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.
Read MoreTurn-Taking & Repair: Problems of Flow in Intercultural Communication
by Steph • 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 […]
Read More(Un)Building a Mystery: Peeking Behind the Curtain in the Academic Land of Oz
by Cameron D. Norman • 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 […]
Brains: “an entity yet to be seen in world politics”
by Steph • 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
What meanings are we making?
by Steph • 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