Emerging Keywords for Higher Education: Art, Engagement, Inclusion, Safe

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

It has become almost a cliche to describe higher education in the United States and beyond as in a continuous crisis, as its principles and practices are threatened by often hostile forces. That state of emergency coincides with the emergence of new, radical, and transformative practices across the educational sector. In different ways, both the threats and the practices put into question the terms and concepts that define and describe what we do at colleges and universities. This roundtable is an opportunity to debate and discuss some of those terms.

Participants will explore four keywords--”art,” “engagement,” “inclusion,” and “safe”--that are contested within these debates over higher education, even as the terms have contested meanings and connotations well beyond that context as well. Each participant has contributed an essay on their keyword to the forthcoming third edition of the influential and widely-taught volume Keywords for American Cultural Studies, co-edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, published by New York University Press. The purpose of the roundtable is to open a discussion of how this constellation of terms--and others related to them--function in debates over higher education.

Keywords for American Cultural Studies co-editor Bruce Burgett will introduce the panel with some thoughts on the keyword “education” itself. After that, each panelist will make a brief (7 minutes for each keyword) opening statement, focusing on the genealogy of their term and how it shapes, for good and bad, discourses and practices in and about higher education today. The roundtable will then open up to discussion, first amongst the panelists and then including the audience a discussion moderated by Keywords co-editor Glenn Hendler. Copies of short essays on the four keywords will be available online in advance of the conference. Though these are not, strictly speaking, the papers being presented or discussed at the roundtable, the opportunity to read and discuss the essays can provide a common jumping-off point for discussion, both for panelists and the audience.

Art (Lisa Lee, Art & Art History, University of Illinois Chicago), engagement (George Sanchez, American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California); inclusion (Rebecca Wanzo, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis; and safe (Christina Hanhardt, American Studies, University of Maryland).

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Bruce Burgett, University of Washington-Bothell

Panelists

• Lisa Y Lee, National Public Housing Museum

• George J Sanchez, University of Southern California

• Rebecca Wanzo, Washington University in St Louis

• Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland-College Park

Comment

• Glenn Hendler, Fordham University