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RabachK Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

asking the right questions

ntanio

I filled out a TA multiple choice questionaire recently about teaching during pandemic. Did I feel supported in access to remote teaching tools? Did I need workshops on how to run an online discussion, test prep,? etc.

What was unasked and therefore unstated is the trauma students are facing amid an administrative effort to carry on, do our best, and talks about our "Fill-in-the-Mascot" Family. In my class we hear stories of students forced to leave campus and return to unsafe family home environments. Many students lost their on-campus jobs, yet are still stuck in rental contracts, with full tuition fees, and reduced campus services. Many students discovered they were on-call "essential" workers which has played havoc with their health concerns and class engagement. We also have students with COVID19 trying to stay on top of their course workload because they are supposed to graduate this Spring. 

Meanwhile as I talk to students I hear that most of their classes are recorded lectures taught asynchronously. They tell us that they often binge listen to these at 1.5x speed just to get through them. --This is the mode of online learning that Robert Post in his NCA post describes as "effective and efficient" for the "tramission of information." I wonder who isn't he talking about.

In trying to teaching using zoom during the pandemic, Sharon Traweek and I have held synchronous online class discussions. Many students have told us this is their only synchronous class this quarter. We have tried to teach students to think critically in/of zoom as a built environment. To ask what  assumptions, hierarchies, epistemologies are built into our online classrooms. We have struggled to find ways to disrupt those pathways with alternative strategies.

In answer to the question what is being foregrounded and obscured? I think in all the reflection about the future of residential and online learning and about the multiple crisis Universities, as well as the rest of us, are facing; what gets obscured is how important and how difficult it is to teach to students that they must think critically with and about the tools they are given and expected to learn.

NANO - Energy Scales and Systems - Utah

danica
Annotation of

An ethnographic moment that stands out to me is when a yearly visitor to the Grand Staircaise Escalante region emphasized the importance of preserving the area under monument status. In a rare moment of recognizing the energy use/demands of even those who are preservation/wilderness proponents, he said "look, I know we have to get our energy from somewhere and maybe for now it's going to be fossil fuels, but please, not here. This place is sacred." Although everyday energy use and the use of petroleum to make such outdoor recreation products as kayaks is occasionally brought into view instead of displaced, these comments are often divorsed from thinking about how people in this area get energy, where the materials extracted from this area go, and what other forms of energy production might replace this extraction. Rather than arguing for a transition of how energy is produced, there seems to be a sense of inevitabilty of extraction but a desire for such industrial processes to be carried out somewhere else.