Cracked open the CD case for David Byrne’s The Forest today, returned to the liner notes, and had a thought about why it is that “bad English,” Engrish, Spanglish, Finglish, and other nonstandard forms of my native tongue appeal to me so much.
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In case you haven’t heard it from me elsewhere, we’re running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the next few episodes of The Media Show, the YouTube show I’ve been producing since 2008. Among other things, we’re offering the complete back archives of the show on DVD — useful if you’re teaching a media literacy or digital rights unit and your campus has unpredictable campus wifi access. ALSO: we’ll make you puppets. Pledge now — the campaign is only on for two more weeks, and then these premiums will no longer be available!
Had a remarkably productive day Tuesday, the latest in a series. The surprise was how much it had to do with women and technology. Future research, a panel on Thursday, a survey at my dance class, and my own little scraps of code.
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Last August I had cause to think about the “invisible knapsack of white privilege” article, beyond where I originally found it. I don’t quite remember what prompted me to do this, but I started writing up a piece parallel to the original, about linguistic privilege. It’s been lingering in my post queue forever, and I figure I might as well post what I came up with; I don’t think anyone else has written up a version describing the feeling of being in the linguistic majority.
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While I’ve been applying for faculty positions, I’ve frequently been leading by saying “I’m interested in how we know what we know.” I’ve tried calling this “epistemology,” but a number of people have made it clear to me that I really don’t know what philosophers mean when they use that term; I’m not familiar with their tradition.
What I mean actually comes out of my exposure to a range of other traditions: scientific research, arguments against quantitative research in human behavior; history, journalism, anthropology, and linguistics; the founding documents of my undergraduate college, which presented me with a living, breathing education in the organization of academic disciplines; and ideas about education from Dewey to the “unschooling” movement.
To make this history clear for myself and others, as well as to clarify a few other things (for example, why it makes sense to me that the American Anthropology Association recently took the word “science” out of their mission statement), I’ve written up a sort of personal intellectual history over at Studyplace. It’s kind of disorganized at the moment, and doesn’t feel quite finished (jeebus, I introduced Bruno Latour towards the end and totally didn’t say what I wanted to about him), but I wanted to get it out and up there so that I can go back to thinking about other things.
Let me know what you think.
