weekend fun

Waking hungover but happy at noon on Sunday after much fun and revelry this weekend (tally since Friday: four house parties, two visits to Cafe Habana, two sightings of K&J, two sightings of Alice, two coffee dates at Amer's with colleagues, one slightly-drunken stroll through the Pinckney Kroger wearing fishnets and a cleavage-bearing black chiffon dress with freakishly long sleeves, one 3am dining adventure at the Fleetwood, one quiet walk in a Metropark, one baking event.)

A lovely lazy Saturday spent soaking up as much vitamin D as possible (oh, blessed sun!) , doing a little GSI work, and acquiring green vegetables (broccoli and spinach, yum!) and gas and strolling through the aisles of clothes, wine and liquor, and fancy, sexy computers at COSTCO. . .

. . . led into an evening of baking adventures and a couple nice house parties. A quiet, intimate group including some wonderful friends, with an outstanding spread of food, and woeful soulful music at Jenay's place . . . a stop-off at Cafe Habana to pick up Alice and some of her law school friends, and then over to Jonathan and Dan's place for one of their characteristically wild parties, peopled with drunken, maudlin boys, snarky and hilarious architects and artists, and lots of GEO folks, with astonishingly good fresh salsa verde thanks to their Mexican roommate. Alice took me out to the Fleetwood afterwards, then we parted ways at about 4 am.

I'm tired and my head hurts, but I feel cleansed from the experience of being with good friends. It had been a long week, with the GEO picketing and all. I never knew what hard work it would be to be out there.

Time now to wander around the house for the afternoon in my super-soft pink bathrobe and slippers and drink lots and lots of coffee. And maybe eat even more bacon. Mmm.

what lies beneath

self-portrait in ice

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN GRADUATE EMPLOYEES AUTHORIZE TWO DAY WORK STOPPAGE

Looks like we'll be striking . . .

The press release today said:


LABOR UNION OF GRADUATE INSTRUCTORS VOTE 727 TO 177 TO STOP WORK

Ann Arbor, MI – Members of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO, AFT local 3550), the labor union representing approximately 1,700 graduate student instructors and staff assistants at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, voted in support of a work stoppage on campus. The walkout is planned to take place on Tuesday, March 25th and Wednesday, March 26th.

The GEO has been in negotiations with university administration since November of 2007, both sides have yet to come to agreement on core issues, mostly economic. GEO has shown good faith throughout the bargaining process. Membership extended the contract twice past its March 1st expiration date, and agreed to additional bargaining sessions during the week of March 17th. However, the administration’s bargaining team failed to present new proposals at three of this week’s sessions. GEO’s contract will expire again at midnight on Monday, March 24th.

GEO’s contract campaign prioritizes bringing the graduate employee salary up to a living wage, meeting the cost of attendance published by the university’s Office of Financial Aid. Currently, the average graduate employee earns $781.00 less than this figure. The university’s administration has refused to raise wages to close this gap. To merely close this gap and account for a conservative estimation of inflation would require a 9% increase in wages in the first year of the contract.

GEO lead negotiator Colleen Woods said that the increase in the first year remains non-negotiable. “Our members have been consistently telling us that this is very important to them.” This average salary figure is no longer competitive with what U of M considers its peer institutions. Northwestern University has launched a program that provides 5 years and 4 summers of funding, and Yale, Harvard and Princeton now provide graduates with an average of $20,000 over 12 months. Beyond private schools, the average salary at the University of Iowa is $16,575 for graduate instructors; and at Rutgers it is $19,815.

With the university’s current pay scale, those working fewer hours a week make less in hourly wages, and do not receive health benefits or full tuition waivers. This places a disproportionate burden on those who are already at a disadvantage. GEO has proposed a wage parity scale to address this, but this has been continually rejected by the administration.

On Thursday, March 20, approximately 300 GEO members and allies rallied in support of the current contract campaign marching from the central Diag to the Regents’ Plaza. GEO President, Helen Ho, and Vice President, Kiara Vigil, delivered two letters that urged the Board of Regents to promote a swift and reasonable resolution to negotiations in order to prevent any work stoppage.

Goodbye Lenin

Eastern Europe night. I went to a union meeting and came home to eat pierogie with onion cooked in bacon grease and drink beer, while watching Goodbye Lenin. I'll finish an article on beer branding in post-socialist Georgia shortly.

Taking a two-minute break to watch mud wrestling from Ukraine.

