This page is only useful for historical purposes. The main page for the seminar is to be found here.
My goal this semester is to push further ideas about education as the motor of cultural production. These ideas have concerned me over the past few years (and build on my earlier work). Over the past year I have collaborated with students in starting several research projects through which we are exploring theoretical and practical possibilities. They are concerned with "Education in autism, adolescent health, and communication technologies." The major focus of the seminar will on the analysis ofethnographic fieldwork related to these projects, as well as the planning of larger proposals.
About half the seminar will be specifically dedicated to these projects. The other half will be further discussions of the theoretical underpinning of the overall approach with the goals of drawing the concrete consequences for ethnographic research in areas of general concern.
In general, for many years I have searched for a way to face, theoretically and in ethnographic practice, on the one hand, the disabling power of arbitrary institutions on everyday life and the life careers of humans, as well as, on the other hand, the enabling power of human action that is revealed in the very appearance in history of arbitrary institutions. Culture must be both hegemonic and, in terms Boon borrowed from Thoreau, extra-vagant. In the not so long run, and continually in the details of everyday life, "culture" cannot captured by any forms of hegemony. In recent years, this has brought me back to thinking about education as the fundamental and irreducible process through which human beings, always together, construct, maintain, demolish, and reconstruct, differently, that which ends up as their particular world. This has led to a series of edited volumes and papers (2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011). All this is a development of my work with Ray McDermott in the 1980s and 1990s summarized in Successful failure (1998) particularly Chapters 2 to 5 and 8, as well as my earlier American school language (1983).
This seminar stands on its own but students would be well served by reading those authors who are not in the schedule this semester but which were discussed in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007.
While the class gestalt will be strongly anthropological, doctoral students in linguistics, sociology, history, political science, philosophy, communication, pedagogy, etc., may also be interested. There are no specific pre-requisites. It will help if students have taken (or are familiar with the authors and topics addressed in) either of my courses Communication and Culture or Ethnography of Education. I will also expect students to have some relatively well-formed research interest about which they want to think theoretically in terms of education and culture. I will easily give permission to register to students who have taken these courses, or who have at least one year of graduate anthropology. To the others I will ask questions such as:
More information about this course is available by moving your mouse on the "Course Link" tab on the left of your screen.