Not the Next Book: Recent Advances in Pseudoarchaeology

I’m just about done the book project that I’ve been toiling on since before the pandemic, and I’m recovering from a mild case of burn out. I’ve started to get the itch to think not about not the next book, but the book after that. (The next book has to be finishing the publication of our excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus). 

Anyway, to keep me motivated to do anything and not to descend the ominous spiral of burn out once again, I have to think about what’s next. Here’s my current next idea and its origin story. 

A few years ago, I started a project on Sun Ra and pseudoarchaeology called “Not All Ancient Aliens.” I had this idea that it might be a good fit for Near Eastern Archaeology but the editor didn’t really think that it worked there. Since then, I spun the literature review off as a review essay in North Dakota Quarterly and the main paper just kind of sat in a folder on my laptop. A chat with my buddy Kostis Kourelis convinced me that this paper could every easily become a paper on time in pseudoarchaeology and unpack a bit what non-pseudoarchaeologists could learn from the way in which other modern traditions think about time.

The next chapter would be about space and it just so happens that I have another article rejected by Near Eastern Archaeology moldering in a folder on my laptop. This paper thought a bit about space and consider how the concept of Babylon had become unmoored from its historical location and may be following the flows of oil around the world. You can read a draft of that here. This would be the second chapter.

The final chapter is a bit more nebulous right now, but I have this idea that I could maybe wrangle some of my various writings on Philip K. Dick into a chapter on pseudoarchaeology and the future. I’m still sketching out how this might work, but the plan might be to use his writing (and perhaps the writing of Samuel Delany) to talk about how things can embody futures lost in the past. This would allow us to use pseudoarchaeology as a more than just a whipping boy to demonstrate how racists use problematic rhetorical strategies, unsystematic augmentation, academic mimicry, and other problematic approaches to attempt to breath new life into long rejected (or never accepted) arguments.

The goals of this book are threefold.  

First, I want to encourage people to take pseudoarchaeology more seriously as a way of thinking about time and space and the foreclosed futures. This isn’t just to be contrarian (although that’s part of it), but to remind archaeologists that our disciplinary anxieties are as likely to produce the kind of blinders that makes it hard to discern the character of the supermodern world. If nothing else, it contributes to the ongoing conversation about how we represent a past that is useful for our vanishing present. 

Second, I have this vague idea that archaeologists might benefit from reading more broadly and approaching their work — at least sometimes — in a more playful manner and seeing in some of the more opaque and confusing work in the past a sense of hope and perhaps even joy at seeing the world in unconventional ways. There’s something about the relentlessness of hope, joy, and play that can disarm even the most blustering polemicists. 

Finally, I want to produce something more speculative. I wonder whether University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunner Series might be a destination for this book. If I understand its remit, it is to promote books that celebrate speculative and thought-in-process scholarship. 

The Swamp Peddlers

This week, I’m vacationing in Florida with my family and it seemed like a good time to read Jason Vuic’s new book, The Swamp Peddlers:  How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (UNC 2021). Some readers of my blog might remember my long-standing fascination with the huge platted communities here in Florida. Places like Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, Golden Gate, and Port Charlotte. That said, I really didn’t know the history of these places and why their sprawling street grids often lacked homes and seemed to be fading into the Florida wilderness. 

Vuic’s book answers this question in style. Most of the places that had so fascinated me were schemes by developers, lots sellers, and land scammers to attract money from middle-class retirees in the north and midwest by offering them lots on installment plans. In some cases these lots were simply not buildable owing to the seasonal flooding or inadequate infrastructure. In other cases, these lots were undesirable because they formed parts of sprawling developments that lacked room for commercial development, lacked amenities, and fell far short of the promises made by developers. In other words, these neatly platted, but empty developments represented a combination of areas never suitable for building, failed ambition, and inadequate planning. Vuic’s book unpacks the various schemes, scams, and personalities that led to this distinctive landscape.

The archaeologist in me is fascinated by the history of these marginal places. They don’t represent traditional example of abandonment in that they were never really used intensively. At the same time, these spaces did see uses ranging from intermittent development to illegal marijuana farming, land strips for small airplanes, or, in the case of River Ranch Acres, as hunting, camping, and squatting grounds.

There is something about these spaces at the very edges of capitalism. In many ways, they’re shaped by capital, but they also somehow exist at the edges of what capitalism sought to project onto the landscape. Squatters, drug runners, hermits, and loners have founds a sense of place in these strangely marginal places in our landscape. A project designed to document the use of these spaces would shed light on how places carved out of the Florida wilderness through dodgy land schemes mapped out the rough edges of capitalism. These places sought to create ambivalent futures that were suspended between the dreams of the post-war suburban middle class and the avarice of developers.

