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Aug 31

Enclosure: “Private companies will take over five public schools in Gary and Indianapolis”

The Associated Press and various news outlets reported yesterday how “Private companies will take over five public schools in Gary and Indianapolis.” This is a consequence of an assessment by the Indiana State Board of Education that the target schools are in “various stages of dire situations.” The students in these five schools surely deserve more educational opportunity that they have been getting, but it is also crucial to note what else is going on here. Two large and one small for-profit corporations are being handed five pieces of the former public realm and no one should expect to see these schools handed back to their communities. In keeping with the spirit of the age, corporations have allies in government willing to take public resources and responsibilities away from citizens and local communities and hand them over to private interest, for-profit corporations. The public realm shrinks and the private realm grows through processes of enclosure. The children of Indianapolis and Gary are now revenue-generating assets for Edison Learning, Inc., Charter Schools USA, and EdPower. Indianapolis parents who would rather not have their children turned into corporate beings have a choice–private parochial (Christian or Islamic) schools, which Indiana is also now subsidizing with tax funds via its new voucher program. Voucher-eligible, Christian options in Gary only go to grade 8, so parents at Gary Roosevelt High School will have to stick with Edison Learning, Inc. Those retrograde folks who still believe in community-driven, public interest activity will just have to get with the program and accept their new corporate overlords.

Aug 31

Oklahoma Native Language and History Projects Making Progress

A round up of some good news Oklahoma.

The team at the Euchee (Yuchi) History Project has published an account of the project’s work in the prestigious journal Native South. Native South is published by the University of Nebraska Press and is made available electronically via Project Muse. The article, by Stephen A. Martin and Adam Recvlohe,  is titled, appropriately enough “The Euchee (Yuchi) History Project.” It is accessible (toll access) here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/native_south/v004/4.martin.html

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation have announced a series of grant awards under the Documenting Endangered Languages program. I would like to highlight the following projects pursued by friends and acquaintances and to congratulate all the grantees. Durbin Feeling (Cherokee Nation) and colleagues have received funding for “Collaborative Research: Documenting Cherokee Tone and Vowel Length.” James Rementer and colleagues at the Delaware Tribe have been awarded a grant for “Lenape Language Database Project.” Mary Linn and Amber Neely have been funded for Amber’s dissertation research on “Speaking Kiowa Today” and Sean O’Neill and Elizabeth Kickham have received support for “Choctaw Language Ideologies and their Impact on Teaching and Learning,” Elizabeth’s doctoral research. Rounding out the good news for Oklahoma language efforts, Mary Linn and Colleen Fitzgerald have received additional support for the ongoing “Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project.” Congratulations to all of these language workers and the communities that stand behind them in support! Read the NEH/NSF press release here: http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20110809.html

Aug 26

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The Hasan El-Shamy Shout-Out

This is a shout-out. I have boundless respect and admiration for my senior colleague Hasan El-Shamy. Dr. El-Shamy is continuing to make crucial contributions to the social sciences and humanities, especially in his beloved field of folklore studies. He is a leader in considering the mutual implications of psychology and folklore studies. He is a world renowned scholar of Middle Eastern expressive culture and belief systems. He has advanced comparative methods and theories in folklore studies, adapting them for the current century. He has argued persuasively for the importance of recognizing vernacular theorizing on the human condition and he has an uncanny ability to recognize the lay social theories expressed in the most humble of expressive genres and folk beliefs and to connect these to the longterm concerns of psychological, social and cultural theory in the academic mode. At another end of the continuum, he is in dialogue with literary scholars as a consequence of his detailed studies of a key canonical text in world literature—The Thousand and One Nights. The glowing reviews that his works receive and the global community of admirers in dialogue with his studies speak to his centrality and influence to our field.

In the past several years, Dr. El-Shamy has published numerous important books, including Tales Arab Women Tell (IU Press, 1999), Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2002), Types of the Folktale in the Arab World (IU Press, 2004), Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature (Sharpe, 2005), A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (IU Press, 2006), and Religion Among the Folk in Egypt (Praeger, 2008). In one of countless high profile recognitions that he has received, this year he was recognized with the honor of being the “Great China Lecturer” at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He was the 94th internationally recognized scholar to be accorded this distinction.

Dr. El-Shamy is on a well-deserved research leave this semester and I wish him well in his continuing research endeavors.

Aug 25

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On “Options Dim for Museum of Folk Art”

The New York Times is reporting that the American Folk Art Museum in NYC will probably go under. This is mainly about financial issues, both the larger economy and mismanagement, but there is also an intertwined intellectual one and this can be seen clearly in the NYT story.

Billie Tsien, an architect who designed the new building, said the museum’s capacity to raise money was in part limited by its subject matter; New York’s movers and shakers do not tend to collect quilts and weathervanes.

The American Folk Art Museum has been pretty consistently hostile to the field of folklore studies–those scholars who actually study the vernacular arts of the United States, the Americas, and the world in context. On intellectual grounds, this day could have been foreseen long ago. That the architect who designed their (former) brand new building understands the museum so narrowly to be a thing of quilts and weathervanes speaks to how out of sync with contemporary folk art scholarship the museum was. There are no shortage of potential donors interested in folk art in New York City, its just that their folk arts of interests were not central to the agenda of the museum.

