Eli Thorkelson: Can we perhaps start by talking a bit more about the internal history of the project? I know the project was initiated by Nancy Abelmann (whose 2009 book about Korean American college students I really loved) and Bill Kelleher, but I’m wondering how you yourself came to the project? How has its organizational atmosphere changed over the years, as it has gone from novel experiment to a more durable part of the institution?

Gina Hunter: Looking back, I see EUI emerging at the confluence of at least three intellectual currents. I was a student of both Nancy and Bill in Anthropology. Nancy taught Ethnographic Methods and I recall her excitement about the then-new web-based software programs (the Community Inquiry Laboratories at UIUC) that she thought might be used the show the process of how an ethnographer moves from inquiry to field notes and data to writing up analyses and conclusions. She saw pedagogical potentials of “asynchronous learning environments” and a publicly accessible online archives of student work. She wanted to “open-up” the classroom for collaborative work and so that students could build on each others’ work from one semester to the next.

Secondly, at that time, many people in higher education were discussing the release of what came to be known as the “Boyer Report.” In this document, officially titled Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University had concluded that U.S. research universities were frequently failing their undergraduate students who too often graduate without knowing how to think logically or to write and speak coherently. The Commission’s number one suggestion was to fully integrate undergraduates into the research mission of the university, by making research-based learning central to undergraduate education. EUI was one answer to that call.

Finally, Nancy was herself developing research interest in the University, and specifically the University of Illinois, as she began to explore how so many Korean students ended up there and what challenges they faced. By 2002, Nancy and Bill had initiated the Ethnography of the University of Illinois, with a year-long series of events and workshops at the U of I’s Center for Advanced Study. They invited people from across campus and beyond to speak on various aspects of the University from its budget, to assessment, to its architecture and physical footprint.

EUI really took off when then-chancellor Nancy Cantor designated EUI a Cross Campus Initiative, gave it a temporary budget and commissioned EUI to study the Brown vs the Board of Education Commemorations. So EUI was a research endeavor, pedagogical framework, and a collaborative community.

It was shortly after that that I came on board as an “outside” affiliate by teaching a course at Illinois State University in conjunction with EUI. A few years later, in 2006, I became a co-Director (there were a number of others for different periods) and I stayed in that role for eight years or so. Over those years, the project formalized: we developed a website, wrote the mission statement, recruited faculty, developed new faculty orientation workshops, developed internal and external advisory boards, wrote grants, and began to strategize about the long-term sustainability of the program.

What I most appreciated about EUI was the very supportive and engaging pedagogical community. Faculty from across the university and from multiple institutions were teaching EUI courses at the same time. The “online” aspect of the project –both the shared course management and the EUI archives within the UofI institutional repository, called IDEALS—required thinking through key interdisciplinary aspects of the project. We needed faculty and students across many departments and institutions to understand and follow human subjects research protocols that we established with UofI’s IRB. And, we asked faculty the same basic format for the EUI projects (so that there would be some consistency within the archives). Specifically, we asked that all projects include a process document (not just a final product). We also suggested that the process document include sections such as “Question”, “Methods”, “Data”, “Conclusions” although this format was not entirely compatible with, say, creative writing or museum studies classes

Within this pedagogical community, EUI inspired other kinds of campus-based projects. (See, for instance, Writing@ The University of Illinois by Catherine Jean Prendergast, Richard Nardi and Cory Holding).

Once EUI became incorporated into the Office of Undergraduate Research at UofI, the project seems to have become more internally directed (the web presence of EUI diminished) and focused on scaling up to larger classes. The current Director, Karen Rodriguez, can speak to those changes.

Eli: Nancy Abelmann, in her short piece called the “EUI Story,” observes that she tried to bring institutional researchers into the project. Did that continue at all over time, or did these institutional researchers end up going back to their offices and leaving EUI to the faculty and undergraduates? I know Priscilla Fortier, from the Office of Minority Student Affairs, got quite involved in the project, but that seems like a different sort of role than the more quantitative analysts who typically work in official “Institutional Research” roles. So I wonder if EUI put in question the existing structures of institutional expertise, which usually serve the upper management, or perhaps pushed them to become more dialogical or collaborative?

Gina: Right, Pricilla Fortier was involved in the project primarily as a teacher rather than as an administrator. In particular, she worked (she’s retired now) as an instructor and advisor for McNair Program Fellows; she saw EUI as a valuable way for minority scholars to explore issues of privilege and power within academia.

The data available from the institutional research office is a great place for students to start asking questions of the institution. What is tracked? Why? Who are our “benchmark” institutions? And, indeed, some students effectively critique the formation of institutional research data and categories. But I think it often takes much prior knowledge of the university to “get behind” the numbers. For instance, interrogating data on diversity in enrollments is easier once you have knowledge of various programs used to attract and retain various populations of students (not only racial and ethnic, but honors students, athletes, etc). So, I have to provide my students that information—otherwise the numbers just seem like reflections of larger social and demographic facts.

I’ve also had institutional researchers and other administrators visit class to converse with students—in part to prevent any facile characterization of “The Administration” as a faceless bureaucracy— not to discount at all the potential violence and tyranny of bureaucratization but for students to see how certain interests and positions on university concerns are formed.

I don’t know that EUI research is of interest to institutional researchers—largely because it is not in a form that institutional research offices know well how to use. I do know that EUI research has had impact on our universities—at least when it aligns with existing interests. A few years ago, for instance, students in my ethnography course collectively studied the “international student experience” at Illinois State. Among the findings, was a critique of literal and figurative space of our English Language Institute, a first stop for many international students on our campus. The ELI was located in small building at the edge of campus. My students wondered aloud why a campus interested in attracting larger numbers of international students “greeted” them at a campus “back door.” A related finding was a lack of tolerance and understanding some of our faculty show toward non-native English speakers. We presented these and other findings at a well-attended campus conference and that generated much discussion. A year later the ELI was moved to a building on the main Quad and our teaching center began offering workshops on how to engage international students in the classroom. Obviously, “internationalization” of the campus was already underway at our otherwise provincial university, but I know that the International Studies Office paid attention to out EUI project and I like to think that we instigated some positive action.

Eli: Perhaps this gets us to the obvious big question: what has happened when the project’s ethnographic findings aren’t congenial to the administration?

Gina: Early on at EUI, we discussed the issue of institutional feedback. Nancy always argued for the intellectual value of pushing students to make recommendations back to the university, and we saw the potential for institutional reform. At the end of one semester, we made a list of key student findings and recommendations and wrote it up as a press release. We sent it to the media relations person for the Anthropology Department and got a prompt slap on the hand from someone in the administration. They did not publish the article and asked what response mechanism we had in place to allow those responsible for policies and programs to respond. I recall being stunned at the level of image-management at UIUC… something I had not encountered at the lower profile Illinois State. We took the critique to heart and tried to implement some feedback loops—for instance, sending targeted invitations to administrators from campus units that were the subject of student projects. But of course, this was only when we knew in advance that there were well-done student projects. All of this requires advance planning that is really hard to do for semester mini-projects.

Things may have shifted further on this front now that EUI has been integrated into the Office of Undergraduate Research.

Eli: Can you comment a bit on what EUI has meant to its undergraduate student participants in the long term? Does it seem to leave a durable impact on them? Does it become a pipeline to graduate school or applied anthropology work?

Gina: I know some EUI students have gone on to graduate school, like Teresa Ramos, but I wonder if that became a real trend. I don’t have data on this, though Karen might.

Eli: Relatedly, are there any interesting social dynamics that emerge within the EUI student populations? For example, does this reflexive research particularly appeal to students from socially marked or marginalized populations (perhaps in ethnoracial/sexual/religious/socioeconomic/linguistic terms)?

Gina: I don’t think it’s only a question of the student being from a socially marked position, although those positions sometimes do foster social critique that, in turn, aids students in doing EUI research. Students involved in social movements —be it feminism, decolonialism, anti-racism—are also already engaged with critiquing the social structure. So, this kind of “institutional ethnography“ also makes intuitive sense. The struggle is how to get all students to “see” the university.

Eli: In the September/October 2008 issue of Change, you and Nancy Abelmann and Timothy Reese Cain wrote: “In the classroom, EUI struggles to find the best ways to help students think institutionally. Not all EUI research ‘goes institutional’; for some students the university remains simply a setting and is not envisioned as an agent of any kind. This challenge extends to faculty participants as well, many of whom think of the university as little more than the backdrop to their own academic lives.” I think this points towards an issue for many people trying to “teach the university” these days, including me. Can you say more about when this sort of “institutional gaze” comes into being and when it doesn’t?

Gina: I think some questions and some projects lend themselves to more institutional thinking. It’s easiest to see institutional forces in moments of change and debate. Adding a historical or cross-institutional perspective helps too.

In 2012, I published the results of a small SOTL study conducted the year following one of my EUI courses to assess the learning “take aways” from the course (Hunter, 2012). I found that EUI helped many students reflect on the purpose of higher education in a broad sense and on the complexity of the institution. On the one hand, those things seem like things students would obviously learn in a study of the university. On the other, most public discourse these days on public higher education focuses on earning a degree to get a job and whether a particular degree offers a good “return on investment” (or will get one a job that pays enough to cover student loans). EUI courses can shift the narrative toward understanding the broader value of higher education institutions, and well as critiquing their role in increasing or decreasing social stratification, and understanding the forces that seek to commodify and privatize all aspects of education.