Needless to say, I’ll likely never pursue this project, but the more I read about these developments in Florida the more fascinated I am about their potential to reveal something about how we negotiate our relationship with not only the future, but also capital.

Twosday: PKAP II and 1100 Miles of Racing

Like many people, I’ve started to get a bit antsy about what I’ve accomplished and how I’ve prioritized my time during the pandemic. Not only am I feeling a good bit of survivor’s guilt surrounding any productivity that I did manage during the pandemic, but I also feel bad about prioritizing some of my own projects – namely my single-authored book and a number of single-author articles – over the same stretch of time.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project 2

To get back to feeling good about myself, I’ve (finally) returned to the long stagnant project that is the second volume of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project’s final excavation report. The book is 90% complete with just a few odds and ends necessary to prepare it for review. So, this week, I’m going to get PKAP2 into shape for publication and, with any luck, get it to the editor of ASOR’s Archaeological Report Series by the middle of next month (warts and all).

The book will mostly be just a report and as such, it won’t be very interesting to anyone not invested in the archaeology of Late Roman Cyprus. The excavations of the church at Pyla-Koutsopetria, for example, produced very little additional information about the architecture or design of the building. The work on the hill of Pyla-Vigla is rather more interesting, but it is likely to be superseded by ongoing work at the site. That said, the artifact assemblages produced at Koutsopetria and Vigla will continue to add some nuance to our understanding of the Late Roman and Hellenistic periods.

As importantly, it’ll also offer some context for the work of our survey in the region and allow us to connect our survey to more secure excavated contexts. For the Late Roman period, better contexts exist elsewhere on the island, but for the Hellenistic period, the assemblages documented from our excavation of a “clean up pit” adjoining the fortification wall on the height will likely be of interest to scholars of the Late Classical and Hellenistic period on the island. The painted plaster from the church should also be of interest.

The most interesting thing that we hope to accomplish is the complete integration of our digital dataset from the project. In fact, the data is already available via Open Context here.

1100 Miles of Racing

This weekend is the Indy 500 (Indy Car) and the Coca Cola 600 (NASCAR) and both happen on Sunday. I’ve been trying to take some time off on Sundays to enjoy parts of life that don’t involve books, writing, and laptops. Part of the challenge, of course, with being an academic is that almost anything in my world could become an academic task.

One place that seems safe, so far, from my perspective, is my love of autoracing. Usually, I’m overseas over the Memorial Day holiday and last year with the Indy 500 running in August on account of the COVID pandemic, things just didn’t feel right. This summer, while things remain a long way from being normal, both the Indy 500 and the Coca Cola 600 will happen on the same day.

Part of me (a small part, I must admit) wants to live blog BOTH races. I have no idea why I want to do this. I mean, first off, no one live blogs any more. It’s just not a thing. People post on social media. 

Secondly, what can I say about about 1100 miles of racing in a weekend? I mean, I know the racers and the events fairly well and have been following this season, but I don’t feel like I have any particular insights (of course, when has that stopped me from blogging in the past)?

Finally, I realize that part of what I want to do with my blog is expand its scope a bit. As any number of pundits have opined, the academic blog is likely in terminal decline. The stakes of blogging are too high (as academics have become targets of partisan politics and bad faith arguments), readership is split between social media, podcasts, and more conventional academic writing, and people are just too busy to enjoy reading someone’s half-baked and poorly edited ideas. That said, there is something liberating about this situation. Maybe realizing that relatively few people read this blog any more is exactly what I need to do new things and to stray further from its long-standing academic-lite format? 

Writing a Book and Slow Archaeology

One of the many downsides to the COVID pandemic is that I’ve had too much free time to thing. As a result, I’ve started not only to come up with new projects, but I’ve also come to second guess these same projects.

For example, this past week on a couple run and walks, I concocted a new book project, which I’ll unpack below, but I also started to wonder whether the world needs another book these days. As a tenured faculty member who is well and truly mid-career, I’ve struggled a bit to come to terms with my changing responsibilities both to my field and my colleagues.

We’re trained, of course, to read, write, and teach. In fact, most of us derive a good bit of pleasure from this routine. At the same time, most of us have become increasingly aware that reading, writing, and teaching are just one part of our larger social responsibilities as faculty members. We’re increasingly being called upon to give our frenetic keyboards a rest and listen. We’re becoming aware that when we speak, teach, write, and publish, we’re not just doing our jobs, but we’re also creating conditions in which other voices and perspectives will be less likely to be heard, read, and advanced. This is especially true as we move from early to mid-career status and our acquired skills and training often generate a kind of momentum of its own which allows us to produce scholarship, mould a classroom discussion, and acquire grants, publication opportunities, and audiences that often far exceed the value of our ideas. This creates a kind of obligation on our part to make sure what we’re doing is meaningful and not just the product of a well-conditioned routine and to examine our energies and commitments to determine whether our efforts really do make our field and society better. 

