Productive (adj)

I'm part of the organizing team for Philopolis Guelph, a philosophy conference that engages with everyday topics and includes the whole community, not just the academics. Here is the call for activities! Daily life is full of interesting philosophical issues (How ethical are my eating practices? Why do I believe what I believe? What does it mean to be sexed or gendered?). However, academic philosophers these days could be doing a better job of engaging in dialogue with members of the broader public, including researchers in other academic fields, who are also interested in these questions. Philopolis is an event that aims to facilitate just such an exchange through panel discussions, workshops, and activities of many kinds. Philopolis welcomes and actively encourages the curious of mind from all backgrounds to take part, drawing on this diversity to enrich the whole. The event is generously supported by the University of Guelph, and offers free admission as well as light sna...

There have been some pretty exciting developments in the last few months, and my poor blogging skills mean you may not have heard about any of them. Get ready for a barrage of updates! February: I applied to York University's  Science & Technology Studies graduate program . It's an interdisciplinary field that looks at science and society through the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. This program seemed like a better fit for my project on wildlife films and the public perception of animal behaviour. March: I was accepted (yay!) and began preparing for the transition from U of T to York. We also got an exciting new desk, courtesy of IKEA. April: Isaac proposed and I sad yes! (I told you this would get exciting!) May: Loads of travel. I attended the 6th European Spring School in History of Science and Popularization on Visual Representations in Science, which meant a week on the sunny island of Menorca, Spain. Then I flew home to Montreal...

Happy New Year! Holiday baking update: the anti-procrastination baking worked really well. Having baked all kinds of things before the holidays, I was both able to give all kinds of decorated cookies to loved ones and I was better prepared to bake "on the fly" during the holidays when the cookies had long run out (unexpected benefit). It turns out that loads of techniques that you use in one kind of recipe transfer to improvisational baking, where you try to make the best of the ingredients you have on hand. My best "on the fly" baking experience was a Victoria spongecake in someone else's kitchen; the centre didn't quite bake for long enough and therefore collapsed a little when the cake was cooling but apart from that it was a success. I took almost 3 weeks away from Toronto for the break, and it was exactly what I needed after a December of frenzied writing. That's not to say that there wasn't a lot to do - paperwork, emails, planning and so on. A...