Professor Paige West
@PaigeWestNYC
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7,168
Following
2,564
Media
250
Statuses
6,752
#FirstGen faculty at both a liberal arts college and a research university in NYC, Guggenheim Fellow, she/her. My tweets represent me and not my employer.
New York City
Joined October 2014
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I don't know who need to hear this but: I have been submitting papers to peer review journals for 20 years and every time I open the reviewer comments for the first time I feel sick. When people are helpful and kind it is just a miraculous act of generosity and collegiality.
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Today I got a *BIG* rejection letter. I don't apply for much anymore because I'm busy and I love my life, but this is something I really wanted. I don't want sympathy here. I want every single young person to know that WE ALL get rejections and it is always crappy. Hang in there.
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I’ve also been accompanying students to these hearings. Our students while under this enormous pressure have been articulate and poised and breathtakingly Impressive. What’s happening to them makes me sick but how they’re standing up for themselves makes me love them even more.
Columbia and Barnard faculty have been working overtime since December to accompany students to increasingly draconian disciplinary hearings related to protests against Israel's war on Gaza. A colleague just sent this anecdote (shared with permission). This is where we are at
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Y’all - Pls correct inaccurate news from MSM, including by
@CNN
-- those arrested in the first roundup at
@Columbia
WERE ALL STUDENTS. About 26 Columbia college & about 58
@BarnardCollege
students arrested & suspended. The others were from other schools AT COLUMBIA. No outsides.
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Every graduate student who sends a dissertation/thesis chapter to their advisor right now is a superstar. Having the head-space to focus is so hard right now and the work you are doing is incredible. Y'all are amazing. Also, unsolicited advice, drop assholes from your committees!
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What is the name for the syndrome whereby you obsessively register for every online event that looks amazing and then don't go to any of them?
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Joint statement by the American Association of University Professors, Barnard and Columbia chapter.
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I am incredibly honored to have been named a Guggenheim Fellow this year. Thank you to the Guggenheim Foundation, to the people who wrote letters for me, to my colleagues, friends and family in PNG, to my colleagues
@BarnardCollege
&
@Columbia
, and to all my wonderful students.
Congratulations to Professor
@PaigeWestNYC
who was named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow (
@GuggFellows
)! Professor West will use the fellowship support to continue her scholarship in anthropology and cultural studies.
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I mean the people in the sciences and conservation who are having the Come to Jesus moment about the racism inherent in environmental conservation..... well.... bless their hearts. There is a whole world of people who have been writing about this for decades.
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I want to live in a world where during meetings male colleagues don't repeat what their female colleagues say right after they said it as if it is a bolt of unique special boy-genius-thought from their brains and not what they just heard a woman say.
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Yesterday as I walked to work in New York City the campus where I have taught for the past 22 years was surrounded by NYPD with guns. They were there because our students - our brilliant, complicated, and wonderful students - were planning a peaceful protest.
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I'm syllabusing and considering teaching my graduate seminar on Space, Place, and Nature with nothing but ethnography and fiction. So, no philosophers, no theory-bro geographers, none of that. Has anyone done this?
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I’m out of town. Traveling for work. Watching everything on this campus that I love with all of my heart from another state, and all I have to say tonight is that
@BarnardCollege
and
@Columbia
students I love y’all so much. I am in awe of your incandescent fierce bravery.
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Today I was honored to march in solidarity with
@SW_Columbia
and the student workers
@Columbia
. I am ashamed of the tactics of intimidation that the university is now using against our student colleagues. And I was proud to see so many of my other faculty colleagues out today.
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I don't know where to start with any of this. But here goes: Anyone shifting attention way from sexual harassment to elite institutions needs to rethink that move. Elitism is BS and pervasive but sexual harassment happens EVERYWHERE. Poor state school cases don't make the news.1/
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Brace Yourselves: We are about to see *a whole bunch* of people in anthropology who have never thought about collaboration, coproduction, standing up / stepping back, or any of it before in their entire careers work to position themselves as the experts on it all. Mark my words.
