Last year

it was handmade greetings cards. Now her room is filled with glassware, paints, beads, pictures and ribbon. She nests in amongst it all, sitting on a beanbag with her laptop on her lap. It is all very cosy in my daughter Rosa's space.

These are a few examples of her work:



Notice the colour matching and the beads all thread in a style to match. The pictures are found on the Internet, printed, carefully cut and pasted.



The nineteen-twenties have been an interest - and note how there is a poem on the background here:



Whilst here is a just a line from a poem ...



This one has a Japanese theme:



and as in the last little display with the miniature bamboo plant, the finished pieces are put together in R's bedroom with other artifacts that have a similar theme:



The glassware is displayed around her room in little groups, each with appropriate other artifacts - e.g in a magical/fantasy genre/ Japanese or nineteen twenties. A commonly used icon across all themes though is the wings which are given to many of the characters. They are all carefully selected from a huge collection she has gathered from across the Internet; colour and size must match the character. They are all angels or fairies.

I think it is interesting the way we create backdrops for ourselves; we often fill our spaces with artifacts that seem to set the scene in particular ways, as if our world is a stage set that has to present a consistent and particular message. This is, I think what Goffman was getting at in his work 'Presentation of self in everyday life.'

Maybe when people get irritated with a mess in their spaces, they are nervous that the backdrop is creating the wrong presentation; yet there are those who like to live in mess. This is might come from a desire to resist one particular 'reading' of the self - ! /em>Or maybe even a desire to mislead!!

Of course blogs offer possibilities for presenting identities to others, exploiting the public/private affordances of online spaces ...
Stern (1999) has compared girls’ homepages to their bedroom walls where self-expression and public presentation come together as textual constructions of self. Yet these are complex textual constructions which reflect tensions across multiple selves, showing what

in some way the selves girls think they are, the selves they wish to become, and most likely, the selves they wish others to see

(Stern, 1999:24)

I know that in writing my blog I present a particular self and have a particular range of themes. As I write I tend to think I am showing a 'real me' whatever that means; I think I mean that I am not aware of the type of identity I am presenting; it seems to be the same as the me elsewhere, but I do not really believe this can be so. The medium always changes the message. The blog just poses as a window onto my world but it is a filter.

I love to write my blog and feel disappointed when I cannot get to it everyday. I think it is not that I am egocentric (although I may be) but that I have created a space for myself and I can make it whatever space I want. People share it with me and I like that; I can bring to, bits of my life, turn things round and present them and re-present them in different ways to help me think.

Mohawk

claims to be lazy and confused as well as aged 31.
I am interested in the exciting artifacts he uses in his photographs.

'What an interesting juxtaposition!!!!',

I hear you say.
And others call out:
'Check out the semiotics in that!!!'


thanks so much to Mohawk for showing us this too.

You must see the discussion here of what is going on.
Aaaanyway at the weekend (when I was working) a student told me she had read my Babyz paper here.
She told me she had to stop reading after a while as the thought of cyber babyz being tortured upset her so much. When I told her this was just girls (gurlz) playing experimentally and it was only pixels being manipulated not Babyz being tortured, she explained that many murderers had been found to have brutalised their dolls when younger.

So I now worry about Guy's daughters' futures. See here.

online and in touch

The Professionallurker has some very interesting statistics about Americans online, who is, who isn't etc.
Some of the findings are similar to those of Sonia Livingstone and Magdalene Bober in their research about UK children - for examples, adults who have kids under 18 are more likely to be online than not.

Considering the electricity cuts and the dangers to individuals who use the Internet - especially English language sites - in Iraq, it never ceases to amaze me how many Iraquis manage to get online and blog.
It is so cool that Riverbend continues to write and she cites A Star from Mosul whose first post begins:

I'm going to Baghdad tomorrow. So, I might not be able to post for few days. Therefore, I’m writing a long post...
- My name is not Najma Abdullah, and I'm not going to tell you my real name, coz I don't want to get killed.

From here I went to Tell me a secret who reveals how crucial the blogging network has become in infprming others of their safety ..

I know, it’s been a long, long time.its funny, Riverbend doesn’t .blog regularly so I and Raed get emails asking where is Riverbend all the time, and then I stopped blogging so Raed started to get emails asking where is Khalid and Riverbend? And now Raed stopped blogging so I got emails asking where are you and Raed and Riverbend?:))

I invite you to read around on these three blogs and see how for some people life online is truly a lifeline.

