I just read a book (Trent Jacob’s The Authentic Dissertation) about alternative dissertations—-using art, fiction, dialogues, indigenous ways of knowing and so on for doctoral dissertations. I have to admit, my dissertation process was completely the opposite of anything vaguely related to “experimental.” My process was about jumping through hoops to try to please my [ Read more … ]
ph.d.
Our Work is Larger than We are
In No More Secondhand Art, Peter London wrote that artists were custodians of issues larger than themselves. This is also true for those of us working in diverse areas of social change: our tasks our larger than we are. Our work isn’t simply a matter of expressing ourselves properly, fixing what appears to be broken, [ Read more … ]
Love is the Soul of Genius
Mozart said, “Love, love, love—that is the soul of genius.” And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed that “People cannot learn what they do not love.” Unfortunately, in our intellectualized society, where the power of the word nearly always triumphs over the power of the heart, having feelings (or dare I say, passion) for something isn’t [ Read more … ]
Giving Birth to Beauty
To create is always to learn, to begin over,to begin at zero. — Matthew Fox In John O’Donohue’s book The Invisible Embrace of Beauty, O’Donohue mentions St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that beauty was the perfection of a thing. “To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence.” According to Aquinas, [ Read more … ]
