By Andrew Nurse Do midterms have any point? Do tests? Quizzes? Finals? These questions outline the scope of a discussion that recently drew considerable discussion among historians on Twitter.[1] The conversation was both apt and timely. It is apt because it goes to the heart of teaching and learning; it is timely because Covid-19 — and a range of other… Read more »
The comments here were first shared during the Canadian Historical Association’s second of three panels responding to the “Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto” entitled, “Precarious Historians, Trade Unions, and the Neoliberal University.” Along with Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon, Peter McInnis, Christine Gauthier, Catherine Larochelle, and Janis Thiessen, Jeremy Milloy discussed his insights on precarious academic work and working-class organizing. What follows is an… Read more »
The students of HIST 5210, Carleton University In just three days, this tweet was liked over 90,000 times. Responses varied from triumphant vindication (take that, students! So many more than 10 likes!) to moral panic (society is crumbling thanks to Twitter). Surprisingly few people recognized it for what it was: playful teasing between students and their professor as they wrapped… Read more »
Erin Gallagher-Cohoon This post has been cross-posted with The Covid Chroniclers. “I feel like if you even just wrote something on fatigue – like the whole essay, just the word fatigue. We’re tired.” -2nd year PhD student Last December, I FaceTimed one of my closest friends, a PhD candidate who I have not seen in person since we both started… Read more »
Reportedly, the “add and mix” approach with which Indigenous histories have been incorporated into Canadian history is an inadequate method to facilitate transformative change. According to two respondents, the add and mix approach fails to encourage historians and students to push beyond merely acknowledging settler colonialism, to move to what it means to be engaging with Indigenous histories and teachings
The Active History collective is thinking about how to address precarious employment, both in the way we operate and in the wider history profession. We want your help to do it. In February, Active History was asked to support and publish the Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto. Written by a group of historians who have experienced, or continue to experience, the… Read more »
By Francine McKenzie This letter is a response to Will Langford’s essay Congress 2020, Interrupted. Ken Hilborn was a member of the History Department at Western from 1961-1997. He died in 2013. In his will, he left a bequest to the University of Western Ontario to reward academic achievement amongst history students. While Hilborn was a faculty member, his controversial… Read more »
Will Langford In 1989, psychology professor Philippe Rushton inflamed debates over discrimination at Western University (then known as the University of Western Ontario (UWO)) by outlining his racist theories at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For some, Rushton’s academic racism made him unfit to teach at UWO. For others, protecting academic freedom was… Read more »
Alan MacEachern & William J. Turkel Imagine being suddenly told that you cannot research online when writing history. No electronic journals, no ebooks, no Internet Archive, no Wikipedia, no search engines. You will instead be forced to rely exclusively on available print copies of books and journals, on microfilm, and, most important of all, on archives scattered across the country… Read more »
What we are instead seeing is a move towards emergency remote teaching. These are not online courses in the sense that we are used to seeing, but they are better than nothing.