NEET

Not in Education, Employment or Training

Statistics here showed this:

NEET

In 2004, 1.1 million 16-to-24-year-olds were not in education, training or
employment (NEET).

(Source: Labour Force Survey, Office for National
Statistics, 2004).

In 2004 12% of 18-year-olds in England and Wales were
not in education, training or employment (NEET). 17% of Black young people were NEET at 18, and 6% of Asian young people were NEET at 18.

(Source: Youth Cohort Study, Department for Education and Skills, 2004).

When young people are 16 in the UK, they can stay on at school, go to colllege, take up employment or do an apprenticeship scheme. I think that's pretty much it.

If you do not do those, then you are classified as NEET, which is considered to be a BAD THING.

I think it is considered that the student herself is bad and probably the parents.

A couple of weeks ago, when I got back from work, my daughter told me she had a 'comfort call' from Connexions.

Connexions are the people who are commisioned to guide young people into careers, training or academic courses (amongst other things). It is a government funded body that is supposed to bridge school, careers and adult guidance I think.
I was quite interested in the idea of them giving my daughter a 'comfort call'; I assumed this was different to a 'comfort break' and she explained she had invented the term.
She told me it is a phone call intended to make the caller feel better about themselves, less guilty for not providing a service.
My daughter, (now 18) who has not attended school or college due to illness since she was 11, and who has not received home tuition as she was not well enough to work for as long as an hour, (the least a home tutor is allowed to work) is now a NEET person. This means she has no services offered to her still. At the age of 16 no one rang from school to ask what she was doing; no one contacted us to see whether she was OK. They continued to ignore her existance. But she gets a Connexions comfort call once per year it seems.

Aaaaanyway, the Connexions comfort caller said something like ....

Connexions person: Hello, my name is Angela. I am your personal Connexions Advisor. Can I ask if you are in Education, Employment or Training at the moment?

Darling Daughter: Hi. No I am not in any of those.
Connexions Person: You do know that we are a service that can help you, don't you?
Darling Daughter: Er yes I think so.
Connexions Person: Well we are here to help you so if there is anything we can do, pleae do feel free to ring me.
Darling Daughter: Yes, thank you.

So there you have it. Neat, huh?

I mention this , not because I want to moan or to canvass support or to try and evoke emotion. But I want to show you how easy it is to be a NEET person and how once you are one it is hard to get out of it.

(In fact darling daughter is going to sign up for a little Open University course later in the year when we hope she is through a current little 'bad patch' .)

I am prompted to think about this as today I was talking to some International students at the university, teaching in fact, about the UK Education system, in a general way. The session is designed to give the students the basics of how we do things, what is compulsory and what-not. And they were shocked that there were such things as NEET people.

Are you all shocked? Did you know about NEET people? Do you know any NEET people? Do you think it matters if people are not in Education or Employment? Do you think the term NEET is neat or nasty?

I just wondered what people think. This is quite a new topic round this neck of the woods too. One to maybe get us going ....

Afterword
(*ha ha* can you have one of these on a blog? I am just trying it out ..)
Someone said to me that in places like Australia where there are lots of kids in remote locations so therefore no access to school for different reasons, the networks have been set up for YEARS for people to be able to get an education without home tutors etc. Don't know if this is true. Don't know how it works. And what happens to these kids after school age? Do they become NEET?

Ordinariness

From here:
Noun
1.
ordinariness - the quality of being ordinary
quality - an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone; "the quality of mercy is not strained"--Shakespeare
mediocrity, averageness - ordinariness as a consequence of being average and not outstanding
expectedness - ordinariness as a consequence of being expected and not surprising
commonplaceness, everydayness, commonness - ordinariness as a consequence of being frequent and commonplace


In an e mail today one of my students asked me why I keep a blog. Of course we all get asked this all the time. But why do we record our ordinary daily lives? Do we seek to narrate their ordinariness or do we shape out of each day a little something extraordinary?
Do we look to narrate ourselves on a daily basis out of a desire to self affirm? I think Giddens would say yes.

The existential question of self identity is bound up with the fragile nature of the biography which the individual ’supplies’ about herself.A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ’story’ about the self.

(Giddens 1991: 54)

I think we continually try to turn the mundane in to the exotic. Yesterday I showed the beans; the onions;the garlic; the mug; as if worthy art forms. They were each a 'still life'; they were shown as other than the mundane items of food or crockery.
They were no longer functional, but aesthetic. Maybe this is a way in which we enrich our existance - through creative acts that resist the mundane.

