Why I Hire English Majors

Prisonation: Visions of California in the 21st Century

A series of landscape paintings and prints depicting all of California's thirty-three state prisons, inspired by paintings of the American West from the 19th century.

The entire series was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 2001.
A book has been published about the project: "Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century." A similar series was completed in 2002, depicting all fifteen of New York State's maximum security correctional facilities and exhibited at Debs & Co. Gallery, NYC, in a show entitled
"Maximum Security: Visions of New York in the 21st Century".

Carceral Geography Blog

- TN

Is the universe unnatural?

Is it annoying that I only pose questions?

-- TN

Big Plans!

I always begin the summer with big plans: I'm going to turn a couple of conference papers into articles, dust of a book proposal that I began working on a couple years ago, actually get on top of courses for the year, read books that I don't have time to read during the academic year,  etc., etc.  Typically, I complete a fraction of this work due to the various other obligations I have: summer teaching, family obligations, the list of home repairs that is at least as ambitious as my various scholarly plans.  I never finish any of the lists, although I do make a dent in all them.  I've learned to be relatively upbeat about this sorry state of affairs; after all, our plans really don't amount to all that much in the grand scheme of things.  Maybe I'll put "enjoy the summer" at the top of all my various lists.

On a related note, the NY Times Magazine's story on germs.

-- TN

Secrets (Plant-to-Plant)

* A new paper in Ecology Letters titled "Underground signals carried through common mycelial networks warn neighbouring plants of aphid attack" (2013) suggests that bean plants can signal other plants (through mycorrhizal fungi which colonize their roots) to produce aphid-repellent chemicals when aphids are in the area.  These chemicals also attract parasitoids that eat the aphids.

* I'll leave the sticky plant ethics to Corey, but the bean plant-on-bean plant dynamic raises a few other interesting issues.
 
* If we consider this signaling through fungi a form of communication between plants, does it shift our conception of communication?  Does it change how we see vegetables, minerals, animals?  How can plant-to-plant gossip reorient our vision of "Nature," what is "natural" and how material -- living and nonliving -- acts?  And what about the attracted parasitoids?  Is there such a thing as truly ecological material poetics?  Fungi/form/message?  The aesthetics of bean talk?  Things are getting crazy...


* A few thoughts: “… the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption… by preventing us from detecting (Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter ix). 

* “There is no object, no subject… But there are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do” (Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope 281).

* “The basic dualism in the world lies not between spirit and nature, or phenomenon and noumenon, but between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things” (Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics 74). 

-- TN 

University of Illinois to hire 500 New Faculty and Increase Funding for Humanities and Social Science by 50%

Good news for Humanities and Social Science disciplines here.

Reading the news report, I was interested in how such an outlay of resources would be justified by Chancellor Wise:

“In 20 to 50 years, there will be fewer great research universities than there are today,” Wise said. “I believe that the ones that will survive and thrive are the ones that embrace and manage change. They are the ones where excellence is both broad and deep. They are the ones that will be relevant to society, that will add value to the people who are paying for that education. They will be the ones that contribute to the quality of life of the citizens around them, and they will be the ones that perceive the sense of urgency, that are agile enough to embrace change and not be managed by the changes.”

I'm assuming that 500 faculty lines won't be added in these disciplines, but the article is a bit unclear on that.  Still, it's good news.  It seems that the reasons that she gives boil down to two:

1.  These fields contribute to the quality of life of not just the individuals who get these degrees but also the people in their community.

2. The skills students in these programs will acquire skills that will make them more adaptable to an ever-changing work environment.

Obviously, there must be studies to support both of these claims; is anyone aware of any good ones?

Via Leiter.

Term III

Elmira College has something of a unique academic calendar.  We have two 12-week terms and a 6-week term.  Our fall term concludes around the same time as a regular semester, in mid-December, just before the winter holidays.  Winter Term begins the second week in January and extends until the second week in April.    After a week-long spring break, Term III begins.

The good:  Term III is idea for travel courses.  It is a great time to travel, wherever students are headed.  Unlike some schools that have a J-term sandwiched between the fall and winter semesters, Term III extends from mid-April until just after Memorial Day.

The not-so-good: as a College, we haven't figured out what to do with Term III beyond the travel courses.  Students in professional programs such as Nursing or Education do their clinical work and student teaching during this term, and the rest of us offer interesting, off-beat interdisciplinary courses that we wouldn't otherwise be able to offer.

Sounds great in theory.  In practice, it's not so good.  Students typically see Term III as  a chance to have a good time, and some faculty are all too willing to oblige.  In short, it's not perceived as a good term for serious work to get done.

Oh well, enough kvetching about Term III for now.  After all, I have to finish preparing for my course "Zombies in Philosophy and Literature" that starts tomorrow.

Takin' It to the Streets

Well...um...not really.  No real revolutionaries here.  But I did have a lovely time giving a talk to various members of the ethics team on staff at the VA Hospital in Bath, NY yesterday.  It was nice to give an introduction to moral theory talk to a group of professionals that had already started to think about some of these thorny moral issues and how they relate to their lives.

And this raises a broader issue: how exactly can we, as academics in fields that often don't pay immediate professional dividends, communicate to a broader public that our fields are valuable despite the fact that they may not have immediate obvious cash value?  If what students learn in fields like philosophy, history, and sociology isn't as immediately applicable to their professional lives as the things that their friends in, say, nursing are learning, then what is the value of these fields?

This is a question that has implications outside the academy, of course, and it's a multi-faceted, complex issue, one to which I hope to devote a series of posts.  Here are a couple of quick points that I will elaborate on later:

1. It's a historical question, tied to the rise of university in the West: Even early American colleges were mainly devoted to training clergy, as Delbanco has recently shown in his interesting book College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be [Amazon].  This means that what early universities in Europe and the United States provided esoteric knowledge to an elite. 
2. But this elitist aim collides with the populist streak in American higher education: we believe that our institutions of higher learning should, at least in principle, be open to all to learn valuable, practical skills: not just lawyering but farming as well.
3. These two aims are obviously contradictory.  The populist aim remains, with all the talk about MOOCs and increased access.  But the elitist aim remains as well.  Academics are to provide cultural capital to all who want it, but what is this cultural capital good for?  
4. One increasingly popular way to think about what we humanists and social scientists provide is to think about it in terms of skills that employers want.  Paula M. Krebs' recent piece at Inside Higher Ed is a good example.  Here's the opening paragraph: 

With so much focus on higher education's obligations to job preparation, the humanities are perpetually playing defense, especially in public higher education. We academic defenders of the humanities generally take one of two lines: we argue that 1) our majors ARE work force preparation -- we develop strong analytical skills, good writing, problem-solving, etc., or 2) we have no need to justify what we teach because the value of the humanities, the study of what makes us human, is self-evident.

 Krebs argues that it's past time to think about the public mission of the humanities.  I think she's right.  

 But how?

Welcome!

Welcome to the HSS, the group blog maintained by Humanities and Social Science faculty at Elmira College in Elmira, NY.  Soon we will be regularly updating the blog with discussions of our teaching and research as well as links to interesting item in our various fields and in higher education more generally.

Enjoy!