A BLOG – Page 47

on procrastination

Right now I need to be finishing up another non-blog writing project. It has a non-negotiable and pretty urgent deadline. So, what have I been doing today instead? Yep, writing several blog posts and avoiding, at all costs, what I’m actually supposed to be doing. Sadly, even as I recognize my acts of avoidance, I can find ways to justify them. Like: One purpose of this blog (and my twitter feed) is to document the writing process. That includes the painful non-writing, procrastinating parts. I need to archive those experiences for future reference! Ha!

Here’s what I just tweeted:

To save time, I just took a screen shot of the four tweets. Here’s a link to the New Yorker article on procrastination.

Word count: 122 words

Whose Curiosity? A very uncurious manifesto for curiosity

In my last post I mentioned that I have been following Brain Pickings a lot lately. I’m especially drawn to all the great visuals in her posts. I also like her focus on curation and her book lists. In that same post, I also mentioned that while I enjoy reading and engaging with the site, something is just a little off about it. I’ve been thinking about it more, and I’ve realized one reason why: She really really likes TED. I don’t. Thinking about how much I don’t like TED gave me an inspiration for a new social/online media project (details TBA). Her love of TED, with its business self-helpy tone and its pedagogical model that idolizes Experts-who-enlighten, influences the overall tone of the blog. For a number of reasons, which I’ll leave for another post or a series of posts, I don’t like business self-helpy shtuff and my vision of pedagogy comes into conflict with the Expert-as-awesome model.

Recognizing what is off about this site doesn’t make me want to stop reading it or to reject it altogether; I still find lots of value in her curation and am very impressed with what she has developed and maintains (and without ads! that’s pretty sweet!). Instead, it simply helps me to understand my own troubling sense of unease when I read certain posts and learn about others’ projects via her site–like the one I want to write about today: Skillshare and their video, The Future Belongs to the Curious: A Manifesto for Curiosity.

The Future Belongs to the Curious from Skillshare on Vimeo.

Taken at face value, this video manifesto seems awesome. Valuing curiosity as the future. Encouraging the asking of lots of questions. Promoting life long learning. Yes! However, the video bothers me…and the more I watch and thinking critically about it, the more bothered I get. From the hyper-masculine voiceover to the heteronormative male POV throughout the video (we literally view the film through the eyes of a growing boy), I don’t see any space for my own vision of feminist curiosity–or even my own practicing of curiosity as a girl/woman. I also don’t any space for a whole lot of folks, that is, anyone not fitting the mythical norm of white, male, middle-class, etc!

The representation of women and the imagining of them in the past/present/future of who “we” are (of course the “we” = the universal white Male subject) as curious beings is as follows:

1. loving/caring Mom (twice: when boy is born and when boy breaks his leg) who doesn’t ask questions, just encourages others

2. teenage girl sitting in corner, passively listening to music while “we” play/experiment with guitar in a band

3. teenage girl in closet, looking shy/coy and puckering up as “we” move in to kiss her (hello male gaze!). I should mention that it was this image that first made me stop, question and rethink this whole manifesto. I find this to be a really problematic image–is it possible to read a counter-narrative into it? While it seems to imply that she is being kissed by a boy, could we imagine it otherwise?

4. the back of a girl’s head in Driver’s Ed as “we” playfully throw a paper airplane at her

5. smiling woman who seems to be dancing (but not questioning or being curious herself) just for us and for our camera

6. pregnant woman who is fixing up the nursery, presumably for our child

Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see any girls/women asking questions and being curious. I didn’t see any girls/women having any agency in this heteronormative narrative at all. The only purpose that any of these women seem to serve is to further the narrative of the male thinking, acting, playing, kissing, filming, experimenting, networking, questioning, working self. Speaking of heteronormativity, the vision of the curious future is not that innovative, interesting or curious. Instead, it’s the standard normative model of future = grow up + marry + have kids. For some (myself included) that’s a nice future/present, but it’s not the only one that we should imagine and represent. If we’re truly being curious, why not be imaginative about how we represent the future. Why not include a wider range of folks in our visions of what it could be?

For Cynthia Enloe, in The Curious Feminist, curiosity is about taking the lives of women (I want to expand it to state: not just women, but a wider range of folks) seriously: being open to other stories, listening deeply to the experiences of those beyond ourselves, using our imagination to create spaces where they are agents who have curiosity and can imagine their own better futures.

Wow, this video really got me going. One final bothering thought: In light of all of the attention being given recently to the lack of girls/women in science and math (where successful, “productive” curiosity usually happens) and the need to value and encourage girls in these fields, why would Skillshare develop a manifesto that reinforces the idea that only boys/men are curious and that girls/women are only object and props to men’s practices of curiosity?

