Overview...

What started as an awareness raising and ethnographic styled walk through Sierra Leone, this site now details the encounters of a not so academic academic who spends more time occupying Wall Street and squats than a university...

About Me

My name is Tim Weldon.  I am from the New York metropolitan region.  I have lived in a multitude of various places throughout the years, mostly in Prague, but several other places on the European continent, China, Sierra Leone, and a number of places in the US. 

I am currently working on a PhD in Anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I hold an MA in Economic and Social History from the University of Manchester in England, a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from West Virginia University (with a minor in Business Administration), and have done additional graduate work in Sociology and Anthropology at Central European University in Budapest.  My main areas of interest have socio-cultural understandings of political and economic conditions, specifically capitalism and democracy.  My work focuses on movements for change, "alternative" politics (i.e. real democracy) and socio-economic systems and change, specifically transition, cultural variance, social movements, and revolutionary change.  I also have experience with conflict areas and rebuilding after war and calamity.



I also have about ten years of business experience doing everything from running a small non-profit american football organization in Prague, to working as a senior analyst and head of research and development for a small company doing work in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I decided to set up this blog after a few years of being in and out of employment starting in 2009. At that point, I "got tired of sitting around 'waiting' for someone else to 'give' me a job - to recognize my value through their eyes (or in the stack of three hundred resumes on their desk) - so I independently fundraised for and undertook an awareness raising and humanitarian trip to Sierra Leone in Autumn 2010.  I came back from that trip with a rough case of malaria and lots of work to be done for the community based organization I set up with locals in Makeni, in the northern region of Sierra Leone.  Since returning I did my best to piece together a life with odd jobs and such.  But as soon as Occupy Wall Street started, I jumped in to a life of activism and intellectualism which has brought me to my current PhD program and further activist work with Occupy, Occupy Sandy, Black Lives Matter, and now squatting movements in the US and Europe. I am currently living in the Czech Republic as a member of the Klinika squatters collective in Prague, and travelling regularly to Stockholm where I am also a part of the squatting movement there.



In short, I am completely and total driven by making the world a more inclusive place for everyone.  This blog/endeavor was originally an effort to take all of my experience, my interests, and ambition, and package it all into one expandable project in Africa that could be the start of 'making a difference' in the world.  It has now evolved into just another piece in a puzzle of incredible cultural encounters...