I was interviewed for the campus weekly newspaper last week; the story ran today. And the story ran "above the fold," which was nice, even if I think I look a little goofy in the accompanying photograph . . .
The reporter for the paper did a marvelous thing and recorded our conversation. I can tell because the direct quotations in the piece were in fact direct quotations -- they are exactly what I said, not paraphrases or shorthand recollections. Having been somewhat misquoted in several past interviews, I'd like to give a public tip of the baseball cap to Mike Unger for getting it right! I think I come across in the piece close to how I am in daily life, which was nice to see.
Oh, just for the record: 7 biological, 19 adopted, 2 in line for adoption, and one guardianship. Making me officially the oldest of 28 children.
3.4.06
Safe spaces
Last Wednesday (running a bit behind in my blogging here, as in so many other areas of my work…) I attended "Safe Space sticker training." This is a program sponsored by the campus life department and the GLBTA (Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgendered-Ally) center, the point of which was to certify the participants as providers of a safe space within which people can explore their sexuality. For participating we got a nifty rainbow sticker, which is a concrete designation of wherever we post it as a "safe space."
The training was interesting. The central exercise was a group discussion about sexuality, but not one in which people necessarily had to speak from their own experiences. Instead, everyone had to assume the identity of a GLBT person, and try to speak from that place. The instructions were to think about how our own lives might be affected if we had that identity; for those of us who were GLBT individuals, we had the option of speaking from our own actual lives, and for those of us who were not, we should think about how our lives might have been different if we were. [And people who were GLBT individuals were also given the option of adopting a different GLBT identity than the one the enact in their everyday lives.] The point, I think was two-fold: to get non-GLBT people (those who would be "A"s) to really confront what it would be like to struggle with those issues, and to give GLBT folks an opportunity so safely talk about their experiences under the cover of "I might be just playing a role here."
The exercise worked very well; having never really had an opportunity to ask a self-identified transgendered person what kinds of challenges they faced, it was nice to be able to do that in such a setting. There was another, perhaps unintended result of the exercise: by placing all of us in a position where our enacted roles bore no necessary relationship to our actual life experiences, it raised the opportunity to wonder who was "telling the truth" and who was "making things up." I was surprised to see how much I was wondering about the stories that people were telling during the discussion, and whether they were "true" or not. This was surprising to me both because it didn't matter to the exercise, and because it illustrated how central certain notions -- like the "true identity" -- are to our everyday practices of relating to one another.
It was particularly odd at a session devoted to creating safe spaces for the exploration of various sexual and gender identities to find myself so internally insistent on knowing whether the stories that people were telling were true. It wasn't as if knowing whether someone was gay or a lesbian or whatever would have caused me (or anyone else in the session) to dismiss them; the whole point of the exercise, after all, was to create a safe space! But it was almost as if the ambiguity of the situation was itself uncomfortable. Intellectually, I'm not surprised, but emotionally it was odd to confront that uncomfortability in myself.
Indeed, in a "safe space" of the sort that my office will now be labelled as, there needs to be tolerance for precisely that kind of ambiguity. In that way it's different than a classroom space, where my pedagogical reaction to ambiguity is to push students to clarify and to commit and to stake out claims. Classrooms should be safe, I think, but safe for something different: safe for arguing positions, safe for trying out ideas, safe for speaking your mind with the understanding that you will have to defend what you claim. As long as the differences between the spaces are kept clear, I think, there's no problem.
The training was interesting. The central exercise was a group discussion about sexuality, but not one in which people necessarily had to speak from their own experiences. Instead, everyone had to assume the identity of a GLBT person, and try to speak from that place. The instructions were to think about how our own lives might be affected if we had that identity; for those of us who were GLBT individuals, we had the option of speaking from our own actual lives, and for those of us who were not, we should think about how our lives might have been different if we were. [And people who were GLBT individuals were also given the option of adopting a different GLBT identity than the one the enact in their everyday lives.] The point, I think was two-fold: to get non-GLBT people (those who would be "A"s) to really confront what it would be like to struggle with those issues, and to give GLBT folks an opportunity so safely talk about their experiences under the cover of "I might be just playing a role here."
