Archive for Read

Land Diagrams — reading diagrams

04/04/2012 Read No comments

A new ongo­ing series, Land Diagrams, pairs writ­ers from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­pli­nary back­grounds, writ­ing in response to the same image. To quote from an email:

Land Diagram 3

So far it includes pub­lished pieces by the geo­g­ra­phers Martin Dodge, Mark Monmonier and Owain Jones, paired respec­tively with lex­i­cog­ra­pher Giles Goodland, exper­i­men­tal poet Mark Dickinson, and philoso­pher and essay­ist Peter Larkin. It aims to show how many peo­ple are involved in dif­fer­ent ways with the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of knowl­edge sys­tems in the land­scape — as well as offer­ing new ways for topo­graph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tions in dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines to inter­sect through dia­gram­matic thought (or the lit­er­ary tra­di­tion of ekphra­sis).

From the website:

The read­ing of dia­grams depends on dif­fer­ent forms of tacit knowl­edge of prac­tises, tech­niques and con­ven­tions of inter­pre­ta­tion. But dia­grams are also ‘machines of trans­la­tion’ (Krämer, ‘Epistemology of the Line: Reflections on the Diagrammatical Mind’), offer­ing ways of trans­mit­ting and prompt­ing thought between disciplines.

In each of these Land Diagrams, a found image (chart, scheme, score, map) acts as a hinge between two pieces of writ­ing, com­mis­sioned and pub­lished simul­ta­ne­ously. Each writer has been cho­sen for the value of their work and its involve­ment with the knowl­edge sys­tems coded in land­scape. Each pair of writ­ers has been cho­sen for a per­ceived – often unex­pected – rap­port across disciplines.

The fin­ished ‘twinned study’ offers two simul­ta­ne­ous ges­tures of thought in response to one geo­graph­i­cal image. The responses are often exper­i­men­tal: no rules have been set beyond word count, and there is no con­sul­ta­tion between the writ­ers (a diver­gence of read­ings and resources is pre­ferred to a col­lab­o­ra­tive middle-ground).

Land Diagram 1

Thriving in academia, “living in the middle”

01/02/2012 Read No comments

Another great blog post from the Tenured Radical (hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education since last year).

Living In The Middle; Or, What I Learned At My First Job
December 31, 2011, 1:51 pm
By Claire Potter

There are moments when you wres­tle with ter­ri­ble self doubt and real­ize that mis­takes have been made — and if you are for­tu­nate, they are bal­anced out by the moments in which you get to look around you and com­pli­ment your­self for a job well done. That sen­sa­tion also usu­ally does not last, in my expe­ri­ence, and a great deal of life is lived in the mid­dle. It is the busi­ness of mak­ing life in the mid­dle worth­while that mat­ters most, I think.

The five tips offered are:

  1. If it isn’t right for you, no mat­ter how good a job you have, you can always leave.
  2. If you leave your job, you don’t have to leave for a job that is “bet­ter” by all the con­ven­tional stan­dards of the academy.
  3. If you fig­ure out what work will make you happy and do it with integrity, you will prob­a­bly succeed.
  4. Commit to what­ever you are doing in such a way that you dis­cover, or redis­cover, your love for it.
  5. Plan.

Religion and development in Africa

08/11/2011 Read No comments

Tipped from SSRC’s The Immanent Frame blog:

At African Arguments, Knox Chitiyo and Lucy Mbugua inves­ti­gate the poten­tial for faith-based groups to con­tribute to the achieve­ment of the Millennium Development Goals in Africa:

Could faith groups be a pow­er­ful dri­ver in achiev­ing the Millenium Development Goals (MDG’s) in Africa? Recent think­ing and ini­tia­tives in Africa and within the wider African dias­pora, cer­tainly seem to indi­cate that faith groups can, and should, be seen as part­ners and/or dri­vers in push­ing towards the 2015 MDG goals. The MDGS are par­tic­u­larly focused on the erad­i­ca­tion of extreme poverty and hunger; achiev­ing uni­ver­sal pri­mary edu­ca­tion, pro­mot­ing gen­der equal­ity, com­bat­ing deadly dis­eases and improv­ing mater­nal health. Continental and dias­pora African faith groups, with their diverse con­stituen­cies and access to infor­ma­tion and power net­works, are uniquely placed to assist in ful­fill­ing Africa and the African diaspora’s vision of devel­op­ment in the 21st Century.

