Pedagogy – Academography https://academography.decasia.org Critical Ethnography & Higher Education Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:23:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3.4 How to study a department and its place in the field https://academography.decasia.org/2019/04/04/how-to-study-a-department-and-its-place-in-the-field/ https://academography.decasia.org/2019/04/04/how-to-study-a-department-and-its-place-in-the-field/#respond Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:22:05 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=2201 Continue reading How to study a department and its place in the field]]> I got an interesting query from a student who wanted to design a comparative research project about two criminology departments and the ways they each construct different versions of their field.

I wrote back with a number of methodological thoughts. I thought I might also post them here, as they sketch out one way to approach this kind of question.

My general intuition is that any academic department is suspended within a number of separate social fields. These would include the disciplinary field, the institutional field of its own university, and the internal field of the department itself. So I essentially suggest that one could start out by mapping these different fields. One could then show how different images of a given discipline themselves emerge from different social locations.

Data gathering

I think you would want to think about finding a balance between archival or documentary research, interviews, and first-hand observation. Interviews can be very rich but it’s also very valuable to do things like see how the department presents itself on the website, what happens at events for new students, the atmosphere in department meetings or seminars, the physical spaces of the department and their moods…  Photos are good memory aids for later description.

Disciplinary fields, departmental fields and hierarchy

I would try to read up a little in the scholarly literature on the relationship between disciplines and departments, since this is often a complicated relationship. It’s worth gaining tools for thinking about how university departments maintain a specific position within a disciplinary field (which may evolve over time, etc). It could be worth reading papers such as Mario Small’s Departmental Conditions and the Emergence of New Disciplines: Two Cases in the Legitimation of African-American Studies, Charles Camic’s Three Departments in Search of a Discipline: Localism and Interdisciplinary Interaction in American Sociology, 1890-1940, or Judith Butler’s Against Proper Objects. Some more general books about disciplinary formation that could be interesting are Andrew Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines, Ellen Messer-Davidow’s Disciplining Feminism, Karin Knorr Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures, or Fabio Rojas’ From Black Power to Black Studies. In your particular case, definitely read up on the history of criminology as a field, and in its relations to other fields/professions (and to the state).

The question is further complicated because there is generally a field within the department too. Usually different people in a department are going in strategically different directions, and they may have significantly different understandings of their field (or indeed come from different fields and belong to different fields). Part of your objective would be to map the space of positions within the department, and then check out how differently positioned actors construct criminology. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields is very useful in this context.

I think the socialization perspective on disciplines is very important and if I were you, I would think about whether you want to privilege professorial or student perspectives. You can look at both, to some extent, but it helps to have a focus.

Studying the university context

The question of a department’s relationship to its university is also a major topic of its own. Students don’t always know much about the institutional politics of this relation; if you get a good relationship with professors you might be able to inquire directly. It’s often good to find out whether there are institutional metrics that weigh heavily on departmental policy and curriculum. Some places give funds in proportion to student enrollments, for instance; definitely check out any obvious steering mechanisms like this. Remember that institutional power is often indirect in higher education. It may be better not to focus on this question in your research design, because it gets vast and complicated, and may lead you away from the relationship between department and discipline.

Internal hierarchy in departments

There is always a hierarchy of belonging within a department as well. As you map the different actors in a site, try to keep track of which ones are dominant actors/public spokespeople, which ones are more “ordinary,” and which ones may be getting pushed out. It’s good (ethically and methodologically) to notice who is particularly socially excluded. In my graduate program, unfortunately, this often tended to be minoritized students (both ethnoracially and in social class terms).

How to get started with a research proposal

I don’t think it is too ambitious to write in your proposal that you want to study how criminology is differently constructed in two criminology departments. I would go with that as a framing question, and then narrow things down in terms of which actors do you want to talk to and which contexts are the most important. Also, start collecting interesting tidbits of data, stories, rumors, images, etc, that could serve as points of departure for your proposal. A good proposal needs some empirical information to work with, not just theory and methodology!

****

As a concluding thought: Obviously there are many possible approaches to this question. If you would advocate a different approach, feel free to say so in the comments!

