… after reading 60 essays on the transition to modernity.
Category Archives: University life
Day at the newest UC
I spent yesterday visiting UC Merced – the state’s newest University of California campus, and the first in the San Joaquin Valley. It’s small but quite impressive! They have about 5,000 students, mostly undergraduates, and will grow into a larger university over time. Here are a few shots of their modern buildings and grounds. (The buildings are all LEED certified. Check out the reflective panes attached to the walls of the library to reduce cooling costs, and the gravel parking spots that reduce runoff.)
Doing sociology in Las Vegas
Las Vegas. 106 degree heat. 6,000 sociologists. Put them together and what do you get? The 2011 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association! Here are the highlights, lowlights and general weirdness from my six hot, loud, strange days in Las Vegas:
– Gave three talks in three days. : (
– Got some awards! : )
– Indoor smoking.
– Paid $14 to print a two page document.
– Had dinner at the “KGB Burger and Vodka Bar.”
– Beautiful, drought-resistant landscaping at the UNLV campus.
– Misters around town still going at 10 pm, and already on again at 8 am.
– Had my photo taken with Frances Fox Piven!
– Asked Dr. Piven how she handled the Glen Beck attacks and death threats from his followers. She turned down personal armed guards but did have them posted outside the door of her classroom to protect her students. : (
– Attended a great talk on blogging by the creators of Sociological Images. They have something like 600,000 visitors a month and 12,700 Facebook fans. Check out their recent post on the US Postal Service stamp that features a patriotic close-up of the Statue of Liberty…. the one in Las Vegas.
– Went to the ASA blogger party and met the author of this neat blog on teaching sociology. Check out his “Dead Grandmas and Teaching Research Questions” post.
– Heard my advisor Andy Szasz talk about the military’s stance on climate change (it’s real) and what they think needs to be done about it (a lot). Riley Dunlap pointed out that climate change deniers have given the military a wide berth on this topic. Andy’s point was that the military could be a strong ally to environmentalists.
– Heard the most articulate, eloquent speech of the conference given by a woman from the Las Vegas chapter of the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project.
– $5 “express lane” lines to get into restaurants faster.
– Lounge chairs by the pool that you have to pay to sit on.
– A massive billboard of a woman’s butt at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road.
– Watched the “Hot Babes Direct To You!” billboard truck go by countless times. The idea that you could have a woman delivered to your front door like a package was somehow less distressing than the claim that these are “Girls that want to meet you.”
– Was really glad to come home to my own personal brand of weird in beautiful Santa Cruz.
Academics and the creative process
Mike commenting on a finished work.
This week I got a personal tour through New Mexico artist Mike Bell’s paintings. Now, artists and academics are usually depicted as two entirely different types of people. Artists are free-thinking, soulful and sometimes a little wild, while academics are uber-rational eggheads who delight in flow-charts, facts and logic (right?!).
Nonetheless, I think academics have a lot to learn from artists. We don’t usually talk about our work as a creative endeavor, but the process of shaping our own ideas, making unexpected connections between events and ideas, and writing about the social world involves a touch of mystery that artists seem much better equipped to think about than academics are.
The more I hear Mike and other writers, sculptors and creative types talk about their work process, the more I learn about my own. We all need to find ways to keep our creative juices flowing in spite of other, often more pressing, demands on our time. We struggle to value our ideas enough to try to realize them, to learn who is helpful to discuss early-stage ideas with and whose commentary will have toxic impacts on our work, to navigate the pressure to be our own best publicist with competing instincts to be humble. Sometimes we think our creations are terrible as we are making them and then come back later and realize they aren’t half bad.
Beginning scholars in particular need all the help we can get in navigating the creative terrain of our work. I’d love to find ways to bring us more formally into conversation with artists! In that spirit, please send in any of your own creative practices and tips!