Is that what a blog is? A creative, resistant act against the mundane? Is it an attempt to subvert ordinary and re-create it as extraordinary?
Or.
maybe we are saying, that we know we are ordinary.
This is it.
This is our ordinariness.
That is who we are.
And we are OK with that.

I was given a copy of 'Boring Postcards' for Christmas last year and it is really interesting (and funny) to see the boring places depicted there in all their drabness. The pictures, (of motorway cafes, motels, carparks, airports and so on,) show the backdrops that belong to the 'inbetween' parts of our lives, the bits we want to ignore. The liminal spaces. The margins between the events.
But these are the spaces in which we spend a LOT of time.
(Hence the great sales of ipods and walkmans to take us through these spaces.)

These marginal spaces, or 'mythologies' apparently unworthy of attention are the focus of Moran's book, which I have returned to, this week.

These mythologies are so buried in unnoticed habitual spaces and routines that they are relatively resistant to the kind of analyses undertaken by Barthes. I want to find a critical strategy that acknowledges this boredom in everyday life, raher than one that simply seeks to transform it through resourceful readings that strip away the veneer of what Barthes calls the 'falsely obvious.

(Moran, 2005: page 22)

The iterative routines of office life, the ritual phrases and actions and reactions, the habitual inertia. These are the stuff of the everyday that come under the spotlight. And I think these are the things I see Vitriolica deal with; Bitch PhD and many more. But I think we exoticise them; I think we are creative about them and it takes a brave person not to try and make the rdinary a bit more perky than it really is.

Know your onions

I have just been messing around in the kitchen and in the photoshop....









I have become really interested in the way photographs - the framing, the focus, the angle, can make you look at everyday life in new ways.
I have become more interested in all kinds of things since I got my posh camera; and making some parts of the photo into monochrome, makes me see more detail in the colours of the rest of the image.

I have also become interested in how the process of photography means that you can isolate things from their context. In this way we see them as separate artifacts (the 'a' word) in their own right. They are no longer just functional e.g. as food or as machines, but designs or organisms. They stand on their own, not just a component or part of a set which gets overlooked. I notice shape and detail more too.

Look at this cup .. it is one of the many coming of age symbols belonging to my son ... despite its crudity.




And that's shallot.

Help for Kate

Kate said...

Thanks for the tip Dr Joolz.I will now use you as my centre of advice on all
matters domestic.I will ask help with:

1. Recipes( am getting stale
-
where are the cookery blogs)

2. Winter coats. A dilemma. To buy or
not
to buy a winter coat.What kind. A navy blue trench?

3.
Interiors. Should
I purchase spicy candles as recomended in the Sunday
papers and infuse my home
with warm smells?Help please.

Have moved Kate's comment from the back to the front.

Ok so :
1. Go here.
This blog is delicious to look at and has good recipes. She has loadsa good links down the side. (But don't worry too much. You are a working Mum and so have a good chance of doing the right thing food-wise. )

2.
Yes buy a coat. Today I spoke to someone who had just spent £500 on a coat and did not regret it. I felt she was an excellent example. And you need one . Even at £500.00 it is cheaper than a car which you would otherwise have to travel in.

3.
Candles. No. Don't do it. I have a friend (Guy knows her)
who had her house burnt down by her husband (now ex) burning candles and going out of the room and forgetting. (It was very Thomas Hardy as the insurance letter was on the table and got burnt so they were not insured. )

Another person who needs our help:
Poor Vitriolica has come up against the madness of the education system. It is a different system against which I come up or which Kate's daughter DETESTS and which Kate detests on behalf of daughter 2, (who does not want to read yet) , but nevertheless it is THE education system in general.

One more thing

Just adding to the post I did earlier ...

Thanks to Anya she has put this great link on her blog and I love it.

Weekend school

The MA Literacy and Language course had to move location this weekend to here.
We were a bit concerned as we have always liked the venue here. But we were looked after like we were the treasured guests of royalty...
... The grub was good and the rooms warm and comfy. The staff were all sweetie pies.
There were some funny things though.
Like the too-quiet -listen-to-music in the background. Always there but never able to be really identifiable. Bit irritating in fact.

Then there was the whole cutlery thing going on ... the tables were laid with cutlery on plates, on serviettes. So the waiters have the ritual of coming to each person and taking the cultery and serviette of the plate and taking the plates away. The plate was never used for food, just cutlery. Why? What is that about? Am I uncouth? It was a mystery.



Maybe it is a special new grammar that is coming out.
Perhaps it is fashionable.
Maybe Becks and Posh do it??