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Please share widely - we are hiring an Assistant Professor whose work focuses on Afro-Latinx histories, communities, cultural practices, and political struggles, and whose thinking is transdisciplinary, theoretically innovative, and empirically grounded.
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Thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions for the place/space/nature class. Syllabus by week:
1 Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai’I to Kahiki, Emalani Case
2 In the Shadow of the Palm: More than Human Becommings in West Papua, Sophie Chao
1/
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A faculty friend died unexpectedly at the beginning of the semester. In processing this huge loss I keep thinking about how kind they were. Kind to students, kind to staff, and kind to their colleagues. To leave this world with beautiful kindness is what we should strive for.
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So, here is the deal (the real deal): I'm struggling right now. I'm worried all the time about my family and friends and I am afraid of what is happening in the world. Classes start soon and I'm also worried about that. If you are faculty and feeling the same, solidarity. 1/
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Fellow women faculty, you know when you are in a meeting and you make a suggestion and there is silence and then a boy colleague says the exact same thing right after you and everyone is like "OMG you are a king!! That is exactly what we should do!" It's even more fun on Zoom!
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Postdoc at Columbia focused on the co-production of knowledge and we REALLY encourage Indigenous, Native, and First Nations scholars to apply. It is hosted at the Center for Science and Society but located in the Political Ecology lab!
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When a dude you work with who *constantly* turfs work to women, ignores his PhD students, sits on no committees, and weasels out of teaching whenever he can (apologies to true Mustelidae everywhere) sends you an announcement about HIS NEW BOOK.
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**REMINDER** The college or university where you work is not your friend. They do not care about you as a full living human. There is A LOT of talk right now about "factly support" but the only support for faculty is from other faculty so we need to step up for each other. 1/
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Hey,
#PoliticalEcology
#POLLEN
friends, guess what?
@BarnardCollege
Anthropology has a brand new track in Political Ecology! Starting this Fall, students can concentrate their
#Anthropology
major on Political Ecology.
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There’s a dumb story today in the New York Times about intergenerational tension in the workplace between people in their 20s and people in their 40s. Here’s a little reminder from me that the whole idea of generations was made up by marketers in the service of capitalism.
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20 years ago today I officially started my job
@BarnardCollege
/
@Columbia
. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to teach, mentor, and learn from the BC/ CU students. Really, for me, a job like this was and is the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. I never expected it. 1/
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As the day unfolded today
@Columbia
I watched meeting after meeting get canceled in solidarity with student workers -
@SW_Columbia
. I'm proud to call these students my colleagues and ashamed of CU.
Also, best chant of the day:
On Strike
Suit it Down
New York is a
Union Town
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Today, after 17 months of zoom teaching, was the first day I forgot to turn off my video during the 10 minutes before class when I "DJ" for the students. The poor people had to watch me dancing to Heart of Glass at 10 AM.
It. Was. Ridiculous.
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I've been off twitter for a while and especially anthropology twitter. I opened the app today and all I have is this: Nope, Nope, Nope. No. With a side order of WTF.
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Academic Pro Tip: Being an nasty reviewer in the PhD student granting process is not pedagogical, people don't learn from it. Stop it. Clear, focused, critique and suggestions teach and make work better, snarky derision of a student's ideas makes you look like, well, an asshole.
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I would like to invite every scientist who follows me to read this piece by
@MaxLiboiron
- It’s the most important thing I’ve read in Nature in a decade.
Decolonizing geoscience requires more than equity and inclusion - an important new World View article in
@NatureGeosci
from
@MaxLiboiron
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When the nastiest, most elitist, Theory Bro at your university discovers climate change and the environment like a bolt from God and starts writing about it.
#blessedbybros
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Come work with us
@columbiaclimate
- postdoctoral position focused on race and environmental justice.
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Faculty Confession: I'm still, after 20 years in this job & telling colleagues, mentees, and students to protect their time and learn to say NO, really bad at saying NO. I'm going to need everyone here to tell me to start saying NO to things. Week 3, on leave, still overwhelmed.
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I rarely. tweet personal stuff but today while I was running this made me love the world so much. What a gift this life is. What a blessing this world is.
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I mean if you’re going to join a made up completely unaccredited university…….go big or go home.
