But the budgets in higher education are gasping for breath. If you happen to work at a small, private institution with limited travel funds, for example, your options for professional development are further limited. In the large expanse which is the United States of America, travel costs are high whether you travel by air, train, or car (and who has the time to travel by bus?) You certainly can’t save on hotel accommodations often because you don’t have good friends to stay with in every city (not to mention the fact that you don’t have time while conferencing to be commuting; even staying at hotels that are not the conference hotel compromises the professional networking you can accomplish).

Then there are meals, of course: if you are a hardy person, you might survive on energy bars and soda, but if you need, you know, actual food to survive, you’ll have to spend some cash. Especially if you want to hobnob with colleagues at restaurants.

Then there is academic organization membership, baggage fees, airport parking, and last minute business cards. And what’s the point of going if you don’t have a sharp suit to wear? Oh, and by the way, have you tried attending a conference wearing uncomfortable shoes? … The list goes on.

Right now, my conference attendance is at an all time low. This must change, but what’s to be done? You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and you can’t find extra cash in the pocket of a junior academic. I thought it was hard as a student (and it was), but I find that it continues to be so – except now I don’t have a choice to skip a conference. With every conference I fail to show up, I become more and more invisible in my professional networks. But I have a family, and I am trying – in my 40s – to become a first-time homebuyer. I am also making progress on a dizzying array of payment plans for my recent cancer treatment. I have not enrolled my daughter in music lessons or Kumon or soccer as has almost everyone else because I don’t have the money. So the costs of conferencing are painful.

The folks who can comfortably attend conferences are usually the ones who don’t necessarily need to. The ones who desperately need to – grad students, jobseekers, adjuncts, and other junior academics – struggle to get by even without attending those 2-3 conferences a year, which cost roughly $1000 each. I don’t know about you, reader, but I don’t recall ever having a spare $1000 lying around on the kitchen table. Every penny that flows into my bank account is well, accounted for.

While academics may be unable to do much about travel costs and lodgings, perhaps we can have conferences that are less showy and expensive. We can do without the fanfare and the banquets.

And we can start becoming a little more reasonable about conference registration and membership costs.

For my income bracket, the American Anthropological Association charges $200 for membership, not counting section memberships (which are also essential, because how could you not have a departmental home within your organization?) The Middle East Studies Association charges a little less, $130 for my income. The Comparative and International Education Society charges $70, which is fairly low. The sliding scale approach to membership is helpful, but for a grad student who makes $1000 a month (or not), even $65 is a lot of money. I would like to mention the American Educational Research Association here, which charges $150 for regular membership, but has a Hardship Policy:

Mindful of the challenging economic times, AERA offers a hardship policy whereby members confronted with financial hardship due to unemployment or transitional difficulties may request a waiver of dues for one year. 

Other academic organizations need to take note of this policy and, “mindful of the challenging economic times,” should follow suit.

And then of course there is conference registration. In most cases, the American Anthropological Association requires attendees to register (and pay membership) well before they get notification of proposal acceptance. This means that you could sink hundreds of dollars into a conference that you then don’t attend because you really need a conference where you are presenting, not just attending (most institutions don’t really reimburse/support your conference travel unless you’re presenting). 

The Comparative and International Education Society charges members $275 for registration. For students attending the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, on-site registration costs $140. (The conference does not list the cost of registration for faculty attendees who are not presenters). If attendees decline to receive a program booklet, registration is essentially the price of walking up and down the conference hotel, trying to make eye contact with their academic idols, and trying to strike up conversations with other hopefuls who won’t want to waste their time networking with non-celebrities.

The returns on conference attendance are like the returns on gambling: shrouded in uncertainty.

Imagine a tenure-track assistant professor – let’s not even imagine a grad student – making $50K, raising 2-3 children, paying rent/mortgage in a large city, and commuting to work in a used car. Are you aware that, even with excellent credit, there is no spare cash in this picture? Imagine, now, if the assistant professor gets sick or injured, or her car breaks down, or her parent is hospitalized in another city. Do you really think that about $100-200 for membership for a single organization, $200-400 for a single conference registration, and the costs of air travel and hotel accommodations (multiplied by about 3 conferences) is something she can – or should – come up with? Especially given the uncertainty of the investment?