That being said, messing around with a book idea is a far cry from writing a book, and most readers will recognize that like so many ideas that bubble up from the COVID induced isolation, this one is probably best left in the idea box…

Slow Archaeology: The Book

What if I wrote a book on “slow archaeology”? In some sense, this would be the ultimate vanity project. I’d be expanding an idea that I had five years ago and explored in a few articles. I’m under no illusions that I’m the best person to do this, but I’ll also admit that the idea seems really fun.

The book would be short (<50,000 words with references) and organized into two parts following an introduction.

Introduction: Slow Archaeology: This chapter would set out the historiography of the slow movement and seek to establish the intellectual roots of the slow movement in the larger critique of modernity, efficiency, and technological acceleration. This seeks to walk a fine line between conservative nostalgia and fantasies about the past (that inform so much of the slow food movement) and the most radical critiques of contemporary technology and our post-industrial world. In many ways, this introduction will allow me to return to formulations of slow archaeology presented in past publications, to respond to some thoughtful critiques, and, frankly, walk back some of the more ideologically fraught positions that I’ve found myself occupying.

More than that, it’ll frame the book as a good faith effort to infuse the discipline — and academic archaeology, in particular — with a greater attention to social critique. Slowing down pushes us to consider how our choices of technology, our organization of work, and disciplinary practice shapes not only the kind of information that archaeology produces, but also the kind of social relations that define our field.  

Part I: Slow Archaeology as Research

Chapter 1: Slow Archaeology in the Field.

This chapter would emphasize slow practice in the field. It’ll look at the technologies that have become our constant companions from GPS units to mobile phones, digital cameras, and, increasingly, tablet computers and consider how these technologies have changed the ways we view landscapes, survey units, stratigraphy, and most importantly, the organization of archaeological work. 

This will draw on my own experience in the field in Greece and Cyprus and leverage the growing body of work that draws upon ethnographic practices and historical research to understand the organization of archaeological labor in the past and the present.

Chapter 2: Slow Archaeology and Analysis

This chapter considers how slow archaeology can inform the tools that archaeologists have increasingly come to use for analysis. These took ranges from relational databases to GIS, computer aided illustrating tools, 3D imaging and manipulation technologies, and even the ubiquitous laptop or desktop computer.

The chapter will drawn upon my own experiences as well as projects like “The Secret Life of Data” project from the Alexandria Archive Institute and the work of folks like Costis Dallas and others who are working to produce an ethnography of digital practices. The goals is not to reject digital technology in analysis, but to argue for a more attentive set of practices in our use of digital tools.

Chapter 3: Slow Archaeology and Writing

This chapter would consider how a slow archaeology would shape the writing and dissemination of archaeological knowledge. Over the last 40 years, archaeologists have become increasingly attuned to how our forms of archaeological writing shape the arguments we make. This chapter won’t add much to this larger discussion, but will present an updated survey of recent efforts to explore more nuanced, complex, and affective forms of archaeological writing and presentation. 

Part 2: Slow Archaeology and the Academy

This chapter will look at three key areas of archaeological work through the lens of slow archaeology: professional practices, teaching, and publishing. The goal is to extend the basic critical principles of slow practice beyond the field work to publishing continuum and think about how both teaching slow practices and engaging in slow archaeology could shape a wider range of disciplinary practices in academic archaeology.

Chapter 4: Slow Archaeology as Professional Practices

This will be a grab bag chapter that considers things like graduate seminars, academic conferences, and even peer reviewing as places where various slow practices provide a  basis for critiquing academic archaeology. This chapter would argue that slow archaeology questions how archaeologists communicate with one another and the underlying practices and goals associated with supposed “merit-based” methods of advancement. To be clear, this chapter will consider how “generous thinking” can serve to undermine the persistent fantasy that the current set of disciplinary practices advance the best possible candidates to positions of leadership in our field. 

It will suggest that unconferences, collaborative projects, and greater efforts to engage with the community can challenge competitive models of advancement increasingly grounded in quantified methods for evaluating research and performance. In its place, slow archaeology proposes convivial practices that celebrate diversity, plurality of views, and egalitarian methods of creating new knowledge.

Chapter 5: Slow Archaeology and Teaching

Like the previous chapter, this chapter will develop conviviality as a mode through which to understand teaching at the university level (and ideally beyond). I’ve written a bit about this already without explicitly invoking slow archaeology, but I think my critique of technology and the “assessocracy” is consistent with my larger critique technologically-mediated and efficiency-driven archaeological practices. The emphasis here will largely be on the undergraduate classroom and I’ll lean on my work with the Wesley College Documentation Project as a case study.

