Nelson City

Nelson itself also had quite a lot to do. We stopped at a little fruit and veggie store on our walk downtown and I picked up blueberries and peaches. The Saturday market had a surprisingly large number of vendors, and I found some art and a book to buy. I also picked up a carton of fresh strawberries while D picked up a delicious garlic sourdough loaf.

There was some nice architecture and a very weird store window that I took a picture of. You find the weirdest things out and about sometimes.

The Nelson Provincial Museum was small but good. I really enjoyed the Women of WWI exhibit which featured a whole room full of mannequins dressed up in styles of the time. But what was interesting was the stories on all of these amazing women who pushed and persevered to serve their country and those in need during the turbulent war years and beyond. It really inspired me.

not that long ago, when Britain still ruled the world...

Nelson's cathedral

weird shop window with bat iphone things and a baby horde

Visits from Arabic Language Professor and U.S. Ambassador

I finally finished the first draft of the journal article I've been working on for seemingly ever. Every time I think I'm done with the research, I find something else that needs to be looked into. It has been a humbling experience. Next it goes to my supervisors for feedback and then off to the journal for review.

But I still have another journal article to work on, and that one is on pedagogy (teaching). Let me tell you, researching pedagogy is like going into a huge black hole: there is so much out there and you can easily get lost in it. However, it's quite interesting reading about what people have to say about what makes the best teaching practices, and I find myself reflecting on my own experiences at school and what worked and didn't. I have learned and continue to learn a lot about teaching this year.

I was involved in a second session of teaching/leading at the tutoring center and it was quite fun preparing for and presenting because the topic we chose was holiday celebrations. I made a quick 5-minute presentation on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas in the U.S., and everyone seemed to enjoy all of the pictures and my stories of shopping and making cookies and decorating. I told them all that they need to try pumpkin pie at some point because it is so good. I can't wait for October to be here so I have an excuse to make lots of pumpkin treats. Sure, the Libby's Pumpkin is $5 a can, but it's so worth it.

The bookstore on campus had a further reduction in their clearance books -- only $2 each! -- so I couldn't resist buying several. Okay, maybe 14. But most are gifts!! Much cheaper than buying a Secret Santa gift, and it's good for people to read. :)

We also popped by the British store that we haven't been to since we arrived to see what they were stocking. It was taken over by new management so the prices were a little better. They have boxes of Shreddies which I think I can use as a Chex replacement so I can make Chex Mix and other treats requiring that kind of grid cereal. D bought a can of Heinz Spaghetti with O-shaped pasta (looks like Spaghettios but unfortunately doesn't taste like it) and we both got packages of Bachelor's pasta which we had almost weekly while in the UK. It still tastes the same!

Professor Sahar Amer (Chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney), whom I heard at the ANZAMEMS conference this past July, was visiting the university and gave two presentations on Muslim women. The first was on "Gender Trouble in the Seventh Crusade" and focused on the first female sultan of Egypt, Shajar al-Durr, whom I had never heard of. The second was on "Muslim Women's Rights in Post-Colonial Europe" and discussed modern Muslim women and veiling practices. We learned about the rising Islamic fashion industry which is becoming a substantial source of revenue for Europe; she played a clip of award-winning British Asian Muslim comedian Shazia Mirza poking fun at her culture, as well as a clip from The Hijabi Monologues. I was glad she had brought these things to our attention, as I know I had never encountered them before and probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Finally, the US Ambassador to New Zealand, Mark Gilbert, paid a visit to the university. First, the International Recruitment Officer said a few words about how great it was that U.S. students were helping expose New Zealand students to new ideas (and helping fulfill part of the new graduate profile: "being globally aware"). He said he travels a lot in the U.S. and finds that the two peoples are quite similar in values and being hardworking and motivated. I was thinking, where do you get that idea?! I have not found many people here who have the same work ethic that I find in the U.S., but maybe in different circles or in Auckland things are different. Next the Chancellor spoke about the importance of a strong relationship between the two countries. The Ambassador got his chance to speak and reflected some on his career moves from Major League Baseball to 30 years in the banking industry, and then becoming part of Obama's campaign and getting this position. He spoke about how many entrepreneurs he's met across New Zealand and advised us to try to see some of the cool things going on on-campus, like drones. Very business-oriented, but that's to be expected from his background. He did make a funny joke about feeling less wind chill in his house in Florida during a hurricane than in New Zealand because of the poor quality of insulation and window thickness. He said New Zealanders could learn some things from the U.S. and we all laughed because we know how cold it is here!

Ambassador Mark Gilbert with U.S. students studying abroad

White pigeon young-lings at school

Japanese cherry blossoms

Digital Humanities Conference

My Digital Humanities conference at the University of Western Sydney went well and I met a lot of people and learned a lot. The chance to participate in the new scholars pre-conference was a great opportunity and gave me access to a lot of the up-and-coming minds I may well work with someday. I learned about all of the anonymous women involved in the early days of computing and punchcards before men took over the field and coding. Apparently, one woman went down to Italy to interview some of these women who worked with famous computer guy Father Roberto Busa and had to use a translator, and the male translator was cutting off the women when they started talking about negative things Busa did. A loss to history, for sure. 

