This story is true. Last week I was sitting on a hilltop with my book in basically the absolute middle of nowhere in Wales. Dressed in gray and brown. Motionless. Two women maybe my parents’ age walk past me on the cliff path. We say hi, in the cursory way that’s the norm for passing [...]
I’ve been reading some literature on the “Idea” of the university lately. If you’re curious to get a sense of this arcane set of texts, which go back to Kant and Cardinal Newman, the best recent introductions are Gerard Delanty’s 1998 The idea of the university in the global era and Jeffrey J. Williams’ 2007 [...]
I was just finding out how much it would cost to attend the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference this summer, and the costs and fees run something like this: Accommodation €105 (€35/night * 3) Student conf. registration €90 Obligatory EASA membership €50 Roundtrip airfare to Dublin €150 Very cheap meals from restaurants €45 (€15/day [...]
I was reading a curious old book called The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, 1970) and I came across a rather shocking passage: This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority [...]
There are times when I feel like ethnography should be less about seeing the local point of view and more about prying free all those sights, events, phenomena that are locally invisible. For everyday life, in my fieldsite at least, is full of little absurdities and small surrealisms that seem to pass without notice. For [...]
Dozens of copies of this poster have been put up at the University of Paris-8. (Photo by Imen I., a student in sociological methods at Paris-8.)
Last month I went to a debate organized at the Sorbonne, “Is the university burning?” (L’Université brûle-t-elle ?) Appropriately, it ended in chaos; but midway through, there was a bit of performance art. Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the [...]
Here we have a second testimonial of precarious life in French universities, one that comes not from a temporary worker but from a doctoral student struggling to finish her thesis. This one has to be filed under the genre of the public lament: a political genre which, it comes to mind in passing, deserves further [...]
When the report on precarity in higher education was first publicly released, the presentation was followed by a number of panel discussions. Here I’m going to try to translate a few people’s personal tales of precarity. Today we’ll start with that of Aurélie Legrand. Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… [...]
I’m about to post a few things about precarious jobs and political responses to precarious jobs in French higher education, but before I do that, I wanted to call a bit of attention to this fragment of a personal narrative of precarious work in American higher ed, which I came across by chance in an [...]