Chapter 6: Slow Archaeology and Publishing

I’ve already developed many of the main ideas for this chapter in a paper that I submitted last fall titled: Collaborative Digital Publishing in Archaeology: Data, Workflows, and Books in the Age of Logistics. In a nutshell, this article proposes that changes in technology have allowed archaeologists to approach publishing in new and collaborative ways that can challenge the traditional role of publishers in our discipline. Like the other chapters in the book, this will chapter will demonstrate how slow archaeology is not necessarily anti-technology, but rather an approach to technology that allows for a more critical and ideally responsible (and egalitarian) approach to the discipline.

Conclusion: Toward a Slower Discipline

The final part of the book will look to the place of slow archaeology amid the changes taking place within the discipline of archaeology — from the casualization of academic labor, the rise of the assessocracy, and the pressure on our field to become more diverse, pluralistic, and responsive to a wider range of communities.

It goes without saying that slow archaeology will not solve all the discipline’s problems nor is it somehow above critique. Instead, I’ll suggest that slow practices have a place within our archaeological toolkit and offers ways to critique long-standing archaeological practices and create new ways of engaging with the public, students, and our peers.

NDQuesday: On Cricket and Basketball and the Future

I have this idea, it’s not a good idea, but it’s an idea nonetheless to put together an essay the NBA and cricket that brings together some of my research on the Bakken Oil Patch, on the age of austerity, and my interest in these sports. In my fantasy world, I imagine this as a penetrating essay in this fall’s volume of North Dakota Quarterly. In reality, these ideas are probably best left shoved deep down in the ole “idea box.”

On Cricket and Basketball and the Future 

I’ve been watching a good bit of cricket and the NBA lately. Most people tend to see the former as slow-paced, obscure, and unapologetically aristocratic and the latter as up-tempo, almost jarringly athletic, and deeply rooted in American urban experience.

Of course, these simplifications do not hold up to even superficial scrutiny. With countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and now Afghanistan playing cricket at the highest level, it is hard to continue to associate the sport with a genteel aristocracy (to say nothing of the explosive play that characterized West Indian cricket and the recent rise in short-form T20 cricket). The NBA is now, more than ever, a global league with superstars hailing from Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia as well as across the U.S. In short, both sports are global in scope and whatever their historical roots, the significance of the game is now translated into numerous local idioms. 

What has intrigued me lately is that the NBA is undergoing some pretty significant changes in how it is played. When I started paying close attention to basketball in the 1980s, there were clearly defined positions that, with some variation, had clearly defined roles. Centers rebounded and scored in the low post, power forwards did likewise, but often had a bit more athleticism and range. Small forward and shooting guards were typically assertive scorers whose main distinction was range and size. Shoot guards tend to be smaller and more accomplished shooters and small forwards more athletic and slashing with a bit more size and defensive acumen. Point guards distributed the ball and generally had defensive responsibilities around the perimeter.

In the last 5 years, all this has changed. Point guards have become scorers; power forward and centers without outside shots have become one-dimensional role players; small forwards and shooting guards have become so interchangeable that teams generally play three guards without distinguishing. My team, the Philadelphia 76ers, has a 6-10 point guard, Ben Simmons, who can switch to playing power foward, small forward, or even center. In short, the idea of positions has broken down in the NBA and as a result, the game on a play-by-play basis has become a bit more chaotic, less predictable, and, for lack of a better word, elastic with the dominant tactic on any possession, to simplify greatly, to stretch a player to the absolute limits of their comfort zone. 

Cricket has always been a game where positions, particularly in the field, are fluid. Unlike baseball, it’s closest relative, there are only two defined positions in Test match cricket (which is the 5-day form of the game): a bowler, who pitches the ball, and a wicket keeper, who stands like a baseball catcher behind the wicket. Early in the history of the game, fielders were limited to one side of the field, and in shorter form of the game, there are some limits on how fielders can be arranged, but this never created designated positions for players. In fact, any player can play any position. I recall, for example, the great Indian wicket keeper M.S. Dhoni, taking off his wicketkeeping pads and bowling in a Test match in England and nearly getting out the great English batsman Kevin Peterson! 

I’ve always assumed that this relative fluidity in positions in cricket harkened back to its pre-industrial roots. Absent is evidence for the kind of specialization found on the assembly line (or in industrialized sports like football). In fact, the absence of industrial specialization of the players is also reflected in its leisurely pace stretching over five days in the purist form of the game and stretching the weekend to include Thursday, Friday, and Monday as well. In fact, what is curious from the history of cricket is that prior to the 1930s, timeless test matches were not uncommon meaning that teams would simply play until one side got the other side out in the second innings. It was shipping schedules, in particular, that doomed the timeless test as a number of the games were brought to a premature conclusion because one team had to depart home. Timed tests introduced the draw where neither side could declare victory and historically over a third of all tests have ended that way. Even today, a drawn test can be revetting viewing as one team eagerly pursues victory and another endeavors not to lose. I’d argue that draws remains consistent with pre-industrial practices because it separates playing the game from the need to produce a winner.  

