Joy?

Does anyone else walk past this image a lot lately and think 'Joy?' I think Jennifer Lawrence is great, I loved the hunger games especially, but I can't help but notice that this is not a very joyful expression from her. That she is pulling the same passive, half-dead, 'I won't resist if you assault me' face that women have been pulling in artworks for centuries.

On the evolutionary dynamics of social injustice

I've got to blog about this book I read, that isn't even out yet, because it's awesome, and because y'all need to look out for it and go buy it when it's published:

The evolution of inequity by Cailin O 'Connor

New email charter

The original email charter sets out 10 rules aimed at saving us all from drowning in emails:

1. Respect recipient's time (ie don't send an email unless you absolutely have to).
2. Don't treat email brevity as rudeness.
3. Keep emails as clear as possible.
4. Keep questions specific.
5. Don't add unnecessary cc's.
6. Don't let threads get too long.
7. Avoid unnecessary attachments.
8. Restrict short messages to the subject line.
9. Don't send contentless responses
10. Disconnect: don't spend so much time on email.

Much as I appreciate this charter and its attempts to consciously steer our norms regarding email, i don't think it goes far enough. 

Autumn days

We are enjoying yet another stunning autumn day here in the North of England - it’s cold but crisp, the light has a wonderful slightly honeyed clarity and the pavements are decorated with delicate origami shapes in an array of purple, yellow and dazzling red. For November 23rd this is highly irregular and I'd personally call it the best autumn in memory. The Forestry Commission predicted as much, back in August, when an unusually wet summer gave trees the opportunity to store plenty of sugars in their leaves. The following months have been almost uniformly dry, warm and still - no frosts to kill off the leaves, no water to turn them into mulch and very little wind to blow them away. The results have been breath taking. Autumn has always been my favourite time of year and the kids are used to me staring at the sky a lot and constantly stuffing fine specimens into my pockets to be pressed and displayed at home, but this year I've been insufferable. By rights it ought to be dark and damp and full-on SAD by now, but its almost December and the skylines are still dripping with  iridescent, flaming leaves.

Furthermore, I've just made a thrilling new discovery.

Why i have not been posting....

I have managed only one post in the last ten months. That makes me sad. While i would love to write a long post explaining why, i have only got time/energy to write a list of the things that have been getting in my way.

My favourite things that I taught this semester: Patricia Hill Collins

For my module about Feminist Philosophy I talked about an article by Patricia Hill Collins, 'Shifting the Center: Race, class and feminist theorizing about motherhood (1994). It is a beautifully written paper in which Collins, an African-American Feminist Scholar, describes the agonies involved in mothering children within a society which treats their ethnicity as inferior. I introduced the paper as a way to convey the force of what's known as the 'commonality problem' in defining the class 'women'. Here is the problem.

Leeds Leeds Leeds

I'm here!

We moved and we're all still alive. We've got two children that (mostly) sleep at night, a boy that likes his new room and his new preschool, a stay-at-home dad with three days of no deaths under his belt and a mama who can construct simple sentences. Result!!

Massive apologies to the millions of people who are waiting on an email from me about something. There has been no time. Hoping to get round to things once the desperate fight for air eases into some gentler treading of water.....maybe around June then.

In the meantime, I'm now at e.clarke@leeds.ac.uk

Good luck getting a response out of that.......

On being a grinch

Periods for Pence

I came across this campaign on Facebook a while ago, but it's taken on more poignancy now that Mike Pence is not merely Governer of Indiana but the future Vice President. Now renamed as 'Periods for politicians' the campaign was started when Pence, a Conservative pro-life politician, signed off new laws placing various restrictions on access to abortions in Indiana.

Campaign founder Sue Magina (a.k.a. Sue My Vagina) took affront at one law in particular. This law obliged women who have aborted a foetus, had a medical termination of a foetus, or miscarried a foetus -at any stage of pregnancy- to provide that foetus with a formal burial or cremation.

The unbearable richness of being

Never ever let your baby hear you say that things are going well. They will make you pay for it. Wow did that last post come back to bite me.

I don't know what the hell happened....a cold, a new developmental stage, an interrupted routine because we went away, divine retribution for my sounding perilously close to blasé about everything....whatever it was, it broke the baby.