Monday, September 16, 2019 • 10am
The Wisconsin Idea room (Education Building #159)
Informal Meeting for Students
1:30-2:30pm • 5230 Social Science Building • Open to all graduate and undergraduate students
College and university programs that craft student experience have become a major selling point, representing an intersection of student life administration and higher education marketing. For example, “First Year Experience” programs craft student life in ways designed to fit students into the most productive aspects of college life, optimizing the production of an ideal student. That production, understood in terms of measurable outcomes, becomes a major marketing angle for parents worried about their child’s future. Neither perspective takes into account structural inequities shaping student experience, with consequences for at-risk students. Nor do they take seriously the role of faculty, who are neither problem solvers nor career developers.
Bonnie Urciuoli is professor emerita of anthropology at Hamilton College. She has written on race/class ideologies of Spanish–English bilingualism in the U.S., the discursive production and marketing of ‘skills,’ and the construction and marketing of studenthood and student diversity in U.S. higher education. She has published the monograph Exposing Prejudice and the edited volume The Experience of Neoliberal Education, as well as articles in American Ethnologist, Language and Communication, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Signs and Society, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Annual Review of Anthropology, and elsewhere. Flyer.