Recent trends away from specialized position players in the NBA might seem like a revival of an older, perhaps even pre-industrial, style of play, but I wonder whether the convergence of a less specialized NBA and a historically less specialized cricket actually reflects key trends in the globalization of sport (and in global economics). First, as innumerable critics have observed our world is accelerating and the economic and technological realities of this rapidly changing world mitigate against any specialization that occurs at the expense of adaptability. Of course, this may have always been the case on the assembly line where management expected a worker to perform with highly efficient familiarity at his or her post, but the worker also knew that the assembly line was always being tweaked and updated requiring a kind adaptability in both the workforce as a whole and the individual worker. At the same time, the 21st century economy, defined by precarity and the radical deskilling of workers demands both efficiency and flexibility in way that makes developing all but the rarest forms of specialization undesirable. As we tell our students, we’re training you for jobs that do not exist yet.

Second, the breakdown in the trajectory of modernity and, its related logic of assembly line, occurs with globalization. Cricket has always been a global game, initially mediated by the scope of the British Commonwealth, but now articulated largely along national lines. The style of play, conditions, and traditions remain local, however, demonstrating the kind of hybridity that thinkers like Homi Bhabha have articulated as characteristic of the postcolonial condition. The result is a delicate tension between the tendency to demand specialized “horses for courses” who can play in certain conditions (e.g. on the dry pitches of the sub continent or in England’s fickle summers) and the desire to maintain a side that can triumph with equal proficiency at home and abroad.   

The globalization of the NBA lacks the keen attention to the local that persists in cricket, but is no less hybridized. The breakdown of specialization, for example, in the power forward and center position can be traced, in part, to the arrival of big men like Arvydas Sabonis and later Dirk Nowitzki and Kristaps Bazinga with skills honed in Europe and with the ability to both post up and play facing the basket at the perimeter. Today, of course, this is not limited to European imports, but a fairly common aspect of many big mens’ games. Hybridization eroded specialization as the basic logic of the game in one place encounters counter logic from elsewhere.    

In this context, cricket and the NBA both manifest the tensions of globalization that disrupt the neat linearity of modern progress. The skills involved in cricket evoke craft in their disregard for specialized efficiencies born of the assembly line. The archaic characteristics of the game has tempted me to call it pre-industrial. At the same time, the same features in the NBA appear to evoke the contingent dynamism present in a globalized modern economy and this tempts me to label them post-industrial. It may well be that the convergence of cricket and the NBA do not represent points on the modern continuum of progress at all. At their best, they may be places of protest where the economic logic of culture is rebuffed by the logic of practice. At their worst, the lack of specialization in these sports might reflect the global logic of precarity where the risk associated with valuing specialization is increasingly offset by a deskilled workforce that are as valuable as they are disposable.    

 

 

 

Snichimal Vayuchil

It is pretty exciting to announce the paper publication of the first volume of the new North Dakota Quarterly Supplement Series. This series is a collaboration with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota designed to provide a bit more space for poetry, fiction, or other creative projects that embrace the same values as the Quarterly, but can also stand on their own. The books will be available as open access digital downloads and print-on-demand paperback.

The first in this series is Paul Worley’s edited and translated collection of Tsotsil Mayan poetry, Snichimal Vayuchil, which has a new introduction by Gloria E. Chacón. 

You can download or purchase the book from the NDQ site here or from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota site here. 

~

This project has had a special place in my heart because it involves a collaboration with Paul Worley. Five years ago, UND had this gaggle of ambitious and creative junior scholars: Paul Worley, Kyle Conway, Brett Ommen, Crystal Alberts, Mike Wittgraf, and Joel Jonientz. I was lucky enough to hang out with them and, from time to time, scheme and dream up projects.

In fact, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota was a project that Joel Jonientz and Kyle Conway and I dreamt up together, and from its earliest days we had envisioned that Paul Worley would have some part in it. (Actually, I still want to publish a series of old baseball manuals with some historical introductions… I wonder if there exist manuals in Spanish, from Mexico or the Dominican Republic or Cuba that Paul could translate and edit?).

As readers of this blog know, Joel Jonientz died four years ago, Paul Worley, Kyle Conway, and Bret Ommen left UND, Crystal Alberts and Mike Wittgraf are still around and when I get a chance, we catch up and still scheme a little. Kyle Conway and I still work closely together on The Digital Press. But none of our collaboration has the same kind of frenetic energy. Maybe it’s because we lack the critical mass of people here in Grand Forks, maybe because we’ve settled into our mid-career malaise, or maybe just because we don’t see each other every weekend, but we haven’t really collaborated like we used to.

