Trinity College Queer America students visiting the Christopher Street Piers in New York City. CC BY-NC Jack Gieseking 2016.
This spring I taught two incredibly exciting courses. The senior seminar, Queer America, was comprised of a small group of students, primarily from our American Studies program. This is my second senior seminar at Trinity College and my first full-semester lgbtq studies course. Of course, the latter is the more shocking of these components: all of this queering I’ve been up to and I’m only just achieving this beautiful moment. I taught Queer(ing) New York with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies with their Seminar in the Series course in 2013.
The course was framed around the following questions: What is queer about America? What can be and has been queered about America? What, if anything, is not queer about America?
I was really energized and excited to see …
You say: Ack! You are going to submit something you wrote! To a journal! This is happening!
I say: Good for you, friend!
Wow, you did it. You wrote something and you sent it into the ether of peer review and three months to two years went by and, suddenly! (because it feels that way), your peer review is back. Quite like my most recent post on How to Do Peer Review, it is just as important to think about how to respond to peer review. Junior researchers and scholars can especially get bent out of shape–cough, cough, myself included–when overwhelmed by criticism and critique, some of which is inevitably at odds at one another.
This post includes some steps (below) on how to reply to peer review and keep a sane distance in the process, all the while producing a clear, tight, and logical series of responses that …
A grad student friend of mine called in a panic a few months ago asking how to do a peer review. “Should I say yes? Is this a good thing? Is this just free labor? How the hay do I even do one of these things?!?!?!?!”
I admit the last question floored me until I recalled that I took a class with the amazing Barbara Katz-Rothman and Juan Battle when at the Graduate Center CUNY that explained this process to me. As a cultural geographer, I begged my way “Writing for Sociologists” and it made my academic life so much easier. To write this post, I reached out to colleagues about how they do peer review. I also draw on my experience as admin associate of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly for three years and my service on multiple editorial boards to offer some best practices / shortcuts / ways to …
The Sober April wasn't meant to happen, and i have failed on the very first day of the month - Friday, when upon screening the crowd at one of the Bushwick night clubs I sighed and declared that I need a drink, now.
While alcohol is not particularly healthy;
It is indeed a social lubricant, a melting - sharp-communicational - corners substance, and the key to understand and to be understood in the foreign environment should that be a different industry or a different country.
My Serbian friend once told me a tale about a foreign general who came to Serbia to sign an agreement only to learn that he must drink with the Serbian army chief before signing anything. The chief's reasoning was very simple, "I can't trust someone who can't drink with me. "
Many of my European friends have shared with me their version of this story adding that they also wouldn't be too comfortable in a company of a person who doesn't drink. " What is he hiding? Is he trying to take advantage of me? Is he sick? Does he take medication? And overall, what's his story?"
This post is not to agitate you to run outside and buy a bottle of something and make it a day. It is to make you understand the different psychology behind everything, and how having one social drink can turn things in your favor.
Okay, so this was not at all close to the prompt for yesterday’s daily create. But the prompt really did not speak to me and I have been doing this for long enough to determine my own creativity rules, dagnabit!
I saw this post by Open Culture that talked about the Internet Archive’s public domain photo repository, I clicked and was lost there for a while. The latest uploads were the bugs in my wee collage above. I was taken by the little creatures and thought: a collage would be awesome! But it is such a silly thing and it would take so long in Photoshop…
To my rescue: Big huge labs.
I thought it would take a while anyway to get the photo links over and organise the thing so that it looked good. It looks good, right?
Well, I did not do it. Big huge labs did. Here is the magic: it can use your Flickr Favourites to create the thing for you! So, I went to Flickr selected my favourite bugs from the Archives and went back to Big huge labs. All I had to do was say use my Favourites, give them my user name and wham! The web gophers went away and produced the collage. What is incredible to me is that the layout is just as I imagined in my head. It is likely (I have not checked) that the middle photo is the largest and hence the one chosen for the middle - but it felt like web magic to type in: I want this, and to have the very thing I imagined come back to me with no effort.
I have pro membership with Big huge labs, their tools are simple but so effective - no fancy big sell, just somebody making web magic. They rock.
