~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Aggrieved students find books dangerous; neoliberal administrators say they’re useless. I’d take the former any day
Corey Robin is a political science department chair from New York. He finds that bottom-line focused higher education administrators to be a greater risk to an educated society than aggrieved students. He has a provocative essay in Salon “Higher Education’s Real Censors What We’re Missing in the Debate over Trigger Warnings and Coddled Students.”…
It was 53 degrees this morning where I live at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Fall is in the air, which is nice because with the drought going on it’s been a long, hot, and breezy/dry summer in our woods and it’s still fire season, at least until we get our first good rain. While I have been here in northern California goofing around with my dogs, hiking, writing poetry, and clearing brush, Tony was writing stuff for the blog, and traveling throughout Germany and in Thailand and China; Marianne was busy with her dissertation work and being a mom and gardener (her tomato pictures on facebook looked really good!).…
The Tattooed Professor (AKA Kevin Gannon) has some New Year’s resolutions for academics and they’re so good, we wanted to tell you about it. We like the Tattooed Professor here at e.com, we think he’s cool and provocative; I like him because he is direct, something we working class people value. This time, the Tattooed Prof offers some kind words for you professors beginning your academic year. He wants you to be mindful and committed to a “better academe” because lord knows, higher education is fraught at the moment.…
University classes start on Monday, and once I again I resume my task there of creating students who are “disciplined” to the “seamless into the demands of bureaucratic production.” To do this, we will adjust their very psychobiological nature as a human being to the demands of the university. There will be demands put on them to show up on time, study on their own time without direct supervision, and write papers about esoteric subjects of my choosing.…
onsidering finishing your PhD on the 30 year plan? It can be done, it seems—Miranda Irving writes about her experiences on the 30 year plan here. Her PhD. in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies was finally awarded in 2015. Embedded in this article is a nice link to what she wrote in 2006 about unfinished PhDs here.
Last month I wrote about the process of cooling out the graduate student who does not complete the PhD.…
Anyway, my kids knew where the Climbing Wall was when they attended a private Liberal Arts college. Somehow they never came home and told me about the Student Learning Outcomes that were presumably on their course syllabi. There is a very engaging article by Erik Glibert “Does Assessment Make Colleges Better? Who Knows?”
I have to finish my course syllabi for Fall 2015 this week, and will dutifully put on the Student Learning Outcomes of various programs because doing so is relatively harmless. …
Every once in awhile, I’ll revisit George Orwell. Last week it was for “Shooting an Elephant,” when I lectured here in Thailand about the nature of ethics and state/political power. The essay is great for teaching about the nature of state power, in this case using 1920s Burma where Orwell himself served as a British colonial police officer for several years.
But shooting rogue elephants peacefully eating by the side of the road was not the only thing that Orwell wrote about, or was called to do.…
There is a nice description/analysis at National Geographic which Emma Louise Back posted recently at The Geek Anthropologist. Such postings manage to make archaeology and popular culture fun at the sme time. Somehow she manages to even get a citation to Agatha Christie into the post. Here is the link to the article.
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996.
At this time of getting ready for Fall classes, just a reminder that Dee Thao’s movie about Hmong identity is an excellent introduction to issues involving the Hmong in the United States and Laos, as well as more generally issues of identity, migration, refugees, family, and generations. It’s 24 minutes, which fits well with a discussion. I know that I’m planning on using it this Fall for my International Engagement class. …
For the last few semesters, I have taught a course on “ethnographic methods” to designers in an MFA program. The class itself is my own design but the title was gifted to me. I can’t say that I approve of the term “ethnographic methods,” but one has to go along at times. In the main, it is every bit as fun as it sounds. I demand students delineate and pursue their own projects, rather than safely shepherding them through a series of artificial exercises.…
I just came back from China—my fourth trip. This time it was to Jishou University in Hunan Province for a few days. Jishou is the capital city for the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao and Autonomous Prefecture and is in a remote mountainous corner in China. Still it has the hallmarks of every other Chinese city I’ve visited, including thirty story high apartment blocks, and a very social public square where during the evenings hundreds of people come out to do rhythmic dancing, and generally socialize in the evening.…
I taught Erving Goffman’s book Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity in Germany last month. One of the things that came up was how students are culturally and linguistically German (i.e. German is their first language) but racially “different” manage their identity as a non-white. In other words, they deal with the dissonance between a linguistic and cultural identity, in the context of racial beliefs about what it means to be German. …