Tilos az a

Macedonian bear convicted for theft of honey.

"For a while, he kept the animal away by buying a generator, lighting up the area, and playing thumping Serbian turbo-folk music."


. . . In other news, a Czech scientist determines that beer drinking is negatively correlated with academic productivity and the likelihood that your article will be cited by your peers.

Those of you with institutional access (and therefore a vested interest in the results, of course!) can view the Grim news here.

Ooh, interesting reading. I just happened upon New Mandala -- New Perspectives on Southeast Asia, a blog written by a couple Australian academics -- an anthropologist and an international development doctoral student with a background in Asian Studies.

I found it because, slow to read my email, I finally looked at the American Anthropological Association homepage and found their open letter to Prime Minister Sundaravej, opposing Thailand's War on Drugs. I was looking to see if there's an online petition regarding this issue and happened upon Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly's discussion of anthroplogy's potential contribution to this cause, "Anthropology goes to war".

I was pleased to see the AAA engaged in human rights issues, and also pleased to discover that there's now a AAA human rights blog.

Last night I met some of the new recruits to my programs at dinners sponsored by the departments. Yay for great students and free food. I also enjoyed a couple happy hour drinks at Cafe Habana with K&J. It was a wonderful day, with a talk with Eri, who was in the midst of nursing and burping her newborn baby girl, and positive tenure news about a beloved professor. And it was SUNNY. And I made a decision, for better or worse, that I'm not going to apply for any more summer funding to travel, because I think it would be better for me to stay in the States this summer, work on my existing papers and studies, and REST.

Is there a doktor in the house?

Non-European PhDs In Germany Find Use Of 'Doktor' Verboten

By Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 14, 2008; A01

BERLIN, March 13 -- Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you're a doctor could land you in jail.

At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home.

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title. . . . (what a trip!)

Women of color at the University of Michigan

Campus Lockdown conference at University of Michigan, Saturday, March 15, 2008.

In response to a number of women of color being denied tenure recently at the University of Michigan, there is a growing crowd of folks at U of M as well as other universities drawing attention to the situation and trying to advocate on their behalf, and for diversity at the university, in general.

For this conference, there's quite a star-studded panel of speakers:

Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz (via teleconference)
Rosa Linda Fregoso, University of Southern California
Ruthie Gilmore, University of Southern California
Fred Moten, Duke University
Clarissa Rojas, San Francisco State University
Audra Simpson, Cornell University
Haunani-Kay Trask, University of Hawai'i

Love Client #9

Ha! My favorite commentary on Spitzer thus far.


(Discovered through Vinylboy20, friend of a friend on Livejournal, who has his own commentary on the subject).

From Ann Arbor to Rajasthan to the Nile

Tonight I saw "In the Trail of the Ghawazee: Gypsy Dances from Rajasthan to the Nile" with Leila Haddad and the Ghawazee musicians of Luxor, thanks to a friend who got some extra tickets and kindly invited me. I was about ready to pass out because I'm so tired from grading and everything. (Okay, part of the effect is due to the fun of celebrating K&J's engagement last night!!) But the music and dancing were quite beautiful, and it was humanizing to be with friends doing something besides my everyday labor. I couldn't help but think of my friend and his research on the Gypsies of Rajasthan, though, and our informal interviewing of groupies in the audience at the Sziget a few years ago.

Yesterday I saw a lecture on the origins of domestic food production by the illustrious Kent Flannery, entitled: "The creation of agriculture: So easy a caveman could do it." Katie and I were both excited to learn about teocinte.

Contract negotiations continue for the University of Michigan graduate student instructors, via the Graduate Employees Organization. There's serious talk of a possible walk-out, depending how the conversation goes over the next couple of weeks. We've already extended our expired contract for a couple of weeks to allow for additional negotiations.

Meanwhile, there's a policy change called "continuous enrollment" being discussed at U of M's Rackham graduate school that has lots of us very concerned, to the point that the Dean met with the Graduate Student Forum today and there's another lunch meeting with the dean being scheduled for students by the GSF in another week or two. The arguments in favor of the change that were presented by the dean today centered primarily around (a) the data on degree completion from research that included both institutions that have such a policy and institutions that don't, and the apparent fact that the policy will, in fact, be revenue neutral, and (b) that the decrease in candidacy tuition will counterbalance the increase in semesters of enrollment while a candidate.

