Convergence: Punk, Slow, and Care in a Digital World

Every now and then I start to worry that my interests are diverging and running away in every direction and leaving me adrift. With budget cuts, possible changing in our teaching/research balance, a shift away from graduate education, and many of my field archaeology projects entire their final seasons, I find myself like many “mid-career” faculty bereft of morale, motivation, and, frankly, direction. So I get to thinking about convergence.

Every now and then, I read something or turn an idea around enough in my creaking, void-filled, mind that I get what other people have often described as an “idea.” This weekend, I had a glimpse of how several tracks in my academic and intellectual development might actually be converging around a theme (or two maybe?) that a few blog posts this weekend helped me to recognize more fully.

I’m going to try to trace these out this morning and to make sense of what my various projects are trying to do and say.

Over the last few years, my colleagues and I have had some entertaining, and I hope useful, conversations centered on three concepts in archaeological research:

1. Punk Archaeology
2. Slow Archaeology
3. Archaeology of Care

I can’t take credit, really, for any of these, but I probably am as responsible as anyone for coining terms to describe them, and promoting the use of these terms.

Punk Archaeology celebrates the performative, DIY, and improvised aspects of archaeological field work and thinking. It has tended to focus a bit more on the archaeology of the contemporary world because this is where archaeological methods and practices have tend to break down when confronted with challenges such as modern abundance leading archaeologists to innovate on the fly, our work is less bound by the formal limits of the site and more publicly accessible, and contemporary observers are more willing to offer dissonant, alternative, and conflicting perspectives. As a result, punk archaeology – at its best – defamiliarized the familiar in everyday life (much like punk takes the basic structure of pop song and makes it something else) and familiarizes the unfamiliar in archaeological practice by putting it on display. In short, it can turn archaeology inside out.

Slow Archaeology is a critique of the role of technology in archaeological practice. I’ve argued that the Taylorist drive for efficiency has produced field practices that tend to fragment both how we describe material culture but also our experiences. At its most perverse, field work is reduced to “data collection” and digital tools are celebrated as ways to make the harvesting of “raw data” more efficient. There is no doubt that field work should be efficient and that technology will improve not only what we collect from the field, but also how we collect archaeological information. Slow archaeology, however, calls for us to maintain a space in archaeological field practice for analysis and interpretation and to be patient with these processes. Moving forward, I’d like to see slow archaeology celebrate integrative practices in archaeological field work that both bring together our fragmented techniques in the field and the information that these techniques produce.

Archaeology of Care. The archaeology of care is a term coined by my colleague Richard Rothaus and, like slow and punk archaeology, it offers a critical reflection on the practice and performance of archaeology. It stemmed from the observation that people who we encountered in the Bakken were genuinely moved by our archaeological and archaeological interest in their world and lives. While neither Richard nor I conceived of our project as a gesture to the people (or objects) that we studied, it became pretty obvious that archaeological work became a medium through which shared understanding of the past and the present are formed. For us at least, the archaeology of care was de-theorized and reflected our very practical experiences doing archaeology of and in the contemporary world.

It has taken me a while to recognize that these three moves in my archaeological thinking have focused on a number of shared themes centered largely on our practices in the field: (1) a focus on archaeology as performance and experience, (2) a tendency to recognize these experiences a bringing together people, data, and objects, and (3) a preference for DIY and an aversion to “technological solutionism” in its various forms.

These ideas have started to come together with another couple of “projects” that I’ve been slowly working on over the last few years. As readers of this blog know, I’ve invested a good bit of time and energy into The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. This emerged directly from my interest in punk archaeology (which became the first book from the press). It started as an experiment in DIY publishing and has slowly expanded into a project designed to the traditional fragmentation of the publishing process that separates the authors from the publishers. At my little press, we create an environment where authors, editors, and publishers work together to produce books at a lower cost than traditional commercial publishing, but with opportunities for more experimentation and control for the authors.

I’m pretty upfront with my authors that I am not a conventional publisher. As my more critical colleagues point out, my books tend to be a bit rough around the edges, my distribution channels remain a bit uncertain, and everything is essentially experimental. But for my authors and editors, this seems to work. If anything, I have more than enough books to keep my enterprise afloat, to hold my interest, and to keep me feeling that this is a meaningful extension of my approach to archaeology and archaeological knowledge production.

