The NAB Project Podcast

NAB Podcast: Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen on Inequality, Diversity, and Higher Education

What are the racial consequences of underfunding public universities? What are "new universities" and how is their focus on underserved student populations transforming U.S. higher education? What is “postsecondary racial neoliberalism” and how does the term capture key facets of the extant crisis in public higher education? How does the “culture of austerity” in U.S. public higher education delimit choices for administration and staff? Why do public universities often support trite models of diversity? We explore these questions and more with Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen the author's of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo33896239.html] Universities [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo33896239.html]. Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at University of California Merced. She co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088023] (2013) with Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and authored Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo18900892.html] (2016). Kelly Nielsen is a Senior Research Analyst at the University of  San Diego Extension Center for Research and Evaluation. He is the author of numerous articles, including "Fake It 'Til You Make it': Why Community College Students' Aspirations 'Hold Steady,'" [https://www.academia.edu/16368693/_Fake_It_Til_You_Make_It_Why_Community_College_Students_Aspirations_Hold_Steady_] and, "Beyond 'Warming Up' and 'Cooling Out': The Effects of Community College on a Diverse Group of Disadvantaged Young Women." [https://www.academia.edu/16368755/Beyond_Warming_Up_and_Cooling_Out_The_Effects_of_Community_College_on_a_Diverse_Group_of_Disadvantaged_Young_Women]

Sean Latham on Dylan Studies, Popular Music Centers, and the Role of the Humanities

What has been the legacy of Bob Dylan on modern cultural life? How can research on Dylan be co-collaborative with the public toward meaningful ends? How can popular music institutes and centers model a new route for the humanities? How ought the humanities to engage and co-collaborate with the world outside of the academy? What is the relationship between public humanities work and the liberal arts? We explore these questions and more with our guest Sean Latham, the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, the director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, the editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, and the director of the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies [https://dylan.utulsa.edu/]. He works with a team at The University of Tulsa and the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation to bring together the Bob Dylan Archive, the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and a new Bob Dylan Center in downtown Tulsa (scheduled to open May 10, 2022), as a new hub for publicly engaged humanistic research and scholarship. In particular, they aim to create in Tulsa a hub for popular music appreciation and reflection (including the Woody Guthrie Center, which is also in the city). He has written and edited numerous books on modern culture, and organized over 100 public humanities events including exhibitions, performances, conferences, and community-engaged research projects. He recently organized the edited collection The World of Bob Dylan [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/world-of-bob-dylan/916BBA230743297755AA21B73EFDA599] (Cambridge UP, 2021) and has been working on a new book, Bob Dylan’s Odyssey: A Creative Biography.

NAB Podcast: Matthew Sharpe on the Shaping of Academic Subjectivity Through Bibliometrics

How has the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research shaped academic subjectivity? How are bibliometrics being used as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades? What of most importance has been lost in the use of marginalia by scholars as a personal and political act? Does the production of neoliberal subjectivity and the power of bibliopolitics within academia exaserbate the two tier system of tenured and adjunct labor in higher education? Are there ways to resist the bibliometric regime and its multifarious form of surveillance and subjectivity formation? If so, what channels and modes of organizing should we be thinking about to resist our current trajectory? We explore this questions and more with our guest Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University. He works on classical philosophy and modern receptions thereof, and the early modern period, up to and including the French enlightenment. He is interested in the history of Western receptions of its classical past, and the rich ethical legacy left by Stoic and academic schools in particular. He also has expertise in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and has published one single-authored and one coauthored book on Slavoj Zizek's work, and with Joanne Faulkner, Understanding Psychoanalysis. In the past, he has published on aesthetics, the theory of ideology, eschatology and political theology, and critical theory. He has written on a host of different thinkers: for instance John Macdowell, Jacques Lacan, Montaigne, Voltaire, Maimonides, Pierre Hadot, and Epictetus. He is also the author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings (Brill, 2015/16), the first monograph to bring the philosophy as a way of life (PWL) framework to the analysis of Camus' literary and philosophical work. Since 2011, he has published extensively on the work of Pierre Hadot and the 'very idea' of PWL, and most recent co-authored with Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life; History, Dimensions, Directions  (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has published several articles on Francis Bacon's ethics and wider conception of philosophy. He is also a co-translator of The Selected Essays of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice (Bloomsbury, 2021), and he is presently coordinating with Michael Chase and Eli Kramer a new PWL book series with Brill: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Text and Studies.

NAB Podcast: Lori Bednarchik on Sex Positivity and Assault Prevention in Higher Education

How can we help college and universities students (both undergraduate or graduate), or other participants, navigate the fraught worlds of intimate social interaction, romance, and abuse in the 21st century? Are there any gaps between how issues surrounding consent, assault, and sexual violence are talked about in the academic literature and how higher education students experience these issues in their lives? What sort of interpersonal and bottom up programming could be done to address issues of sexual assault, violence, and other sorts of coercive dynamics in graduate departments? We explore these questions and more with Lori Bednarchik a professor and one of the leading national experts on sexual consent and communication, and in particular sex-positive and skills-based approaches to violence prevention. Alongside her scholarship and research, she has worked closely with athletes, fraternity men, and college students across the country, challenging the norms surrounding relationships, consent, and sex. Bednarchik received her PhD in Human Communication from Arizona State University, and an MPH in Health Education and Health Promotion, and BA in English and Gender Studies from The University of Maryland. She lectures at Arizona State University, San Diego State University, California State University at San Marcos, among other universities. Previously, she worked as a Health Educator at San Diego State University where she created several award-winning programs on bystander intervention education, and alcohol risk-reduction. She also re-designed and facilitated a Peer Health Education Program specifically for fraternity men called FratMANers (Fraternity Men Against Negative Environments and Rape Situations).

NAB Podcast: Christopher Chase-Dunn on World Systems Research and his Academic Career

What is world-systems research and how did it emerge from the student movements of 1968? What is “diagonalism” as a mode of organization for meaningful theory and social change? From a world-systems perspective, what are the major global changes that are likely to occur within the next 30 years, and how might social movements influence those changes? In particular, what will U.S. and global higher education look like 30 years down the road? We explore these questions and more with our guest Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. Chase-Dunn specializes in "crossnational quantitative studies of the effects of dependence on foreign investment" as well as "studies cities and settlement systems in order to explain human sociocultural evolution. His research focuses on interpolity systems, including both the modern global political economy and earlier regional world-systems." He is the founder and a former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Series Editor of a related book series with Johns Hopkins University Press. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. We join him today as he prepares for retirement and reflects on his career is it developed in the foment of the 68 student movements.