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thelongestway · 3 months ago

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Fictional sociology is hard: electric boogaloo number whatever! It's fun how, even in fiction, you wind up cutting about half of your theoretical chapters and getting rid of your most flowery metaphors. Which is kind of sad, because we all know this one sociologist absolutely would lean into The Magnus Archives references even more than I left in. :P

Chapter 22: Poison

ART helpfully informed me that Greaves was Aspen's cluster name when they were human, so I said, "Yes. Why?"

Thiago dropped his head into his hands and groaned loudly.

"And here I thought I'd finished with the most embarrassing things in my life at least fifteen years ago," he said. "Apparently not. "

"Is there a problem?" ART said.

Thiago sighed and straightened his back.

"I--Not really a problem, no. Not like our imminent attack. It's just--that's not the way people should find out about this sort of thing. I really should be braver and talk to Aspen about it."

"No, you shouldn't. And what sort of thing?" I said.

Thiago opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he sighed again and looked up, like he was looking to ART for confirmation.

"This might not be easy to explain. But the short of it is that they're not on the list."

I remembered how Aspen had skimmed Thiago's file looking for a data point and how they re-read it more carefully later. They hadn't seemed particularly surprised or bothered by what they found.

"Yeah," I said. "And how is that a problem?"

"It's--" Thiago tried talking again and stalled again. Then he got up from his chair and paced like he was in a classroom. That helped him talk. "SecUnit, imagine that you wrote incredibly famous books, and before your departure into space on a Javelin-class ship, you were known all over the world for them. Somehow, you survive the next few hundred years torn away from the greater part of humanity, and then you re-emerge out into the world at large and find--."

He stopped, hugging himself uncomfortably before he started pacing again.

"You find that history has judged you, as it always does, and that it has decided your books were never really that good after all! That your work was only popular because it captured a certain spirit of the age and happened to be published at just the right time! Centuries later, your oh-so-famous books aren't even considered to be good enough to make one of those overwrought literature lists containing everything that your professional community considers to ever have been remotely worthwhile!

"Even worse, because they were so widely published, your books have become the kind of curiosity that clueless show-runners immediately hit upon when they're researching an age gone by and say 'why weren't we given this to read at university? This is so interesting!' And then they go off and use your work to misrepresent the time period entirely. It is, quite frankly, a social scientist's worst nightmare."

Huh. It didn't sound that bad to me.

"Aspen's work is in shows?"

Thiago laughed despite his distress.

"I shouldn't have mentioned that, it derails my point entirely. But yes, a lot of contemporary media makes use of Dr. Greaves' work. Cold Sleep Explorers, of course, and then The Outer Wilderness and even Worldhoppers borrows a lot of the framing. They're not usually credited, which is an abhorrent practice in itself, but if you've read the books, you start to recognize their fingerprints, and they're not uncommon."

I could see ART's interest spiking at the mention of Worldhoppers. Even I found myself a little curious.

"But you know about them. Did you find out from a show?"

"No," Thiago said miserably. "Worse than that. I read about them because I had to do a research methods paper back in the university. I was bored and wanted an exciting topic, so I wrote about the dangers of becoming desensitized to threat alerts when operating under constant pressure. Aspen was… A cautionary tale in one of my textbooks. They were very public about their work, and received a lot of attention about it--including death threats. Which they mostly ignored, as such things are rarely acted on. Things went fine for a time, until a real attack happened and people died."

"Including their sister?"

Thiago lifted his eyebrows in surprise. "Yes, but… How do you know that?"

"Aspen told me they'd gotten her killed. But I don't know the details."

"Well… I wouldn't have put it quite so harshly. They worked in a dangerous and brutal time."

"That's not how they see it. Aspen said they ignored their security's advice, which got their sister killed. Was that in your textbook?"

Because if it was, I wanted to read it.

Thiago frowned.

"The example in the book was more about the inevitable consequences of living under constant non-resolving threat. There is a certain dynamic--when there are too many false alarms, people begin to perceive them as noise and…" He shifted uncomfortably.

"Go on," I said. This was suddenly relevant to my interests.

"It's a long story, and we may be short on time," Thiago said. "Besides… I didn't put my paper on the effective warning ratio and how it changes under different circumstances on your reading list, but if you're interested, I can send it along. That might be faster--and more useful. I wrote it well over twenty years ago, I couldn't give an effective summary right now."

I nodded, and he sent me the file. I scanned it quickly, and--what the actual fuck?

"You didn't mention Aspen tried to kill someone."

Thiago grimaced. "That's why they were in the textbook. It was a memorable anecdote, so it survived the ages. Aspen thought a CEO responsible for the Javelin Program was behind the attack. But instead of trying a normal non-violent approach, they just walked into a business meeting about their books and pulled out a knife. They didn't manage to inflict any real damage, but they tried."

