Category: Psychology
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Defining
Read more: DefiningIn a small, completely random conversation with a neighbor not long ago, I recommended to her a shop with “cool earrings” in a beach town here in Michigan. She wanted to know what I meant by “cool.” Indeed, depending on when you catch me, this could mean any number of things: an ankh, a petroglyph…
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Communication · Development · Project Management · Psychology · Social Theory · Sustainability · Urban PlanningIn Transformation, It’s All Signal
Read more: In Transformation, It’s All SignalIn some media I’ve consumed recently, a woman speaker made a casual side remark that men act to act, and women act in context. I don’t know if those two categories are gendered, but I do recognize them. I have seen them play out repeatedly in projects, and I have been particularly keyed to them…
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Infero: the Dante Mystery School
Read more: Infero: the Dante Mystery SchoolReading Dante’s Inferno as an Initiated Text To the modern literary mind, Dante’s Inferno is to Hell what Milton’s Paradise Lost is to the Fall: a poetic masterpiece that has defined, even replaced, the imagery of its biblical antecedent. It is fitting and expected, then, for critics such as Dr. Luisa Vergani to claim…
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Urbanist Series – Blood and Soil
Read more: Urbanist Series – Blood and SoilOne of the advantages in looking at community organizing and development through the field of social work is that it consistently invites you to dilate the lens from micro to macro. I am always intrigued, for example, by how communities act collectively in ways which reflect certain psychological types. Drawing from the strength of interdisciplinary…
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The Road to Hell: Sublimating Suffering & the Collective Unconscious
Read more: The Road to Hell: Sublimating Suffering & the Collective UnconsciousWhen considering the various manifestations of the imagination during the early Middle Ages, such as visual art, literature, folklore and visions, one notices a certain Hell-centric obsession. The Apocalypse of St. Paul was but one example of this outpouring, notable because “it was the most widely known of all narrative tours of Hell.”[1] This vision…
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Just Whip It
Read more: Just Whip ItI moved to Detroit partly in response to a subconscious nudge which can never genuinely be broken down in rational terms: these nudges are Gestalt. But mentally, I expected Detroit to present every form of social questioning, and so it does. Daily, in just the small sphere of my particular neighborhood, sweeping issues of fundamental…
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My Airbnb: Hostess with the Someness
Read more: My Airbnb: Hostess with the SomenessI lived in diaspora from 2011-2014, traveling extensively while working internationally and engaging in barter agreements for housing while I went through my first post-bac program. When I entered my current graduate degree program and finally settled into my own place again, I decided that I would enjoy visitors through Airbnb, and it would additionally…
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Not Like Silver: Exploring Hell’s Fire
Read more: Not Like Silver: Exploring Hell’s FireThe Book of Watchers within I Enoch strikes the reader as a vengeful departure from its more neutral netherworldly predecessors, its pits of fire casting doubt on the frequently maintained assertion “that there is no belief in life after death in Judaism,” much less a “Hell” as Christianity has come to define it.[1] This perception,…
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The Way You Do Anything
Read more: The Way You Do AnythingI’ve been working on a project recently which I sort of fell into, as is often the case, just by showing up. Some parts of it I like a lot, others I could do without, but what I have been most frustrated by is the lack of collaboration and support by my program colleagues. Conceptually,…
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Impish Thoughts
Read more: Impish ThoughtsSo, I watched the Superbowl ad from yesterday which opens with apocalypse, in the conventional Biblical sense. Horrors are being visited on the world, the order of things is turned upside down: dogs are walking people; God is Black. This ad was listed in the “funny” section. The punchline is that all this mayhem is…