Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

3 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Making / Doing

  • Last week I finally submitted my revised ethics application, so now that is out of the way I can start working on my first bag (a methodology bag) and some side projects.
  • Unfortunately I find myself procrastinating. Reading is the things I do when I want to avoid something or pass time. I’m sure there is some grist for my therapist here. At the very least it was adaptive to be able to disappear into a book for days at a time when I was on disability for much of my 20s.
  • A related problem is that I have wide-ranging interests, and this project reflects that. It could, in theory, encompass everything from a blade of grass outside to geopolitics. It wants to be big and messy, and I (if I am being honest) want to let it.
  • But I have less than 4 months left. And at the end of the day I decided to do a research creation project where my primary outcome is physical bags. I’ve done most of the reading I need to do for this project already, and what I still need to do should be about clarifying ideas, not expanding scope, or following up on new leads.
  • It’s time to clear out my reader, my calibre, and my todo lists. I have been reading about and exploring the ideas for years now. For most of these I have notes. I also have hundreds of articles, papers, and books saved. It’s time to push all those into a theoretically-in-the-future pile so they stop giving me the side-eye.
  • So this week is about switching from reading to writing/making. It’s time to make a plan that involves spending the best hours of my day on actually making things.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

A few things worth sharing from the last week.

Rebecca Solnit: : The War for the Imagination

What this place will be, and what this country will be, is the subject of a battle right now, and I believe that books have a crucial place in it. They hold the records, the truths, the facts, in ways that cannot be forgotten, manipulated, or erased in ways that digital information can. Books, I once wrote in one of mine, are solitudes in which we meet, in which the reader in his deepest solitude meet the writer in her deepest solitude; they encourage the empathic imagination that arises from entering into lives other than our own, from expanding beyond the bounds of the self; they encourage the concentration and attention that makes us thoughtful in the most literal sense.

Eryk Salvaggio on Human Literacy

But look: of course you can choose to find a story given to you by an AI system compelling and there is no shame in that. I found one on a door. I will not lie and tell you that I sit and choose every word through careful deliberation at all times. I am also not the most accomplished of writers. My point is that translating your language through AI is a lost opportunity to cultivate the sweetness within you. With your own words, connecting to the words of others, we can use stories for what they are for, which is to link ourselves with the stories of the people around us.

Arturo Escobar: Designs for the Pluriverse

Said otherwise, the notions of the individual, the real, and the economy as having intrinsic existence by themselves, independent of the relations that constitute them, and of us as observers, are instances of “folk essentialism,” as Kriti Sharma (2015, 12) wonderfully puts it. They seem to us completely real, yet they depend on an entire complex set of operations. It is precisely this impression of reality that we need to probe more deeply to arrive at a view of their ineluctable contingency.

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