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
As you read these words in this moment how do you feel real? Words can bore us or they can carry us away; words can push and pull our minds and it’s up to us to decide how we feel about them. Our university education teaches us to think beyond the boundaries of our predilections. … Read more »
History, like life and learning, is about more than big moments. Graduations, weddings, fireworks, and final marks only serve as pointers on the path toward understanding the world and our place in it. So let’s pause and remember that, of 40,000 Canadians who served in Afghanistan, a full 10% are likely to be diagnosed with… Read more »
AU is about the small stuff, the learning that adds up to a worldview that matches our hearts to our brains. We inhabit strange times that nevertheless have parallels in history: be it fake news or raging pandemics, or new Cold Wars, the idea that many truths abide on the same planet, and that everyone… Read more »
The oldest neighbour in our neighborhood, Jim, the only one who precedes my family arriving in this bucolic British Columbia valley in 1985, just passed away. So will us all, like wisps of breeze and leaves on the trees. Our studies and our lives equally mean nothing or everything depending on how they make us… Read more »
What does an existentialist seagull caw? Pour q’uoi!?! (Why, they seem to ask.) Why are we here now, and how? That’s the backdrop to our learning as we seek to understand the world and our place in it. Our personal growth is part and parcel with this journey. The search for our meaning of life… Read more »
To translate our learning into a more personalized form of life, one where we forage and consume in the most of authentic ways, it helps to have space to breathe. Witness, then, the noble mudskipper, a fish living on land. The mudskipper is known best for the way it spits great gobs of mud out… Read more »
They say that if the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence that’s because it’s fertilized with bullshit. In the cultural paddies of late 1960s college campuses, Herbert Marcuse took this metaphor to heart. In his office were hippos. Why? Well, he loved how hippopotamuses could graze across the vast escarpments… Read more »
Wisdom and enlightenment require a sense of humour; if you don’t believe me, think of how dour and miserable activists often seem! Happily, rural life as an AU student is often devoid of such sandwich board simplifications of us versus them and good versus evil. The further from a college campus the less strident and… Read more »
Education teaches the practical skills of critical thinking but a sense of humor helps as well. Take summer heat; it can make studying an exercise in Lawrence of Arabia futility or it can test our mettle and produce a more tempered intellectual product: our AU selves! Knowing that learning is a matter of perspective, I… Read more »
While writing this I, as a male, note that the gleeful songstress commanding a mop in our kitchen is achieving fantastic things in part because I am not getting in the way of progress. She implores me to appreciate the consequences of her labours, and, while knowing that she values the earnestness of my efforts… Read more »