Eli: It’s great to know that you’re able to shift students’ consciousness in this direction. My experience is that while my students are able to strongly criticize academic administration, broader questions about commodification or privatization are often hard for them to engage with directly, and I’m reminded here that doing research can really open their eyes in some cases.

Let me just step back for a moment and ask a little about your life and your context, since I think it’s always easier for our readers to understand reflexive research when they know a little bit about the people who do it, and the space they work in. I noticed that you’re a product of these institutions too, since your undergraduate degree is from Illinois State, your graduate degrees are both from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and now you teach at Illinois State. Do you think you could just say a word about your own family background and how you came to your academic career?

Gina: Yes, I was born and raised in central Illinois and have benefited enormously from the public education I received at these two institutions. My father was a first generation college student at Illinois State, where he met my mother. He became a high school math teacher and the state government employee—so my siblings and I grew up middle-class. Although tuition at these public schools was and is relatively affordable, my education was funded in part through government subsidized loans, my part-time work income, and my parents’ contributions. Average annual tuition and fees and Illinois public universities was only about $2,500 in the early 1990s; it is about $14,000 today. It’s much harder for families like the one I came from to send their children to four-year universities. It has become much more common for students to complete two years at community colleges and then transfer to a university. One-third of the undergraduates at Illinois State today transfer from other colleges and universities.

So, I feel hugely privileged to be in academia and to be able to teach cultural anthropology. I, like all the faculty in my department, teach General Education courses up to graduate seminars. Illinois State does not have the publication and grant-seeking expectations of a major research institution like the University of Illinois, so we are allowed more time for teaching, which suits me.

Eli: And to step back even a little bit more — here I’m imagining talking to my students in South Africa! — what’s central Illinois like as a place to live and work in higher education? From where I used to live in Chicago, a few hours to the north, I always pictured Urbana-Champaign as one of those classic, big Midwestern college towns surrounded by an enormous zone of rural agriculture. I picture it as a bit of a cultural bubble, since a lot of the students don’t come from the region, like the ones in Nancy Abelmann’s book who hail from the more urbanized Chicago suburbs. Does this cultural bubble, if there is one, extend to faculty life as well?

Gina: Your imagination is quite accurate! Yes, Urbana-Champaign is a big college town. Nancy referred to it as “centrally isolated.” It is a cultural bubble although faculty may be more mobile than students and are perhaps more likely to identify with their national and international disciplinary or professional communities and networks—than with the institution per se.

Bloomington-Normal, where I live, is much less of a college town. Illinois State is a smaller school (21,000 vs the UofI Urbana-Champaign’s 44,000 students) and our largest employer is an insurance company. It’s a very different “feel.”

Both institutions draw students from the Chicagoland area, such that many of our students come from more diverse neighborhoods or high schools to find themselves in white dominant campuses. This perhaps feeds back into your observation that critical university studies may appeal more to students from socially marked positions.

Eli: Let me circle back, finally, to questions about the institutional future. As I think we all know, there’s been a lot of writing about how hard it is to get critical projects to really “stick,” to become permanent parts of academic institutions. As Davydd Greenwood puts it, “Individually positive projects do not change the larger political economy of public universities.” So I wondered: where do you see the EUI project going in the future? Is it still meeting the same reflexive needs as it did when Abelmann initially wanted to study processes of racialization and segregation? You mentioned that you might frame the project differently in our era of Trump and #BlackLivesMatter — can you say more about that?

Gina: Individual projects can lead to small positive reforms –I’ve seen it on my campus– but they are indeed very weak against the larger political economic forces shaping higher education. Collectively, these projects help shape a vision and understanding of higher education that is quite oppositional to neoliberal forces.

Funding for higher education continues to decline in the US—and given new tax cuts we might expect that funding to further diminish. However, the last US election saw substantial discussion about free public college education and more media attention to that idea than given in decades. Things change.

Those of us who see higher education as contributing to democratic citizenship and to human development—and not only as a route to economic development and social mobility—need to wrest the dominant narrative back from neoliberal logics. I think that EUI-type projects help us do that.

Eli: Thanks so much for taking the time to do this, Gina, and I hope in a small way we can help spread the word that collective research projects like the EUI can really affect large numbers of students, especially if we can sustain them for longer periods of time.

Eli Thorkelson: I was really interested to see that your early work was about Walter Benjamin’s theory of utopia, and that you’ve written a great deal about Bulgarian women’s and environmental movements (and migrant workers in Britain) as well as about university politics in Venezuela and precarious academic labor in Europe. Do you think you could say a few words about how your research projects have evolved since you entered the academy?

Mariya Ivancheva: Where to start… All these different topics and field-sites might sound thematically and geographically eclectic – even more so, given that my current field research is in South Africa. The new project I just started working on with the University of Leeds and the University of Cape Town is on widening of access to higher education through digital technologies, in contexts where marketization and disaggregation of traditional degrees (unbundling) are going on. And yes, many times we come to study topics that mix our biographical and intellectual trajectory with contingencies of educational institutions and the job market…

Still, I would rather think of my interest in all these projects as feeding into one bigger intellectual/academic project, which I have tried to address through different field sites. Walter Benjamin’s (unwritten) theory of utopia, which I explored in my days as a student in Philosophy and Social Theory, had a strong influence on my thinking. Benjamin insisted that lost revolutionary moments (unsuccessful struggles or intentions that don’t enter the historical record, because official history is written by the winners) need to be salvaged “from the garbage heap of history”. I see myself as a social historian of lost projects of radical social change. As an anthropologist, I study them not only in their own contemporaneity but through the concrete material and social effects left behind in their aftermath.

My major case studies are about progressive projects that started with good intentions but – due to a combination of structural and agentive forces – have gotten derailed or faced unintended consequences, failure, and sometimes oblivion. Such is the story of my main field sites, state socialist Bulgaria and Venezuela of socialism of the 21^st century, and I see many commonalities in post-apartheid South Africa. These were places where good intentions failed, and the institutions which reproduce an unequal society got perpetuated in spite of egalitarian aspirations. By studying these projects’ initial intentions, their historical development (including turning points of rupture or continuities), and the legacies and silences left in their aftermath, scholarly research can help nurture the historical imaginary of new generations.

But that said, my aim has not been to uplift such projects to a status of blueprints and condemn or romanticize them en gross, which has sadly often been the case with scholars of socialism. On the contrary, as Miguel Abensour insists in his discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia, I believe the reading of such utopian moments need to be done with caution. If we account for their true colours and deep contradictions, they can serve us as didactic tools for charting the potentials and perils in future attempts to create social change.

So intellectually, that’s why I’ve been exploring the initial intentions, development, and aftermath of projects of social change. East-Central European movements during and after state socialism, which you mention, are often just such a scene of the aftermath. Paradoxically and despite their denial or condemnation of the past, these movements reproduce many of the practices of state socialism — and not the best ones. Here I’m thinking especially of a middle class elitism that puts spikes in the wheel of more inclusive movements. That’s also why I’ve mainly focused on intellectual and student movements, as higher education is both an institution of elite and status quo reproduction and a site for redistribution and contestation.

As a philosopher by training, I was interested in the history of concepts. But it was only during my training in sociology and anthropology at the Central European University (CEU) that I learned to study the social reality behind discourse, and the way discourses are produced by material realities and produce material effects. In scrutinizing concrete projects, my interest in how ideas affect realities got more grounded. My first study at CEU was on dissident intellectuals’ choice and use of the concept ‘civil society’ as a key mobilization frame in the 1980s, in dialogue with Western European progressive intellectuals. I wrote about how erasing the discussion of the market in this debate across the Iron Curtain allowed the Trojan horse of neoliberal capitalism (with its laissez-faire attitude to the market) to be entrenched in a smooth, unquestioned manner in the post-socialist state and ‘civil society’. It also helped me to see how universities – such as the Bolivarian University in Venezuela, which was my PhD research site – can be studied as a key site of progressive intellectuals’ projects of social change.

By the time I finished my PhD at the CEU, I was equipped to keep exploring higher education as a field where social justice was done and undone, and where material redistribution was happening. My research has shifted to new contexts in the Irish Republic and post-apartheid South Africa. And the repercussions of the global financial crisis (along with currently emergent scholarship that attempts to cut through the Cold War divide of area studies and show trans-local connections in the global capitalist system), I could see more clearly how the distant contexts I studied were connected, not only by the project of socialism, but by similar global processes that impacted socialist and non-socialist contexts alike.

Contemporary systems of higher education have abandoned their attempts at massification, as they have been impacted by processes of neoliberalisation implemented to ease (or rather, as we now know, to exacerbate) the crisis of capitalism in the late 1970s-early 1980s. They have surrendered to the logic of the market and to new managerial governance, at the expense of reserve armies of indebted or un(der)employed students and precarious, outsourced, and disposable university workers. This has been the reality in higher education that I have been studying ever since.

