Monday, June 4

 

 

I woke up to find that the weather has changed. The wind has risen and clouds have filled the sky. I remained optimistic and cycled to work in shorts and a t-shirt. I wore a cardigan as a precaution, and within fifty metres of leaving the house I felt glad I had it on.

I had a ferociously busy day, consisting of lots of separate things that required switching from one thought to another. I started with a tutorial with a student who had had trouble getting her thesis started. This time, she promised, things will take a different turn.

I then spent an hour and a half checking Eliademy and making sure that all of the elements in the summer course worked as they should. I then set up a welcome page and a Help Me! discussion in Its Learning for those few students who will inevitably fail to set up an account in Eliademy, for one reason or another.

I wrote an evaluation for one of the theses I saw presented last week, and then I attended a meeting that Mona Forsskåhl, the new rector, had called for all the staff. She presented her new organisational structure with a flow chart that looked different from the flowchart that describes the current structure. She also announced that our department, the Institute for Culture and Communication would now become the Institute for Culture & Media.

We all felt warm inside.

After this we had our first team meeting under our new name, and this lasted for over two hours, as we discussed various aspects of next year’s programme. Ann-Sofi had told us over the weekend that she needed an apartment in Helsinki for the summer, so I emailed Maria to ask if this might prove possible.

At 17:00 I began a two and a half hour Skype call with Scott Cunningham in ´which we looked at what we had achieved so far in our discussions and decided that we had effectively begun pursuing two parallel projects. One concerns itself with what Peirce might have to say about social media if we conceive them as “third places” in Ray Oldenburg’s meaning of the term. The second concerns the relationship between some of Peirce’s ideas, virtuality reality (in its helmets-on Oculus Rift sense), and Transhumanism.

Just after 20:15 I arrive home to find Sunshine deep asleep on the carpet, in that odd position he sometimes adopts, recovering from a wild weekend in the windy countryside.

I will receive a bowl of freshly made nettle and coconut soup, and it will taste so good that I will vow to scour the countryside for nettles for the rest of summer.