What prompted this sudden bout of introspection was a little article titled “Ed-Tech in a Time of Trump” by Audrey Waters. Go read it (and comment if you want; there is the start of a little Hypothes.is comment thread). To summarize a complex argument, trends in Ed-Tech data collection are troubling for a number of reasons. First, Waters critiques the basic philosophy that if we collect enough data on our students we can customize our educational practices to produce particular outcomes. Most thoughtful educators realize that this is not how teaching or learning works just as most thoughtful archaeologists do not think that intensified scrutiny and technologies in how we collect “all of the datas” will produce better archaeological knowledge more efficiently. (Do check out Dimitri Nakassis’s refinement of my critiques of data at his blog especially here and here and here.)

At the same time, we are lured by the temptation of easy digital data collection especially in online courses or in courses with substantial online components. Universities have developed sophisticated data collection schemes as their infrastructure has become digital and student interactions with almost all services is mediated by tools that collect data to produce increasingly comprehensive digital profiles of students. Even with the protections offered by FERPA, universities have vast quantities of data on students that can be leveraged internally to encourage practices that “better” serve students. Students are consumers and the university has indulged in all the conceits of online consumer culture. In place of a culture of care grounded in complex experiences of teaching and learning, the university as an institution has fragmented students into bundles and clusters of data that can be arranged to anticipate and serve student and administrative expectations. This has particularly toxic potential as calls to “reinvent education” often look to technologies to create the appearance of doing more with less, while obscuring the reality that less almost always means less in education.

What is more troubling for Waters is that the calls to “reinvent education” or to “innovate” almost always rest on the assumption that current practices are flawed. The temptation is to identify the problems with education through scrutiny of “big data” rather than attention to small, daily practices. With the lure of big fixes residing in big data issues of security and privacy abound. What is more terrifying still is that for public universities, this data could easily fall into the hands of politically motivated leaders either on campus or at the state or local levels who could use students and faculty data for purposes that run counter to many of our values as educators, scholars, and public servants. Waters evokes the always chilling specter of Nazi data collection as an example for how the state can mine “big data” for nefarious purposes.

To be clear, I don’t see slow archaeology, punk archaeology, the archaeology of care, or The Digital Press as a bulwark against Nazism or as explicitly political statements, but I would like to think that the common aspects of these projects represent a kind of resistance to some of the more troubling trends in academic practices and higher education these days. Calling for greater scrutiny of practice in a time of big data, promoting DIY among students and colleagues, and demonstrating how integration, and care, rather than fragmentation and “analysis” can produce meaningful and significant results. 

Teaching Thumbelina

On the recommendation of a commenter on this post, I read Michael Serres’s Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials. (2014). As readers of this blog realize, I’ve been struggling with the growing gap between my expectations as a teacher and the expectations of my students. In particular, I have come to recognize more and more of the daily annoyances – refusing to read, refusing to follow directions, irregular grammar and style, modest levels of classroom engagement – have less to do with laziness, lack of preparation, or even just apathy, and more to do with active strategies of resistance. I find the approach to teaching has led me become more sympathetic with student attitudes and less likely to devise strategies that undermine their autonomy as learners (even if I find that their learning styles run counter to my own expectations in the classroom). In short, I’ve become more inclined to meet students where they are – bored, restive, resistant – than force them into a form that I have created.

Serres’s book is empowering because it recognizes the remarkable character of the millennial generation and suggests that it should be celebrated. In particular, he embraced the desire of millennials to be connected and to talk to one another and work and plan together rather than to lectured. For Serres, Thumbelina talks with thumbs that blur across mobile phone and table screens. Chats with multiple people simultaneously and exists within a dense network of connections. Unlike Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, which presents a desperate and isolated generation only superficially connected through digital media, Serres offers a more uplifting view of a densely networked generation and any superficiality intrinsic in this form of networking as a generally positive rejection of such superficial identifiers as race, nationality, and even – to some extent – economic disparity.     

More importantly, this densely networked generation has a world of knowledge at their fingertips (or thumbs) and is no longer anxious to be told things by authorities. In fact, they are eager to discover connections – links if you will – on their own using their own networks to bring together disparate bits of information into a unified whole. In other words, they don’t need us to tell them what to do because they already do it. So when they are chatting away on their phones and laptops during our lectures, they’re not distracted, they’re working. They’re figuring life out, creating connections, and de-centering knowledge that we remain desperate to re-center.

In fact, Serres indicts the generations that constructed the modern university as the same who brought (in my words, not his) war, colonialism, neoliberal ideologies, and authoritarianism. Our students are actively resisting systems that privileged the authority of the teacher as the keeper of the knowledge and while we grow frustrated talking at them, the students are building new communities of knowledge on their own in defiance of our droning voices heavy with the past. What we need to do is meet our students where they are and enter their networks as legitimate partners in learning. (This is easier said than done in that we carry the burden of generations of privileging and commodifying access to information and we still claw at the vestiges of authority fortified by these practices, but Serres (and I) think it’s possible. In fact, it’s necessary because the next generation with their tools, techniques, and communities will continue to subvert how we do things.)

