Reflexivity

I bailed on the conference this afternoon; went into DC to spend some time at the new National Museum of the American Indian. I got on the Metro going the wrong way (!) and two amazing things happened.
First, I met a “road engineer” (if I remember his title correctly), who I’d name but….don’t wanna get him in trouble (if there’s any chance of that). It’s a pretty high-up job in the hierarchy of train engineers, he troubleshoots on the tracks themselves. We’re sitting there on the bench, and start chatting.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been in an all-signing environment; my eyes are rusty! We had a characteristically Deaf start at my first ever Interpreter Trainers convention, the keynote began only 50 minutes past the scheduled time. I, in my introvert fashion, found a seat to plant myself while most folks schmoozed. Anna R. knows how to work a crowd! I exchanged greetings with lots of people from Allies

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Jung Yup told me Learning to Labor is the best ethnography he’s ever read, because it fully contexts the microsocial within a political economy (at least, this is what I understood from our conversation).
I’ve found a follow-up Learning to Labor in New Times that lauds the original book and updates it through a series of essays that might also be very good to read.

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Danny the Destroyer (grin) taught me a lot tonight, as did everyone who participated in the critique of Smith. Thanks, Li, for telling me a gave a “good defense,” at least I have that to hold onto! and, the brief de-brief with Srinivas and Jung Yup, about how we all have different points of entry, was helpful somewhat reassuring. I knew I was entering new turf, but … well. I’ve never been one to learn quietly or make my mistakes in private. Natalia, you ROCKED as a partner. Your balanced view and ability to shift between “pros” and “cons” enhanced our presentation a lot (although it might also have had the effect of highlighting my less (I won’t say “un”-) critical enthusiasm.
We’ve got one presentation down! I had one more thought (a parting shot?!) about the apparently pervasive view that Smith’s “stories” were “disconnected.”

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We escaped the sauna of our classroom last night and moved outside to the courtyard, onto the grass, where it was cool (and a bit buggy). Big class, about a dozen, several people from outside COM, which is cool – I like more, diverse perspectives. I’m also psyched that I’m in class now with folks I haven’t been before, Srinivas, Jung Yup, Danny…they also see things differently than I do and I’m looking forward to getting to know them (I hope!)
Paula had to move us along quite a bit, some hadn’t read, others had perhaps read but were shy to join in the discussion. I’m sure that’ll ease up as we go along. The summaries of David Harvey and Saskia Sassen’s arguments were really helpful to me; they helped put Smith’s critique into perspective. The overt discussion of what Smith’s argument is and where he’s coming from was also terrific for me because that made the connection between what Smith had written and the background that Paula shared – the relationship to LaClau and Mouffe, reviewed by Saul Newman, and the general sense of this emphasis on any form of agency being “heretical.” When Paula said that I thought, “No WONDER I like him!”
Here’s someone who argues “the project as a whole is unlikely to achieve its intellectual and political ambitions”. And another who analyzes LaClau and Mouffe’s reconstruction of the term, hegemony.
This is my first class in political economy so I know I’m missing a lot of knowledge most (if not all?) of my peers have – grounding in Marxism, most obviously. Hopefully, my willingness to display my ignorance (!) through guesswork and thinking-out-loud won’t reflect too poorly upon me.

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this book by Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. (I can’t seem to locate any online info on the author – poo!)
He unabashedly argues for the social construction of “globalization” and critiques the heck out of Michael Harvey and a few representatives of what he calls the “global cities discourse” (Michael Friedman and Saskia Sassen). Smith “advance[s] a social constructionist analysis which exposes the entire discourse of globalization as ‘a tightly-scripted narrative of differential power’ (Gibson-Graham, 1996/1997: 1) that actually creates the powerlessness that it projects by contributing to the hegemony of prevailing globalization metaphors of capitalism’s global reach, local penetration, and placeless logic” (italics mine, 2001: 58).

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