Julia Kowalski

Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.

Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.

further thoughts on this: the idea of ‘prompt engineering’ as a ‘skill’ that requires a mix of technical and linguistic ‘skills’ has been around for a while and doesn’t seem to disappear. what i’m interested in is not whether it’s a well-defined skill (probably not) or ‘valuable’ (probably not) but

Harvard University Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally.

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

I also think the basic claim "humans are adaptive weirdos and liberal technocracy isn't necessarily the end stage of history" is increasingly counter-cultural, worth bearing in mind when parsing debates about the text.

In class we just read sections of the introduction because it does a good job explaining how most efforts to grasp something deep about "human nature" are products of historically contingent contemporary concerns and offers a crash course in Hobbes v Rousseau.

Oh man, I really don't know. My sense is that a lot of the debate came from folks not knowing what genre of text the book was supposed to be (which, fair enough). I read it as political theory, which shifts how I think about the role of evidence, if that makes sense.

A point of light this week: students in my course reading the assigned texts closely enough to notice how the playful, joyful, snarky prose of Graeber and Wengrow, and Leguin, support their core argument that humans are adaptive creative snarky weirdos, and thus so many worlds are possible.

I can't decide which would be a worse outcome here. That research is cut off permanently. Or that the administration uses the pause to implement new restrictions on science to the point where the only "research" researchers can do and publish is research supporting administration-approved "facts."

How do you write your annual faculty report, when the primary output of your leave semester was an intensive federal grant application that might now never be reviewed, on a topic now suddenly coded as politically biased/"harmful"?

Can't wait for our post-collapse anarcho-primitive society where i will have the role of writing policy briefs about the anarcho-primitive society on the next block over (those bastards)

2024 Contingent Book List When you’re shopping for books this season, consider a contingent scholar.

What does it mean to write a book as a contingent scholar? It means to do something that's already hard enough on its own, but also to do it without the (admittedly eroding) supports of full-time tenure-track employment--time, funding, library access, and a steady job.

Recognize this work. 🗃️

One of my top 5 favorite books I've read in recent years (Ypi, not Merkel). I keep trying to think of ways to teach it in my global affairs courses.

I would read a LOT of words of critical analysis of the origins of and semiotics of this specific Face.

It's weird, and tbh, kinda unacceptable, that most info about selecting a qualitative analysis software doesn't address data security. I want to be sure my qual analysis isn't being stored for AI training and participant info is secure.

Plus I have to tell my funders & IRBs about data protection.

this #givingtuesday consider donating to your local DV shelter

people are surprised to learn I, an economist, mostly study these shelters. but these organizations are DEEPLY important to protect vulnerable folks and their kids nationwide

Like I am longing for someone to come tell me how to teach the upper-level literacy skills students once learned in HS, which many of my students increasingly lack.

actually engage college-level critical reading and writing seems non-coincidental and makes me frankly more nervous than AI itself does.

how to use AI in my classes, how to work "with" rather than "against" it. The intersection of a sea change in student preparedness for college-level reading and writing with the sudden aggressive suggestion that we "use" AI to replace the labor of bringing students up to the level where they can...

What I'd like from the university teaching center: workshops from education scholars on how to understand students' writing and reading skills (which have changed profoundly in the past 5 years); support for analog assessment methods like in class exams. What is actually offered:

Violent misogyny has been and is going to be an animating force in younger generations of the far right.

And until we actually start acknowledging that and treating it as the extremist hate it is, it will continue to function as a virtually unchallenged avenue of fascist radicalization.

Organized by Elise Andaya and Lydia Boyd, 2:30 pm, TCC 111

A screen shot of a ppt slide, with overlapping images of photos, website headers and news headlines surrounding care ("ILO care policy portal," "fund childcare now", "UN International Day of Care and Support"

Have you also noticed that, suddenly, "care" is everywhere? If you are at this year's AAAs in Tampa, you can see me chew on this theme at length in my talk on enacting care as a global policy category on Friday am, part of the panel "Conceiving Care in Reproductive Health," details below.

How about a kinship studies starter pack?

Please let me know if you’d like to be included (or removed). And please share!

Cc: @wennergrenorg.bsky.social

Linguistic anthropology, language in culture starter pack!

Please share and let me know if you want to be added

go.bsky.app/MQijNGW

(I love the starter packs! Please suggest starter packs you have found and loved!)

Advice for finding and building a robust follow list, as I say goodbye to The Other Platform?

My social media scene is in flux but I feel like more needs to be said about the Paul Pelosi attacker using the Pelosis to get access to GAYLE RUBIN.