Well, at least now I knew why Aspen bled knife imagery whenever they were agressive. And that I was probably wrong about them using Thiago as bait. Because from all available data Aspen didn't hide behind other people when they were threatened. They attacked directly and personally, using their own hands, or knives, or tendrils, or whatever the fuck else they had available.

Which meant our current situation was weird. Why were they stalling? Hacking someone wasn't nearly as high-stakes as murder, and they obviously weren't averse to breaking into a hostile installation. We were missing something. But what?

There is something about their situation we haven't considered yet, ART agreed on our private channel. Then, aloud: "Interesting. Can you tell us more about their work? Perhaps that will grant us some insight."

"Well… I think their best work isn't actually the books, but an early paper that's brutally critical of the Big Data problem. I even assign it to students from time to time, at least to those stubborn enough to make it through something called Plentiful Leaves and Poisonous Fruit: Against Big Data Approaches. Ancient Arborean metaphor can be difficult, and this paper is written by a young and frustrated author, which shows."

Yeah, I wasn't going to read that. Even to find out whatever the fuck it was Aspen implied about my analytics.

"Give me the short version."

Thiago grinned. "I'll do you better." And he quoted, mimicking Aspen's tone:

"Work conducted via Big Data approaches can be invaluable. Its plentiful leaves often shelter us from such horrors as lack of funding or, less trivially, inappropriate generalizations from a small sample size. But in tending such seeds and letting ourselves rest beneath the resulting boughs, we must remain wary of the poisonous fruit they inevitably bear. The ceaseless watcher learns nothing new from the wretched things it observes sequestered in the Panopticon. Delusional and functionally blind, all it sees are twisted reflections of its own biases, until it drowns in the very bile it has produced."

Thiago looked at my drone and then up at ART's ceiling, waiting for our reaction.

That passage was the opposite of helpful, ART said to me.

But I wasn't so sure. I was getting a weird feeling. Like I was coming up closer on a target.

"What's a Panopticon?"

"An ancient thought experiment," Thiago said. "There are still debates as to who its author is--Foucault or Fukuyama, or even if those two are pseudonyms of one another--sorry. The point is that it's a prison with a single central intelligence that observes the inmates, who don't know whether it sees them or not and whether they will be punished for their actions. Pre-Neocambrian theorists thought the uncertainty was an effective means of control in itself, worse than being under constant known surveillance."

"So like Aspen themselves, because they can see most things on the station. Except they're not a prison."

Thiago hummed, surprised.

"That's… Actually a very interesting question, SecUnit." He said. "Because I'm certain the author of that paper would not want to be a Panopticon. But… Perhaps that is what they have become anyway. I don't know how far their analytical modules reach, but I do know that there are points where getting more data becomes useless at best and detrimental at worst. Not to mention how being under constant surveillance must affect the people in their care. They may not think much about it, being born to the node ships, but I would bet Aspen does."

ART shifted uncomfortably. Yeah. I wasn't liking what I heard either. But now I was getting a picture, and it didn't feel wrong, or terrifying. Just sad.

I got up from my seat.

"I think I need to go talk to them."

"May I offer a suggestion before you do that?" Thiago said.

"Yes."

"Don't go straight for the conversation. Let the insight settle for a bit before you talk. Good old-fashioned cranio-ocular analysis helps with that."

"What the fuck is cranio-ocular analysis?"

Thiago smiled at my drone. "Go onto the station. Find a spot. Sit down. Shut up. Watch."

Shut up and watch, huh.

I could do that.

#the nameless fanfic #ttou #time to orbit unknown #tmbd #horrible crossover thoughts #my writing

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sociologyontherock · 6 years ago

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Of Time and Serendipity: Sociological Roots and Surprising Swerves

By Anne Martin-Matthews

In October 2018, I stood on the stage of the Corner Brook Arts and Culture Centre at a Memorial University Convocation ceremony as Dr. Holly Pike, a professor of English at the Grenfell Campus, gave a 10 minute “oration” on my career. I was receiving an Honourary Degree. Her perspective on my career was fascinating (certainly to me, anyway!), in its clever juxtaposition of prospective and retrospective views of time, and how I have integrated both throughout my career. It conveyed a sense of consistency and logic to ways of thinking that I had (apparently) manifested throughout my career – something that I had certainly not “seen” (in myself) before. Few of us have the opportunity of hearing others describe us, and our careers, in this way – with a perspective that was, with Dr. Pike’s deft touch, both thoughtful and reflective (without boring the young graduating class).

At the time, I was keenly aware of how social gerontology considers reminiscence as part of a life-review process, a typical aspect of socialization for old age. Often thought to be an inherently internal, psychological process, reminiscence is generally considered to be adaptive, enabling individuals to assess and reintegrate their lives. A well-known sociologist of aging, Victor Marshall, advanced understanding of a life review as much more than a mental process. He re-conceptualized it as a social process: not just thinking about the past, but also engaging with others in talking about the past, where in true symbolic interactionist fashion others help us in confirming or (re)defining our lives: “When people get help from others in re-writing their auto-biographies, they are more likely to develop ‘a good story’ of their lives” (Victor Marshall, 1980, Last Chapters: A Sociology of Aging and Dying).