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2019/04/04/how-to-study-a-department-and-its-place-in-the-field/feed/ 0 Public Anthropology and Student Politics Syllabus https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/20/public-anthropology-and-student-protest-syllabus/ https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/20/public-anthropology-and-student-protest-syllabus/#respond Wed, 21 Nov 2018 03:36:40 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=2034 Continue reading Public Anthropology and Student Politics Syllabus]]> I wanted to share one last syllabus that I’ve taught myself: this one was from when I taught last year at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The prescribed title was “Public Anthropology,” but it was really a critical survey of student movements since the 1960s, seen in global perspective with a focus on South Africa.

I’ll just post the course description and reading list, and then add a few further comments.

Course Description

This module is aimed at understanding the public role of anthropology in moments of political conflict and educational crisis. It will reach this goal through critical reflection on the notions of politics and publics, and through ethnographic study of the history of student protests since the 1960s, culminating in a reflexive study of the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa.

Readings

Part I: Anthropology, publics and politics

Sept. 11 – Decolonizing anthropology in South Africa

  • Nyamnjoh, Francis B., and Nantang B. Jua. “African Universities in Crisis and the Promotion of a Democratic Culture: The Political Economy of Violence in African Educational Systems.” African Studies Review 45, no. 2 (2002): 1-26.
  • Dubbeld, Bernard, and Kelly Gillespie. “The Possibility of a Critical Anthropology after Apartheid: Relevance, Intervention, Politics.” Anthropology Southern African 30, no. 3&4 (2007): 129-34.

Sept. 13 – Power and the Postcolony

  • Mbembe, Achille. “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony.” Public Culture 4, no. 2 (1992): 1-30.
  • Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. “Reflections on Liberalism, Policulturalism, and Id-Ology: Citizenship and Difference in South Africa.” Social Identities 9, no. 4 (2003): 445-73.

Sept. 14 – Decolonizing Knowledge

Sept. 18 – Publics & Counterpublics

  • Cody, Francis. “Publics and Politics.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 37-52.

Sept. 20 – Policy and Critique

  • Mosse, David. “Anti-Social Anthropology? Objectivity, Objection, and the Ethnography of Public Policy and Professional Communities.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 4 (2006): 935-56.

Sept. 21 – Test 1

We will have a written test in class covering questions about Part I of the module.

Part II: Historical anthropology of student protest

Sept. 25 – Public Holiday

There will be no class or reading today.

Sept. 27 – Biko

  • Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Oxford: Heinemann, 1987. (Selections.)

Sept. 28 – France

  • Feenberg, Andrew, and Jim Freedman. When Poetry Ruled the Streets : The French May Events of 1968. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2001. (Selections.)

Oct. 2 – United States

  • Jones, Alethia, and Virginia Eubanks, eds. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014. (Selections.)

Oct. 4 – The 80s and “neoliberalism”

  • Bundy, Colin. “Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Aspects of Youth and Student Resistance in Cape Town, 1985.” Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 3 (1987): 303-30.

Oct. 5 – SASO to SANSCO

  • Badat, Saleem. Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid: From Saso to Sansco, 1968-1999. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1999. (Selections.)

Part III: #FeesMustFall

Oct. 9 – #FeesMustFall

  • Badat, Saleem. “Deciphering the Meanings and Explaining the South African Higher Education Student Protests of 2015–16.” Pax Academica 1-2 (2016): 71-106.

Oct. 11 – Gender

  • Cornell, Josephine, Kopano Ratele, and Shose Kessi. “Race, Gender and Sexuality in Student Experiences of Violence and Resistances on a University Campus.” Perspectives in Education 34, no. 2 (2016): 97-119.

Oct. 12 – Colonial History

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Black Pain Matters: Down with Rhodes.” Pax Academica 1-2 (2015): 47-70.

Oct. 16 – Stellenbosch

We will discuss a range of ethnographic materials dealing with the history of student organizing at Stellenbosch University.

Oct. 18 – Course Review

There is no assigned reading for today. We will review the module content.

Oct. 19 – Test 2

We will have a written test in class covering questions about Parts II and III of the module.