There are many issues being raised among students and faculty in disciplines that depend on extended field research in discussions that I don't want to go into here, but a couple of the things that puzzled me about what she said yesterday were the following: (1) she indicated that the cost of tuition is set by a different body than Rackham, who obviously would preside over this policy. So in principle the candidacy tuition could rise at a later date, making the argument b look rather less convincing. (2) While the dean indicated that data that include all disciplines in sciences and humanities indicate that the rate of completion of degree is higher when continuous enrollment policies are in place, when pressed by a student in the GSF with the question "Do institutions with continuous enrollment policies have greater degree completion rates than the University of Michigan?," she said that those data were unavailable, but that anecdotal evidence indicates that there are some that have better rates of completion and others that have far worse.

. . .

My neck pain is excruciating after grading my undergraduates' papers. I'm almost through all of the 75. I know I can't afford a massage, but I may need to find a way to pay for it anyway, because I can hardly turn my head. I wish there were affordable acupuncture in Ann Arbor.

I almost missed the most exciting news! My dear friend Eri just had her baby. I don't know exactly what time, or the stats or anything. But they both look positively radiant in the photos.

Good thing I'll be keeping *my* trampoline inside. Not that there'd be much danger of gathering a crowd of much of anything except bunnies under the kind I bought.

come join the youth and beauty brigade

Well, I came up with an interim solution, until I can find the guide to usher me out of my existential maelstrom. REBOUNDING!

Herr, lehre doch mich

I think I've finally figured out the correct metaphor for how I've been feeling.

It's as if there is an elephant sitting on top of my soul.

And though I'd benefit from talk therapy, physical therapy, massage therapy, grief counseling, and many other varieties of therapy, what I could probably most use is a shamanic healer.

Is this just another bump in the road in grad school? Is existential crisis part of the routine?

There are books staring at me from across the room. Can I open them? What am I so afraid of?

god, i am so coveting a hybrid right now.

Digital Landscapes of Maori Memory

Dude, this upcoming lecture and workshop sound really cool.

Dr. Samuel Mann, Otago Poltechnic, New Zealand

The SimPā project aims to convey and strengthen research aspects in regard to Māori culture, tikaka and knowledge using game‐based and digital technology. In short, the project aims to provide a means of telling whānau, hapu and Iwi Māori stories in 3D game format. This development has benefits in terms of both technology and cultural awareness and the fusion of these two: Iwi digital content. The project will achieve this through active engagement and participation with Iwi through Runaka (local tribal council) engagement and member participation to recreate landscapes in a digital format. We will discusses learnings from the first stage of the project the creation of the “SimPā toolkit” to enable participatory development (he kohinga o nga mea rauemi). This includes communication and negotiation processes, technical choices and issues surrounding the recreation of narrative histories including the notion of object‐based storytelling. We discuss an unexpected twist that has seen the project take a quite different track from that originally expected.

What: Public lecture and workshop
When: March 10, 2008, 2 pm, public lecture
March 11, 2008, 2:30 pm, workshop
Where: Ehrlicher Room, 411 West Hall (both events)

More: Prof. Mann has been working with Khyla Russell, a Maori anthropologist, on mapping Maori memories. Their work should be of interest to School of Information people, computer scientists, anthropologists, and Native Studies scholars.

(Khyla Russell profile)

Hey remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines -- so cheap and juicy!

Mmmm. Well, for the record, walnut molasses hermits go very well with beer.

Especially after grading over 25 undergraduate papers, most of which are on exactly the same topic.

This is a lonely town, ours is a lonely life . . .

Crampy, moody, and intensely craving molasses. I am trying my hand at a variation on hermit cookies, which I'll post on the Kitchen Empress if it turns out good. (Edit: it's here!) My version of the old-fashioned spiced raisin bar includes walnuts, turbinado sugar, and molasses. Even though I shouldn't be eating the raw egg, I couldn't help but taste the batter, which tastes really good.

The sun peeked out for a few minutes this afternoon, and the sunset is another one of those lovely ones where the frozen surface of the lake turns a cool purplish shade of pale grey, and the horizon gets dappled with a gentle peachy yellow behind the bare treetops. It's beautiful, but I still am hoping for the spring soon.

I spent the day grading undergraduate papers for Anthro 101, trying to work my way through the stack of 75. Characteristically slowly. I need to get a move on, though, because I have to do some writing tomorrow.

I took a little break to talk to Ali, who just bought a blue Prius, and to watch the last episode of Felicity again, while eating a little lunch of roasted broccoli, sauteed grape tomatoes, and quesadillas.

