Kakadu National Park (Australia): Aging reversal - Let's build 1 interactive #ActualVirtual #RealisticVirtualEarth for #WUaSAgingReversal (to complement - #RealisticVirtualEarthForLongevity :), at #WUaSCellAtomLevels & way beyond the relatively simple graphic in this #HMS video * * * Architecture * * * Quaker Academics (Friends' Association for Higher Education) * Sa’ed, did you by any chance attend the Ramallah Friends School growing up? Is it taught in Arabic, in part (I've heard that it is), also an International Baccalaureate school (and by some accounts, the best high school in the Middle East), as well being one of the oldest/older Quaker schools, since 1869, in the world? Friendly greetings in the coronavirus pandemic

Ma, Sandy, All, 

When I heard you were taking a (n online?) course on 'architecture of the 21st century' last night, Ma, I was reminded of Granny Brown's love of architecture, and talking about it (in Cincinnati esp.) a lot!, as well as having a curiosity about SF East Bay architecture, and even regarding WUaS. Could WUaS eventually begin to get houses for faculty and staff in the east bay, and in all 200 countries (since WUaS educationally seeks to be all online - with a big box, medium box, little box actual-virtual bookstores/cafes / computer stores / robotics stores / hospital technologies distribution centers - as the only physical aspect of WUaS currently), - and have these be interesting (or make this such) architecturally especially. (And how could a single realistic virtual earth for architecture - https://twitter.com/hashtag/RealisticVirtualEarthForArchitecture?src=hashtag_click - and - https://twitter.com/HarbinBook/status/1325896085961728000?s=20 -  help too). Sandy?

So I looked up, out of curiosity, 'architecture of the 21st century' to see what I found, and:

"Contemporary architecture is the architecture of the 21st century, no single style is dominant; contemporary architects are working in several different styles, from postmodernism, high-tech architecture and new interpretations of traditional architecture to highly conceptual forms and designs, resembling sculpture on ..."

The best architecture of the 21st century

The 16 Best Architecture Projects of the 21st Century (So Far)

15.3: Architecture for the 21st Century

But none of these mention residential architecture, interestingly, and which I could be most interested in even ... and possibly with robotics too (https://twitter.com/hashtag/RealisticVirtualEarthForRobotics?src=hashtag_click)! 

Fondly, Scott

am re-sending, with some additions, :) after an email bounce-back: 

Ma, Sandy, Ann, Cathy, Alden,

Thanks, Sa’ed, Cara, David, Walter, Donn (All),

Thanks for your timely and topical Friendly "Quaker Academics' conversation on April 27, 2021: 

FAHE 4/2021 video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h7Rv29L4osQdepMEUbQoXt1bjAqkLF0V/view

Text chat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Op2ef1AcjLIp5mZi0Nw1YD7IaY0yVzLL/view

Here are some of my and Cara's (and David's) communications about this from my April 28, 2021 blog post -https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/kemeri-national-park-latvia.html (at bottom, and posted below) - and even potentially regarding hiring Quaker graduate students to teach 'to' MIT OpenCourseWare at WUaS.

Sa’ed, as NtFriendly-informed CC-4 MIT OCW-centric wiki World University and School grows (and as WUaS partners with edX, also founded by MIT, and Harvard), it would be great to stay in touch about growing free-to-students' online degrees (Bachelor, PhD, Law, MD and IB high school - in Arabic - and in all 26 or 27 countries, out of ~200 countries per Olympics, that speak Arabic as their official language). 

Sa’ed, did you by any chance attend the Ramallah Friends School growing up? Is it taught in Arabic, in part (I've heard that it is), also an International Baccalaureate school (and by some accounts, the best high school in the Middle East), as well being one of the oldest/older Quaker schools, since 1869, in the world?

Friendly greetings in the coronavirus pandemic. 

Friendly regards, 

Scott

PS

Here's a recent 5/3/21 WUaS News and Q&A, for where further World Univ & Sch is heading, in the big picture (and as its head / presiding clerk): 

(https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/razna-national-park-latvia.html) 

Sa’ed Atshan - 

https:// www.swarthmore. edu/faculty-sa’ed-atshan 
https://twitter.com/Dr_Atshan

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/moralagency2019/2020/07/27/cara-curtis/
https://twitter.com/caracurtis

World Univ and Sch Twitter - http://twitter.com/WorldUnivandSch
WUaS Press - https://twitter.com/WUaSPress

Scott MacLeod - https://twitter.com/scottmacleod
Languages - World Univ - http://twitter.com/sgkmacleod

“Naked Harbin Ethnography” book (in Academic Press at WUaS) - http://twitter.com/HarbinBook
OpenBand (Berkeley) - https://twitter.com/TheOpenBand

David, Donn, Walter - are you on Twitter :)?

