Welcome! I look forward to meeting all of you, and to our work together this semester! Because this is yet another anomalous pandemic semester, I sense that it’ll take another few weeks for us to get settled – and we’ll have a bit more work to do to acclimate to our environment. For this first week we’ll establish the terms of our engagement and acknowledge how our whole class can function as a fieldsite in which we’re all participant observers: everything we do – content and form – is open to meta-analysis, discussion, and reinvention. We’ll also discuss our obligations to one another and our commitments to inclusivity and privacy.

🚨🚨 We’ll meet virtually this week! 🚨🚨

* For the anthropologists in the room, I’ve marked all anthropological / ethnographic texts with an asterisk*, just in case you’re looking for disciplinary representation 🙂

Agenda:

Land Acknowledgement (and caveat: see Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgement in Settler Institutions,” Social Text 39:1 (2021)).
Introductions (using Eugenia Zuroski’s “Where Do We Know From?” exercise)
Semester Overview + Explanation of my Choices (re: balance of reading, reading responses, discussion, in-class activities, assignments, opportunities for interdisciplinary teamwork, fieldwork, etc)
Community Agreement

Today I’ll be drawing on the texts below; you needn’t read this material, but you’re welcome to do so, if you like!

Via Present & Correct; used with permission

Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (MIT Press, 2009).
*Anthropology & Education Quarterly, a Wiley journal. Why does that matter? See Corey Bradshaw, “Academic? You’re Just a Cash-Hamster Spinning a Publisher’s Profit Wheel 😈,” ConservationBytes (September 9, 2019); Martin Hagve, “The Money Behind Academic Publishing,” Tidsskriftet (August 17, 2020); Lindsay McKenzie, “The Beginning of the End of the ‘Big Deal’?” Inside Higher Ed (March 27, 2019); and T.R. Shankar Raman, “Why I Will Not Review or Write for Elsevier, Wiley, and Other Commercial Scientific Journals,” TR Shankar Raman (March 31, 2021).
*Susan D. Blum, “Why Don’t Anthropologists Care About Learning (or Education or School?) An Immodest Proposal for an Integrative Anthropology of Learning Whose Time Has Finally Come,” American Anthropologist 121:3(2019): 641-54.
Douglas Dowland, “The Problem with Rigor,” Avidly (September 1, 2021).
*Margaret Eisenhart, “The Anthropology of Learning Revisited,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 52:2 (2021): 209-21.
Jeffrey Kastner, “A System Not Imagined” [on Hans Haacke] Places Journal (August 2020).
Ana María León, “Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Cowriting, Coteaching, and Colearning,” ArtJournal Open (November 20, 2018).
Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art” Fillip 6 (2007).
*Eli Thorkelson, “Academography and Disciplinary Ethnocentrism,” Platypus (May 2, 2017). Check out an archived version of Thorkelson’s Academography blog and their great Zotero collection of ethnographies of higher ed!
*University of Pennsylvania’s Ethnography in Education Research Forum.
*University of Illinois’s Ethnography of the University Initiative.
*University of Toronto’s University Worlds project.