Here are a couple of suggestions – neither novel nor innovative – to start us off.

First: the local and regional conferences need to be revitalized. Part of what ails the local/regional conference is the absence of the academic celebrities. So I suggest that the academic celebrities of all hue transcend their egos and make a habit of attending the local and the regional conference. Attendees of these conferences should receive “extra credit,” as if they were engaged in professional service. Times have changed. Not everyone can afford to be in San Francisco, Montreal, or Washington, DC for the national conference. You know we’d all like to be there, but since we can’t, let’s make professional networking and the life of the mind possible for the vast numbers of academics who can’t.

Second: the virtual conference needs to get off the ground. We’ve been talking about them for a while, but they haven’t quite made it. So let’s get this party started. And in the ARPT files, these virtual conferences need to start counting for much more.

Because something has to change. The world is changing around us, and we can’t afford to pretend. We are thinkers and social critics, reformers and investigators – how can we, of all people, act like our profession is rolling in money?

What are your suggestions to address the situation?

The saddest moment of the movie is probably when Grug resolutely steels himself, without hesitation, to toss all the members of his family into the distance over to safety, saying, “All I have is my strength,” accepting that he is just a caveman with few original ideas, little flexibility for changing times, and sparse emotional intelligence. But he loves truly and strongly, and his emotional illiteracy is reflected in his lack of narcissistic self-regard as he does not spare a single thought for himself. I see this in many fathers.

Naturally, as I write this, I am awash with tears again. I think of the stolid, strong, volatile-tempered father, who was absent from home through much of my youth because he was working two jobs and when he returned home, he was tired, sullen, and focused on his dinner. I think of how he was unable to exorcise his childhood nightmares of losing his mother, and thereafter perpetually negotiating access to his father via a difficult stepmother.

Even now, when he sees me off at Lahore airport, he turns away without a word after embracing me tight, unable to speak. No Disney speeches from my abbu. I remember the day when he vented his frustration at our complex relationship in words of hurtful anger and when I shouted that I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just communicate, why he had to always end up hurting me instead, why couldn’t he just say things without erupting like a volcano.

And then in 1993, my parents shuttled from office to office, negotiating with difficult bureaucrats, struggling to help me pursue my dream of an education abroad, even as I sensed their hearts breaking. My parents were now retired, no longer active, and they would suffer no late-in-life move to the West. Like Grug, my father picked me up bodily, and tossed me into the void where he could not follow me.

How does a parent have the strength to do that? As a parent, I don’t know. Maybe I will not learn until a very, very distant day in the future when my daughter, grown up, tells me she has to detach herself from Mama, that she is no longer “hooked” to Mama, and that she has a life to live, a life that is separate from my own. For now, I will plan on college down the street and a house next door (a la My Big Fat Greek Wedding). The Grugs of a previous generation have changed with changing times, and it has been painful. Who knows what changes lie ahead for the children of these fathers?

“Muslim Students on American College Campuses”

Shabana Mir

Assistant Professor and Coordinator, Global Issues and Anthropology, Millikin University

Shabana Mir received her Ph.D. in Education Policy Studies, with a minor in Anthropology and a concentration in Comparative and International Education from Indiana University. Her research was awarded the 2006 “Outstanding Dissertation Award” by the American Anthropological Association’s Council on Anthropology and Education. Her book “Constructing Third Spaces: American Muslim Undergraduate Women’s Hybrid Identity Construction” is forthcoming (2013) from the University of North Carolina Press.

