Not THOSE Birds and Bees

Director’s Note (spring 2021)
Alex Keller, Director, Kahn Institute

We’re fully into many kinds of spring. We have sprung forward, there’s a spring in our step, things that sprang to mind now spring to life beyond it. Spring fever is the one kind of fever we want, and we spring chickens have it. (The cliché store shelves are now bare, aren’t you glad?) The weather is warming, flowers are budding and blooming, and animals are preparing to make new animals. But people are also budding and blooming, walking around still masked, but knowing that the opportunities to unmask are increasing. You can see it in the posture of campus perambulators and those promenading. Months ago, even when there was a day warm enough for a good long walk, we didn’t promenade. We stole a stroll, snatched from the grip of only slightly modified lockdown. And we did so on a largely depopulated campus. Eerie doesn’t begin to cover it.

The idea of the Kahn as an incubator is understood – there’s even a place on the Faculty Record Sheet to say what you might have done here that translated into some concrete contribution to the world of ideas beyond Smith. We cradle, we nestle, we nurture new and vulnerable ideas and their creators, and foster cultures and communities that can revel in and learn from their differences. We offer a framework for scholars to challenge themselves and each other, and hope to do so in a spirit of serious play. We hatch ideas, and help them take flight. The chicks become full-fledged birds.

But it might not have been quite so clear until the pandemic that we’re also a beehive. What has come to the fore about the Kahn, for me, is its capacity to exceed incubation and to cross-pollinate – as well as the profound desire of Kahn fellows to do exactly that, exactly now.

Over the last year, each of us has come to understand, in high relief, what the strengths and weaknesses are of the overlapping frameworks in which we live and work. We might hate all of the time on Zoom, with its delayed and fragmented visual cueing and the flattening of some aspects of our discourse into gridded postage stamps no philatelist would bother with. But how else would we see some of the people with whom sharing time – of any kind – is always a plus? We might really love not having to commute or tear across campus to another meeting, but most of us miss the interstitial conversations, or pieces of conversations, or the quick smile as we pass someone on a pathway on the way to or from class or office hours. Smiles in the open air…remember those? Now we can only thank Tyra Banks unironically for teaching us, lo those years ago, how to “smize.” And, yes, I am worried that when I re-enter a real classroom this fall, my students will think I am one of those over-emoters, or a refugee from a silent film melodrama, because on Zoom I have learned to shake my head vigorously like a bobblehead in agreement to someone’s point, or shake my head violently like Linda Blair in The Exorcist when I disagree. I just can’t get to the reaction buttons fast enough to do the same discursive work. I should play more video games.

But even on Zoom, the Kahn is buzzing this spring. The yearlong projects have been working steadily and mightily.[1] From the first planning meeting last April, through a summer in which I was fortunate enough to work with the incoming student fellows in something like an all-you-can-eat special studies, and through an academic year of weekly meetings which insisted on replicating the warmth and rigor of the colloquium room, we have persevered and we have connected. It has been deeply moving to me to witness the commitment that Technophilia/Technoskepticism and Imagining Climate Change: From Slow Violence to Fast Hope have made to each other as communities of scholar-humans. Acknowledging the losses of the pandemic, they have nevertheless persisted with every advantage Zoom can provide. The Pacific Northwest has never felt closer to Northampton, as speakers have “come” to campus who might not have had time to do so otherwise. Techno recently hosted MacArthur fellow and anthropologist  Sven Haakanson (Alutiic), who Zoomed in from Seattle to talk about going beyond knowledge preservation to reversing knowledge loss in indigenous communities. Imagining Climate Change hosted a conversation between Northern Cheyenne artist and scientist James Temte and Ahtna elder Wilson Justin, Temte Zooming from Anchorage, and Justin calling in from much farther afield, proving, happily, that there are some places videoconferencing as such still can’t reach. Though it’s always preferable to be in the same room with people for the kinds of big and ranging discussions that happen at the Kahn, the idea that we have developed public audiences and private conversations that tax the environment far less seems like a good outcome.

Because the Kahn is about thinking, researching and talking for their own sake, we don’t demand a finished product from any fellow. Nevertheless, in a year when many of us will be glad just to hand in or grade that last assignment, Espy Thomson ‘21 (a fellow in Techno and an Environmental Science and Policy major) has already produced one lauded project as she won the People’s Choice Award in the Wurtele Center’s Amplify contest for a piece she did called, “Two Truths and a Lie: I grew up without the Internet, I hate birthdays, and I have 65 half siblings,” that is one result – for now – of the work she is doing in the Techno project about the global sperm donor industry. Thomson may be at the start of a much larger endeavor, but for now, it’s clear that Big Pharma and Big Ag have a partner: “Big Sperm.” What started in the Kahn has migrated to Wurtele, and that cross-pollination has not been the only one. If you want to know what else the student fellows have been working on in this year when the intellectual labor of so many is more crucial than ever but is as invisible as it’s ever been, come to their presentations.

