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Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
Published in M. Ann Garrison Darrin, Patrick A. Stadter, Aerospace Project Management Handbook, 2017
As described in this chapter, effective project communication takes many forms in various venues to many different stakeholders. It is the cornerstone on which projects are built. Projects with effective communication are much more likely to succeed than those that lack a consistent and appropriate means of communicating across the team and stakeholders. Timely information delivered in the proper way is empowering to all who receive it. Finding the right balance of level of detail and frequency of information communicated across the project is the job of the project manager and it is one of the most important ones.
Not inconceivable: knowledge-production, the arts, and the pre-history of a Puerto Rican artist, 1934–1882
Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2020
On February 20, 1933, President Herbert Hoover’s remarks at the ceremony to lay the cornerstone for the National Archives Building articulated the historiographical stakes for the effort: Here will be preserved all the other records that bind State to State and the hearts of all our people in an indissoluble union. The romance of our history will have living habitation here in the writings of statesmen, soldiers, and all the others, both men and women, who have built the great structure of our national life. This temple of our history will appropriately be one of the most beautiful buildings in America, an expression of the American soul. It will be one of the most durable, an expression of the American character. Devoutly the Nation will pray that it may endure forever, the repository of records of yet more glorious progress in the life of our beloved country. I now lay the cornerstone of the Archives Building and dedicate it in the name of the people of the United States. (Hoover 2013, 225)The cornerstone joins two walls of a building: it is the literal and metaphorical base for the structure, its purpose, and its meaning. The words spoken to mark the laying of a cornerstone are no less fundamental than the actual brick and mortar. In this regard, Hoover is quite precise in his statement, shifting quickly to an affective register in order to describe the creation of a new state-run institution oriented toward the writing of history. Consequently, the archive is defined as a spiritual site – that is, as a temple filled with “sacred documents” expressing the national soul. But Hoover does not stop there, layering other affective engagements with the archive. The archive becomes the site of a union – a home or “living habitation” – where romance binds state to state, men to women, family to nation; it is, broadly speaking, the site for the union of erotics and politics as the basis for national identity.15 And, it is the site of art, that “most beautiful” and expressive quality that conflates a governmental building with the American character. Finally, it is the site of the future, “of yet more glorious progress,” devoutly prayed for and to be duly archived herein. Thus, the archival records – from which history will be written – are presented as spiritual, domestic, and erotic; and their repository is itself aesthetic. These are affective modes such that the archive’s function – what it will do – resonates with biological and social reproduction within the realm of “national life” as a romance, and not the workings of government. In other words, the archive is seen as the repository of individual contributions to the nation, and not as an institution of the state, the institution that was created to select, organize, and preserve the documents of all the other such institutions, both political and bureaucratic.16