Student testimonial

It's not often that teachers get to hear about how they have influenced their students. Even more rare is feedback on workshops or short presentations. Today I receieved a lovely email from someone who was in a workshop I offered over a year ago based on my "Voluntary Simplicity and Anti-consumerism" course. That class was essentially an introduction to the anti-consumption strands in American culture that have co-existed with materialism from the very beginning. It was not a how-to course in voluntary simplicity; it was part history and part cultural studies. But as nearly always with the material I teach, whether gender or consumption related, the discussion often veered to personal experiences and choices. This is what my student wrote:

It changed my life.

I had a series of very hard conversations with my loved ones about how I felt my family’s consumption patterns were actually lowering our quality of life. After a year of research and planning, we purged about 90 percent of our possessions (including almost my entire personal library) in order to move from a 3 br house with full finished basement to a 2 br apartment. The book donations alone were roughly 50 boxes. I feel almost deliriously unburdened.

Sometimes I berate myself for not being more of an activist, not being on the front lines. But working behind the scenes is not the same as standing on the sidelines, is it?

My academic side: teaching a new course on craft and production

I've been blogging here as a side interest, while a book project gets most of my attention. (It's related to ethical fashion on the gender vs. gender-free side of things, being about pink and blue and all that.) It's been a real luxury being on sabbatical; time is everyone's most precious commodity, and I was willing to go on half salary in return for a full year to research, think and write. (also knit, cook and take afternoon naps) With just under six months before I am back in the classroom, I now have my teaching schedule and and trying hard not to get too excited, lest the book slip to the back burner. Fortunately, next year's courses include two new courses which will be making frequent appearances in this blog.

Advanced Material Culture: Craft and Production (Fall 2009). Most material culture literature and teaching these days seem to emphasize either object analysis or consumer culture, as opposed to the production of objects and the relationship between maker and artifact. Given the interest in DIY (including gardening, knitting, furniture hacking, and all forms of cookery) and my own lifelong fascination with how things are made, this seemed to be a great, fresh angle to pursue. I am looking for good readings, but want the course to be very hands-on, not text-heavy.

Consumer Culture: Simplicity and Anti-consumption in American Life (Spring 2010). This is a course I've been imagining ever since I migrated from textiles to American Studies. Consumer culture literature and courses tend to focus on advertising, marketing, consumer-identity/branding aspects of purchasing behavior, but American culture has always included movements which resist or oppose excessive consumption. David Shi's The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culturewill provide the historical perspective.

I'll be posting about both courses here as they progress.