AAAs

After I published the last piece, I realized that I had not mentioned here that I also submitted a poster presentation abstract for the American Anthropological Association's meetings in San Francisco this fall.

I heard this summer that I had been accepted... another small victory on my way to this PhD thing.

However, since I have not really amassed much in the way of research on my actual dissertation project, I submitted the abstract on my St. Catherine work.

Specifically, I will be using the archival data I found in Santa Fe to explore the different ways that Catholic was performed at the school in the 1980s.  I am interested specifically in the way different ways of understanding religion and culture are portrayed in the school newsletters I read.

I have not started transforming the paper I wrote into the poster content ... and I have to go back to the archives to see if I can get better renditions of the pictures... but I will try to remember to share the poster here when it is done.

Digital Cuentos...

I just found out that my digital cuento about my grandma and St. Catherine's Indian School will be featured along with some of those of my classmates and a documentary about the Librotraficantes at a fundraiser this Thursday ...  I am honored to be in such company. 

There were times over the summer when I worried that I had spent an inordinate amount of time on the work for this class.  The paper and the video were both intensely personal pieces -- I cried a fair amount in the writing and the making of both the paper and the video.  I tried, when possible, to link this work to my dissertation, but all of my St. Catherine work is really personal.  It is about the resilience that my grandmother passed to us without ever saying a word about her experiences there (and a million other personal things).  But it is also about the power of educational experiences -- and in that sense, it connects to my motivation for my dissertation work.

I don't know how my video came to be chosen - or how many of my classmates' work will also be presented.  You can see all of my classmates videos here!  

No time to really unpack this ... but I can say it was a lovely little boost in the midst of all the work piling around me.  Sometimes hard work pays off (wink)!

I will take every little victory available to me right now.