Proposals are due April 30th, 2024 for a fall 2024 start date for the groups. Notification will be made via email in May.

 

“Rethinking Place: Food & Memory”

The Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Steering Committee invites students, staff, and faculty to propose interdisciplinary reading groups for Fall 2024 semester. In supporting these groups, Rethinking Place wants to give the campus at large an open slate to develop and expand the Bard curriculum as a result of the kind of focused and collegial conversation that a reading group can provide. To the point of curricular development, part of the goal of each reading group will be to design or devise their own primary source document in the form of one interdisciplinary unit of instruction (i.e. a teachable lesson plan) that could ideally be used interdivisionally across the college. Reading groups proposed during Rethinking Place’s three-year sequence of articulated themes should respond to the corresponding year’s frame. Our 2024 framework is “Food & Memory.” If you are hesitant whether or not your application works with this year’s theme, please submit your application anyway.

Teams of students, staff, and faculty will apply for funding from the Rethinking Place Project Team. To underscore the importance of each reading group’s interdisciplinarity, each team should have two (2) faculty sponsors, which should hail from at least two (2) divisions at the College. Faculty, staff, and students are invited to propose reading groups in a broad range of fields and topics including, but not limited to: Native American and Indigenous Studies; Enslavement/Reparations; Latinx/ Immigration; and Humanities-focused environmental justice topics. We also encourage proposed reading groups that will investigate and discuss how students, staff, and faculty interact with the campus, grounds, and surrounding area, as well as confront our institutional history and past representations of Indigenous and diasporic communities.

Rethinking Place will provide support for approved groups by purchasing copies of the selected text(s) for all group members as well as refreshments for group meetings. Groups should commit to meeting regularly at least 4 times throughout the semester.

Interested students, faculty, and staff should submit a proposal describing the group’s format and topic/text(s), include a list of possible participants, and an itemized budget. “Rethinking Place: Deep Listening” can offer $2000, which can be divided between one to three reading groups, dependent on need.

 

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One of the aims of these reading groups will be to produce their own primary source documents in the form of interdisciplinary units of instruction that can be used across the college. Templates for analysis will emerge in part from the interdisciplinary faculty-student reading groups, part of whose charge will be, in addition to developing such templates (for example, producing a primary source document as a group, and then using that production process to discuss power dynamics in other source bases) creating teachable units that employ humanities-based theories of reading, writing, listening, and viewing that could then be used in classes across the college. Imagine, for instance, a lesson plan on The Great Gatsby that emphasized humanities-based skills of critical reading and writing that could be taught just as easily in a literature class as in an art history class, an environmental studies class, or a gender studies class as well. In this way, both student and teacher would be explicitly engaging with the humanistic skills employed in the production of these teachable documents, while the documents themselves would serve to school future generations of students in how to employ these techniques.

Past Reading Groups

Decolonization and Indigenous Resurgence

Gesturing towards the possibility of life beyond the state form, colonial or otherwise, Indigenous resurgence envisions, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, “relationships of freedom and self-determination” based on “grounded normativity.” How can the theory and practice of indigenous resurgence help our analysis of Kurdish liberation struggle’s new “democratic confederalism” project, which seeks to generate anti-statist, sustainable and feminist lives and futures 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 the North Americas in conversation with this new anticolonial imaginary practiced in the Middle East, this group explores the internationalist futures of political struggles of Emancipation. Texts include Talkin’ up to the white woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe, and As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Rethinking Place Core Texts

The 2023 reading group of the Rethinking Place team aims to develop a practical and theoretical foundation for continuing and expanding the work of developing an expansive NAIS curriculum at Bard College. Texts include Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, InDivisible: African-Native Lives in the Americas, edited by Gabrielle Tayac, and Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith.

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