Here in the airport at Boston it’s dark. Not yet night, but a gristly dusk. A man in an orange vest is standing almost motionless on a yellow platform next to our aircraft; periodically he climbs up and down a ladder; periodically he pushes buttons on a console. The runways are white with snow and [...]
Two weeks ago I was at a bar with a pair of other American graduate students. A fake british pub or something. The kind of parisian establishment that gets away with serving bad food by cloaking it in an “anglo-saxon” theme. The kind of place with cheap low couches and cramped tables and a superficial [...]
This is the university where I do my research, this year. I like this picture because it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the overdetermined and crass narratives that so easily predetermine one’s whole perception of this campus space. This is the tree that has grown up behind the amphitheatre with its jagged roof, [...]
I saw the following statements posted on Sauvons l’Université. I have, of course, no personal knowledge of the facts of the situation, but it’s a culturally interesting scenario:
Academics solicited for participation in a “debate” about “national identity” (nov-dec. 2009)
Mail addressed to a teacher-researcher at a university in Nantes
Monsieur,
[...]
In the framework of the debate over national [...]
Something should be said about professor-student relations. For the most part, contact is limited to the classroom, where the student’s ignorance is taken for granted and the professor does all the talking without permitting questions. The theory is that the students haven’t enough background to make intelligent inquiries.
At Nice last summer, on the final day [...]