The yearlong projects at the Kahn are the spine of what we do, but we also do short-term projects, a format that is designed with fast twitch reflexes to be responsive to everything from tentative steps toward a longer project, to crises, to epiphanic lightbulbs going off over faculty heads. After a very quiet spring and fall 2020, the short-term projects have sprung to life and are rolling out over the rest of the semester and beyond. The bees are flying from project to project, and from project to conference, to committee meeting, to strategic plan, to class and classroom, and beyond. The density of projects this spring reflects the faculty’s desire to work together and to be together in the central way that has been so brusquely pushed aside for the last year: our identities as scholars and thinkers beyond online pedagogues-cum-online problem solvers. As much as most of us love teaching, that love really comes from the way it is balanced with other aspects of our intellectual life, and that balance has been very hard to come by since March 2020. Though these short-term events tilt toward that very classroom and toward the refinement of our pedagogy, they are doing so in bigger picture ways than optimizing your Zoom screen for video sharing. When all is said and done, in addition to the 28 yearlong fellows, the short-term projects will have brought in at least 150 faculty, staff and students into conversation in ways that are very hard to come by right now, and we expect that number to have easily surpassed 120 by the end of the last project. Some small number overlap, and that’s to the good – it’s how honeybees cross-pollinate. And as the honeybee attending all of them, I will have been in more than 24 hours of short-term projects this spring. That’s also to say that the faculty have had the equivalent of more than a solid day of programming available to them to reestablish contact and turn their energy back to the big ideas that connect them as scholars to their research, and their research to their teaching.

Over three sessions in March, Rob Dorit's (biological sciences) and Mary Harrington’s (neuroscience) The Notorious RCG: Race, Class and Gender in STEM assembled faculty, staff (and, for the first time, students) from all divisions, and, over the month of March, took advantage of the fact that Zoom rooms have larger occupancy limit than the Kahn colloquium room – and the fact that there was no spring break. In these conversations, aided by Jamboards and breakout rooms (two things we hardly knew about pre-pandemic), as well as some consortial conversation with students and faculty at Amherst who were founders of Being Human in STEM, they talked expansively about everything from the fine line between a gateway course and the unintended gatekeeping that can result in it, to developing better ways for students to understand what’s involved in teaching and learning so that their stake in it is more active and critical. Reverting to a more typical size and an exclusively faculty makeup, the Kahn partnered with Darcy Buerkle (history) and Frazer Ward (art history) of Faculty Council as Curriculum: Protest and Process grappled with the complexities of how to teach from expertise that is not necessarily also experience or identity. Two important takeaways: 1) as RCG also explored, students often have no idea what the totality of faculty work is, and if they did, we collectively might address any perceived curricular issues in more effective ways; 2) that the mandate of the Academic Freedom committee may need to change in order to be a resource for the faculty in ways it always should have been but hasn’t yet. In both of these projects, what centrally emerged is that different stakeholders don’t necessarily understand each other’s lives and professional practices (student being a professional designation in this context) well enough to have the most productive versions of some vital conversations, and that’s one of the first things to address at a post-pandemic Smith.

Anna Botta (Italian Studies) and Joel Westerdale (German Studies) offered an opportunity to be Thinking Post-Nationally, Teaching Transnationally. This two-day project (May 17 and 18) was a way of imagining beyond the zombie of the nation-state and the mirage of a static one-to-one correspondence between that and (any) language, asking, as the co-organizers do: “How can we work together to help our students not only comprehend the transnational, multilingual web into which they and their studies are woven, but also appreciate their own position as learners and conduits of new languages, cultures, and transnational disciplines? How might we teach our students to focus on the rich semantic possibilities of the prefix “trans” and to envision cultures, languages, and disciplines interacting across diverse axes of connections?” Here, too, questions of how the student experience at Smith and the faculty experience at Smith both profoundly intersect and sometimes seem to be speaking past each other (in this case, literally and multilingually) are made more powerful in the context of the curiosities opened up in the other projects. It was the largest short-term Kahn project ever (if you don’t count the 200-person audience for the Frankenstein symposium in 2017), with 45 fellows from all divisions and 30 different fields including a comprehensive representation of the languages (no surprise there) as well as anthropology, engineering, environmental science and policy, geosciences, government, math, and psychology, and scholars from four of the five colleges. After a semester of exhausting teaching, one reason this many people would devote six more hours of their working lives to Zoom, was to spend quality time with colleagues who might otherwise not know on what grounds they could collaborate with each other in and out of the classroom. Not only did we hear about extant interdivisional collaborations that modeled what others could do, we also spent sustained time thinking about how to sustain while reimagining the connections between research and our curriculum. And – and this is never to be overestimated – simply sitting with each other and getting to know each other, is a crucial aspect of better collaboration.

