Nine years ago, I spent a summer teaching English at Urumqi Vocational University (whose website is curiously unavailable at the moment) in the capital city of the Xinjiang province. Back then, Urumqi was a “small” (by Chinese standards) city of two million people undergoing rapid development as the Chinese government moved massive resources of people, infrastructure, and capital investment into the area.
Today, as longstanding ethnic tensions have exploded into deadly riots in Urumqi, it’s not surprising that the violence has spun out of control. Whenever you colonize, ghettoize, and oppress a particular people group, the eventual and inevitable confrontation is bound to be bloody. (more…)
First off, a happy 4th to all you fellow Americans out there. This– the quintessential American “holy-day”– is an occasion for all the festivities Americans enjoy: BBQs, fireworks, flag-waving, and some revisionist history. And while I’m all for some time off to enjoy a burger, beer, and casual round of “God bless the USA“, there are times when the patriotism on steroids that some people practice just scares me.
For Christians in particular, there is something insidious about the ideology of empire that is embedded in so many of our national patriotic symbols. When followers of Jesus confuse their loyalties and the agenda of the flag is always compatible with the way of the cross, then we have a problem. (more…)
The 2009 National Cohousing Conference is now in full swing, and even though I’m not attending any of the main events, I have plenty to think about from the Getting it Built workshop I attended on Wednesday with Jason. Kathryn McCamant was the presenter, and it was interesting to hear about her extensive experience in cohousing development.
I’m still processing some of the info-overload from the workshop, but there were definitely a few things that stuck out to me initially. (more…)
This week we’re hosting a Burmese refugee family as they resettle in the US from Malaysia, where they had been on the move for some time. Specifically, they’re Chin people, which is a large ethnic group whose home state on the western border of Burma has been devastated by persecution from the infamous SPDC, a brutal military regime if there ever was one. Described as “forgotten people” by Human Rights Watch, much like their southeastern counterparts the Karen, widespread human rights abuses have gone largely unnoticed by the international community. But scores of Chin people have been scattered around the world because of refugee resettlement programs, and last night a family of three showed up on our doorstep, one day “early” since Chris had confused their arrival date. Surprise! (more…)
My research paper is in, I finished submitting my final grades for spring quarter, and just like that, my first year as a professor is done. To celebrate the occasion (and for your listening enjoyment), here’s North by Northwest, a song that was on heavy rotation during many of my long study sessions at Seattle’s Central Library.
Both Blue Scholars and Common Market gave me some much needed energy in those writing and grading marathons that can be pretty draining. So to honor their contribution to my research process, I bought both of their first CDs off Amazon. Now what? Technically, my work’s not really done since there’s still some miscellaneous stuff to do over the summer, but for the most part, I’m pretty much headed into the best part of an academic career: summer vacation! Peace.
No, not the bootstrap-pulling, metanarrative forming “progress” of modernism, although on occasion that’s a nicely packaged set of ideals. The progress to which I’m referring is in regard to the traffic jam pile up of academic work due at the end of every quarter here at SPU, which normally wouldn’t be all that bad if it weren’t for the unfortunate coinciding calendar of my work due in SIS. *On a sidenote, doesn’t “SIS” sound like something much more sinister and subversive (in a covert operative kind of way) than “School of Intercultural Studies”? I mean, just look at wikipedia’s list of SIS acronyms- most of those sound pretty cool (except for maybe “small intestinal submucosa”- that sounds gross). Sorry, I digress. I’ve been writing in academic mode for the last few weeks and so it feels nice to just ramble. (more…)
… in paperwork. Okay, so my desk doesn’t look exactly like this one, but I think this at least captures the feeling. At times like this, I really wish I had a competent graduate-level TA for grading. And while I’m wishing for the unlikely, a talented ghostwriter would be nice, too. These dissertation things don’t just write themselves.
