Chicago. So. Yeah. I spent the night there in a hostel (IHSP). The hostel was really nice, and unfortunately I did not get to spend enough time there. I got up early Friday morning to catch my train to Notre Dame from the station by Millennium Park. Unfortunately, I got lost (it's what I do). And missed the train. But then gained an extra four hours to just hang out in Chicago. So I went into the Chicago Cultural Center, which is in an old building that used to be a public library. There were some interesting exhibits...
So, yeah. An evil Hello Kitty. I also went to see the Bean, in Millennium Park.
I don't have any photos of Notre Dame...I mostly spent my time there indoors (hiding from the cold) at the conference, watching panels. And presenting my paper, which went fairly well. I was happy that people were interested in what I talked about, asking me questions about the research. And I had a funny run in with some students from Wheaton. Well, Wheaton Illinois. They came up to congratulate me, thinking I was from the same school because the program did not make a distinction between IL and MA. Wahahaaa, noooo. Oh, and in the same vein, a nun led us in prayer during the keynote dinner. It threw me off a little bit. I can't imagine that ever happening at Wheaton (MA!). I definitely felt out of my element.
One last thing about the conference. While I admired the work that other students were presenting and the sentiment behind it, I was a little wary of the way the keynote speaker was talking about development. Like it was a definite and unambiguous force of good, and I guess that definitely had some Christian undertones to it. He talked about how proud he was of development as something to 'help people' in a apolitical way. I could not help but remember something I read on the politicization of development in Lesotho back in a anthropology class. Essentially a development project in Lesotho failed in regard to the goals it had set out to achieve and yet in the process of trying to implement those goals, it did manage to strengthen the power of the state in that area. Or so that's how I remember it going...I wish I knew the name of that article or the author. In any case, the keynote speaker seemed to me to have a single-minded view of development.
On Sunday I started my twelve hour trek back to Boston. In this photo you can see downtown Chicago off in the distance:
Flying over the Atlantic (below) is one of my favorite parts of coming back to Wheaton - the airport in Boston has such a cool landing strip!
Home sweet home!