And while it is instructive, often infuriating to see how educational institutions are now key sites of undoing social justice and redistribution through the merciless entry of capitalist market logic in their domain, choosing the university as a fieldsite taught me, I think, a valuable lesson. What I learned is to look at universities neither as mere tools for redistribution, not as a simple powerful mechanism in the machine of state reproduction, but as a field of social struggle and continuous contestation. In this field, progressive and conservative forces alike face their countermovements. Thus, they often end up hosting battles over issues that go beyond the ivory tower and cut to the core of society.

Eli: As a follow-up question about your own trajectory, I see you did your doctoral work at CEU in Budapest. I’ve always imagined CEU must be a very particular type of institution, as an Anglophone institution in a non-Anglophone city, perhaps like the EUI in Florence. What was your graduate experience like, intellectually, socially, politically speaking? Did the faculty encourage your reflexive interest in higher education as an ethnographic object, or did you come to that on your own?

Mariya: Interestingly, between the time you asked me the questions and the time I answer them, things have changed dramatically for CEU – the Hungarian government of Victor Orbán targeted CEU with a bill that challenged the very operation of the university within the Hungarian polity. Despite an outpouring of international and national solidarity, including from very conservative Hungarian institutions and actors, and a 10.000 strong bilingual rally in Budapest on April 2, 2017, the bill passed the National Assembly on April 4th without much discussion, through a fast track procedure, and with over 75% vote of Fidesz MPs. Now, let us be clear, Orbán and his political allies have long shown they have no mercy for vulnerable populations — they have criminalized the homeless, caged and barb-wired refugees, and imposed disciplining workfare measures for the unemployed, while also not opening up new jobs, homes or futures. Universities and individual academics in Hungary have also long been under threat and exposed to growing repression and precarization, without much support from us in the international scholarly community.

What is really crucial in this instance is that Fidesz is not aiming for the “low-hanging fruit”, for the most vulnerable and precarious. It is targeting one of the strongholds of liberal thought (in both senses of “liberal,” but particularly in the European sense in terms of the institution’s senior management and branding). And this time, it seems no petitions, statements from political figures, op-ed-s in leading world media, and who-knows-what diplomatic bargaining behind the scenes can stop the reaction. How this battle will be decided seems to be less and less about CEU itself. On the one hand, the stakes are higher now that the Hungarian academics and students – in much more precarious situation income-wise and also in terms of their vulnerability to the Hungarian state power than most people at CEU – have stepped in firm support of the university. So the CEU community is not alone in this but the responsibility is also higher. On the other hand, the bigger question is whether the liberal establishment still holds any institutional leverage, or whether the future before us is rather that of existent and upcoming Orbáns, Putins, Trumps, and Erdoğans of this world…

But knowing how this same liberal establishment has acted when it was their time to save the homeless, the unemployed and the refugees, I wonder if it is their support that CEU should be eliciting … What steps will we take, as students and academics, to make sure that next time they come for another vulnerable group, we are there to support it with our own bodies, not half-heartedly and tongue-in-cheek-ly as it has too often been thus far? And yes, I ask this as self-criticism as well… Dark days…

But back to your question. The similarities between CEU and EUI that you mention are true, indeed, but there are differences worth exploring – perhaps a PhD thesis that someone else can write one day. The design of the two institutions was quite different. Unlike EUI’s endowment through EU funds and the understanding it would produce knowledge and expertise for the European Union, CEU was a privately endowed university. It was not initially designed to be limited to just one campus…The story goes that millionaire philanthropist George Soros conceived the idea of CEU after visiting the Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik, which held summer schools including neo-Marxist social theorists from both East and West. Initially, those who developed the idea pictured the first campus in Dubrovnik, with more to open across the region. Yet the war in former Yugoslavia started, the building of the Interuniversity Centre was destroyed, its summer school practices were interrupted, and the Western Balkans became a non-viable context for a new university. So the first campuses opened in Central Europe, which was more politically stable and more acquiescent to demands by international organizations for a transition to liberal democracy and the free market.

Budapest and Prague were the two first campuses. Later the Prague campus closed, and some of its programs opened in Warsaw, but by the early 2000s the Budapest campus remained the only one in function. CEU had two key characteristics in that era. First, its faculty included many former dissident intellectuals from East-Central Europe – liberal intellectuals who entered politics in the 1990s but then withdrew either into academic or into expert careers. Second, for the first fifteen years, CEU’s mission statement said that CEU was to train the new generation of political decision-makers in the post-socialist world. So there was this understanding that through short-term post-graduate degrees, students from the region would absorb Western liberal ideas about democracy, law and order and free market society, and then they would go back home to implement these ideas in their own countries.

I entered CEU in 2006 at a very specific time, when all these three components – the multiple campuses, the dissident core of faculty, and the idea of CEU as training ground of post-socialist political elites – had been taken off the ‘menu’. Under the late Rector, Yehuda Elkana, the university adopted a new identity: that of a research-intensive university that competes for global ranking and produces globally relevant scholarship, moving outside the narrow focus on regional political and social processes. The focus on 1 year MA programs gradually declined, while doctoral programs and research-intensive 2 year MA degrees were expanded, sometimes in consortia with other European universities. This helped satisfy the requirements of the Bologna Process, and of national and international accreditation processes.

So then, with few exceptions – faculty members recruited at the university were increasingly those who could live up to the ever more demanding and geographically uprooting standards of an international academic career. Thus, former dissidents were marginalized within the university. The student profile and career trajectories were changing as well. By the time I entered the university, the majority of the students were also not aiming at a political career, but were decided to stay in academia or work for the public sector. These were, more often than not, children of professional classes from the region: people ‘downclassed’ income-wise either during state socialism or at some or another point after 1989. Many of us had stayed completing a first degree in our home country, and could not afford an MA or PhD abroad unless fully funded. At that point in time, both Western and Eastern European public universities were increasingly introducing fees – so CEU became one of the only universities which offered a scholarship to most MA students and fully-funded PhD programs.

When I arrived, the Department of Sociology had just been moved from Warsaw and all its faculty had been dismissed. It had reopened as a Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest, attracting scholars with geographical and topical expertise far beyond the region and with degrees from top American and European universities. Instead of emphasizing regional expertise and policy-oriented knowledge, students got introduced to debates on neoliberal capitalism, globalization, international urban and rural development, memory and religious studies, and this ranged across sites as distant as the US, Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia.

Entering this department at this time has been extremely formative for me in many ways. In the first class I audited, one of my professors, Don Kalb, described himself as ‘crypto-Marxist’ and spoke against capitalism. That was a shock for someone like myself, coming from a liberal personal and intellectual upbringing in post-socialist Bulgaria. Other faculty were no less radical in their statements and political lines, excavating concepts of class, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, bourgeois state, political resistance, revolution, and further notions that the post-socialist universities in the region have swept under the rug of the ‘transition to liberal democracy’. During my Masters’ degree, I was one of the students who initially rebelled against what I thought was an uncritical acceptance of Marxist theory and the dismissal of the department’s regional focus. I initially saw it as diminishing the local relevance of CEU for the region and the region’s relevance for CEU students after graduation.

Yet, in a steep learning curve, I was soon to realize how the new approach — coupled with sensitivity to issues of gender, race, and a more refined contemporary world-systemic reading of concepts such as class and capital — gave us critical tools to explain our Eastern European reality. This was a reality that we as students and intellectuals of the periphery, in what Alexander Kiossev has called auto-colonising gestures, simply discarded and looked down upon as ‘shameful’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘backward’. Staying at CEU for my PhD, I was one of the first students of the department to leave East-Central Europe as a field-site and focus on Latin America. In my PhD thesis I used Marxist theory, comparative historical sociology, and political anthropology to critically examine Venezuela, a new socialist regime in the making. Although I’ve shifted fieldsites subsequently to Ireland and now to South Africa, East-Central Europe has remained always my key intellectual and political context, which I speak back to through my scholarship and activism, e.g. through the political platform LeftEast, where I am a member of the editorial collective. But I have also realized the importance of breaking through geographical divides in knowledge production, in search of comparable or contrasting historical processes.

The new cohorts who have entered CEU’s PhD program in Sociology and Anthropology after the economic crisis in 2008 often come with already shaped Marxist political thinking. Perhaps this is a combination of their getting degrees abroad with the opening up of Eastern European academia to this Marxist theoretical legacy, which was condemned or left in oblivion for two decades. Many of us – regardless of the geography of our field-site – have been using our scholarship for applied interventions in political and social struggles in the region. And it is, interestingly, precisely CEU – a privately endowed, elitist institution – which, through its generous funding and open intellectual atmosphere, has allowed a lot of quite radical debates to take place. Even though portraits of liberal thinkers as Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner still hang in the halls, to remind us of its past and the strife of its senior management.

But for me – as I recent said to an academic in the region decrying CEU as an outpost of neoliberalism – CEU is as any other university, a site of struggle. I prefer to have Popper and Gellner listening to student defences – where neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers are not even the most radical authors cited – and rolling in their graves. As an unintended outcome – perhaps of what Nicolas Guilhot has called Soros’s dialectical thinking – CEU has allowed the majority of people who call themselves Left in the region to emerge from its halls as faculty or students, without political repression. So when defending it today, it is not the institution as an uncriticizable bloc that need to defend. Rather, we need to defend our right to carry on challenging it from within, against the whim of an autocrat to just close it overnight.