On more than one occasion, American Folk Art Museum staff told graduate students with whom I work that if they wanted a real museum job working with folk art they needed to get degrees in art history, not folklore studies. Well, those students are doing just fine and are studying and working with folk arts and artists everyday while the American Folk Art Museum is going under. Financial foundations are important, but so are intellectual ones. An elitist art history was not the best platform upon which to erect a museum nominally dedicated to the arts of diverse peoples and communities. I am not against art history, but I am against an art history that is opposed to folklore studies without even knowing what the field is about.

Aug 24

Where are the essays on annual faculty retreats?

Where is the CHE/IHE-style higher education literature on annual faculty retreats? I would have thought that they would have been treated in ProfHacker or one of the IHE blogs. I thought there would at least be snarky blog posts. I wonder if the higher ed. research community has actually studied them via-a-vis manifest and latent functions, aspirations and outcomes? (No time to dig deeply on this, of course.)

Today is my department’s day-long faculty retreat staged at a secret location just outside of town.

Aug 24

What Marketers Can Learn from the Food-Truck Trend – Grant McCracken – Harvard Business Review

What Marketers Can Learn from the Food-Truck Trend – Grant McCracken – Harvard Business Review.

Aug 18

Fighting the Big Deal [Fighting Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier]

Reminder. Commercial scholarly publishing is an adversarial rather than collaborative undertaking. As an author, editor, peer-reviewer, and/or scholarly society decision maker, you get to choose which party to the contest you will serve and support.

British Libraries Push Back [Against Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell] from Inside Higher Education

Whose healthy corporate balance sheet / straining public budget have you impacted this week?

Aug 14

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Folklore and the New Social Problems

Like many friends, I am now rushing to prepare courses to be taught in the upcoming fall semester. This year I am teaching a new course in both the fall (=Indigenous Worldviews) and the spring. As fall progresses, I will need to get my act together for the new spring course. Book ordering will, for instance, come quickly. I wanted to describe here my new spring 2012 course and invite suggestions and comments from anyone interested in weighing in.

This new course “Folklore and the New Social Problems” or (in expanded form) “The New Social Problems: Expressive and Communal Responses” builds on work that I have done with graduate students over the past few years and was the focus of my contribution to the recent Teagle Foundation-funded project of the American Folklore Society. As part of the Teagle Foundation’s “Big Questions and the Disciplines” initiative, the AFS project focused on undergraduate curriculum innovations linked under the question “What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?” This provides one context for the course that I will teach next spring.  Here is the course description.

FOLK F253 Folklore and the Social Sciences (3 cr.) S&H
VT: Folklore & New Social Problems
TOPIC:  The New Social Problems: Expressive & Communal Responses

This course considers human responses–including aesthetic, expressive, customary, and communal responses–to a range of recently emergent and highly contested human social problems. Working together to map uncharted territory, we will draw upon the methods, theories, and empirical findings of the international field of folklore studies while cultivating skills in media literacy and critical thinking.  As a course in folklore studies, we will specifically investigate the relationship of lay and expert knowledge within the fraught, complex, and large-scale phenomena and dilemmas that are its empirical focus. Among these course topics are: globalization and trade policy, financial engineering, the digital divide, intellectual property, the industrial food system, the trade in living human tissues and organs, biodiversity, geoengineering, climate change, cultural and linguistic diversity, farmer’s rights, corporate and media concentration, genetic engineering/synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and bioprospecting/biopiracy. Because these issues transcend the historic disciplines, the course will turn to the insights developed in a range of fields but the intellectual center of gravity will be the enduring concerns of folklore studies, as expressed in such core concepts as art, performance, identity, community, vernacular knowledge, context, expressive life, worldview, and heritage. While they will not be the focus of this course, we will acknowledge the enduring significance–in and beyond folklore studies–of what might be characterized as the old social problems. These would include such issues as slavery, terrorism, disease, colonialism, war, poverty, hunger, corruption, and racism.

Suggestions welcome!

Aug 12

More Groundlevel News from the Tel Aviv Protests

Our friend in Tel Aviv continues to share news and views and video and photographs from the Tel Aviv protests at White City Streets. Check out the latest “Adding Fuel to the Fire (Literally)”.

Aug 11

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A Note on Predatory Open Access Publishing

One of the worst developments in the emergence of open access as a set of practices and goals for the progressive reform of scholarly communication is the emergence of new commercial firms that are combining the worst traits of open access strategy, vanity publishing, automation of editorial and production tasks, and a predatory approach to meeting the publishing “needs” of foolish and/or desperate-to-be-published scholars and would-be scholars. Typical is the email that I received recently from a firm that included a section where I could click a link through which I could become not just an author with this publisher but could become a reviewer, an editorial board member, and even the Editor-in-Chief of a new journal. Such firms are, or hope to become, cash cows via author fees. One sign of such a firm is the announcement of a large number of not-yet-extant journal titles spanning a wide range of fields almost randomly. These vaporware journals are often announced before the identity of an associated journal editor is established. Another simple sign is the frequency of typos in communications and on websites. Lots of typos. Open access is too important for the scholarly community to become distracted by these marginal cases. Beware.

For discussions of predatory open access, see here and here.

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