Anne Martin-Matthews

This life review of a sociologist’s career is in response to Stephen Riggins’ invitation to write for this newsletter. However, my agreeing to do so, with my own reminiscences and reflections, was prompted by a recent sequence of events. First, in July 2018 came the 40-year milestone anniversary of my first academic appointment, at the University of Guelph. The death of Victor Marshall, my doctoral supervisor, mentor and collaborator, in August 2018, was a genuine loss, and prompted my reflections on how his life and career had impacted my own, as I collaborated with long-time colleagues in publishing about him in the Canadian Journal on Aging (2019, 38(2)). Then, in October, the MUN convocation oration mentioned above. And so, in this process of reminiscence and life review, I hope to convey the “good story” of the career that Newfoundland, Memorial University, and sociology have given me.

Time – and timing – are central features of enquiry for those of us interested in the sociology of aging/social gerontology. In research on aging, we make distinctions between age, cohort and period effects. “Age effects” reflect changes (typically, physical) with the passage of time (typically measured as time since birth; more recently being measured retrospectively in time from death). “Cohort effects” are related to the historical time of a person’s birth, with those born around the same time often sharing a common background and view of the world. So, I am a baby boomer – and that tells you a lot about me, my habits, values and lifestyle. Finally, “period effects” are due to time of measurement, when circumstances and events may have different influences on different age cohorts. So many aspects of (what I now look back on as) a wonderful, dynamic, stimulating career have been influenced by my experience of cohort and period effects.

Typically, I have attributed these influences to a fortuitous serendipity of timing. I was born in St. John’s two years after Newfoundland joined Canada. Thus, I started at MUN in September, 1967, in the glow of Canada’s Centennial Year celebrations, and benefiting from Premier Joey Smallwood’s offer of free tuition to Newfoundlanders as first-year students. My career aspiration was to become a journalist, and hence I enrolled as an English major (taught by prominent Newfoundland scholars such as Patrick O’Flaherty).

As a requirement of my English major, I had to take an Introduction to Sociology and Anthropology course. That brought me to the memorable day of social anthropologist Elliott Leyton’s introduction to the concept of “cultural relativity.” On the board, he wrote: “Nothing that you have ever been taught is true.” This notion truly challenged me – a product of an Irish Catholic family and a Catholic convent-school education – on multiple levels. There was a world view that was an inherent part of being an Irish Catholic in Newfoundland back then; one of the very first things you would know about a person (reflected in their name, or at the very least, which school – in a parochial school system – they attended) was: “are you Protestant or Catholic?” The concept of cultural relativity brought another level of understanding and insight about others’ beliefs, values, and practices. Concepts such as this hooked me on the idea of switching my major to sociology!

In the maze of portable buildings (where the QEII Library now is), at the entrance to the Department of Sociology, graduate students in the department had, at some point in the early 1970s, erected a banner: “Welcome to the Department of Sociology: Home of the Minnesota Mafia.” The banner’s message reflected the many connections between the two sociology departments: Minnesota-trained faculty (such as Roger Krohn and Noel Iverson) had left MUN before my time; but during my two years as a sociology Major (1969-1971), Minnesota-trained faculty included Ralph Matthews, Jack Ross, Robert Stebbins and Fraine Whitney. Other (then) current Minnesota faculty were visiting professors at MUN: I remember a fascinating 1970 summer course in Urban Sociology taught by Gregory Stone, who brought his family to St. John’s and attracted much attention, driving around in a converted hearse, painted white.

One course in particular was an especially impactful experience for me: Fraine Whitney’s research methods class. There, he offered us an opportunity to help Morgan Williamson, a graduate student in sociology, to complete the data collection for his Master’s thesis – subsequently completed under the title “Blackhead Road: A Community Study in Urban Renewal” (1971). Several of us volunteered to be trained to conduct interviews on “the Brow” (now known as Shea Heights). The Brow was a completely “other world” back then: dilapidated housing, no water and sewer facilities, known even then for its “night soil” trucks and what were called “honey buckets.” The lack of basic sanitation services, and the poverty of the living conditions of residents, was unlike anything I had seen in St. John’s. But the people were quite welcoming, and gave me an exceptional opportunity to experience first-hand how sociological inquiry could advance insight and understanding. As I completed my assigned roster of interviews, I became increasingly committed to the idea of a career in sociology.

There were comparatively few female professors during my undergraduate years at Memorial, and in sociology the only one was Lithuanian-born Marina Gorodeckis-Tarulis (briefly at Memorial before returning to her home in Venezuela). In a one-on-one directed studies course that I took with her in the fall of 1970, she strongly encouraged me to consider application to graduate school – an option that I had been completely unaware of prior to that. No other professor had ever, in any way, implied that I might possess the aptitude for a graduate career.

