Showing posts with label dissertation defense. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dissertation defense. Show all posts
Friday, May 29, 2009
Dr. King
Just got back from hearing my friend Jason defend his dissertation, "The Rhetorics of Online Autism Advocacy." The now Dr. King was brilliant. My favorite line: "Rhetorical listening is not a refuting of but a rendering of the ones I hear. I may choose a stance of openness towards any person, text, or culture in cross-cultural exchanges."
Monday, November 24, 2008
Picture My Defense
As promised, here's my handout for my defense. Hope you find it interesting, even relevant to you in some way.
My dissertation advisor and committee chair, Dr. Charlotte Hogg, advised that my defense "must sparkle with clarity and coherence." (She'd become nearly accustomed to my writing otherwise.) And my reader-group colleagues, Jason King and Moriah McCracken, some of the best and clearest and most coherent writers I know, gave me pointers all that week up to the defense. Moriah had tracked with personal stories, and encouraged me and my family with the implications of the dissertation even in the blogging here. I decided, in my defense, to tell stories, as bookends around this handout I'd made: in a quaky voice unworthy of our president elect, I began by quoting Barack Obama telling the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, a woman, a black woman, giving voice in government, and telling the story of his daughters now having hope. And one of my daughters, Amelia, was in the room, so I expressed my hopes for her and her sister in relation to their brother. We talked of Aristotle's persistent influence on the silence of women in Western cultures. (Amelia was "Helen" in her school play "Troy" and she happily stapled the handout together the night before and colored the little cartoon on the second page, as you see it below). After speaking for 25 minutes, running through the handout, I quoted Nancy Mairs telling her story of "defending" her "dissertation," a violent separating but a narrative that ran back and forth, sort of like mine. The committee members asked such wonderful, thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. And they did so for more than an hour before Dr. Hogg invited questions from the audience. My wife, who culled my project into the two word phrase "Aristotle Exposed," and who teaches me many things about writing well and good and many things if I'd just learn, was in the room. My mother, who had taught me to read, also was there, listening. My brother from London was there, and asked a couple of questions, following up on our earlier conversations about the project. Then my Dad spoke. "Kurk, I have a problem," he started. (I'll let you imagine what he asked--but it certainly did reveal a lot, I thought, about the unmarked positions of patriarchy). Later, he and Mom each emailed to say they were proud of me. I was thrilled and honored that so many showed up with so much intellectual curiosity and willingness to listen to one another in this process.
My dissertation advisor and committee chair, Dr. Charlotte Hogg, advised that my defense "must sparkle with clarity and coherence." (She'd become nearly accustomed to my writing otherwise.) And my reader-group colleagues, Jason King and Moriah McCracken, some of the best and clearest and most coherent writers I know, gave me pointers all that week up to the defense. Moriah had tracked with personal stories, and encouraged me and my family with the implications of the dissertation even in the blogging here. I decided, in my defense, to tell stories, as bookends around this handout I'd made: in a quaky voice unworthy of our president elect, I began by quoting Barack Obama telling the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, a woman, a black woman, giving voice in government, and telling the story of his daughters now having hope. And one of my daughters, Amelia, was in the room, so I expressed my hopes for her and her sister in relation to their brother. We talked of Aristotle's persistent influence on the silence of women in Western cultures. (Amelia was "Helen" in her school play "Troy" and she happily stapled the handout together the night before and colored the little cartoon on the second page, as you see it below). After speaking for 25 minutes, running through the handout, I quoted Nancy Mairs telling her story of "defending" her "dissertation," a violent separating but a narrative that ran back and forth, sort of like mine. The committee members asked such wonderful, thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. And they did so for more than an hour before Dr. Hogg invited questions from the audience. My wife, who culled my project into the two word phrase "Aristotle Exposed," and who teaches me many things about writing well and good and many things if I'd just learn, was in the room. My mother, who had taught me to read, also was there, listening. My brother from London was there, and asked a couple of questions, following up on our earlier conversations about the project. Then my Dad spoke. "Kurk, I have a problem," he started. (I'll let you imagine what he asked--but it certainly did reveal a lot, I thought, about the unmarked positions of patriarchy). Later, he and Mom each emailed to say they were proud of me. I was thrilled and honored that so many showed up with so much intellectual curiosity and willingness to listen to one another in this process.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Facing the Music: the Diss Defense
How do you dress for a dissertation defense?
And my Episcopal priest friend steps out of his car that dark night with, "What kind of social statement are you making now?"
