Archive for the 'translation' Category
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
I met an interesting professor in Aix earlier this spring, Joëlle Zask, who has worked on Dewey and early 20th century culture theory (she suggested the Sapir article I mentioned earlier this spring). Here I want to translate a short interview she did in 2007 with a monthly culture magazine in Marseille called Zibeline. Philosophy, [...]
Posted in france, pedagogy, translation | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Yesterday was the big day of student elections at Paris-8, just as there were elections in Aix that I covered a few weeks ago. But in the thick of the afternoon I was delighted to see that not all the groups were handing out election fliers, for right at the campus entrance was a new [...]
Posted in france, gender, translation | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
This is the last installment of my translation of some preliminary results from Charles Soulié’s study of religion among Paris-8 students, and this is going to be the post where I out myself as some kind of rationalist and modernist… Or at any rate where I express surprise at the non-negligible rates of magical and [...]
Posted in france, translation | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
I see that Mike has already inquired as to the methodology of the report on student religion that I began posting yesterday. Most of his methodological queries are settled by the below section, which was actually the introduction in the original French version, but which I’m posting second because I wanted to start with some [...]
Posted in france, translation | No Comments »
Monday, May 17th, 2010
The main point of this post is as follows: One of the most left-wing universities in France is composed of a majority — a very slight majority, mind you, but still a majority — of religious believers. Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project [...]
Posted in france, translation | 3 Comments »
Monday, May 10th, 2010
As someone who’s young, as someone who hasn’t known the academic world for decades and decades and decades, this hadn’t occurred to me, but it turns out that something as seemingly innocuous as the campus newsletter may have a political history. At least that’s what I infer from this fairly bitter critique of campus newsletters [...]
Posted in france, neoliberalism, translation | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
In this winter’s exhibition on the history of Paris-8 at Vincennes (the university’s first site in the 70s), I was particularly interested in a text that discusses the relationship between Paris-8 and U.S. academia. The exhibit was separated into panels each starting with one letter of the alphabet, and this was one of the last [...]
Posted in france, space, translation | No Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Here we have a second testimonial of precarious life in French universities, one that comes not from a temporary worker but from a doctoral student struggling to finish her thesis. This one has to be filed under the genre of the public lament: a political genre which, it comes to mind in passing, deserves further [...]
Posted in france, ordinary life, translation | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
When the report on precarity in higher education was first publicly released, the presentation was followed by a number of panel discussions. Here I’m going to try to translate a few people’s personal tales of precarity. Today we’ll start with that of Aurélie Legrand. Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… [...]
Posted in france, ordinary life, translation | No Comments »
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
And what does it mean when a research project that thought it was about France and about arcane educational questions suddenly finds itself confronted with an event from across the sea? What does it mean when the question of the intellectual production of a single academic department in the Parisian banlieue turns out to be [...]
Posted in france, translation | No Comments »