by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 09/08/24-09/14/24

weeknotes teaching museum books race indigenous

This Week:

  • In FLP102, we visited Hartwick’s library and writing center, and also introduced students to the concept of “Object Biographies” with a reading derived from “A History of the World in 1000 Objects”.
  • I did some design work for our upcoming exhibit “‘With That Shadow Over Them’: Constructing Reservoirs, Remembering Home”.
  • We hosted a visit from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, who surveyed our museum for its accessbility.
  • I finished reading “For the First Time, Again” by Sylvain Neuvell, the last book in the “Take them to the Stars” trilogy. It was still good, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as the first two books; to my mind, it lost some of the interesting ideas that made the first two books so compelling, in the service of tidily resolving the stories of the main characters.
  • I also finished reading “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American life” by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields. It’s a dense book, and I’m still digesting its complex analysis. I am intrigued by the idea of thinking about the American concept of race as analogous to witchcraft, not to mention the utility of parsing race, racism, and racecraft as distinctive but overlapping processes. But there’s a lot more going on here, and I want to digest it a little longer.
  • I attended a meeting of Hartwick’s Indigenous DEI committee, to work on planning events for Indigenous People’s Day.