Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

I am the president of a European-based organization that focuses on collaborative projects between classes/groups of people in different countries and contexts, Our membership includes Israeli academics and Palestinian academics, the latter of which are often based outside of Palestine and in Jordan, Canada, the US.

In January, a member of our training team received an email criticizing her involvement in a panel that included a researcher from an Israeli university that has ties to the IDF. The email was from a Palestinian-American based in California who had spoken at a webinar on decoloniality hosted by our orginization but is herself not a member of our organization. The criticized member of our organization requested that we have an explicit policy regarding organization members collaborating with or being involved with Israeli organizations. The outcome of our discussion and vote was that individual members are free to choose who they partner with but when members are representing the organization that the management board vet the collaboration in cases of uncertainty or conflict to ensure the partnership aligns with our values.

Initially the question was targeted at Israel (i.e. whether we should collaborate with Israeli institutions) but some on the management board (including me) argued that this is too country specific and there may be other countries (like the US) that are similarly violating organizational values and we don't want to have to come up with a new policy for every country. Although not everyone supported this position (some wanted an explicit anti-Israel stance and others wanted to remain entirely neutral) this decision was passed by a majority vote.

Now I have been contacted by the editors of our journal who want to know what our policy is regarding journal editors having explicit political statements in their email signature. I believe this pertains to one of our journal's associate editors who is a Palestinian-Jordanian PhD student in Canada having an explicit pro-Palestinian signature in her university email, which is the email she uses for correspondence for the journal. I have asked the editor to submit this to the management board to discuss. 

However, on a personal level, I'm really tired and annoyed by people wanting a policy forbidding involvement with or explicit support of countries in conflict. I can understand this on an abstract level, but on a visceral level and because I am in a country where these specific countries and positions are being used by bad actors, I do not want to indulge the banning of any of them. It is possible the email signature promotes genocide, but that is a step beyond being political (which is what the journal editors were worried about). To educate is to be political and all of us in the organization are in the business of promoting internationalization and global citizenship. So banning political signatures seems to really misunderstand what the hell we're doing. 

At the same time, I question my own thinking on this. I do not want to abandon our Israeli colleagues, many of whom despise what their government is doing and are advocating for peace and support for Gaza. I also do not want to tell people who are facing the obliteration of their people and culture to tone down their email signature - what the ever-living fuck!

The good thing out of this is that it is making me aware of my values on some level, but it is also making me question whether my values are right in this situation.

I just returned home from my last conference of the academic year. I was in San Diego sharing an AirBnB with two academic friends and due to a logistics mix-up, we ended up having to use Uber quite a bit to get around. At one point towards the end of the trip, I asked my friends their approach to tipping and rating Uber drivers. This is because they seem more comfortable using Uber and Lyft than me and also had a lot of opinions about a number of App-based things that I don't use or don't use as much and I thought they would have good advice. 

To my shock I learned that neither of them tips, except of exceptional service and they only leave ratings if there is a problem! They were adamant about this. I felt a little crazy because I do tip and give maximum ratings as much as possible and I wondered if I had been doing it wrong all along.

I also learned that they had never heard of tipping hotel cleaning staff (e.g. leaving a tip in the room whenever you have it cleaned). That one I learned about when I was older and started reading travel guides about tipping in different tiers of hotels for the different services. They also seemed to object to tipping cab drivers too and said that they tipped people like their hair dressers, who they had an ongoing relationship with. 

I was really beginning to doubt myself since there were other things this weekend that left me feeling like an oddball that didn't know social rules, so I reached out to another friend to ask about Uber tipping and she was adamant about tipping and rating at all times, My husband was also surprised to hear about the no-tipping tendencies of my friends and pointed out that the algorithms food delivery services deliberately lower the base pay drivers receive to make them more more reliant on tips. He surmised the same model was probably at play with Uber. 

I'm not alone in my preferences but I wonder just how much more common my friends' nontipping/non-rating practice is than my tipping/rating practice. 

How often and how much do those of you who use services like Uber and Lift rate and tip? And what factors affect your choice to do so or not?

I am in Denver for a big academic conference which makes me happy on some level because I get to see cool people. The state of the US is casting a pall over many things, and I realize this will probably be the last time this conference is able to attract many/any international scholars so I am determined to enjoy the presence and energy of my colleagues in the moment.

Traveling means that yesterday I was offline for a good portion of the day as we flew, checked into our hotel and scoped out the different locations for the conference, and wandered around downtown Denver looking for places to eat. This means I was not fully following the news, at least in the format I consume it which is to see what people are talking about in social media spaces. 