'Quaker Academics: Walking in the Light on Campus and Beyond' -
https://quakerfahe.com/2021/04/02/qlhe-quaker-academics/
Question for Cara from your Friends' Association for Higher Education (FAHE) Quaker Academics' presentation


Dear Cara, (and David),

Greetings from the SF Bay Area, and thank you. (Do you happen to know perhaps Caleb Alexander MD in Baltimore Yearly Meeting? - Our families met for a Xmas meal over about 2+ decades in Pittsburgh, PA,  and it's through the Alexanders partly that I became involved with Quakers). Thanks, David, also for moderating this timely and topical Friendly FAHE Quaker Academics' conversation.

And do you happen to know, too, MIT Professor of Anthropology, Heather Paxson, who is a Friend, I think, and a Haverford alumna too?


From the text chat:

Thanks for your wonderful Light-filled Friendly thinking, Cara (and thanks too Sa'ed).

Cara, am curious how or if - in your ethnographic research methodologies regarding flourishing motherhood in the Emory, GA, prison or affluent church, for your PhD - the questions you're asking are developing online or digitally in new ways? What kinds of new opportunities for Quaker scholarship, if any, have online ethnographic research modalities made possible for you? And how are you also exploring 'walking in the Light' in emerging ONLINE campuses (if such opportunities have emerged over the past coronavirus pandemic year) and even regarding if online virtual places are emerging in your studies? What is authentic online flourishing motherhood in your research or thinking?

Friendly regards, Scott

(sgkmacleod@worlduniversityandschool.org)

PS
World Univ & Sch's Monthly Business Meeting (MBM) is conducted loosely in the manner of Quakers, and here are the 4/17/21 WUaS MBM Minutes just completed today - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/hyacinth-macaw.html.

PPS
My Actual-Virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnography also had a slight Friends' Quaker focus, since I identified as a Friendly ethnographer in part, while doing field work, for example, and kept in communication, and connected with Quakers in Lake County (one of whom had been participating for many years in the oldest group at Harbin - an AA group), northern California, too, while 'in the field.;


Thank you, Cara, and David!




*

Hi Scott,

Thanks so much for coming last night, and for your question. In terms of the people you mentioned: I don't think I know the Alexanders, at least not by name...always possible I would recognize a face. :) And I don't know Heather Paxson personally, but my spouse, who is an anthropology PhD student, knows her--she works on topics similar to him, and they have connected through that. Various small worlds interconnecting!

In terms of your question about how things have pivoted online: it's a very good one, and I'm afraid I don't have the best answers! As far as my research goes, I was fortunate to have finished most of my research in-person before the pandemic started (though some on the non-prison side did get cut off--I didn't feel it made sense to keep connecting with new folks online at the start of the pandemic as everything was in chaos...though I did do a couple of follow-up interviews over Zoom). And as for the prison, they have virtually no internet access at all, so we have been largely cut off from them, which has been hard. I also work for the theological studies program in a teaching/directing capacity, and we have been able to send in photocopied packets of readings/letters, but that's about it. In a year when many of us relied heavily on online formats for connection, incarcerated folks (at least in states like Georgia) have been largely left behind. In addition to their dramatically increased risk for the virus--it's very frustrating.

But thinking about your question more broadly, I think I see lots of places where online worlds are helping us live better lives right now--if not quite "flourish," perhaps. I know online mothers groups have been extremely important for many folks. And while I was an online teaching skeptic before the pandemic, I will say that I have come to see how it can work well at least in some instances for building community. I'm teaching right now in Candler's Doctor of Ministry program, which is always online, as folks are working pastors and chaplains located in churches/communities throughout the US. The online format allows them to come together and build community, as well as stay rooted in their own context.

Anyway,  I hope this is helpful food for thought, at least! Thanks again for your question and engagement last night. I hope your work is going as well as possible in our continuing strange times!

