Smash the Patriarchy!
This term I’m teaching courses in political science, anthropology, and history. I wear many hats at my university. This is the joy of being an interdisciplinary scholar. In many cases, it makes me less employable for a full-time position because most departments want someone who did their PhD exclusively in that field. While my master’s and bachelor’s were in history, my PhD included history, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and gender studies. So, when I teach disparate courses, I play a game—I look for crossover between…
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On the Postcolony
This week I visited my family in Ottawa for the first time in two years. My parents are some of my best collectors, which means I get to visit many of my old paintings when I’m there. Here is one of the paintings hanging in their dining room. After I painted it in 2016, I wrote what I had inspired me to paint it. Here’s what I wrote: From October 2016: I spent the month of August back in northern Uganda. It’s an uncomfortable feeling…
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Surprising History of Golf… And What’s That Got To Do with My Art?
Somehow I have ended up being a golf mom. If you know me, golf is NOT something I would ever associate with on my own. But, when my middle son was 10 he had the opportunity to be sponsored to join a golf club… and he fell in love with it. Then my youngest son did, too. To me, golf had always represented an exclusive, privileged pastime. Historian Amber Njoh (2008) explains that the “need to distinguish the colonized from the colonizers commanded importance in…
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Asemic Writing
Asemic writing is a provocation to thought; and the thinking it encourages is not that of a system or science. It is open-ended, based in wonder and wondering. Schwenger 2019 In many of my paintings, you can find asemic writing (see some examples of my asemic writing artworks below). My kids call it “scribble writing,” which I think describes it rather well. But there is a lot more to asemic writing than just scribbles, and that story is rather beautiful, in a philosophical kind of…
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