There and Back Again: a Retrospective Post

“I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure, and it's very difficult to find anyone.”

“I should think so, in these parts. We're plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things, they make you late for dinner.”

Returning home after the trip was almost surreal. It took about a week for my life to settle down, but when it finally did and I had the opportunity to sit down with a friend and let my mind relax for awhile, we decided to have a three day run of the Lord of the Rings movies, which he had never seen. I had the chance to think through the events of the last couple months. If anything, I think the above quote from the Hobbit describes my life before the trip.

I grew up in a suburb, doing my fair share of city traveling, making trips around the States with my family, but starting college, I’d hoped for the opportunity to study abroad. I didn’t know where or when, but I’d looked at programs as a freshman, hoping that somehow I could fit one into my schedule. For the first two years of school, that seemed impossible. I was told about the Scotland trip almost by accident, and I started looking into it on a whim.

My parents weren’t particularly fond of my desire for international travel experience, but I eventually won them over. It took time, but it worked. Looking back now, I was nervous, but at the time I did my best to hide it. Telling my parents I was worried wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

I can say today, without a doubt, that it was one of the best decisions of my life. Not only did I come away from the trip with international travel experience and a better idea of where I would like my future career path to take me, but also with a sense of mental and physical strength. Life has its twists and turns, and I’ve made it through many of late that I doubt I would have had the mental fortitude to handle before the trip.

As far as career direction goes, though I’ve always wanted to do something that would have a positive impact on others, I don’t think as many of the options were apparent to me until this trip. Medical writing, though perhaps not the most entertaining work to many people, has always held an appeal to me. Work with a medical technology company would be interesting and almost certainly fulfilling.  There are so many companies these days that work with teams around the globe, and I’ve always hoped I would end up working with a project that has a global element. The idea of improving lives on a global scale appeals more than ever, and the trip is no small part of that change.

However, my experiences also opened my eyes to small-scale work and the impact it can have. There isn’t a need to work for a massive corporation in order to impact other people’s lives. Before, I wanted to have a global impact. I wanted to make a change in the world, but remained blind to a number of issues in my own life.

The trip made it obvious: if you want to make a change, you have to start with the problems at home.

By no means does that mean that I’m not interested in a career in global communication, merely that if you want to fix something, you have to start small. You have to understand the roots of the problems through communication with a number of people, the more perspectives the better. I began to realize that making a difference or impacting someone else’s life didn’t have to be done on a massive world-altering scale. Small things, such as the nurse who took the time to explain some of the complexities of the NHS while riding the train or the man I ran into on the waterfront that talked with me about American politics, can make all the difference. Spreading knowledge and information doesn’t have to be on a massive scale to impact the world.

And you know what? That means it’s time for another Tolkien quote: 

“Even the smallest person can change the course of history.”

Maybe in this case, it will be small actions that have a large impact. Only time will tell.

On a concluding note: I am eternally grateful to the people that encouraged me to go on the trip as well as the people that made it possible for me to go. Though it may not be apparent just yet and it may take some time for me to find my path, they have made all the difference in the world. It may not seem like much, but it was the chance of a lifetime.

revisionist histories in progress

How many of you have heard of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh?

She and her sister were artists in Glasgow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They attended the Glasgow School of Art and then formed their own independent art studio. You can see some of Margaret's work in the Hunterian Art Gallery's Mackintosh Online Catalogue, courtesy the University of Glasgow.

But hold on... whose photograph is that there in the banner at the top of the site?

This is the other Mackintosh, Charles, whose surname Margaret shares because they got married in 1900. Charles Rennie Mackintosh did some cool things too. A bit of cursory digging around in the same online art catalogue brought up over 500 artistic/design artifacts under Charles's name. In comparison, there are 122 under Margaret's.

Maybe Charles was generally and honestly the more prolific creative, or maybe this collection is skewed his way for some other set of reasons. I do not know.