It's a small world after all.

I love the small world of the internet. Today I happened to read an internet listserve message of a listserve I happened to find through another listserve, through a course that I found out about through . . . god, the world of coincidence is paved with other coincidences. And there I found that my old friend Sarah, whom I'd lost touch with, is writing for the blog of the Arete Youth Foundation in Bulgaria now. Now all I have to do is put fingers to keys and I'll be back in touch with her. :)

Otherwise, today wasn't such a spectacular day. I was doing a little stretching to try to ease the pain in my neck, which has given me pain fairly consistently for about a year now. (It goes back to a rainy day in the fall last year when a speeding car rammed an SUV into me after I had to stop suddenly in response to congestion ahead, and the impact of the fender-bender brought an immediate headache and then, a few months later, excruciating and puzzling neck pain.)

So, anyway, there I was, doing a forward bend in the grad lounge while chatting with a couple friends in the department about the vagaries and stresses of academic performance evaluation, when -- what is happening? I was there, all the way on the floor, and I had the sense: I shouldn't be sleeping here now. One friend said: "Did you do that on purpose?" And I had to ask: "Do what?"

When I realized I'd fainted, I tried to gather more information: how long had I been out? What had happened? I was confused and a bit upset. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the university health center instead of at home grading papers and writing, where I'd planned to be. A kind, dear friend walked me over to ensure I didn't fall over on my way there.

I went, prescription in hand, to the Kroger pharmacy after my UHS excitement (I lay under a white blanket in a quiet, private, white room for a couple hours, reading celebrity gossip rags and National Geographic, listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg variations on my iPod while waiting for the doctor to arrive), only to be told that my health coverage had been cancelled effective 12/31. I was offered the option of buying the drugs for over 100 dollars a pop, and I was less than enthusiastic about this option, so I'll have to wait until Monday when the benefits office opens and I can ask WHY THE ^&*()_ isn't my health insurance card active?

Last night, after a glorious reading from Gary Snyder, a lovely visit with Katie & John, who met up with me at Rackham auditorium to hear the fabulous reading, and a happy, serendipitous visit with my other friend John, who happened to be on his way back to write an abstract after an evening visit to the gym, I arrived to my truck only to discover that I had left my lights on when I moved from one lot to another between administering an exam and going to union contract bargaining, so I had to call AAA to get a jump start.

Thank goodness for weekends. I don't think I could face the world tomorrow if I tried. And tonight, I am hiding away in the comfort of the cottage, eating mac & cheese, internet chatting with friends, and watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica: Razor from the lazy softness of the couch and my own bed, contemplating baking hermit cookies and instead lazily licking sticky, thick blackstrap molasses straight from the spoon.

Gary Snyder reading tonight in Ann Arbor!

National Book Award winning novelist Andrea Barrett and Pultizer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder will kick off the "Writing in Public" conference tonight with a public reading in the Rackham Auditorium at 7:30 p.m.

Full conference information available here.

Sometime, remind me to tell the story of when I went to hear Snyder read at Stanford University when I was a student in Santa Cruz.

Slit: "Do Muslims never get to have an idea of their own?"

Livejournal blogger slit strikes again with another incisive post, with her intrepretation on Western media coverage of the Turkey's recent reflection on the hadith.

Cheap prescription drugs

I was meandering through Kroger last night and noticed an advertisement that they now have $4 generic prescriptions at their pharmacy. And I just thought, huh, that would save some serious cash. I think that's even cheaper than the mail-away option offered through Walgreens. Not to mention, I would have more flexible hours and a more convenient location to pick up my prescriptions.

Mapping Genetic Variation for Insight into Humanity's History

It's an interesting learning experience, teaching undergraduates about race. Some of them have a really hard time letting go of essentialized thinking about groups, and understanding the quite basic notion that race is a social construction with material consequences, but no biological basis.

The fabulous PBS film Race: The Power of an Illusion helps quite a bit for fueling the discussion, so we showed the third part, The House We Live In, to the sections this time around. Somehow roughly a third of the class still missed the question on the exam asking about the biological basis of race, answering that it's "skin color, hair texture, and nose breadth".

As I continue striving to find a way to communicate these ideas to young people, I get increasingly excited about research that may help to clarify the issues. So the image above caught my eye when I saw it on the U of M homepage today. It's a schematic of human genetic variation, with colors representing different genetic types. If you click on it, you'll get to the article on the research the team has been doing. Pretty amazing, I say.