The welcome night ceremony was held at the State Library of New South Wales, and it had a gorgeous reading room.

Things were off to a tumultuous start the first day at the opening ceremony and keynote presentation when there was a continuous string of men on-stage giving all of the introductions as well as the keynote speech. I had finally joined Twitter just before the conference, and it was exciting following along with the backchannel of people tweeting #whereareallthewomen and complaining about the representation of Digital Humanities as a white, male sphere (except for one Aboriginal man who gave the welcome to country speech).

The evening poster session had some quite interesting digital projects, including:

•  DigitalDemocracy.org which creates a searchable database of videotaped California legislative sessions (lots of people think there are transcripts available of these sessions, but there aren’t, making it difficult to know who said what)
• Using Google Ngram Viewer to track word usage in books over time
• Chinese-characters.org which is a study of Chinese characters and their historical evolution using a computer program.

The second day saw one of the conference organizers get on-stage and openly call out the men and ask them to exit the stage so that women could have a voice and participate equally. Then, the keynote speaker after her (Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and VP at Intel) gave an extraordinarily good speech on the history of technology and where we are at with robots today and what kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves. It was so relevant to my study of science fiction and literature, it has now set my expectations for a keynote speech very high! If I could give a speech like that one day, I would be very lucky. She even used one of the same images on her slide that I had in my presentation for my next conference, and I came up afterward to tell her that and she wished me luck. I met a man who looked just like Spock in a lunch session on global data infrastructure in the humanities (sciences are already on their way to having standards and clear articulation of needs). I found interesting presentations in the afternoon on video games in India featuring female characters and using programs to generate more realistic stock video game characters that come from particular universes for game developers to be able to buy off the shelf (Game of Thrones used as the example). I took the river ferry home to get some beautiful nighttime views of Darling Harbor.

The third and final day made me worried about all of the data our devices are sending to the cloud and companies without our knowing or thinking about it. A presentation on ebook data where they were studying how long a reader spent on particular pages of a book and how many chapters they read raised issues of publishers using this data to make decisions about not financing new authors, or limiting creative output to more of the same that readers spend more time on, potentially stifling creativity and new ideas. I’ve heard that Amazon may now be using this kind of data to determine royalties to authors (based on per page, rather than per book). I know some people really like ebooks, but I still prefer the feel of real and ability to notate my books, as well as the anonymity they afford (and ability to lend out). Another presentation examined GoodReads reviews and found a lot of errors in plot summaries, with people mentioning characters or events that never happened in books as if they were true (example: Bilbo described as slaying the dragon in The Hobbit).

I agreed to give a brief statement on my experience attending the pre-conference and ended up having to speak on-stage in front of dozens of people at one of the annual meetings of an organization that helped sponsor it. It was my first time on that big a stage in front of a microphone so I wrote everything out the night before and just read my statement. It went okay and I didn’t mess up so that was good! Definitely need more practice on the public speaking front.

I made the mistake of reading my student evaluations for my tutoring during the middle of the day and there was one disgruntled student who did not appreciate being challenged to think critically about the world and wrote a long paragraph on how worthless some of the sessions were. It was hard to read, but I will have to face this (and worse) in the future if I end up teaching, and it really shows that there is work to do even in students who you’d think would be more open-minded. Plus, I know it’s not my fault that they didn’t do the reading and weren’t prepared. However, the rest of the few received were positive and nice to read.

Tutorials and Popular Art

It is possible I have taken on too many jobs, partly because of the last-minuteness of planning in New Zealand so that I didn't know for sure if I would have the tutoring one which takes the most time until right before classes started, and partly because I have trouble saying no to new opportunities (and more income). I am up to six now, though some of them are just for a short, fixed period of time and others will be in bursts when papers are turned in for grading. This will be a test semester to see how everything goes.

Meanwhile, I survived my first two tutorials! I was nervous but it wasn't too bad and after the hardest part -- starting the class and having everyone look at you for leadership -- it was mostly just prompting discussion through questions. The first group took longer on the questions so I had to rush at the end, but I still had time to give them the recent news article on human head transplants only being two years away and relate it to Frankenstein's relevance today, almost two hundred years after its publication. The second group was in a smaller room actually meant for that kind of small group which does make a difference in the atmosphere, and they were more active. I have so much more appreciation for the prep work that teachers do and the energy it takes to be that person in the room that everyone is expecting to lead them. I think the nervousness will diminish over time as I get more comfortable with the role and the groups feel more comfortable discussing and asking questions. You are so thankful for the contributors because they make the job that much easier. It is a unique position being the one in the room with more knowledge and experience, and I enjoy that power and ability to guide their thinking and questioning into certain directions. Sometimes they make the leap themselves, but other times you have to tease it out. It is odd that it has taken this long to have the opportunity to lead a classroom, after going down a degree path that points that direction in most cases. But I have to say, getting to discuss and write about literature for a living has to be a good gig. Probably why professors rank so highly on the job happiness scale!