Reflections

As always, the first time you teach at a new university — not to mention in this case, in a new continent — there is a lot to learn about fitting into the local context. If I were teaching this again, I would tinker quite a bit with the readings, especially in the first and last sections, and replace some of the denser texts with shorter, punchier ones. But I was happy with the general course structure, which moved from theories of publics and politics to protest histories and then to current events. The South African #FeesMustFall movement was still quite recent when I taught this class in September 2017.

I also found that this class was complicated to teach at Stellenbosch because my students themselves were deeply divided along political lines. It wasn’t the mission of the class to endorse any particular protest movement, of course, but it did insist that we take student protests seriously, and be willing to learn about them. For some of my South African students, that stance was controversial. A few people walked out the day we talked about Steve Biko.

Instead of assigning traditional papers, I asked students to do two teaching exercises. The idea was that you had to try teaching someone about something we’d learned in class, and then you’d turn in a short written reflection on how it went. I actually found that this was very effective: my students largely had no experience with teaching, but asking them to teach seemed to help shake them out of some of the traps and conventions of regular academic writing.

I’ll attach the full syllabus as well, and some of the lecture notes are also available on GitHub.

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/20/public-anthropology-and-student-protest-syllabus/feed/ 0 Resources for Resistance: A politically engaged reading list https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/01/resources-for-resistance-a-politically-engaged-reading-list/ https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/01/resources-for-resistance-a-politically-engaged-reading-list/#respond Thu, 01 Nov 2018 14:09:48 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=1955 Continue reading Resources for Resistance: A politically engaged reading list]]> Maximillian Alvarez kindly offered to let us repost his short bibliography of Resources for Resistance, which affords a great, broad introduction to recent critical writing on higher education. (Much of it is U.S.-oriented; it also includes reflections from Canada, Britain, Australia, Mexico, and some more transnational cases.)

We’re borrowing the list from the end of Alvarez’s manifesto last year in The Baffler, Contingent No More. The manifesto is well worth reading for its general reminder that organizing against precarity should also be about organizing against the academic star system and against the dominant structures of academic knowledge.

For teaching purposes, this list could provide many useful starting places, especially since many of these texts are shorter form essays that could work well on syllabi.

Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography):

Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”

The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate

Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“

Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”

Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”

Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”

Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)

American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)

Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists

The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects

Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”

Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“

Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”

The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”

Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”

Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“

Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”

Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“

Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”

Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“

Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”

Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”

Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual

Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”

Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”

Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity

Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”

Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”

Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”

Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”

Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”

Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”

Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”

Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“

Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”

Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas”

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2018/11/01/resources-for-resistance-a-politically-engaged-reading-list/feed/ 0 Politics of the University in the Global North Syllabus https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/politics-of-the-university-in-the-global-north-syllabus/ https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/politics-of-the-university-in-the-global-north-syllabus/#respond Wed, 31 Oct 2018 14:37:06 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=1946 Continue reading Politics of the University in the Global North Syllabus]]> A note from an Australian colleague just reminded me that we still need to flesh out our collection of teaching materials in Critical University Studies and critical ethnography of higher education. I do have a few things I can contribute from my own teaching practice. I’ll start here with a reading list that I wrote in 2013 for a class on the politics of universities in the Global North. It is mainly about the United States, with a bit of comparative work from other places, particularly France.

A self-critical note is in order as I post this. If I were writing this list again now, it would probably center feminist and race theory and politics quite a bit more, and honestly, I didn’t have much teaching experience when I put this together in graduate school. It would probably need some revisions for a classroom — it looks too much like a graduate seminar, with too many readings, and not enough space for other kinds of work. But in any case, it does have pointers to a wide range of contemporary critical literature, and I thought it might be a starting place for someone. Maybe even for me, one day.

Politics of the University in the Global North
Draft Reading List

Preamble/Overview

Just what is a university, understood anthropologically? How should we understand its many subcultures, its organizational forms, its economies and its ideological functions? The primary empirical focus of this course will be France and the United States. We will talk a lot about methodology, about multiple sources of data, about different forms of intervention. And you’ll be asked to keep observational journals throughout the quarter, in which you analyze your own university life. You’ll have your choice of writing a research paper or conducting a short ethnographic project about a nearby institution of higher education.