I awoke at 5:00am local time, which would have been 7:00 back home and saw a text message from a friend in Sweden that simply said: "Checking in. Saw the news. Any immediate effects on you?" and a sense of dread bloomed in my stomach because I didn't know what I had missed and how bad it was that my friend texted me about it.

I immediately got online and started my day looking for "news" about things that might directly affect me. I saw there was a fire or explosion that had shut down Heathrow airport, which is going to affect some people traveling to the conference. People are still sharing their stories about being detained for long periods of time by ICE  or turned away at the US border, but that is not new.  

Then I saw that another drunk angry guy had been appointed to root out all forms of race consciousness in higher education and my stomach dropped even further. I figured that might be what my friend was referring to and yes that is going to have an impact on me because I have modules about culturally responsive pedagogy in my courses and just three weeks ago when talking about bias in AI, we read an article in Science that unpacked the covert racism in ChatGPT4 and several other AIs. 

I texted my friend back to find out what news and she said the executive order to shut down the Department of Education and I felt relieved it wasn't something worse. The government has been dismantling the DoE in parts and already shut down arms associated with foreign language education, which is directly related to my area. The effects of this on the major journal in my field that I blogged about in a previous entry is something I had planned to ask about at the special session being held at this current conference concerning the impact of the administration on our field. I want to know what plans are afoot to save this journal and the research published there and to offer help if needed. 

Mass layoffs in administration were also going to have trickle down effects on support for students with disabilities, IEPs and 504 plans and this came up in the online townhall meeting with my senators that I attended in February. But there is so much other stuff going on that we as teacher educators need to be able to help teacher candidates with that are ongoing whether the DoE exists or not - like ICE raids at schools and on campuses and how to protect/prepare/comfort children when this happens. 

I was touched my friend was reaching out to check in on me, but I still have this ball of dread in my stomach and that is how I am starting my day. This is why I am typing this entry here now. It is a strategy for an outlet of anxiety so I can release this ball of dread and also not carry this negativity and fear into every interaction I have going forth throughout the day.

My husband is out of town again for the week and I am on my own too much. I don't sleep as well when he travels but it is worse now due to anxiety about the world and future. I'm rewatching the Witcher because the monsters of that reality don't seem as scary as the monsters in this one. It is interesting that my escapism right now is taking me to fantasy realms instead of romance or mystery. This is probably related to my constant feeling of powerlessness and inability to recognize my own power. There are a lot of stories about average people coming into their power in these magical worlds and that is a counterpoint to what I see in this present realm.

I'm also on social media too much and that is bad. I have ingested other people's fears on top of my own and this is not making me feel more resolved or hopeful.  I need to limit my social media use. I think I will come up for a plan for that because I am just harming myself. I've done this before with my anxious attachment issues - I watch too closely and fixate on collecting as much information as possible to hopefully find that one glimmer of hope to prove to myself that my worst fear is not true. In reality there is no amount of information that will guarantee I won't be abandoned or that life will be safe or good. The incessant search for hope is doing me more harm than good.

My head feels heavy and my eyes ache from not enough sleep. I am going to make myself go for a run now. Hopefully that will clear my head. 

My laptop was on its last leg so I bought a new one in December. I am not good at password managing and it's taken me time to get back into all the things I that I regularly accessed by computer. 

In other news, I do not work in a state or for a university that's all about complying in advance with bullshit.. Maryland and UMBC seem to be more interested in suing the federal government or just ignoring things that are not laws for as long as possible. I have increased the amount of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in my teaching materials out of spite. This includes reading an article in Science investigating and uncovering the anti-black covert racism in several Gen AI tools. We read this in my class on computer-assisted language learning last week because it was an excellent illustration of linguistic profiling and a modified matched guise study technique, both of which have a long history in sociolinguistics of revealing bias.

In less awesome news, my husband and I have officially been affected financially by these policies. He was PI on a grant funded but the State Department. The grant was already slated to end in September and so we were preparing for that, but he received noticed last week that it had been cancelled/ended. now. The last payout for the grant will be this Friday which means we will see about $8000 less than anticipated this year. 

We will be fine but we will have less money to put into retirement or set aside for helping with his aging parents. Less fine are the people hired by the grant. Francis spent some time trying to see if they could still maintain health insurance through the university somehow. 

I realize I engage in catastrophizing and I don't want to make things worse for other people by spreading around my negative thinking. At the same time, I find it helpful to externalize my thoughts and fears with others so that I don't spiral into despair or just feel too crazy to talk. I am trying to find a balance here.