Archive for the ‘Community’ Category
Beijing’s vanishing charm: for a buck, for better living conditions, and for a hefty price
Chicken coup, built atop a home inside a Beijing hutong It’s a bit mysterious to me how my fascination with China began; this far into it, I cant quite retrace the steps back to the beginning. But one of the first books I read about the country was journalist Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Portraits [...]
July 21st, 2010Aww, so the little white girl wants to make a difference? Or: The intimidating world of changing the world
Plenty of young people have dreams of changing the world, making a difference, having a purpose in the wider world. Realizing this goal seems more accessible the more the world shrinks, as if maybe through our interconnectedness and supposed knowledge of each other we can somehow bring about change, that we’ve learned enough to avoid [...]
June 1st, 2010Food and, after all, friends
Four days before I wave goodbye to the last semester of my undergraduate degree, I ate dinner at the house of one of my professors. It is a rather strange idea, and perhaps a little bit awkward–unless the class is South Asian politics and she’s having everyone over for some of her homemade Indian food. [...]
May 1st, 2010Smart educators, often a rarity.
Chinese students I met in May 2007, who attend a bilingual Chinese-English school in Zhengzhou, China In an atmosphere of economic recession, budget cuts, and even failing K-12 schools, good news in the public school system can be elusive. And in U.S. schools, if the first things to be cut are the arts and music [...]
March 20th, 2010A snowman comes to Georgia
On Friday, February 12, 2010, Metro Atlanta got a little bit of the weather that the northeast has been experiencing; a couple of inches of snow was just enough to cover the entire landscape, painting the world a beautiful black and white. I got off work early because campus was closing, and I took the [...]
February 14th, 2010The vague aspirations of one neighborhood’s street signs
Five months ago, I discovered a townhouse subdivision of sorts called “the Magnolias,” when I moved to a spot nearby. In the months since I’ve lived in the area, I’ve wandered bemusedly around the neighborhood, growing more bewildered with each passing street sign. Anyone living in the United States is familiar with the “Pine Groves” [...]
January 2nd, 2010Fighting for a country in which you have no rights…
This may sound more like a description of a totalitarian state, a lawless nation in remote Africa (or urban Africa), or maybe a Soviet-era Eastern European country. I’ve just been learning all about the atrocities suffered on the German-Russian front of WWII in Dan Carlin’s “Ghosts From the Ostfront” podcast series, and how many of [...]
November 12th, 2009Decatur Street, 2009: Lessons in Atlanta’s 1906 race riot
For the first half of my history senior seminar class, we had assigned readings–articles from the Georgia Historical Quarterly–that we discussed for their knowledge and arguments but also for their technical structure and research methods. Because the ultimate goal of the course is our own senior theses, we were using these as models for what [...]
October 13th, 2009Museum studies and the Tuskegee Airmen
This fall I am part of a team that is curating an exhibit on the Tuskegee Airmen for KSU’s Museum of History and Holocaust Education. The exhibit will be on display Nov. 17 – February, and then will begin to travel to schools for possibly the next ten years. That’s a project that turns into [...]
August 30th, 2009