Eventually, I accepted an offer of admission from the Department of Sociology at McMaster University. That decision was influenced by a combination of several factors: McMaster’s generous offer of scholarship support; Hamilton’s proximity to Toronto (where my Dad, who was in the hardware business in St. John’s, would periodically come for trade shows); the familiarity of other MUN sociology grads “going to Mac” too (though, ultimately, they’d be homesick and leave before Christmas); and one of the MUN professors, Ralph Matthews, was moving there too. (I might add that I was third on the “alternate” list for admission to McMaster, after all their “first choices” had made their decisions. This fact – and the subsequent requirement that I take additional sociology courses to make up for the deficiency of a 4-year MUN degree that was not an “Honours” degree – made my receipt, 25 years later, of McMaster’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, all the more sweet, I must say.)

Although I could not have known it at the time, what would become the framing for my entire academic career was, in fact, cast almost immediately upon my arrival in Hamilton. First, I rented a flat in the home of an elderly widow, Mrs. Pelma Erskine, and quickly became aware of – and at times immersed in – her social world of older (often widowed) women, their mutually supportive friendship styles and their issues and concerns.

Second, I enrolled in Victor Marshall’s sociology course on Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology, and chose to present one of the elective readings, David Sudnow’s book Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying. This is an ethnographic study of “death work” in an acute care hospital, and the relevant social treatment associated with dying. Both these experiences opened my eyes to aspects of living as an older person (and a woman, especially) and to the social aspects of dying and death in modern society.

While I retained my core interest in social and organizational aspects of transitional life events and my commitment to my Master’s research on Newfoundland migrants living in Ontario, I was greatly impacted by the timing of a period effect. Almost simultaneously, numerous countries were establishing professional organizations to promote the study of aging and gerontology; Canada was no exception, with the establishment of the Canadian Association on Gerontology (CAG) in 1972.

A newly-minted PhD himself, Victor Marshall was highly involved in building this new field in Canada, and as a founding member of the CAG. His scholarship and enthusiastic advocacy of studies of aging quickly engaged a cadre of my fellow graduate students in sociology at McMaster. The field of social gerontology and the sociology of aging was, quite literally, born in Canada just as I embarked on my graduate studies and, in working with Victor Marshall, I was right at “ground zero.”

No courses yet existed, but I became the Teaching Assistant for the special topics in an “Age-Related Studies” course that Victor Marshall offered at McMaster in 1972, and the next year I enrolled in his graduate directed-readings course, unofficially known as “sociology of aging.” While I took the course out of personal interest (with no particular aspiration beyond that), in the process I researched and wrote a lengthy paper on role changes associated with widowhood in later life – with the purpose of collating and synthesizing a body of inter-disciplinary research (much of it, social psychological) on widowhood. Constructs of role exit, role loss, and widowhood as essentially a “roleless role” pervaded the literature. I became interested in whether role change (or “exit”) was in fact the basis of identity change in widowhood, or if, rather, a redefinition of self, along with the behaviours of particular others and attitudes and structures of society in general, contribute to the social (re)construction of self and identity.

In 1974 (after being “advanced” to the doctoral program and completing PhD course work before I had even started collecting data for my Master’s degree), I completed the MA thesis (“Up-along: Newfoundland Families living in Hamilton, Ontario”), based on interviews with 61 Newfoundland families who had migrated in the previous two decades. (The interview data are now on file in MUN’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies.) I applied Frederic LePlay’s constructs of “stem” and “branch” families, to understand ties to Newfoundland and extent to which Newfoundlanders had established a community (formal and informal) in Hamilton and area. And, indeed, many study participants told me that, “lately, we’re tending to see more of foreign people, too” – foreign people, in this case, meaning non-Newfoundlanders.

On the other hand, I was quite intrigued to find evidence of another pattern: Newfoundland migrant families told me, “The last three years have made a difference with the Newfoundlanders here. With the children growing up and getting married, you go to your children’s houses to visit, instead of your friends…. You visit the kids, and if there’s time, you see your [Newfoundland] friends later. Then the hours are gone when you would have been together.” Quite unexpectedly, then, I was confronted with a generational, age-related explanation for what otherwise might have appeared to be evidence of assimilation of Newfoundlanders into the social life of Hamilton.

While I had hoped that the issues identified in that early widowhood research paper would be the basis of my doctoral dissertation, external constraints rendered this impossible. My PhD studies, initiated when I was still completing the Master’s research on Newfoundland migrants in Hamilton, were funded through a doctoral fellowship in Urban and Regional Affairs, from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. CMHC, understandably, expected my continuing research focus on issues of housing, migration, or urban affairs. In my original proposal to CHMC, I had proposed to study women’s experiences of long-distance family relocation. Thus in order to keep my funding, I pragmatically decided to rekindle my interest in this topic, completing a doctoral dissertation applying Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’ concept of status passage (1971) to examine women’s experiences of relocation and the “moving career.” My commitment to research on aging would have to come in my post-graduate life, it seemed.