Week 1: The “mass university” in turmoil

Tuesday: The U.S. in the 1960s

  • Kerr, Clark. 2001. The Idea of a Multiversity. In The Uses of the University. 5th Edition. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pp. 1-34.
  • Kahn, Roger. 1970. The battle for Morningside Heights: why students rebel. New York: W. Morrow. Selections.

Thursday: The view from white radicalism

See also: McMillian, John, and Paul Buhle, eds. 2003. The New Left Revisited. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Week 2: Race, class, and social reproduction

Tuesday: Minoritization and national culture

  • Mir, Shabana. 2014. Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. (Selection.)
  • Abelmann, Nancy. 2009. The Intimate University: Korean Americans and the Problem of Segregation. Durham: Duke University Press. (Selection.)

Thursday: Class and masculine elitism

  • Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1979. The Inheritors: French students and their relation to culture. Translated by R. Nice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Selection.)
  • Karabel, Jerome. 2005. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Selection.)

Week 3: The increasingly post-national university

Tuesday: Neoliberalism and audit technologies

  • Brenneis, Donald. 1999. New Lexicon, Old Language: Negotiating the “Global” at the National Science Foundation. In Critical Anthropology Today, edited by G. E. Marcus. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pp. 123-146.
  • Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 1999. Audit culture and anthropology: Neo-liberalism in British higher education. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (4):557-575.

Thursday: Globalizing the university 

  • Ross, Andrew. 2000. The mental labor problem. Social Text 18 (2):1-32.
  • Ong, Aihwa. 2005. Ecologies of expertise: Assembling flows, managing citizenship. In Global Assemblages, edited by S. J. Collier and A. Ong. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Pp. 337-353.

Week 4: Evolving disciplinary conflicts

Tuesday: The system of disciplines

  • Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ch. 1 (pp. 3-33).
  • Le Gall, Brice, and Charles Soulié. 2009. Administrative reform and the new conflict of the faculties at French universities. Laboratorium 1:83-97.

Thursday: Case studies in disciplinary conflict

  • Jennings, Bruce H. 1997. The killing fields: Science and politics at Berkeley, California, USA. Agriculture and Human Values 14:259-271.
  • Rojas, Fabio. 2007. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a radical social movement became an academic discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Selection.)

See also: Graff, Gerald. 1987. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ch. 9

Week 5: The classroom scene

Tuesday: Classroom language and power

  • Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. “Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom.” In The language of law school: learning to “think like a lawyer.” 12-30. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thursday: Smartness, debt and friendship

  • Martínez-Alemán, Ana M. 1997. Understanding and Investigating Female Friendship’s Educative Value. Journal of Higher Education 68 (2):119-159.
  • Williams, Jeffrey J. 2004. Smart. Minnesota Review 61-62:171-190.

Week 7: The scholarly gaze

Tuesday

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Scholastic Point of View. Cultural Anthropology 5 (4):380-391.
  • Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3):575-599.

Thursday: Standpoint epistemology and critique

  • Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 2002. The Concept of Enlightenment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pp. 1-34.
  • Messer-Davidow, Ellen. 2002. Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse. Durham: Duke University Press. (Selection.)

Week 8: Campus space and political economy

Tuesday

  • Eichhorn, Kate. 2006. Breach of copy/rights: The university copy district as abject zone. Public Culture 18 (3):551-571.
  • Lafer, Gordon. 2003. Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography. Political Geography 22:89-117.

Thursday

  • Konings, Piet. 2002. University Students’ Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon. African Studies Review 45 (2):179-204.
  • Abu-Radia-Queder, Sara. 2008. Does Education Necessarily Mean Enlightenment? The Case of Higher Education among Palestinians—Bedouin Women in Israel. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39 (4):381-400.

Week 9: Affect and relationships

Tuesday: Student experience

  • Sabin, Portia. 2007. On Sentimental Education among American College Students. Teachers College Record 109 (7):1682-1704.
  • Stephens, Sara, and Amelia Fay. 2010. ‘This Masters is Going to Kill Me’: E- Narratives of Stress and Support Between Anthropology Graduate Students. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 18:70-111.