Aaaaaanyway, the weekend was great, kicking off with Bob Lingard talking about

Productive Pedagogies.

This is a model for teaching produced by a team Bob worked with while in Queensland; it evolved through a huge piece of research and has been written about in a range of publications from the team.
Allan Luke is continuing the good work in Singapore now.
Suffice to say our students loved what Bob had to say and were excited by what he had to say about teachers and their ability to make a difference through professional pedagogies.
We also had Mark Vicars talking about life history research; I was really interested in what he had to say about the usefulness of GOSSIP of ways into life history work... fascinating stuff. I am going to look these up (as Mark recommended):

Leach, M (1997) Feminist figurations: gossip as a counter discourse. Qualitative studies in education vol 10, no 5 305-314Blum Kulka, Shoshana. (2000).
Gossipy events at family dinners: Negotiating Sociability,presence and the moral order. In, Justine Coupland (ed.) Small Talk. London: Longman.213-240.


They sound good, don't they?

Kate's work on her Turkish person, who she has been working with for years looking at her literacy and languae practices also was really fascinating and we all wanted to be a fly on the wall. Kate is learning Turkish now as she is realising the importtance of understanding the nuances of the language and the idea of taking on someone's vision through the frame of their cultural Discourses/discourses. She is having her paper on this matter published here soon. The paper is not out yet but some of the work is in here. I can't wait for her paper to come out ...

David's stuff on Critical Analysis went down brilliantly as usual and all in all it was a good weekend. (I rambled on a bit about blogging, Flickring and play theory , but that was all.)

I was so excited this week to see these fab posts on the play blog.

Anyhoooo, another tough week coming up with loads of teaching, a few deadlines and then a weekend school. Oh well the following week SHOULD be easier and I am lucky enough to have a REALLY interesting job.

Ido In a box

Ido In a box
Originally uploaded by translucid.

Baby as artefact/artifact.

Thanks to Idoo and to Translucid for reminding me of the importance of putting babies in boxes.

I used to do this with my babies and they seemed to like it. It also helps with keeping the place tidy.

Life online

Whether one studies the Internet as a social structure or utilizes Internet-based technologies as tools for research, Internet-based technologies change the research scenario. Computer-mediation has a significant influence on many aspects of communication practice and theory. The internet has
similarities to many earlier media for communication, such as letter writing, telephone, telegraph, post-it notes, and so forth. At the same time, the capacities and uses of Internet communication are unique in configuration and shape a user’s (and thus the researcher’s) perceptions and interactions.
These influences extend beyond the interpersonal; outcomes of these communication processes have the potential to shift sensemaking practices at the cultural level. We are, as Gergen (1991) notes, saturated in technologies. The Internet and associated communication media permeate and alter interactions and the possible outcomes of these interactions at the dyadic, group, and cultural level. Equally, Internet technologies have the potential to shift the ways in which qualitative researchers collect, make sense of, and represent data.
In online environments, self, other, and social structures are constituted through interaction, negotiated in concert with
others. The extent to which information and communication technology (ICT) can mediate one’s identity and social relations should call us to epistemological attention. Whether or not we do research of physical or online cultures, new communication technologies highlight the dialogic features of social reality, compelling scholars to reexamine traditional assumptions and
previously taken-for-granted rubrics of social research.

This is from Annette Markham here.

This is very interesting I think. markham talks about the research scenario having changed. Does that mean we have to adjust our research tools?

Blogging as a social practice is a VERY interesting thing; it changes so much about what I understand about the meaning of the word 'text', 'author' and 'narrative'. But does that mean we research differently? Do we have to have new tools? New ways of looking? New ways of finding out?

My experience as a blogger is that I feel I put a lot of who I am here in this space; the posts are closely tied to my many selves. While there is variety in the posts there is also I think, a sense of me as female, as academic, as who I am. Markham looks closely at the potential to be other in th eonline space and to experimet. But here, I feel I am intensely me.

Despite this, I also agree so much with what she writes, for there are so many possibilities online - more to think about here.

I need views on whether research in the online space needs to be qualitatively different.

Heeeeeelp!!

(Lots more Markham here.)

Theme: Stuff that keeps falling

Don't you find that some days loads of stuff seems to fall on you and then keep falling?

Hardly able to keeep myself afloat but for the fact of wonderful colleagues and friends...