I have described, in some detail, this early stage of my career, the stage of developing my sociological roots and training, because, in fact, this was to be the most consistently and overtly sociological phase of my career. For, in 1978, I swerved.

In her best-selling book Becoming (2018), Michelle Obama describes several swerves in her own life: consciously making an abrupt change of direction, often involving moving away from a previously chosen career path. In 1978, on the job market, still ABD at Mac, and only seeking academic work within a 100-kilometre radius of my home life in Hamilton (I had married Ralph Matthews in 1974), I received two job offers from the University of Guelph. One was a one-year contract as a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology; the other, a two-year contract as a Lecturer in the Department of Family Studies. The position in Family Studies would allow me to teach courses in social gerontology.

The opportunity to teach social gerontology prevailed. As a result, I spent the next 30 years of my career (20 of them at Guelph, 10 at UBC) in more “applied” social science departments, working alongside colleagues with training in economics, psychology, sociology, education, nutrition and dietetics, and focusing on issues of the life course, aging and behaviour.

But here, once again, the serendipity of timing propelled my career forward. When the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada launched its Strategic Grants Division in 1980, one of the three themes identified was in “Population Aging”! It took a bit of doing to persuade the Senate of the University of Guelph to endorse a proposal initiated by a couple of untenured Assistant Professors in the Department of Family Studies, supported by a senior colleague in sociology and another in psychology – but they did. We developed a competitive bid and won in the 1982 competition (competing against the University of Toronto, I should add). I led the Gerontology Research Centre at the University of Guelph for 12 years, from 1983 until 1995.

Yes, the research and scholarship were primarily “applied social science,” but those years certainly provided me the opportunity to bring a sociologically-informed perspective to my research on aging and later life. And, in a research context that was becoming ever more focused on multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research, I gained valuable experience in collaborating with geographers, psychologists, family economists, and even researchers in nutrition education and public health. This proved useful when, in 1990, I became one of four Co-principal Investigators on CARNET: the Canadian Aging Research Network. CARNET was the first Network of Centre of Excellence led by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and including, among its 26 network members, researchers funded by all three federal funding councils. This level of multi-disciplinary collaboration was unprecedented at the time.

Throughout those years, I maintained my own active research program (independent of the Gerontology Research Centre): writing a book on Widowhood in Later Life; publishing with my doctoral students (some with backgrounds in sociology) and colleagues on the gendered nature of filial care, care and caregiving, social supports in later life, aging and health behaviour, home and community care. Female colleagues in the sociology of aging (Ingrid Connidis, Western; Carolyn Rosenthal, McMaster; and Sarah Matthews at Cleveland State University) assured me that my work was sociological, even as I doubted that I was, any longer, a real sociologist. I recall that my doctoral supervisor, Victor Marshall, who maintained a strong reputation as a sociological theorist while active in research on aging, occasionally let me know that I was going a bit too far into “this caregiving stuff.”

And, of course, I collaborated with Ralph Matthews on several research initiatives – the most substantial being a SSHRC-funded study titled “Social and Psychological Responses to Infertility and its Treatment.” Ralph, indeed, likes to remind me that, despite my many publications in social gerontology and the sociology of aging, my highest citation is of a publication with him titled “Infertility and involuntary childlessness: The transition to non-parenthood,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1986, 48(3): 641-649.

Despite all those years outside a Sociology Department, a major source of academic connection for me became the Research Committee on Aging of the International Sociological Association (ISA). I found a true scholarly and intellectual home there, alongside colleagues with “real” sociological credentials and affiliations. Research Committee 11 provided the perfect context for presentation and discussion of my scholarly interests, the focus on the study of aging in multiple contexts, but quite explicitly within a sociological frame.

By the time I was elected President of the ISA Research Committee on Aging (2010-2014), I had spent more than a decade at the University of British Columbia. Again, there was some serendipity at play in that process: with an email unexpectedly landing in my inbox at the University of Guelph in the fall of 1996, inviting applications for the position of Director of the School of Family and Nutritional Sciences in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at UBC. (The School at UBC was much like the department in which I had spent nearly 20 years at Guelph.) Although another swerve, this time into academic administration, was not something I had ever considered, it became a vehicle for a mid-career move at a time when I was ready for a change. So, instead of moving east (as we had long thought we might do one day), Ralph and I, with two teenagers and a dog, headed west to Vancouver in December 1997.

Having assumed that moving to such a large, research intensive institution after nearly 20 years at a much smaller one would guarantee anonymity (a new little fish in a VERY big pond), I was surprised by the array (and pace) of challenges, opportunities, and some quite unanticipated swerves of those early UBC years. Within six years, I was in the Faculty of Arts, serving as Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, and then, for 10 months, Dean pro tem. Surprisingly (!) enjoying some aspects of academic administration, but worried about its impact on my research career (which I was not yet prepared to abandon), I was just settling back into life as a “regular” faculty member, when the opportunity for making the most unlikely swerve in my career, unexpectedly came along.

