Mathemagenic just posted on her beginnings at Microsoft, where she is Walking on Ice trying to figure out which rules are bendable and which risks worth taking. The censure I’ve received from various folks at school has been at the social level more than the professional level – although it may come out against me at some future/potential employment site. Because it’s an academic institution there are more protections for me (I have assumed, going on what has/hasn’t been said to me) on the basis of the right to intellectual freedom/free speech.
The problem with the social level is that persistence is taken as aggression . . .
sometimes I sense that in me – resistance to being “told” to toe the line, conform, not make waves, etc etc ad nauseum. I try to hold my own line on the basis of integrity to my own thought-process and writing here what I’m thinking: in the moment (like now, spontaneously after reading mathemagenic’s blog) or based on the day’s events (what took up the most time/energy/interest, seemed most important, or what I most want to remember/record).
Social negotiation of this sort is tough. I’d like to think I’m getting better at assessing the risks and managing to reduce the tensions while still pushing at inherited boundaries. Other times I wonder if my peers just KNOW more than me about the ramifications of this type of epistemological practice and it’s relationship with surveillance.