Office update

As you may remember, I've been redesigning my office in order to create a space conducive to completing a dissertation. This will be particularly crucial when I lose my Milwaukee office at the end of the semester at the same time when the winter doldrums tend to set in.

At any rate, I LOVE my desk - so spacious with loads of leg room and surface area and I can look out the window when I need to move my eyes to something else for a minute.


While I've had the desk for a month, I just put up my new shelving unit today. It's Smart Furniture, but discounted stuff from their outlet store. As you can see, we can grow into the existing space and this unit is modular so when we move we should be able to reconfigure it to fit in our new space. We could also add on to it if need be.


Last major item on the acquisition list is a lateral file. This photograph shows where it will go and some of the material waiting to go into it.


We were hoping to get one "on loan" from one of our workplaces but, alas, none are available. I'm keeping my eyes peeled but if I haven't found something by the next credit card billing cycle I'm going to get the one that matches the desk.

On the wish list: an office chair and corkboard.

Apropos

best student typo ever:
excreta instead of etcetera

ode to human subjects

your hands around my neck
my voice is distorted, muted, silenced
knowledge/power culture/power corporate power
you protect those without need
and perceive risk only to your own skin
you limit what we may learn
and determine what can be known

verily

1. Teaching a repeat class is a good experience - allows you to work on balancing your teaching with research, service, etc.
2. Perfect weather today - hot in the sun, cool in the shade, memories of summer and hints of what is to come.
3. Here's something to do with all that CSA corn:

Preheat oven to 425
Cut kernels from 3 ears sweet corn and spread on cookie sheet
Spray with olive oil
Bake until golden (15 minutes-ish)
Drain and rinse one can of black beans
Chop (and all other sensical prep), combine and pulse in food processor
1 red onion
1 cup cilantro
2 gloves garlic
2 jalapeno peppers
4 -6 ripe roma tomatoes
1 red pepper
3 tablespoons of cider vinegar
1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
Juice of 1 or 2 limes
pour into large bowl and fold in the beans and completely cooled corn
add 2 diced avocados immediately before serving

whoops

A journal editor has asked that I review a manuscript. I suppose this is a CV builder too even if it can't be placed under the "publications" heading.

Is it just chance that I am getting this request? Seems odd but the editor made no mention of my advisors and I know they are clear that I want to be a BOOK reviewer.

on reviews

Apparently it is appropriate to have your advisor recommend you as a reviewer. If you're faculty I suppose you're supposed to make the contact yourself.

rapt

Today I was lecturing and noticed that we were running out of time. I began to speed things up a little and noted that no one had so much as capped a pen. This is uncommon in my teaching experience at this and my previous place of employment. In fact, I tell students on the first day that I find it the height of rude when folks pack up before I stop talking and request that they refrain. In general people comply with my request but, all the same, usually there is discernible change in the tenor of the class in the last 5 minutes. Today I thought to myself, "Damn, I knew this was a good lecture but I didn't realize it was that interesting."

Finally, about a minute after the class-time, I used my "I'll leave you with this [somewhat debatable statement] and we can pick up here Wednesday. Still no one moved and slowly it dawned on me. "We still have another 15 minutes don't we?" To which there were universal nods and a few snickers.

to all 2 or 3 of you

traffic is down lately. i feel a little disgruntled about it too. blogging without the help of jfw's sidebar is a little more lonely. seriously. anyone out there?

so i've written the first draft of a stellar book review and i've got some "feelers" out to figure out how to get it picked up. if things are going too slowly or not going at all, i think i'm just going to be brazen enough to email some editors and tell them that i've got reviews and, since they are in the review business, at least in part, we should get together.

doesn't this earthbound organic/natural selection foods thing bug you a bit? i did a little snooping around and it seems to me that natural selection foods is the packaging arm of earthbound and they also package for all kinds of other folks - many of whom are not organic. here are my questions: are all the greens sold under the earthbound label produced on the earthbound farm? if not, why is there no mention of that on the label or on the company (FARM!) website? are the other greens packaged by natural selection produced on earthbound acreage (meaning that the farm is not completely organic)? finally, what, if any, work is done to insure that organic greens are not processed with conventional greens or, for that matter, that the organic greens remain free of pesticide and other chemical residues introduced into the packaging facility by the conventional greens?

it's weekends like this that make me happy for community supported agriculture even if I am up to my ears in sweet corn and carrots.

