Thpppt...

As you can see my career as a major campaign operative went "thppppppt...." I hate campaigning. I can't do it. It's exhausting - I'm an educator and a scholar. I can't go, knock on people's doors on a random Thursday during the day when they're all at work anyway, fake a smile, and ask them to vote for so-and-so. I'm too busy wondering about them as an ethnographer. Now, if I were to go and do an actual ethnography of a campaign - I'm sure it's been done, right? - that would be amazing. But I wouldn't actually have to campaign. I could do what I do best, observe, write, interview, and question. I don't do well when I can't question the system.

Moving on to real life. I am back taking classes almost full time and working full time. Wow, I didn't realize there were 30 hours in a day. Just kidding. I like what I'm doing, although my research last semester apparently raised issues with some of the students - they think I'm in the witness protection program for researchers, that this job is a cover, blah blah blah. Apparently I'm a spy.

But life continues - I can't help being an ethnographer 24 hours a day. It's kind of like being a teacher. Once you realize how much you can learn just by paying attention and taking notes on what people do, you suddenly can't stop doing it. Every where I go, I think would make a great ethnography project. Campaigns. Restaurants. Conferences. Summer camp. Airports. Highways. Whatever. Anywhere people are, you can see what they're doing, ask them some questions, and learn something.

I'm in two classes this semester: one is an advanced ethnography writing seminar, and the second is a class on organization and administration of higher education. For the ethnography seminar I'm continuing to look at teams. For the admin class, I'm learning basic organizational theory - which I love. I'm going to analyze a problem in my program and look at it from different lenses - cultural/symbolic, political, organization, and something called cybernetic (sp?).

I'm blogging again because I actually created a blog entry for students in one of our classes - and I realized that writing is when I really get my wheels turning and have new ideas. So we'll see how it works.