I replied that it had been my university service earlier in the (Halloween) day, when as part of the "community relations" committee of the "staff governing body" I did my part to make a few school kids happy. The students of the school run by our college of ed dress up themselves and go trick or treating safely on campus. I was told by the committee chair to dress "not too scary" but some of the teachers scowled at me anyway. And yet the down syndrome kids just loved the make up, and the older kids kept debating whether I was a clown or if it really was the Joker. In the neighborhood, one uncostumed boy told me he'd be right back, and a few minutes later, a proud looking batman showed up. I didn't try to explain anything to my friend the priest as kid after kid, with knowing chuckles, kept saying to me through their own masks, "Why so serious." He had not ever let his kids trick or treat before, so this was quite a conversion experience. (Our daughters are good friends at the private school, and mine invited his over for the event).
Which takes me back to when I was a (younger) kid growing up in South Viet Nam, and my (Southern Baptist) missionary parents let my siblings and friends and me run a neighborhood haunted house in their Center (for literacy and for printing and for sewing classes) in Ba Ngoi (where we lived in Cam Ranh Bay). I'd hung on to my glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume (from America), and wore it. At the right moment, around the second turn in the haunted house, I'd pop up out of a grave and scare the bejeebers out of grown men and women interested in seeing what American missionary kids did for entertainment. It was horrifying, mainly because all my friends believed in ghosts as resurrected phantom ancestors who must be appeased daily by incense burning and veneration and such. Some of them saw their uncle Minh in me the animated glow. Needless to say, we Americans were run out of the country shortly afterwards, and I claim my responsibility for that. Which is why I keep going back from time to time under the guise of a scholar doing English language and sociolinguistic work. That's particularly horrifying in itself. But then that's another story altogether.
If you have any better ideas for how to dress for my defense, then by all means, leave me a comment.
when it's less than a week from today? and between now and then you've got to run an orientation for new students? fight the annual departmental budget fights with the university controller? get in the spring faculty appointments to the dean and the provost? have a normal weekend with family and friends? get to the other dean the college draft of the dissertation knowing that the committee has found it relatively dense and muddling and lengthy? and you just want to blog about the wonderful things that professor Hawhee and professor Mountford are talking about and doing as the latter "mixes historiography with ethnography" to overturn Aristotle's documented influence on our societies such that we've all conspired to silence women in the pulpit and in the pews and even (thanks Deborah) at Huffington Post?
Last time I put on a good face for something, it was this one:
And my Episcopal priest friend steps out of his car that dark night with, "What kind of social statement are you making now?"
I replied that it had been my university service earlier in the (Halloween) day, when as part of the "community relations" committee of the "staff governing body" I did my part to make a few school kids happy. The students of the school run by our college of ed dress up themselves and go trick or treating safely on campus. I was told by the committee chair to dress "not too scary" but some of the teachers scowled at me anyway. And yet the down syndrome kids just loved the make up, and the older kids kept debating whether I was a clown or if it really was the Joker. In the neighborhood, one uncostumed boy told me he'd be right back, and a few minutes later, a proud looking batman showed up. I didn't try to explain anything to my friend the priest as kid after kid, with knowing chuckles, kept saying to me through their own masks, "Why so serious." He had not ever let his kids trick or treat before, so this was quite a conversion experience. (Our daughters are good friends at the private school, and mine invited his over for the event).
Which takes me back to when I was a (younger) kid growing up in South Viet Nam, and my (Southern Baptist) missionary parents let my siblings and friends and me run a neighborhood haunted house in their Center (for literacy and for printing and for sewing classes) in Ba Ngoi (where we lived in Cam Ranh Bay). I'd hung on to my glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume (from America), and wore it. At the right moment, around the second turn in the haunted house, I'd pop up out of a grave and scare the bejeebers out of grown men and women interested in seeing what American missionary kids did for entertainment. It was horrifying, mainly because all my friends believed in ghosts as resurrected phantom ancestors who must be appeased daily by incense burning and veneration and such. Some of them saw their uncle Minh in me the animated glow. Needless to say, we Americans were run out of the country shortly afterwards, and I claim my responsibility for that. Which is why I keep going back from time to time under the guise of a scholar doing English language and sociolinguistic work. That's particularly horrifying in itself. But then that's another story altogether.
I've been facing the music and putting on faces all my life, I suppose. To prove that, my parents sent me this photo of me that they took back when we lived in Sai Gon (which is now Ho Chi Minh City).
The only thing I have to add, before I go away from blogging again, is that I think we all wear faces, don't we? I mean would you look at how Rafael dresses up his only woman (Hypatia) in his School of Athens? And guess who he has front and center? You're right, it's Aristotle. So that kind of makes not only me but also her his feminist subject. And don't be fooled into thinking that you're not Aristotle's barbarian subject either.
If you have any pearls of wisdom, then by all means leave them here. I leave you all now, until . . . .
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