Presentations Galore
It has been a busy week!
Last Thursday I had the Derogatory Terms workshop (see below), which went pretty well. It was a good start, although it would have been nice to have more people there, and one always thinks of things one wishes one would have said after the fact.
I went straight from there to the airport to go present a paper at the Society for Applied Anthropology meetings in Memphis, TN. The conference was pretty good, but my hotel was terrible. I’d post pictures but I don’t want you to think less of me for knowing I actually slept there!
The session I chaired turned out to be really wonderful even though three papers were withdrawn at the last minute due to the high costs of travel. We had one paper about teaching the Anthropology of Education (at the 300-level) in a maximum-security prison. The inmate-students did an ethnography of their own educational system and then wrote a proposal to improve it, which was actually approved! Applied anthropology indeed. The second paper was about a pilot study which investigated adult and adolescent educational programs for those who had dropped out of the school system in Nogales, Mexico.
And then there was my paper, Taking Over the Neighborhood: How “racial” tensions affect educational choices among Mexican immigrant youth in the south, which was about what it sounds like it was about.
Tonight I am giving my last presentation until June. It is called Mexican Teens, Identity and Education, and will provide an overview of my dissertation research. If you happen to view this blog in the next hour, you can catch the presentation in Rose Hall 250 at 6 pm.