The book is short and has done more to fuel my imagination than to solidify some particular line of argument. More than that, it’s overwhelmingly positive. I’m increasingly fatigued by articles that tell me that I need to slow down (and to realize that I contributed to this is painful), to read less, to say “no,” and to savor the moment. I wonder if I share more with my students than the authors of these works. I want to read more. I want to speed up. I want to do less with more things. And most importantly, I just want to do stuff. I get tired to talking about things, building skills, practicing, planning, and learning. Maybe this is why I found Serres work so refreshing.  

Teaching Tuesday: Some More (Maybe the Same) Thoughts on Student Resistance

Each year around this time my heart sinks a little. With the start of the school year, I am pushed into the role as someone who coaxes effort and enforces consequences among students. The ubiquitous memes appear mourning and mocking students’ reluctance to read and digest syllabi. And the annual season of “why don’t students read” articles appear each with a different take on the the perennial problem of convincing students to engage material outside of the classroom. As someone who has now taught (in some capacity) for nearly 20 years, I experience the same frustration when students aren’t prepared and struggle to find ways to motivate students.

Over the last few years, however, I’ve also come to hate the role as motivator, as cajoler, and as enforcer of standards. Part of what as sucked my enthusiasm for these roles is the growing recognition that campus culture, not just at UND, but everywhere has drifted increasingly toward audit culture, assessment practices, and skill building and away from instilling a passion for engaging ideas, confronting problems, and negotiating challenges. This isn’t to say that I’ve lost my excitement and interest in teaching, but I feel like the shift in the conversation on campus has pushed me to be complicit in a scheme to make the university into an increasingly corporatized education factory. In this new arrangement, I’m compelled to make students learn stuff as part overseer and part machine operator pressing reluctant minds into assessable and monetized commodities.

In this context, every time a student complains about the structure or expectations of a class, I feel less obligated to justify my pedagogical decisions and more of a vague glow of pride as the students resist mounting pressure of the modern educational establishment.

Why don’t students read?

Because learning is hard.  

But there’s more than that. Our expectations of student work is increasingly couched in terms of skill acquisition which then equate to success in the post-collegiate world. It makes sense then, as students struggle with the bleak reality that they will invariably confront as they are dragged toward adulthood and responsible (corporate? economic? political?) citizenship, that they resist. The simple act of refusing to read or of confounding our expectations should not be seen simply as an act of petulance or a sign of being overwhelmed by other things, but as an act of resistance to the dominant mode of contemporary educational culture. 

As faculty, we are obligated, then, not only to encourage students to read, but more importantly give them reason to read that goes beyond the language and culture of current university culture. Student resistance to reading is more than simply an act of resistance to overcome, but may well demonstrate a shared disenchantment with modern academia. In other words, students not reading might be a shared strategy that could be profitably redirected rather than subverted. When I think this way, I can almost convince myself that students are on our side as we struggle to resist the growing debasement of higher education. Almost.

(And it’s sure better than complaining!) 

Three Unrelated Things: the Homeshow, Lemonskinheads, and the UND Writers Conference

Sometimes I get a backlog of blog ideas and I realize that it makes more sense to push them out in a disjointed post than to wait for some opportunity to expand each idea into a individual posts. I realize that this violates a rule of writing which states that writers should give their ideas room to stretch out and not cram too many thoughts together in one place. I’ve never been good at that.

So here are three unrelated things combined in a single post: 

1. The University of North Dakota Writers’ Conference starts today! If you spend any time at the University of North Dakota, in Grand Forks, or in North Dakota, you know about the Writers Conference. In fact, if you know anything about UND at all, it’s likely to be their long tradition of hosting one of the great writers’ conferences in the U.S. As people might recall, the Writers Conference was almost sacrificed to budgetary priorities advanced by careerist administrators looking to prove that they’re tough enough to stand up to faculty and make “hard choices.” Fortunately, the community and donors rallied to save the conference. 

This year the theme is “The Other Half” and will feature women writers who write about gender and race. But as always, the Writers Conference is more than that, it is an opportunity to hear writers talk about their craft. The lunchtime panels are completely enthralling and well worth sacrificing a lunch hour! So go and check it out this week! 