Over the next month, the Kahn will continue to hold more short-term projects. Taking the cross-pollination and collaboration to the level of the Center, on May 26, we will offer another project that picks up a number of strands developed in RCG and P&P as Sara Pruss, director of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning, and I will co-host Is Inclusivity in My Classroom the Same as in Yours?, which will provide space (if, alas, still no sustenance) to pool and learn about our multiple approaches to inclusive teaching—not in an effort to improve it, but to share its varying nature across disciplines. Inclusive pedagogy is often vernacular, and how it’s best done in visual studies might be vastly different from how it’s done in geosciences. The more we understand each other’s best practices, the better we will be at helping our students truly embrace the totality of the liberal arts, calibrating conversations among disciplines as they move around the curriculum.

In June, when perhaps we have somewhat caught our breath after grades are in and commencement is in the books, there will be other reverberations and cross-pollinations. We have never run summer projects, but if ever there was a time to do so, it’s now. The Kahn is bringing back a longtime and very cherished collaboration with the Smith College Museum of Art, Excavating the Image (June 2). In this annual project, the Kahn and SCMA invite faculty from all divisions to consider a single work in the museum’s collection and look at it from as many different perspectives and for as many reasons as we can. The year that became “2020 sucks” actually started in September 2019 with the biggest collaboration between SCMA and the Kahn yet: a convening of scholars and artists from around the world animated by Emma Chubb, Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art’s preparation for a mid-career retrospective of the Moroccan artist Younès Rahmoun, coming soon, in spite of all, to SCMA. After a year without this partnership, I am delighted to work with Emma again, this time on a project about the newly acquired and not yet exhibited work The Lessons of the Hour (2019), an immersive video work by Isaac Julien (Looking for Langston, 1989), one of the foremost time-based media artists currently working. This work, deeply researched, investigates Frederick Douglass — whose connections to the Five Colleges and the Valley are many — not only as an abolitionist and intellectual and political force, but also as the most photographed man of the 19th century. Conversations animated by the complexities of being photographic object and discursive subject as a freed slave in the 19 th century are more relevant than ever. Given some of the usual objectification of Blacks in photographs during that time, we are not so far removed from some of what’s up for discussion in Racialized Medicine. The touchpoints and intersections generate yet more touchpoints and intersections, and they loop us back to The Notorious RCG.

As we exhale away from the pandemic, there is much we have yet to work through, and Kathleen Pierce (art history) and Suzanne Gottschang (anthropology) will partner to enable a consideration of Racialized Medicine, Past and Present: Teaching and Research in the Spaces Between STEM and the Humanities (June 11 and 14; apply here by May 28). Whatever scientific information we ever have, it is generally only possible for the public at large to understand it via discourse and visualization. Trump dropped a rock in the cultural ocean when he called COVID “the Chinese virus” that washed up over and over and over across the US, never more fatally than in the Atlanta spa shootings a year after he started that misnomer. As the co-organizers write in their invitation to our colleagues, their goal is “to consider the spaces between science/public health and the humanities that can offer opportunities to expand how we see, interpret, and draw conclusions about our respective fields.” This, too, has touch points with the other projects of the spring.

The pandemic is the historical bracket around the murder of George Floyd and the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin for that murder. One can only be very guardedly optimistic that the arc of history has bent yet again toward justice too long deferred and denied. Three people a day, a disproportionate number of whom are people of color, are still killed by police; prisons are still full of too many of the wrong people, built on too many of the wrong ideas, and run by too many private corporations. But we might be getting fractionally closer to our national self-image: we have a president, we have a vaccine, we have a verdict. It is a good time to be turning our attention to democracy as a flawed, unfinished project, which is exactly what the Kahn will be doing next year as the hub of the Year on Democracies. The Lessons of the Hour are lessons for the era, and it, too, will be back on the Kahn’s calendar in 2021-2022.

The bees are buzzing. The honey will be sweet.