Sew the Bear: A Meditation on the Place of the List in Academic Life

Keywords

Lists; Academia; Meditation; Invention

Abstract

When anthropologists and archaeologists seek to know how people lived––not what they say they value, but what they actually value––they look at trash, including yesterday’s grocery or to-list, for evidence of actual behavior. This essay runs an experiment on a theory of, and through, to-do lists. The to-do list theory here interrogates the demands of the academic institution to fulfill a list of duties. The academic institution has quantified knowledge production to only include “productivity” without regard to arguments about what counts as knowledge. What gets on the list, and what is not on the list? One can easily imagine an academic noting that, “None of my colleagues will ever read this lyric essay. They have likely never read any of my scholarship except to check-off a quantifiable box -- amount of peer-reviewed articles ___.” The university committee members could not care less about the qualities of the work, its texture, its form. Nothing counts on the institution’s list unless, of course, it brings prestige or external funding to the university. In that way, this essay fills a space on a list, though it aims beyond that to make us reconsider the value of knowledge production within academic institutions.

Date Created

January 2019

https://works.bepress.com/barry-mauer/22/download/

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