2 things

1. To those who keep leaving copies of the new testament on the bench in front of my gym locker, on our steps, and in my office mailbox: thanks for being worried about my salvation and all but although it is true that I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, it is not for lack of access to the New Testament.
2. Also, perhaps this is only hilarious if it depicts your current life fairly accurately but I laughed so hard I cried.

what was i thinking when...*

If I were put together enough to run any regular kind of posts, one of my regular "segments" would be entitled "What was I thinking when..." In these posts I would detail some glaringly stupid thing I had done.

For example:
1. What was I thinking way back when I was 5 years old and at Feeney's grocery on the island with Mitzii (yes, really) and her mom and I just popped a piece of gum in my mouth without waiting to pay for it or even asking if Mitzii's mom was willing to buy us a piece of gum?
2. When I agreed to teach 2 classes this semester?
3. When I stupidly announced that a faculty member had been offered and turned down a job at another department and I did this in a very public setting in front of that faculty member even though I had no idea how public that information was and I learned it through a member of the faculty at that other department who has his foot in his mouth even more frequently than I do?
4. When I said, "I swear to God" while giving a lecture?

Of course, if I were going to really do it up, I would elaborate on these stupid acts, including the lead in, how quickly (or not) I realized I was an idiot, exactly how bright red I became and for how long, and how my stupidity continues to affect my life even today.

*incidentally, I imagine this is the kind of post that prompts my partner to believe my blogging is risky activity.

Last night when I was giving E her bath before bed, she was splashing around like usual and she slipped and went under - the first time ever on my watch. I was right there. I saw it all happen and recall the detail so well it was one of those seconds that lasted forever. One minute she is laughing at the water she is causing to fly about and the next minute she is staring up through the water with a look of complete shock on her face. I pulled her out instantly and held her, getting soaked. She made a couple of futile attempts at gasping for air and then coughed a little, fussed for a second, and started to squirm in my arms. I thought to myself, "Well... she's OK so it's probably best to put her back in the tub for a second so she can end the bath on a good note and not develop an aversion to bathing or the water." I placed her very gingerly in the tub and she started laughing and splashing again - this time reaching across the tub for one of her bath toys. "Be CAREful," I said as she began to slip again and I took her arm to make sure she stayed alfoat. She laughed again!

At this point I decided that I was the one developing an aversion to her baths and pulled the plug both literally and figuratively. My partner took care of bathing tonight. As for me, I'm thinking she's old enough for the shower.

To blog or not to blog

My partner and I differ a little bit when it comes to our notions of privacy and risk. When we first moved in together, it was a constant battle between having all the shades up, the windows open, and the doors unlocked and living in a "locked down" facility. We've both regressed toward the mean a little. He doesn't feel the need to close all the downstairs windows every time he goes upstairs and sometimes he even leaves the outer door unlocked when he takes out the dogs although he is still pretty strict about keeping the blinds down and curtains drawn. I actually frequently lock the doors when I am inside and am not constantly running around the house undoing all the closing up he does. However, I still don't worry about closing the shades at night or drawing the curtains so that folks don't see me streaking from the shower to my bedroom closet.

My generally unarticulated philosophy on privacy goes something like this:
1. If you have nothing better to do than hang around waiting for a glimpse of me streaking to my bedroom, I feel for you.
2. If you happen to see or hear something "private" because the shades are up, I expect you to show me the courtesy of turning away and moving on. I would do the same for you. Privacy is, after all, a social arrangement. Living in close quarters (there is not more than 14 feet between our house and the next and there is only a wooden fence separating our backyards) means that we are privy to all kinds of information about one another. Instead of policing the public/private boundary, ultimately a futile task, it makes more sense to maintain norms for respecting the difference between public and private behavior.