Eli: How do you see your own disciplinary identity, as someone with a joint sociology-anthropology doctorate?

Mariya: Disciplinary boxes were never too comfortable for me. Trying not to compromise on the methodological rigour and ethnographic writing, my work brings together debates from anthropology, sociology, social theory, global history, political economy, with focus on education, labour and political mobilization. My PhD supervisor Dr Alexandra Kowalski has been very encouraging and inspiring in this regard. Trying to keep me focused must not have been easy for her, but as a comparative historical sociologist and state theorist, her own scope and scale of work has been far from narrow. It was she and her colleagues who encouraged my interest in the Venezuelan Bolivarian University.

Yet initially, the focus of my PhD was less on higher education as an institution and more on the role of radical intellectuals coming to power. In this I was also aiming at a comparison between CEU (the post-1989 elite graduate school of anti-communist Eastern dissidents and Western liberals) and the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV, a mass university aimed to train the new revolutionary cadres of Venezuela and pink-tide Latin America). But the comparison was difficult to carry out, mostly because of my different positions at CEU and UBV. And while initially higher education got framed only as a possible lens for analyzing intellectuals coming to power, things changed during my fieldwork in Venezuela. It became more and more clear to me that the university institution was a site with its own fascinating dynamics and structural constraints. My work increasingly responded to broader debates on the global field of higher education, rankings, performance indices, and shifting regimes of funding, labour, and knowledge production.

Eli: I’m wondering where you see your work going on a more conceptual level. Your work seems deeply influenced by sociology of social movements and anthropology of the state, and you’re often very attentive to the limits of political consciousness (as in the Bulgarian cases where you remark that anti-anti-communism became unthinkable, or that liberal “rights” frames remained dominant). Is it fair to say that much of your work has been about this double dynamic between consciousness and historical conjuncture, between the state and the (always multiple) movements? How much autonomy — as it were — do you ascribe to political praxis or consciousness in the face of the historical structures that, as you repeatedly show, set limits on that very consciousness?

Mariya: Sure, though I would probably phrase it a bit differently, speaking about the chicken-and-egg question of sociology, namely about the relations and boundaries between structure and agency. And also, the not unrelated question about to what extent structures get reproduced, and if and how social change happens.

Let me bring in more concrete examples from my own work about the latter question. What always fascinates me is how radical movements critique universities and academics as part of the established institutions, reproducing the old bourgeois state, but at the same time, the moment they come to power, these movement soften place intellectuals in decision-making positions, and establish new universities or open up the old ones to newer populations. So, if the university is a form that needs to be dismantled and its cadres need to be dismissed, why take them up at the first place? This questions resonates with socialist theorists’ study of what to do with the state when they come to power. Or in terms of the contemporary Left in Europe – what to do with the EU?

So then the agency/structure question is, what happens when revolutionary movements – and here I don’t mean intellectuals only, or even not at all – come to power within these structures of state and elite reproduction? Do they get completely absorbed? Is there any place for agency on their behalf or do they inevitably get co-opted by the centrifugal forces of the old establishment and the omnipotent system of capitalist state in service of the market? And what is – if any – the role of university educated upper and middle class (often white) people, by origin or by educational and professional attainment – in movements for social change, if they seem to represent the core of the problem? I don’t pretend my work gives an answer to these questions, but it certainly seeks to address the complexities and contradictions of this process through empirical case studies in different parts of the world.

I also add one more layer here, and try to dig deeper into a very uncomfortable zone of progressive politics, which are usually discussed uncritically. Yet, often the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Often radical movements get frustrated not just by structural processes, but also by decisions and actions made by the very agents involved in them. In their aftermath, some progressive practices and institutions, which were designed without thinking about their own potential modes of failure, have been misused in very dark and dangerous ways by antagonistic forces.

The question of why chose the university is, interestingly, similarly valid to the question of how to take power (or build dual power) within newly liberated post-colonial states since the 19^th century, and within socialist regimes throughout the 20^th century. Today, this question becomes ever more pertinent because universities are no longer exclusive to elites. But also today, even those universities and institutions of higher learning that were created to subvert elite reproduction – whether in peripheries of the core states during massification, or in the post-colonial periphery during decolonization – have become key playgrounds for reforms inimical to their initial design. Sometimes through the benevolent effort to prove that their education lives up to the standards of traditional elite universities (Ivy League, Oxbridge, grandes ecoles etc.), many public universities have opened up the Pandora’s box of evaluation, performance measurement, of commodifying or unbundling their educational provision (partly or fully) to widen participation; they may also try to compete with privately-endowed research-intensive universities in terms of research-led publications, even as they receive their core funding for teaching; and so on.

Of course one can’t point fingers and blame individual institutions in the face of such harsh competition, and given how the entry of new managerial governance and market logic in public higher education has changed the game for everyone… Yet sometimes blaming the bigger system without seeing contingencies and turning points that depended on individual or collective decisions also diffuses responsibility. It leaves new generations of political leaders and policy makers with a very rigid and deterministic framework, and it leaves academics, students, and members of the public with very little sense of agency and little understanding of possible openings in the next rounds of the struggle. And this at the time when the university and its cadres are attacked from all sides.

These attacks come from the top — and not only from the new managerial class, but also often from authoritarian political leaders such as Orbán, Putin, Trump, and Erdoğan with strong anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and anti-expert statements and policies. They also come from the bottom, from social movements challenging the domination of Western modern narratives and institutions. Inside the university the divisions are ever stronger as well. Precarious faculty are still seen as elites by indebted students or by those who never had the privilege of higher education. And then, even while the precariat is challenging the academic salariat, the latter also sees itself precarious, since it is are under ever stronger pressure from the senior management. But these weak positions, and the ongoing enclosures of academic autonomy, are getting used not for mobilizing across the divides, but for justifying one’s position and privilege…

Eli: I loved your problematization of academic “autonomy” (particularly in “The Discreet Charm of University Autonomy” and in your joint paper on academic freedom with Kathleen Lynch). This has been a major issue in French higher education as well, where “autonomy” has been construed in very deeply opposed and ideologically laden fashions — new autonomy for institutional management has come very much at the expense of the collective autonomy of the traditional scholarly disciplines. What’s been the reaction to your efforts to produce a more politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy, or to show how it can in fact end up becoming a conservative tool (as in the anti-revolutionary “autonomous” universities in Venezuela)? Do you think that recent anti-precarity efforts, like #precanthro, can help revitalize the notion of autonomy in spite of the uncertain economic underpinnings of the current academy?

Mariya: So, in both papers, the main thesis – seen through my fieldwork in Venezuela, and through processes happening in traditional academic institutions in Western countries such as Ireland – was that current debates on academic autonomy speak only of autonomy from the state, but not of autonomy from the market. So, while academic autonomy and freedom are especially treasured in struggles against authoritarian regimes, often movements which demand them are much less alert about market processes that enter higher education. Thus even in liberal regimes, academics demand autonomy from the state, but often to avoid regulation and public responsibility, not to get a respite against market forces. In liberal market regimes, academic autonomy often becomes a way to perpetuate privilege and refuse public responsibility. This is especially visible in Venezuela, where it was used by anti-Chavista academics to entrench themselves in the traditional higher education system, and to refuse reform and massification.

And then, not to flog a dead horse, but to bring my own cherished alma mater, it was sad to see that when the CEU senior management came to struggle against Viktor Orbán, they did not underline their extended service to the community and the relevance of their programs, but rather their international ranking and their standing on the prestige market. And this while the university community – CEU but not only – has been put under increasing pressure to (self-) monitor its ‘research excellence’ through meaningless or narrow quantifiable criteria. There’s pressure on permanent academics to fundraise and publish-or-perish. There’s pressure on temporary research and teaching staff to follow these incentives and work almost for free. And there’s pressure on students to be happy they are given an education despite the often outdated and colonial curricula, and the demands to pay fees that put especially ‘nontraditional’ students at risk of ever growing debt. So academic autonomy is already under massive threat from the market, but the only threats we notice are the ones from the state even in instances when it tries to regulate against the market… Of course, if we discarding the relevance of academic autonomy, we deny the struggles of academics working in repressive regimes. But hyperbolizing and extending it beyond proportion contributes to keeping the university in its own elite confines. So then, what autonomy do we want? How can we achieve another as you put it, politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy — or I would add, a decolonized one? It’s a challenge, but a worthy one.