Monday April 8, 2013
4 PM | Life Sciences Building 142 FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Sponsors include Theology, Political Science, Asian Studies, Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, the School of Education, Sociology, and Anthropology | With funding from the CAS Dean’s Special Events Fund

]]> http://koonjblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/lecture-at-loyola-university-chicago/feed/ 0 mskoonj http://koonjblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/lecture-at-the-university-of-illinois-this-week/ http://koonjblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/lecture-at-the-university-of-illinois-this-week/#comments Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:43:52 +0000 Shabana Mir http://koonjblog.wordpress.com/?p=532 ]]> I am speaking at the University of Illinois this week:

CSAMES Brown Bag Lecture: “Muslim American Undergraduates in College Leisure Culture: Conformity, Resistance, Self-Essentials, and Third Spaces”

Speaker:              Shabana Mir, Assistant Professor and Coordinator, Global Issues/Anthropology, Milikin University

Date:                     Mar 12, 2013

Sponsor:              CSAMES

So at this time, I am staring, through my data, at a variety of paths leading out in a variety of directions. It is also difficult that I am doing international research and that I am woefully ignorant of the work that has been done in Pakistan on the reforms in Pakistani academe. A lot of such work is government documents which is, let’s be honest – yawn. There is so much reading between the lines to do in government documents. And when I come across Pakistani officialese, I find myself completely befuddled. Maybe my training in informal American academic-speak has left me grievously inadequate to the task of formal jargon. This is not to say that I am, like – stupid or linguistically impoverished. I think.

I am looking forward to doing another round of interviews and observations at the university this summer. But since life is complicated, and I have a family which won’t accompany me this time, I cannot spend more than two weeks there. I do sometimes wish I was one of those fiercely independent academics who deal, efficiently and productively, with long periods of time away from their families, and build their research careers on such stints. I am told that when my child is older, this will become easier. As of now, my daughter gazes at me in relief when I return home after a couple of hours’ absence. So the guilt is overwhelming.

The mothering guilt is another problem with the pre-creative stage of academic writing. When I was immersed in finalizing my book manuscript (it is on its way, thanks for asking), the work was simple (well – I mean -), I knew what I was doing, by and large. Actually, I had so much to do, I had no time to feel lost. Right now, I am stuck, staring at the different paths. I am at risk, while productively contemplating my choices and the literature, of wasting (well – “waste” is an ugly word) wasting abundant quantities of time wandering in directions that will ultimately prove worthless (another ugly word). I know there is no such thing as waste in the research process. After all, as I stroll into studies of academic climate, and then gaze over into studies of work-life balance, I can only benefit from a wide-ranging appetite for contextual knowledge. But there is no category in my resume that says “Academic Appetite” or “Desultory Wanderings.” If they didn’t result in a tangible artifact, they don’t really count for much. When I am a tenured professor, I can be the expert whose musings and wanderings will be of value – someone who scatters academic value on her way as she ‘wastes’ time.

I never had the stomach to watch the slaughter. I still like my meat packaged and washed clean, food, but not animal, entirely dead. Back in 1995, when I was cooking some meat in a shared London house – our landlord was Yusuf Islam – I shivered in disgust when I saw blood in the cooking pot. “Why is there so much blood in this meat? Isn’t there something wrong with it?” My saucy roommate, Sanella, a Bosnian refugee, sneered at my hypersensitivity and countered, “It’s made of blood!”

It is, I know. I just don’t want to know. I don’t want to know, in the front of my mind, about death, killing, cutting, knives, terrified bleating, blood spurting, and a cow that was calmly grazing now lying dead upon a blood-drenched floor. I’d like to keep the grazing cattle image separate from the image of meat, sort of like a fast forward.

We scream in excitement when we watch slasher movies, we wage our wars like video games, and we buy our meat packaged and plastic and covered in transparent wrap. We shudder and squirm when we speak of cutting an animal’s throat and letting the blood flow, as if the animal was any less dead when a hammer is used, or the animal is stunned by a machine rather than held and cut by a fellow living being. If the animal must die, surely we owe the courtesy of contact to the animal whose life is to flow into ours.

Lives must not be taken lightly. Like Ned Stark in ‘Game of Thrones,’ if we kill, surely we must experience a shudder in our souls for the lives we take. There should be some realization of the horror of death. Maybe the butcher should cry, as in this report of an organic halal slaughterhouse.