1. Got to write a report with Anne Marie and Pam by Friday. (Nearly done. We have done 30 pages since Monday; we are just on the tidying up stage.)
2. Got to get a new teaching session together by Friday.
3. Got to sort out some finance forms for a new research project by tomorrow (Thursday).
4. Had to fill in SEVEN forms and get them all co-signed by SEVEN people in order to access cash to buy tickets to Miami ... (Thanks to Colleen and Shirley and Helen and Lou for guiding me through the horrible forms)
5. Had to write an abstract and biog for a new chapter for a book proposal (Thanks so much Kate - she did it for us)

I did not manage number 5 or number 4 and Kate so wonderfully did number 7.

But oh what a disaster .. the usual place we teach our weekend schools appears to have closed down and we are going to a hotel and we HOPE it will be OK.

Some weeks it is all too hard, but I have a great looking to do list with colour coding and columns and sections.

Whata hullaballoo.

Well off to do number 4. (It's a wine night apparently so must get this done asap.)

Before I go, this was a conversation between gorgeous son and I..

(Context: he has just started doing A levels.He is a big boy now; he gets to have free periods and they have to do 'enrichment activities' on Wednesday afternoon.)

Miles: Mum, do you get paid if you do voluntary work?

Me: No. It's voluntary. You don't get paid. (I am driving to the supermarket.Miles has come to help.)

Miles: Do you get paid if you volunteer to work in an OXFAM shop?

Me: No.

Miles: Do you get paid if you volunteer to work in a kids' nursery shool?

Me:No.

Miles: Do you get paid if you volunteer to.....

Me: No!!!!! Volunteer means you do it for free. It is done for no money. You do it to be kind, nice, to help out.

Miles: OK. I think I'll choose IT.

Hmm. Where did I go wrong? (Maybe he thinks 'enrichment' means 'get rich' - standards really are falling. )

So, the theme of this post is stuff that keeps falling.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Originally uploaded by Monkey Magic.

Artefacts.
Atrtifacts.
(I have a keen eye to an international readership.)

Life Online

I was in a meeting today speaking with people about the Blended Learning course which Sheffield college has introduced to a number of Sheffield secondary schools.
And I have only just this second discovered that the Evaluation of this course which Jackie and I produced a few weeks ago is on the web here.
Last year the course won a Beacon award as it was taught within the colllege, but this year they have been shortlisted again for another award, for successfully importing the work into schools. I hope they get to win again!!

The course is wonderful and has been developed by an incredibly commmitted team - and I believe that some of those teachers created a 'Third Space'. Yes. I do. Moje et al explain this brilliantly in their rather long paper , but I love this piece especially shots like this:

In third space, then, what seem to be oppositional categories can actually work together to generate new knowledges, new Discourses, and new forms of literacy.

(Moje et al, 2004:page 5)

The idea is that by bringing learners' Funds of Knowledge into the classroom and introducing them to new Funds of knowledge, then learners can interrogate each Fund of knowledge through the perspective given by the other. In the case of the college course it is for example that learners can look at Rap and at traditional poetry side by side; they learn new ways of seeing and understanding. That is the potential anyway, I think.

In today's meeting room there was a beautiful vase of sunflowers:

The centres looked sticky.
Talking of sticky situations ... Jackie is here in Australia at the moment doing a scary keynote. I have found the programme here. And I note she is on first thing on Saturday morning. Poor love. Still, it will also be very exciting and I have read her fab paper which is called:

The third spaces of digital childhoods:
Implications for early literacy curricula and pedagogy

(Blimey)

Just as a tiny taster, I don't think Jackie will mind me showing you this bit from the introduction:

This nexus of cultural identities is, therefore, a shifting space, a space which is always in flux. This notion of hybridity occurring through cultural border-crossing has a long history, as Heidegger (1975) argued, and was strongly articulated in the work of Bahktin, who suggested that the ‘most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity’ (Bahktin,1985: 2). Therefore, in this articulation of the notion of ‘third-space’, both Bahkthin and Bhabha emphasise how the process of cultural production is dependent on interactions between previously quite separate, even dichotomous, spaces. In this paper, I draw on this use of the term in order to explore the cultural hybridity of children’s experiences with popular culture, media and new technologies in the home. The way in which these experiences draw together various aspects of children’s lives and identities and create new cultural experiences in which boundaries are blurred is examined.

Yep. I know. Brilliant. (Her office is next door to mine and Ikeep hoping the ideas will seep under her door and into my room. I keep my door open for that reason.)


The good thing is that our Jackie will be meeting Anya here next week.

Anyway, have you seen the call for papers here and here?

The eyes have it!

As promised.



