Abelmann, Kelleher, & Mortensen on Ethnography of the University
As part of our ongoing speaker series supported by the Ford Foundation's Division of Knowledge, Creativity & Freedom, I am pleased to announce that the subject of our next presentation is "The Ethnography of the University," which will be held this Friday, December 12, at 1:30 PM in Room 336 Gregory Hall. The distinguished speakers will be Professors Nancy Abelmann, William Kelleher, and Peter Mortensen.
ABSTRACT The Ethnography of the University (EOTU) initiative sponsors undergraduate research on the university and archives it in web-accessible form for the UIUC community. EOTU also functions as a learning group for students, staff, and faculty interested in what it means to conduct research on universities as institutions. EOTU encourages students to interact with existing university narratives through qualitative research. Namely, by engaging the multiple stories that universities tell themselves and others, student researchers can understand the implications of their findings. From this perspective, EOTU appreciates that universities and colleges—as institutions, organizations, maps, and histories—are composites of diverse prose, statistical, and visual narratives that communicate complex and often conflicting institutional values, commitments, and identities. EOTU thus directs students' attention to these complex and even conflicting narratives about the university. EOTU ethnographic research includes face-to-face participant observation and interviews, as well as historical, discursive, visual, numerical, and web-based analyses.
Background Readings: Visit the Ethnography of the University (EOTU) website at www.eotu.uiuc.edu for an overview of this initiative. Also, attached to this email please find the EOTU white paper.
Nancy Abelmann is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she is also a teaching faculty member of Asian American Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. in East Asian Studies at Harvard University. She has published books on social movements in contemporary South Korea (Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement), University of California Press, 1996); on Korean America (Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, with John Lie, Harvard University Press, 1995); and on women and social mobility in post-colonial South Korea (The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk and Class in Contemporary South Korea, University of Hawai'i Press 2003). Her co-edited volume with Kathleen McHugh, Gender, Genre, and Nation: South Korean Golden Age Melodrama, is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press. Currently she is completing Been There, Doing This: Korean American Families go to College, based on 4 years of transnational ethnography on the educational trajectories of Korean American public college students as they articulate with the educational histories of their 㩭gr㩠arents. Also, she has received two campus grants with psychologist Sumie Okazaki to study Korean American mental health in its familial context.
William F. Kelleher is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1990. His research focuses on social and cultural theory, colonialism, work and class, ethnicity, social transformation, and political violence in Europe, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. Regarding the latter, his research addresses the ways by which British colonial and postcolonial presence in Northern Ireland have created forms of racial identification and disidentifications. He has examined the everyday labor processes in a Northern Ireland factory and has linked the difficulties of forming class identities to the histories of colonialism and political conflict there. Among his most recent publications is The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland (University of Michigan, 2003).
Peter Mortensen is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Freshman Rhetoric and Academic Writing Programs. He earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in Literature from UCSD's Revelle College. His books include Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States (with Janet Carey Eldred, 2002), which examines the fate of women's liberatory civic rhetoric in the new republic; and Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (edited with Gesa E. Kirsch, 1996). He is currently completing Illiterate Sorrows: The Uses of Illiteracy in Industrial America, 1880-1920 and Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century (edited with Beth Daniell).