2. The Home Show. This past weekend, my wife and I went to the Grand Forks Home Show. I’d never been to such a thing! Apparently the purpose of the home show is to show off various ways to improve, change, or repair one’s home. According the local newspaper, over 150 vendors rented booths at the show and thousands attended. As an archaeologist with an interest in the contemporary world, the Home Show fascinated me. Here in one place was an example of many objects that might appear in an archaeological assemblage from a modern home. There were three or four booths showing off cook pots, for example, and we know from our experiences in Bakken that cookware is often left behind when a temporary settlement is abandoned. There were two or three vendors showing off windows, which if our home is any indication, are a common object set aside in provisional discard even when they have been replaces (and can, in the right hands, be the objects of salvage). There were several firms advertising landscaping services by elaborate displays. Because the materials in these displays are relatively low value and designed for a particular space, they tend to persist at a place and accumulate traces of earlier landscaping efforts. Unsurprisingly the vendors at the show were almost all men, suggesting that the materiality of the home and its immediate environs continues to be something constructed (in a physical sense) by men even if the gender balance between the visitors appeared more even.

3. The Empire Theater and Usama Dakdok. Last week, the anti-Muslim speaker Usama Dakdok came to Grand Forks. He was brought to town by one or another conservative evangelical church and sponsored by the local conservative Christian radio station. Dakdok is know as an inflammatory speaker and leverages his Egyptian heritage to purport inside information about Islam to help Christians convert their Muslim neighbors. His talks have a pseudo-academic structure where he presents his “more authentic” translation of the Quran and compares it unfavorably – apparently almost at random – to passages in the Christian Bible. Whatever one things about Christian-Muslim relations, Dakdok provides very little substance and considerable fuel to already enflamed audience who fear the imminent arrival of ISIS type militants, Sharia law, and anti-Christian pogroms in their small town. 

His reputation proceeds him, of course, and in many communities he struggles to find a venue to spout his venom. This has apparently allowed him to play the victim and to demonstrate the urgency of his message. The grand plot against God-fearing Christians is already well underway, because his truth is being suppressed. As a few of my colleagues pointed out, this kind of rabble rousing has a long history in American political life where conspiracies, secret knowledge, identity politics, and playing the victim often combine to fuel the fires of hatred. 

In light of this situation, I expressed disappointment that the Empire Arts Center (our local early 20th century movie house turned to an arts center) agreed to host a speaker like Dakdok and suggested to some colleagues that the Empire Arts Center might no longer be a great venue for, say, a lecture series organized by the International Studies program to explore ideas of global diversity. Two things made our conversation all the more emphatic. First was a confused Op-Ed piece in the Grand Forks Herald which somehow celebrated the Empire Arts Center for allowing hate speech in its venue as an important opportunity for the community to consider Dakdok’s views as a valid contribution to a global conversation on religious difference. Second, with the appearance of some anti-immigrant graffiti directed at Somali immigrants in town, the Herald cautioned us from jumping to conclusions and claiming that our community has a race problem. Ironically, if the views expressed appeared in a venue like the Empire rather than on the wall of a local strip mall, then, according to the Herald we should celebrate the vitality of civic conversation: “Some claim Dakdok’s speech was beyond the pale. But a big reason for the United States’ world leadership and enormous strength is the fact that we trust debate — not repression — to resolve political quarrels.”

The upshot of our conversations is a meeting with the folks at the Empire, mediated and facilitated by a city council member and some fine folks at the University of North Dakota. We do not want to damage the Empire as a civic institution because it’s a great venue, a good partner, and an asset to the community, but we do want to make sure that we expect more them. It’s not that we’re angry, we’re just very disappointed.

One good thing to come out of all this is that I discovered calling Usama Dakdok, Evan Dakdok is pretty fun (for me). It’s a mash-up of Dakdok with the drug-addled lead singer of the Lemonheads, Evan Dando. Evan Dakdok is the frontman of a band called the Lemonskinheads. So that’s fun.

 

Thinking Forests and Resistance

I spent some quality times over the past month with Eduardo Kohn’s brilliant How Forests Think. I’ll admit that little in my training as a historian or Mediterranean archaeologist prepared my to deal with the ideas that he introduced. My buddy Dimitri Nakassis pointed the book out to me and I think he discovered it either through a long interview with Kohn over at the Savage Minds blog, or through his interest in agency.