When we visited the Glasgow School of Art last week, our tour guide Lili explained along the way that though we celebrate Charles and his influence much more thoroughly today, it was his wife Margaret who garnered more fame during their working lives. How do we know? Mackintosh himself called Margaret a genius, but so often the work they did was collaborative--not easy to divide satisfactorily into his and hers. Both exhibited work at the 1900 Vienna Secession, both worked on plenty of architectural and design projects around Glasgow, together. Without doing a lot more research, I can't say who was really more regarded then vs now, exactly. But simply the idea that Charles has come to overshadow the female artists he worked with brought to mind a headline I noticed weeks ago: 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle, and Slaves' Narrative, an article by Kameron Hurley. In turn, Hurley's writing led me to others' on similar themes: Your Default Narrative Settings are Not Apolitical by Foz Meadows, and then from there to Tansy R. Roberts's unravelings of so-called Historically Authentic Sexism. Admittedly, these are not the most academic or theoretical or 'official' sources or platforms to turn to--they are concerned primarily with fantasy settings and the market for fiction, but before I knew all those details, the Hurley piece came to mind. So I went back to find it, read it through and followed a few of its links, and now I am applying some of the points from these pieces to some of the history and story we've encountered in and around Scotland so far.


Like Hurley, I too have "been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history." The notion of women's history as a separate field altogether--a separate set of classes, a separate set of textbooks, a separate level of influence--almost feels normal to me. It makes sense... But separateness isn't the only problem here. As Hurley explains, "pretending there’s only one way a woman lives or has ever lived--in relation to the men that surround her--is not a single act of erasure, but a political erasure. Populating a world with men, with male heroes, male people, and their 'women cattle and slaves' is a political act. You are making a conscious choice to erase half the world."

Erasure is a strong word. We couldn't really say that Margaret Macdonald has been erased, can we? And plenty of Scottish women haven't been fully erased by history--we can read about and visit a handful of memorials to women here in Dundee, if we like--and one even might argue that surely plenty of men's lives have been erased over time too. History can't make room for everyone, can it? Some people must be forgotten along the way, or nobody will feel very important. Some people just have to lose. Not everyone can have a plaque in the town square, right? Is any of this really a problem? Is it worth worrying about? I don't know.

Margaret Macdonald's wikipedia page is 1/3 the length of her husband's. Do we just happen to have more to say about him? Maybe.

I don't know.

Hurley writes, "Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things." In her conclusion, she acknowledges that "so what?" question, anticipating the "is this really worth worrying about?" objections, and widens the lens: "Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories and language tell us what’s important."

In German, the words story and history are the same word: Geschichte. I like to remember learning and being somewhat astonished by this idea. We consider the two from such varying perspectives most of the time, and sure, there are some differences between the things we call in English stories and the things we call histories... but not many. Neither is pre-determined and neither is ever unbiased.

While the analogy of cannibalistic llamas in Hurley's essay feels extreme to me, it is a successfully gripping introduction, at least. And the way Hurley uses the example, in some ways, brings me back to Andrew Feenberg (I wrote a little bit about his book last week) and Katie King (I wrote about her book last month) talking about black boxes. Hurley is seeing a single, lazy narrative concerning her example llamas and by analogy, concerning women. The shape of that story is so easy, so common, so normalized, that "our eyes glaze over, and we stop seeing [...] anything else." Once the differences get smoothed away, we can box up all the expected, traditional, standard things we "know" will be there--the elements and characterizations that seem to have worked so well for so long--into a shiny black square. We won't need to unpack any of it anymore--it works however it works and life goes on.

Nearer the end of Between Reason and Experience, Feenberg summarizes the black box concept again, specifically with respect to technology. He writes, "Standard ways of understanding and making devices are called 'black boxing' in constructivist studies of technology. Many of these standards reflect specific social demands shaping design" (178). Along with technological devices and gadgets, Feenberg mentions the market and bureaucratic systems as places where black boxing happens. I want to expand the idea even more; what if black boxes, as they make magical/invisible the design and standardization of devices, engines, markets, etc. also do the same to stories, as Hurley seems to see, and to groups of people and relationships in real life?

The women, cattle, slaves narrative is another instance of a black box. Women within that narrative become invisible bits and pieces--not because they aren't there, but because they fit a certain set of preconceptions which signal a certain level of insignificance, or at least lesser significance. Any kind of discriminatory prejudice could work the same way, not just the kinds based on gender. Sexism is complicated enough on its own, but it isn't on its own. It comes overlaid with plenty of other oversimplifying, reductive, unthinking prejudices. Our biased expectations of people based on any random characteristic, from hair color to gender to age--all of them take advantage of our tendency to put things in neat, tidy, little boxes.

