Observations from IFTR Day 0

I am at the University of Warwick in a dorm called "Bluebell." U Warwick is in Coventry, sort of. Mostly it is outside the city by 4 miles and there are trees and countryside surrounding the sprawling campus.
Observations:
1. Unlike London, there are no food shops inside or outside the station. It left me no option but to trust that there would be something to eat at the other end on the campus.
2. It is incredibly easy to identify the other people on their way to the IFTR conference. Because they are the gawky Europeans with sheaves of papers who keep asking the bus driver the same question every two minutes. They laugh when the bus's jolting knocks them around and over their rollaboard suitcases.
3. It seems that IFTR is sharing the campus with a national teen football (meaning soccer) camp this week. Our registration did not involve a queue of parents and teenage boys snaking all the way around the center hall of the student union in a spiral. Thank goodness.
4. I met a Finn. We were looking for the bus at the same time and ended up walking together from the wrong bus stop (with the right bus declaring "via Univ of Watwick" on its destination) to the right bus stop, then ran into each other again getting off the bus (also with the aforementioned French people who, by virtue of having a working smart phone, I ended up leading in a sort of ragtag procession from the bus at the correct stop then into the registration building). Then again I saw him at conference (as opposed to accommodation) registration, so that by the time he walked out of the balcony of the campus pub where I was waiting for my dinner, it seemed the time to say, hello, why don't you sit down here.  I did that, then almost immediately realised how complicated this would be: he turned out to be Finnish, and although we had made eye contact with each other innumerable times over the previous hour and even spoke, he lived up to our joking notions of the Finns as incredibly taciturn. It was awkward, even if we were disposed to be friendly.  Frankly I could mostly not even hear him when he did speak, which slowed down our conversations considerably. He seemed to warm up a bit over time, but I did feel a bit angsty about having forced both of us to make friendly for so long and I excused myself with my unwritten conference paper as the reason when I'd finished eating. Oh Finns!
5. There is much much more, but not now. 

So much.

So much has been happening.
The biggest things are that I've signed a contract and I'm moving to a new job in September. Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Theatre at UCLA. 
In 1997 I moved to southern California to start my freshman year of college and it was also the big El Niño year. That winter we had rain and endless rain, mudslides, and closed roads meant that classes were cancelled many times-- but we the on campus kids could still get to Blockbuster, so I remember those rainy days as gleefully irresponsible ones, punctuating the big new events of being at university.
This year, the meteorologists say that El Niño will be back, the biggest since 1997-8. We come together.


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There's much more to say. And tomorrow I leave for China, where I'll have some leisure I think, and I'll try to start catching up. Hope to hear from you.

University, teaching, education, grades

I have a guest post on Kim Solga's pedagogy blog, The Activist Classroom.  I talk a bit about differences between the US and UK university systems, some of my own troubles with grades in education, and one experiment I did trying to make grades work better for everyone involved.

Old prejudices in new media

Several years ago, I found myself in a university basement, everyone with drinks, playing a sort of silly but strangely entertaining impromptu get-to-know-you game. We simply went around in a circle, each declaring "I like [something]" and everyone who agreed took a sip. After several rounds, I was running low on ideas and thought I'd say "I like Japan" having lived there and all but as soon as I thought it, I thought, no, they have a pretty bad history with the US and Europe, world war Axis and all, so I'll say China-- they were on the "right" side of World War 2 and have been the victims of so many imperial attacks.  Whatever this may say about the skew in my own quick thinking, I was still actually viscerally shocked when I said "I like China," took a sip, and everyone else at the table kept cups adamantly down even to the extent that now I remember an audible expression of dislike uttered in response.  And it was only then that I remembered, oh yeah. Everything that has happened in China since world war... 1949, Communism, Mao, Cultural Revolution, etc... I really don't know how I forgot it in the moment or how my general consciousness could have forgotten the general attitude toward China of not just red-blooded patriotic American capitalists and democracy-philes, but even those much leftier-liberal types that tend to congregate in Ivy League graduate schools.

That is, it seems that no matter what your political stripe, be it "closer" to socialism or as far as you can get, it's always open season to hate China. And, I get it. I do. There are horrific human rights abuses, there is widespread environmental degradation, there are big problems, they are complicated, the country is very very different from the USA, and that is scary. We should be concerned about those problems, but really, I don't actually feel a lot of "concern" from most of the English-language coverage I see of China's problems. I just see old fashioned bigotry.

