Grades are in, the seniors have graduated, and campus is unusually quiet. Welcome to summer!

(Did anyone ever notice that Will Smith is wearing a Speed Racer t-shirt? I feel like my students in Global Japan would appreciate this!)(Also — what a great video to use when talking about the role of the gaze.)

It has been an amazing year at St. Kate’s, and I continue to be grateful to have landed at an institution that has values so closely in line with my own, especially with regard to issues of social justice. After reflecting on my own experiences at co-educational institutions (K-12, undergraduate, graduate), I have constantly grappled with what it means to actually teach at a women’s university. As this year draws to a close, I feel like I am one step closer to understanding the importance of this commitment.

Like most of us in education, I look forward to the summer with relief and anticipation! I have a whole bucket list of things to accomplish over the next few months.

 

My (Ambitious) Goals for the Summer

• Continue working on the Evelyn Goodrow Mitsch collection at St. Kate’s and flesh out my previous conference presentation into a full essay on chirimen-bon and US collecting practices. It will be good to get back into the archives without having to run to class!
• Finish an essay about indigenous representation in gaming, based on conference presentations at Console-ing Passions, Mechademia, and the Popular Culture Association.
• Begin inputting data I have collected for Traveling Hokkaido for Arnold Henry Savage Landor in ArcGIS. Because his travel was so extensive, this will be a lengthy undertaking… I also need to decide on future figures whose journeys I want to map and include in the project. My end goal is to have 6-8 journeys mapped with illustrations in order to be a useful, comparative, and open-source digital resource for scholarly work in Ainu Studies.
• Finish a blog post for Art History Teaching Resources for the Fall on using Sutori to create interactive study guides for undergraduate students.
• Research and pitch a 2000-word essay to First Person Scholar on gacha mechanics in Japanese and F2P gaming.
• Work with Gabrielle Filip-Crawford in Psychology to develop our new collaborative course at St. Kate’s, All Art is Propaganda: Visual and Scientific Perspectives on Persuasion with our Academic Professional Development Committee Curriculum Development grant. (So excited for this!)
• Redesign my approach to the Ways of Seeing course to include a significant community or service learning opportunity (#arthistoryengaged #arthistorythat)