Tag: labor


It’s Time We Tackle This Directly

On Facebook the other day I read a post by a doctoral student in the US who, near done the degree, is venturing into a possible career outside the university; the post repeated a theme we’ve long heard in the humanities: we generally conceive of learning and research too narrowly and, by extension, graduate training ought to be re-calibrated to take into account the many other futures for which we might be preparing students. I admit that I found this […]

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On Having an Effect

It’s National Adjunct Walkout Day, during which university instructors who are not part of the tenure-track system (or even those who are) may not be showing up to teach or, instead, may take this opportunity to have a “teach-in” during which they depart from the regularly scheduled material, to whatever extent, so as to ensure their students understand some of the challenges facing higher ed at this particular moment in history. It’s a snow day here at the University of […]

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It Ain’t Sexy But….

We have Kelly Baker on campus, here to give the second annual Day Lecture. On the ride to Tuscaloosa form the Birmingham airport the other day, we got talking about the issue of contingent faculty in academia (a topic on which she has blogged) or, more specifically, about how the issue plays out in the academic study of religion. We talked about the American Academy of Religion’s current forays into the issue (e.g., a task force she is herself involved […]

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Excerpt from Gregg Lambert’s “The Future of the Humanities”

On September 25, 2012, Prof. Gregg Lambert of Syracuse University’s Humanities Center, joined us in Tuscaloosa to present a public lecture entitled “The Future of the Humanities”*–the inaugural lecture in this year’s series on the place of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the contemporary university. As with all future talks in this series, we plan to post an excerpt from the lecture soon after it is delivered, inviting comments from those in attendance or from those reading this blog, […]

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