And then again, could an initiative as PrecAnthro – which is still in the very slow process of coming together, after the bi-annual meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropology in Milano in 2016, so it’s still difficult to use as an example – create such community? I don’t know, to be honest. It is difficult enough that we are trying to bring together precarious workers in a struggle for their labour rights – in a very unequal terrain, and we’re just speaking of Europe…

I believe workplace organizing is necessary, and translocal initiatives such as PrecAnthro – which emerge from an uneven landscape, in this case across the members of EASA – are crucial to bridging the gaps between groups who see each other as antagonistic, rather than subject to the same structures of exploitation. I also believe care and solidarity are crucial assets to nurture and develop within such organizations, because they are our strongest weapons against alienation and exploitation, which comes not only from the top, but also from our very relations with each other…

Yet, my experience with organizations like PrecAnthro is that they function in very volatile, vulnerable contexts where cultures of care often coexist with cultures of violence. Individuals are constrained in a specific way by a structure that often pits us against each other in a zero sum game. We’re in a game of competition over scarce material and symbolic resources, of internalisation of fear and bullying, of the individualist and individualising ethos of the contemporary workplace and academia, where historically the message is that one should kick the ladder out from beneath you once you have climbed it…

So, while I would like to see practices of care and solidarity created at initiatives as PrecAnthro, I don’t know at present if such instances could be replicated and to what extent they are replicable and could be brought to some universal status. As Rosa Luxembourg said about the basic error of what she called the Lenin-Trotsky theory in her book on the Bolshevik Revolution, revolutionaries tend to “make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by… fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them… as a model of socialist tactics”. So for me, it is important to draw the lines between the limitations of the struggle we are in, and the normativity that we can attribute to the lessons we learn from it. That just feels like a more honest approach than saying ‘movements of precarious workers create care and solidarity’ – which would be quite an overstretch, creating unrealistic expectations rather than outlining future goals.

Eli: Finally, a question about the politics of being an ethnographer of politics. I had long been involved in university-related activism in the U.S. context before I began doing dissertation fieldwork. Yet I found when I went to France in 2009-11 that, although I was working with a broad range of activist groups in the public university system, it took quite a while before I felt personally invested in any of the local causes. Many of the conflicts over French university reforms were about fairly technical and procedural questions that became political in the context of larger alliances, inflammatory policy trends, etc. In a way, my outsiderness was a methodological asset, because my exteriority made it easier to relate to a range of activist groups who didn’t necessarily get along with each other. So my question for you is — how did you end up negotiating the political fractures that organized your fieldsite? Were you able to cross local boundaries as an outsider, or did you find yourself rapidly placed on one side or another?

Mariya: In a way both. In my case we’re speaking of very different fieldsites, in which my ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status has also changed dramatically. I always remember Kirin Narayan’s great discussion of ‘how native is a native anthropologist’ on that. In Bulgaria, I have been an insider, but in some fieldsites the intersection between my middle class upbringing, my ‘Bulgarian’ majority ethic belonging, my gender and Left politics positioned me differently, when it came to researching such different contexs as housing in Roma neighbourhoods, women’s NGOs, and environmental protests. In Venezuela my principal field site had me studying Venezuelans from poor urban communities, who entered UBV but had formerly been excluded from higher education. But that project also had components of ‘studying up’, as Laura Nader developed this concept, and ‘studying sideways’ in the terms of Ulf Hannerz. Some of my informants were traditional intellectuals with radical views but a very privileged upbringing, degrees from prestigious US, UK, French, and Spanish universities, and a life standard that was not affordable to me or to Bulgarian academics with similar positions, so I had to study up the class ladder. And I experienced ‘studying sideways’ when I met some of the Bolivarian educators who came from high-rise neighbourhoods and expected – rather than experienced – upward mobility through higher education, but then remained economically downclassed during state socialism, in comparison to people with similar standing in core countries.

The latter is the social background I come from and – within the current predicament of precarious academia – I feel I belong to, even if the promise in my case was given by the ‘silver spoon’ of post-socialist transition. In Venezuela, I also moved relatively freely between pro-government environments, and some Venezuelans and foreigners my age who were connected to opposition circles. Yet, the more I studied Chavismo, and regardless of my critique of and frustration with some sides of the movement, it became increasingly difficult for me not to side with that part of the divide. The social vertigo I experienced moving between these contexts was creating incredible cognitive and emotional dissonance in me which I brought back to Europe, starting to be more observant about my own position in my own society. It is this lesson that I bring with me to South Africa – where the class divide coupled with race, is ever steeper, and my own income of a researcher in the UK, social status of academic, and skin colour, make me feel ever more privileged.

And then on studying movements. When I moved to Ireland in 2014, I studied university workers, but many of them by then were living in very dire conditions. I was also involved for some time in a political group dealing with academic precarity, but I did not study that group per se. I just happened to study some issues its work touched upon, and others it did not; there was tension over my own and other researchers’ academic interests and the overall group dynamic, boundaries, and the vulnerability of group members. I also worked in other political groups as Attac Ireland that were challenging the order of the day in Ireland and Europe, fighting for financial justice and labour rights in what now seems to be a main tax havens for the corporations, whose privilege is paid by the huge taxes of the working poor (and here I mean many university workers as well, but not only)…

And then again, unlike many Bulgarians coming to Ireland to work in menial low-skilled jobs regardless of their qualifications at home, I was one of the lucky few who could work at my proper qualification level. Translation was more difficult in Ireland when it came to politics – Eastern European politics mean little to the Irish, who feel solidarity with settler colonialist contexts as Palestine, South Africa under apartheid and the Basque Country, but know little about the places where most of the migrant workers in their country nowadays come from: Latin America and Eastern Europe… I did try to use my and further research in the region to inform local struggles there. To what extent this was successful, I still am not sure, and this can hardly be the role of a single individual.

And then again, while trying to be active in such movements, I realised more and more that starry-eyed paradigms such as PAR – participatory action research – are not a space where I feel comfortable. While I still think politics and academic research should and arguably could not be divided and that choices of research topic, theory, and ethics in the field are extremely crucial, I like to think of academia as a space that allows some distance and reflection on movement actions. I try to do this with my scholarship, and so I do not usually study the very movements I participate in as a core activist, even if these are causes I believe in. But I hope that – for instance – my work on universities as institutions and workplaces informs struggles of students and precarious academics as myself. I hope it gives them the necessary critical but also constructive and caring space to step back and think about the place of the university in the broader structures of society we live in, and their own agency in it.

Eli Thorkelson: I’ve known you and your work for quite a while, Bonnie, and we went to the same graduate program at Chicago (albeit 30 years apart), but I only just found out as part of this interview that your early work was on Puerto Rican speech communities, and then you gradually became more interested in American constructs of multiculturalism, race and class, right? And then a few years after you got tenure, you started working on higher education diversity discourse, focusing on your own institution, Hamilton College. How did that shift come about? Was there some moment when you decided that you had to write about where you worked?

Bonnie Urciuoli: I got to Hamilton in 1988, and within a year or two I noticed students, generally recruited through HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program), who came from the neighborhoods where I had done fieldwork or neighborhoods much like them, and who could easily have been younger members of the families I worked with on the Lower East Side (1978-79) or in the Bronx (1988). HEOP plays a key role. It was established and funded by the state to provide higher education assistance to academically and economically disadvantaged students who show academic promise. The decision to admit a student through HEOP takes place in the admissions process, and students are offered financial packages combining grants, loans, and work-study, some funding from the state, some from the college. Incoming cohorts are 30-40 per year. All participants attend a five-week summer program before their first year. This is a sort of college prep boot camp with classes in various subjects taught by college faculty. (The boot camp part is because of how the residential aspect of the program is run, not so much the academics.) HEOP cohorts include white students, often children of college plant or clerical employees, or sports (usually football, sometimes basketball) recruits but the white HEOP kids tend to disappear into the mass and HEOP is generally identified with Latino, Black, and Asian students. Those kids tend to become the core of the student ‘cultural’ organizations (LaVanguardia, Black Student Union, Asian Cultural Society). From 1972 through 2001 HEOP was the main source of ‘diversity’ for the college; in 2001 the college started partnering with the Posse Foundation to develop another ‘diversity’ source. But I am getting way ahead of my story. Also if you’re interested, I have a ms under review on this very topic. Not to mention a book chapter.

OK, so in summer of 1993, I was working in my office and a couple of my students who were on campus working with the incoming HEOP group came by and said that one of the English professors teaching in the summer program had told some of his bilingual students that the reason they had trouble writing in English was because of interference from their Spanish. I am giving a very low-key account. The reality was more like “Bonnie, you would not believe what Professor X is telling these kids!” “Wait, what???” “Yeah, and we thought you could tell him to stop doing that.” So then when the blood cleared from before my eyes and I got the HEOP director on the phone, she said “well he’s faculty and I can’t do anything about it.” So I went to this friend of mine who was teaching a communication course and asked if she knew about it and she said yes and she was going to tell me and what were we going to do about it and I said how about I come to her class since the kids who got told about their ‘Spanish interference’ were in the class and I could talk about my research and the book I was writing and we could see where it went from there. So we did that and as it happened, my friend Millie (who was one of my key informants and is in Exposing Prejudice) was visiting so she came too and we had quite a discussion. So then three of the kids who’d gotten the ‘interference’ lecture came up to Millie and me at the end of class (I had been pretending I had no idea this had happened) and told us about it and I said well, that’s not how interference actually works. So, long story short, I wound up with these kids as my advisees and students. Then there was my, um, follow-up phone conversation with the professor in question and the HEOP director who I think agreed with him on the ‘interference’ thing, so I had a couple of fairly crisp conversations with them as they both thought the students in question shouldn’t be taking any Spanish and I said well I’m their advisor and if they want to take a course on “Spanish for native speakers” they’re taking it.

