Birds and Boats

I cannot believe it is my last week here in Scotland.  I am incredibly sad to be leaving Scotland so soon. Last Thursday, my class and I traveled to Anstruther on a coach bus and this bus was incredibly comfortable because there were many seats open with only eleven students occupying these seats. Once we arrived in Anstruther, the day was beginning to warm up and there were numerous people who were riding the boat from Anstruther to the Isle of May.  The boat ride was incredible because the ride itself was incredibly calm.  As we continued onto the Isle of May, I saw many birds flying around the island because the island is a preservation for many species.  I saw baby puffins trying to fly in the air only to lift off the ground for a few seconds and the birds then landed back on the ground.   Furthermore, I saw some dolphins swimming around and the boat was about 45 minutes altogether.

After we arrived at the Isle of May, the tour guides gave us a brief introduction about the island and then we had about two and a half hours to explore the island.   They informed us that the Isle has numerous puffins and that we need to stay on the path so we will not step on the eggs of puffins.   As I started my walk up the hill, I accidentally veered off the path and was rewarded by a puffin attacking my face. After this incident, I was able to continue climbing and got to see the birds flying around in their natural habitat.   I got to observe the behavior of these birds and I have never seen so many birds in my entire life.

Visibility

Scotland has moved from industrial to post-industrial state. One can see the evidences and characteristics throughout the place easily. The capability of being readily notice is the definition for visibility. I am interested in seeing the different aspects of development of Scotland especially about how Scotland is putting effort in being environmental friendly. Therefore, I have chose visibility as the theme for my study abroad program.

Post-industrial - taken from http://www.bloglet.com/understanding-the-values-of-a-post-industrial-society/

Since I have decided the topic that I want to focus on, I start to do the research. Then, I have found a surprising fact which is Scotland has been one of the leading roles in sustainable developing in Europe. I have never thought that Scotland would be a candidate for being so environmental friendly and then, I begin to wonder the reasons behind it. After some research, I have found various evidences from small to big or digital to physical objects.

Flag of Scotland - taken from http://www.desktopc.com/2193/scotland-flag-wallpaper.html/scotland-flag-wallpaper-2

From my perspective, I think the tone that the Scottish government uses on its energy website encourages its citizen to participate in a series of activities of install renewable energy equipments. Thus, one can see solar panels install on the roof of the individual household. Another visibility example is the hand dryer in the restroom. In Scotland, most of the restrooms provide only hand dryers instead of paper towel. Replacing paper towel by hand dryer will save water, trees and reduces solid waste and the amount of resources depletion. There are numerous case studies conducted at schools to prove that the use of hand dryer is more environmental friendly than use of paper towel produced from recycled materials. The last example that I want to use to demonstrate visibility of being “Green” is the tram in Edinburgh. Tram only relies on electricity to power, so there is zero emission. It also decreases the usage of cars and transport significant number of people to Edinburgh airport.

GREEN Earth - taken from http://technology-green-energy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/green-earth-technologies.html

After being in Scotland for one and half months, I really think other parts of the world should follow it as a paradigm to make Earth a better place to live on. This blue giant, Earth, has once been beautiful and clean. However, human activities have polluted and destroyed it. If we do not start working on restoring or at least improving the environment, human may extinct before we are capable of travelling and residing in another planet. Please cherish mother Earth!

Cruachen power station

Local Stranger

Night view of Dundee - by author

Port of Dundee( Marine Parade) - by author

Penguins in clothes at the side of church - by author

RRS Discovery Ship - by author

University of  Abertay Dundee - by author

Royal Mail: Sending Packages Internationally

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. 

Walking in a Rocky Wonderland

In last week’s post, I discussed how a few places we have visited have created programs designed to teach certain audiences about their subject, be that the history of jute or the development of bridges. This week my focus is still on education, but in a more general sense: how can learning spaces outside the classroom affect what and how we learn?

Consider my expedition to Siccar Point, arguably the most significant geological outcrop in the world. It was here, in 1788, where James Hutton found proof of his theories of the geologic unconformity (a gap in the geologic record) and his ideas about deep time. In the classroom, thousands of miles away in West Lafayette, I learned the facts about Siccar Point in the context of the history of geology, with a few interesting pictures to illustrate the point. I can remember thinking “that’s a nifty outcrop,” my professor (perhaps jokingly, perhaps not- it was sometimes hard to tell) say that geologists have a religious experience when they visit this site, and not much else. When the opportunity arose to actually visit this mecca of geology, I knew that it was important, but had almost no idea what I would actually learn from the experience.

Gaining access to the point was both more and less difficult than I expected. More, because I had misinterpreted the online directions I had obtained and ended up walking eight miles instead of one and a half, and less because there was a significant number of path markers and “you are here” type maps along the way. The Coastal Path walk itself was incredibly beautiful, with views from the cliff tops over the North Sea for most of the journey.

The map at the head of the Coastal Path. Photo by author.

The cliffs on part of the Coastal Path. Photo by author.

t the trailhead marking the location of Siccar Point, there was an interpretive sign explaining just why in the world this location is important, and why you should visit. It summarized Hutton’s findings, and described how those findings went on to affect the development of geology and of science in general. While this information wasn’t new to me, I felt that just by reading it in this setting, less than a kilometer from the point itself, made it more significant.

The first interpretive sign. Photo by author.

After a tense ten minute walk through a pasture in which I was forced to dodge innumerable piles of cow leavings, I found a second sign, this one specifically discussing the geology of Siccar Point. It described the order in which the geologic events occurred and how we know those events occurred. Again, I had already been exposed to this information in class, but now that I was just a few hundred feet from this historic site, it suddenly had more weight. What I was about to see was history, and it was personal. This was one of the reasons I applied for this study abroad in the first place, and the fact that I was actually there, at that moment, made the information I already knew become personal as well.

The second interpretive sign. Photo by author.

And then, finally, I climbed down the last hill and got my first view of Siccar Point. There is nothing quite like being somewhere you have seen in pictures, read about in textbooks, known that, although you might want to get there sometime during your life, it is probably out of your reach, and then suddenly you actually do get there, and realize that the pictures don’t do the place any justice and the textbook descriptions suddenly seem so clinical and meaningless. One of Hutton’s traveling companions remarked that “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time” as he described the scene at the point. When I first heard this, I thought that while it probably did feel significant, to say that it caused giddiness was probably an exaggeration. I was wrong. I spun around, trying to take it all in at once. I hopped from rock to rock, knowing that this was exactly where Hutton had been and what he had seen, and even though that was 226 years in the past, it was less than a moment compared to the true age of this place. I touched the unconformity, just because I wanted to see what 55 million years felt like. And I took my one (and only) selfie for this six week trip with Siccar Point in the background. I did, in fact, become giddy.

Siccar Point from above. Photo by author.

Panorama of the area. Photo by author.

Some of the folding is visible here, as well as the more horizontal sandstone layers. Photo by author.

Hutton's Unconformity (55My). Photo by author.

Beds folded nearly vertical. Photo by author.

The view looking back towards land. photo by author.

The all-important selfie! Photo by devilishly hansom author.

Actually being there, seeing this with my own eyes and reading the signs along the way, allowed me to understand the idea of deep time in a way that I never had before. It was an idea, an abstract concept that I understood but didn’t really get. I get it now. Thinking about deep time still makes me dizzy, but now I understand it not as a sense of confusion, but one of vertigo as I stand at the top of a cliff with no base, looking down into a past so distant as to be unknowable except for the evidence that survived hundreds of millions of years so that I could stand there on the shore of the North Sea in Scotland with my mouth open, speechless.