Aesthetic Categories in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Looking at Neoclassicism, the Renaissance, and the Gothic through Word Frequencies
Aesthetic Categories in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Looking at Neoclassicism, the Renaissance, and the Gothic through Word Frequencies

One of my ongoing projects has been a historiography of the concepts of neoclassicism, the gothic, and the renaissance over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this work, I ran some Google n-grams to chart the emergence of these categories. I don’t think that there is anything surprising in the data, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see it visualized. The first graph looks at the terms “Neoclassical,” “Renaissance,” “Gothic,” and “Arts and Crafts.” The second graph examines four different terms for speaking about the medieval world: “Medieval,” “Middle Ages,” “Gothic,” and “Dark Ages.”

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Blog Posts, Digital Humanities, ResearchJason Kellyneoclassicism, gothic, arts and crafts, aesthetics, renaissanceComment
A Multimodal Approach to the Anthropocene
A Multimodal Approach to the Anthropocene

Using An Anthropocene Primer as our case study, this essay is organized into three sections. The first section introduces the primer as a tool that bridges disciplinary boundaries to advance critical and timely sociocultural research examining changing earth systems and the human experience. The second section examines the ways that anthropologists might productively engage with the dominant interdisciplinary debates and metanarratives about the Anthropocene and the role that tools such as the primer might play in this. The final section reflects on how the primer is one model of multimodal pedagogy that answers the needs of formal, informal, traditional, and continuing education in relation to serious play. In part, then, An Anthropocene Primer is one form of anthropological educational practice that might be used to prepare the next generation of researchers and partners with frameworks to pursue ethnography in the Anthropocene that is truly applied, interdisciplinary, and multimodal at the outset.

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Research, Teaching, Public ScholarshipJason KellyAnthropocene, anthropology, open access, peer review, pedagogyComment
The Wrong Question: Is This Higher Education's Golden Age?
The Wrong Question: Is This Higher Education's Golden Age?

In sum, I don't disagree with Brint's data. Rather, I think that his essay unnecessarily rejects valid critiques of the state of higher education. Certainly, by some metrics, the US system of higher education is running on all cylinders. However, this has come at a cost: the increasing commodification of knowledge; cuts in public support and the concurrent rise of private debt; the instrumentalization of public education to serve market demands; and the balooning of the faculty precariat. 

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Blog Posts, Higher EducationJason Kellyarts, humanities, education, highered, higher education, universityComment