Anyway that’s what kick-started my next project. The students in question were young women from New York, and as I recall, they were Puerto Rican, Honduran, Cuban, and Ecuadoran. I told them I wanted to start a new project on what it was like to go from being Puerto Rican etc from Manhattan, the Bronx, etc to being “Latina” at Hamilton and were they interested in working with me and they were and we started interviewing. Also, as I got along with my draft of Exposing Prejudice, I floated pieces to them and got reassuring comments of recognition like “that sounds like my neighborhood” or “that sounds like my mother.” As they became core members of LaVanguardia, the Latino student society, it became an important site for sociality for them, and they also provided much of the Latino programming for the school.

So by now this is the mid-1990s when Hamilton and every other college in its comparison group was concerned with its demographic profile, especially in the face of the hardening social facticity of that damn U.S. News and World Report ranking system, begun in 1983 as a gambit to sell magazines. My anthro colleague Henry Rutz, who had been there since the 1970s and knew the place and its players inside out, said that its concern with its status as a nationally ranked institution really sprouted by the early 1990s, partly reflecting board members’ (very connected to Wall Street) success in what he called the “go-go 80s” and their willingness to donate $$ to overhauling the school’s image, especially since it had, for the first time since 1983, dropped off the top 25 list. So there were lots of mid-90s initiatives: closing and buying the old frat houses (lots of legal action there – a very expensive undertaking), lots of work with consulting firms to do student surveys, and lots of work with college branding consultants, not that I ever heard the word ‘brand’ (so crass!) Lots of strategic planning, and LOTS of obsession with increasing diversity numbers which is how we got hooked up with Posse ca. 2001.

So my project started small with a handful of student interviews in 1995, the original aim being to examine the contrast between what it meant to come from a specific background (Puerto Rican growing up in the Bronx, Dominican in Washington Heights, Cuban in Miami) and to become, over four years at the college, Latino/a – how did they experience, live and perform that transition. But once it was clear how institutionally bound that question was, the project grew. The establishment of college multicultural/diverse identities was embedded in academic and institutional structures, most immediately those of student life. So by 1998 I had expanded my range of interviews to include faculty members and administrators. By the early 2010s, when I finished (or just stopped) interviewing, I had over a hundred interviews, including 60-plus or so with students, 25 with faculty and 15 with administrators. I also became obsessed with the neoliberalized thinking and language that framed every institutional decision and move. And with the branding. Eventually the project turned into the study of how ‘diversity’ is institutionally produced at Hamilton in ways that are strikingly contrastive depending on whether you look at how the institution presents itself to the outside or operates on the inside, and for the latter whether it’s classroom or student life. And socially marked students get to do the heavy lifting in the branding department.

I guess the main reason I focused on Hamilton was that it was there, right in front of me, and so small that it was really easy to study, plus I had gotten to know it so well. Plus, and this is kind of crazy, no one seemed to care what I was doing. IRB kept renewing me and I gave copies of what I wrote to the president (who came in in 2003) and dean of faculty (who came in in 2005) and they didn’t seem to have a problem with what I was writing. I work it into my classes all the time, kids find it pretty interesting. Academically it really does grow out of my earlier project in that it takes up how racialization operates in institutions that I really think see themselves as socially progressive but that have also put themselves in a position where they all use ‘diversity’ to promote themselves, so they need some kind of neoliberalized racial markedness to do that. Is that nuts or what?

Eli: The contradiction between wanting to be a progressive institution and wanting to participate in racialized marketing discourse seems pretty striking (as I’ve learned from reading your work for a while too!). Do you think you could elaborate a little on why this may not feel like a contradiction to the campus actors who are producing diversity discourse? Does it seem like doxa to them (just seems natural) or are they more consciously fatalistic (like “we have no choice about our diversity branding given the higher ed landscape today”)? And can you say a little bit about what it might take to really change the structures of racialized identity on campus? Do you see these identity discourses varying a lot across institutions?

Bonnie: I think to answer this question one needs to think about how an institution is put together. Colleges and universities may be academic institutions but the people tasked with diversity jobs of various kinds aren’t all academics. There are faculty and then there are professional administrators who do the work of admissions, or of student life administration, or of institutional advancement. Faculty are pretty isolated from the rest, plus when faculty move into administration – generally in the Dean of Faculty office, at least where I work – the requirements of their new job tends to crowd out whatever notions of diversity they might have started with.

Here I take pages from Andrew Abbott’s (1988) work on professional expertise versus his (2001) notion of the ‘chaos of (academic) disciplines.’ Re the latter, faculty acting as department members are at a disadvantage: they (we, I should say, I’m in the same boat) tend to see diversity in terms of their own discipline and there is considerable variation across departments as to what diversity is, so none of us are speaking from a unified place. Re the former, one does not have to (nor in fact can one) define what diversity is; instead on is handed the job of solving problems, and one does that depends on one’s institutional role. When faculty act as administrators, they don’t have to, nor can they, define diversity, because it has already been defined in terms of one’s task. If you’re the chief diversity officer, you are supposed to increase the number of diversity hires and do something about the climate those hires will face. But the former tends to take precedence because its success can be measured in numbers, unlike the latter. When those problem-solving positions are occupied by non-faculty, it’s even simpler, because the people in those positions don’t have to put up with interfering academic notions of diversity. If they are in admissions, their job is to increase numbers of students in specific demographic categories. If they are in institutional advancement, their job is to create images of students in those demographic categories that enhance the institution’s reputation and attract support from donors. So I guess you could say that a sense of doxa develops though less so for many faculty, particularly African American faculty, as well as African American student life administrators, particularly those connected with Posse and Opportunity Programs. Having said that, I know several faculty who went pretty doxic (can I say that?) as administrators or as Posse mentors.

But the major decisions about how the institution defines and administers its diversity policies are way out of the hands of all us bit players: they come from the trustees, the president, the director of admissions, and the director of the office of institutional advancement. And they do not see any racializing contradictions because they all see the institution first and foremost. And I doubt that anyone connected to diversity branding at levels of any authority felt any fatalism, conscious or otherwise.

As to what might change all this? Short of losing the whole structure of commodification and branding, I cannot imagine. As to how these identity discourses vary across institutions, I think there is a correlation with how central undergraduate liberal arts education is to the institution, since I get the impression that a lot of what drives this packaging of diversity is making it part of that kind of education. Here’s this ‘useless’ central element of U.S. education – liberal arts – that can be successfully packaged neoliberally as a way to package the general worth of the worker, and some vague notion of diversity becomes part of that packaging. So maybe diversity in US higher education was really never about leveling the playing field for students who are racially marked.

Eli: As you talk about actors finding their way through diversity discourses that they didn’t produce, I think we’re getting to the heart of your long series of papers on higher education diversity and marketing discourse. Your work has brought together a really detailed project of semiotic and textual analysis with a broad survey of liberal arts branding and self-presentation. I gather (correct me if I’m wrong) that you started out from the specific questions about racialization/diversity/multiculturalism that you mentioned earlier, and then you followed a number of discourse chains and associations into a number of related research projects, like “skills” discourse or general idealization projects (often as much photographic as textual) about the “good student.” Your early papers seem more focused on the diversity problematic, like in “Producing multiculturalism in higher education: Who’s producing what for whom?” (1999) and “Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: marketing liberal arts education” (2003), and your later work seems to develop these related topics, as in “Skills and selves in the new workplace” (2008), “Entextualizing diversity: Semiotic incoherence in institutional discourse” (2010) and recently “The semiotic production of the good student: A Peircean Look at the Commodification of Higher Education” (2014). In any event, throughout the work, you emphasize how commonplace institutional signifiers like “diversity” or “skills” have radically unstable denotations that vary in different institutional arenas, and you emphasize that the incoherence of their reference is no obstacle to their discursive flourishing, or perhaps even is a condition of their success. In other words, you’ve brought linguistic anthropology to bear on a topic that doesn’t always get a lot of sustained linguistic analysis. 

Having said all that for the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with your work, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your own practices of research and analysis. Once you decided to embark on this project, how did you go about it on a day-to-day (or year-to-year) basis? Do you divide it up into sub-topics, collaborate with your students, anything like that?

Bonnie: In truth, my “practices of research and analysis” have not been particularly organized. Often I was drawn to particular points of research because of what seemed especially fetishized in the college environment. I may have made the connection between race issues and skills talk when I noticed the opportunity program director (who was African American) stressing the importance of ‘communication skills’ and leadership to students of color. I think I started noticing references to ‘skills’ in the mid 1990s (and first wrote about it in spring 1998) in relation to talk about ‘communication’ particularly by our C&D (marketing) people. And it seemed pretty clear much of this emphasis was being driven by trustees. It started being really evident in college publications by around 1995-97, so I gathered up college publicity literature, print and website. A key element here was that the college used to have a public speaking requirement, the classes for which were supplied by what used to be the Speech Department. That became a department of 2 FTE, one of whom did his best to turn it into an academic department, first Speech Communication and then Rhetoric and Communication. But public speaking remained practically mythologized, especially by trustees and alums, so as skills language started finding its way into higher education advertising, our C&D immediately connected it to public speaking. So I talked to anyone I knew at the school who knew about this history. In particular, my anthropology colleague Henry Rutz, was a wonderful mentor as I was getting started, given his knowledge of our institutional history, his own expertise in the anthropology of education, and his help in clarifying Marxian principles. Henry, who retired in 2006, was a huge part of my coming to understand the institutional embedding of the production of multiculturalism and diversity. Besides that, I just watched what went on around me. For example, in the late 1990s-early 2000s, we had a dean who became highly focused on the importance of communication, hiring consultants to ‘develop’ faculty implementation of ‘communication skills’ in classes. He did the same with assessment. So I didn’t even have to go looking for topics, they surrounded me.