Thursday: Precarity and debt

  • Sharff, Jagna Wojcicka, and Johanna Lessinger. 1994. The Academic Sweatshop: Changes in the Capitalist Infrastructure and the Part-Time Academic. Anthropology Today 10 (5):12-15.
  • Adamson, Morgan. 2009. The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt. Polygraph 21:97-110.

Week 10: The metanarrative industries

Tuesday: The ideology of excellence

  • Readings, Bill. 1996. The University In Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ch. 2 (pp. 21-43).
  • Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2003. Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: marketing liberal arts education. Language & Communication 23:385-408.

Thursday: The politics of critical research

Contemporary writing on the politics of what has been polemically called “Grievance Studies” will be distributed.

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/politics-of-the-university-in-the-global-north-syllabus/feed/ 0 Critical Philosophy and Anthropology of Education Syllabus https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/critical-philosophy-and-anthropology-of-education-syllabus/ https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/critical-philosophy-and-anthropology-of-education-syllabus/#respond Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:21:40 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=1948 Continue reading Critical Philosophy and Anthropology of Education Syllabus]]> For our continuing collection of syllabi, here is the syllabus for an undergraduate seminar that I taught in 2016 during my postdoc at Whittier College (a small liberal arts college in Southern California). Its mission was to put critical ethnography of higher education into dialogue with critical philosophies of education (from Plato to Freire, essentially).

Let me begin here with the reading list and course description, and then I will add some retrospective teaching comments at the end.

Critical Philosophy and Ethnography of Education
Fall 2016
Tuesday/Thursday, 1:30-2:50
Eli Thorkelson

Course Description

What is the meaning of being educated? How can educational institutions be so contradictory, combining systems of discipline with ideals of freedom and emancipation? How does education change in the face of globalization and digital technology? In this class, we will take an anthropological look at how education works in a range of global cultures and institutions. One part of the course will look critically at educational values and ideals, ranging from the French Enlightenment to the postcolonial era. A second part will be interactional, studying in fine detail at how ethnographers analyze power and language within the classroom. And a third part will be institutional, considering the rise of “neoliberalism” since the 1980s, the changing structure of social reproduction and the labor market. Students will also practice doing some of their own ethnographic fieldwork, centered on an educational setting of their own choosing, and will be asked to write about their own educational experiences.

Reading List

Week 1: Introduction

September 8: Overview of the course

In-class writing assignment

Week 2: Philosophies of Education

September 13: “Traditional” Western Pedagogy
Plato, Republic, Book 2, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm

Recommended:
Jacques Verger, “Scholastic Pedagogy,” “Knowledge and Authority: The Teacher’s Image” and “The Place of Teachers in Medieval Society”

September 15: The Birth of Education

Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/623/623-h/623-h.htm

Recommended:
Eli Meyerhoff, “Against Education”

Week 3: Enlightenment Pedagogy (I)

September 20: Rousseau, Emile, Book 1

September 22: Rousseau, Emile, Book 2

Week 4: Enlightenment Pedagogy (II)

September 27: Rousseau, Emile, Book 3

September 29: Rousseau, Emile, Book 5

Week 5: Feminist & Progressive Education

October 4: A Retort to Rousseau
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, Chs. 1-2

October 6: U.S. progressivism
John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education” (in Democracy and Education)

Week 6: Postcolonial and Liberation Pedagogy

October 11: National Independence
• Donald Freeman, Rollie Kimbrough and Brother Zolili, “The Meaning of Education”
• Julius K. Nyerere, “Education for Self-Reliance”

Assignment: First paper due by midnight

October 13: Freire
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Ch. 1-2.

Week 7: The Classroom

October 18: Social Order
• Deborah Golden, “Structured Looseness: Everyday Social Order at an Israeli Kindergarten”
• Judith Kapferer, “Socialization and the Symbolic Order of the School”

October 20: Participatory Pedagogy
Johan Elvemo, Davydd Greenwood et al, “Participation, action, and research in the classroom”

Week 8: Social Reproduction On Campus (I)

October 25:
Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party, Ch. 1 (“The Women”)

October 27:
Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party, Ch. 5 (“Socialites, Wannabes and Fit with the Party Pathway”)

Week 9: Social Reproduction On Campus (II)

November 1:
Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party, Ch. 6 (“Strivers, Creaming, and the Blocked Mobility Pathway”)

November 3:
Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party, Ch. 7 (“Achievers, Underachievers, and the Professional Pathway”)

Week 10: Informal Education

November 8:
Loic Wacquant, “The social logic of sparring,” pp. 77-100, from Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

November 10:
Loic Wacquant. “An implicit and collective pedagogy,” pp. 100-127, from Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer

Assignment: Second paper due by midnight

Week 11: Gender and Power

November 15:
C.J. Pascoe, “Becoming Mr. Cougar: Institutionalizing Heterosexuality and Masculinity at River High,” from Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.

