Even erudite flies get smashed now and then for sounding too ‘school smart’. As one of many AU students not immersed in an academic social sphere, Jason’s ‘Fly on the Wall’ column seeks to aid and abet the success of others in his cohort. We won’t always be understood when we speak of what we are learning in school but we can rest assured that our education still has value.
His lighthearted approach to sociological philosophy stems from conducting field research at bush parties and working his day job reforesting the mountains of BC. Born in the city of Vancouver and raised on a farm in the Fraser Valley and an orchard in the Okanagan, he attained a diploma in Horticulture in the Creston Valley and then returned to school as a Sociology major. Today’s he’s an AU Master’s of Integrated Studies student who spends his spare time enjoying nature walks, snorkeling and reading whatever philosophical and sociological tracts capture his fancy.
Jason is fascinated with the micro-sociological thoughts and interactions that frame and demarcate our experience of daily life as well as the philosophical realm considering essential questions about what it is to be a human. It’s dense brush but Jason seeks answers where murkiness holds sway.
A Few Theoretical Influences: Louis Althusser, Isaac Asimov, Jean Baudrillard, Simone de Beauvoir, Aime Cesaire, Carol Clover, John Cummings, Kurt Cobain, Jacques Derrida, Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Hobbes, Agnes Martin, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber
How do We Select Our Electives? Why did the chicken cross the road? What leads us to choose a particular elective? Sometimes the process feels purposeful, as though we are fulfilling an interest that has haunted or intrigued us for eons. Other times we might feel like uncertain fowl meandering through the traffic of unexpected… Read more »
Winter months and distance education courses have one thing in common: they can both drag on interminably when we get bogged down. Yet, as successes pile up over the years, and remembering how far we’ve come since early childhood education, we can feel confident in the face of what appear to be long odds for… Read more »
Mired in coursework on a bleak February day I recall a common refrain from classrooms of my childhood. A student would plaintively announce, “I’m stuck!” Often it was during math class and usually the problem seemed utterly insoluble. As adult students these same struggles and doldrums can occur; in mid-winter it’s easy for even the… Read more »
Last year, we addressed the idea of us, noble scholars, reduced to asinine drudgery and suggested that behind our mild-mannered veneers we have a cornucopia of fruitful intellectual possibilities. We posed the question, is truth itself impossible? Education means philosophical inquiry, even if it’s only to realize that each act we engage in and each… Read more »
At AU we have all felt a lingering shadow of dread as a deadline approaches. Maybe we’ve squandered spare time we could have used to apply ourselves; perhaps life just got in the way. It’s as though we’ve revelled amidst plenty only to realize that our privilege can be crushed at any moment. Yet we… Read more »
Fwap, splash, fwap! Imagine a dream where you are ambushed and smacked across the face with a sopping filthy mop. Why this assault, and from who? A few feet away leers a dour figure. It’s the janitor of the building. What does s/he want from you? The answer is spat out in syllables at once… Read more »
“How is school going?” For students the world over, that question often invokes feelings of stress and anxiety about interactions with classmates. It’s been that way since the first cave family sent their kids down the mountain to an educational quarry. Essay deadlines and academic struggles are unavoidable if we are to succeed in university… Read more »
A nightmare scene: our vibrant student minds reduced to a brainless blob! Who cast this malevolent spell? Perhaps it was nefarious alchemy wrought by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who stated with slitting simplicity that, prior to language, “thought is merely a vague shapeless mass” (de Saussure in Allan, 316). Language possesses us and subjects… Read more »
Who hasn’t heard the phrase ’well-behaved women seldom make history’? Far fewer of us know who coined the phrase: Laurel Satchel Ulrich in 1976. In her academic research she studied obituaries of ordinary women “who lived and labored in silent obscurity” and realized that the ones who became known and notorious were those who challenged… Read more »
On dusky, late-summer nights bats flit and flicker by in what appears to be playful pursuit of insect prey. I marvel at how it might feel to actually be what, in German, is known as a fledermaus (Reverso-Softissimo, online). As a flying mouse, Id traverse the starry nights buffet and dance aloft with my nocturnal… Read more »