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I'm going to have to be away from this platform for a bit. Here are Megan Rapinoe West-Salyer and Alex Morgan West-Salyer seeing snow for the first time ever this morning. I wish you all Peace, Love, and moments of quiet surprised Joy through the next week, and always really.
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On US based academics excited about "getting back to the field" - I miss my family, colleagues, and friends in
#PNG
so much right now it hurts, because this week is basically when I have left for PNG every year, for the past 20+ years, for the summer months. 1/
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Last night I went to an online memorial service for a colleague who I loved. They were brilliant & they were famous. But every single speaker talked about how kind they were. In the end it was their incandescent kindness and love that will keep them alive in minds, hearts, souls.
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Brand new paper…….The importance of Indigenous and local people for cataloging biodiversity - ScienceDirect
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When
@danbrockington
and I started
@EnviroSociety
a little over a decade ago, we had no idea how great it would be to work on it. I'm so proud that it is now Open Access! The new Editors (Amelia Moore and Jerry Jacka) are amazing.
The first
#OpenAccess
volume of Environment and Society has published! Special Issue: Oceans
#BerghahnOpenAnthro
@EnviroSociety
#AnthroTwitter
@PaigeWestNYC
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I mean you would think that this journal would have sent this out for review to people who might already know about the several interdisciplinary fields of scholarship that have been doing this for ages.
@Trends_Ecol_Evo
this is super embarrassing. 1/
🚨 We are excited to share our new
#openaccess
article in
@Trends_Ecol_Evo
where we introduce
#conservation
#geography
, a new subfield at the overlap between conservation science and geography. Read thread below 👇
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I'm back on the twitter for 5 and seeing a lot of virtue signaling about elite institutions from people who lapped that s' up when we were all in grad school and at the AAA meetings and they treated us public uni folks like trash. But now they are all like 'burn the Ivys'.
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“You cannot become a superstar university president right now unless you break the faculty. You cannot satisfy the board, you cannot satisfy donors and the political class, unless you get around what tenure does for worker power in the university system.”
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Faculty Confession: I've got so much on my plate all I want to do is drink a PBR and watch Bridget Jones' Diary on repeat. My solution to this - writing a LOR for a brilliant young scholar who's work I value and respect and who leads with love in this profession and this world.
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This is important. Everyone I know is working this summer to revise their courses for the Fall. It is labor and it is time consuming. Almost all of us are on 9 month salaries so are not being compensated for this labor. 1/
The process of revising a f2f lecture into a 15 min online video lecture w/ slides, recording, uploading, captioning, and syncing to a learning platform, took about one day. Schools need to pay every instructor like, $2K for one week of time + energy spent on focused course prep.
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Dear
#anthrotwitter
#Anthropology
people. What are the top 10 controversies in our field that have caught your eye this past academic year? I'm writing a little something and am wondering what tweeting anthropologists think about this.
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The greatest privilege of my life is that I get to go to Papua New Guinea and work with Papua New Guineans. On the eve of the country's 45 Independence Day celebration, I want to say THANK YOU. THANK YOU.
#PNG45
(Picture from collaborative research workshop with colleagues 2015).
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Because I think people may need a hug from Megan Rapinoe West-Slayer and Alex Morgan West-Salyer this morning.
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Huge welcome to Alfred Kik from
#PNG
a visiting scholar in my lab group
@Columbia
sponsored by
@columbiacss
- who is here working on the nexus of language and biodiversity in PNG
#indigenouslanguages
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I just walked on a treadmill during a zoom faculty meeting and friends, it will change your life. I *highly* recommend this if you have access to one. (Also you can see if your heart rate really does go up when certain colleagues talk...).
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I don't understand why more people are not talking about Dika Toua. She is a weightlifter from
#PNG
who has competed in the Olympics FIVE times. She is extraordinary.
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We have reached the point in this semester / pandemic where I wore pajamas to faculty meeting today.
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I am extraordinarily honored to have been named one of the
@ExplorersClub
50! I am so humbled to have my name among this group of incredible activists, scientists, scholars, and artists who are making the world better.