OH BOTHER! I might just need to create my own manifesto for feminist curiosity!

writing day #1: when thinking up writing projects isn’t the problem…

This winter I get to devote a lot of time to writing. So exciting! I should clarify, however. This winter will be dedicated to collecting, shaping, polishing and producing (in a variety of forms and media). I’ve been writing on this trouble blog since May of 2009 and I’ve generated a lot of words, ideas and topics for more in-depth writing. Now I need to do something with those ideas. Okay, I have been doing things with these ideas. I’ve used posts in my teaching, in my few published articles, presentations, and workshops. But I haven’t done enough with shaping them into more coherent, in-depth stories/narratives. And I haven’t engaged with them fully enough to be able to let go of some of them. What does that mean? Maybe I should explore that question in another blog post.

Lately, I’ve been reading Brain Pickings a lot on my Flipboard (I can’t quite articulate why, but something on the site is a little off for me…). A couple of weeks ago, Maria Popova (the creator of Brain Pickings) did an entry on various bits of advice that design graduates gave to current students. The following two seem appropriate for me and my own thinking about how to proceed with my writing projects in 2012:

First: to create ideas is a gift, but to choose wisely is a skill

Second: Finish What you Start. It May Seem Insignificant, But It Is Very Important That You Do It.

Troublemaker that I am, I have some problems with these pieces of advice (what gets left out when I choose? At what/whose expense am I choosing? Can anything ever really be finished?). But, I also see them as important reminders of the unproductive or damaging limits of making too much trouble–opening too many cans of worms–when thinking, writing, acting. This year I feel a strong need (and desire) to wrap up some projects, develop some thoughtful and tentative conclusions, and to create a few tangible products that I can use in other spaces outside of this blog. While I don’t want to stop questioning and being curious, I want to do more things with those questions and curiosity.

Over the next couple of days, I’m planning to spend some time thinking through which ideas to take up. Here’s one idea that I will write on, and not just because I have to–it’s for a possible workshop in June:

title: Shifting from Branding to Caring: Using Blogs in Feminist and Queer Classrooms to Resist the Online Crafting of a Neoliberal Self

abstract: This paper explores how using blogs in queer/feminist classrooms can provide students with spaces/tools for resisting, rejecting and transforming the neoliberal model of consumer-citizen-as-brand that is increasingly promoted as the primary way in which to cultivate the self online. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of the care of the self and various feminist and queer pedagogies, I argue that blogs can be used to encourage students to engage in practices of caring for the self and/with/in the midst of others. These practices include: making visible the process of becoming implicated in knowledge, negotiating (without eliminating) the complexity of multiple subjects and one’s own subject positions, making and staying in a state of trouble, and participating in collaborative knowledge production.

This project builds off a lot of my research and thinking about care and its possible practices online. I still need to think through how much I want to use Foucault here (in fact, as I look through this abstract I wonder if it might not be way too ambitious). Here are a few sources on branding that I’ve started reviewing:

Here’s one more bit of advice (and one of my favorite posters). I wish I would have followed it this morning.

Reflecting with/about/on twitter

While many of my students are still not sold on the value of twitter in the classroom, I find it incredibly useful in my own research, writing and teaching; I’m hoping to experiment even more with it this spring as a writing/thinking/processing tool. I’m also interested in developing ways to succinctly and compellingly articulate how and why twitter is valuable in academic and non-academic spaces. When I first started writing this post, I was planning to provide a list of links that I had bookmarked or put in my safari reading list. Somehow that project stalled (I had started writing this about a week ago and only managed to write about one link: Can you use twitter in your classroom? ). This morning I read an article that I found on twitter over the weekend, Why Authors Tweet, and started imagining this post on twitter differently.

Why Authors Tweet I’m always interested in exploring how people use twitter in their writing process. Up to this point, my twitter focus (twocus…STA, that one’s for you) has been on how twitter works/doesn’t work in feminist and queer theorizing, teaching and writing. This year, I’d like to give some attention to how people are using it imaginatively for their creative (and not just critical) expressions. I like this tweet from Mat Johnson:

Here’s a list of reasons, culled from the article, of why some authors use twitter:

allows author to be playful (Salman Rushdie) and humorous (Mat Johnson)
enables author to get a sense of what’s on people’s minds at any give time (Salman Rushdie)
gives author access to readers’ thoughts/feelings/experiences with their novels (Jennifer Gilmore)
encourages author to engage with readers and other writers (Mat Johnson)
makes author feel like they are “living in the future” (D.A. Powell)
expands collaboration by bringing readers into process (Jennifer Weiner)
provides opportunity for moving outside and resisting writing as promotion/selling–not about whose book is promoted most, but whose tweets are most interesting (Mat Johnson)

In reading through this article, I started thinking about the role of the author and what we can/should know about them. Instead of writing on this post about it (admittedly, my brain was a little stuck), I decided to do a series of tweets about the theme. I offer them up (using storify) as one experiment in using twitter in the writing process. Was this helpful? Successful? Not totally sure, yet. (note: not sure why it seems to take storify so long to load. If you can’t see my list of tweets below, click here to find them.)