Category: Editorials (Page 1 of 3)

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Before you get excited, I’m not actually back! I’m just popping in with some news!

So, first of all, if you’ve been missing my writing, I have good news for you. I’ve recently started writing the University Affairs’s Careers Café column! You can check out my first two pieces, on opportunities and online job announcements.  Here’s a preview of the latter:

Digital technology, including social media, has dramatically transformed the academic landscape over the last 10 years. Some of these changes have been positive, and some negative. Some platforms like Twitter have facilitated the creation of online communities for academics, creating spaces where we can provide support for each other, engage in conversation, and share our work. But at the same time, new publication venues, like blogs, have put even more pressure on graduate students and early career academics to produce material. Other changes are less easily categorized, but raise important questions that we, as a field, need to address. In this case, I’m speaking about the increasingly common practice of online job announcements. To be clear, I’m not referring to job ads, but rather, the announcements from the individuals who get the jobs and/or promotions.

Secondly, Stephanie and I have been chatting about what to do with Unwritten Histories. We’ve basically come to the conclusion that we’d like to keep everything up, and write occasional posts when the mood strikes us. I don’t think we’ll reactivate the Patreon account right now, though maybe we can consider switching to a per-post model. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

And on that note, keep your eye out for a brand new blog post on Tuesday. I wasn’t planning to do a gift guide for this year, but I couldn’t resist it. See you then!

I absolutely love citations. There is something beautiful about a perfectly formatted bibliography that just makes my heart sing. But aside from their aesthetic value, citations have tremendous transformative potential when it comes to academia, education, and the sharing of knowledge. So, in today’s blog post, I want to talk about why this is the case, and how you can maximize the potential of citations in your classroom.

This blog post was inspired by a recent Facebook post by the talented and lovely Joanna L. Pearce, which I will include below. While I was writing this blog post, I also happened to mention my plan to Krista McCracken, who was already planning to do a podcast episode on the same subject (in case you needed more evidence that our minds are psychically synced). So while I will be talking about citations in terms of education today, Krista will be speaking about citations and research; definitely make sure you check out that podcast episode.

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Here is a preview:

On April 3rd, I was on my way to class, when I received a phone call from my husband. It was the last day of the winter semester, and my students had organized a potluck to celebrate. My husband has battled Crohn’s Disease for the better part of ten years, and had decided to stay home that day because his symptoms were severe. Over the course of those ten years, we’ve been through several flares (as they are called), and knew what to do. So my husband calling me right before class time was quite out of character. And for good reason: he called to tell me that he needed to go to the hospital. After a brief discussion (he wanted me to go to class, I told him he was being ridiculous), I popped into class to explain what was going on, and then ran to catch the bus. That was one of the longest commutes my entire life, both literally and figuratively. I arrived at the hospital to find my husband curled up on the benches in the Emergency Room. While I didn’t know it at the time, we had just entered a two-month-long hell-scape that involved multiple emergency room visits, two major surgeries, and a lot of waiting. I’m happy to report that my husband is now doing fine, but the entire ordeal has highlighted the invisible costs of precarious academia, particularly those costs that arise from academic relocation.

Check out the rest here: http://activehistory.ca/2019/02/untethered-precarity-place-and-people/

Note from Andrea: we have a very special blog post today, that is also being shared on Active History and Histories Engagée. This post was originally published in the “Word from the President” column in Intersections 1.3. Special thanks to Adele Perry, the CHA, and Jim Clifford for making this happen.

By Adele Perry

The CHA|SHC is one of the organizations involved with The|La Collaborative, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [SSHRC] of Canada-funded network dedicated to fostering Social Sciences and Humanities knowledge and skills in society at large.[1]  In part, this involves discussing and promoting a range of different ways of being a social science or humanities scholar outside of the formal academy: in elementary and secondary classrooms, in media both new and old, and wherever we might find opportunity and cause to demonstrate the capacity of scholarly practice.

What historians can contribute to this is a long and I think notable history of practising our scholarship in public. In 2010, Joy Parr explained that historical practice “attentive to contemporary concerns, engaged in policy and with an engaged citizenry has existed as long as historical scholarship has existed in Canada.”[2]  The causes, communities, and issues that historians engage with have changed, as have the tools and technologies that historians use to engage and communicate.  But the basic fact of historians’ willingness to connect their research to the present and to speak to communities beyond the archive and classroom is longstanding.

In the last decade, Canada’s historical community have seen a number of new initiatives that mobilize historical knowledge and expertise to contribute to wider discussions.  These are notable and worth discussing in a forum like Intersections unto themselves.  That these initiatives are significantly organized and maintained by junior scholars, many of whom who have done so without the resources of tenure-track or tenured appointments, should give us all additional pause.  As a profession, our capacity to engage robustly with wider conversations and publics is not threatened by scholarly disinterest as much as it is by a precarious condition that a generation of historians are compelled to navigate.

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