I bought these yesterday and wondered if anyone thinks I am a victim of consumerism?

Out in town

today I came across a few interesting sights. I only had my little Sony with me but was quite pleased with the results...


These two little fellows were inching there way towards each other in the city centre. At a bargain £3.99 each, I thought they could make many kids happy and I had to restrain myself not to put my hand in my pocket. Mind you I had already treated myself to a bag of eyeballs,so could not treat myself twice.

(Do you want to see them? )

I wondered whether the two soldiers could be deemed to breaching the peace at all:



for this was the polite notice I found myself reading close by. If you click on the photo you will see it has attracted some comments from a couple of my lovely Flickr contacts, who were keen to compare the sentiments of the notice to those seen in their own towns in the United States.

Later I saw these pretty things:



inside the Millenium Galleries.

Really enjoyed The Real Ideal exhibition where the work of Gregory Crewdson was stunning (I thought).

Two things helped me to really enjoy the workeven more than I would have done if these two things had not presented themselves. Firstly, that I was looking at the Crewdson's photographs in gallery where a group of women firends, (in their sevnties, I would guess) were talking about the pictures. They were very clearly local people, talking in the strong Yorkshire dialect, enthusing energetically about the stories they could make up about the images. I loved listening to them, as they debated what was happening and were earnestly persuading each other that,

'All of us are right. You can make any story you want.'

I could not help joining in and chatting and I thought about how you can gain so much more from an exhibition by seeing it with others. The fact that I did not know these people made the exchange all the more welcome and exciting.

The second thing which helped me love the photographs, was that there was a video showing the artist at work and talking about his work. He talked about how he stage-sets everyone of his photographs and uses actors and directs them really closely. He uses elaborate lighting, involves many other people to help him choreograph the images. It's like something out of Steven Spielberg. Go and see the exhibition if you can ...


And finally, just to say, that like Simply Clare in her BLOG HOLE I have found it hard to blog lately, because of the need to fully think about other aspects of my work for the last couple of weeks. It has made me realise that it is quite hard to put together a blog post.

But I will try and get back into it properly now.

And finally finally (nearly forgot) I have set up a new blog here.

(Don't forget though, let me know if you want to see the eyeballs.)

Further info .

on yesterday's post here

You really should check out the story.

Sightseeing, New Orleans

Sightseeing, New Orleans
Originally uploaded by Tampen.

Dunno what you all make of this. Click on the photo to view large.

I see Bobby Billy-Bob has discovered the self-timer function on my camera

I see Bobby Billy-Bob has discovered the self-timer function on my camera
Originally uploaded by groc.

Please look away now.

iPod Mini

iPod Mini
Originally uploaded by βLØP€.

Starting young ...

Knees

You can tell a lot about a person by their knees.



And their shoes.

One wedding and a funeral

One wedding and a funeral
Originally uploaded by Burps Liberty.

Burps Liberty is one of my fave contacts on Flickr. I love the caption she gave this one.

Following on

from Dr Rob's post about freshers arriving at university. The Mums and Dads with new student offspring were out in force at Tesco this week. I had to drive round the carpark three times to find a space and then there was no toilet roll left. Mind you, I did have a lovely chat with a Mum about the wonderful special offer on Wolf blass wine.
The freshers all looked so, well, 'fresh' with their Mums and Dads. And then as I walked to town, through the university I saw this scene of co-opeartion and mutual support ...

I have this:




(Note the queue at the cash point just behind. A hint at the funding they are going to need later in the evening.)

Yes, you may well be nodding a smiling at how sweet they are. But that is probably because you do not live where I live.

I can now no longer park outside my house; I am woken by the sound of drunken darlings singing and professing undying friendship; the sound of shouted argments and hatred. Then there is vomit on the pavement.

They look so different in the library, mind you. And if you are a Mum or a Dad, don't worry, it is not your child who is being naughty. It is the others.

(I reserve the right to be cynical on a Sunday morning after no sleep. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.)

Mindtangle

Interesting thing on culture here about a kid who understands a maths problem as a social comlplex. The teacher has assumed a numerical solution, but instead gets a cultural analysis.
Very nice.

Space Travel

One of my fabulous MA students includes this quotation in her dissertation. (It is a very interesting snippet to choose; on the face of it, this could look racist. It does not seem to accept the idea of multi-culturalism; of sets of beliefs, rituals and practices able to co-exist. It looks somehow intolerant...)

