Friday May 1st Workshops
(Saturday May 2nd will be Panels and the Keynote)
12:00 – 1:30 Careers and Commitments workshop with Dr. Susan Coutin (UC Irvine), Dr. Ilana Gershon (Indiana University), Dr. Melissa Cefkin (IBM) – in the Graduate Resource Center
- “Success Stories: Leveraging Your Expertise to Create Career Opportunities”
- This special presentation will feature two speakers. Dr. Ilana Gershon (Indiana University) has been studying how new media are affecting hiring and firing in the U.S. recession workplace. She will discuss the implications of her research for graduate students’ strategies to achieve success in their own career plans. Dr. Melissa Cefkin (Nissan Research Center- Silicon Valley) is a Principle Scientist in the role of Design Anthropologist, specializing in workplace ethnography, services research, product and service design, and organizational dynamics. She will be describing her own career path and will provide advice to graduate students who are contemplating industry careers.
1:30 – 2:00 Lunch
2:00-3:30 Project Development Workshops
- Workshops in which small groups of graduate student participants along with one facilitator per group will discuss the students’ developing projects and give feedback.
3:30-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Concurrent specialized workshops
- “Contingent Pedagogies: Thinking through course design and instructional strategies” with Dr. Angela Jenks
- While discussions about course design, instruction, assessment, and other pedagogical efforts often focus on the implementation of “best practices,” it is important to recognize that effective teaching is always contingent on local contexts. In this workshop, participants will identify strategies for effective course design and instruction that can be used to engage diverse student audiences in a variety of settings, including large lecture classes, seminars, and online education. Participants should come prepared with a 1-paragraph description of a potential course.
- “So What? A Walkabout” with Dr. Michael Montoya
- In this walking guided session, students will pitch their projects to their peers focusing on the “So What?” More than clunky “relevance,” “So What?” questions require free form immodesty after which the constraints imposed by academic conversations and advisors can be considered. Three rounds will occur where each round will benefit from the feedback of the other participants.
- “Inversion Techniques” with Dr. Valerie Olson
- We’re always being asked: “what is your project about?” Often we spend so much time on this question that we don’t adequately explore 1) what objects of study and concepts that end up standing in opposition to our projects and 2) what things we have consciously or unconsciously designed “out” of our projects. In this workshop we’ll focus on what we can learn about our projects by better understanding what they are “not.” We will use techniques of inversion and obversion to help us with research project conceptualization, drawing on sources from C Wright Mills’ description of the “sociological imagination” to Andrea Ballestero’s 2014 “Underground” Ethnography Studio at Rice University.