Tag Archives: #epiconference

November Tour 2019

RISD Photo Daniel Penfield https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RISD_auditorium.jpg
Toronto Image by James Wheeler from Pixabay
Carothers Library URI by Kenneth C. Zirkel https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:URI_Carothers_Library.jpg Hartford Connecticut Capitol Building Image by Esteban Rodriguez from Pixabay

November is a busy month for me,  and I’ve been getting ready (and fussing about it online) for the last while by writing talks and organizing folks.  It’s been a while since I’ve been “on tour” and I’m glad to be back into it.   So this is me trying to get my head around the upcoming 2 weeks of activity, please bear with me.

First up:  The Ethnographic Practice in Industry (EPIC) conference will be in Providence, RI from November 9-12, and I’ve been invited to chair a panel for it.  I’m super pleased with our lineup of speakers, and think that our discussion on Monday is going to be fantastic. I also expect I’ll be live-tweeting as much of it as I can at #epiconference.  

After that is over I will have to make sure I’ve reserved enough energy to give 2 talks that week.  Wednesday November 13th I’ll be at the University of Rhode Island (URI), thanks to the invitation of Karim Boughida.  The title of that talk is “Maybe We Shouldn’t Talk About Diversity Anymore”
“Donna Lanclos is an anthropologist and consultant in higher education and libraries, and is, as a white woman, the beneficiary the structural bias in favor of whiteness in libraries, and in academia generally.  She wants in this talk to confront the harms done in talking euphemistically about “diversity” when what we should be talking about , professionally and as educators, is about race, and social justice. “

The URI talk is open to the public, so come along if you can:

  • 12 noon Wednesday November 13th
  •  University of Rhode Island Library
  • 15 Lippitt Road Kingston, RI
  • Galanti Lounge, 3rd floor.
Directions & Parking

 The next day I’m getting to talk at Trinity College, thanks to Jason Jones.  The title of that talk is “Who gets to have Agency?”
““Universities and Colleges are increasingly able to use systems to quantify and automate administrative and educational processes.  What is at stake when they do this? What is lost? What can happen to students and faculty within these systems, and what are our responsibilities to protect them?  Donna Lanclos is an anthropologist and consultant who works with these issues as the conducts research, and helps teams within institutions think about and engage with technology in the course of their teaching, learning, and research work.  She points to some ways that qualitative research can be an antidote to some of the problems that arise when we reduce people to datapoints. “

 This is also open to the public:  Thursday November 14th, 12.15-1.15, Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut, Raether Library , room # LITC 181 https://www.trincoll.edu/Library/

And then the week after that  I’m also giving two talks.  The first one is for eCampusOntario’s Technology + Education Seminar + Showcase (TESS)  November 18-19.  eCampusOntario is a non-profit, funded by the province of Ontario, that seeks to advance technology-enabled teaching and learning in Ontario’s 45 publicly funded colleges and universities. Folks who want to learn more about eCampusOntario can sign up for its monthly newsletter. 

TESS is an annual event for promoting collaboration and sharing innovations across all eCampusOntario member institutions. This year, Day 1 of TESS features presentations on excellence in online teaching and learning. Day 2 involves cultivating in educators an “experimenter mindset” through some exploration of H5P and Pressbooks.

The theme For TESS this year is Experimentation and Impact.   I am pleased that eCampusOntario have invited me, to have the opportunity to finally visit Toronto, and also to be in a room with a new (to me) group of people..  This talk is called “The Anthropologist in the Machine”

“Experimentation and Impact require scrutiny and insight.  How do we build space for creativity in teaching and learning in digital contexts while maintaining and supporting current effective practices?  Anthropological approaches to digital practices in higher education can be a way to recognize what people in the field are currently doing, and more importantly, why.  It is the why that allows us access to the motivations and priorities of the communities in which we teach, the community members who want to learn, and how our practices can and should be bent to meet them, rather than insisting that communities change for educational institutions.
Dr Donna Lanclos is an anthropologist in the the machine; her field sites include education and the digital landscapes it inhabits. Her role in these machines of education and digital is to understand how they work, how people interact within the cogs and wheels of processes and ultimately to ensure that the machine is serving humanity rather than the machine itself. She argues for a move to decenter technology in discussions of teaching and learning–a challenge  in a time when colleges and universities are developing new strategies for digital at a prodigious rate. Putting staff under constant pressure to “innovate” in their practice is counterproductive if what we actually need is creativity.”