The exercise worked very well; having never really had an opportunity to ask a self-identified transgendered person what kinds of challenges they faced, it was nice to be able to do that in such a setting. There was another, perhaps unintended result of the exercise: by placing all of us in a position where our enacted roles bore no necessary relationship to our actual life experiences, it raised the opportunity to wonder who was "telling the truth" and who was "making things up." I was surprised to see how much I was wondering about the stories that people were telling during the discussion, and whether they were "true" or not. This was surprising to me both because it didn't matter to the exercise, and because it illustrated how central certain notions -- like the "true identity" -- are to our everyday practices of relating to one another.
It was particularly odd at a session devoted to creating safe spaces for the exploration of various sexual and gender identities to find myself so internally insistent on knowing whether the stories that people were telling were true. It wasn't as if knowing whether someone was gay or a lesbian or whatever would have caused me (or anyone else in the session) to dismiss them; the whole point of the exercise, after all, was to create a safe space! But it was almost as if the ambiguity of the situation was itself uncomfortable. Intellectually, I'm not surprised, but emotionally it was odd to confront that uncomfortability in myself.
Indeed, in a "safe space" of the sort that my office will now be labelled as, there needs to be tolerance for precisely that kind of ambiguity. In that way it's different than a classroom space, where my pedagogical reaction to ambiguity is to push students to clarify and to commit and to stake out claims. Classrooms should be safe, I think, but safe for something different: safe for arguing positions, safe for trying out ideas, safe for speaking your mind with the understanding that you will have to defend what you claim. As long as the differences between the spaces are kept clear, I think, there's no problem.
2.4.06
Moving
So yes, it's true: I am moving. Not moving my residence, and not moving my place of employment, but moving my office -- from the relatively secluded confines where I am presently lodged, into a student dormitory.
Yes, you read that right: I am moving my office into a dorm. Where students live. And where said students are more likely to come and find me, as opposed to my present office which is more difficult to get to -- my new locale will be right next to the student mailboxes, placing me right on the main traffic path for the undergraduates who inhabit the dorm.
Why am I doing this? In many ways it's irrational, since one of the causal implications of my moving is that I will have less undisturbed time in my office to write and to do the kind of work that gains one prestige within the academic discipline of International Relations. Whether things should be this way or not (and I don't think that they should be, but that's material for another post or ten), one's prestige as an academic depends basically not at all on one's teaching -- including one's relations with undergraduate students -- and almost exclusively on one's research productivity. Hence the urban legend that the way to damn a junior faculty-member is to give her or him a teaching award before she or he gets tenure, since this is supposed to be a signal that they're spending too much time with students and not enough time researching and writing.
Of course, by all indications I'm about to get tenure, so maybe those restrictions no longer apply to me -- at least not as much. Regardless, though, prestige within an academic discipline is virtually never about teaching, and hence devoting more time to teaching (which means less time for writing and research) means going against the socially dominant norm. So why am I doing this irrational thing? Besides the suspicion that I may simply be insane -- which, judging from the looks on many of my colleagues' faces when I tell them about my plans, may not be too far from the truth -- I suspect that there are better reasons.
In fact, I can think of two.
1) the kind of academic I am -- the kind of academic that I aspire to be -- is a student-focused academic. That means that my vocation is to teach students, and everything else that comes with my job should be subordinated to that end. Moving my office into a dorm seems a logical continuation of that path.
2) teaching students is not just about seeing them for a few hours each week in a classroom. It's about reaching the students in a more profound way, connecting with them in such a way that I can really produce the kinds of social spaces within which they can explore contentious issues and try to ascertain who they are and who they want to become. It's hard to do that if your only interactions with students are distorted by the authority and control techniques of a classroom setting! Moving my office into a dorm increases the potential for such informal interactions, as well as enabling me to engage in some co-curricular programming -- and literally reach students where they live.
