la rhume, la grippe, whatever
Feb. 18th, 2007 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbcI spent most of last week at the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network's national research conference here in Vancouver. Which amounts to yet another opportunity given to me for shooting my mouth off. CAAN co-hosted a satellite meeting on community-based research (CBR) at the big AIDS shindig in Toronto last August. There were a number of academics espousing their commitment to CBR, so I sez "oh yeah? Well CBR remains ancillary to your larger research agenda, and I haven't come across many academics whose research agenda is primarily CBR. Or at least not tenured ones." Yeah, I'm good at either shutting everyone up or getting them howling. In this instance all but one of the academics glared at me: the one who was trying to get tenure via CBR acknowledged my point.
And a guy from CAAN approached and saidput your post-structural wanking where your mouth is "great! we're always looking for folks like you to support our work!? " So I was asked along this week for the first team meeting of a research project in development. Really valuable, interesting stuff--you'll have to trust me, confidentiality dotcha know. So I sat in on another team's meeting (meeting another queer academic whose work I really admire, super cool-ça), attended some sessions, and rode shotgun for 1.5 training sessions on Atlas.ti, a qualitiative data analysis package. Mostly because I'm giving a workshop on the software in 5 weeks and wanted to get a sense of what might be good to, uh, workshop.
I went into the week with a fair bit of "I'm ostensibly not as fucking clueless as most white guys, OK" anxiety. But that fell away (for the most part) as soon as we got into things. It was a great conference!
Friday morning was a rare opportunity to hear someone speak whose scholarship moved me...and moved my thinking, forward. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Director of International Research Insitute for Mäori and Indigenous Education, published a book a few years ago called Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999).
I don't think it overstatement to say that if Said's Orientalism shattered the complacency of many Western scholars, Tuhiwai Smith's book made the next great leap forward: how to wrest control of research on Indigenous communities out of the hands of those whose interests are colonization and marginalization (and stereotypification and...). It is by no means a perfect book, but Tuhiwai Smith takes on a lot and accomplishes nearly all of it very well. I loathe the cult of personality in academia, so I wasn't there as a drooling fanboy. But her writing is clear and comprehensible--usually when dealing with subtle, complex and even paradoxical subjects. So I wondered how her interpersonal skills jived with her writing. And they're quite nicely aligned I'm pleased to say. She speaks among, rather than to, an audience.
I didn't stay behind because I woke up feeling rough. Within a couple of hours I was splayed on the sofa, watching Ireland select this winner of this year's Eurovision.
And a guy from CAAN approached and said
I went into the week with a fair bit of "I'm ostensibly not as fucking clueless as most white guys, OK" anxiety. But that fell away (for the most part) as soon as we got into things. It was a great conference!
Friday morning was a rare opportunity to hear someone speak whose scholarship moved me...and moved my thinking, forward. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Director of International Research Insitute for Mäori and Indigenous Education, published a book a few years ago called Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999).
I don't think it overstatement to say that if Said's Orientalism shattered the complacency of many Western scholars, Tuhiwai Smith's book made the next great leap forward: how to wrest control of research on Indigenous communities out of the hands of those whose interests are colonization and marginalization (and stereotypification and...). It is by no means a perfect book, but Tuhiwai Smith takes on a lot and accomplishes nearly all of it very well. I loathe the cult of personality in academia, so I wasn't there as a drooling fanboy. But her writing is clear and comprehensible--usually when dealing with subtle, complex and even paradoxical subjects. So I wondered how her interpersonal skills jived with her writing. And they're quite nicely aligned I'm pleased to say. She speaks among, rather than to, an audience.
I didn't stay behind because I woke up feeling rough. Within a couple of hours I was splayed on the sofa, watching Ireland select this winner of this year's Eurovision.
