MUSEUM FATIGUE

Teaching a College Class in Minecraft?

January 27, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Humans.Machines.Pandemic.Presence. Meeting online presents a challenge because we are synchronized in time, but not in place. While it might seem we are “together apart” like the advertisements proclaim, we aren’t together at all. Platforms like Zoom or Google Meets offer a stream of visual and audio information about what is going on in different places—making our synchronous exchanges more communicative, but the platform isn’t really anywhere. It just transfers incomplete flows of information about us across digital space that are […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft, pandemic, presence, virtual life

Require Presence in Virtual Classes, but Keep Cameras Optional

January 15, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

The question of presence in online classrooms is so interesting. Do we require students to have cameras on or off? How can one be virtually present online, when all they need to do in an actual classroom is show up and breathe—precisely what we want to avoid during a pandemic! Requiring cameras turned on in a virtual environment is an easy equivalent to just sitting in class, and does make students accountable for at least the minimal engagement of showing […]

Categories: Teaching • Tags: cameras, online teaching, surveillance

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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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DIY Slums and Overpopulated Dystopias

October 12, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I received a most interesting advertisement in my Instagram feed, an appeal to sell me a software package of digital assets of “Future Slums” so that I can “create the overpopulated metropolises of sci-fi dystopias or shantytowns of a not-so-distant future for the largest cities in the world today.” We know that these topographies are tropes of SciFi movies and games, but I suppose until I saw an advertisement for an actual kit of prepared building materials to create […]

Categories: Mythologies • Tags: Digital Culture, dystopias, Kowloon Walled City, Science Fiction

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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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