Care Work, Animated

Invited by Professor Smita Ramnarain, once a student of mine here at UMass, I agreed to participate in an Honors Colloquium at the University of Rhode Island last October. I really enjoyed my visit, and had great exchanges with everyone I came in contact with there. The students taking Smita’s course on Race, Class, and Gender were, not surprisingly, especially engaged, and a group of them just surprised me by making care work the topic of their final class assignment–a short video now posted on YouTube.

Mary Ernster, Kelsey Sanmyer, Ian Connors, and Mark Gianillo joined forces to create an animated mini-lecture in the style pioneered by RSA Animate. Did they know that I am a huge fan of that style? Did they know that I love to sketch people as they speak, and therefore decide to sketch me? Or was this just an example of mysteriously serendipitous convergence? In any case, I love the video so much that I am linking to it again.

You can find their brilliant rendition of me at about 4:16.

Great job, students. Great pedagogy, Smita.

And by the way, isn’t the University of Rhode Island logo beautiful? It hails, I think, from the Golden Age of public higher education in this country. As a product of the state university systems of Texas and Massachusetts, I especially appreciate the anchor metaphor, along with that now-almost-subversive word, “hope.”

 

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