Another word Feenberg uses for these sealed black boxes is "design codes." It has less of the great imagery of the black box metaphor, but it does gesture importantly to the non-tangible and more discursive manifestations of similar phenomena. Design codes. Official specs. Standard procedures. Traditional recipes. Ways Things Are Done. Sometimes such codes are incredibly useful, and they acknowledge important standards, guidelines, and functional patterns. But sometimes they need to change. Feenberg says so, too, admitting that "design codes are durable, but they can be revised" (178). Humans are good at revision. Change is a thing we've gotten pretty decent at. All the histories and stories, after all, yours and mine and the whole planet's, are still in progress. 

Learning About Learning

A short video discussing the ways in which Verdant Works and the Forth Bridge information center address their subjects in a way that is relevant to their audiences:

wet paint and the visibility of process

I've been seeing "wet paint" signs all over the place lately. Just this morning on our way to class we passed a few men with rollers and brushes re-painting the fence around the high school. Chalked warnings all along that side of the walkway warned pedestrians about the paint, marking a distance between foot traffic and the work-in-progress. In Edinburgh, too, there were placards placed outside several storefronts. I failed to take any photographs of them, so all I can give you are brief descriptive sketches of plain sandwich boards propped up under glossy window grates or simple laminated sheets of paper zip-tied onto open window shutters, all declaring "wet paint" and implying "please don't touch or smudge or disturb this area."

In Cockburn Street there was a man on a ladder, with bucket and brush, putting in a few lines of bright pink detailing behind the words "Pie"and "Sky" above a shop door. He was not accompanied (when I saw him at least) by any printed "wet paint" notice. His presence (and the ladder's) was enough of a warning, and perhaps the height of his hand-painted sign would exempt it from the need of any other.

Perhaps it is the few days of sun we had that's prompted so much repainting? Or maybe this kind of small-scale maintenance goes on constantly, and it's anyone's guess what's prompted me to notice it. The wet paint signs are a subtle and temporary form of redirection/crowd control. I am noticing plenty of other methods, less subtle, but presumably almost as temporary, for reasons beyond paint--airport hallways halved by plywood enclosures, whole streets closed off and walkways blocked by aluminum fences or orange cones. During my time in Manchester, a sidewalk diversion over/around a new tramway construction site seemed to shift several feet every time we walked back that way. There were men in orange vests and hard hats milling about, posted signs instructing cyclists to dismount and take care, and make-shift ramps from the existing pavement to the level where all this work was being done. Having recently read and written about Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, I started breaking all of these situations down using three technological categories: material (the fences, the ramps, ladder, paintbrush, the strewn-about tools), social (our training in walkways, the significance of orange vests and brawny workmen, our polite obedience to posted notices), and literary (the language and color of the posted signs themselves) tech.

Along with this, I thought about processes, and our tendencies to overlook them in favor of finishedness. We are often asked to overlook works in progress. Don't stop here--you might get paint on your sleeves. A tourist is not supposed to notice the unbuilt, unfinished sections of a city.

Well okay, a man on a ladder hand-painting a quaint pie-shop sign might add to the quaint ambiance of a place like old-town Edinburgh, but scaffolding around the grand, crumbly old castle will always be unsightly and unfortunate, right? We of course accept it as a necessary side-effect of preservation efforts and hope it'll all be finished and out of the way when we visit next time. It's a sort of trade-off.

If we are lucky, the construction scaffolding will be decorated with a pretty skin. This one (pictured above and below) around the National Library of Scotland caught my eye while we were in Edinburgh this week. Mixed in with the apologetic explanations for the building's state are little visual vignettes about the library's contents. It's a little bit advertising, a little bit educational, a little bit quirky entertainment, all sharing one lovely blue background.

The workmen probably didn't expect this tourist to be taking such intrusive photos of their worksite and its shell. This is not the main attraction; it's an underbelly, meant to stay as much behind the curtain as possible.

Are there material, social, and literary technologies mixed in here, as well? Sure. They are everywhere. Technical and professional writing (and yes, I count the doodles on this scaffold-cover as technical writing--don't you?) seem to combine them all in the most diverse ways whenever machines/tools/material tech + groups of audiences all need to work together using language and rhetoric.

