MUSEUM FATIGUE

Seeing Ghosts of the Anthropocene

October 20, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

This week in our First Year Seminar, The Planet We Have Made, we have been making our way through the incredible book, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Among the topics we have discussed are how to see the ghosts of the world in which we live—the connections between the dead historical pasts and the living world in which we find ourselves. How is it possible to see the ancestors—the beings and animals and relationships—that move across the landscapes […]

Categories: Anthropocene, Haunting • Tags: ghosts

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College Was Already Remote Education

October 17, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve been trying to tack down this education-related pandemic frustration that has been bugging me. This fall colleges have been trying to figure out how to approximate a normal educational experience for students (and normal tuition-dollar revenue) despite the drastic difference of online/remote learning or limited physically-displaced and masked in-person engagements. College management and educators—sometimes working together or other times working at cross-purposes—both agree they want education to continue and universities to survive the unknowns of a pandemic economy. So […]

Categories: Debt, Higher Education, Uncategorized • Tags: Debt, higher education, pandemic, student debt, student loans

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Milanote is My Tool For Teaching in a Pandemic

August 6, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

This past spring semester, when all classes went online during the Coronavirus pandemic, I was suddenly in need of a way to keep my students connected and able to work together. I needed something that ideally would work for my discussion-heavy senior seminar that was working through some tough texts, and also be useful for intense group video documentary work being done in a visual anthropology class. Everyone was under a lot of stress so I wanted something to which […]

Categories: Teaching, Technology • Tags: group work, Milanote, online teaching, remote teaching, software

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This School’s COVID-19 Video Has Filled Me With Dread

July 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

After watching this video I feel even worse about the upcoming semester. I am overcome with dread. I’m sure this school designed this video to make their students feel confident about the fall, but it’s a joke. It could have been made by The Onion or SNL. What is left behind in the quest to deal technically with the problem of a poorly managed pandemic is pretty much everything that makes teaching and learning in person valuable at all. No […]

Categories: Higher Education, Mythologies, pandemic, Uncategorized • Tags: COVID-19, pandemic

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10 RULES FOR TERRANAUTS (Pandemic Edition, after John Cage and Bruno Latour)

July 20, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what the fall is going to look like for educators. Looking back on this spring, one of the things that struck me was how quickly faculty pivoted to remote delivery of classes without really considering what the experience would be like for students. The assumption for many was that the current generation of undergraduates—so comfortable with using technology—would unproblematically adjust to online delivery. This ignored the fact […]

Categories: Education, pandemic • Tags: Bruno Latour, John Cage, Terranauts

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Happy Birthday, Johnathan

July 3, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Johnathan the tortoise turned 188 yesterday. The oldest living land animal—his life has spanned the deaths of every animal on the planet. The world into which he was born is unimaginable to us except as fiction. To put this in perspective, when he was born there were only 24 United States and the Civil War was still thirty years in the future. The last ship bringing enslaved people to the US wouldn’t set sail for another 28 years and the […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Anthropocene, tortoise

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Another Night of Curfew Has Been Announced.

May 31, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Another curfew has been announced for tonight. I’m afraid this weekend has established habits of policing and response that could become normalized. What if the pandemic and the policing become for the 2020s what the Patriot Act and Homeland Security were for the period following 2001? Are we all going to become habituated to new policing regimes the way that we now instinctually shed our shoes at airport security? When there are no politics and no program for achieving a […]

Categories: COVID Spring

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Reading This Morning’s News

May 30, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Waking up to read and see images of what happened last night. I’m still processing details, but once again I find myself thinking about the fact we are still in a pandemic. Seeing so many people so close together—even with masks I can’t help but think there is plenty of opportunity for transmission. Are we going to see a spike in COVID cases in the next week? Are the black and brown communities who have already disproportionately suffered from COVID […]

Categories: COVID Spring

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Concept for a Pandemic Graduation, May 2020

May 16, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve been talking to some of the seniors at my university and they are understandably sad that the arrival of the novel Coronavirus has destroyed their plans for the graduation ceremony they had imagined. After years of study and work, they naturally want to mark their accomplishment, and the transition to the next stage of their lives, with family and friends at a public ritual of recognition hosted by the institution that has shaped their lives. But how does one have […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: class of 2020, graduation, Hamline University, pandemic

Keeping Class Real This Semester (and Perhaps Next Fall): Lessons From My Visual Anthropology Class

May 15, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday afternoon, during my last session for this semester’s Visual Anthropology class, we had a summary conversation about the students’ experiences in our fractured pandemic semester. The students shared some interesting reflections on time and life and our class that were clearly divided into a before and after. Some of these comments offer valuable ideas for a possible Fall semester that is increasingly looking like it might be spent at least partially online. “Class Isn’t Real” Students at my small […]

Categories: Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Hamline University, Hamline University Anthropology Department, Midway Conversations, online teaching, remote teaching, Visual Anthropology Class

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