creating a personal curriculum

building a mystery for real

first, i’m going to give you the short answer because i know any use of AI is a dealbreaker for some people. in this post i talk about how i have used AI to help build a reading list and personal curriculum.

in this post i’m going to take one step back from the topic of the last few weeks and discuss how i’ve been approaching research. it’s been a while since i’ve had to do any heavy reading academically but i found a quick way in through people who talk about learning on instagram and through chats with claude, the bot. in short, this post will be about the initial design of a personal curriculum. i’m working to carve out an intentional learning path, with the goal of pursuing post-secondary education. the curriculum i’m using right now works today, but i stay loose with it.

i. mindset

something the editors of Magical Capitalism point out that i recognize, is that i can’t cover any of this without understanding i am doing two kinds of work; studying magic and practicing it. while not getting too serious about it because ew, i am taking something that’s in my mind and working faith, imagination, will, and secrecy by reading, engaging with what i learn and writing about it. it feels like a lot of fun! and that is what keeps me going. even though i am not doing any of this in a school setting or with a team, i feel embraced by some force or presence in a way that i am not used to.

ii. tech-chantment

i’ve found answers to the questions i had, and questions i didn’t know i had, through social media; through the feed. the two videos i’m going to describe below were posts i could have just scrolled past. i did not search for them nor did i intentionally search for the creators. and while it would be easy to dismiss this as “just the algorithm”, not so fast. technology has changed the practice of magic all over the world. is it possible that someone might use the algorithm to create a servitor; a kind of non-physical being that will only show them things that match the kind of world they want to see? and by doing this, can we call that person a practitioner?

here’s another question, did you know there was a woman who in 2013 drove 900 miles following a satellite navigation system to go pick up her friend at a train station that was two hours away? she went from Belgium to Croatia, drove two days, following a GPS. thinking about technology and it’s ability to enchant, how in sixteen years advances like AI have added a whole additional layer of fish to that cauldron. the argument might be something about technology as a genie-on-tap engineered for hypnosis that has our consent to work on us in hidden ways as demonstrated by all the little anecdotes we have of strange synchronistic things showing up in our feeds, and to even talk about it in this way is just so tired, but i digest.

iii. start

the starting point is the fascination itself (with magic in corporate culture, not my phone) and its ability to aggressively sustain my interest over days and weeks. even now, i’ve been working on this post for four hours and forty-one minutes and yes i told myself i would get off this computer (now) an hour and forty minutes ago and yes i had to change how long i’ve been working on this post and yes i am hungry. the fascination inspires questions (like the ones in the last section) and ideas, and as expected, is fed by what i learn and read.

one thing i notice i have to be careful of is making statements as opposed to asking questions. so if an idea shows up in my consciousness as a statement i’ll try to as much as possible to turn it into a question so that i’m not exploring with assumptions. it was through studying the practice of magic that i learned what it means to have a beginner’s mind and this is where i do the work.

where i started with this topic was the ‘series of traps in my private life’ : the childhood, education, social and work experiences. therapy gave me some distance from feeling trapped. seeing the impact of racism personally and in the lives of my friends and family members, as well as the impacts of capitalism on our lives and health required a safe distance.

iv. the first lamp post

scrolling brought me to a post by @alltimeisaac on instagram that helped me understand what i was doing by piecing the details together. i am grateful to them!

there are a few specific ways i am claiming my knowledge:

• grounded theory - building ideas about magic in corporate based on what i saw and experienced living and working in canada as a black woman

• autoethnography - using lived experience to understand and analyze white supremacy in the west and in the world of work

• narrative inquiry - making meaning of the stories i tell myself and others, ie getting laid off and cognitive dissonance

i’ve since learned that this method of using personal experience is related to a widely popular approach out of the social sciences, detailed by C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination, which brings us to the reading.

v. entering the forest

thinking about magic in corporate culture led to bigger questions that couldn’t be answered by what i already knew. i’d started chats with the claude bot and landed on a few books, but didn’t have a structured plan.

then scrolling brought me to someone named saffana banana. i’d seen their content before but this post about being perceived as an expert in a particular field grabbed my attention for its simplicity. the guidance went: read four books in a specific field, plus the first eighteen chapters of The Adweek Copywriting Handbook and then read The Trusted Advisor in its entirety. this felt like a practical and accessible point of entry.

if my interest was in botany or fashion or outer space, i coulda just gone to amazon and searched up the most popular books. i wanted to be specific. so i went back to the bot and put into it the topics i was interested in. my intention was to get synonyms for words and phrasing, to understand the field, how what i am interested in might be described by someone who studies the same thing academically or fits into a larger picture. the discussion i had with the bot was about potentially working as a consultant, so there was a business angle to the responses, but i think that helped me to understand what is out there and where it fits.

what i have quickly learned with the rest of the world about AI is to take everything it says with a “salt of grain”. i could ask it to give me four book recommendations for a specific topic five or six times in different chats and it will recommend different books each time. so the important thing is to go back to my source; what eye think and what makes sense to me, and to also remember that what i’m getting from it is a starting point. i could read all the books! that is part of the process, along with being in conversation with human beings, ie. reaching out to authors personally.

vi. finding a path

at one point the bot recommended that i cover the research in subject matter layers and, going back to the source, i really liked that approach and the layers it recommended. mind you, i also asked it to tell me where that approach comes from and this is how i got to The Sociological Imagination.

behind the paywall i describe the layers of learning and the surprising ways some books like The Trusted Advisor fit in with what i’m researching. before the wall goes up, here are three of the texts on my reading list, the first one i got free via JSTOR access from the toronto public library:

• Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man Its Overrepresentation-An Argument by Sylvia Wynter

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing

• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.