In 2023, Question Everything
Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for everyone for 2023: Question everything about how we teach, do research, and select students or job applicants.
– Question grades
– Question letters of recommendation
– Question peer review
What else should we question about academia this year?
(Sorry for the paywalled links, I usually try to avoid them, but couldn’t find an alternative just now.)
P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).
2 Replies to “In 2023, Question Everything”
We should question paywalls (and why so much of our work is behind them) and how our professional associations function (I’d like to see them look more like cooperatives and/or unions than what they tend to be now). Thanks for this post Kerim, and for bringing back some ‘short form’ to this site 🙂
yes unions are key as otherwise questioning becomes merely academic, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of reflexivity/standards around what counts as good work (teaching , research, etc) in the humanities I would venture to say that most people in any given dept have never sat in on each other’s classes or read each other’s writing and even if they did how would they evaluate them? So probably near the top of the list is to question why do professional teachers no little to nothing about the research into education?