Remember Goffman's story about how the Shetland Islanders would walk into one another's houses (same holds on my island home) but would make sure to announce themselves by approaching noisily? Were they to walk in on anything (within reason) private, they would likely turn a blind eye.

So here's the thing. My partner thinks I should discontinue my blog in light of my impending foray into the job market. He thinks that much of the information I disclose is too private and would be a problem if it became known to potential employers and he takes it as a given that my potential employers will discover my blog.

I tend to think that's baloney. First, I think potential employers have better things to do than trying to find out if I have a secret blog somewhere. Second, even if folks were to learn about this blog, I fail to see how it would color their opinion of me as a candidate provided the blog was not used to account for some previously recognized problem with me as a candidate. Lastly, although my posts here aren't constitutive of some joyous and empowering Whitman-esque (Whitmanian??) "yawp," I do value the opportunity to make a "peep" every now and then. SO, dear reader(s), I solicit your help in 2 ways. First, if you would be so kind as to respond to the poll, I would be much obliged. Second, comments are welcome.

Plan of Attack

Here's the plan. What do you think? Actually, unless you are going to tell me things that reinforce my fragile self-esteem, just remain mum, OK?

This semester:
1. Send out 2 (possibly 3) book reviews so as to take small steps toward overcoming the fear of disseminating research (to be completed by October 15 ath the LATEST). I'm much more comfortable commenting on other people's work so why not navigate the process a couple of times with written work that I feel OK about? I know, I should have been doing this all along.
2. Complete and clean up dissertation chapter 2.
3. Send it out to folks for comment.
4. Prepare thesis (I know, I know. This should have been done ages ago) for submission.
5. Find folks to read revised thesis and send it to them.

The break:
1. ASA submission- first run at chapter 3 based on data collected in initial field site (try to hijack panel with like-minded co-conspirators)
2. Revise chapter 2.
3. Revise thesis.

Next semester:
1. Send chapter 2 out for publication.
2. Send thesis out for publication.
3. Begin chapter 4 interviews.
4. Ongoing chapter 3 data collection in follow-up sites and writing.
5. Hunger data analysis and policy brief.

E's photo of the month: 1 year old

Can you believe it?

middle

there are so many mediocre books in the world. hopefully the not so random sample of books I've read over the past few days are not indicative of some accelerating devolution in research around race and ethnicity, particularly the African American middle-class and educating African American youth.

Sheesh. Can't we do any better than The Dreamkeepers and Black Picket Fences*, folks? Am I missing the really good stuff?

*I'm inclined to cut Patillo a little slack. It was her dissertation, after all. She deserves props for just getting the manuscript out. Further, I attended a presentation she gave at the ASA and liked it. Ladson-Billings, however, is too senior to have produced the book she did. I decided to use it to replace Bad Boys on my students' reading list because I generally have a number of future teachers and last semester they were hoping for a book that offered a plan of action instead of just spelling out how schools reproduce inequality. Ladson-Billings offers a plan of action. However, it hinges upon having the same cultural frame of reference as the students. She profiles 8 teachers (6 African American and 2 white). However, of the white teachers, one has an African-American cultural frame of reference and the other spent a great deal of time in African and has an equal number of white and African American friends. I fear that my mostly white suburban education students will come away from the book thinking that they don't have the ability to be good teachers of African American students.

refrigerator blindness

I'm back to Jeffrey Alexander again but only for a moment.