This book with Paul Worley, reminded me of those days when we used to scheme up big plans over beers and bitch about things we couldn’t change. I think you’ll see that Paul and I find some ways to collaborate more over the next few years. And who knows, maybe a enough of the old energy is still around to bring the gang back together. (I’m thinking the first Maya Language Space Opera… ) 

 

 

Entrepreneurial Humanities

Every now and then I get an idea that percolates through my head on a run or a walk on a sunny fall afternoon. Usually these ideas dissipate with my growing exhaustion or once I return to the distraction of daily work. Mostly they’re just bad ideas. 

Anyway, I’ve been turning over in my head an idea to connect entrepreneurial practice to the humanities in an explicit way. I suspect this came from reading an endless series of books on the crisis of the humanities. These books are as disheartening as they are facile, but they can – if taken in the right doses (almost homeopathically) – stimulate thought.

So here’s my idea:

There is pretty good evidence that humanities majors make more money in the long run than students with professional and pre-professional degrees (although the results are complex) and are competitive in the long run with folks with various STEM degrees. Because the humanities do not provide a neatly defined set of skills that transfer directly to professional context, they have suffered particularly at state universities where short-term student debt, local economic pressures, and the political agendas of various stakeholders encourage the  immediate value of professional disciplines often trumps the more complicated and politically risky, long-game of the humanities. 

Most professional humanists will concede that the larger project of the humanities has little to do with income, earnings, or professional training. At the same time, most of us exist in a world where certain aspect of market capitalism holds sway. We get paid to do our jobs, leverage our accomplishments for various forms of advancement, and even hold professional degrees (the Ph.D.) as a defining credential. As a result, we become deft navigators of the world of capital, learn to develop our ideas, and balance the demands of an increasingly neoliberal academy while recognizing our privileged positions, our responsibilities, and the limits of the system in which we work.

These challenges have not discouraged people in the humanities for being entrepreneurs in both a conventional sense and within academia. In fact, projects like organizing a national writers conference, producing a regular radio show on public philosophy, publishing a struggling literary journal, developing a digital press, or conducting collaborative research projects all involve entrepreneurial skills and real world challenges all mediated by a persistent commitment to humanistic practices and inquiry.

My idea would be a monthly, TED-style presentation from a humanities entrepreneur. The presentation would be brief, talk about challenges, risks, and decision making and followed by a question-and-answer session that’s either moderated or free form.

The goals of this program would be three:

1. To demonstrate in a real world context how advanced training the humanities prepares people for the challenges, risks, and opportunities of entrepreneurial enterprise.

2. To make clear that being a entrepreneur involves understanding neoliberal practices in the academy and the society, but not necessarily accepting them or advancing them. Being an entrepreneur can be subversive.

3. To share basic entrepreneurial skills and strategies developed in the context of humanities project with the larger community.  

Finally, this is a low-investment program designed to demonstrate, broadly, how humanities education can prepare students and faculty not only to survive in the current economic climate, but to change it for the better. As the program expands we could invite similarly trained entrepreneurs from the community to participate, develop an online video archive, and even coordinate social events that bring together like-minded people from the community to meet and share ideas.

What do you think?

An Outrage Summit

This past week, I probably made a mistake in agreeing to help coordinate the North Dakota University System’s Arts and Humanities Summit here on the beautiful campus of the University of North Dakota. Of course, the funds might suddenly evaporate as the state and the NDUS braces for budget cuts, but that’s not something I can worry about now.

In any event, I am not one to let reality interfere with a bad plan. 

As I started to think about how organize or coordinate the work of arts and humanities faculty across the state, I tried to steer my thinking away from some of the more fruitful recent conversations: The Bakken Oil Boom, Entrepreneurial Humanities, and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) and THEMAS (Technology, Humanities, Engineering, Math, Arts, and Science), or whatever. Instead, I drifted increasingly toward looming budget cut, the role of the administration in shared governance, and the upcoming national, state, and local elections. One thing connected these phenomena in my head: outrage.

What if we hosted an Arts and Humanities Summit and made it forum for outrage. That’s right: the entire event would constitute an airing of grievances. From studies of campus space, to rampant agism, sexism, administrative incompetence, bureaucratic overreaches, paper work, assessment, compliance, and the erosion of shared governance, faculty in the Arts and Humanities across the state have plenty of reasons to be aggrieved. 

What is more interesting is the use of outrage (and outright rage) to express their frustrations with the system. I’d like to use the summit to explore outrage itself as a form of academic, political, and public discourse. I expect that a focus on (out)rage would attract the usual smattering of thoughtful and critical essays that consider the role of outrage as a challenge to prevailing hyper-rational neoliberal discourse, or as a sincere expression of exasperation or even the shifting definition of outrage as a way to marginalize the inconvenient, incompatible, or otherwise unyielding voices. Outrage provides a way to push back against the stifling conformity of professional life and culture. Social media, The Donald, and the “town hall meeting” all provide public venues (yeah, I consider The Donald a venue) for projecting outrage into the crystalline fractures of the public sphere. Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t include some critical engagement with the Jeremiad as a genre that lends often lends itself to outrage in the public sphere. (It also happens that one of the authors of the best recent treatment of Jeremiads in American politics can bring outrage as well as anyone I’ve ever met!).  