All of the tickets for this event have now been claimed, but I know the conference will be recorded, including my talk, so I will share it when I can. If you want a preview of the talk, and to hear me chatting with Terry Greene of Gettin’ Air about TESS and other things, check out the podcast site (as of this writing my particular interview is not up yet). And also listen to the other interviews, it’s quite a list.

AND THEN last but not least I get to go to the University of Guelph, (thanks to the invitation of Karen Nicholson and suggestion by Ali Verslius) and speak to folks there.  

Gaining Insight Over Fixing Problems: How Open-Ended Research Can Teach Us What We Need to Know

Donna Lanclos, researcher, speaker, writer, and anthropologist will be at U of G to deliver a talk about open-ended ethnography and relationship-building as an antidote to being “ethnographish,” surveillance, and quantification in higher education. 

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2019, Time: 1:15 to 2:30 p.m. , Location: U of Guelph LIB Room 246A 

So now “all I have to do is pack,” and remember my travel docs and passport! I hope to see many of you soon.

It was EPIC

The Ethnography Praxis in Industry conference was in NYC earlier this month, and I was delighted to have a chance to attend.  I followed the #epiconference twitterstream avidly when they were in London last year, but couldn’t attend because I was busily applying for funding for the research I did in March.  

I wanted to attend for several reasons (NYC was just one of them).  Primarily, I wanted to be in a room full of people who do private-sector ethnography, because increasingly I am in contact with people, in libraries, in higher education generally, and also in architecture and computer science, who are interested in ethnography as a methodology but not necessarily in anthropology as a disciplinary frame for that method.  I need to have more familiarity with the range of ways “ethnography” is being talked about, used, justified, critiqued in practical contexts.  Industry is just one, but it’s an increasingly visible one, and is one that actually inspired the creation of library ethnography jobs, starting with Nancy Fried Foster at Rochester.

You can find the history of EPIC as an org, as well as the papers from all 10 years of the meetings since they began, here.  And the draft papers from this year’s meetings are here.  They are all worth reading.

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know that I live-tweeted nearly the whole damn thing.  I will say again that is now one of my favorite ways of experiencing a conference–there are connections you can make in Twitterspace, not just with the attendees, but with people who are not in the room with you, around the content of the discussions.  I find it stimulating and enriching.  It’s like doing the reading for graduate seminars and getting to have the discussion all at the same time–I think better, IMO, in groups, I understand more, I have questions that can be thrown back at me and more interesting questions take their place.  I attend conferences alone, without Twitter, at my peril these days.  I was also lucky to be able to attend with my colleague Nicole Peterson, whose impressions of the conference you can read here.

I was struck by a few things.  The first thing was how much of an anthropology conference it seemed to me.  This despite the fact that those in the room were not exclusively anthropologists, but were also designers, programmers, other kinds of social scientists, like sociologist Sam Ladner.  Perhaps I was swayed by the unapologetically anthro-centric keynote of Christian Madsbjerg of Red Associates.  Perhaps this sense varies from EPIC to EPIC.  Nonetheless, I felt very at home in the discussions about the work and its implications.  I got a lot out of (to pick just a few out of a great sea of content) Sam Ladner’s discussion of embodied practice, Emilie Glazer, Anna Mieczakowski, James King, Ben Fehnert’s (from Eclipse) discussion of trust as an important part of motivating people to engage with digital devices, and Kate Crawford’s electric keynote about Big Data.

Part of the anthro-centricity too was the explicit contrast that EPIC-goers and presenters offered to academic work, and to anthropology in particular.  The insistence on the word “practice” in contrast to “applied” anthropological or ethnographic work was evidence of this, too.  I think I understand the reasons for it, but it was something to think about.  I still, for all of the practical work I am doing these days, identify as an academic, and I felt distinctly neither fish nor fowl in that sense while in the room at EPIC.

I loved that it was basically a plenary conference, with a few exceptions for workshops.  Everyone heard the same papers, attended the same keynotes, saw the same Pecha Kucha sessions.  I think it made for a richer conversation about the content of the conference, as people’s experiences were not fragmented across several small rooms.

The Pecha Kucha sessions.  I adored them.  And Simon Roberts has already said a lot of what I was thinking.  But I would also point out that I think that as a form, as a provocation, I wish the AAAs would do Pecha Kucha sessions at least as much (if not more often ) than regular paper sessions.  They are limited in time, visually arresting, and felt like really good uses of everyone’s attention.

I really enjoyed being in such a high-energy room full of people who wanted to think critically and engagingly about the practice of ethnography, and what it meant to their work, the work of the people who hired them, and to the wider world.  I may not make it to Sao Paolo in 2015, but will be happy to get to Minneapolis in 2016, to be in that room again.

#shoetweet #epiconference