“A few pre-breakfast thoughts, as I was fuming about pseudo-paternalistic behaviors, some fragments of constitutional history lectures came to my mind – particularly Kaspi’s assertions that American people are ‘big children’.

What’s interesting in this assertion is that it is true of every people in so far that they accept an authority that deresponsibilizes instead of scaffolding their behaviour into more responsibility like a parent would.

The biggest irony is that Kaspi, through his works about the US, actually mirrored the society of his time, French people paternalised under de Gaulle’s presidence.

Whatever a writer or a researcher in social science and humanities works on, the maieutic process will reflect his/ her space-time experience, deeply anchored in familial history, and a cascade of other paradigms that at times are closely containing one another like Russian dolls, and at other times considerably overlap.

Any piece of writing that is not deeply instrumental or purposive, rapidly turns into introspection.

Is this introspection orientation good? I would say yes, as long as it is not the only modality. Even the best writers need to engage with other minds to avoid the pitfalls of soliloquy: constant redundancies, lack of self-criticism, tainted with a hint of absolutism, and of course flaws and bias.

I’ve been investigating language learning, attrition, metacognition, and innovative strategies, because of my own history. But my introspective tendencies were balanced by the critical friends of my collaborative network.

Anything you’ve lived can be leveraged and turned into a great contribution.”

— Estrella Chang