Category: History
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The Schoolhouse in the Woods: An Earth Day Long Read
Happy Earth Day! Despite my best intentions for a monthly long blog this is only my second of 2023! This wasn’t intended as an Earth Day blog, but its seems apt to be publishing this today as a story about connection to place, love of natural landscape through art and community, and renewal. I have…
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Good Neighbours
I am pleased to say I had a good few ideas for this week’s short blog (again Thursday not Wednesday, sorry), but after attending an excellent webinar from the University of Guelph’s History Roundtable yesterday, i had to get a few lines down about it. As a researcher who often looks backwards to go forwards,…
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Sustainability: The Really Long View
This Tuesday I started back as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Waterloo on the undergraduate course ‘Sustainability: The Really Long View’, taught by Prof. Stephen Quilley. It’s the third time I have TA-ed this course and I love it! The course is designed to bring a sense of perspective on the problems we…
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Putin’s “Master Narrative”
The importance of stories and narratives in our sense-making and deliberative process cannot be over-estimated. Stories are “the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful…Narrative meaning is a cognitive process that organises human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes.” (Polkinghorne, 1988) “ You start to answer the age-old question ’ What am I to…
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The hedger and John Clare
Each hedge is loaded thick wi greenAnd where the hedger late hath beenTender shoots begin to growFrom the mossy stumps belowWhile sheep and cow that teaze the grainwill nip them to the root againThey lay their bill and mittens byeAnd on to other labours hie John Clare, in ‘May’ from ‘The Shepherds Calendar’ (1827) We can’t let…
James T Jones 