It’s difficult for me to describe the book in a way that doesn’t make its ideas seem overly simple, so I’ll leave careful, critical readings of the work to anthropologists who are more comfortable with some of his basic discursive formations. In short, Kohn’s book comes from his field work in the rainforest of Andean Ecuador.  In one of the most biologically diverse regions of the world, he explores about the limits of human culture and understanding the role that other living things plays in our understanding of the world. He recognizes other living things as capable of producing their own symbolic sense by drawing on Charles Peirce’s semiotic theories. By recognizing all life as producing symbols he explores the place of these symbols in human relational systems. For Kohn, these non-human symbolic systems do not necessarily function according to the rules of human language, but are functioning systems nonetheless. This is where it got heavy. He recognized the role that these other systems played in how we understand the world. As such, culture, that most human of way of understanding the world, emerges, at least in part, from our relationship between various dissimilar symbolic systems within the world.

Obviously, this 200 word effort to summarize a complex and nuanced book does not do justice (or even represent in a completely accurate way) to Kohn’s work. At the same time, one can understand how Kohn’s work challenges some prevailing efforts to understand non-human agency.  For example, Kohn draws on Peirce’s semiotics to argue for the existence of systems not grounded in the rules of human language. Efforts to understand material agency, however, tends to rely on human language to articulate agency in the material world. The world of living things, however, functions according to its own logic and rules, that are both consistent and outside of the structures that we’ve built to articulate culture. 

The potential of Kohn’s ideas to influencing archaeological work – at least how it is currently construed in the Mediterranean – has less to do, in my mind, with the role of non-human living things in the construction of the ancient world, but as a reminder of our tendency to limit who we recognize as agents within the production of culture. I immediately thought of my own – largely unconvincing – efforts to identify resistance in the archaeology of the Late Roman Corinthia. I tried to argue that the existing monuments of culture preserved evidence for another discourse that runs counter to the prevailing message of elite power. The key to recognizing these counter arguments goes beyond simply inverting the message of an object in an effort to discern its opposite, but to expect and understand messages that are fundamentally incompatible with the language and discourse of elite authority. Like the language of the forest, articulating resistance needn’t adhere to the rules established by our monolithic views of elite culture, but perhaps derives its power by functioning completely outside this system. 

(As an irreverent aside, I found Kohn’s book almost completely unhelpful in figuring out what our new dog wants. I do, however, think more carefully about what, when, and why he dreams!)

 

Teaching, Learning, and Resistance

This morning we were supposed to meet to discuss more of M. Weiner’s Learner-Centered Teaching. Revised Edition 2013, but a little blizzard has interrupted our regularly scheduled program. Since blogging headquarters remains unaffected by the trivialities of weather, the show must go on!

If I recall correctly, we were planning to talk a bit about resistance to learner-centered approaches. As readers of this blog know, I’m pretty interested in resistance in the student ranks and Weiner’s book provides a short survey of the causes of resistance to “innovation” in teaching. 

To my mind, resistance occurs in three different ways, and much of this happens because of the tendency in contemporary academic life to displace the relationship between knowledge and learning. My observations here do not, necessarily, undermine the validity or effectiveness of these various displacements, but they do, I think, shed light on occasions where students resistance is likely to happen and perhaps even elucidate its causes. 

I’ll explain more below.  

First, students resist bodies of knowledge that they see as unimportant. This is painfully obvious to anyone who has taught an introductory level history course.  We regularly confront students who find the idea of learning history intrinsically unimportant for their future as managers, occupational therapists, engineers, or nurses. On the one hand, we can’t blame them for this critique; it is ubiquitous in the media. Many question the values of the liberal arts in our contemporary economy.

Faculty play into this, of course, by explaining to our students that history might not be their thing, but it does help them develop “transferable skills”, “critical thinking”, and “information literacy.” In this context, a series of rather bankrupt catch phrases for “education” displaces the disciplinary knowledge foundational to history. It is hardly a shock that students find this ruse disingenuous no matter how much passion faculty muster for the elegance of a transferred skill or a critical thought. We might even go so far to present the old cherry that “we’re teaching you for jobs that haven’t been invented yet” or rattle off a series of well-known figures with history backgrounds. Students are justified in resisting this disjuncture between disciplinary knowledge, educational goals, and their future plans. If history is merely a vessel for these other kinds of skills, then students should have a say over the medium in which learning happens. The displacement of empty learning goals for disciplinary knowledge authorizes this critique and mocks our pained attempts to reduce disciplinary knowledge to mere method. 