I had a meeting with two women executives from the Canterbury Women's Club on the startup of the postgraduate network group. They were eager to hear my ideas, and we settled on a monthly meeting on-campus where a few women would give a brief overview of their research and then a woman speaker in the workforce would share her experience. The idea is to build a network and practice skills like presenting, mingling, and preparing for life after the degree. I hope everything goes well and is successful. If I decide to stay on in New Zealand after completing my degree, networks like this will be useful in finding employment.

My literature class had another good lecture which related some to my project. The lecturer was talking about the importance of studying both "high" art (like James Joyce and Picasso) and "low" or popular art, because just like now, people interacted with and consumed both types. He said, Wouldn't you want to look at what 95% of people were reading or watching? This relates to science fiction because until recently it was not seen as worthy of study in academia. Thanks to a generation of people fighting for it to be recognized, and the acknowledgment that studying popular culture is important too, it is now generally accepted at most schools as an appropriate topic for serious academic study. In my view, what we read and watch has a big role in our socialization, so it absolutely makes sense to critically analyze and engage with the culture we live in (or used to live in).

Arts and Fireworks

School & Work

Admittedly, I haven't done much for my research since the trip to Queenstown. I've been working on several editing projects and planning upcoming trips to the North Island and Australia (finally booked our flight to its east coast -- very much looking forward to it!). The English PhD student in the cubicle next-door who is rarely there and never speaks finally talked to me and actually offered me a grading job for the semester! Also found out that her research is something to do with Star Trek television shows. She needs a group of people to grade papers for the one writing class that engineering students have to take (because employers complained that recent grads couldn't communicate). Add that to my other three part-time jobs and I will have quite a schedule when the school semester for undergraduates starts on February 23rd. Of course, I don't have a schedule yet because everything is done so last-minute.

There were two research presentations on-campus by the two candidates for a part-time English faculty position, so it was interesting to see this part of the job interview. The first just received her PhD last year and is looking at representations of women in horror films; the second is an American who moved to NZ over a year ago whose research is on contemporary women's representations in literature and film through the lens of literary theory. They were very different, so I have no idea whom will be chosen. The first was a graduate of the department, so there could be some bias there, although the decision-makers might also be looking for a fresh perspective.

D and I have been having several discussions about arts education, and a particularly intense one after I read aloud parts of this long but informative article on liberal-arts education (link below), how it has changed, what people think it means, and whether or not it is still valued/valuable in various societies. I haven't yet formulated an essay on the topic, but I feel like one is in the works in my mind.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's "The Day The Purpose of College Changed"

In a similar vein, one of the reasons I nominated myself to be on the committee of the university's feminist society/club was to help ensure there are opportunities for education on women's issues and civil rights on-campus. Along with the recent cutbacks in many of the school's Arts programs (including American Studies) was the removal of the Gender Studies programs, which means that currently there is only one class on gender, in the Sociology department, which is only offered occasionally. This seems odd for a well-regarded university of over 14,000 students. So I was successfully voted in and will be doing my part this year to incorporate educational events for interested students into the club's schedule.

Outdoors

We went on a hike in the Port Hills which was particularly hard because it was a hot day and all uphill. The hills were brown but we still enjoyed good views of the ocean and harbor on either side at the top.

Another day we went on one of the trails at Halswell Quarry Park. The blue-gray Halswell Stone from there was used to build many of the city's buildings. The city has done a nice job of preserving the history with several boards around the 30-minute trail. 

For some reason, Christchurch likes its fireworks shows. The third show since November was on January 31, called "Sparks". The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra played movie themes for two hours beforehand. The weather was bad -- it drizzled the whole time and was windy -- but that didn't deter them from lighting off the fireworks.

Home

D had a packet of San Francisco sourdough yeast mailed to him and, after days of prep, successfully made a loaf of bread with some of that sourdough tang he so enjoys. Later, he made another batch and will keep the starter going in the fridge to help it become even more sour-tasting. This kind of bread-making is definitely an intensive process. I made pumpkin pie (with a homemade crust) for the first time for a friend's going-away board game party. It turned out pretty good! Thank you, Libby's canned pumpkin. I advertised my financial guide ebook on social media (a little side project I finished last year) and enrolled for a short cooking class at the local community center which starts tomorrow. My sunflower bloomed and our car passed its Warrant of Fitness test (required every 6 months for older cars). Yay! And today we went to the park to hear the Scottish Society Pipe Band play bagpipes and drums.