| Skill is less a structuring term for cultural studies research discussions than an "unacknowledged keyword" internal to its thematic inquiries and professional contexts (Burgett and Hendler, 2007). Many of the keywords that constellate around skill-"labor," "work," "profession," "management," "industry," and "technology"-constitute subjects of scholarly inquiry within cultural studies, in the US and elsewhere. Skill is closely tied to the language of "experience," "expertise," "education" and "practice." It is joined to the transformation of labor under the rise of industrial and organizational management and the educational enculturation for it, and hence to a changing knowledge economy and ecology. Here "skill" engages the rubrics of cultural work and professional development and joins contemporary discussions about the relationship of the university to other knowledge-producing sectors. "Skill" is today entwined with the workings of power and knowledge in evolving forms of labor, industry, and education.
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My own interest in "skill" as a keyword derives from
two linked contexts. First, I work in a (non-faculty) professional
staff position at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. The Center
is a "research" unit in a public, research-intensive university;
it is situated in the humanities division; and it carries an explicit
mission to engage with non-university publics and organizations.
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My work includes supporting faculty and graduate student professional
development for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship
and engagement-the cross-sectoral collaborations alluded to in this
essay. I also write as an English Ph.D. who transferred out of the
future faculty track assumed by most doctoral programs in the humanities.
My work at the Simpson Center
benefits from a number of local, regional, and national collaborations
The first of these has been the Institute on the Public Humanities
at the University of Washington which I have co-directed with Bruce
Burgett for the past four years, and which has evolved into a proposed
graduate certificate program in Public Scholarship; the tri-campus
Cultural
Studies Praxis Collective and the New
Formations of Cultural Studies series, both funded by the Simpson
Center; and Imagining America:
Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium promoting
public scholarship in the cultural disciplines
Read the entry on skill
by Miriam Bartha or contact
her for more information on her work with the Simpson Center
and Imagining America.
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