Our class had the privilege of learning about and observing the work-in-progress of a new Forth road bridge, plus the interesting historical and technical details of the trio it will complete when it is finished. I was struck by both the grand, plodding pace of it all and by the deep, unpredictable necessity of engineering adaptations that have had to happen as part of the bridge-building process.

We didn't see any "wet paint" signs or their equivalent surrounding the new bridge site. We were specially invited into the education center to notice and bear witness to this set of spaces, despite their unfinishedness. There weren't any apologies for the state of things; rather, there was pride and confidence surrounding the project's huge arms and legs and lifespan. The histories and futures of the bridges were presented beautifully. 

Our role in such a space isn't like the role of the tourist confronted with a scaffold-wrapped monument. Our job is not to spend money and send postcards home anymore. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Not quite tourism, not quite school field trip, or something. Our invitation to the Firth of Forth this week did not come without conditions. We were invited so far, and no further. We were only allowed so much. In some ways the educational center and its staff managed our movements just like wet paint signs, aluminum fencing, and orange cones do with touristy foot traffic.

Who knows if this will become a theme for me or not, but I am very interested in where all these boundaries tend to fall and why. The lines (or do I want to call them grades or levels or spectrums instead?) between allowed and not-allowed, between unfinished and finished, between open-access and top-secret... how do they compare to the line between wet paint and dry paint?

(unknown)

While the plan of not planning can take you to the more unexpected corners of a country, it can teach you a lesson in just how much to plan further on in the future with, say, other trips. Studying abroad in the UK has yet been my biggest adventure and I have yet to regret the decision of leaving a comfortable life behind to settle for a month in an unfamiliar place with so many unfamiliar faces. The residents of Dundee and all cities surrounding have been welcoming and comforting to myself and the Purdue Study Abroad group attending. Some more welcoming and excited than others, such as Ronnie at the Ninewells Hospital.

After about a long roaming tour of the Ninewells Hospital here in Dundee, I trust that I know the ins and outs of the hospital. From Frank Gehry’s “Maggie’s Centre” out back above the landscape to the hospitalization learning center for students underground, the Ninewells hospital is equipped with many features I was seeing for the first time. The atmosphere gathered an entirely new focus and theme regarding the student’s performance skills. Hands on activity is emphasized in an entirely different fashion with microphones about the ceiling and mirrored windows for supervision purposes.

Aside from the post-industrial aspects of Dundee’s newer technologies, we went back a few years or so to the Dunnottar Castle dating back to the late 16th early 17th century in Stonehaven, Scotland. Cliffs as high as 5 story buildings held the ruins of a castle so old, only sea gulls and pigeons dared to live in the dark fireplaces and cracks of its remains. Dunnottar Castle inhabited some of the most beautiful sights I had ever witnessed in life with shores similar to that of what you would find in a Pirate of the Caribbean film, large rocks where the sea meets to the shore for daring adults like ourselves to hop across for a simple look into the life under its waters. And the waters of Scotland, let me tell you about the waters of Scotland.

Our next big adventure as a group consisted of fish, bridges, and airplanes just meters overhead. On our trip to the Pitlochry Dam, streams lined the streets and cottage houses along the way. The dam was quiet and content on one side while it’s process created stirring and blundering water over the rocks on the other side. Myself and two other group members walked into town after learning about the dam, discovering a bridge not so still with pedestrians walking across, and not to mention my first fish and chips since arriving in Scotland.

 Next up was the Edradour Distillery in Pitlochry which was my first experience at a distillery. This trip gathered a many first for me as it was my first hiking experience, my first tall waterfall (which was not man-made as I was expecting the entire time), and my first beverage tasting experience.  Above the treelines we stood on our hike to to the distillery taking in the range of green fields like nothing I had ever experienced. At 800 feet we continued to the distillery where we learned of casks worth a quarter of a million pounds alongside 3,000 other casks all stacked in one warehouse for the next several years.

Having not planned any of the trips thus far, Scotland has been an incredible exploitation of many firsts for me. There is much more to look forward to being only two weeks, or a third of the way into the study abroad trip here in Scotland.