When You Are The Demographic You Study: Interrogation of Self versus Going Native

One of my least favorite academic concepts is the anthropological “going native“. This idea that one can become so immersed in the culture or phenomena one is studying that they lose objectivity is rife with cultural, imperialist, racist ideas of knowledge, understanding, and science. But, I have to give anthropology credit for at least articulatingRead More “When You Are The Demographic You Study: Interrogation of Self versus Going Native”

Who’s Afraid of Post-Racist?

I called your attention to the following post at orgtheory.net a few weeks ago. At the time I took issue with the construction of Fabio’s argument and used the opportunity to call, again, for some critical interrogation of race in organizational theory. Fabio has returned to defend his original post and so I’ve decided toRead More “Who’s Afraid of Post-Racist?”

Upcoming Talks

I said this would be the semester I don’t go to every conference. Promises, promises. It looks like I will be the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association conference in Greensboro this April. The talk is based on my experiences of using social media to talk back to powerful organizations. You can likely intuit the case study.Read More “Upcoming Talks”

Emory U Joins Coursera & I’m A Debbie Downer

Today, Emory University joined about a 100 other universities in partnership with Coursera. It was probably pretty poor timing for Emory, though. Just this week the administration announced that they are cutting undergraduate and graduate programs in education, Spanish, Russian, visual arts, educational studies, and interdisciplinary liberal arts. Some of those will be restructured. MostRead More “Emory U Joins Coursera & I’m A Debbie Downer”

All Your Skinfolk Ain’t Kin Folk?

That’s what my spirit animal, Zora Neale Hurston, is quoted as saying: “All my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk.” My experiences in academe have been…a textbook case of everything that could happen would happen. That includes a rocky start in a different program and a transfer and yadda, yadda, yadda. Needless to say my experiences primedRead More “All Your Skinfolk Ain’t Kin Folk?”