The idea of faith groups as cat­a­lysts for con­struc­tive change is not a new one; but it is an idea whose time may have come. Within Africa, there has been increas­ing debate and real-world ini­tia­tives on engag­ing the faith com­mu­ni­ties regard­ing a trans­for­ma­tive devel­op­ment agenda. For exam­ple, the Inter-faith Action for Peace in Africa [IFAPA] has, since 2002, been a focal point for a multi-faith dia­logue which also engages key polit­i­cal and busi­ness deci­sion mak­ers on vital issues such as water secu­rity and con­flict res­o­lu­tion – there have been a num­ber of IFAPA sum­mits which have also included national and regional deci­sion – mak­ers. Faith groups also play a major role in the African dias­pora; the July 2011 ‘Communities of Faith; Agents of Change’ con­fer­ence (hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Africa) was both an affir­ma­tion of the impor­tance of African dias­pora multi faith com­mu­ni­ties, and also a clar­ion call for bet­ter co-ordinated action for con­struc­tive change by the faith groups and pol­icy makers.

Religion is a potent force in Africa and across the globe. Faith groups tra­di­tion­ally con­fine their min­is­tra­tions to social inter­ven­tions, but there is poten­tial for reli­gion and faith com­mu­ni­ties to play a deeper trans­for­ma­tive role in upgrad­ing or chang­ing inef­fec­tive social/value sys­tems; enhanc­ing local best prac­tice and capacity-building for devel­op­ment. Traditional reli­gious empha­sis on spir­i­tu­al­ity and rigour is impor­tant, but it needs to be allied to the real-world chal­lenge of uplift­ing mil­lions from poverty.

H-Net Review Publication: ‘Modern Korean Buddhism’

07/06/2011 Read No comments

Jin Y. Park, ed. Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism. Albany State University of New York Press, 2009. ix + 382 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978−1−4384−2921−2; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978−1−4384−2922−9.

Reviewed by Richard McBride (BYU-Hawaii)
Published on H-Buddhism (July, 2011)
Commissioned by A. Charles Muller

Modern Korean Buddhism

Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism brings together thir­teen wide-ranging essays on indi­vid­u­als and top­ics asso­ci­ated with the devel­op­ment and expe­ri­ence of Buddhism in mod­ern Korea. Jin Y. Park orga­nizes this col­lec­tion of essays in a roughly chrono­log­i­cal man­ner after sep­a­rat­ing the arti­cles under the three gen­eral sub­head­ings of (1) “Modernity, Colonialism, and Buddhist Reform,” (2) “Revival of Zen Buddhism in Modern Korea,” and (3) “Religion, History, and Politics.” Although six of the essays were pub­lished pre­vi­ously, all have been revised by the authors. Taken together, the essays pro­vide mul­ti­ple win­dows through which to view Korean Buddhism’s com­plex and mul­ti­fac­eted encounter with moder­nity, as well as demon­strat­ing the chang­ing norms of intel­lec­tual discourse.

Scholars of Korean Buddhism trained in Korea assess the his­tory of Korean Buddhism from the open­ing of Korea to for­eign influ­ences in the late Chosŏn (ca. 1876 – 1910)through the Japanese colo­nial period (1910−45) with a dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions and intel­lec­tual agen­das than schol­ars of Korean Buddhism trained in the West. Thus, the wide vari­ety of schol­arly approaches found in the book should be both chal­leng­ing and stim­u­lat­ing to read­ers inter­ested in ques­tions of the emer­gence of moder­nity and the evo­lu­tion of Buddhist doc­trine and prac­tice, as well as issues of Korean nation­al­ism. Jin Y. Park’s intro­duc­tion does an admirable job in con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing the main themes cov­ered in the book: Buddhist reform move­ments, the revival of Sŏn/Zen Buddhism, the Buddhist encounter with mod­ern intel­lec­tual ideas and views, and the recon­sid­er­a­tion of Buddhism and moder­nity in Korea.

This col­lec­tion of essays should cause stu­dents of Korean Buddhism trained in the West to rethink the received aca­d­e­mic under­stand­ing of the sig­nif­i­cance and his­tory of Korean Buddhism dur­ing the late Chosŏn and Japanese colo­nial peri­ods. Hitherto, schol­ar­ship on this period of Korean his­tory has cen­tered on the sem­i­nal issues of the reform and devel­op­ment of Korean Buddhism, and nation­al­ism. In other words, the peo­ple who have been stud­ied pri­mar­ily are those Buddhist monks who pub­lished essays describ­ing how the Buddhist church in Korea should reform and mod­ern­ize, regard­less of their actual influ­ence. Also, the issue of nation­al­ism has been para­mount. Buddhists, both monks and lay peo­ple, who played sig­nif­i­cant roles in pol­i­cy­mak­ing, schol­ar­ship, or prac­tice, have been labeled either as col­lab­o­ra­tors with the Japanese or as nation­al­is­tic patri­ots, nei­ther of which labels com­prise a fruit­ful approach to truly under­stand­ing who the most influ­en­tial Buddhists were dur­ing this trou­bled time period.

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