My creative process involves lots of post-its…
Dead Central
I’m not usually a fan of swapping “kids these days” stories about my students with other teachers. To my mind college students are too old to be kids, so I usually just stick with calling them “students” instead. Still, I had a classic “shake my head at kids these days” moment recently. While we were chatting over the photo-copier, one of the staff-members in my department described a mysterious “dead room” in the newly renovated library. Sure enough, when I went over to check out books later in the day it also caught my eye. My conversation with the librarian about it went something like this:
Me, while checking out books: The renovations to the library look great! But what on earth is “Dead Central?”
Librarian: That’s where the Grateful Dead Archive will go.
Me: Of course, awesome!
Librarian: Lot’s of the students have never heard of them.
Me: !!!!!!!
(On the other hand, earlier this year one of my students came across the job announcement for a “Grateful Dead Archivist” and pronounced it the coolest job ever…)
Research assistant asleep on the job
New presentation software
I know there’s a lot of Powerpoint haters out there but I’m not one of them. I remember using it for the first time towards the end of college and being thrilled with how easy it was to show photos, and I still enjoy it as a visually rich medium today. Yes, some powerpoint presentations are terrible, but many other kinds of presentations are terrible too. I’ll risk following the lead of the gun lobby to say that ‘Powerpoints don’t bore, people do.’
Nonetheless, I was excited to see a different kind of software in action for the first time at a recent conference, and used it in a presentation of my own on Friday. Prezi let’s you create one big canvas and zoom around on it to focus on different aspects of what you want to say. Your presentation lives online so you can access it from any computer with an internet connection, and you can e-mail people a link to your presentation for them to view on their own.
That said, it seems just as easy to go wrong with Prezi as it is with Powerpoint. The zoom effect is fast enough that you could easily get overzealous and end up with a roomful of disoriented audience-members. The canvas-like starting point gives you more leeway to present your ideas in a non-linear fashion, but it still won’t organize them into something meaningful for you. If your presentation doesn’t have a clear organizing thread there’s nothing the software can do to help.
Check it out yourself! Clicking here will take you to the online version of what I showed on Friday. If you have any suggestions for improvement, let me know!
The week that was
This week I:
– traded stories over an impromptu lunch with an old friend and occasional collaborator. It was a warm day in Berkeley, we ate outside, and I felt good.
– caught a swarm of bees! Very satisfying except for the fact that it does not seem to want to stay put in its new home.
– participated in Greenaction’s first annual Walk for Environmental Justice in Golden Gate Park, and then had an apré-walk lunch with friends from the Inner Sunset farmer’s market. My friends traded stories of their favorite parasites (for the record, one was an ‘ant zombie fungus‘ and the other was a parasite that takes over the body of a snail, grows up through its eyes and sprouts little blinking lights at the top).
– celebrated my birthday! Twice!
– ate fresh berries at the UCSC farm and garden’s Strawberry and Justice Festival
– went to a lecture on how to save the world with simple pictures, but was unconvinced
– listened to the last podcast of my advisor’s “Contemporary Sociological Theory” class from last quarter and began the podcasts for his current class, “Environmental Inequalities.” Don’t you wish you were my driving companion?
– got some good advice about online advocacy from the genius in charge of Aspiration
– was given this fabulous update on on the Beany Baby, the Beany Ball bee:
Tech tools for graduate students
I seem to spend half my time keeping up with my computer. It updates itself, deals with its own viruses, and is generally a miracle of the modern world. Still, each update means some new twists to the programs I use, and figuring out how to make use of its massive capabilities feels like a full-time job. Here’s a list of some of the tricks and tools I’ve been trying to master.
- Backup your work! Who hasn’t heard a horror story of the student who lost all their work in the final stages of writing their dissertation? I double up. My Mac uses Time Machine to automatically back itself up to an external hard drive. I also use Carbonite for automatic online backup to a remote site (in case my house burns down and said hard drives become a gooey mess).
