Here, There and Back Again: Reposting

In a curious twist, I'm choosing to take an excerpt of a post that I had previously deleted and put it back on this website. What the heck, right? If you read it, might you volunteer to help me refine some of the things I discuss?

Best,

Heather

Sky, Sea, Rock: Misc. Thoughts on Relationality

I know I am not alone when I say that I feel something powerful when I look at the sky. I am never disappointed at the ability of the sky's expansiveness and the movement of clouds across it to provoke wonder and awe. And it's not just the movement of the clouds, it is the way that their colors and shapes at dawn or twilight are really quite magical. I focus on these times of day because often that's when I'm coming to or from home, down a long stretch of highway in the Deep South. My commute consists of travel up and down a ribbon of asphalt punctuated every now and then by a chicken or hog-toting eighteen wheeler, in the midst of gently rolling hills, and underneath a sky that makes me feel large and quite small at the same time.

I would not feel this magic in the same way if I was not situated with my feet or the wheels of my car on the ground--anyone who's been in the window seat of a 747 can attest to that. Different kind of magic all together. There is something about looking up from a "situated" place at the sky…Pilots talk about the danger of losing one's bearings when flying a plane because of the way in which you can lose a sense of what is up and what is down. It is this fear that popular culture plays on when they show a space traveler who, as the victim of foul play, has been set adrift forever in space. This same fear is used in movies set in the ocean. Think about Titanic, Poseiden, The Hunt for Red October, or The Abyss.

Conversely, think about how different it feels, the sense of wonder and awe and peace one feels when we have the opportunity to take a long walk along the beach. Even the innocent child's game of "keep away" with the incoming waves of the tide seems to be implicitly tied to our constant search for both a figure and a ground, a metaphor for the interdependent way that our "rock" (earth) and the "unknown" (sea/sky) helps us feel as if we are a part of something "real."

Feeling connected, feeling that we are a part of something real requires, absolultely requires a connection--be it to an idea, a place, a person, a discourse….and it absolutely requires a PRACTICE that is based in those connections…Feeling that we are a part of something real requires an acknowledged practice of the interdependence between space and place…and our movements between spaces and places. Of course, this is nothing new to anyone who is reading this that has spent much more time than I puzzling through these things, and in much deeper ways, but given that I'm pretty much the only one that consistently reads my blog, if you happen upon this post, please forgive my broad brushstrokes and feel free to help me think more deeply. So maybe I'm not even too the brushstrokes stage yet. I guess I'm mostly fingerpainting now...but you never know...someday soon I might be doing water colors like Bob Ross used to...

...In any case. The other night I was driving home and I looked up, as I often do, at the moon. On this evening it was a half moon, a pale glowing yellow…like a photograph of a luminous bowl provisionally taped to a midnight sky. As its position changed, its color deepened…I started trying to capture what it was that I was seeing. I imagined that the moon was this large rock, slippery with sea moss, half submerged in some vast body of water. I felt reassured by its presence…and even as I watched, wisps of nighttime clouds coalesced above this half-circle moon, like waves of some water that had been captured by Ross's brush.

Skip forward to today.I was thinking about the concept of time. Actually, I was thinking about why it was that I was trying to do something weird like imagining that the moon, or time were my "friends." The moon is cool with me, but it is much more difficult for me to be friendly with time. And then I started thinking about how the moon aganst the sky is also a metaphor for our relationship, an uneasy one, with time. We have a constant need to mark time,to fix ourselves in particular ways based on our understanding of where we are relative to the moments that have just passed or that seem to be approaching. The moon helps us to do that, whether it is in the course of a single night, and we are standing in a field or whether we are traveling home on a course that takes us West , and then Southwest…Or whether it is in the course of a month and we see the way the moon changes as it goes through different phases.

The sky and the sea are scary precisely because they have the ability to unfix us from our ways of understanding who we are within the flow of time. We know through the work of so many philosophers and social scientists that it is through time that we make meaning of our lives and the lives of others. That's why, when we see Brad Pitt's character at the end of The Perfect Storm, bobbing up and down so precariously on top of the roiling monstrosity of the hurricane-whipped ocean, it conjurs up feelings of hoplessness and despair.

