Catching My Breath – Pt. I
Phew, it’s been a busy last few weeks. Where has the time gone? I feel like I haven’t had any time to stop and think or catch my breath. Between work and school and committees and events and more meetings and more work the nearly non-existent fall flew bye. In short, a lot has been going on. For example, last week I attended quite a few interesting events put on by the India China Institute, which is where I work. There was a very interesting Sustainability Day at The New School (photo at right), which included not only info about the Divest movement at The New School but also nationally. You can read a great post at 350.org by our friend Davis on the event.
On the social justice front, where I spend a lot of my time, we are slowly but surely making baby steps in the right direction. This week noted authors, activist and critiques bell hooks, Eve Ensler and Melissa Harris-Perry have all been-or will be later this week–at The New School. I’ve been to two of hooks’ events already this week, but will save writing about those events for their own separate post. I was also at an interesting meeting this past Friday organized by Students for Social Justice (SSJ), which is a New School student group that formed in the past year or two and has been trying to help raise the profile and level of discussion of social justice at The New School. There were about 25 people who showed up in response to efforts by the SSJ to bring together different members of the SJ student activists community. There were also a few staff members there whose work deals with social justice. Besides myself, there were four other members of the Social Justice Committee at The New School there, which is a small number, but still better than some past events. There were also a few members of the USS, which is the student government at New School. And at least two of the groups came out with concrete proposals for next steps and actions on student space and organizing, so all of this was very encouraging. It definitely made it worth coming into the city on a Friday night at 6pm for a meeting.
In other news, I’m still a PhD student! dammit. But on the upside, I get to read articles with titles like “The Creation of Cosmic Magnetic Fields” and “Toward the Development of an Instrument for Measuring a Christian Creationist Worldview.” And I have to watch stuff like this for my current research, which I would never have imagined in a million years. But in the process I am learning a lot more about both the practices of science and the beliefs of fundamentalists Christians, which I am sure will make for interesting dinner conversation over the holidays for years to come. 😉
Most of what I am doing now is writing. Somehow writing a book is proving much harder than I ever expected. Technically I am not writing a book, but a PhD dissertation is basically a pre-book that, when completed, gets edited and turned into a book–so I am basically writing a book and calling it a dissertation 😉 But wow, even though I love to write, and don’t struggle with writing per se, figuring out how to take a lot of big and complicated ideas and turn them into sustained and interesting text page after page is much harder than one might imagine–at least so far. Maybe it comes easier to others.
But I really do find the work I am doing super fascinating, even if a bit obscure at times. After all, trying to link the Anthropocene and creationism with the End of Nature and critiques of industrial capitalism is a massive undertaking even on a good day! I must say, if you had asked me a few years ago what I was going to be working on, this wouldn’t have been it. In fact, it’s not even remotely what I came here to work on, which was immigration and media. How things evolve!
Until next time…pas de quoi.
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