It began, of course, with another coincidence of timing, another period effect. In June 2000, the Medical Research Council of Canada and the National Health Research and Development Program of Health Canada (from which I had received funding) merged to become the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). With a mandate to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a strengthened Canadian health care system, CIHR was composed of 13 national institutes, one of them an Institute of Aging (IA). I had been serving on the IA’s inaugural Institute Advisory Board and was very engaged in that role, working to support the Institute’s Scientific Director in setting a research agenda in aging across biomedical, clinical, health services and policy, and population health research. When the Scientific Director (a geriatrician) resigned unexpectedly, I had the opportunity to apply for a job that, I immediately realized, I really wanted. This was as far away from sociology as I was ever going to get, and yet it afforded the opportunity to help set the national and international research agenda in my field of research, in aging – an extraordinary privilege and opportunity. I became the first (and, to date, only) “card carrying sociologist” to become a Scientific Director of a CIHR Institute – a position I held for two terms, from 2004-2011.

In my Scientific Director position, I was seconded from UBC on a .60 full-time equivalency basis (crazily unrealistic, in truth), but this “balance” enabled me to champion initiatives for the Institute, as well as maintain my own program of research. That research had assumed a particular focus when, in 1999, my mother was paralyzed by stroke, and, as I later wrote (in “Situating ‘home’ at the nexus of the public and private spheres: Aging, gender and home support work in Canada,” Current Sociology, 2007, 55 (2), 229-249), “home care entered my family biography.” For the eight years of my research stipend from CIHR while I was Scientific Director (and otherwise ineligible to apply for CIHR funding), I conducted research on the roles and perspectives of publicly-funded home care workers, older people as clients, and family members at the intersection of the public and private spheres of home-based health and social care services.

At CIHR, I had inherited from my predecessor a commitment to explore the feasibility of a Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging (CLSA); a very “big science” initiative; and I did. I am not a “visionary” and I would not ever have developed the idea for a CLSA – a 20-year study of 50,000 Canadians between the ages of 45 and 80 (at point of entry to the study), to examine the complex interplay between biological, social and behavioural aspects of aging. But I am a “process person,” and once convinced of the unique potential of the CLSA to advance understanding of aging, it became my driving mission to work with the research team to secure CIHR’s support for, and funding of, this ambitious initiative. The CLSA was launched in 2009, with one of its 10 Canadian research sites based in the Health Sciences Complex at Memorial University.

There were other initiatives over those 8 years at CIHR, with an especially meaningful one for me being the launch in 2006 of what has become an annual week-long Summer Program in Aging, bringing graduate students from all fields of aging research together from across Canada. But the CLSA is the key legacy of those years.

I returned full-time back to UBC in 2011, to an appointment in the Department of Sociology! At last, my sociological career had come full circle. (The move into sociology had actually occurred in 2008, while I was still part-time with the CIHR Institute of Aging, fully 30 years after my first academic appointment at Guelph). Aging is a very marginal research focus in this department, and so all but one of my PhD students have come to me via the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program.

Nevertheless, I graduated my first PhD in sociology in 2017. I taught my first (and only) graduate course in Aging and Society in the Department of Sociology the same year (with 2/3 of the course participants coming from disciplines other than sociology). And in 2016, I published a paper, “The Interpretive Perspective on Aging,” in Vern Bengtson and Richard Settersten (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Aging, 3rd ed., pp. 381-400. My name appeared between two bona fide sociologists, my doctoral supervisor Victor Marshall (then at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Julie McMullin of Western University. By then I was beginning to think that, just maybe, I am sociological enough, after all.

Recently, in cleaning out my sociology office (I retain a .20 full-time equivalency appointment in sociology as I assume a new role of Associate Vice-President Health at UBC), I came across a paper that I cited in my 1978 job talk in the Department of Family Studies at the University of Guelph. I could not have imagined then how the words of Stella Jones, in a publication titled The Research Experience, would so aptly capture the essence of my own academic (and, indeed, coast to coast, geographical) journey: Jones described doing research as “analogous to a journey across the country. [It] can be an experience with many serendipitous turns.… The traveler and the researcher alike find that the best laid plans must frequently be altered in transit. Unexpected delays occur; last minute changes in routing are sometimes necessary.… Such unexpected factors may add to or detract from the total travel or research experience” (pp. 327-328).

Certainly, I swerved – and often – between sociology and social gerontology (and various academic footholds around and between), and between scholarship and administration. Best laid plans were, indeed, altered in transit. And, as Dr. Holly Pike so insightfully deduced, my research has indeed juxtaposed prospective and retrospective approaches in the effort to advance understanding. This has become particularly pronounced now that I have become what I have been researching and teaching all through my academic career: a senior citizen. This has occasioned some self-reflexivity in my approach to my research, as I bring the “perspective of time” back to topics that I have researched and written about previously.

