family members and friends communicate with each other. All of the Italians and Romanians who had learned a bit of English made efforts to connect with each other as well as with the Americans (and guests of other nationalities using English as the lingua franca). Since both Italian and Romanian belong to the Romance family of languages, Italians speaking Italian to the Romanians and Romanians speaking Romanian to the Italians supplemented (in some situations) limited vocabularies in English. Spanish is also a Romance language, unlike English, so Spanish also served as a communicative bridge.

The point is that no one with any degree of bilingualism was upset about making the effort! No one complained that communicating took “extra” time! What was important was the mutual desire to connect, and whatever language was available was what was used. The relationships were forged in-and-by the process of figuring out the meanings together. There is a special quality to connections based on conscious cooperation that distinguishes them from relationships that stem from the automatic flow of using the same language. This is the zone where the intercultural communication skills of simultaneous interpreters have particular importance and special use. No other communicative practice has as much potential for forging individual, cultural, and systemic capacities for the equitable embrace of diversity and fair treatment of difference.

Dynamics of Simultaneously Interpreting Signed & Spoken Languages

Tracey shared results of the 2007 member survey with us, including the dismal statistic that a mere three percent identified as Deaf. Although RID is officially invested in putting a positive spin to recent efforts at increasing and enhancing the Deaf role in the organization, this figure represents a drastic drop from the percentages at the organization’s founding in 1964. What I want to emphasize is the disproportionate influence of this tiny slice of the membership on the organization overall. The success of such a numerical minority to shape organizational goals, mission, and culture brings to mind Margaret Mead’s famous quote about small groups of committed people being the only effective agent of large-scale change.

One of the historical puzzles that Janet clarified is why the law requiring sign language interpretation as a reasonable accommodation uses the adjective “qualified” instead of “certified” to establish a baseline measure of interpreter competence. This is because, at the time of the public hearings, RID was a small organization (less than 5000 members) and only a fraction of those members were actually certified. The law could not be written with a requirement that would be impossible to satisfy. The result is a chaotic and contested terrain that contributes to some of today’s tension among interpreters working in different institutional fields.

A distinction I heard in Janet’s talk that I will continue to listen for involves a difference between “consumers” and “clients.” Janet mentioned consumers referring specifically to the Deaf, and clients in reference to who pays the bill. One of my criticisms of our field is the general disregard for the non-deaf, “hearing” participants in interpreted interaction. Until we bring all interlocutors into the overall professional discourse, we cannot resolve persistent problems nor achieve the promise of the field: the unprecedented capacity of simultaneous interpretation to contribute to multicultural practices of equality and democracy.

Popularity: 2% [?]