Perhaps that's also why we are so very excited to see video of the ballroom of the Titanic still intact. We like to know that there are dishes and knives and spoons that are sitting at the bottom of the ocean in this great ship's kitchen, just waiting for us to come down, fish them out, clean them up and eat off of them again.

All of this leads back to the importance of a relational ontology for social science research and methodology. Isn't all of social science predicated on this idea? Whether one's view of what can be known falls up or down the objectivity/subjectivity continuum, what we choose to try to know still requires that we orient ourselves through relations…how fast does a bowling ball fall from the Tower of Pisa in relation to a feather? Aren't things so much better for black people now that when we were slaves? In what kind of relationship does a dependent and independent variable exist? Who am I now vs. who I was ten years ago? We constantly meditate, fixate, and relate through time/temporality.

Maybe that is why the sea and the sky seem so scary (to me) when (I'm) we're in the middle of it, why the moon is comforting when we are standing on the ground, and why we penetrate the sky with space shuttles and satellites.…Time is just too central to our lives for us to be on friendly terms with it.

Storying Our Writing Lives

I've been thinking a lot about the process by which I write (or not). There are accepted grand narratives about the writing lives of scholars, and there are those of us for whom the myths are not myths. I'm speaking here of the "we" that writes in the morning, every morning, for one to two hours. I'm referencing C. Wright Mills, and I'm referencing those of us who have been phenomenally prolific and important to younger scholar's thinking and writing.

What are our writing stories? Where are these stories? I'm surprised by our reticence to describe and discuss our writing lives. It seems that openly revealing the difficulties of maintaining such a life while having families, friendships, and while working for change within classrooms and communities could be an essential part of crafting ways of having a writing life that do not lead to divorce, drinking, depression, or some combination of all of the above. I'm often surprised at how little we discuss the cultivation of a writing life with our graduate students.

I was raised by an incredible group of scholars--highly successful men and women by any standard. The lessons I learned from them run the gamut from "read periodicals like Atlantic Monthly and HER everyday," to sitting around a full professor's kitchen table, while she speaks aloud words that we transform into text, which we then cut with scissors and tape onto a legal pad, and transform again into text until what emerges is the semblance of an article. Most, if not all of the women came up in a time when they were the only woman in their departments, where they were expected to be better than the best, where they were expected to disappear and come back with manuscripts in press, or give birth and an hour later, work on article revisions. Where tenure was a matter of being alone with "themselves, God, a pad of paper and a pencil." I think it is important to ask ourselves how we have been taught to think about writing, not just for our own healing, but for the creation of revised or new models of a writing life that bring us more whole, into the scholarly discourses we care about.

I have many peers who were raised under the model of working as a second or third author under senior scholars. I have several peers who, as assistant and associate professors, have continued to work with their dissertation chairs and have published articles together over the years. Other peers have published with the help of fellowships, parents, grandparents, nannies, spouses, pets, and editors.

So how do we talk about our writing lives? Do we talk about them? And of course, who among us has written about the emergence and cultivation of our writing life? As our Griots pass on, or simply migrate into leadership and administrative positions, it seems important that we take seriously the task of storying our writing lives, especially as these lives are increasingly situated within different kinds of personal, academic and political margins.

I place a high value on books like Bateson's "Composing a Life," and Schultz and Lareau's "Journeys Through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork"--in a much different and often richer way than Henson's "Writing for Publication: Road to Academic Advancement" though clearly these books all figure in some way into our understandings of what it means to have a writing life as an academic. I'd welcome, though, other's discoveries of people writing about their own writing lives, even as I try to make sense of my own.

Mattie Rufus Wright, 1922-2007

Rest in Peace, Mattie Rufus Wright.

I should mention that in addition to having a passion for writing, Mattie loved Louis L'Amour westerns and Kung Fu movies. I'll never forget the night we watched 5 Deadly Venoms together in her house on S. Edsel Street in Detroit. If you have referenced The Matrix, Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction in your scholarship/teaching...you might want to rent the Venoms. It's a classic, like Mattie.

Mattie, at age 84, had self-published a book of her poetry on Amazon.com, was looking for an illustrator for an African American folktale called "Big Belly John," and was searching for an editor for a novel based in the post-Emancipation South.