So after two years in my present office, I will be moving on Tuesday.
I originally had big plans for this move, and in particular for the packing of my office. I wanted to take some time and really triage all of the accumulated crap in the office, and throw a lot of stuff out before I left. But I ran out of time and find myself doing something quite different: tossing things into boxes and planning to triage after the move, during unpacking. In some ways that's fine, because the important thing has been done -- all the stuff in my office has been neatly divided into small boxes. Now all I have to do is to sort it while unpacking, and remember precisely what is in that box labeled "who the heck knows?"
Yes, you read that right: I am moving my office into a dorm. Where students live. And where said students are more likely to come and find me, as opposed to my present office which is more difficult to get to -- my new locale will be right next to the student mailboxes, placing me right on the main traffic path for the undergraduates who inhabit the dorm.
Why am I doing this? In many ways it's irrational, since one of the causal implications of my moving is that I will have less undisturbed time in my office to write and to do the kind of work that gains one prestige within the academic discipline of International Relations. Whether things should be this way or not (and I don't think that they should be, but that's material for another post or ten), one's prestige as an academic depends basically not at all on one's teaching -- including one's relations with undergraduate students -- and almost exclusively on one's research productivity. Hence the urban legend that the way to damn a junior faculty-member is to give her or him a teaching award before she or he gets tenure, since this is supposed to be a signal that they're spending too much time with students and not enough time researching and writing.
Of course, by all indications I'm about to get tenure, so maybe those restrictions no longer apply to me -- at least not as much. Regardless, though, prestige within an academic discipline is virtually never about teaching, and hence devoting more time to teaching (which means less time for writing and research) means going against the socially dominant norm. So why am I doing this irrational thing? Besides the suspicion that I may simply be insane -- which, judging from the looks on many of my colleagues' faces when I tell them about my plans, may not be too far from the truth -- I suspect that there are better reasons.
In fact, I can think of two.
1) the kind of academic I am -- the kind of academic that I aspire to be -- is a student-focused academic. That means that my vocation is to teach students, and everything else that comes with my job should be subordinated to that end. Moving my office into a dorm seems a logical continuation of that path.
2) teaching students is not just about seeing them for a few hours each week in a classroom. It's about reaching the students in a more profound way, connecting with them in such a way that I can really produce the kinds of social spaces within which they can explore contentious issues and try to ascertain who they are and who they want to become. It's hard to do that if your only interactions with students are distorted by the authority and control techniques of a classroom setting! Moving my office into a dorm increases the potential for such informal interactions, as well as enabling me to engage in some co-curricular programming -- and literally reach students where they live.
So after two years in my present office, I will be moving on Tuesday.
I originally had big plans for this move, and in particular for the packing of my office. I wanted to take some time and really triage all of the accumulated crap in the office, and throw a lot of stuff out before I left. But I ran out of time and find myself doing something quite different: tossing things into boxes and planning to triage after the move, during unpacking. In some ways that's fine, because the important thing has been done -- all the stuff in my office has been neatly divided into small boxes. Now all I have to do is to sort it while unpacking, and remember precisely what is in that box labeled "who the heck knows?"
17.3.06
Still rock and roll to me
Holly and I went to the MCI Verizon Center last night to catch Billy Joel on his latest solo tour -- by my count, his second since he "retired." Being a rock star is like being an emeritus professor, I guess: you aren't on active duty any more, but you still have discretion to offer a course/tour whenever it suits you, and if you're prominent enough you can fill an arena without releasing any new material.
It was a good show -- not the best show I've ever seen, and not even the best Billy Joel show I've ever seen. (His Storm Front Tour takes that title as far as I'm concerned; I hear fans rave about earlier tours but I'm not that old :-) This is an "album cuts tour" for Joel; he is making an effort to play songs that are not just his well-known greatest hits, but also to trot things out of his extensive back catalogue. My night was made when he played "Captain Jack" about mid-way through the show; Holly's was made when as the third song he reached back to the Cold Spring Harbor album and played "Everybody Loves You Now."
