Hello friends 🤗
Another week down and the sun is starting to return to the sky. A mixed week in terms of productivity, but I have gotten a solid draft done for Hidden Worlds and had some fun with primary sources. What more could a little PhD student really ask for?
📆 Activities 🛼
Monday 18 March. Historical Perspectives writing group
Tuesday 19 March. Assessment, AI and Active Learning workshop
Thursday 21 March. 🧠 🧑🏼⚕️
Friday 22 March. 👨🏻⚕️
Sunday 24 March. Writing book review (at least, that’s the plan!)
✏️ Hidden Worlds chapter 🙈
This week, I have been adapting my Hidden Worlds workshop paper into a chapter for the edited collection. Should be straight forward enough, right? Well, in typical Beck fashion I have managed to complicate it somehow.
Some people say that the blank page is the hardest part of writing. I think that getting through the last 20% is just as (if not more) difficult. Not the ‘conclusion’ necessarily, since I don’t really write linearly. But the last 20% of work that tries to iron out all of the parts I struggled with and tie up all of the loose ends so that the end product is cohesive. The fatigue does not help at that point, either. Does anybody have any strategies for this stage of writing?
At least I have a draft now. Plus, I got to explore some really interesting ideas and excavate some exciting sources.
🧏 Deaf-Blind💡
Campaigns to recongise the white stick as a symbol for blind pedestrians started in 1930 and, in response, there was quite a lot of debate about whether there should be a similar symbol specifically for Deaf-blind pedestrians. And, if so, what that symbol should be. For a time, a white stick with a black handle was standard but nowadays (in Britain) it is a white cane with a red stripe. It would be interesting to know more about this. Especially since a red stripe near the tip has been the standard for white sticks denoting just blindness in the US since the 1930s. Filing this question away for a future project.
Anyway, there was a contingent of readers of the RNIB’s New Beacon, mostly Deaf-blind themselves, that were particularly active contributors to the discussion over the 30s, 40s and 50s. I have integrated some of their creative solutions into my Hidden Worlds chapter, but their ideas deserve a whole article in themselves. For now, here is a little taster:
A fan reading ‘Deaf’, attached to the white stick so that it fans out when held horizontally
Red glass letters reading ‘Deaf’ etched into the handle of a white stick and back-lit with a torch
An orange, red, green, or black stripe (or stripes) painted onto the white stick
Red balloons strung to read ‘Deaf’
💬 Quote of the Week 💬
‘The white stick, the hearing aid, the crutch, no matter how helpful, are stigmata that mark a man off from the common herd’
- Anthony De Silva, ‘I'd Rather Be Deaf’, New Beacon, August 1960
🧩 Entertainment 📺
🧩 Finished second gingerbread wasjig jigsaw!
🎮 Playing Hotel Transylvania: Scary-tale adventures on my Switch
📺 Watching The Apprentice, Ambulance, Gossip Girl and Desperate Housewives
📖 Continuing to read Becky. There’s quite a few time skips which frustratingly seem to skip over what should be the most interesting parts
🎨 Drawing more pokemon - up to number 28 now!
Sorry not sure I have any ideas for the last 20% of writing. At least Easter is round the corner and a few days for recharging