He's reaching on his application of the autonomy of culture and his requirement that cultural sociological analyses take culture as an independent variable. Ultimately, or at least based upon his own work, one must conclude that his theory cannot make predictions and only appears to have value when used as a retrospective explanatory tool. Furthermore, actors, interests and values, and other spheres of social life are left out of his "thick descriptions of culture." Yet they come sliding right back in again when Alexander attempts to explain cultural change and the succession of social theories. Instead of self-interested agents, economic incentives, politics, or other "non-cultural" factors, Alexander's theory rests on theory itself as an actor seeking self-preservation and ascendancy ("Broad theories can defend themselves by defining and protecting a set of core propositions, jettisoning entire segments of their perspective as only peripherally important" (Meanings of Social Life, p. 205)). Alexander constructs culture as an actor the same way states are constructed by Skocpol, individuals are constructed by rational choice theories, corporations by organizational theorists, etc, etc.

Ultimately Alexander is so adamant regarding the independence of culture that he really has no way to bring culture back into the world of material consequences without jettisoning that which is most important - an understanding of culture as the affective, dramaturgical and discursive context in which all action is carried out.

impatience

Anyone know when I can expect the books I ordered at the ASA? They're coming directly from the publisher so I kind of figured they would arrive quickly.

i'm here but i am tired. in lieu of a proper post, i am opting for bed.

inconvenient

The office is coming along great. I love the desk and now cannot wait for the shelving and file cabinet to arrive. I like it all so much, in fact, that I am thinking of renting a carpet cleaner so I can attempt to bring the carpet up to snuff with the rest of my new office. I also need an office chair, a corkboard, and some picture frames.

Yesterday was my partners birthday so we went out for a nice dinner and a movie. We saw An Inconvenient Truth. I enjoyed it. I think it's safe to say that my thoughts kept returning to a few specific things on the walk home (thankfully, I was spared the guilt of driving home because we live in a neighborhood in which we can walk to 4-star restaurants and movie theatres).

First, I kept wondering what my dad and Mary would think of the film. I think my dad would find it somewhat compelling and I think that Mary would either say that we just need to pray about global warming or she would say that there is no such thing at all and that people who think other countries are doing a better a job on the environment should just go ahead and move.

Second, I've decided that I am going to seriously curb my driving over and above the low levels of driving we currently do (I am going to be a mass transit and walking nazi). This endeavor is supported by the impending opening of Milwaukee's first Whole Foods which is minutes away from our place.

Finally, wouldn't it be nice to have a president who is ABOUT something? I don't think we've had one of those in my lifetime - a president who is really consumed by one particular social concern. The film reminded me that back in the 90s I was a huge Al Gore fan, read his book, followed the work he was doing on the Kyoto Protocol, etc. My partner thinks Gore should take another shot at the white house but I think that would be foolish. He won't have the party behind him and, besides, I think he may accomplish more as the man who should have been president - kind of a Jimmy Carter-esque position (I know Carter did a term) of having the moral authority and voice but not having the practical obstacles to pursuing the best ends.

An office worthy of a dissertation, Part I

We have a very nice house and we tend to keep it tidy and reasonably clean except for the dog hair tumbleweeds that like to blow about between vacuuming sessions. Our decorating is a bit on the spartan side - not a great many knick-knacks, etc.

Our house is great except for the office, which is a total disaster. See photographic evidence here:



I've decided that I need an office worthy of the dissertation I want to write - a corollary of my dad's obsession with "dressing for the job you want to have." The office worthy of the dissertation I want to write will have comfortable seating, loads of surface area and enough shelves for the books (and other assorted reading material) my partner and I currently posses as well as the books we will come into possession of in the next 24 months (presumably after that time I will have a job and an office at said job and some of my books will live at work).

I recently implemented phase one of the office reconstruction: ordering a spacious corner desk. Target's Furio mission style desk with hutch and computer desk have to go. Phase 2 is floor to ceiling modular shelving to be ordered during the next credit card billing cycle. Phase 3 is the acquisition of a lateral file no more than 42 inches long. I'm trying to do that one on the way cheap.

The desk has just arrived and I am about to start taking this office apart to usher in a new period of unprecedented mental clarity and productivity! Not sure how long it will be before I get my computer set up in the desk's CPU cabinet. Until then, adieu!

the end is near!