November 17: NO CLASS (AAA Meetings)

Week 12: Gender and Power

November 22
C.J. Pascoe, “Look at My Masculinity! Girls Who Act Like Boys” from Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.

November 24: NO CLASS (Thanksgiving!)

Week 13: Public Higher Education (I)

November 29:
Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, Ch. 1

December 1:
Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, Ch. 3

Week 14: Public Higher Education (II)

December 6:
Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, Ch. 5

December 8: Conclusion

Reflections

With a few years of hindsight, if I were designing this class again today, there is  quite a bit that I would change. Here are a few notes on that.

The long books turned out to be tough going with the group of students I had. They were not really accustomed to reading long books in anthropology classes. I had decided beforehand that I really wanted us to read Rousseau’s Emile in this class, and in hindsight, I still think its image of non-didactic pedagogy, and its extreme sexism, are worth learning about and historically important. But it turned out to be a very hard and long book for my students, and I regretted giving it so much space on the syllabus. And Jonathan Swift’s 17th century prose, however much it illuminated an earlier moment’s politics of knowledge, proved to be an even harder challenge.

I found in practice that Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking The Public University was hard to work through, again largely because it is long and intricate, and I didn’t discover how to excerpt it effectively. It covers an important topic that my Californian students cared about — the U.S. politics of race, affirmative action, and public education — but I would probably look for a more concise introduction to the topic.

I would likely also rearrange the syllabus now to give feminist theories of education much more attention. The philosophical “canon” of educational theory is structurally quite male, and I would like to challenge that more effectively, beyond just reading Wollstonecraft’s reaction to Rousseau, and then coming back later to gender issues with Armstrong and Hamilton’s and Pascoe’s excellent ethnographic books.

All these caveats aside, I do still really like the idea of reading philosophy of education alongside ethnography of education. Students (not to mention many teachers) don’t usually know much about the history of educational ideas, and they are very interesting to juxtapose with ethnographic work.

Full syllabus

I’ll also post the full syllabus (with assignments, policies, etc) as a PDF. Here it is, along with some closing reflections from the last day of class.

Anthropology of Education Syllabus + Coda (PDF)

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2018/10/31/critical-philosophy-and-anthropology-of-education-syllabus/feed/ 0 Interview with Gina Hunter (Ethnography of the University Initiative) https://academography.decasia.org/2018/02/26/interview-with-gina-hunter-ethnography-of-the-university-initiative/ https://academography.decasia.org/2018/02/26/interview-with-gina-hunter-ethnography-of-the-university-initiative/#comments Mon, 26 Feb 2018 11:28:49 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=1278 Continue reading Interview with Gina Hunter (Ethnography of the University Initiative)]]> Gina Hunter is an anthropologist teaching at Illinois State University, in the Midwestern United States, and a longstanding participant in the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI). The EUI, which we’ve written about before, is an institutional initiative housed at the University of Illinois which aims to support reflexive student research projects about higher education. The project has been around since 2002, and Hunter was its co-director from 2006–2014. She generously took the time to answer a number of questions about the project, its politics and context. The interview, if I may say so, is particularly relevant for teachers thinking about the politics of students doing critical research on their own educational institutions.

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.

