78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Can't sit still.
2008-06-04   9:58 a.m.

In typical me (nerd) fashion, I found a class to TAKE this summer at the last minute, and so abandoned that whole "take a month off" thing, which was WACKY in the first place. Here's how that went:

I planned on taking a public admin. class, as my doc research has much to do with public policy studies - or, I suppose, as much to do with public policy studies as I want it to. And perhaps I want it to have much to do with public policy studies. We shall see.

Nevertheless, I (nerd) decided to email the public admin prof in advance to ask a few things. Mistakenly, it seems, I identified myself as a global affairs student. Ignoring my question about the class/texts completely, the prof wrote back, with somewhat questionable command of English, that I shouldn't take the course - as I am a global affairs student. I wrote back to explain that my dept identified this particular class as relevant to global affairs students, depending on their interests, and then asked if the class was only open to public admin students, to which the prof replied no - but followed with an extremely confusing answer that went something like this: "But there is no global component to this course. We discuss policy studies relating to government, intergovernmental relations, and application of policy at the national and international level." Since this exposed the prof's odd (mis)understanding of "intergovernmental relations" being irrelevant to global affairs students (odd, given that's precisely what we study...), I decided said prof likely has NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON.

So I decided I would take a dummy French class*, which won't be terribly challenging, and work on my ugly painting and read books about Tanzania and Zanzibar and make zucchini bread and roasted Quinoa salad. BUT...

A friend of mine who is working on an MFA found a class offered through our American Studies department focusing on the artist as public scholar. I was in utter shock that I not only missed this course in the summer schedule of classes (though to my defense, the actual title is sort of cryptic and my MFA friend had a copy of the syllabus to give me which explained the focus a lot better than two sentences in a bulletin can) but that such a thing existed in ANY department at my university. I'm really REALLY interested in the arts engaging political socialization, especially in regions/areas where marginalized populations (like women) are kept out of conventional or traditional modes of political education (like schools, voting booths, media, etc.). I'm also interested in "the arts" as a mode of research - artists and public performers, collecting stories from people and doing participant observations in various ways, are way less intimidating than even the most well-meaning "official" researchers: scientists, social workers and NGO people alike.

So yippie for me! But also, wah-wah (sad music). I'm up to my eyeballs in Performance-Studies theory, and I've just spent the last two days preparing for my first presentation (how community based public performance can combat Gramsci's notions of cultural hegemony), and before I know it, a paper will be due. Oh, and besides French and this Arts class, I'm teaching a Women's Studies class to 12 undergrads and trying to finish an article on the implementation of ICTs for the prevention of gender-based violence across Africa. A journal out of Ghana's Cape Coast University accepted my proposal and abstract, so hopefully they'll like the full version, also - I just have to make it, um, full.

So no time for zucchini bread. I will, however, make some Quinoa salad this afternoon, before I have to make my presentation.

Thankfully, I did (a lot of) legwork re: Tanzania in the month leading up to this summer semester. It has been near IMPOSSIBLE to get a response from most of the organizations I began bugging back in March, when we finally secured our flights into Nairobi & Dar es Salaam. This trip is very much a break for us (and Thomas, who will come with us to hike Mt. Meru and then find us somewhere on Zanzibar in August, but for the most part will be on Kilimanjaro**), but I'm also really really really REALLY interested in getting into a few organizations that do the sort of work I'm studying (ICT+development in gender contexts and social justice). Painstaking, this process, but eventually I got some responses from a few orgs. who agreed to let us in to poke around.

So having that set up, I'm on to watching people paint themselves orange and drive around in vans covered with newspaper or whatever. I don't understand many of the projects I'm reading about, but man do some of these people have balls.


*Thanks to underuse, my French has been demoted back down to dummy-level. I am taking some form of middle-school French at a local university to prep for my language exams next year.
**As I refuse to bring snow boots to East Africa and our sleeping bags are only good for temps above 30 degrees, we politely declined hiking to the Kili summit. Perfectly content to hike a few thousand meters up Meru (Kili's bastard step-sibling) and simply admire Kili from the front porch of a nice coffee shop in Moshi or something.