[click for more info]

I know that the last couple installments haven't been the best but here's hoping.

strong program

I'm really quite busy over the next few days and, it being E's nap time, I should be tending to a plethora of more immediately pressing things. However, I need to work through this a little bit.

I've been reevaluating Jeff Alexander's strong program of cultural sociology since the ASA. I decided earlier on in my graduate career that the strong program is a little too retrospective (in that it doesn't seem to have any predictive power) and a little too agent-less for me. However, some conversations I had at the meeting led to me think I should reconsider. So, I'm reading.

Anyway, in theory (used here as a figure of speech) I am sympathetic to the strong program which is akin in many ways to Foucault's study of the causal and arbitrary nature of language/discourse/knowledge (have I mentioned that I LOVE Foucault? Discipline & Punish would likely make it on my all-time top 10 READING list) but maintains the autonomy of culture, which is to say that the cultural realm is distinct from and not homologous (sorry Bourdieu) or reducible to other elements of the social world like the state, economic interests, etc, etc.

It is no wonder that Alexander's theoretical work is appealing to me. My entire larger research project, including my quantitative master's thesis and even my BA thesis, is concerned with the relationship between intention and action (particularly as both intention and action are mutually constitutive as well as necessarily referential to both internal and external meaning systems). However, I have never encountered an application of the strong program that works for me.

What I am looking for is a more microsociological theory of cultural autonomy that takes pragmatic (here used as a reference to American Pragmatism. I am thinking here about the importance of habit and intelligence in that pragmatic sense) and ethnomethodological (e.g. accountability to everday interaction) concerns into account. I want this microsociological theory to be the corrolary of a more macrosociological theory of culture explaining the development, dissemination and impact (causally speaking) at the macro level of culture structures.

Any ideas, folks? Seems like too large a project for the dissertation.

and down again

Not only am I crazy (see my comments here for proof), I attended a job market meeting today (yes, I know, not until next year but I worry that my partner is going to be offered a lateral this year and I want to have something to send out) in which I looked at CVs that confirmed no amount of cosmetic work is going to make mine worthy of the short list. Then I was off to a meeting with a faculty member I hoped would be a good collaborator/mentor/#4. This particular individual gave me a "we'll see."

Given that most of the faculty I know from taking courses and attending brownbags have left or retired and that I am not around the department to maintain and initiate relations with others, I feel like I'm really in a bind when it comes to rounding out my committee and coming up with a list of recommenders (let's bracket the fact that I'd also like a bit of a shepherd and agent when it comes to the job market). Furthermore, I would find it particularly painful to be told by a faculty member I asked that s/he would rather not recommend me/etc so I find myself not asking. I know I'm not around and I know there are a lot of grad students in the department and I know that it's work to write those letters, particularly if you want to do it well and say something about the dissertation but I also know I need some advocates.

For now, my ego mildly bruised after today, I think it best if I get through some of the books and articles on the stack and finish my syllabus for the fall. No danger of assaults on the self esteem there.

recovery

Better today although I'm decelerating when it comes to work. E doesn't have school this week - intercession - and my partner started teaching today. Thus, I am going to have a slow work week.

Something else about the ASA. Did anyone else notice that there were a lot of babies and small children present? Further, did anyone notice that those youngsters were usually in the care of their fathers or other male caregivers?

It seems too obvious to mention but I will anyway. The idea is, folks, that good dads can bring their kids to work from time to time ( and aren't they just such great parents for taking part in care-giving) while good female sociologists don't let children distract them from their work. We hear and obey!

shambles

Sadly, things have gone downhill since my last post. Back to feeling alone, invisible and "like butter scraped over too much bread." No new developments academically... it's just the rest of it, you know, the rest of life.

Is it just that I have been home long enough for the ASA high to wear off? Is blogging bad luck? Was it wrong to state what I had been feeling for days, that things are good?

Damn.