The Explorers Club 50 was established to expand the definition and reflect the great diversity of exploration and to help amplify the voices of 50 trailblazing explorers, scientists, artists and activists. View all 50 winners here:
#Explorers50
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3 yr postdoc in my department—- sociocultural or archaeological anthropology whose research focuses on Black, Latinx and/or Indigenous North America, broadly construed, and/or with interests in critical race theory and/or settler colonialism.
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A former undergrad who I love told me I should be my "authentic self" on social media during a conversation about why I took a twitter / FB hiatus. Here goes: I should be working on syllabus
#2
. I am listening to Taylor Swift and crying because a senior scholar I respected died.
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The failure of imagination it takes to hold on to disciplinary boundaries like you are holding on for dear life astounds me. One of the reasons I am happy to be a part of designing
@columbiaclimate
is because we are refusing disciplinary boundaries and scholarly silos.
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We Columbia University students urge you to listen to our voices | Columbia College Student Council | The Guardian
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To every senior faculty member out there who has been working endlessly, supporting others, stepping up to take burdens off of the shoulders of others, and taking care of students, community, and family, I see you. Not all of us have been doing this but if you have I see you. 1/
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Being a professor and getting to work with extraordinary students is one of the great privileges of my life. Today, and every day, I stand in solidarity with student workers.
@SW_Columbia
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I'm teaching a new course this summer on The Anthropology of Climate Change - do you teach something similar? Will you share your syllabus? I'll share mine when it is done!
#anthrotwitter
#anthropology
#POLLEN
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We all need to stop and think carefully before we ask anyone to take part in another online / remote meeting this academic year. We need to ask ourselves: Is this necessary? Can this be done with a phone call or text? Is this needed work or is this produced from my own anxiety?
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Sometimes I am so blow away by the scholars who choose to come work with me for their PhDs that I am speechless. I know things are bad right now but if these scholars I have the privilege of working with are any indication, anthropology has an incredible future.
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Everyone who works on the environmental should read this new piece by
@MythriJega
. It is a stunningly important paper that pushes us to think about what transnational feminist forms of restorative justice should like like and who's work we should center.
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Here is to all the faculty who mentor undergraduates. Who change their lives. Professor Jim (JR) Gross died yesterday. He spent his career at
@woffordcollege
teaching theatre, directing countless plays, and loving his students. Without JR there would be no me.
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There is a man dressed as the Red Power Ranger hitting the streets in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Today, this brings me extraordinary joy. PNG is a place where people have amazing creative hilarious senses of humor. I wish I was there in POM right now to see this guy.
After you beat all the city rangers you will face the final boss, the most powerful ranger there is.
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I am in awe of the women speaking up now. They are amazing. But I also see every single one of you who is not. I understand why not. Honestly, I do. Do not take the guilt of not speaking up on yourself. You have enough on your shoulders. 8/8
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Faculty Confession: I'm about to co-teach with one of my BFFs and I'm a nervous wreck! Both because they are so smart and so cool and because the students deserve for courses to be extraordinary right now. Send pedagogical-good-vibes friends!
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Excited for follow up study that uses ethnographic data to show how shitty senior faculty can be to people who did not go to elite universities who happen to get jobs at elite universities. There are only about 100 of us so data collection should be easy!
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Oh Good Lord. I'm going to have to write a long think piece about how a whole bunch of people with PhDs in anthropology need to go back to school and redo their anthropology degree. I mean every single person I know and love in the field teaches against everything in that piece.
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The 1980s was a glamorous time to be a university student, that is for sure.
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Someone asked me "How are you doing?" this AM and I knew that they really meant it, that they really care about how I am doing and I immediately started crying. The answer is: I'm okay. My family are healthy. My people are healthy now. My students are healthy. I am healthy. 1/
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Faculty True Confession: my "classroom" is literally the room next to the one I'm sitting in right now and there is an 80% chance that I'm going to be late for class.
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Recently some people wrote a plan for "Protecting 30% of the planet for nature". It calls for the strategies of dispossession that I have spent my career writing about and countering in my work. See the response to it by I and my colleagues below.