A few weeks ago, some other internet journalist hit the nail on the head, I thought:
Westerners are so convinced that China is a dystopian hellscape, they'll share anything that confirms it.

That piece is a brief debunk, but another acquaintance picked up on the western obsession with China's air pollution and added to it the consistent scares over poison and chemicals in products manufactured in China. I'd add to that the attention that FoxConn electronics factory suicides garner.  These are serious issues that should be attended to and there are serious abuses here that should be rectified.

But here's what bothers me: the message in these news stories is never about our global complicity in these national issues, through, perhaps foremost, our relentless consumption of what China is producing. Why are those poison-in-children's-toys scares always divorced from any scrutiny to how the pressures to make more things faster and cheaper might lead to industrial contamination? They come off as if it's some kind of privilege for China to get to make products for an insatiable, stingy West and we've discovered that they were maliciously slipping something into the cheap, disposable toy. We looked at FoxConn as if it weren't our iPhones and OUR insatiable greed for more, newer, faster, cheaper, fancier things that undergird the process of production. Isn't it the rampant industrialism that is causing China's air pollution disaster? And who is driving the demand for those that industrial output?

So one part of it is denial. And I think the other part of it is leftover, tenacious racism and bigotry. Could there be a certain kind of scapegoating going on here-- a fierce abjection of the feared other especially when they start to look a lot like us, when they're the supplier to our junkie dependence on more stuff?

It's not the whole world that seems to slip into this category, but by no means is China special. I felt the same dynamics going on in media reactions to Russia lately, especially to the "gay propaganda" issues and of course the Olympics. Of course I'm deeply concerned about what's going on in Russia right now in terms of freedom of speech, treatment of homosexuals, and the Ukraine. Here's someone who was voicing some similar concerns:

Sochiproblems is a bigger embarrassment for the US than it is for Russia

This writer takes a slightly different tack than I do, but I think is asking for something similar to what I think we're missing. For one thing, as this writer makes clear: the government and the people of the country are not the same entity. In both these cases all the people of these large, very large, nations are not only generalised, but elided with national and economic structures, as if the activists being suppressed and workers being exploited were not also Russian and Chinese!

The very way in which we structure and disseminate our information about issues in China and Russia perpetuates old stereotypes and phobias about our historical enemies much more than it expresses any real concern toward alleviating the very real problems that these countries face. It obscures our own complicity and imbrication with those issues and it ignores any gesture toward solutions in favor of fear-mongering and othering.

There are innumerable other instances of these problems of media and thinking. Indeed, such oversights might be a continuing hallmark of our continuing struggle to see past (and post) the legacies of colonial violence, world war, and political partisan hatred. That's hard and the issues are complicated. But I think it would behoove us to start on these issues by thinking more carefully, clearly, and compassionately about those places we don't understand.

St Vincent and what feminism might look like

Sometime  in 2011 or 2012 I went to see St Vincent play in Providence at Lupo's. I didn't know *that* much of her catalogue, but I knew enough to be excited. It was a good show. She is a very slight woman with curly hair and that night she was wearing black leather shorts I remember. Actually, some kind soul has posted video from that night (looks like it was May 3, 2012):

These two videos I found give an idea, but they don't show the part that really made that night memorable for me. 

Taking Time

I've been reading the little blog posts and magazine articles here and there for years: multitasking doesn't work. Doing too many things at once hurts overall productivity.  Etc etc.
I've known that stuff for years, heard student speeches about it while teaching, and suffered through three years of dissertating, which was the hardest, most straight up depressing thing I've ever done where I was buffeted constantly with self-doubt, procrastination, and discouragement. And despite all that, all that stop-multitasking stuff didn't really feel like it was relevant to me.

Digital art

Okay, so as you know, I had some bad tech luck and I'm not really sure how I'm going to afford in on top of my swingin' bi-continental skint lifestyle, but here's something kinda good:


Sort of beautiful "digital" art from my broken electronics.  It kind of inspires me to try to make other beautiful things in this manner-- only preferably not with the ones I was relying on to do more than be gorgeous.