This has been a challenging week indeed.  I have been pushed way beyond my usual domain of intellectual musings.  It feels as though my flabby, complacent brain has been given it’s first proper workout in years.  

I spent most of the week, until Friday actually, just reading up and listening to whatever lectures and podcasts I could find that related to the many “isms” that I found in the core readings and the subsequent “isms” that I encountered along the way.

Humanism

Posthumanism

Transhumanism

Essentialism

Instrumentalism

Constructivism

Cognitivism

Solutionism

Neoliberalism

Data capitalism

Subjectivism

Objectivism

Some of these terms I’d heard bandied about in conversation or read about in the odd newspaper article, but if I’m honest, I would not have been able to explain with any great depth the meaning of any of them.  I am going to start my own glossary of terms that I will put on the blog. It would be a “work in progress” – I think it would be an interesting exercise to see how the glossary might expand and how my definitions (and understanding) of the terms might change over time.

On Friday I felt like I was making headway and I was ready to attack the core readings.  What a sense of accomplishment I felt when I was able to make some meaning from the ideas put forward in both papers.   It has been incredibly motivating to have finally found light at the end of the tunnel.

In addition to my “isms” research I have also read as much as I could about developing critical reading and writing skills.  It has been a long time since I have been required to write and read at this level. I am going into this task as a novice and I am trying to shed my expectations of being able to master these skills on my first attempt.  For me this has been a very healthy paradigm shift and I’m hoping it’s going to free me from any impedimentary self-criticism.

Feb 3, 2019