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I don't know which I find more upsetting: this long list of tweets and Facebook statuses announcing that Kids These Days (tm) don't know who Paul McCartney is, or this long list of tweets wherein people announce how much they'd like to be brutally physically abused by a famous r&b singer. I mean, the latter is much, much wronger, but I actually expect people to have totally awful thought processes about domestic violence. Whereas I assume they know who the goddamn Beatles are.
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One of the things I love about teaching is the moment when your students think things totally orthogonal to what you think, and it opens up a new train of thought. We were talking about long distance nationalism, also sometimes called transnational migration, with my seminar students. Now, long distance nationalism is crucial to a lot of my research on diaspora communities and their politics--but my students are now working through this idea, and they had all sorts of interesting objections to the concept, particularly its normative foundations. I still think that diaspora political engagement is both natural and politically useful, but it was still great to work with them through their ideas. tl;dr teaching is fun.
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Dean Dad reported that Arizona is considering two bills, one of which would effectively demand affirmative action for conservatives in higher ed hiring, and the other of which would mandate the use of "G-rated" language. Dead Dad spends most of his time taking apart the absurdity of the first, but I found myself more caught up with the idea of the second. Partially this is because I'm someone who uses YouTube videos of Eddie Izzard routines to teach world politics ("Hitler never played RISK as a kid" is an incredibly useful teaching tool). Partially because I see in this an attack on gender studies, among the many things this could be an attack on: I definitely said the word vagina on the first day of my feminist political theory class. Probably a few times. Not to mention that explaining the sex/gender dichotomy without being able to say the word sex would be, you know, hard.
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I have discovered a circle of hell Dante could not have anticipated: translating tweets. Seriously, you've got 140 characters, nonstandard syntax and spelling, use of colloquialisms, huge variation in transliteration techniques when they've been transliterated, and, of course, frequent typos. (It took me literally fifteen minutes to figure out that تسعمية was تسع مية, which is a difference of precisely one space. And I only got it because of context.) The amount of time I have spent sorting through these lately has both given me a headache, and reminded me how much I like translating. In small doses, at least.
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I should have something to say about Syria. I don't. Because sometimes thing are just so horrible that there's nothing to say.
***
One of the things I love about teaching is the moment when your students think things totally orthogonal to what you think, and it opens up a new train of thought. We were talking about long distance nationalism, also sometimes called transnational migration, with my seminar students. Now, long distance nationalism is crucial to a lot of my research on diaspora communities and their politics--but my students are now working through this idea, and they had all sorts of interesting objections to the concept, particularly its normative foundations. I still think that diaspora political engagement is both natural and politically useful, but it was still great to work with them through their ideas. tl;dr teaching is fun.
***
Dean Dad reported that Arizona is considering two bills, one of which would effectively demand affirmative action for conservatives in higher ed hiring, and the other of which would mandate the use of "G-rated" language. Dead Dad spends most of his time taking apart the absurdity of the first, but I found myself more caught up with the idea of the second. Partially this is because I'm someone who uses YouTube videos of Eddie Izzard routines to teach world politics ("Hitler never played RISK as a kid" is an incredibly useful teaching tool). Partially because I see in this an attack on gender studies, among the many things this could be an attack on: I definitely said the word vagina on the first day of my feminist political theory class. Probably a few times. Not to mention that explaining the sex/gender dichotomy without being able to say the word sex would be, you know, hard.
***
I have discovered a circle of hell Dante could not have anticipated: translating tweets. Seriously, you've got 140 characters, nonstandard syntax and spelling, use of colloquialisms, huge variation in transliteration techniques when they've been transliterated, and, of course, frequent typos. (It took me literally fifteen minutes to figure out that تسعمية was تسع مية, which is a difference of precisely one space. And I only got it because of context.) The amount of time I have spent sorting through these lately has both given me a headache, and reminded me how much I like translating. In small doses, at least.
***
I should have something to say about Syria. I don't. Because sometimes thing are just so horrible that there's nothing to say.