The last few chaotic months have finally reached the listless blogger buried deep in the caverns of my overworked brain. And also I’m procrastinating. I’m supposed to be on vacation, sort of, but I had hoped to use this week in between teaching gigs to finish transcribing the last of my English interviews from Fargo for my dissertation. I completed a couple, but I can’t seem to find the energy to finish the rest, and I’m seriously contemplating paying someone to do it for me. It takes a fast transcriber, like me, at least four hours to type a one-hour interview and that is if the interviewees speak clearly in a quiet room. Those interviews that I have left are the ones with loud, distracting background noises like coffee grinders, music, clinking dishes, and others’ nearby conversations and make for a frustrating listen. Transcription is an important part of my job as a cultural anthropologist. I love conducting interviews and speaking with people and the interviews provide rich insight, but transcribing is tedious and time-consuming but also very necessary in order to accurately capture what people are saying and thinking about topics. I recorded about 60 interviews while I was in Fargo and thanks to a lot of help from undergraduate students, I only have nine left in English and four in Bosnian to transcribe. It would take me at least 8 hours to type a one-hour interview in Bosnian so I have reached out to colleagues in other countries to help me find a native speakers to do those but it could be a while before I find a person, much less until he or she finishes typing those interviews. In the meantime, I listen to them for bits and pieces that I can use in my analysis.
Last week (or was it the week before?) classes ended, I finished entering my grades and spent last weekend cavorting with friends who graduated with their PhDs while daydreaming about this time next year when it will be me wearing the funny-looking gown and poofy hat, secretly and maybe even openly, loving the new Dr. title. But I have a lot to do before that happens, like write the dissertation, enter the increasingly competitive job market, and teach two 4-week summer classes: Gender in a Cross-Cultural Perspective and Gender, Folklore, Inequality. Fortunately, I have much fodder to use in those summer classes, like the murders of Dr. Tiller and at the Holocaust Museum not to mention so many other instances of violence that haven’t made front page news, all of which have so much to do with racism, sexism, classism, politics, economy and culture. For my second summer class, I have a unit on Iran where can discuss varying perspectives on why Iran’s electoral process seems to be running amok and the role of gender in that context. I taught a class both winter and spring terms too (Gender in a Cross-Cultural Perspective and Anthropology and Citizenship). More and more I feel teaching is my calling – or at least my profession of choice – so the shrunken academic job market worries me. Like the rest of my friends, I have plans A,B,C,D,E, and F but my first choice would be a university teaching job in a city with lot of diversity and a way for me to continue working with refugees not to mention a place to settle down and dig my feet into the community and feel at home for more than a few years.
In addition to teaching, about a month ago, I organized a talk by my friend Jen Marlowe, documentary filmmaker, author, and activist in Sudan and Israel/Palestine. Her latest film is Rebuilding Hope, a documentary about three Sudanese Lost Boys in their 20s who return to South Sudan for the first time since they fled the war as young boys. Jen gave a talk at the University of Oregon about her time in Darfur filming Darfur Diaries and in South Sudan and made the best, necessary connections I have seen between the two regions which are too often portrayed by Western media as separate entities. Thanks to professor friends who offered extra credit to students as incentive for coming to the talk, and the support of the local Lane County Darfur Coalition who also helped advertise, we had almost 100 people come to hear Jen speak and I raised $650 from various departments on campus which Jen is donating to her two projects. And I got to spend time with Jen and our friend Caroline, a PhD student in Human Geography, who drove with Jen from Seattle to Eugene. The last time we were together (and the first time I met Jen) was in South Sudan last summer so we had much to catch up on. Caroline and I are working on an article about women’s rights movements in South Sudan that we hope to submit to a feminist academic journal within the next few weeks, a project we have been working on for about a year. Weekends like these make me feel very lucky and appreciative to have the amazing kinds of friends that I do but also to be working in a setting, like a university, where feminist activist scholars can come together and discuss ways to best combat various forms of oppression. I love it!
Like my spring, my summer will not only be filled with teaching, researching, and writing but also hiking, camping, weddings, and BBQs galore. And I’m moving again! After all, it has been a year and thus time to change the scenery. This time, at the end of August, I”m moving out of my adorable, cavernous and expensive one-bedroom apartment in an attic into a to-be-determined home with a roommate who understands the dissertation-writing zone because she just finished hers and has promised to take care of me while I write mine. Did I mention how appreciative I am of my friends?
Happy Summer to all of you. I hope your weather is more indicative of summer than Eugene’s cool, breezy, cloudiness that is making me want to curl up with a cup of tea and good work of fiction and not get up until the sun does.
