Teaching and timelessness
As I write, night is falling slowly and heavily, like a train gaining momentum gracelessly. It’s easy to feel sleepy when I come home after the all-day heat,…
As I write, night is falling slowly and heavily, like a train gaining momentum gracelessly. It’s easy to feel sleepy when I come home after the all-day heat,…
It’s a Sunday. The ants are everywhere around the kitchen sink, swarming through the crack in the dishwasher door. Afterwards, every time you feel the tiniest itch, you…
In my email right now, there are 10,364 messages signed with American academia’s standard valediction: Best, I have always found best an incredibly alienating sign-off. So alienating that…
1. Packing my library Twelve or fifteen standardized brown boxes of books, covered in dollar store tarps and dust from lizard corpses and asbestos toxins — I’m lining…
One time a friend of mine, Mike Bishop, asked me an interesting question about the ethics of deviating from norms: “In what sense is deviance important for its…
Jeffrey Williams wrote in his excellent essay Smart that academics’ hands are remarkable for their contrast with working-class hands: My father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people…
One day back when I was working in my campus IT job, I jotted down some notes on a day at work. I was in the middle of…
Outside my new house, which is currently full of half-unpacked boxes and lamps waiting to be reunited with their shades, there’s a palm tree. If you go out…
I’m not sure whether this little descriptive passage from my fieldnotes will ever have much use in academic discourse, but it does remind me quite vividly of urban space in my fieldsite.…
I was reading through my field notebooks lately and I came across a little ethnographic snippet of description. It is a description of a male French student sitting in a…
I’ve now had the Ph.D. in hand for about three weeks. It is in a large brown folder. It looks pretty official. There is, if anything, something incongruous about the…
I’ve been thinking about what counts as utopian in my research site, and happened to come across a handy definition by René Schérer, now an emeritus professor. It’s…