Different cultures, the difference between cultural practices, the difference in the construction of cultures within different groups …however rational you are … it is actually very difficult, even impossible and counterproductive, to try to fit together different forms of culture and pretend that they can easily coexist. The assumption that at some level all forms of cultural diversity may be understood on the basis of a particular universal concept, whether it be ‘human being’, ‘class’ or ‘race’, can be both very dangerous and very limiting in trying to understand the ways in which cultural practices construct their own systems of meaning and social organisation.

(Bhabha in Rutherford, 1990, p.209)

But in fact Bhabha is talking about the process of hybridity, or third space. He is talking about the coming together of different cultures then finding a need to negotiate, to come up with newer ways of being together. JC (Fab student) also found this:

the negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition (or representation) of cultural difference.

(Graves, 1998)

It is about being flexible, able to change over time... obviously you don't want me to go on and on and on about this... but the theory is great I think for describing some online spaces. (Bhabha is talking about colonialism). Some spaces manage to bring people together who have shared interests, a fascination over the same things, like Flickr; ebay; illness support sites; cooking blogs . (Obviously this view derives from Gee.) In interacting over content brought to the space, I think that what happens is firstly a 'show and tell' phase, but then as the affiliations mature, there is a sense of exchange, of development of a specific culture in that space. I would not say that it would transform affiliates' lives; what I would say is that in that space negotiations occur.

Phew.

Got that off my chest then.

Sheffield city of contrasts

In August, as I mentioned earlier, Sheffield went a bit wacky for a few days and plonked sand in the middle of the city centre. Bizarrely, there were donkey rides, all sorts of sideshows, even an automated surfboard, and all sorts of seaside stuff.

I was struck by the mix of people and felt mesmerised by the way complete strangers all mixed together and joined in with the fun. It is strange how we learn to immerse ourselves in parallel play at such times; doing the same thing as others but somehow pretending they are not all there. We avert our gaze - very cleverly as we also acknowledge each other in respectful ways.

One of my shots captures the medley of people in all their contrasting glory. It tends to be only the young, who break cultural rules and sometimes stare.



Of course photographers stare too, hiding behind their cameras and somehow get away with it. For the first time, some people ASKED me to take their photo!!

I have photoshopped this image to look like a painting as the scene reminded me of a children's jigsaw puzzle.

Our Lady of Tenth Avenue

Our Lady of Tenth Avenue
Originally uploaded by caromira.

This is for Kate; Queen of Arty Facts.
Click on the image and look at the other photos in the series.

I'm a Barbie girl, in a Bar-bie wo-orld (la la)

Oh dear.

There have been complaints about Barbie setting up unreal expectations for girls ... and no, not what you think.

This time it is not about her pointy bosoms and tiny feet creating a physiological dream/nightmare for impressionable young minds. It is not about the fact that she is impeccable looking, with westernised notions of beauty.

Of course not. That would be dull.

The complaint is about CEO Barbie who sets up impossible career goals for young girls:

"This doll furthers the myth that if a woman works hard and sticks to her guns, she can rise to the top," said Frederick Lang of the Changes Institute, a children's advocacy organization. "Our young girls need to learn to accept their career futures, not be set up with ridiculously unattainable images."

Well I never.

The full report (with picture) is here.

We all know that the only chance that Barbie has of getting rich is to divorce Ken and get his car, house, horse, boat and treasured Harley Davidson.

Oh and by the way, have you checked out Barbie's friend Becky? She is in the para-olympics..

Freeze frames

Sometimes people keep nice and still so you can take photos. And my girl was out and about again, collecting photos for her Flickr stream... I was allowed to take this



The plants in Sheffield botanical gardens are amazing:



And there are some gorgeous trees:



It is amazing that these days squirrels seem so tame - and there are so many. This one sat still while I took his photo:



Meanwhile it was hard to see whether it was art imitating nature or the other way round here:



And finally I was pleased to capture this in Vienna:

Counter-intuitive

Normally, knitted artifacts are cute.
I like a bit of subversion sometimes, they can make you challenge your assumptions ... although these may well be considered bad taste...






We tend to think that knitted artifacts are for kids to play with and that they should not evoke certain aspects of our world. The pieces here challenge that such artifacts are just for kids and obviously depict things not usually thought of as toys. Nevertheless of course, kids do include bad things happening in their play and lots of the stories we read to them reflect the darker side of our lives.

If you are really curious you will see more here. But I am not sure that the artist was thinking along the same lines as me.

Cheers to Bitch PhD for the tip off.

On the Move

NY on the Move0007
Originally uploaded by lorenzodom.