- Accessing documents on my computer when you’re not actually at your computer (you know, in case inspiration hits while you’re on vacation or otherwise enjoying a perfectly good day away from your desk): Carbonite
- Creating a virtual library to house all the crazy pdfs that would otherwise suffocate my desktop: Zotero. I used to use End Note, but just switched over to Zotero. So far it seems a lot easier to use. Plus, it’s free! They both also automatically format your citations and bibliographies in the style of you choice. Wow! Can they do my laundry too?
- Finding things on the rabbit’s warren that is my computer: Google Desktop. I just downloaded this yesterday so I haven’t used it much yet, but my friend Bernie assures me it does the trick. It searches not only file names, but also what’s INSIDE the files. Crazy!
- Sharing massive documents and syncing e-mail accounts and other information across computers. I use Mobile Me, but I hear Google does this pretty well too.
- For when you go back to your desk and realize that although you thought you understood it at the time, you actually have no idea what your advisor was talking about: Recorder app on a smart phone. Record the conversation now, make sense of it later. Kind of like interviewing.
- For organizing and analyzing interview transcripts: NVivo. NVivo is designed for PC’s, so using it on a Mac also requires using Bootcamp or Parallels.
- For recording and calculating student grades: Excel or Numbers. They both work but I like Numbers because it has a pre-fab grading worksheet that automatically transforms number grades (92%) into letter grades (A-).
- For staying up to date with the outside world: Google Reader, Tweet Deck, and that old fashioned thing called the phone
- Task management software (otherwise known as to-do lists): OmniFocus. I was thrilled with this when I first got it, now I’m closer to lukewarm. I’m back to using my whiteboard for day-to-day to-do lists, but I still like it for storing my longer term to-do lists.
- One of my writing buddies uses Foxit Reader to read pdfs online and highlight and take notes on them, but it doesn’t look like it works for Macs. Plus, I don’t like reading things online. Still, I may snoop around and see what’s out there for Macs and give it a go.
And that marks the end of my tech savvy.
The week that was
This week I:
– saw a banana slug on my way to class – the first one I’ve seen since I’ve been able to call the banana slug my school mascot!
– made a loaf of rye buttermilk bread from this newly released cookbook. Yum!
– took advantage of an office-mate’s recommendation to back up my computer with Carbonite. Besides backing up your files, it also lets you access everything on your computer anywhere you have an internet connection. Awesome!
– after two and a half years of revisions, submitted an article based on my master’s research findings to its first academic journal. I felt proud and productive for about 45 minutes, and then fell into a sad, empty kind of state. My writer and researcher friends tell me this is common. : (
– guided my students into the murky waters of writing a literature review. So far so good.
– had some of my photos published as an accompaniment to an article on the recent agreement to allow California industries to offset their pollution by purchasing pollution credits in Chiapas, Mexico and Acre, Brazil. Check out the backstory in my post.
– read the following in preparation for the Supreme Court case on climate change that was heard on Tuesday. (Now I need to find out what the actual verdict was, and how it impacts the case in Alaska I described in a recent post)
- Why the Supreme Court should let states sue the country’s biggest carbon polluters by David Donager and Matt Pawa in Grist, April 19
- Supreme Court set to weigh in on whether we can hold companies responsible for climate change by Jess Zimmerman in Grist, April 18
– got a phone call from the post office saying that my new bees had arrived in the mail! They are now settled safely into their new diggs, and being, well, busy little bees.
– indulged my fantasy of being a scholar-farmer by doing some grading at 5th Crow Farm. The fantasy part, however, doesn’t involve my car smelling like PSG after lending a hand with errands (that’s Peruvian Seagull Guano for those of you not in the know). It also doesn’t involve the earth trying to eat my shoes as I navigate the mud in my “stylish and inappropriate” footwear of choice: clogs.
– realized, again, that nothing makes me feel incompetent faster than trying to hang out with farmers while they are working.
Bees at the post office – in the box they were shipped in
Tracy Perkins 
