Tag: 200 words or less

Thanks Mom! Banksy Beside JennyHolzerMom

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Thanks to Susannah for this image and her question about the link between troublemaking and care. I really like the idea of envisioning encouraging kids to make trouble (well, maybe not always or often in the forms represented in this image) as part of a parent’s caregiving practices. I’d like to read/reflect on this beside JennyHolzerMom’s tweets about the tension between rebelling and following rules:

Word Count: 71 words

Giving an Account and Telling a Story

As I think through how I use my blog to give an account and/or tell stories, I want to put the following books and ideas about storytelling and giving an account beside each other:

Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself
Paul John Eakin How Our Lives Become Stories 

In thinking about how and why to put these beside each other, I’m partly interested in exploring the different (and sometimes similar) ways in which they explain the purposes for our stories. Why do we tell stories? Who are they for? What compels us to give an account? What sort of self is created/revealed/performed through these accounts/stories?

Word Count: 116 words

Another great twitter source

Looking through my Safari Reading list, I found an excellent post by Josh Greenberg “about the benefits and limitations of using Twitter in support of research and teaching.” In addition to providing his own list of reasons why he tweets (research, building profile, professional networking, teaching and personal), Greenberg also links to a Storify on why scholars tweet: Twitter in the Tower which has even more great ideas and links (like to this prezi on social media and this site about being a Networked Researcher).

This post has provided me with lots of great sources for more reflecting on twitter; I’m especially excited to read this article on social media and ethics and this one on personal branding in academe! It has also inspired me to begin sorting through my twitter reflections and fine-tuning my own statement on tweeting. And it inspired me to tweet the author:

Word count: 149

 

Trouble and the Academy

A recent comment that I wrote on this blog has got me wondering about my own relationship to the academy/academic spaces. Just a few minutes ago, I wrote:

I’m currently struggling with my own relationship to the university. Having devoted so much of my life to formal education (as a student and teacher), I’m deeply invested in it. Yet, I feel that in the last few years, I’ve really pushed up against its limits and experienced a deep sense of alienation because of it. Is it fatally flawed? I really hope not, but sometimes I’m not so sure…especially when institutions are unwillingly to rethink elite models that serve the interests of so few at the expense of so many others.
As I think through my own (troubled) relationship to the academy and academic spaces, I thought I’d revisit some of my past reflections on the topic. Here are just few entries in which I write about my struggles of feeling alienated in the academy:

a note about podcast 6 @The Undisciplined Room

This afternoon, STA and I had another fun, albeit free-wheeling and fairly cranky, podcast conversation about: what’s wrong with the Apple app store, becoming increasingly dispinterested, social media etiquette, #notbuyingit, bad Superbowl ads, live-tweeting, how awesome Keith Ellison is, making music only using iPhone apps, Fame (the 80s movie and TV show), and possible kickstarter projects. I love podcasting! While I would consider myself more introverted than extroverted (as a side note, I haven’t bought the newest book championing the introvert, Quiet, but I do have a sample chapter in my iBooks library), I do love good conversations. Deep conversations that make you curious, get you thinking and enable you to imagine new possibilities. I think podcasts can create the space and opportunity for interesting, intense and great conversations. Am I achieving that in my podcasts? Not sure, but I do know that I come away from my discussions with STA inspired and with new ideas. In the future, I think it would be fun to develop a podcast where I get to have great conversations with other troublemakers. Hmm…

Check out Episode 6: Cranked up

Word Count: 188