Second, students resist approaches to teaching that they see as trivializing learning. Much of learner-centered teaching involves slight of hand. Faculty engage the students in co-authoring their learning environments with the hope that such coauthoring will help the students master a set of faculty-dictated learning goals that invariably include methods, processes, and content. Again we see a strategic displacement. The course goals and teaching methods are set by a faculty member who then, within rigorously defined limits, allows students pick their own path through the course. Student resistance tends to occur along the seam of displacement where the more clever students refuse to choose their own “punishment” and defer to the teacher. The most common example of this comes in the simple question from the student to the teacher: “what options would you choose?”

This subversion of learning-centered teaching approach both announces to the teacher that the limits of student authority are known, and questions the legitimacy of a technique designed to obscure authority in order to co-opt student energy for the goals of the class.

Finally, students resist approaches that run counter to the practice of deskilling faculty and disciplinary knowledge. Over the past two decades, academia has embraced whole-heartedly “audit culture” as a tool to deskilling the academic workforce and undermining the primacy of disciplinary knowledge. From the standpoint of management, this turn against disciplinary knowledge parallels the rise in Taylorism and scientific management principles. The goal is to transform faculty from engine that drives higher eduction, to interchangeable cogs in a machine. By emphasizing the universal character of teaching and learning, faculty become interchangeable and the university trades disciplinary knowledge for the teaching of skills as I have argued in point one. In other words the displacement of authority grounded in disciplinary knowledge to that grounded in terms of employment authorizes students to act as consumers and to defend their rights. We’ve all experienced this kind of resistance as faculty members.

In this context, student resistance represents both a recognition of their authority in the classroom as well as the displacement of faculty authority from particular, specialized knowledge to teaching skill. In this place, student resistance supports the growing power of the assessocracy and metadisciplines like SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). While I am tempted, in my most cynical moments, to see student resistance in this context as anti-faculty, when I critically reflect, I tend to see student behavior as part of the larger transformation of higher education away from artisnal practice and toward a model of 20th century efficiency. For my blog post today, I am more interested in recognizing that student resistance developed along the rifts created by the displacement of authority grounded in disciplinary, academic knowledge for that grounded in our position – however tenuous – on the assembly line.

The goal of my post today is to identify the location of student resistance within our discourse of practice in teaching and learning. Resistance seems most likely to occur in places of weakness where our imagining of the world has flaws and inconsistencies. I identify these were moments of displacement where we say one thing and do something else or have a foot planted, none-to-firmly, in two mutually exclusive discourses of authority.  

Some Fragments on Time and Place in the Bakken

I had the real pleasure of listening to my colleague Sebastian Braun present some of his research in the Bakken last night. His paper looked at the complex relationship between global capital, extractive industries, and local (and, particularly, indigenous) communities in the Bakken. The talk was good and well attended. The conversation afterward was thought provoking.

Since this is stuff that I’ve been working on lately, I thought I’d write down some of my ideas in as straightforward a way as possible here.

It was particularly useful to hear Sebastian talk about the relationship between the Bakken oil play, the frontier, and the local experience. This has become one of the more vexing issues in my recent efforts to articulate the impact of workforce housing (i.e. man camps) on the region and our understanding of global trends in settlement in the 21st century. 

So far, I’ve argued, like Sebastian, that the Bakken represents both a historical and a contemporary frontier. Historically, Western North Dakota – a semi-arid grassland – never supported a large population, had limited resources available for commodification, and stood well away from established centers of population, industry, and commerce.  This remains true even today. Last night, Sebastian made the interesting point that the contemporary frontier may be as much beneath the ground as across its surface with hydraulic fracturing representing the newest way to commodify natural resources in the region.

Any argument for the Bakken’s peripheral location implies the perspective of the core, but in the 21st century localizing the core is not at all easy to do or clear. The old national cores of the 19th and early 20th century or of the first wave of globalizing capitalism have largely receded from immediate importance (although the Bakken is peripheral to these locations as well). In their place, we have the oddly decentered (and dislocated) cores presented by transnational corporations and their myriad (often obscured) subsidiaries. In short, the core is no longer a particular place, but a concentration of authority, capital, and technology that can be deployed in the periphery very quickly. 

If we can accept that the core is a “non-place” (that is outside of any clearly understandable spatial relationships; a shinny office tower in Houston can be for a company incorporated in Delaware), then the periphery becomes merely the area or field in which the core articulates its authority. Peripheries become non-places too. We have noticed this “on the ground” in the Bakken as Type 1 man camps tend to be nondescript modular units that are as at home on the North Dakota prairie as in anywhere in the world (or are equally alien in all places). The same might be said for the massive drill rigs that can be disassembled, shipped around the world, and reassembled for their task and operated by the same crew. 

