The Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, invites applications for our first round of course development support (in the form of course costs (speaker fees, transportation, supplies) and/or course release or financial equivalent) for faculty interested in offering a course specifically addressing the themes of Rethinking Place, as outlined below.
Deadlines: (rolling applications process)
- Round 4 (applications due April 30, 2024): accepting applications for Theme #3, for courses to be taught Fall 2024 / Spring 2025.
Course Themes:
- Rereading America/Deep Listening (using archives and existing texts/data to reinterpret the idea of being American through the lens of Indigenous Realities and histories of enslaved peoples)
- Deep Listening/Language (exploring language in service of broadening worldviews through interdisciplinary but NAIS focused methods)
- Food & Memory (engaging broad themes of food and land as sites of historical and cultural memory)
Overview:
What would it look like to truly acknowledge and honor the land beneath us, its history, and its previous (and continuing) stewards? Answering this question demands a meaningful engagement with Bard’s land acknowledgment in the realm of higher education and the humanities. Most non-Native institutions focus on the text of the acknowledgment, crafting a good statement, but then struggling with how to move beyond a recitation of words. Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck takes up the invocation embedded in Bard’s land acknowledgment, “We understand…that this ongoing and challenging work requires that we commit to real engagement with the Munsee and Mohican communities to build an inclusive and equitable space for all” to create an equity-driven curriculum. By this, we aim to ensure not only that all students have access to similar educational resources and opportunities, but also that such a curriculum both reflects and honors the broadest range of experiences and backgrounds of our students in the educational materials provided.
Rethinking Place proposes adopting a Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) approach to a revitalized American Studies curriculum, to undertake an expansive understanding of what it means to “acknowledge” the land, that goes beyond addressing an institution’s particular history in regards to Native peoples. Thinking with Bard’s land acknowledgment not only centers the needs of Native communities but also affords space for universally restorative work. The commitment of our students to social justice objectives is one that has not only been facilitated in the recent past by technology—in the form of social media and the smartphone—but also, in some ways, has been engendered by it. Technology exposed, in the most visceral and violent of ways (via camera-phone videos, police reports, legal briefs, digital newsletters, as well as in books, essays, film, or television) the many communities that had been heretofore overlooked, oppressed, and that face generational systemic racism and inequality. Rethinking Place was conceived with the overlooked, yet newly visible, communities in mind; our aim is to provide as many students as possible with the tools to respond intelligently and urgently to their historical moment. One way to do this is to actively engage the clear and mounting documentary evidence of discriminatory systems that do not treat or protect American citizens equally. Confronting and making use of these documents, as well as the spaces and materials overlooked by state repositories, requires a broad range of humanities-based skills to parse the overwhelming volume and power of these ever-growing archives. These humanities skills are long-standing, analog practices, such as reading closely and critically, but here we approach them consciously with an eye to turn such analysis into the foundation that supports activism of any form.
Call #3 Theme: Food & Memory (2024)
For the final theme of the Rethinking Place community funding initiative, we seek proposals engaging the theme of history and memory through land and food, including (re)creation of spaces and lands. We invite proposals that build on previous Rethinking Place themes of language and archive. Here, potential frameworks are questions of land and food as an avenue for social justice (in food sovereignty, rematriation, foodways revitalization), as a living archive (in cookbooks, works of food history, seed relations, writings and theory about naming and classifying our environments), or as kinetic, organic material for creation (in material or land-based projects), and includes exploration of both cultivated and and non-cultivated varietals.
We welcome proposals from all divisions of the college, with the only pedagogical requirement that a critical reading/writing component is not only used but celebrated alongside other disciplinary skills. We welcome proposals that creatively and expansively (re)interpret Rethinking Place themes.
We welcome proposals that creatively and expansively (re)interpret Rethinking Place themes. For inspiration (but not required emulation), some of the courses that have recently taken up this challenge at Bard (and provided the foundation for this grant) include:
- Prof. Dominique Townsend’s “Death and Dying” seminar, which trains students to engage broader publics beyond their individual disciplines through different forms of public writing.
- Courses that engage questions about the politics and problems of archives as well as broadening student perspectives on what constitute sources (for instance, History seminars like “Politics of History,” (Prof. Robert Culp) “Material Cultures and Violent Pleasures,” (Prof. Christian Crouch) and “African/African American Arts” (Prof. Drew Thompson).)
- Courses that explore multiple modes of writing – cultural reportage, formal analytical, biography – as in “American Study” (Prof. Pete L’Official), which was a Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing.
- Courses that engage cross-disciplinary collaboration between writing, arts, and natural sciences, as in “Radical Cartography” (Profs. Eli Dueker and Krista Caballero).
Eligibility
Any faculty member with an appointment to teach during the academic year the course will be offered at Bard Annandale is encouraged to apply. You must have an existing appointment spanning the timeline of both course release/compensation and course offering.
Grants Details
Please note that for 2024 we are only awarding course development grants ($1,000-$2,000). No more course releases or equivalents remain.