All best,

Cara




*

Hi Cara, (David, Research Professor at Bryn Mawr! - I've been thinking you are an Emeritus Professor, but didn't realize you are still active!),

Thanks so much for your prompt email reply, Cara. My Actual-Virtual Harbin Ethnographic book comes into conversation with 'Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human' (Princeton UP 2008) by Tom Boellstorff, also with Stanford PhD like Heather Paxson. Has your spouse engaged these resources or a digital focus anthropologically or in his PhD studies? (I don't have a spouse yet:). While my Actual-Virtual Harbin Ethnographic book is a bit out of the box, since it seeks to actually create a realistic virtual Harbin Hot Springs for comparative ethnographic study ... http://www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html - and here's a beginning in the Harbin Hot Springs' Gate in Google Street View with time slider, where you can walk down the road a spell toward Middletown CA, as a possible emerging ethnographic and STEM field site and classrooms too, or campus even ~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg (~ https://twitter.com/HarbinBook ~ http://bit.ly/HarbinBook ~) - it also engages fully the anthropological academic literature regarding emerging virtual worlds. You and your spouse might find interesting this emerging possible research group - http://www.scottmacleod.com/research-group.html - in a related vein. (Harbin is also a church - Heart Consciousness Church, since 1975 - albeit unaffiliated with other churches, and whatever church means).

Online over the past year seems like it could be taken as an opening to study the Web ethnographically perchance flourishing in new ways, - in Friendly flourishing too. I also have a specific #ActualVirtual comparative focus - https://twitter.com/hashtag/ActualVirtual?src=hashtag_click. I've also given some thought to the idea of flourishing here in the flourishing label - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/flourishing?m=0 - and here in my 'eudaimonia' web page -

(Regarding eudaimonia, as flourishing, see -

Eudaimonia (personal flourishing)
is 'Flow' and Bliss


Dear Friends,

While bliss may be experienced by evoking or exploring good spiritedness, I'm curious about the following.

 
How to experience eudaimonia, flow, and bliss naturally?

FLOW

What is 'flow' ~ the psychology of optimal experience?



http://scottmacleod.com/EudaimoniaFlow.htm - with an explicit focus on Friends esp.).

and here again too, in this blog label -
http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/crested-partridge.html?m=0 - (and Friends-wise further, here, too, esp. - http://scottmacleod.com/daltonletter.htm - which I began writing - might need editing:) - in Scotland around 2003:).

It seems like the ongoing creation of a myriad virtual worlds is a remarkable aspect of a kind of flourishing, I'm thinking and writing about.


(The image on your Twitter feed is a bit macabre -

https://twitter.com/caracurtis_/status/1387066536272277505?s=19 - an antithesis of flourishing?

Qu'est-ce c'est?)

But your FAHE Quaker Academics' talk about flourishing, motherhood, Quaker social ethics, and ethnographic approaches makes me wonder whether one could use photos as evidence or textual resources for identifying flourishing. :) How do you examine academically the idea of flourishing, Cara? For example, the picture in your Twitter profile I could read ethnographically as exhibiting flourishing. What do you think? Helpful 'evidence' - another approach to reading 'flourishing' even, and ethnographically, if you chose to interpret photos with similar flourishing as such, and contextualize this perhaps in terms of what gave rise to such flourishing? I'd be interested in learning further your thoughts to many of these questions.

Did you happen to study 'social ethics' or similar at the Harvard Divinity School with any of these philosophers - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/crested-partridge.html (where you'll also find some of my non-theistic Friendly thinking, and in a related blog label).

You both have what could be quite Scottish last names re it can be a small world indeed regarding connectedness and identity (I became a member of the RSOF in Edinburgh, Scotland, Quaker Meeting:).

Friendly regards,
Scott
http://www.quakerquaker.org/profile/ScottMacLeod


PS
Caleb Alexander MD's father, George L Alexander MD, may have had some Scots' background as well - and was also a brilliant Yale & McGill (and Harvard residency) trained Lacanian psychoanalytic psychiatrist, and a bit of a philosopher & linguist too. (I mention him in my blog, since I learned much from his thinking, as a family friend - in the Jacques Lacan MD label, for one). Not a Friend, I think he may have met his wife who lives at Kendal Crosslands in Quaker circles in Cambridge or New Haven, for example. David, do you know any of the Alexanders, by any chance? :)

PPS
And you'll see I mention Heather Paxson's work on open source publishing at the bottom of the 4/17/21 WUaS Monthly Business Meeting Minutes from yesterday:
- https://worlduniversityandschool.blogspot.com/2021/04/41721-minutes-for-wuas-open-monthly.html

- https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/04/hyacinth-macaw.html