The collapse of place is vexing for the archaeologist who assume that social relations occupy recognizable spatial perimeters and transform “space” (which is empty) into “place” which has meaning. The place making exercise also has a temporal dimension in that it relies on time to deny the contemporaneity of object in order to make it accessible for study. This temporal displacement is typically the first step in the historical or archaeological project. We have to recognize something as an object of study and “space” must become place (that is, instilled with social, historical, temporal or other relations) to be knowable.

Traditionally, the work of the nation played a central role in creating places even if it was the nation as refracted through local agents. And the disciplines of archaeology and history developed in parallel (and in collusion with) the nation and emphasized and contributed to similar place-making activities. In other words, history and archaeology are very good at making meaning from place, but not as good at understanding the transnational non-places at the contemporary periphery.

This is where Sebastian’s talk last night really got my attention. When I asked something along these lines, he pointed out that people still worked, lived, loved, and played in the Bakken. These individuals have agency within a world that struggles against the commodification of everything and the alienating spread of the new core. So the ongoing lives of people in the Bakken – from the contingent workforce to the longtime residents – present a desperate strategy to stability their own places. 

Student Resistance

It’s grading time, and like most college faculty members, my mind turns to attempting to understand how students engaged the course material, assignments, and class structure. There is the inevitable frustration at shortcomings and misunderstanding, and the slight feeling of accomplishment that comes from seeing a class performing to specification on an assignment. I’d be lying if I said that the latter offsets the former. Mostly, I spend time pondering how and why students did what they did.

(For those regular readers of this blog, I have posted on this topic before here and here with links further back into the mists of time…)

Of course, this is not unique to me or to higher education at this moment in time. American higher education, prone to self-doubt and external and internal critique even as it became the model for much of the world, is enduring a particularly virulent bout of critical scrutiny right now. Assaulted by MOOCs, moves toward alternative forms of credentialing, and substantial funding cuts, higher education has pushed hard to be more accountable, transparent, and rationalized. To do this, universities have employed a growing number of assessocrats, administrators, and quality experts to promote the virtues of efficiency and to bring the diverse traditions of American higher education into line with both one another and the expectations of a range of stakeholders ranging from idealistic and detached critics on the left to short-sighted commentators on the right.

Students understand this and have endured the growing move to an industrial model of higher education with a certain amount of grace. Beset by a growing number of requirements, assessment tools, and regimentation, students have become adept at navigating a system which despite being under constant critique, nevertheless demands of their allegiance and confidence. When students struggle to wrap their head around what it happening in the classroom or on their transcript, we as faculty alternate between near-resignation (typified by the long “sigh”)and moralizing. The former is relatively harmless  as long as it produces understanding and a willingness to compromise. 

The latter – moral judgment – is frustrating to watch. There is nothing quite like the end of the semester to bring forth faculty complaints that students are “lazy”, “unmotivated”, or “clueless”. At the same time, faculty desperately attempt to concoct new strategies to prevent what they see as students’  willful misunderstandings of assignment or subversion of course “learning objectives.” The holidays become a time to rearm to enter the classroom in January with a new set of strategies, tactics, and approaches to bringing students into line. Pedagogy is transformed into a battle. 

Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to convince colleagues to take seriously the idea that students are agents (and in some cases allies) in the struggles against the long term industrialization of higher education. While they might not articulate their resistance in this way, they nevertheless behave in ways that undermine the regimentation of university life.

1. Due Dates. I’ve long given up on this battle. Even with the more dire warning or appeals to shared humanity, students refuse to turn in papers on time. Over the past few years, the excuses have become more half-hearted and my willingness to penalize students has diminished. While the semester’s end would seem to present a firm deadline on student work, even that has appeared increasingly negotiable in student eyes. 

2. Attendance. Students vote with their feet. My upper level classes tend toward the boring. I know that. At the same time, I make ever effort to present material in each class that helps students to succeed in the course. They still don’t come to class. This behavior does not come just from “poor” performers, but from “decent” (C to B) students as well.

3. Basic grammatical rules. When I first encountered the unwillingness to avoid contractions, follow the rules of capitalization, and to use punctuation like the semicolon correctly (I even banned the semicolon in my classes as an effort to curtail its abuse!), I was quick to bemoan the declining standards of literacy. I then moved on to seeing it as the changing nature of our language. Now, I recognize it for what it is. Students refuse to follow basic rules like “do not use contractions” and “do not use the semicolon” not out of ignorance or laziness, but as an effort to resist faculty control over their modes of expression.

