Organizing Dialogue, Experience and Knowledge for Complex Problem-Solving

“Do What’s Right for All of Us”

by • April 23rd, 2019

gardening to grow food….understand the food economy where you live, because then you can identify what staples to produce for yourself and strategize whether and how to fill a specific niche for your community.

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Social Polyculture at PV2

by • April 2nd, 2015

One Day You Will Turn To Sustainability

Learning, the Permaculture Way was a pre-conference workshop by David Eggleton and me at the 2nd Permaculture Voices conference (PV2) in San Diego. Our session drew about 50 participants, some of whom continued a dialogue that seemed—on the surface—to have a narrow focus but, over the five days of PV2, grew wider, broader and was deepened […]

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Learning, the Permaculture Way

by • January 24th, 2015

permacultureVOICES2015-01-24 at 8.24.56 PM

This workshop at the 2nd Permaculture Voices conference in San Diego will help you plan how to maximize your PV2 conference experience by applying a tool for lifelong learning. Learning throughout your life involves steady investments of attention, time and energy. In this session, you will acquire and work with a set of considerations that […]

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Turn-Taking & Repair: Problems of Flow in Intercultural Communication

by • September 29th, 2014

This workshop, featuring Dr Eileen Forestal, Dr Stephanie Jo Kent, and Cynthia Napier, M.Ed., will be presented at the Conference of Interpreter Trainers in Portland, Oregon.   What would interpreting be like if we embraced and valued interruptions rather than judging them as negative disruptions to flow? Conversation analysis yields specific insights about the dynamics […]

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Race and Ethnicity promote Character and Resilience

by • April 4th, 2014

At the end of May, I’ll be presenting two major workshops at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) in higher education.   One presentation, called Social Interpreting: An emerging model of simultaneous interaction, involves Babelverse, which you can learn about by watching this 20 minute video prepared for the @ think! Interpreting conference in Istanbul (March, […]

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Spontaneous Action Research: Interrogating Intersectionality

by • July 2nd, 2013

researchmethodsB

The challenge of making the invisible visible, of bringing those aspects of relationships and identities that have been silenced into awareness and open conversation, was a common problem across seven international research projects explored at a workshop on “intersectionality” hosted by the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons College School of Management.

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Listening for Action and Engagement

by • May 30th, 2013

The capacity of people with disabilities (or, as FEMA says, “functional needs”) to contribute to emergency response and emergency recovery begins with listening. Participants in a focus group outline a sequence of creative interaction stemming from high quality and careful listening.

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(Un)Building a Mystery: Peeking Behind the Curtain in the Academic Land of Oz

by • December 16th, 2011

The gap between what academics do and what those outside of the academy think they do is enormous. The mysteriousness and elite status that universities enjoy may actually serve to undermine the very values of inquiry and education that it seeks to promote. In this second in series of posts on academic life, I take […]

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Brains: “an entity yet to be seen in world politics”

by • August 20th, 2009

International Relations Theory
(political science)

The quote above is from a comment by blenCOWe to a blogpost, Theory of International Politics and Zombies, by Daniel W. Drezner. Drezner’s blog entry is an example along the lines of this youtube video, Gay Science Isolates the Christian Gene, and a powerpoint presentation made by MJ Bienvenu at the recent biennial convention of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, in which she offered deconstructions of audism from the organization’s official website. For example:

“English is not ASL on the mouth.”

The pedagogy of this style of teaching is aptly captured by Erin in her comment to Drezner:

“As Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann write, “The mirror approach is broader than simply deploying popular culture artifacts as a teaching aid. IR scholars can examine popular culture as a medium for exploring theoretical concepts, dilemmas of foreign policy, and the like.” (12).”

The mirror approach operates on the simple principle of substitution: take an existing discourse, and

a) reverse the key tropes (as in “Gay Science” or unveiling audism in “The Heart of the RID Organization”),

b) replace the key actors with an abstraction, or

c) combine both.

A View from Communication Theory
The engagement spawned (ha) is impressive. A communication theorist has

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What meanings are we making?

by • April 26th, 2009

de-briefing
two talks at Heriot Watt
by Stephanie Jo Kent

In addition to the transmission of information, the larger and deepest purpose of simultaneous interpretation is to generate and maintain common culture among people from different cultures.

As hoped, the opportunity to present on my dissertation fieldwork in-progress forced my brain to synthesize the trends and patterns that I have been noticing during this year of research at the European Parliament, as well as find words to express what I think these trends and patterns suggest about mono- and multilingualism. The effort to explain my perceptions moved me far along the analytical path; since returning to fieldwork many of the findings have crystallized further.
A few weeks ago, after more backbrain simmering, I finally uttered the statement highlighted above, distilling the years of talking with interested colleagues (and anyone else who would listen, thanks Arne!) into a single, comprehensible idea.
Purposes are human creations, not physical facts, so there is plenty of room to disagree. I am anticipating a conversation that will take place in Philadelphia in August (“Interpreting as Culture“), and other conversations that I hope grow from there and link from/with other sources (such as Ryan Commerson’s brilliant master’s thesis applying the work of

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