We're pleased to feature a new keyword essay that extends the insights and contributions of the published collection, Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

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.

[ Read the entire entry ]

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.

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.

Archived Resources
You can also visit the June 2009 and October 2008 Keyword Kiosks and Instructors Exchange to read student-produced keywords essays and instructor comments about course design, student outcomes, and wiki integration.