On a number of occasions, I’ve been able to keep up a regular blog practice – please see the excerpts and links to those projects here. I also have extensive experience with more formal academic and grant writing, which is available on request.

The Modern Story Blog

During the six months of my fellowship, I published bi-monthly blog posts on the organization’s website. The purpose of these reflections was to document the fellowship experience, and share the students’ successes with donors, past fellows, family, partner organizations in India, and other interested parties.

In the “Photos Of Students Working” folder I keep on my desktop, the number of Hill Street photos overwhelm the rest, but it’s not because they work more. In the inevitable minutes of downtime when Sunita and I are preoccupied and the students have cameras in their hands, they don’t take photos of their friends awkwardly smiling or staring stony faced at the camera with their arms wrapped around each other. They document what’s going on in the classroom: boys using microphones, girls setting up tripods, teachers looking sweaty and frazzled… I don’t know why this practice is so consistent at Hill Street, but I appreciate it (minus the latter example). It makes sense that their first video project should skew towards documentary.

In Hyderabad, the Telangana conflict is always around us. Sometimes it is more present than others  – when groups of military police shadow a protest, or when bahnds (strikes) close school and bus service. As our first project continued to get derailed by bahnds, a conversation arose. Why was this happening? Who did it hurt? What were the students’ opinions? It soon became clear that the majority (if not all) students were pro-Telangana. But in the same way that I parroted my family’s beliefs at 12 years old, it was clear that the students’ beliefs were based on what they had overheard at home, rather than full comprehension of this complicated issue. When I asked too many “Why?” questions, the conversation petered off. And thus, research became our first focus. I brought in Andhra Pradesh maps, and news or opinion articles written in Telegu that presented both sides of the conflict (or at least I hope they did; I was pretty dependent on my friend Ravi at the copy shop to translate). A group of students conducted eight interviews of teachers and one auto wallah, and we watched them as a class to understand where everyone was coming from.

 

Sociobyte Blog + Podcast 

As a maker of digital work, and net artist, I have always been interested in the intersection between the virtual and physical world. This (short-lived) blog explored those issues, in a very casual and pop-culture-tastic voice. 

In August I got to spend about two weeks in the same itty-bitty northern Wisconsin cabin I have been spending holidays at since I was but a babe. (A baby, that is. I’m still tots a babe WHAAAAT.)

***special note! I realize so many of these posts are starting with: Once upon a time, I had this experience blah blah! But I have been jotting down down social tech ideas for months, and have been thinking about them even longer, so there’s a lot to catch up on. STOP GIVING ME A HARD TIME. Just kidding, no one is giving me a hard time. Ever. About anything.

As I was saying, I was at this pine-tree-encrusted paradise of toads and canoes with my sweet mom, my SHOCKINGLYGREAT sister, and my INSPIRATIONALLY-SOCIALLY-TECHNOLOGICAL cousin.

So this is a lot of preamble to say that the most hilarious thing ever happened in the kitchen. There’s nothing even resembling the internet up there, but as I walked by the oven installed by my great-grandfather Forrest Bennet I SWORE TO GOD I heard the little chime of a new gchat. Ears muthrfkn perked up. Who’s talking to me?

It was a teapot knocking against the burner or something, but isn’t it SO FASCINATING how we are now so attuned to a set of sounds that didn’t even exist before? Certainly this is not a new phenomenon– the sound of a locomotive was a wholly new sound that became ingrained or whatevs, as was the ringing of the telephone– but the sounds we now associate with getting some kind of new information are so subtle. It’s not like “OH DAMN, THAT’S A TRAIN,” but instead like “Oh, that soft series of tones is a new email on my iPhone,” and “Oh, that background whirring on the song I made in GarageBand is my overworked harddrive,” and “Oh, that tiny click at the beginning of my PhotoBooth dance video is me hitting the space bar to start All The Single Ladies in iTunes.” (Wow, Apple should pay me a zillion$$ for that sentence. Barf, sorry.)