Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Welcome to the Middle Finger Awards 2012 presented by Mashed Musings. The awards honors the best news makers of 2012 in various categories. We are committed to an unbiased and honest approach toward selecting the nominees and the winners. If you have any concerns about any of the winners not deserving his/her award, please keep it to yourself.
So, lets begin the ceremony.

*Drum rolls. Trumpets Blaring*

Here is the first category :

The Middle Finger Award for the Most Courageous act of 2012

And the nominees are :

Dr. Manmohan Singh – for gathering enough courage to address the nation 7 days after the protests and letting everyone know that he too is a father and there aren’t enough commandoes protecting his daughters. Theek hai?

Sheila Dixit– for having the courage to come to Jantar Mantar and lightening something that looked like a half burnt candle while the…

4th Global Conference
Space and Place

Monday 9th September – Thursday 12th September 2013
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations
Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other” constructing a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; while ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of reconstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about…

I’d been hoping to move a rather urgent paper on this month, another PhD-derived one that really needs to beat the 1st April 2013 submission deadline, otherwise I’ll have to pay dearly for it to be published due to the new UK Open Access rules. But I’ve been rather knocked out of late, and haven’t finished the transcribing I’d hoped to do. I have my own microfilm machine at home, and the relevant records on film, but haven’t been well enough of late to sit down and work through them, which is not good.

But to move things on despite all this I’ve been looking tonight at developing other parts of the paper. Some time ago I had made lots of notes in a text editor, jotting down ideas for a rough structure. But I was struggling to see beyond these, and to properly see the bigger picture. So tonight…