But the ways in which our identities are written are never straightforward, as evidenced by the article (below) that I found after googling Mattie's name.

I've yet to think through an analysis of this press release as it relates (or not) to my own understanding of who my Grandmother is/was.

But, I do have to say that the author's characterization of George Washington Carver is exactly the stereotypical version of Carver's contribution that my Grandad Joseph would rail against as he talked of Carver's contribution to agricultural science. Grandad took classes from Carver at Tuskegee University, during which time he witnessed first hand Carver's genius and the ways that he taught black farmers about crop rotation techniques. Eventually, as the black farmers' crops grew more and more successful, white farmers also came to Carver for assistance. It was this story that Grandad came back to again and again as his dementia worsened.

Anyway, when I get back home, I'll include Grandma's poem, "what makes a mother," as yet another (re)presentation of who she is/was....

Eastern Michigan University model respite care project finds unique, yet simple, ways to help others in community

YPSILANTI – It’s as if Mattie and Joseph Wright of Canton had won a contest.
People came weekly with bags of their favorite foods and made a hot, three-course meal. The visitors also set the table, brought taped music and cleaned up after the meal. But Joseph, 83, who has dementia, and his 79-year-old wife, Mattie, didn’t win any contest. The service was provided by Eastern Michigan University students as part of the University’s Respite Care Project.

Eastern Michigan University students Stacy Wallace, of Ann Arbor, and Yi-Min Cheng, of Ypsilanti are just two of more than 90 students in the program who visit people in the community who need assistance. The program, which is considered a model for other universities in the state, began with a grant in 2001. And while the grant was recently terminated due to the state’s budget crunch, Anne Robinson, director of EMU’s Alzheimer’s Education Program, said the project would move forward. “The project will continue in a modified way,” said Robinson. “EMU has a strong commitment to service families. There is no doubt in my mind that the project is continuing.”

With the state grant, EMU created a new approach to home care where the emphasis is to design meaningful experiences for people with dementia, said Lisa Gray, project co-director of the Respite Project at EMU. The University’s in-home respite project, a service of EMU’s Alzheimer’s Education Program, provides a break for many people -- those with dementia or severe memory loss, their caretakers and their families. Respite care is traditionally custodial, performing activities of daily living such as personal care.

The EMU project provides families with home visits and focuses on the remaining abilities the person has rather than on what they can’t do, said Gray.Since June 2001, 25 families in Washtenaw, Oakland, Wayne, Lenawee and Livingston counties have been helped by the project. Juniors, seniors and graduate students from gerontology, dietetics, occupational therapy or nursing receive special training on dementia before going into the home. They collect information on the person’s hobbies, past jobs and medical history before designing an activity plan for their weekly, three-to-four hour visits.

Student and family activities include gardening, going to a restaurant, or attending a symphony or concert. One person with dementia had been interested in horses, so the student brought in a saddle and other equipment to his home for the two of them to clean. “Most families are impressed that students are interested in them and shocked as to what students can do with a patient,” said Gray. Wallace and Cheng developed a plan for Joseph to help with the meals. Joseph washed potatoes, stirred food and helped set the table. They discovered that he could not distinguish between actual food on the table and the printed flowers on a tablecloth, so they changed to a plain table covering.

“Joe is not aware of everything that’s happening around him, but he understands conversation and enjoys the familiar surroundings,” said Mattie. He first exhibited signs of dementia, said his wife, when he was a church treasurer and was making mistakes on the financial records. Later, as a repairman, he began getting lost on familiar routes. Growing up in Alabama on a 40-acre farm provided many memories for Joseph. In 1937, he met George Washington Carver, inventor of peanut butter and many other peanut products. Today, Joseph has a hard time remembering many things without help from Mattie.

Both Mattie and the students have exchanged recipes. Mattie has traded several of her southern recipes for the students’ secret to good salmon. “I learned a lot from them (the Wrights),” said Wallace “You see many people with dementia, but until you spend some quality time with someone, you don’t truly understand it (the disease).”

The students also have gained insights into African-American culture, life in post-World War II Detroit, Mattie’s make-do homemaking skills and her love of poetry. “I think I made a difference in their lives,” said Wallace. “Not in any earth-shattering way, but I think I did make their life happier.”