My main concern was to keep looking for how they linked to and informed each other. Basically, I followed threads from one research question to the next. Who I interviewed depended on what principles I was trying to illustrate – how the institution operated, what coursework addressed, the nature of student lives. When I started the project I did a couple of focus groups with students to get a sense of what threads I wanted to pursue. I also frequently incorporated what I was working on into my courses which generated a lot of interesting feedback and sometimes got students in those courses taking up some of the threads and expanding them in course papers and senior projects, some of which I cited in my own work, though I’ve never done any formal collaboration with students. But we sure talked a lot.

Really, there has never been a master plan, nor did I ever consciously sub-divide it ahead of time. It’s been a combination of watching what goes on around me, following threads, and talking to students and colleagues. Since I started the project, there have always been students who have gotten interested in what I’m doing — especially anthropology majors, we have a nice semiotic anthropology program at Hamilton. And I’ve been very lucky in the colleague department: besides Henry, I’ve had Susan Mason in Communication and Education and Chaise LaDousa in Anthropology at Hamilton, plus Richard Handler in Anthropology at Virginia. So I guess the answer to your question is, I just followed the threads that surrounded me (especially the ones that called out to me, “can you f*#!ing believe this??”) But I always tried to do it in a way that connected back to basic principles of Marx-inflected social anthropology anchoring a Silversteinian pragmatic approach.

Now that I think of it, that thing about points of investigation in effect jumping out at me and yelling “get a load of this!” might be peculiar to analyzing one’s own academic institution. I think Richard experiences it at Virginia, I know Chaise does at Hamilton, and I think Gaye Tuchman did at U Conn (Wannabe U). Chaise and I talk about this all the time, why have we (and Henry) noticed it, and why do so few other faculty at Hamilton seem to? We are constantly astonished at how much our colleagues take at face value. But all that is probably going beyond the question you asked.

Eli: I don’t think this is off topic in the least — in fact, I think that the question of “what colleagues notice or take for granted” is central to my earlier question about how much higher ed actors take neoliberal categories for granted, and also to the question of how we are able, or unable, to craft meaningful projects of critical research in the academy. I usually see ethnographic work on higher education as a rather diffuse, but quite long-term discussion among really far-flung scholars from widely dispersed institutions. But here, you’re reminding me that it also makes a big difference to have support from one’s immediate colleagues. How did it happen that Hamilton has two anthropologists working on the language of higher education (you and Chaise LaDousa)? That’s remarkable! 

Bonnie: Well here’s what happened. My anthropology colleague Henry Rutz decided to retire in spring 2006. Henry’s training was in economic and political anthropology and his earlier work on nationalism and time. In the 1990s he moved into anthropology of education, working in Turkey with a colleague. While he didn’t consider himself a specialist in discourse or semiotics, he certainly understood them, especially in relation to neoliberalism and class. My project really started in long conversations with him – he really mentored me on commodification and neoliberalism, and we had endless discussions about the political economy of higher education, of which he had a profound understanding. That’s really how my project got started. I just can’t say enough about how much he helped me.

Anyway, once Henry decided he was retiring and we got authorization to search, the three continuing members of the department decided we’d like to have someone with Henry’s strengths, and I also said I’d really like someone who thought semiotically. And we got something like 160 responses and one of them was Chaise. He actually hadn’t yet developed the angle on education in the U.S. But I had met him and I knew his work on India, and he was a terrific candidate. So he started in fall 2006 which was about when he started publishing his work on student life. And I think in a lot of ways we carried on the conversations that I had earlier had with Henry.

So the answer to your question is, serendipity. Once Chaise got here, we built on common interests and came to work together in ways that I have found wonderfully productive. Over the last decade we have worked with a lot of students together and that too has been wonderfully productive. So there’s been this intellectual space in our department for a long time. Chaise inspires students, he sees and treats them as colleagues.

Eli: The question of like-minded colleagues also gets me to the last big question I wanted to ask you: What’s your take on the field of ethnographic work on higher ed more broadly? It seems to me that academia has slowly become legitimate as a site for anthropological research since the late 1990s, and people like you, Don Brenneis and Sue Wright have done a lot to call attention to the work of language and discourse in academic institutions. Where do you see this research going in the future?

Bonnie: I honestly don’t know. I’m kind of surprised at how long it seems to have taken U.S. anthropologists to tune into structural analyses of higher education compared to say British or European anthropologists. At AAA sometime in the 2000s, I think when he was still president, Don Brenneis organized an AAA session or round table on audit culture. I can’t remember details nor find them on the website. It was a big name session including Sue Wright and Cris Shore, and in a big room, and I was really surprised how few people came. (Don introduced me to Sue and Cris which was very nice of him and very lucky for me.) My sense is that in the US, the hot work in the semiotic anthropology of higher ed is coming out now, with pretty recent Ph.D.s — people like you (no pressure). Maybe it has to do with something like a shift from people thinking of linguistic anthropology as sharply bounded and somehow marginal (even into the 1990s, many departments seemed to treat ling anth as a specialty that only needed one person) to enough people thinking in terms of good anthropology as informed by an understanding of discourse. Not that enough people are there as far as I’m concerned but it’s better. (Pause here for huge shout-out to Michael Silverstein for training so many anthropologists who aren’t necessarily linguistic to think semiotically.) Also, a lot of people doing anthropology of higher ed aren’t in big influential anthropology departments so aren’t training lots of grad students.   And I think the linguistic anthropology work in higher education tends not to be recognized all that much as linguistic anthropology.

So to summarize, some of it is that the study of discourse itself has for a long time, and maybe still, has seemed sort of a specialty in anthropology, some of it is that higher ed hasn’t quite penetrated generally as an ethnographic focus, some of it is that the idea that really incisive political economy analyses of institutional structures really benefit from being semiotically informed has also not quite penetrated – do I have too many dependent clauses in there? – anyway I’d guess all those dynamics play a role. And then too, like I said, the people who are doing this stuff, where are we teaching? That plays a role too. But given that stuff is getting published and emerging scholars are reading it and doing it, maybe there’s a real shift going on.

Oh, and I have one last thought. If you think about where most of the work on academia is that’s informed by political economy analytic thinking (sorry, another awful clause), it emerged in places with stronger Marxist/Marxian social thinking traditions and also where the effects of neoliberally informed thinking come in through policy – hence all that audit culture work outside the U.S. But in the U.S., neoliberal effects come in as much if not more through marketing and branding processes. Sue Wright and I had an interesting talk about it – I had edited a special issue of Learning and Teaching, the higher education journal than she and Penny Wright edit for Berghahn and Chaise LaDousa and Richard Handler had written pieces for it that pretty directly identified Hamilton and Virginia. Sue was worried that they’d get institutional blowback as she had once gotten it (pretty nastily too) from her university’s chancellor. I said so long as what they wrote didn’t affect the brand no one in our marketing department or Virginia’s would even notice what we published. As far as they’re concerned, faculty research is just content provision for the website. (When Chaise published his House Signs book, he was a little concerned how Miami U. would react – well how they reacted was, they put it on their website. They didn’t care about the semiotic analysis, they just figured it was useful publicity. Even better story, when Gaye Tuchman published Wannabe U., if I remember the story correctly, U. Conn. threw her a book party.)

Eli: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk, Bonnie. Your image of research as purely “content provision for the website” is a bit glum, but, you know, it’s better to have our work on the website than not to have it on the website — and so much the better if there’s a book party as well! And on a more serious note, your distinction between “policy neoliberalism” (like in Europe) and “branding-marketing neoliberalism” (more in the U.S.) is quite important. (Though one of the things that I saw in my work in France was that, while neoliberalism did arrive as national policy, it rapidly spawned a big marketing apparatus as well.) As this interview series goes on, we’ll have to come back to this point!

Eli Thorkelson: Your work on science education seems like it comes pretty directly out of your own higher education trajectory, which was in anthropology, botany, and educational thought, right? Do you think you could start out by telling the story of how this diverse set of interests formed, and how you ended up in New Mexico doing your PhD and working on American Indian science education?

Carol Brandt: As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I was an anthropology major and studied archeology. At first I was in the human osteology lab and working on disease patterns in prehistoric human populations as a work-study. At the same time, I was strongly interested in biology and had almost completed double major, if I had only done the organic chemistry. After graduating with a BA in anthro, I found a position working with the University of Colorado at the Dolores Archeology Project in southern Colorado. It was one of the last huge US Corps of Engineers projects in the Southwest that involved inundating an obscene amount of land at near Mesa Verde by damming the Dolores River. This area had thousands of Puebloan and Basketmaker sites dating from 200 BC to 1200 AD. Because I had biology and botany coursework in college, I found myself doing archaeobotanical analysis for several years. Eventually I decided to get a MS in Botany at Colorado State University to continue this work. After getting my MS degree, I worked for the Pueblo of Zuni doing archaeobotany for six years.

