budding scholar

There’s a prevalent myth in the world of academia that it’s possible to get work, and especially writing, done during the holidays. It feels like this wide open time, full of whole days that can be spent writing. And then the holidays come, and they’re full of family and food and perhaps catching up on email. So in an effort to make my holiday time productive, I’m spending my mornings at the library in Toledo this week. I hope to write up all my fieldnotes, get through email, transcribe two interviews, and plan out writing projects for January. Mixed in with these work things, I hope to start finding some excitement about the holidays themselves, possibly by making Christmas cards.

As an aside, have you seen this preview? With the babies and culture of different places, it’s the perfect movie for a grad student working away on research into cultural integration while dreaming about life with kids.

On the last Friday of every month, Maria Kalman posts a unique artistic story on her New York Times blog. Back in August, the topic was immigration, and how people got to America. I posted about it. Back in April, a piece about women on the Supreme Court. More recently, there was a piece about Thanksgiving, and going back to the land. I love her style, the way she’s taken the medium of a webpage and made it into a story, a way of displaying her art. How she mixes painting and photography, and complicated topics. An inspiration for sure.

(1) Book Group

It’s a plan, we’ll do a book group, starting with reading Three Cups of Tea in December. I’ll do the job of finding a medium to discuss it, taking all your suggestions. And if we find after December that we peter out, well then it will be a one-book group. But if we find we the virtual, multi-country group works for us, well then we’ll keep it going.  Get your hands on a copy of the book (I just ordered mine from Amazon in the UK!) and let me know if you haven’t already that you want to participate. I’ll be in touch about it come December 1st!

(2) Government and Identity?

Anyone else read this article from the this past weekend’s NYT about Jewish schools in the UK? It’s about a lawsuit currently in the Supreme Court there brought by the parents of a boy who was denied admission to a Jewish school because he wasn’t Jewish according to Orthodox laws (his mother converted to Judaism, but in a progressive synagogue). I’m not Jewish, nor am I British, but I found this article very interesting for the questions it raises about culture, government, and education. Who gets to decide the boundaries of a cultural group? Who draws borders around who “we” (as Jews, as Latinos, as Muslims, as Americans) are, and who is included or excluded? What does it mean when the government is making rulings that shape who’s in and who’s out? Should a private religious school be able to exclude someone because they’re not ____ enough (in this case Jewish)?