Save the TaTas

At the beginning of this year, I stopped exploring how women with breast cancer represent their experiences and identities by blogging. I completed enough background research to get familiar with the pages of women who either passed on, or just stopped writing. After talking with a friend who is a survivor of breast cancer, I decided that I did not feel comfortable with continuing the research. (Since then, my Grandmother has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This changes my thinking on the research a bit, especially since my mother and aunt have decided to use a blog to update our far-flung family on Grandma's health).

At that time, I was unable to adequately resolve personal questions surrounding the ethics of my participant observation work.

Thes ethical dilemmas were made more complex by nagging questions about the conceptual framework within which I was situating the research. In a nutshell, with the help of contributors to blogher and a book by Samantha King entitled "Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and The Politics of Philanthropy" (hyperlinks added after I cooked dinner), I had begun to explore how the blogs of women with breast cancer were part of a larger, continuing discourse on the ownership of women's experiences and the commodification of that experience.

However, I'd like to thank the two anonymous women standing outside of the Today show this morning for--as Justin Timberlake would say--"Bringing Sexy Back," for leading me to this website, and for rekindling my interest in the project.

The Hollywoodization of Anthropologists

Think quick: When did you first see an anthropologist represented in movie or film?

For me, it was the first time I watched an episode of Doctor Who (w/the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, and his trademark long scarf). Though he was from an(other) world, and was not ever described as an anthropologist, it was his spaceship--the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension(s) In Space) that gave it away...

So. While anthropologists were busy representing/writing others, Hollywood (and the BBC) was also busy "writing" anthropologists. See my partial list below, and feel free to add other titles you may be familiar with. All quoted text is cited from wikipedia entries.

King Kong (1976):
Jeff Bridges as a primatologist
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989):
Harrison Ford as a “fictional professor, archaeologist and adventurer"
Bones (2005-):
Emily Deschanel as Temperance “Bones” Brennan, a forensic anthropologist “loosely based on the works of real-life forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs”
Krippendorf’s Tribe (1998):
Richard Dreyfuss as a “respected anthropologist” (who, by the way, fakes a documentary about a fictional tribe); Barbara Williams as an anthropologist who is the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’ character; and Jenna Elfman as an anthropologist
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003):
Angelina Jolie as archaeologist Lara Croft
Gorillas in the Midst (1988):
Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey (in turn inspired by the life and work of Louis Leakey)
Relic Hunter (1999-2002):
Tia Carrere as “unorthodox American archaeologist”
The Nanny Diaries (2007):
Scarlett Johansson as Annie Braddock, an NYU grad who wants to be an anthropologist
3rd Rock from the Sun (1996-2001):
Jane Curtin as anthropologist Mary Allbright
The Life (2005):
Denise Richards as an anthropology student who starts off studying prostitution, and then decides to make a little money "on the side"
Instinct (1999):
Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Ethan Powell, an anthropologist who studied gorillas before mysteriously disappearing
Mysterious Ways (2000-2002):
Adrian Pasdar as Declan Dunn, an anthropology professor at the Northern University of Oregon

As I've thought about this list, questions and thoughts about the gendered representation of anthropology within and outside of the discipline are ever present....after all, when I was a kid, I wanted to be Tom Baker. Didn't you?

First Day of School

My daughter had her first day of kindergarten a couple weeks ago. I videoed her response to the question "How are you feeling on your first day of school?" She said, "Uhhmmm....I'm a little nervous, but that's okay, because I'm going to try my best and just relax and have a good time!"

Apparently, you really can learn everything you need to know about life in kindergarten--or by listening to your kid as they prepare for kindergarten.

It's my first day at work for the semester--three meetings in a row. Typical academic menu of activities I suppose...

In the midst of all this, I just want to make note of two future posts/essays:
1) Thoughts on the Hollywoodization of Anthropology
2) The Cartouche, Amy Winehouse, and Bratz Dolls: A Commentary on Talismanic Identities

Everyday, New Ways to Blow My Mind

My current favorite example of a post-structural discursive moment...

Beginning, Middle and End

I didn't want to explicitly guide the construction of their stories. But I did anyway.