4. Paper length and formatting. Students’ tendency to read paper lengths literally and produce papers that are not one line or one word longer than required demonstrates a playful engagement with the kind of arbitrary rules that structure their assignments.

These four behaviors are simply the most obvious forms of student resistance to the industrial requirements of higher education. They all demonstrate efforts to subvert the regimented character of higher education and the aspects of learning that conform most narrowly to expectations of capitalism. Performing to specification, arriving and doing work on time, and ceding their time and workflow to external control are all standards closely associated with industrial modes of production. Moreover, these easily evaluated criteria for “student success” share some basic similarities with the most formal methods that the assessocracy uses to track student and faculty performance through time. Contact hours, quantity of work, and the ability to perform consistently to specification is not merely standard for students, but also key structuring elements for faculty work as well.

Chances are that we’ll continue to make efforts to enforce the rules of academy no matter how arbitrary some of them are. At the same time, I wonder whether we need to shift the nature of the dialog a bit from critiques of student performance that tend toward the moralizing (and, frankly, condescending) toward those that recognize student behaviors as legitimate forms of resistance against a system that is flawed and dehumanizing. Perhaps we can find a better way to meet our students half way because I think we’ll discover that they’re fighting the same battle as we are.

Ambivalent Landscapes of Early Christian Corinth: Final Draft

Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked on a series of papers on the role of Early Christian basilicas in constructing new forms of authority in Greece. They form the rough outline of a book (or at least a dissertation) that I never had the time, focus, or energy to write. A few years ago I have a rather adventurous (and perhaps in places ill-considered) paper at the Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality conference held at the University of Texas. This paper reflected on how Early Christian churches around Corinth could provide evidence for resistance and accommodation in the 6th century Corinthia. 

Here is the full citation: W. R. Caraher, “The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth: The Archaeology of Place, Theology, and Politics in a Late Antique City,” in Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality. S. James, S. Friesen, and D. Schowalter eds. Brill: Leiden 2014.

Here is a draft of this article and here are some of my thoughts leading up to that draft.

And, here’s the article:

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Civility and Student Resistance

At the end of the semester any conscientious teacher is invariably confronted with a series of challenging moral and ethical decisions. Students are panicking, feeling significant pressure, and everything is due (almost by definition) at the same time. The scenes are the same all over the country. Stressed, exhausted, panicked, and flailing students arrive during office hours and ask for some kind of hope. For the better students, hope comes in the way of reassurance that we recognize their hard work and it will produce desired results. For students who have struggled, however, the negotiations become more complex and invariably desperate.

Recently, some of my colleagues and I have noticed that the more desperate negotiations have increasingly deviated from that most slippery quality of truthiness. In fact, in a number of cases, students have just lied to us. As often, students over promise and under deliver in ways that are clearly tactical. The end of the semester, then, brings about a series of wholly unpleasant interactions with our students and can sour the memory of an otherwise good learning and teaching experience (for both parties). 

To mitigate the unpleasant endgame negotiations faculty seem to take two approaches. I have tended to use increasingly soft deadlines for my courses to discourage students from turning in “late” papers by making it more difficult for a paper to be actually late. The only firm deadline is the end of the semester and that is non-negotiable, but the responsibility for the ending date of the semester is beyond my control shifting the responsibility for due-dates from me to the rather less personal institution. The other approach, which is perhaps more common, is to be inflexible about deadlines and enforce increasingly draconian penalties for their violation. 

Both approaches seem to me to be a response to the break down of any sense of community in the classroom and at the university. The air of desperation at the end at the end among students assumes a certain degree of inflexibility on the part of faculty. At the same time, the willingness of students to connive to get extra time acknowledges that the very limited opportunities for real conversations about the root causes of missing due dates, performing poorly on assignments, and end of the semester panics, and the lack of confidence in faculty taking these issues seriously.

Of course, the reasons for this lack of confidence may stem from a kind of classroom “tragedy of the commons” where students have used opportunities to negotiate and shape the course to undermine the pedagogical intent of the course. The failure to recognize and respect the course structure and how it creates an environment best suited to student learning suggests that there is a disjuncture between student and faculty expectations. In this context, negotiations for extra time or exceptional treatment are not compromises between an accepted and appreciated pedagogy and the recognized realities of student life, but something entirely more desperate and misunderstood. Students feel willing to subvert the intent of the class because they don’t accept that the course serves their purposes.  In this context, faculty look to reinforce deadlines using stricter penalties that reinforce the power differential between student and faculty. This then leads to the idea that the class structure serves as a basis for faculty power and the classroom and the interaction between faculty and students becomes an arena for student resistance.