| Why the name? In some respects, the members of Shifting Ground are not terribly interested in our name, just as we don’t necessarily believe very heartily in mission statements. But both names and mission statements are creative as well as limiting. The choice of name is not accidental or whimsical.Shifting Ground was the name of a previous site, created by two of us and another colleague.This was an attempt to create a lively site centred around an interactive bibliography and focussed on social and cultural movements. As far as we know it is the only such interactive bibliography, and certainly was the first, concerned with social and cultural movements. Sites need regular tending or they turn into a rather weedy garden. The first version of Shifting Ground drifted out of our attention and was a much more limited vision than the present SG. We call ourselves Shifting Ground for several reasons. We have always been fond of the chapter from the Tao Te Ching which claims that a journey of thousand miles begins with the ground beneath your feet. Sometimes this is mistranslated as “a single step”, but the “ground beneath your feet” is more appropriate. We feel that in the contemporary era, the actual ground, while still existing, is shifting, changing, moving into new configurations more rapidly than at most times in human history. While we are not certain exactly what the new shape will be, we do wish to capture, in our name, both the notion that “a ground” might exist, and that if it does, it is shifting, perhaps a bit hard to pin down. For us, the tension, the contradiction inherent in social and cultural life is well worth putting to the forefront. Many people either find that the ground is steady and unchanging and stick to this in spite of any evidence or experience to the contrary. Others become so wildly out of touch with the notion of a foundation or solid grounding, that they are unable to find anywhere to stand, anywhere to root themselves, and become aimless critical intellectuals. Our goal in Shifting Ground is to become rooted and comfortable in the shifting ground of contemporary politics and culture. |