Directory of World's Minorities and Indigenous Groups

Minority Rights Group International has published a directory of minorities and indigenous groups of the world. I haven't given it much review, but it looks like a very handy reference.

kultiplex

oh, damn. another cool pesti hang-out spot is about to bite the dust.

Help Save the European University at St Petersburg.

There's been a lot of traffic recently on Eastern European-oriented academic listserves regarding the status of a well established post-graduate institution in St. Petersburg, the European University at St. Petersburg, which has been closed indefinitely due to "firecode violations".

The situation seems very dubious and the effort has been to get international attention on the problem, to generate signatures on a petition to re-open the university, and to solicit donations for building repairs and letters to the Russian authorities. If you are interested in learning more, there is a blog devoted to this issue. This has also received some attention in the English-language press, with an article in the Guardian and an editorial in the New York Times.

There are a few different petitions online now. Here is a petition and letter of support authored by Alexei Yurchak and Michele Rivkin-Fish, two well known and respected American anthropologists of Russia and the former Soviet Union.

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has also generated a statement regarding the EUSP closure.

I include, below, an open letter from the EUSP students. Similar reports have come from faculty as well.

Open letter from EUSP students
Dear colleagues!

As students of the European University at St.Petersburg (EUSP), we would like to ask for your help and support. On February 8th, the activity of the EUSP was suspended for 90 days by order of the district court.

The result is that the university has been paralyzed for the whole semester. This situation is totally unacceptable from our point of view.

The official reason for the suspension of educational activities at the EUSP is that fire-safety violations have occurred at the university building at 3 Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg. No problems of this kind had previously been identified by inspections of the fire service. As indicated in press-releases issued by the EUSP administration, the university leadership has taken measures to eliminate the problems revealed by the state fire inspectorate, though some of the problems identified will need months, or even years, to be eliminated completely. The EUSP’s building is a listed building (monument of architecture), and so this process requires huge financial outlay and numerous agreements with a whole range of different official bodies. Hence, the EUSP petitioned to be allowed to conduct its academic activity at the same time as carrying out the work required. The district court has, however, refused to satisfy this petition. On February 18th, the decision to suspend the academic activity of the EUSP was left in force. We are now extremely worried our university will not survive.

The motives underlying this situation are mysterious, and we do not propose to speculate about them. What is crucial for us is that we are now denied the opportunity to study, to attend seminars and lectures, and to carry out our own research. Yet many of us have come to St Petersburg from other cities in Russia with the precise purpose of doing all this, and of enjoying the renowned facilities of the EUSP.

The EUSP is known all over Russia as a graduate school that provides an education of outstanding quality. It accepts only graduate students, those who have already obtained their first degree and decided to devote themselves to research. For the time of over a decade since it was founded, the EUSP has proved that it can train young researchers to the highest international levels, as is shown by the fact that dozens of foreign students from all over the world come to study here every year. Many members of staff at the EUSP have degrees from Western universities, or have taught for significant lengths of time abroad, but have preferred to come back to Russia and make their contribution to developing knowledge here. Those who have completed degrees here are teaching at universities and working at research centres all over Russia, and making a unique contribution to Russian academia. One of the aims of the university is to stimulate young researchers to stay in Russia, to give them chance to realize their research potential here, despite the practical problems of academic careers (low pay etc.) that make these unattractive to many young people.

Now all our plans for the future are under threat because of the shutdown of the university. Essentially, we will lose most of the second semester of the teaching year, a long break that is likely to do serious harm to our professional development. Without having access to the university building, we cannot work at the unique university library, which provides materials not available elsewhere in the city; our research plans have been completely disrupted.

It is essential that the EUSP must be allowed to renew its academic activity in the shortest possible time. A reasonable solution to the existing situation must be found. We see no reason why the elimination of fire-safety violations could not be carried out alongside teaching, or why classes could not be moved, on a temporary basis, to another building while the supposedly most dangerous problems are dealt with.

In order to ensure a swift reopening, we are now asking you to help us. Please get as much publicity as you can for our case. Write to newspapers, make posts on the Net, state your position in public, send letters of support to official organizations and governmental bodies, both in Russia and in your home country. We are desperate to resume our studies; please take our cause to your hearts.

Students of the European University at St.Petersburg
http://www.eu.spb.ru/index.php?lang=en

(Note: The above image is borrowed without permission from the website of the university.)