Abelmann, Nancy. 2009. The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation. Durham: Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-intimate-university.
Cain, Timothy Reese. 2013. “Examining the University: EUI at the Confluence of Student Research, Institutional Critique, Pedagogical Community-Building and Technological Change.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060308.
Fortier, Priscilla. 2013. “The Persistence of Racial Discomfort on Campus: Ethnographic Perspectives from under-Represented Student Researchers.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060303.
Hunter, Gina. 2012. “Students Study up the University: Perspectives Gained in Student Research on the University as Institution.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 12 (1): 19–43.
Hunter, Gina, and Nancy Abelmann. 2013. “The Ethnography of the University Initiative: A Decade of Student Research on the University.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060301.
Kwon, Soo Ah. 2013. “The Comforts and Discomforts of Race.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060304.
Prendergast, Catherine. 2013. “Reinventing the University: EUI as Writing Initiative.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060307.
Ramos, Teresa. 2013. “Critical Race Ethnography of Higher Education: Racial Risk and Counter-Storytelling.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060306.
Rana, Junaid. 2013. “Anti-Racist Teaching, Student Ethnography and the Multiracial Model of Islam.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060305.
Somerville, Siobhan B. 2013. “Locating Queer Culture in the Big Ten.” Learning and Teaching 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060302.
]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2018/02/26/interview-with-gina-hunter-ethnography-of-the-university-initiative/feed/ 4 Students as course evaluators https://academography.decasia.org/2017/11/28/students-as-course-evaluators/ https://academography.decasia.org/2017/11/28/students-as-course-evaluators/#respond Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:51:31 +0000 https://academography.decasia.org/?p=1005 Continue reading Students as course evaluators]]> Chronicle of higher education on student roles in course evaluation

This Chronicle of Higher Education story is both welcome and disturbing. It is welcome because it credits students being intelligent enough to evaluate constructively what and how they are learning in classes.  So far so good.  But the rather breathless tone of this essay ignores the fact that the Tayloristic premises of higher education institutions as organizations has primarily created students as passive consumers of “education” rather than active partners in a process.  This reveals the native Fordist model that dominates and its associated “banking model”.

It is positive to have some student voices as being credited as worth hearing.  It is not very sensible to see this as a solution to much.  So long as the organizational structure make it appear innovative to include students and other stakeholders in the teaching/learning process, we are not getting anywhere.

And this piece takes no account of other key issues.  First, most teaching faculty are either on term contracts, part-time and cobbling together jobs, etc. The article evokes places where this is not the case.  Second, creating a collaborative teaching/learning environment is a fundamental pedagogical reorientation.  When it occurs by itself, as it did in my classes, the students report “whiplash” in moving between a class where they were valued partners and classes where they are filling seats in an auditorium or being lectured at in a so-called seminar.  Third, most higher ranked universities clearly take no account of the quality of or support for teaching quality.  Administrators want evaluations to control faculty and to polish their institutions’ public image.

At various times in my career, we had some coalitions of the willing who created a small space for this kind of teaching/learning and the results were breathtaking.  But they ran against the grain of the institution and could not survive.  My learning is that higher education cannot be half-reformed.  Incremental change is not going to work against such a consolidated structure. The value of the article is simply to show that you can learn from students and they can learn from the process of being valued as evaluators.  It is important but more is needed.

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2017/11/28/students-as-course-evaluators/feed/ 0 Anthropology of the University Syllabus https://academography.decasia.org/2016/06/04/anthropology-of-the-university-syllabus/ https://academography.decasia.org/2016/06/04/anthropology-of-the-university-syllabus/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2016 22:09:27 +0000 http://academography.decasia.org/?p=56 Continue reading Anthropology of the University Syllabus]]> Davydd Greenwood kindly shared his syllabus for an Anthropology of the University course. I believe he taught this course for about ten years at Cornell University, so it presumably went through many iterations. Here’s the description:

We examine the contemporary university as a social and cultural system. The seminar involves an examination of the convergences and divergences between the trajectories of the sciences and engineering, the humanities, and the social sciences in contemporary universities and some international comparisons with the trajectories of universities around the world. The overall aim is to link an ethnographic analysis of the microstructures of departmental differentiation, professional hegemonies, and local financing with the larger-scale processes of transformation of universities’ place in society under the pressures of corporatization, globalization, and competition from a host of alternative higher education institutions.

Here’s the list of books they read:

For more details, read the complete syllabus here.

 

]]> https://academography.decasia.org/2016/06/04/anthropology-of-the-university-syllabus/feed/ 3