The great thing about this summit is that we could arrange not just for calm, detached academic talk about outrage, but also to offer a forum for outrage. I’m sure every campus in the system has its own expert practitioners of the art of outrage. What if we got some of the most deeply outraged faculty in the system to come to UND and to BE OUTRAGED. Like the famous dozens of early rap music, we could arrange a series of lecterns and invite each of the arts and humanities faculty to drop some genuine, earnest, sincere, outrage on us.

Maybe it’s delusional, but I can even imaging recruiting a couple outrage artists from the community. Terry Bjerke, a local candidate for mayor, brings a particular brand of outrage to the fore. Al Carlson, an outspoken and outraged legislature, can drop outrage like few others in the state. Again, it’s not so much what they say, it’s how the say it. A summit dedicated to outrage would probe the tender intersection of sincerity, conviction, and public display to critique key aspects of contemporary political and professional theatre. Plus, it would be amazing to bring together the most deeply aggrieved and outraged members of the community and celebrate their intensity, conviction, and art.  

File this one in the idea box.

Proposals for New Grant Programs

I spent part of yesterday morning contributing to an email discussion of digital humanities and virtual reality with the good folks at the North Dakota Humanities Council. This was both fun and productive. One result of these conversations is that I was encouraged to propose some new grant initiatives to the NDHC. These are just proposals, but I wanted to think out loud here on the bloggie-blog to gets some feedback from as wide an audience as possible. As with any grants, the outcomes are only as good as the program will allow. Poorly articulated grant programs produce poor projects.

The first of two new programs that I’d propose would be called Digital North Dakota Grants. These grants have three goals:

1. Extending the Reach: The state of North Dakota has long suffered a diaspora of sorts as people with strong North Dakota ties have moved elsewhere for a better climate, more opportunities, and a different life. These individuals often retain a strong sense of connection to the state and its communities. The energy and remittances from this diaspora community has had an impact on life here in the state. The Digital North Dakota Grants would be a way to engage the North Dakota diaspora in the vibrant, local humanities scene.

More importantly, perhaps for the NDHC is that these folks have resources, and as the NDHC has turned its attention toward development to ensure that our programs can weather upheavals in federal funding, we need to expand the impact and reach of the NDHC to the diaspora who have typically remained active in state initiatives.

The population of the state has historically trended older, but recent trends have shown that the state is, in fact, getting younger and the media age of ND residents is now below the national average. Our younger constituency typically lacks the financial resources of the North Dakota diaspora, but should nevertheless be a target audience for humanities programing. Digital North Dakota grants would help bring a generation of citizens more familiar with digitally mediated discussions into the conversation.

2. Celebrating the Local. The National Endowment for the Humanities initiated its Office of Digital Humanities in 2011. This office has funded a wide range of grants that they recognized as having national and international impacts. They have been somewhat less interested in digital projects that have local impacts or reflect the more focused priorities of local communities. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 1997 Red River flood or the 50th anniversary of the publication of Elwyn Robinson’s influential History of North Dakota, we encounter local events that speak directly to history of the region, the state, and our communities. Funding to support digitally mediated projects that engage these events (as examples) is unlikely to come from a federal sources (and even if it does, the NDHC brand should be associated with work to preserve, celebrate, and reflect on these memorable events).

3. Preserving the Conversation. The NDHC is remarkable in its ability to stimulate conversations. All too often, however, these conversations, discussion, and engagement are ephemeral. Digitally mediated conversations offer a way not only to expand the conversation but also to preserve it allowing future generations of North Dakotans to reflect on how certain events or encounters transformed their ways of thinking or even their communities. For example, the recent tumult over the new University of North Dakota nickname provides a fascinating perspective into the relationship between UND stakeholders and Native communities, ideas of North Dakota identity, and the politics of race in the state. Creating a digital application where members of the community can contribute their reactions to this process, while it remains energized by emotions, polemic, and conversation, presents an exciting way to document and capture the local history of the state at a particular moment in time.

With these goals in mind, my proposed grant would encourage applications that (1) extend the reach of traditional humanities programming, (2) focus on local concerns, issues, collections, and conversations, and (3) feature robust data management plans to ensure that both the program and conversations are preserved. Successful proposals must stimulate discussion, focus on local groups or communities, and encourage and preserve dynamic and thought provoking engagement with the humanities. Purely archival or access based initiatives will not be funded unless they foreground dynamic opportunities for reflective and reflexive engagement with collections. Whenever possible proposals should involve open source software and encourage free, open access materials.

