- Globalization and the University
This project examines the influence
of globalization on the university and the university's place
in a burgeoning world market for higher education. What impact,
for example, do the half-million foreign students studying in
the United States have on the nation's universities? At the same
time, this project considers domestic students' engagement with
international education, including foreign language study and
study abroad. How will the globalization of the university affect
U.S. undergraduates' much-lamented ambivalence about study extending
beyond the nation's borders?
- Learning Communities
Both in and beyond educational institutions,
people forge human ties that allow them to learn more effectively
and with greater results. Through these collaborations - be they
in workplaces, sports clubs, or on the Web - people construct
something more powerful and meaningful than they would have alone.
Research in this project aims to document and learn from these
communities and in so doing to consider how we might better foster
collaborative learning.
- Race and the University
Whether spoken of in the context of
"diversity" or "multiculturalism," race
is at the heart of the American university--its history, its
contemporary challenges, and its futures. This project examines
ways in which the U.S. university and the American college experience
are indelibly racialized. In particular, this project examines
longstanding U.S. debates and decisions on affirmative action.
- Student Writing
Students write their way through the
undergraduate curriculum, in part simply to demonstrate what
they know about a subject, but also to rehearse and demonstrate
disciplinary modes of knowing and expression. This project examines
how students use writing to make sense of the university's research
mission as they themselves engage in academic inquiry. It also
investigates students' extracurricular writing and attempts
to discern how students compose a coherent "writing life" that
that draws from their various identities during their undergraduate
years.
- Technology and Student Life
The lives of U.S. students are day
by day becoming more enmeshed in digital technologies, from
e-mail to Internet messaging, and from web-logs to cellular
phones. Less clear, however, are the meanings and impact of
these technologies on students' social lives, learning, and
group formation. This project appreciates that the media ecology
of student life is transforming quickly. Technology in student
life thus offers a rich ethnographic site.
- The University and the Community
EOTU appreciates that the boundaries
between the university, the local community, and the wider world
are porous. Many campus units and constituencies interact with
the community and world in diverse ways, from service programs
to research projects. EOTU is interested in documenting this interaction
in the interest of thinking about how more truly collaborative
university-community projects might be developed.
- University Archival Practices
This project appreciates that university
units and constituencies are archivists: they make decisions
about the records and memories they preserve, be they students'
scrap books or web logs; departments' faculty meeting notes;
or administrators' e-mail correspondence. This project is also
interested in the vision and decision-making of those diverse
campus units charged with archiving the university, including
the University Archives, the Student Life and Culture Archive,
and an emerging project to establish an electronic institutional
repository. The durable memory of a university-its digital and
print records-offer a telling window on university identities
and values.
