Hello! And an invitation 📚🦉🍄
Hi, friends. If you're reading this, then we share a desire to make higher ed a better place. A place imbued with curiosity and care, built on principles of equity and sustainability. I choose to hope that we can collectively move in that direction.
(First—I hope those of you I took the liberty of signing up based on our past work or conversations together will forgive me! It's totally fine to unsubscribe if you don't want yet another email in your inbox.)
What can you expect from this newsletter? I'm not 100% sure yet. I'll definitely share links for upcoming talks and workshops, and I'll most likely include some reflections on what I'm noticing and learning.
I'm also going to experiment with something new: a low-key reading group focused loosely on how to make higher ed better. Each month, we'll consider a text together. It could be a book or an article or a film, long or short, theory or fiction or history. Anything, really, that will get us thinking about what higher ed is, what it could be, and how we can bring about change.
I'd like to invite you to join me on Thursday, October 21 from 5-6pm ET.
For our first session, I wavered between choosing something that's on my to-read list or choosing something I know and love. Something focused squarely on the topic or something that works at a slant. I've decided to go with the latter: two short texts that have deeply influenced my thinking about higher ed and all its messy, difficult, occasionally beautiful realities—even though neither one is about higher ed per se.
Those pieces are:
🦉 Spark Bird by Emily Raboteau (Orion Magazine, Feb 2021)
🍄 Excerpts from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Princeton University Press, 2015). Let's look at "Autumn Aroma" and "Arts of Noticing"; let me know if you need a PDF
Please sign up here if you'd like to come! And please bring some ideas of what you'd like to read in November—my thought is that we'll take turns choosing readings and leading discussions so that we can hear lots of different voices and ways of thinking.
In solidarity, hope, and some nervous excitement,
Katina
