letter one
Ohai!
What is this?
Sometimes people ask me what I do, and aside from telling people that I don't know what I'm doing with my life, sometimes I say that I read things. And occasionally write about them. In reading things that I want to read, though, instead of taking a class, I haven't quite figured out how to write about them. So...this is an experiment in externalizing my thinking and sharing it with others. If you're getting this, it's because at some point or another you have been/continue to be a delightful thought partner and I thought you might be interested. This week, it's in the style of Ann Friedman's newsletter. (If this is uninteresting to you feel free to delete now.)
This week
Confirmed my orals date--2/19, 12:30-2:30pm (helpful for backwards planning). Started an NSF proposal for Getting Unstuck in earnest, with Karen. Attempted to organize my thoughts into a Ford research statement draft (thanks, Amal & Karen!). Read some things. Made kimchi with friends.
I'm reading
Ellis and I have been working our way through selected chapters from James Scott'sDecoding subaltern politics, so the subaltern--particularly the framing of illegibility/legibility has been on my mind. This theme cropped up in both Megan Bang's chapter on "Decolonial Trans-Ontologies" (read for salon) as well as Lisa Lowe's chapter on "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences." A passage from the Lisa Lowe (thank you, Emily Hong, one of my T550 TF-ees) that I loved:
"By "heterogeneity," I mean to indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category--that is, among Asian Americans, there are differences of Asian national origin, of generational relation to immigrant exclusion laws, of class backgrounds in Asia and economic conditions within the United States, and of gender. By "hybridity," I refer to the formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations...hybridity, in this sense, does not suggest the assimilation of Asian or immigrant practices to dominant forms but instead marks the history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination. Finally, we might understand "multiplicity" as designating the ways in which subjects located within social relationships are determined by several different axes of power..."(p.67)
Other things (a mix of papers, YA, and news)
Community-centered action civics (that probably didn't adequately interrogate power structures).Motivation and help-seeking in high school CS. Traumatic stories of Lithuanian and Polish WWII refugees (don't read these right now; wait for a more positive news cycle). A teenager with too much mysterious power in a badly written plot (thanks, Christan!). Saint Anything (because Dana is on a Sarah Dessen kick). Modern millennial etiquette advice..
GIFspiration
What do you think? Press reply.
-P.