The inky salutation of Mrs. Russell’s sketchbook sweetie, at right, does not know the world of taxonomic confusion in which he and I live. Permit me to elucidate my obscure statement.
Last Saturday, Nanette and I made a cheerful sojourn to Craft 2.0 here in Christchurch, where we met the lovely Ms. Tyler and browsed the many crafty delights. The event, held here, was as densely packed as Shinagawa Station, with rather more pushing and shoving (albeit discreet pushing and shoving). As a result, I decided to take the business cards of the sellers whose work I particularly liked, and browse their online spaces at leisure, later.
A small spanner in the works was the number of sellers whose sites indicated a reduction in the amount of available stock as a result of preparing for Craft 2.0. Not particularly thwarted, I browsed further through the Felt shops, looking for necklaces (my jewellery of choice these days). Eventually I found three lovely pieces to my taste and budget, ordered them and waited.
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My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
.
I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
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I’m working solely with weekend creativity at the moment, as my cold proves difficult to shake and I complete my workplace tasks in a slightly zombified fashion. Or not: I came home sick on Thursday and spent most of yesterday in bed. I dislike minor illness with a passion. It fails in its role as memento mori, since it places one in the class of walking wounded only, but at the same time it incapacitates the body enough for the mind to get on to some really first-class worrying. Thus my catarrh and neuroses feed each other and Arthur gets woken in the middle of the night as I run my hands along his sides to make sure, for no reason, that he’s still breathing. From the same location, the señor orders me not to sleep on my back, so he isn’t woken by my cold-related sleep apnœa, wondering, should I wake her and tell her to breathe, or not?
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Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.
The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present. The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute. Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research. Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work. (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)
So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.
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There’s always plagiarism in my courses, usually from people who are running out of time, or who anticipate gaps in their knowledge of what they want to cover with their writing, or who don’t believe in their ability to turn a phrase of their own on the topic at hand. I’m more-or-less confident, these days, that I always catch it. Many students expect to get caught, but feel it’s the only chance they’ve got at creating something that might pass.
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Early winter words
23 May, 2009
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,O internet,teaching & learning,traveller's fragments
I’m working solely with weekend creativity at the moment, as my cold proves difficult to shake and I complete my workplace tasks in a slightly zombified fashion. Or not: I came home sick on Thursday and spent most of yesterday in bed. I dislike minor illness with a passion. It fails in its role as memento mori, since it places one in the class of walking wounded only, but at the same time it incapacitates the body enough for the mind to get on to some really first-class worrying. Thus my catarrh and neuroses feed each other and Arthur gets woken in the middle of the night as I run my hands along his sides to make sure, for no reason, that he’s still breathing. From the same location, the señor orders me not to sleep on my back, so he isn’t woken by my cold-related sleep apnœa, wondering, should I wake her and tell her to breathe, or not?
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