I have been lucky to have had many great teachers during my academic life and mentors who continue to enrich my intellectual pursuits. In this post, I want to write about only three of them. The first is Graham Fulton. When I first met him, he was a psychology professor at University College Sedaya International…
A Science of/for Human Beings
Reflecting on the title of the book, Psychology as the Science of Human Being: The Yokohama Manifesto, it occurred to me that we can read the title in two different ways. First, psychology can be, and should be, a science that is responsive to human beings, to the messiness and ambiguities of our reality. According…
The Delightful Fellowship of Francois Laruelle
I was one of the participants at a 3+ hour workshop on Francois Laruelle held by Incite Seminars. The workshop was facilitated by Glenn Wallis who opened the session with a personal note about how he had first encountered Laruelle’s work and how that encounter has influenced his own projects, most notably (thus far) his…
Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
In a recent trip to the nearby bookstore, I bought two books. One of them is Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature and the other is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I just decided to right-click and to add “Lamott” to my browser’s dictionary, not just because I was…
My Days in Leiden
During the year I spent in Leiden (2015-16) I did almost nothing that would count as academic productivity. In fact I cannot think of any other postdoctoral researcher, who I have met or have heard of, less productive than me during that year. It wasn’t that I didn’t have ideas. I had many ideas, enough…