To Lessen War

I'm currently at ASEE 2017 (https://www.asee.org/conferences-and-events/conferences/annual-conference/2017). It's a lot of fun. I met a whole bunch of new people. While the first one was primarily fun, I find that I have formed a professional goal for this conference, and I've had some success working at it - and with it I've done quite a decent amount of networking. My goal for this conference, after getting my presentation off my chest, has been to field ideas for carving out a dissertation from the Capstone to Work project that I've been working on. I have a lot written down already, and I'll probably copy and paste. But with this conference I also find myself with a clearer picture developing of my position in the field, and with that a clearer picture of my own life, honestly. For instance, I still need to read the slow professor, but currently if it requires the speed with which many of my elders seem to move, I do not think I will be able to stomach...

Yesterday I watched Black Mirror season 3 episode 5, Men Against Fire. Something about it hit me in a deep place, too deep for me to immediately recognize where. It had a little to do with all of the similarities with the Holocaust, but I knew it was something more than that. Thinking just a few minutes ago about how I would enter writing about my research, it hit me. What is particularly interesting about this episode is how an actual rift in identity (in this case, Gee would call it a biological identity) is exploited to create a larger, artificial rift in identity that minimizes empathy. So the mechanism at play throughout the whole episode is a learned identity difference that is systematized and thus the system as a whole has less empathy to spare, to influence it. This reminds me of Schon and Argyris' model I and model II organizations. How does this play into my research? Engineering is a community of practice that does the same thing. We emphasize an identity differ...

Ramon and I were talking about a dichotomous conversation dynamic, based off of my experience trying to convince my roommate to vote in the upcoming Virginia primary election. In that conversation, I ran up against a few dead ends: 1) Me: Why are you not interested in voting? Roommate: I don't think it makes much of a difference to vote for delegates. M: Well we're actually voting for Governor. R: Virginia is not my home state. M: If you had a vote that could make a difference in any state, why wouldn't you use it? You do care about people other than yourself, right? This vote is a privilege that not all american citizens have, but you do! R: Well, I'm not interested in voting. M: Why aren't you interested? R: Because I'm not. 2) R: I have a different perspective on power than you do, and that's okay. M: It's not okay for me, if I think your vote could be of benefit to others, then it is my responsibility as a U.S. citizen and within my et...

My Ethnography Ramon and I briefly talked about yesterdays writing, and he focused again on the idea of auto-ethnography. He recommended I watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3EJfPN9sIg&t=231s. I haven't done much but skim about 5 minutes of it, yet, so he suggested two primary (and correlated) take-away's from that keynote. - Auto-ethnography builds empathy - Auto-ethnography satisfies a current need in the sciences I have only had roughly-hypothetical interactions with auto-ethnography. I haven't read a full study, though I have been to a seminar on one that is in the process of being written. I've been in brainstorming session for another graduate student writing one. I read a very powerful "ethnography of one" by Foor et al. that I guess I conflated with auto-ethnography until Ramon and I started talking about writing one in earnest. While I am still fairly sure that I won't be writing one yet, it is an interesting question of what I...

My friend, Ramon Benitez, writes a blog ( http://bramon1.wixsite.com/animalempathengineer/blog ). I don't read it. This is partially because we communicate pretty regularly, and I'm fairly certain we've discussed the blog topic in depth by the time he has written the entry. I need to read it. I'm probably wrong about that fair certainty, and regardless, Ramon's take-aways from our conversations will surely be different when in his own words. I also don't read it because I have a lot of hermit behaviors that disconnect me from social networks. Even though I don't read it, people do! It's something I hear people talk about. And even if they didn't talk about it, he writes it! He writes a blog. His most recent entry is about using the blog as a sort of memoing, in the grounded theory sense (positioning the writing as theoretical work, with intellectual merit and impact) and in the James Comey sense (a documentation of important experiences that can...