Advertising imitating life?

(NY on the Move0007 Originally uploaded by lorenzodom)

Head

Head
Originally uploaded by A-A.

This is what happens to your head if you think too much.
Be sensible.
Take a break.
(Head Originally uploaded by A-A)

The Quotidian

Out of the messy maze of happenings, ideas, sights, sounds and experiences I bump into on daily basis, I try to pull a single strand and pick a path through, designing some kind of narrative or single idea for my blog posts.
It is sometimes hard, to squash the ephemera into some kind of moulded shape that will be recognisable, comprehensible, to anyone else. On other occasions it is hard to even see that there is anything in front of me to say anything about. It all looks plain, unremarkable, ordinary.
This (almost) daily blogging ritual has of course heightened my senses and I look around me as I move from morning to night (and back again) for moments, insights, curios I can bring to this spot.
It is the same on Flickr, everyone looks about them for inspiration. As well as showing high points, moments of celebration, they present curios, family affairs and effervescent happenings. They often exoticise the mundane. Flickrites seek the unique in the ordinary, or represent the ordinary to us again and we recognise it in new ways.
We see our lives online, mediated by pixcels, words and graphics, presented afresh.
So we have stuff like

Desk space;
Kitsch in bin;
The Bag Pool;
People on cell phones;
Even stuff like this snack bar or this snack.

And if you have ever been on Flickr you will already know so many more.
And there is no doubt that I have become more visually aware, so that I see images like
Plates



Bags:




and
this sort of thing:


are evidence of this.

When I was in Berlin last year, I was acutely aware of the liminal spaces in that city; the inbetween spaces, the ignored terrains between official happenings and sites. I have pictures and posts here.

In writing about 'the everyday', Joe Moran prefers theFrench term 'quotidian', sinve he says it better captures the essence of mundane, boring, routinised and ritual daily practices.

Just into the introduction I am loving Moran's book. Little gems litter the text and he has gathered some gorgeous quotations, such as Sartre's observation that people in bus queues are a

'plurality of isolations' .

I also find Moran's view of cultural studies as being either about one of two things: 'ritual' or 'popular consumption' an interesting angle.

(And probably I should have put this post on Blogtrax.)

they're baaaack.

they're baaaack.
Originally uploaded by Caromira.

These are the sugar dudes. You can buy them from a bakery in Manhattan and they have new colours every week.

Trouble is they can make you feel REALLY ill when you eat them ... Click here then watch the slide show, (by clicking on 'View as slideshow' in blue text to the right of the thumbnail images.)
And while we are on the subject, contributing photos of cakes to Flickr is quite common.
Special K 13 has this :



And if you like this theme there is a cupcake set here. You may or may not know that there are many cooking blogs and this is one really like. It has Kate's Malteser cake and the links down the side are excellent.

Frankly

you sometimes just have to take a little breathing space and stop working.
Kiddoes, I have been up since 7 and am still at my computer having spent the day dutifully reading dissertations, timetables, papers, and a million e mails. My mail box is now down from 96 to 33. Hooray.

Time to bloggy well blog.

The very exciting news is that (and here is the confession) as I was eating breakfast I happened to peep at Vitriolica's Flickr stream and left a comment on the weird pic here.

Not content with that, I popped across to her blog just to checkout the story behind the weird picture.

There I discovered that the cat thing had been bought by DrRob.

Yep.

It was shortly after this that the blogosphere came close to exploding into my meatspace.

Wow yes dear readers!!!! It very nearl did.

It turns out. (And I know this will blow your minds.) That one of Vitriolica's friends, and comrades from in The Big Blogger house only turns out to be Dr Rob of Plymouth University!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dyougetme? The Blogosphere is shrinking.

(You know the same university patronised by Simply Clare and Professor Victoria Carrington.) - Do I have to exlain everything?

How do I know this??

Because.
because.
.....

Dr Rob has left a comment on this blog.

And to think I voted him out of the Big Blogger House... I regret this now of course.
Because I truly really feel we have truly bonded.
Truly.

No sight so perfect as hindsight, kiddoes.

Check out his cyberpad here.

Get your selves over and you will not regret it.

Wow!!

I have been so BUSY!!!

And still have so much marking, admin, and stuff stuff stuff.
Will do nice blog post tonight but in the meantime, here are some of the eye feasts I had in Lincoln att the Play, Digital literacies and Creativity seminar at the end of last week....

See if you can work out some of the things I did ...




















There is a prize for anyone who can locate all of these items correctly.