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According to the author, the capacity to employ an allocentric perception in the pursuit of objective knowledge of the world requires more than interest; it requires development of the capacity to distinguish self from Other. She also claims that "Allocentric perception is perception in the service of a love which wants to affirm others in their total and unique being." However, I wonder to what extent this is actually applicable to the social sciences. Our "objects" of analysis are humans, and the urge to "affirm others" in turn renders us the ones to do the affirming.

"Projects, like other meaning-making processes, work in part because they exclude. Signal becomes signal, through often painful designations of what will, for the moment, count as noise."This quote reminds me a great deal of a quote I learned of by Stuart Hall. While I do not recall the exact text of this quote, he asserts that one can keep on going theorizing and describing a social phenomenon. But at some point one has to take a stand, to take action. Making a project is painful--I am of the combination and contexture disorder variety.

How do you determine the “correct” figure and ground? Is there such a thing? How much can study of culture/society be structured, and how much must be left to be free as it is? What is the purpose of project design, outside of our own personal curiosities, motives, and interests? Sometimes I find the more I attempt to impose any sort of structure, the more the evidence defies those structures. Even with an open system, I wonder to what extent it might run the risk of imposing on that which we are attempting to understand.

The sketch says the text is about competing discourses of blackness in Jamaica, pushing back against monolithic constructs of blackness in the African diaspora. 

"It’s linearity gives a matter-of-fact feel to how the information is presented and lends to one favouring Thomas’ interpretation as the argument builds upon itself."  No visuals at all. 

Single black drummer (with a snare drum) with glimpses of accompanying marching band. 

"The introduction immediately complicates the assumptions of who has control over the national ideology and the idea of an asymmetrical ideology of blackness in a black nation."

Doesn't include a relay proposal. 

Middle or high school (or undergraduate) activity in which they do a stakeholder mapping sketch, mapping different constructs of blackness (and what catalyzes and corrodes these) -- maybe drawn from their personal experience (if they are Jamaican kids) or from examples from film clips, interview excerpts, short stories, ect. This sketching would graphically bust up monolithic constructs of blackness -- the aim of Thomas's text. 

The ethnographic text centers on a Hmong refugee family who came from Laos to California and whose daughter, Lia Lee, develops a severe medical affliction that requires her family to regularly visit a U.S. hospital. It looks to examine the United States healthcare system as a thoroughly Westernized institution whose doctors are lacking in "cultural competence," leading to miscommunication and obstacles in the recovery of Lia.