How could I not? With an eye toward research and the “others” who might evaluate what I was doing (these others included funders of my projects), I wanted to be able to say things about the emergence of written, narrative expression and its connection to identity. I took a minimalist approach:

Tonya (pseudonym): I want to write a story about my friend, India.
Me: Mkay…what do you want to say?
Tonya: Well, we’ve been friends for a year an’ sometimes she gets on my nerves but she’s good at keeping secrets.
Me: Okay…well…usually stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the middle, there’s something that happens that’s important and at the end you say something about why that was important, or weird, or funny, or something.

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. In terms of a small amount of explicit guidance, that seemed safe enough, right? But there’s always that twinge, that tiny bit of discomfort (it usually happened somewhere between the “okay…” and the “well…” as represented above). Anyway.

I’ve been reading Mishler’s (2006) chapter (Narrative and Identity: The Double Arrow of Time, in Discourse and Identity). He argues that “As Kermode and Doctorow point out, we must know how a “story” ends before we can understand how earlier events in the sequence function as beginnings and middles.” Later, in the same page, he writes “The ‘uncriticized temporal framework’ where time is represented as a ‘linear succession of instants’ is omnipresent, usually as a tacit assumption, in psychology and the other human sciences where CHANGE or DEVELOPMENT (my emphases) are primary topics for theory and research. “

…Hello. Now, the question is, if I/we took Ricoeur seriously, how might that shape how narratives (in digital storytelling with kids or otherwise)…develop? How might that shape how we help kids to tell their stories?

I’m probably just puzzling over things that have been hashed and rehashed in creative writing MFA programs. One more reason to bite the bullet and buy another book (when all else fails…), perhaps one like: The Magic Pencil: Teaching Children Creative Writing.

Existential Question of the Day

Yesterday we frosted and decorated cookies at the digital storytelling project. I was helping one of the kids learn how to use a digital camera that had various nonfunctioning components. One of the girls, a third grader, turned sideways in her chair and said "When is your last day?"

I was thrown off by her question, and so I asked, "What?" She repeated, "When is your last day?" Still looking at her, I paused. After a few seconds I said "...There is no last day." Unsatisfied, she pressed, "When are y'all gonna stop coming?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what the last day is."

And so, all of this raises some very interesting questions for me, as the project co-director and researcher. What I'm doing IS research, so it follows that there should be a conclusion to that research. But given what I'm doing there that is not research-oriented...it just seems strange to conceptualize that there would be a final day. Do the kids need a "last day" for some conceptual organization of what it is that we're doing? This particular girl was most likely asking because they are nearing the end of their school year....But its got me thinking about the nature of the relationships that we've established with each other, and how the kids see us within the larger landscape of their lives.

In terms of the way what I'm learning in this work has become a kind of artifact that I turn over again and again in my head...will there be a last day? I don't think I'll know the answer to that question for a long time.

Inaugural Post

A bit about me. I'm the cofounder of a digital storytelling project in Alabama. In the project I work with African American kids (who are anywhere from 7 yrs old to 14 or so) a faculty colleague and undergraduate volunteers. I am also on the tenure-track as a qualitative research methdologist in the College of Education. Before coming to The University of Alabama, I directed a digital storytelling project in Delaware called "Sankofa Stories," and I was an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Before that, I was an assistant professor of qualitative research and multicultural education at Indiana State University.

...And before that, I was a graduate student at Michigan State University trying to figure out how to connect my love of reading and writing with questions about how we make sense of ourselves and the social worlds/spaces we inhabit.

In an AERA-type nutshell, my main research interests are identity, literacy, agency and community. To pursue these interests, I focus on the stories we tell and how these narratives are represented in blogs, photoessays, web sites, video games, digital stories and other forms of new media.

Although I've started this blog in order to assist people in the Writing and Literacies SIG of AERA with knowing a little bit more about me, I'm looking forward to posting here. Particularly since I can be a "published woman" each time I click the little orange button.

Nothing like instant gratification.

Anyway, a bit more about me, or actually, about my family: today is my daughter's fifth birthday! Right before creating this blog I dropped her off at preschool, along with the requisite cupcakes and goodybags for her class. As a way to stave off the realization that time passes so quickly (and to pay homage to my anthropologist forebearers), I am looking forward to creating a digital recording of the (small) birthday party we'll be having for her tonight.

Looking forward to seeing you in New York next year, if not sooner.