A Sample Portfolio, Some Vintage

This book chapter describes the direction my academic writing and teaching was headed when I left the University of Texas. At its core, my idea was to explore the ways in which our conversations as individuals, with those we’re close to at home, work, and community, go back and forth with the larger cultural discourse, “micro” and “macro” together influencing choices our society makes about important issues affecting our lives and others’. My work-in-progress, Economics Pragmatics, picks back up this theme. Because it’s relevant still, and far beyond someone’s peer review. Because I’m not finished with it yet.

Of course no quantitative assessment of peoples’ wellbeing, economic or otherwise, can measure up to their lived experience. Still, social policy has to try to figure out problems and offer solutions to make things better, for as many as possible, no matter their social standing. Usual economic indicators, among them the decades-old poverty measures, were not, still are not, capably reflective of peoples’ real complex financial pressures and concerns. The family security work I did at the Austin think tank was a start, but a lot remains to be done.

This was my first annual Texas KIDS COUNT report. Starting the job at the think tank, I envisioned a work that, first and most important, fully captured the most significant challenges for children and families, clearly organized into sections ranging from economic security and opportunity, to education, to physical and emotional health, to personal safety. With the KIDS COUNT project, I also aimed to create a fresh synthesis of the best data, crisp writing, and compelling photos and infographics. Can’t offer enough compliments to the talented data, IT, communications, design, and production professionals who helped make it happen. (I take writing credit.)

At a time when being a mom was most important to me, but also needing to pay the mortgage, I did some very engaging project and freelance work. One product of that time, With Courage and Common Sense, told the personal stories of elder women in Texas, who had in the last century lived through decades of, you know, stuff. (Of course I’ve since found that no one in this century is immune to living through, you know, stuff, either.) I co-directed the project that collected these inimitable personal recollections and co-edited the book based on them.

For a while I regularly wrote for an Austin-based magazine. Mostly I did profiles of remarkable people….Austin has been, still is, home to many. My favorite profile was of Charles Hartshorne, a very important philosopher of the last century who coincidentally always sat in the front and center pew of my church just north of my Hyde Park neighborhood. He was 101 years old when I interviewed him at his home.

For the magazine I also wrote occasional features. I was reading a lot about Buddhism at the time, and practiced at two separate Buddhist centers in Austin (highly recommend). “Engaged Buddhism” fascinated me (still does) and the story of the hungry ghosts is so very relevant to human relationships in all times.

Because I was a triathlete, the magazine’s editor asked me to write a monthly column on “fitness culture.” It was just fun. I covered things like workout wear (realizing I’m being judge-y, some people ought to check the mirror and the credit card bill), over-training, experiments with junk food (Cheetos, yuck), alcohol-fueled sports contests, and my favorite, fitness etiquette in shared spaces. “No staring, no spitting.”