Make NERDAs the linguistic minority (proposal)

the future

Building on the potential for a paradigm shift is matter of recognition, marketing, and design. These processes can proactively influence each other, interacting and changing through the development of a project. All are contained within the conception and application of strategic planning.
Strategy has to involve conceptualizing the outcome in two different yet complementary ways. First, you must … Read more...

back in the valley

Amherst, MA
a.k.a. The Happy Valley

It is cool for summer. In fact, the chill at night feels more like autumn. Otherwise the lush, bright greens (of trees, grass, cultivated crops and wild bush), sky and mountain blues, and varying tones of white in the clouds are as they ever were. I got out on the bike trail yesterday, smelling … Read more...

Enjoy Poverty! (please)

Brussels

“When you look down,
all you see is your own fear.”

It took guts for Renzo Martens to make this film. The images he presents and the strategies he attempts mirror the white west back to itself, largely in unappealing ways. Exposing the exploitation of poverty implicates himself just as much as it critiques casual disregard for suffering.

By … Read more...

an ethic of learning (teaching goals)

for a grant application

I had to outline my “teaching goals” for a grant application, I’m sure I will have to do this many times in the future. I have also done this before, but I do not have a standard document: while there is consistency over time, the presentation shifts – hopefully becoming clearer while providing situated information on
Read more...

envisioning the scholarly life (the search for funding)

grant application:
dissertation year writing
[US, diversity]

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, … Read more...

“Dare to Know” (Kant)

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 … Read more...

about Obama

“To act like hunting, like somebody who wants firearms just doesn’t get it —

that kind of condescension has to be purged from our vocabulary.”

~ Barack Obama

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 … Read more...

improv

Some days are just quiet.
I decided to play tourist and went looking for a museum and a recommended bookshop. I found a church! (Make of it what you will!) Street names here change every few blocks, requiring navigational vigilance.
St. Paulus.jpg
Some time thereafter, I stumbled upon a square, Mechelse Plain, in full preparations for an art opening, featuring the photography … Read more...