over spring break, we each chose a reading to do on our own and share back with the rest of the class over padlet, google docs, or other virtual modes. i chose the chapter “Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies” from Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts. as a pseudo-vigilante independent study group scrapped together on the fly that is also an ~official~ course (with a course number and everything!) housed under the ed department and funded by the college, we’re continually grappling with the question: what is our relationship to the university?
Interdisciplinary programs and departments have always needed to be vigilant in relation to institutionalization.
Lisa Lowe, “Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies”
a couple weeks later, we explored the topic of “Teaching and Learning for Social Justice,” and i had the chance to build on some of the ideas we started talking about around Lowe. i also got to read and share a reading/resource of my choice with the rest of the class again, but this time we were encouraged to use a non-traditional, creative, and easily-digestible format to present the material.
i ended up improvising a “choose-ur-own-adventure” (that turned out to not involve much choosing) format that i hoped could distill some of the most important takeaways from a pretty dense, theory-heavy text. look at the difference between my Lowe notes and my Toward What Justice? notes! i think the latter is much more engaging, and i also think it provides us concrete suggestions for how we can approach the question: what do we do with the university?
How do we do more than survive? How do we plot the death of the settler university?
paraphrased from Sandy Grande, “Refusing the University”
see below for my notes on Lowe and the responses that Toward What Justice?, particularly Sandy Grande’s chapter “Refusing the University,” offers us.
notes on Lisa Lowe’s “Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Asian American Studies”
notes on the meaning of justice and a pedagogy of refusal (selected chapters from Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s Toward What Justice?)