But there have also been two constants. While some other contributors to Sociology on the Rock have described themselves as an “accidental sociologist” (Porter, 2008) or a “reluctant sociologist” (Felt, 2012), my roots in sociology run deep. Memorial and McMaster gave me that. Victor Marshall, as my career-long academic mentor, and Ralph Matthews, as the sociologist who has been my life’s partner for 45 years, have kept me grounded in sociology even as more applied science, health research, and academic administration pulled me frequently away.

And then there is that other constant for me – The Rock itself. As I said at the end of my convocation address, “The Future is Aging,” to the graduating class at MUN’s Grenfell campus in October 2018: “For those of you who are from Newfoundland, or feel that you now belong to Newfoundland, I encourage you to honour these roots. This is a special place, and please don’t forget that. I recall how full my heart was at my graduation from Memorial 47 years ago, knowing that I was leaving soon to go to graduate school ‘on the mainland.’ I did not know then that I would not return to live here permanently – though I did marry a Newfoundlander, and have come back countless times almost every year since. I took it as a tremendous compliment when my mother said of me, shortly before she died, ‘Anne left Newfoundland, but Newfoundland never left her.’ Please do not ever lose the Newfoundland in you.” As for me, I’m inclined to think that I never have.

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thesnhuup · 8 years ago

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10 Things I Know About You, Higher Education

As we pass the one-year anniversary of the launch of Academically Speaking and 2017 is well under way, it’s a great moment to consider some of the observations we have made or refined about online education and models for nontraditional students over the last year.

As I noted when we began the blog, Southern New Hampshire University is a microcosm of the national higher education conversation, serving 80,000 students on our century-old, traditional campus; in one of the largest non-profit online colleges in the nation; and in our direct-assessment, competency-based college.

We are often asked about the lessons we have learned or the advice we would give about our experiences. We shared some of that in our annual report, Beyond the Ivory Tower, at the end of last year and here on our blog. Here are some of the key topics that seem to come up in our dialogues when our team presents at conferences or networks at events.

1. Learning Science has become one of those fashionable terms that people throw around almost as much as CBE or adaptive or personalized learning, and like those terms there seems to be little agreement on what exactly it means.

I continue to receive blank or confused stares when I ask well-established academicians to (1) define what it means to learn, (2) explain how learning happens, and (3) tell me what standard for assessment they have employed on their campuses to make sure that it happened (no, grades don’t count).

This lack of purpose and process clarity often is ignored when brilliant minds are employed to teach and exacerbated as those minds settle in and delve further—not into these questions, but into their areas of study. This creates an ironic situation: The smarter they get, the further they get from being able to communicate with novices in their fields.

2. The basic diagram for our educational experiences centers around three things:

Using expert practitioners working in the field paired with academicians teaching in the classroom to determine appropriate standard outcomes at institutional, program and course levels.

Using experts in psychometrics and assessment to figure out the most valid and accurate ways to measure those outcomes.

Creating the most effective (accessible, affordable, adaptable, etc.) learning environment for the various student demographics to acquire the new knowledge or skills necessary to demonstrate mastery on the outcomes when they are assessed.While these seem to be distinct, a key learning we found early on is the critical need for collaboration in all three of these phases. Outcomes remain almost the alpha and omega in this model, yet the design of those outcomes has to consider what measures of assessment are available and even the type of assessment needs to take into consideration the parameters available for a learning environment.JFK set an outcome of getting to the moon, but the outcome would have been unrealistic if he hadn’t recognized the learning process and time it would take to get there.When we first began, theoretically it made sense to have an instructional design team with their expertise working separately from an assessment team: different expertise, after all. But the result was great assessments that couldn’t be mastered in the time frame or given our student body. Upon increasing the collaboration between the two teams, a far more effective learning and assessment environment was achieved, sometimes by re-chunking experiences, sometimes by developing more relatable assessments (NEVER by compromising on ultimate outcomes).

3. When we began to consider accelerated education models for our student body, we committed an error that, in hindsight, was hilarious because it was exactly what we had cautioned many of our colleagues who were entering the online space at other institutions of higher education against.

You can’t just start with what you have and repurpose it. You really do have to take the time to get back to basics; reflect on mission, purpose, outcomes at every level from the institution down to the course section; and then create the student experience based on the new factors involved in the new environment.

Likewise, with acceleration we tried to build modules from current courses, breaking them apart with diagnostics to allow students to “test out” of the formative areas they already had mastery of en route to a common summative experience. Very quickly we realized that the scaffolded and interwoven design of learning in the more traditional versions of online courses did not allow for easy dissection into clean independent units, and even after we did create something viable, it was clear form a gap analysis and early student experiences that the parts did not add up to the sum in a satisfactory way.

Result: same as with converting from face to face to online. Take the time to do it right or you will have to take the time to do it over.

4. Any school that wants to do any type of large-scale, competency-based education program needs to have an early conversation about whether they want to be an institution that simply certifies previously accrued competencies or wants to create an environment where students can build competencies.

