(I’m still sorting through my notes for the conference, next post will be some highlights, this one is more of a reflection.)

The theme of this conference drew out a lot of ideas that otherwise might not have been shared, and it certainly helped me recognize emerging areas of research that is inevitably going to intersect with information science. It helped tremendously to engage, if only for a few days, in the ethnomusicological discourse. There were many ways of thinking and talking that I haven’t done in a while, and some of it came back to me quickly, while others felt a little rusty. I began the conference as a stranger, as an outsider. By the end of it, I felt that I was surrounded by friendly faces, having established what Wenger might call ‘legitimate peripheral participation’.

Just as I found Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle helpful in conceptualizing my life trajectories as I was graduating high school (the more precise the location of an atom is measure, the less precise the momentum and direction can be measured, and vise versa), it has been replaced by Wenger’s theories about community and individual identity vis-à-vis participation. While it is clear that I am capable of engaging and participating in many established communities (information science, ethnomusicology, design thinking, etc.), it has also become clear that I have to be careful in defining my own trajectories, instead of being drawn into a pre-established and well trodden path (for at least a day I considered seriously what it would take for me to study in Oxford). They are very important in what I ultimate want to do, but they are the means, not the end, and therefore a dependent variable. What resonates in my mind is a statistic that I encountered in Dellaire’s memoir of his time in Rwanda, “Shake Hands with the Devil”. I am sure I had heard it before, but perhaps his experience of the world made it stick with me.

If the world was 100 people, less than half has the ability to read, one third would not have access to water, etc. Only one person in that village would have any kind of post-secondary education. Put in such a light, it seems obvious that the one individual in the village has a lot of responsibilities. Yet that is not always what draws individuals into academia. When the majority of people you know hold graduate and post-graduate degrees, with very similar career trajectories, that becomes the world. Anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, geologists and others that go out into the far and distant field are unique in that sense, but even they inevitably fall back to the academic paradigm of tenure and writing. Not much of what the academia do directly deal with the other 99 people in the village, and when it does it’s not really clear who we are serving. Often the intention to serve the communities we are researching is real, but institutional paradigms such as intellectual property ties our hands in more ways that you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no experience more satisfying than talking shop in an intellectual context. The act of reading and digesting text is a solitary process. It is in discourse, whether written or spoken, that we engage with each other by throwing what insights we’ve gleaned around to see what sticks. Such indulgence seems to me like the worst kind of injustice, and by virtue of being that one person in the village, I have the free will to do my tiny little part by making the choices that I am able to make.

So I am taking Timothy Findley’s advice to heart, as inscribed in one of my notebooks back in high school as well. Define who you are by the choices that you make in the times that you live in; that is how we make our contribution to the future.