Draft Ideas: Recent Episodes
James Shelley
What happens to the craft of writing when the de facto global platform for sharing text no longer reinforces or recognizes the role or rights of authorship?
This Wednesday, I am participating in the Research Storyteller Summit at Western University. The event convenes cohort of people from our campus community for a “deep dive” into the intersection of storytelling and academic research.
Whether you are preparing a funding proposal, writing a journal article for publication, discussing your study with a journalist, presenting at a conference, or briefing policymakers, you are ultimately telling a story. Join us for a special, one-day masterclass on using narrative to articulate research clearly and effectively across the research lifecycle — with funders, reviewers, knowledge users, media, and the public.
The summit consciously and intentionally takes a “first-principles approach” to science communication. Here, we assume that communicating any knowledge (even the most quantitative “bench science” data) involves communicating with other human beings — creatures who are ultimately storytelling animals.
The exchange of ideas is, fundamentally, an affair of meaning-making.
The summit is this Wednesday, November 30, 2022, from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time. Interested in attending virtually or asynchronously? Here’s the registration form.
"Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves." - Gilles Deleuze
Thought experiment. Suppose you grew up as a feral child in the wild, marooned on some deserted island and raised by another species of benevole…
What if everything we pursue is an unconscious diversion from the insurmountable problem of death?
Humans generate mountains of data as we describe ourselves to one another, but who are we when we are not describing ourselves?
To be a human being is to have a mind enmeshed in the zeitgeist of society and language, not transcendent of it.
In today’s revisionist history thought experiment: Vitruvius prefigures the “form versus function” debate.
Proposition: functionalism shaped ideas about simplicity and ideas about simplicity significantly informed the thinking of the functionalists.