Years ago, Riaz picked him up from college and asked what he wanted for dinner. “Chicken curry,” Imran replied, without a second thought. Father and son went to the poultry market where Riaz nudged him to choose a chicken. At home, in the kitchen, he handed him a sharp knife. “Here son,” he said, “if you want to eat chicken tonight, you have to take its life.” “I was very young, just seventeen or eighteen,” Imran swallowed hard. “I still get really emotional talking about that. I didn’t eat the chicken that day but the memory’s always stuck in my head.” – Humera Afridi, “When the Butcher Cries”

Yet this video rubs me the wrong way.

Why is the black woman being raped, the olive-skinned woman being beaten bloody, the Middle Eastern woman a victim of an acid attack while the White woman suffers a gentle caress from a White colleague/boss in the workplace?

This is wrong on so many levels: European and American women are being beaten, raped, and killed, mostly by significant others. To erase the violence in White people’s lives while playing up the Scary Black/Brown/Asian Man image is irresponsible.

We have come too far in our analytical awareness of the power of images to be clueless about this construction. I would expect better of Eve Ensler.

For a more fundamental critique of Ensler’s approach, see this. And this is Rafia Zakaria’s critique of “happy feminism.”

Those four words have me reeling. My 6-year old girl believes that I am more attached to my work than to her. Meantime, in the academic recession more than ever, higher education is under the impression that it should be in full possession of its employees’ lives, and that to be a scholar is to be naught else.

As a still-untenured faculty member, I find myself struggling with the promise I have just made to my daughter: “I promise I will try harder to spend more time with you” (note the lengthy sentence construction). I find myself planning ahead, contemplating the international teaching trip in the summer, scheming for new publications once the book is finished, and filling up boxes in my planner.

Those are the boxes which also say, “Sorry, honey, I have to finish this;” “honey, please can you go and play in your room?” and “Raihana, I need to focus.”

But a few moments after I sat down and made a few comments – just to nudge students in the direction of the topic before I showed them the video – I realized that the class was on fire. From beginning to end, an hour and a quarter, the discussion never flagged. The students were bright-eyed, eager, and reflective. Sometimes high participation means an excess of irrelevant but personal comments. Not today. The comments were deep, cerebral, and pertinent. And they were non-stop.

I kept thinking, I should cut this discussion short and pop in the video. But I knew, too, that the students were thinking, thinking hard and eagerly, creatively, on the topic (relativism and neutrality). Students aren’t a mechanical puzzle: you don’t put in all in the ingredients, do your job, and walk out. Teaching is more organic than that – and more unpredictable. I teach three sections of the same course, and often I tell myself I will reduce my workload by doing the same prep and the same tricks for each section. But I can’t. It doesn’t work that way. Each group is different. Each group responds to a different kind of magic. There is nothing uniform about it.

Frequently, I walk into class with a plan that seems brilliant, but the energy just isn’t there. The flame doesn’t burn. I walk out, sometimes, disappointed and sorrowful, irrationally depressed, that the energy wasn’t there. A good class is like a high. I’ve been a teacher and a public speaker for a long time, off and on, and my work relies on igniting the energy in the room. I do not speak independently of my audience. I speak with them.

This high is addictive. The highs remind me of when I first started the zikr (devotions) in my Sufi tariqa (order). The high was instantaneous, intoxicating. It increased, and then, after some time, it stopped. I felt a sinking sense of loss, as if I had lost a treasure. But I hadn’t lost. My shaikh told me it was because I had plateaued. The intoxication is easy, he explained. The control and balance of steadfast work is hard.

Not all teaching yields a high like today’s class did. But as a teacher, I must continue to prepare, exert myself, learn, read, and research new materials and methods – regardless of the returns by way of energy and excitement. … Well, not regardless. -After all, harvesting energy from my students (I sound like a vampire) enables me to do better and more. We harvest energy from our students because teaching – good teaching – drains enormous quantities of energy. One-directional instruction demands that you prepare an essay – a readable essay, to be sure, but an essay – and then you read it aloud, and then ask, Any questions? There may be advantages, especially in some areas of study, in the old lecture style of teaching. I couldn’t do it myself. Even in my public speaking engagements when I have spoken for an hour without interruptions, I draw upon the energies in the room. Is there any other way?