You can see the complete set-list here.
It's an interesting dilemma for an artist, especially one with a career as long and varied as Billy Joel's has been: what do you play when you're in front of an audience? On one hand, there are those people who only know you because of your popular hits, songs like "River of Dreams" and "Only the Good Die Young" and "New York State of Mind." On the other hand, someone like Billy Joel also has something of a die-hard fan base, people (myself and my wife included) who would rather hear relatively obscure things like "Tomorrow is Today" or "Summer, Highland Falls" or "Big Man On Mulberry Street." After starting off this tour with a radical departure from his past practices -- in the first show he opened with "Piano Man," which has been his closing song for years and years -- he has settled into a routine of playing some more obscure things up-front and then getting more traditional and pop-hit oriented as the show goes on.
Thus, last night after a very energetic rendition of "Angry Young Man" and a solid take on "My Life," we got "Everybody Loves You Now," "The Entertainer," "New York State of Mind" (not exactly obscure -- I was really hoping for "Summer, Highland Falls" when he said he was going to play something from Turnstiles next -- "The Downeaster Alexa," and "Zanzibar." "Stiletto" (also from 52nd Street) was supposed to be next, but he nixed it and moved on to the popular hits part of the evening. Which lasted for the rest of the show.
I have to admit that I walked out of the show a tad disappointed. At other stops on the tour he has played marvelous little gems like "You're My Home" and "Sleeping With the Television On," but not last night. And although we did get the traditional songs from my favorite Billy Joel album The Nylon Curtain -- "Pressure," "Allentown," and "Goodnight Saigon" with his usual stage show of local vets coming on stage to put their arms around each other in a show of solidarity -- we didn't get "A Room of Our Own" (which I've never heard him do live, and apparently he is sometimes doing this time out), and apparently he's not playing my two favorite songs from that album this time: "She's Right on Time" and "Scandinavian Skies."
I'm not sure how well a show featuring lots of more obscure things would have gone over, though. Most of the paying customers were most likely not die-hard fans, and probably would have been lost among the rarities. [Certainly the drunk folks in front of us who insisted on standing and staggering around -- they called it "dancing" -- for the last half of the show, thus blocking everyone else's view of the stage…that's a special kind of obnoxious…would have been totally lost. Then again, they looked pretty unaware of their surroundings anyway. It is beyond me why anyone pays that kind of money for a concert and then goes, gets plastered, and soils the experience for the fans who come for the music and the performance.] So in that way I suppose that we should be grateful that as many rarities made it on to the program as they did.
I'd still have preferred -- and have paid good money -- for an all-rarities (or almost-all-rarities) show. It's too bad that more successful artists don't do that; after all, they don't need the money from the gigantic crowds.
On a smaller scale, the same dilemma presents itself when an academic attends a conference. Which songs do I pull out? The audience expects something; do I give it to them? Is this the right time to try out relatively obscure or totally new material, or should I play it safe and stick to the established hits -- even at the risk of failing to excite the hard-core fans? And do I close with "Piano Weber Man," as I usually do, or shake things up a bit and close with (say) "And So It Goes" or "Famous Last Words"?
We shall just have to wait and see what transpires. And in the end, that's the fun of live performance: you don't really know what's going to happen until it, well, happens.
It was a good show -- not the best show I've ever seen, and not even the best Billy Joel show I've ever seen. (His Storm Front Tour takes that title as far as I'm concerned; I hear fans rave about earlier tours but I'm not that old :-) This is an "album cuts tour" for Joel; he is making an effort to play songs that are not just his well-known greatest hits, but also to trot things out of his extensive back catalogue. My night was made when he played "Captain Jack" about mid-way through the show; Holly's was made when as the third song he reached back to the Cold Spring Harbor album and played "Everybody Loves You Now."