It was at the Pueblo of Zuni that I became interested in educational anthropology. I was one of the few people at the Cultural Resources Office who would go into the schools to help teachers develop curricula, lead field trips, and to talk about science (and archeology) as a cultural process and a particular set of practices. As I realized that I wanted to move into education, I eventually found a position at the University of New Mexico in the Biology Department. I was an advisor for undergraduate students, but I also was an advisor for student clubs, one of which was the American Indian Medical Students. These were undergraduate students from the indigenous communities around NM who wanted to pursue medical school. And most of these students were women.

I was at UNM for almost 10 years and found it to be a really amazing place with an incredibly diverse student body. I was really fortunate to take classes with indigenous scholars and to also teach some senior seminars in the biology department on the topics of ethnobotany and agroecology – again, providing a cultural approach to viewing the construction of knowledge about plants and agricultural domestication. I was always taking a few classes here and there and I became interested in getting my PhD at some point – probably as I realized how low the glass ceiling was for women staff at the university. I also enjoyed teaching so much, I wondered how I might become a professor. I also wanted to understand the experience of the indigenous women that I had come to know through my work in the biology department. Eventually this topic became my dissertation topic and I conducted an ethnographic case study of four women who were majoring in the life sciences at UNM.

I was really fortunate to have worked with such great mentors in doing educational anthropology and to have had amazing participants in my research. As I was nearing the end of the dissertation, I wondered what the next step would be and applied for faculty positions and post-docs. I was hired by UC Santa Cruz as a post-doctoral researcher as part of their Center for Informal Learning and Schools. It allowed me to future develop my research skills and to focus on science learning that occurs outside of the classroom. Even though I no longer work with indigenous students, my dissertation profoundly shaped how I look at the ways that youth and young adults move between home, community, and school. I’m deeply interested in the out of school science experiences that we might leverage to engage students who have historically been excluded from pursuing science.

Eli: I have to say, given that academic careers are often so linear these days, it’s remarkable to hear about your more complex trajectory, with your work as a field scientist with the Pueblo of Zuni and then your work as a non-teaching undergraduate advisor all coming before you joined the faculty track. In recounting your shift to a teaching career, the question of gender seems central — via the glass ceiling for women university staff and the predominance of women among indigenous pre-med students — which reminds me that I was also struck, in reading your work from this period, by the strong influence of feminist poststructuralism, which seemed like it was the theoretical point of departure for your research on scientific discourse and American Indian student experience. I wonder if you could say a little bit about the feminist community on campus during your UNM years, and about the feminist intellectual influences on your work?

Carol: Back in the days when you could go into the university and browse the stacks, I found a small book with a purple cover, entitled _Feminist Science Education_ by Angela Calabrese Barton. It really rocked my intellectual world as a beginning doctoral student. I was pretty bold as a graduate student and I emailed her after reading her book, and we had an amazing discussion over the phone. Angie eventually became an outside committee member on my dissertation and has been a continuing influence on my work over the years. But it was a group of my doctoral classmates that really pushed me to use poststructural feminist theory. With two other women, we formed a small dissertation writing group and I remember being really influenced by the work of Bronwyn Davies – a poststructural feminist. We pushed each other to read new (to us) theory and we wanted to understand how to apply this theory to our own work. The Women and Gender Studies program was also very vibrant at UNM at that time and they had a wonderful speaker series. Dorothy Smith was one of those visiting scholars, and her work on Institutional Ethnography provided me a way to think about how to document and analyze institutional discourse. The Women and Gender Studies program had other guest speakers like Cheri Moraga, Winona LaDuke, and affiliated faculty in their American Studies program like Leslie Silko and Joy Harjo – whose work influenced my own.

When I accepted my first academic position in Educational Studies at Virginia Tech, I immediately sought to be an affiliated faculty member with their Women and Gender Studies program, as I was teaching a graduate course on Gender & Education. The WGS program at Virginia Tech was awarded an internal university grant to host an annual regional meeting called Bodies, Gender, & Society that brought together those researchers in the sciences, Science Technology and Society program, with WGS students and faculty. It was a dynamic scholarly community.

At Temple University, my appointment is in science education and so my connections have shifted toward the College of Science & Technology, but I’m still doing research that involves a feminist perspective and gender in science education.

Eli: Can you say a bit more about what it’s like to work in a Science Education program, and what sort of research and teaching you’re doing now? I’m curious, in particular, how you see your work evolving at Temple. Your more recent ethnographic work on studio/design education seems like a larger-scale collaborative ethnography than your earlier work at UNM, with the massive amount of video recording analysis, and I also notice an increased theoretical emphasis on neoliberal political economy (David Harvey and Wendy Brown) in your more recent work.

Carol: So, working in a science education program has been a challenge for me, because up to this point, all my research was focused on learning outside of classrooms. I also consciously avoided classrooms because of the politics around the accountability movement in teacher education. But now, there’s no avoiding it and I feel a tremendous responsibility to bring an awareness of a sociocultural approach to our students pursuing teacher certification. The history of education and science ed in particular have emphasized learning theory that is heavily couched in the individual, drawing from educational psychology. My appointment is in the Early Childhood Education program where I teach undergraduate and master level science education methods. I draw upon feminist and practice theory in anthropology to construct an understanding of the culture of early childhood classroom. We also experiment with different social configurations of the science classroom and analyze the ways that we talk with children about science. Temple University’s strong suit is urban education, so it’s not difficult to contextualize this classroom within  Philadelphia’s precarious politics and poverty. We do a disservice to teachers when we present science as a-political or a-cultural.

I’ve always been interested in alternative learning environments and makerspaces are connected to that desire. Science ed has jumped on to the makerspace (and STEM/STEAM) bandwagon with very little critical analysis or understanding of how these spaces are used by students and teachers. There are many claims about makerspaces being “democratic” and more inclusive for students with disabilities, but very little data or research in this area. I’m also concerned that all of this “making” falls neatly into the institutional pressures for every person to be an entrepreneur and to be the ultimate flexible worker in a neoliberal economy. Justification for makerspaces are couched in discourses around creativity and innovation – with no mention of how makerspaces can potentially address local problems or contribute to the commonwealth. With makerspaces, I’d like to see more teachers and researchers engaging in critical awareness of social-economic issues as they engage in the studio design work of a makerspace.

And you are right, my work now is a collaboration across disciplines – it’s very exciting: I’m working with those in art education, education leadership and organization, humanities (human geography), and the sciences (geology). I have one new project where we are using the alternative learning environment of the design studio in graduate research to bring together students from human geography and molecular biology to develop a social understanding of research on the human body. The graduate students will be designing exhibits to be placed at the Franklin Institute as a result of this work.

Eli: Listening to you talk about your work at Temple, I’m struck by what sounds like one of the great things about not working in a traditional cultural anthro context: you get to do so much more collaborative work. (Traditional ethnography is too often a solo endeavor, partly I think as a bad side effect of the individualizing structures of PhD training and evaluation.) Do you think you could talk a little bit about how your current research projects work, on a day to day level? Do you end up working as a more traditional PI, getting grants and managing a team, while delegating more of the data gathering and analysis to your colleagues? And in terms of where your projects come from, are you picking new projects purely based on your own developing interests or are there other kinds of institutional needs that you try to address? 

Carol: Being at the university, I am without a doubt a neoliberal subject in a neoliberal institution. I know that my success as an academic is full of contradictions and I try to balance that tension. Success in science education is tied to large external grants and collaborating with faculty in the sciences. These projects were important in gaining tenure and offered me the opportunity to publish on large data bases that as a solo anthropologist, I wouldn’t have access to. I’ve been able to encourage my colleagues to take up a cultural lens as a result (no small feat), but the projects have not been focused on social or environmental equity. I usually have 1-3 doctoral students working with me on these projects and it’s a real challenge to stay one step ahead of them, to manage expenses, and to then synthesize the data they generate. Not many education grads want to pursue an anthropological dissertation, so there’s always a large investment in getting the research assistants up to speed and then “poof!” – they disappear as they realize they need to focus on their own research toward the dissertation. I haven’t found any grads yet, that would like to take the data to do some of their own writing or publishing, or even a dissertation.

The big projects have allowed me to do more traditional ethnographic work in the field where I’m working alone. I have a citizen science ethnography that is about 6 years old now that I really need to tie up and perhaps work into a larger collaborative grant with people in hydrogeology over in the geology dept. One of my colleagues at Univ of Montreal, Jrène Rahm, and I talk about doing more ethnographic research with indigenous youth together and I hope I can make time for that.

As for my day to day working pattern – it’s still working alone, with a weekly meeting among the project leaders of the grant. My graduate researchers are full time teachers and part time students, so it’s hard to schedule meetings with them and we usually do Skype or Google Hangout sessions together. Because the Temple campus is 45 minutes away from me, I have a home office where I do most of my academic work. And Wes [Shumar] has his own office right next door, so we often take breaks, read each others’ writing, share articles, or try to work out ideas together. He’s a great colleague in that way.

Eli: Thanks for taking the time to talk about your work, Carol!

Carol: Thanks for letting me think about all of this. I haven’t really connected all the ideas in a while and sometimes I fear that I get distracted by a new project. With your questions, I can see all the linkages and it’s important to keep that in mind as I move ahead.