I am ready to articulate my ontological resistance to so-called AI. It’s not just because it’s over-branded hype (coopting a concept from science fiction and futurism for what is basically an obtuse, upscaled algorithm). It’s not just because of the massive, uncredited resource extraction (both of human creators and of all the raw materials it […]
Scholars never spent much time on Strauss & Howe, but their generational theory has lived on in public opinion. I’ve been grateful for Pew, who have made age cohorts as sound as the science allows. But I see them saying the science isn’t strong enough to sustain.
It’s a personal narrative with citations. And maybe some theory. And some equivocating over the imperfections of memory. And maybe dead academics sharing a hot tub with the author.
The goal of graduate school is not to learn everything there is to learn about a field; indeed, the breadth of anything warranting the term “field” should be far too deep, and when you add in the hyperspecialization researchers and educators are expected to develop there’s simply too much for any one mind to handle. […]
Two quick notes for future contemplation (then the inevitable tangents): The sheer joy I feel in organizing a segment of thesis, only to slash it away into a separate document for future development, tells me everything I need about whether research is a good direction for my life. It wasn’t until I was working on […]
The last few sessions, every time I sit down to my thesis, I have felt invigorated, enlivened by the topic and the contribution I hope to make. Today started out much the same, but after a few hours of just moving around tidbits and half-citations, it’s starting to set in just how much of an […]
I’ve only conducted one other interview in graduate school. Although I think I did a great job with the interview itself, I was trying to shoehorn a lot into a theory class whose scope should have been much more precise. This is part of why I don’t think I’m good at theory. I can’t focus […]
I am, to be honest, quite fried this week, so I’m going to share my notes unstructureded in response to Michelle Ortlipp’s “Keeping and Using Reflective Journals in the Qualitative Research Process”. I like the idea of balancing “transparency” against poststructuralism (697) and “making my history, values, and assumptions open to scrutiny” (698) I note […]
As far back as I can remember, I called my family of origin “well-hyphenated”. There was my mom, my half-brother, my step-dad, my “adopted” grandparents (academically, we call this fictive kin), and any number of distant relatives from each. I couldn’t even refer to my father without specifying “biological”, since we hadn’t had a relationship […]
This week, we took this Internet quiz for an approximation of our research paradigms. My result, above, filled me with dread — not because Foucault’s work isn’t important and influential, not because I don’t share his eagerness to unpack everything with an eye toward questioning power and custom — but because his prose is just […]
Theories of Care 