In my formal proposal, I’ll include case studies funded by other state humanities councils like Washington’s, DC Digital Museum or Vermont’s wonderfully simple, Civil War Book of Days serial email.

The second proposed new grant program would focus on the North Dakota Humanities Council’s already successful GameChanger Series. One of the most exciting things about this series is how effectively it stimulates discussion and brings together a diverse and dynamic group of speakers and from the community to engage with the most pressing issues of the day. The first GameChanger focused on conflict and culture in the Middle East, the second focused on the challenges and opportunities of the digital world, and next year’s series will celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize.

The disappointing thing about these events is that the energy of the conversation tends to dissipate rather quickly as the attention of the small NDHC staff ramps up for the next year’s event. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the game has, in fact, changed (or just the playahs). The KeepChanging Grant Program would support programs and projects that continue the momentum and themes of the GameChanger series in the three years following the event. Each year at least three grants would be available with at least one grant set designated to support a project related to each of the previous three years of the GameChanger. (Wow, that’s hard to articulate in a clear way!).

The goal of the KeepChanging program is to extend the impact of the GameChanger series without taxing the small NDHC staff. It will also provide us with an informal measure of the impact of the GameChanger in on the humanities in the state. Presumably more engaging events will spur ongoing interest.

As per usual on the blog, I’m interested in any and all feedback on these ideas. They are, as I said, just proposals; just my thoughts, man – right or wrong.

A Guide to Byzantine Greece

Each summer my Facebook feed fills study-tour travelogues posted by my faculty colleagues. The best of these trips reflect careful selection of sites, thoughtful readings, and clear learning goals. Most study tours focus on the monuments of ancient Greece, but many of the most visually arresting monuments in the Greek landscape do not date to antiquity. Talking to students participating on the Western Argolid Regional Project for the last couple of year and contributing to study tours in Cyprus, I’ve come to realize that students are generally interested in the post-ancient world in part because they’re simply not as familiar with the narrative, and it has a sense of exotic novelty. In contrast the unfamiliar narrative, Medieval monuments associated are often more immediately accessible to their developing archaeological imaginations because many of them are still standing. 

This realization has led me to think a bit about producing a Guide to Byzantine Greece as a complement to the common itineraries followed by American study tours. 

If I was to do this, or find someone to do it with me, I figure that our guide has to have a couple features to make it useful.

1. Complementary. One of the most significant challenges will be that the guide has to complement traditional study tour itineraries which focus on ancient sites. While I’d love to write a book that leads a group of excited and interested students to the spectacular late Byzantine church of the Panayia Kosmostira in Ferres in Thrace, it’s not a realistic addition to most study tours of Greece. Instead, we have to focus on the main heartland of American study tours which tend to focus on Athens, Delphi, Olympia, the Corinthia and the Argolid. Fortunately, there are plenty of important and interesting post-ancient sites in this area.     

2. Modular. Along with being complementary, we have to write our guide in such a way that it can be used in a modular way. The traditional itinerary-based approach favored by, say, the Blue Guide, is a lovely way to experience Greece, but for the modern study tour which will not stop to enjoy the “lovely principle city of the demos Koutsopodi,” this approach makes dipping into the guide for some information on a particular building or site difficult.    

3. Encounters. The challenge of a modular guide is that they tend to fragment the landscape into distinct, isolated sites, and this works against presenting a cohesive view of Greece in the Medieval period. So, we have to figure out a way to weave unifying narrative throughout the encounters with individual places. We have to assume that the average American study tour might only see one Early Christian basilica or one middle Byzantine church or one “Slavic” cemetery, and our guide will need to find a way to make encounters with these single sites serve as synecdoches for larger trends, processes, or types. 

4. Open Access. It goes without saying that our guide should be available for free in some kind of digital form. I suspect that .pdfs will be the way to go for cross-platform compatibility, but we would also make a print copy of the guide available at as low a cost as possible. This would encourage adoptions (particularly if the book was to function as a supplement to a more traditional guide focused on ancient sites). 

5. Images, Rights, and Plans. One of the challenges of this kind of production is that there are some restrictive rules in place about using images of monuments in Greece and we’d have to reproduce plans which can be a time-consuming and frustrating project. It would be appealing to imagine ways that use the huge quantity of digital sources to supplement our book, but it is probably not useful to expect students to have constant internet connections while in Greece. Connectivity issues could make it more difficult to produce an interactive map that would provide directions to particular sites (although our students and staff this year almost all had phones with good internet connections).

Aside from the technical aspects of this kind of project, the intellectual challenge is very appealing to me. I’m not sure that I have time to do it properly, but I might have a collaborator who has both some time and expertise. For now, I’ll tuck this into my idea box and we’ll see where it goes over the next year or so…