Xxxicana’s Weblog

Phew, I stayed up really late last night putting the final touches to the National Association for Ethnic Studise (NAES) conference program — the conference starts next Thursday!!!  Talk about cutting it down to the wire.  It has been a great experience working on the conference.  I never really appreciated all the hard work that goes into event planning — and our conference is pretty small.  I can’t even imagine the kind of work that goes into a conference with +2000 papers.  At any rate, I don’t even attend large conferences anymore.  I feel too adrift in a sea of people that constantly do the name tag scan (quick firtive look to your tag to see if you rank high enough to speak to . . .  and then they ditch you the moment someone higher on the food chain comes along).  I love NAES — first it is great to work with a group of like minded people committed to social justice, transformative pedagogy, and increasing diversity in academia.  It’s also a hoot to hang with so many other peeps of color and enjoy the freedom of letting our hair down.

I stayed up late last night also to read a manuscript that my colleague and cuate Joy Castro wrote for an edited volume on Latina Motherhood.  She is so not like me in many respects — calm, reserved, quiet, kind, tenured  — ok, I’m kind too.  But I’m loud, spazzy, opinionated, and not tenure.  Yet we click on a number of levels that provide relief and those lightbulb moments of “you, too?”.   Anyway, her article focusses on waking up one day as an empty nester and trying to figure out what to do with all that maternalism.  It was great to read how she has turned her maternal focus into more of a sisterly focus and how she is enjoying the opportunities to be found in Lincoln.

Tomorrow I am attending the History Graduate Student Symposium to offer commentary on a trio of papers.  The paper topics are pretty darn interesting:  La Virgen de Guadalupe, Tourist Imaginings of Eastern Europe, and Sex in the Ancient Greek City (ooh, lots of images of gay sex!).  Now, unfortunately, many profs don’t really enjoy graduate students all that much (I had one prof that REFUSED to work with grads).  But, often times, the cutting edge ideas come from these young researchers that haven’t been jaded by over work or whipped into dogged submission by the tenure process.  They have the (relative) freedom to play with ideas and see where they lead.  But, between now and then, I have to sythesize these three disparate papers!!  Hope I can pull this together!

So, for the moment, I’ll sign off — gotta get ready for work.  TTFN.

This entry was posted on March 27, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.