We are offering up to 6 awards total for courses to be taught during the lifetime of the grant (January 2022-December 2024). For Round #4, our “food & memory” themed round, we will be offering awards for courses to be taught in Fall 2024. The awards can come in the form of a course release or salary equivalent of that release.
These grants are intended to support a faculty member’s time to develop and then offer a new course (or substantially rework an existing course) solidly contextualized by Bard College’s Land Acknowledgement and the Rethinking Place Initiative. In order to be eligible for this award, the applicant must submit a letter of support from their program director, specifying the proposed timing of both release (if requested), and course offering and make clear either in their application or program director’s support letter that a course release staffing plan has been discussed with the office of the Dean of the College. Questions about the grant or about the application process should be sent to [email protected].
Application Procedure for Round #3 (Award announcements May 2024)
- Proposed Course Description (300-word limit): please include proposed course level, prerequisites, and cross-listings
- Course learning objectives and relationship to Rethinking Place theme (300 word limit): please be as concrete as possible in connecting your course’s goals and objectives to themes 2 or 3.
- Proposed course budget (if funding is needed for research travel, student travel, speakers, supplies – ~$500-$1,000 per course possible).
- Email/letter of support from the program director, approving and encouraging the course release to support development of your proposed course and confirming discussion with the office of the Dean of the College.
- Curriculum Vitae: Please include all academic positions, research grants, and publications.
Expectations
Award payment can take up to six weeks after the award letter is issued to be fully processed. Working closely with the Rethinking Place administrative staff to manage budget, other course support needs. Submit a final report narrative and expenditures sheet via email to [email protected] by December 31, 2023, or by May 31, 2024, accounting for the use of the grant award and reporting on course evaluations and reflections for future course offerings. Commit to presenting your experience in course development and teaching at a future Rethinking Place conference.
Past Courses
As theorized by Indigenous scholars and activists, Indigenous resurgence refers to individual and collective processes of decolonial liberation grounded on “return” and “revitalization” of traditional socio-political values, life-worlds and experiences. Gesturing towards the possibility of life beyond the state form, colonial or otherwise, Indigenous resurgence also places distinct importance on feminist liberation in its various forms. In the first half of the course, we will examine resurgent political imaginaries and visions, focusing on the practices, writings, art forms, and activism of indigenous communities and feminist thinkers. We will explore conceptual, theoretical and political vocabularies that we need to learn in order to understand these visions that go beyond conventional political thought and practice. The second half of the course will apply these insights on the analysis of a novel project of feminist decolonization that is currently being practiced in Rojava, or Syrian Kurdistan: “democratic confederalism,” and the broader Kurdish women’s movement. The goal of this liberation struggle is to generate anti-statist, sustainable and feminist lives within a region and an international context fractured by nation-states and the increasingly more racialized manifestations of the latter. By putting indigenous resurgence theory developed largely in North America in conversation with this new feminist anticolonial imaginary practiced in the Middle East, the course will also explore the internationalist futures of political struggles for emancipation. Taught by Professor Pinar Kemerli.
What does labor afford? What does labor provide? The practice of making and witnessing theatre in a potential site of collective healing. In this Creative Research and Practice Course students will use notions of labor, personal narrative, and principles of locality at Montgomery Place on Bard’s campus to create new plays. Montgomery Place is a site where American aristocracy flourished in the 19th Century. This site is fertile ground to excavate theatrical narratives related to the early foundations of American Wealth and the labor that built it. In 2017, Dr. Myra Armstead crafted a space for a student led exhibition spotlighting laborers who facilitated the creation of an American antebellum aristocracy. We will study this exhibition as a departure point for new writing. Simultaneously, we will study labor focused plays from Arthur Miller, Dominique Morisseau, Brian Thiel, Caryl Churchill and Lynn Nottage. Combining personal investigations and studying labor efforts in the context of Montgomery Place, students will write 10-minute, site-specific plays inspired by their research. These plays will be staged collaboratively in a festival open to the Bard Community at the end of the semester. Taught by Professor Daaimah Mubashshir.
It’s mine. Ownership means different things over time and among different peoples. This course charts a history from below about the lived experience of possession, spirit possession and the ownership of property –real and moveable, animal and human, intellectual and intangible – knowable through the archive of things reclaimed by the rural and urban unlettered, raced peoples, indigenous peoples, colonized peoples, and religious and political exiles. We explore challenges to the idea of property during the early modern religious upheavals and radical changes to the idea as inscribed in the late 18th-century written constitutions that made it a basic right. We will focus on France and areas of significant French contact in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas from 1400-1900. My land, my house, my history, my family, my self demarcate the changing socially, culturally, or politically configured borders between inside and outside at the affective and material intersection of belonging and belongings, property and properties, land ownership and propriety, and possession and freedom. Students will rethink narratives of settler colonialism and racial capitalism from multiple perspectives through mini-research assignments, using judicial records, fiction, visual, and ethnographic sources to explore moments of property exchange, value assessment, theft, trespass, expropriation, or other forms of dispossession when the meaning of ownership becomes most visible in the historical record. Taught by Professor Tabetha Ewing.