Lørdag

Late last night we stayed up for tea with Parveneh (the woman from York) as we wanted to hang before she left today. Talking and talking...marveling at our ability to seamlessly speak of challenges, frustrations and personal experiences in and within the academy (and the power relations embedded within those) after meeting just under two days prior. We also did a rank by rank comparison of the UK model and Canadian model of academic hierarchy...very interesting and quite telling (they have a 'grading' system similar to what our university admins have). She also told us about the WUN meeting she attended, and is sending more information about it, as Canada has yet to join in and take part.

Found out that those beautiful purple flowers are called "lupins."

Up at the U just quickly after this morning's plenary address by Lynn Chisholm on "generations of youth, generations of knowledge, youth and knowledge generation" (I may just have butchered that, but I think it's close). She was inspiring and brilliant, even when I disagreed with a lot of the leaps took, connections made and conclusions drawn. Prefaced her entire talk with a straight-up admittance that the work she was about to discuss was laden with problems (what she called "curious tension") and stated she was going to commit the sin anyway because the issues embedded were important anyway (not a disclaimer, more of an acknowledgment of what all of us - and all of the big guns - do but never state outright). There's much to talk about here about her and her talk, but I'm going to let it simmer for a while before I put finger to key. Needless to say, it made the early morning walk more than worth it, left me with conceptual, organizational, semantic, stylistic and tonal food for thought and really feeling as though I learned many, many things. This afternoon should be spent playing 'ladies who lunch' and taking it slow, slow and easy...Hope that pans out! I've got some percolating to do...