Minnesota | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Why Don’t Minnesotans Have a Word For This Thing That Gives Us So Much Joy?

March 6, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Every year as late winter begins the transition to early spring, Minnesotans enjoy a morning landscape punctuated by a unique ice formation. The ice I’m referring to exists as a function of the melting winter snow, when daytime temperatures rise well above freezing creating puddles on the sidewalks, and the partial refreeze as evening temperatures dip for a good portion of the evening. The result are early morning encounters with cold wet puddles capped by thin sheets of ice. When […]

Categories: Everyday Things, Video clips • Tags: chice, Minnesota, winter

University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams

January 15, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning, while doing some preparing for this spring semester’s visual anthropology class, I located an online posting of the locally produced documentary, University Avenue: One Street, A Thousand Dreams. The documentary, which premiered on our local Public Television Station in late 2012, provides a nice historical context for the area in which the Hamline-Midway neighborhood is located. Once again this semester, my students are going to do short video ethnographies of everyday life in the Hamline-Midway. I’m going to have them […]

Categories: Documentary, Urban, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: documentary, Hamline-Midway Neighborhood, Minnesota, Public Television Station, Saint Paul, TPT, University Avenue, Visual Anthropology Class

How the Auggies Schooled Minnesota Higher Education on the Marriage Amendment

August 29, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Higher education in Minnesota has been schooled by the Auggies. Last Wednesday, Augsburg College publicly took a stand stating its opposition to the amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would only recognize marriage as “between one man and one woman.” Their university president, Paul Pribbenow, took the book on “best practices of ‘playing it safe’ in university management” and boldly threw it out the window. In one statement the school publicly asserted its values. It engaged the world. It refuted the homogenous […]

Categories: Higher Education, Liberal Arts, Politics, Random Reflections • Tags: Augsburg, community, current-events, leadership, marketing, Marriage Amendment, Minnesota, politics