The model is very different and far more complicated for the latter, especially if you have a relatively open admission policy. Many students need guiderails as well as structure to progress; that very group of students will require a far more supportive learning environment if they are trying to master competencies for which they have not developed skills. Be prepared for that.

Online education requires a major reality check for those who think they can easily engage and generate quick revenue; competency-based-education requires not just a gut check but a full-bore inspection. Otherwise it will become a money-pit sucking down not only those involved directly but those on the periphery as well.

5. Deliberate design of our disaggregated faculty model has truly exposed some of the unrealistic expectations placed on faculty to be one-size-fits-all expert generalists: advisor, instructor, grader, designer, researcher, committee member and more.

There was evidence of this in my own experience as a faculty member, when students would show up in my office with personal, non-academic issues that I was in no way professionally trained to handle.

It has become far more apparent as we have considered the professional skill sets necessary for each of these roles. Something as seemingly obvious as writing valid assessment questions for a test or creating a supportive learning environment for students with disabilities take skill sets far beyond what most faculty members are prepared for. Future iterations of student experience will require far more collaboration, diversification and specialization than we have considered in the past.

6. There often is a substantial difference between what practitioners in the field and academics in the classroom expect for outcomes in a course of study.

When we begin any new program development we bring in a group comprised of both of these stakeholders, and often they take a while to get to consensus on knowledge, skills, dispositions and abilities expected for success on the first day of a job or profession. Engaging in such an exercise can open eyes on both sides to the limits and possibilities of the classroom.

7. A no-holds-barred conversation about the purpose of general education has resulted in some of our best work to date.

When we came to the table we rather quickly arrived at some common points of agreement, such as:

General education is valuable for the acculturation of traditional college students to broader worldviews and the skill sets necessary to navigate daily life employing those world views.

If we were going to have general education outcomes, there needed to be some clear, common, measurable KPIS in each and every course.

The real challenge came when we considered broad content areas for adult students and began building outcomes and learning environments for them. We still agreed on tackling broad worldviews in areas such as the humanities and social and natural sciences, but it was a real struggle to get out of the weeds to a curriculum that tackled core skills and knowledge — all the more so because every content expert wanted to privilege his/her area of study.

For example, when we raised the question, “What about employing social scientific approach to the world does every graduate need to master?”, the sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, etc., all retreated to their corners and began crafting discipline-specific outcomes rather than thinking about the way the social scientific worldview approaches interactions of cultures, organizations and individuals.

I think several of my literature colleagues stopped breathing for several seconds when I stated that as much as I loved Shakespeare and studied him for my master’s degree, it was not so important that every adult student read Shakespeare, but rather that we equipped them with the ability to read critically whatever it was that they were going to be reading in their lives.We did eventually get there, and then the real hard work began. If you think finding experts to build a general education curriculum with this framework was hard, try finding faculty who can step beyond their area of study and teach such an approach.

8. Good communication, particularly writing, is perhaps the single most important skill college graduates will learn.

Conversely, the essay is probably the single least effective and yet most popular way to assess skill sets when trying to determine competency in professional fields. Writing about something and doing it are not the same, unless of course what you are assessing is actually how well someone writes.

One of the challenges our outcomes and assessment team has worked on is balancing every faculty member’s insistence on effective communication with accurate evaluation of the other skill sets being evaluated, while our faculty training group has worked with instructors to not discard great thinking or performance simply because of poor writing or communication. In these instances the extra academic support provided beyond the immediate content area of the student will often be the difference between success and failure in both the short term and possibly for life.

9. Few things have impressed me more than the accomplishments of both students and faculty in the online environment who have traditionally been labeled disabled.

We have tackled head-on the need to support our most challenged students, and they have repaid our efforts by inspiring us with their brilliance, their determination, and above all, their unique contributions to the various bodies of knowledge. That is equally true of our faculty who, working from their homes, reach out and engage students who have never been successful anywhere before.For the nontraditional student body, it is even more true that motivation trumps intelligence, and the greatest ambassadors I have ever seen are the faculty and students whose voices now have the power to be heard.

10. In a fast-moving culture that prides itself on being agile and responsive, leadership has to ensure that communication is as transparent and effective as possible so team members at every level feel that change is happening with them rather than to them.

My team has often heard me say that God gave us two ears and two eyes but only one mouth for a reason—we should always watch and listen twice as much as we speak. Mastering the listening part of communication is invaluable, particularly in institutions where rapid innovation through iterations is as innate as breathing.

Change in the needs, nature and demands of students as well as the roles of faculty, vendors, technology and administration will only accelerate. To play on a paradigm quote attributed to Henry Ford, there is no need to keep arguing about finding a faster horse: the automobile that is modern education has been invented. It will improve over time, but I wouldn’t be investing in saddles if I were you.

So welcome to a new year! I look forward to continuing the conversation and networking we have started, and to all of us creating the next evolution of higher education.

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