#30by30
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@ervinmalakaj
The fact that
@dolohodgson
, twenty years after I graduated from Rutgers where she mentored me as my Ph.D. advisor, still writes me letters of recommendation, talks me through tricky academic situations, gives me endless encouragement, and always emails me back immedatly.
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Professor Andrew 'Pete' Vayda left this world on Saturday morning. He was 90. His research, thinking, and writing helped to create the field of Environmental Anthropology in the 1960s. He was a complicated genius with a keen eye for the absurd who I will miss tremendously.
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I am currently creating a Jeopardy style game for the last day of introduction to anthropology and 1) I AM AN EPIC ANTHRO_NERD (I am cracking myself up with these questions) and 2) I'm pretty excited about doing something ridiculous and fun for my students because they are great.
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The real archive of higher education and the pandemic will be found in the record of text messages sent during zoom faculty meetings.
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This is worth reading: Land acknowledgments meant to honor Indigenous people too often do the opposite – erasing American Indians and sanitizing history instead
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I would like all these academics who are posting their "I'm vaccinated" pics with tags about their "field work" to stop and think before they go. I'm finding that so distressing I literally do not know what to do with it. Your work does not matter more than people's lives. 5/
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What happens when an architect (
@kateOrff
), a mathematician (
@KyleMandli
) and an anthropologist (me) get a bunch of their smart & engaged colleagues together to develop a network on "Resilient Coastlines"? Who knows, but thanks to the
@columbiaclimate
we are about to find out.
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Congratulations to
@lilyselthofner
a first year
@Columbia
student in my Anthropology of Climate Change class. One assignment was to take a topic from class and write an op-ed about it for your hometown newspaper. Lily's was published!
@columbiaclimate
Lily is one to watch.
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Today was the last day of class for "Anthropology of Climate Change"
@BarnardCollege
/
@Columbia
/
@ColumbiaGS
and the students talked about their fantastic web-based projects focused on climate change education with a social justice and good science focus. I love the students!
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@anarparikh
Para 1 (short): This is who I am, my field of study, my broad interests as a scholar. ** when you will defend if still in PhD prog. Any award your diss won if it did.
Para 2 (longer): About the approach you take as a scholar to your field of study / topic / teaching 1/2
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I'm excited for everyone tweeting about their acceptances to graduate programs right now. CONGRATULATIONS. I also want to shout out especially to the
#firstgen
people posting. You are amazing. I know how hard ALL of you worked to get admitted. 1/
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Y'all, Prof. Sarah E. Vaughn's new book - Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation - is just out with
@DukePress
! All her work is extraordinary and this book is incredible.
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Every second we have as faculty is a privilege - even the whacky stuff that makes us text our friends "WTF", "Could have been an email" and "this shit is off the rails" (all from yesterday) - because of our students. Reading Ph.D. research proposals this AM and they are so good.
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This is an amazing bad-ass decision that refuses to replicate the hierarchies of the pre-Covid world. ACLS, what can those of us with tenure do to help you with this bold transition?
In response to the disproportionate effect the current economic downturn has had on independent scholars & those w/o tenured positions, ACLS will redirect the focus of the ACLS Fellowship Program to support early career, non-tenured scholars exclusively:
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I'm torn. I love it when people in the sciences realize that language and discursive practice matters in profound ways but I don't love it when it manifests in a way that is banal and that takes attention away from the fact that people have been working on this forever.
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Shout out (and OF COURSE that is not enough) to everyone reading this who works their ass of for their institution and for their students and who is never compensated adequately or acknowledged adequately. I see you and I promise that I am trying to change structures. I promise.
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Wait one more! This seems like a good place to remind everyone that a lot of women have been doing a lot of work on these topics for a long long time. This is not an exhaustive list but take a look all of these glorious scholars -
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Our household is making a firm commitment to adding
-ocene to as many things as we can from here on out. Example: Today, I am writing while sitting in the HouseCatocene but I am lamenting not being in the Cookieocene.
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Peace Be With You to everyone who is going to have to spend the next six months trying to patiently explain to their conservative family and friends why increased inclement winter weather is actually a sign of a changing climate and not proof that climate change is not real.
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