You can see the complete set-list here.
It's an interesting dilemma for an artist, especially one with a career as long and varied as Billy Joel's has been: what do you play when you're in front of an audience? On one hand, there are those people who only know you because of your popular hits, songs like "River of Dreams" and "Only the Good Die Young" and "New York State of Mind." On the other hand, someone like Billy Joel also has something of a die-hard fan base, people (myself and my wife included) who would rather hear relatively obscure things like "Tomorrow is Today" or "Summer, Highland Falls" or "Big Man On Mulberry Street." After starting off this tour with a radical departure from his past practices -- in the first show he opened with "Piano Man," which has been his closing song for years and years -- he has settled into a routine of playing some more obscure things up-front and then getting more traditional and pop-hit oriented as the show goes on.
Thus, last night after a very energetic rendition of "Angry Young Man" and a solid take on "My Life," we got "Everybody Loves You Now," "The Entertainer," "New York State of Mind" (not exactly obscure -- I was really hoping for "Summer, Highland Falls" when he said he was going to play something from Turnstiles next -- "The Downeaster Alexa," and "Zanzibar." "Stiletto" (also from 52nd Street) was supposed to be next, but he nixed it and moved on to the popular hits part of the evening. Which lasted for the rest of the show.
I have to admit that I walked out of the show a tad disappointed. At other stops on the tour he has played marvelous little gems like "You're My Home" and "Sleeping With the Television On," but not last night. And although we did get the traditional songs from my favorite Billy Joel album The Nylon Curtain -- "Pressure," "Allentown," and "Goodnight Saigon" with his usual stage show of local vets coming on stage to put their arms around each other in a show of solidarity -- we didn't get "A Room of Our Own" (which I've never heard him do live, and apparently he is sometimes doing this time out), and apparently he's not playing my two favorite songs from that album this time: "She's Right on Time" and "Scandinavian Skies."
I'm not sure how well a show featuring lots of more obscure things would have gone over, though. Most of the paying customers were most likely not die-hard fans, and probably would have been lost among the rarities. [Certainly the drunk folks in front of us who insisted on standing and staggering around -- they called it "dancing" -- for the last half of the show, thus blocking everyone else's view of the stage…that's a special kind of obnoxious…would have been totally lost. Then again, they looked pretty unaware of their surroundings anyway. It is beyond me why anyone pays that kind of money for a concert and then goes, gets plastered, and soils the experience for the fans who come for the music and the performance.] So in that way I suppose that we should be grateful that as many rarities made it on to the program as they did.
I'd still have preferred -- and have paid good money -- for an all-rarities (or almost-all-rarities) show. It's too bad that more successful artists don't do that; after all, they don't need the money from the gigantic crowds.
On a smaller scale, the same dilemma presents itself when an academic attends a conference. Which songs do I pull out? The audience expects something; do I give it to them? Is this the right time to try out relatively obscure or totally new material, or should I play it safe and stick to the established hits -- even at the risk of failing to excite the hard-core fans? And do I close with "Piano Weber Man," as I usually do, or shake things up a bit and close with (say) "And So It Goes" or "Famous Last Words"?
We shall just have to wait and see what transpires. And in the end, that's the fun of live performance: you don't really know what's going to happen until it, well, happens.
The silence is deafening
I haven't been posting much -- here or anywhere else -- lately because March has been an insane month. In the past few weeks I have finished my book proofs (hooray!), revised two articles for publication, given feedback on numerous dissertations and theses (more of those are on the way), drawn up syllabi for the Summer and Fall, and so on. Ah, the idyllic and restful life of an academic :-)
Expect regular posting to resume after I a) finishthe backlogged grading from my courses this semester; b) complete the revisions to two other articles; and c) get back from the International Studies Association conference in San Diego next week.
Expect regular posting to resume after I a) finishthe backlogged grading from my courses this semester; b) complete the revisions to two other articles; and c) get back from the International Studies Association conference in San Diego next week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)