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Ethnography
EUI Newsletter
Spring 2014
of the
http://www.eui.illinois.edu
Email: eui-info@illinois.edu
Tel: 217.244.7733
University Initiative
EUI Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
This academic year, we celebrate a decade of activity as a pedagogical
research community, with over 150 affiliated courses across six colleges
and seventeen departments at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (U of I) (and at five additional colleges and universities);
more than 3,000 participating students; over 1,000 student projects and
presentations archived in IDEALS; twenty-two (biannual) student
conferences; one dissertation and a number of senior honors’ theses and
capstone projects resulting from EUI courses; and over fifteen articles
and presentations highlighting EUI.
Please see our website for a full list of publications, presentations, and
press coverage.
Contents
1
EUI Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary
1-3 Changes in Program Administration
3-5 Annual Report for AY 2012/13
6
Faculty Spotlight: Siobhan
Somerville, Associate Professor of
English/Gender & Women’s Studies
Through our many inter- and intra-university partnerships and projects,
EUI showcases the commitments of the U of I to undergraduate student
research. EUI’s achievements highlight the quality of the University of
Illinois undergraduate research experience and contribute to campus
leadership in innovative higher education with a particular focus on
student research.
Changes in Program Administration
Co-Director Tim Cain -- Leaves for The University of Georgia
We are sorry to say goodbye to Co-Director (2008-2013) Timothy
Cain, who is now an Associate Professor with the Institute of
Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Tim will continue
to serve as our official Consultant in the History of Higher
Education. Tim sent these reflections for inclusion here.
In 2007, a year or two after I joined the faculty of the University of Illinois,
Nancy Abelmann approached me about contributing to EUI. I was unsure
what to expect or even, as an untenured faculty member being advised to
avoid as many service commitments as possible, whether I should consider
the possibility of affiliating with the project. But Nancy’s enthusiasm was
contagious and I was intrigued. I was intrigued by the possibility of reaching
out beyond the small office in the small corner of campus that I inhabited [In
the College of Education]. And I was intrigued by the work that Nancy and
her colleagues—EUI co-directors Gina Hunter and Catherine Prendergast,
as well as graduate student coordinators, librarians, IRB liaisons, EUI
instructors, and many other partners who make EUI possible—were doing to
support and promote undergraduate research. Nancy suggested that, as an
education faculty member studying historical and modern issues involving
college students and faculty, I could bring some field-based knowledge to the
discussions with which EUI instructors were engaged, especially as most were
only for the first time turning their disciplinary lenses onto higher education
as a site and actor. (Continued on next page)
What is EUI?
Based at the U of I, EUI promotes student
research on universities and colleges as
complex institutions. EUI supports faculty
from a wide range of disciplinary and
methodological backgrounds to integrate
original student research on universities and
colleges into their courses through faculty
development workshops, customized web
environments, Institutional Review Board
permissions, and bi-annual student
conferences. In EUI-affiliated courses,
students use a variety of ethnographic,
archival, and multimedia methods to
examine the university in the broader
context of our social and political times. At
the end of each semester, students have the
opportunity to contribute their work to the
EUI collection in the U of I’s digital
repository, Illinois Digital Environment for
Access to Learning and Scholarship
(IDEALS).
2
Changes in Program Administration
(continued from previous page) I accepted Nancy’s offer and spent a year pointing to journals on the topics that EUI
courses were exploring, suggesting articles and books that might be of some use to an instructor or student, and otherwise
trying to make myself somewhat useful. By 2008, I agreed to join EUI as a co-director. I did so because I was excited about
the project, and because I had learned a lot more than I had contributed. For five years, I continued to learn about teaching
and course design. I saw passion for undergraduate education, for helping students come to new understandings, and for
improving pedagogical practices that I had seen sporadically in individual professors but not before in a community. I saw
the willingness for established and successful faculty to take risks with technology, with assignments, and with whole new
approaches and content areas. I saw graduate student instructors and non-tenure line faculty welcomed in as full and equal
members in ways that the higher education literature tells us is rare. I found a teaching commons that would allow me to
explore and improve my own practices, and make me push my own comfort zone. Most importantly, I found a home
among colleagues and friends whose values, work ethic, commitment to undergraduate education, and willingness to ask
difficult questions about our university I admired greatly.
When I decided to leave the University of Illinois for a faculty position at the University of Georgia effective this fall, I was
thus saddened to also need to step down from co-directing EUI. But, I knew that EUI would continue to thrive under the
leadership of Nancy, Gina, Sharon Irish, and Karen Rodriguez’G, that the lessons I would learn would remain with me,
and, as was the case five years ago, that EUI had contributed far more to my development than I had to its program.
-Timothy R. Cain-
EUI Joins OUR
This particular acronym, OUR, spells a good move for the Ethnography of the University Initiative. In January
2014, EUI joined the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). OUR, a Provost initiative to increase the
visibility of and possibilities for undergraduate research opportunities across campus, opened in 2012. OUR is
dedicated to integrating a variety of campus efforts to support hands-on research experience, as well as
presentation and publication for undergraduates at the University of Illinois. OUR Director Paul F. Diehl is
the Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science as well as the Founding Director Emeritus of the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Academy. Karen Rodriguez’G is now Associate Director of the Office,
juggling new responsibilities as well as continuing her capable management of all things EUI. EUI’s decadelong program to foster course-based primary research is now much more stable financially within OUR. This
campus-level home acknowledges the multidisciplinary nature of EUI and the exciting ways in which we have
grown over the last ten years. We are, however, pleased that EUI retains an independent identity in OUR,
safeguarding our commitment to faculty development, Institutional Review Board approval, student
conferences, and archived research and related projects that examine the university as an actor within larger
contexts. We are indebted to Anthropology (founding director Nancy Abelmann’s home department) for all
their years of support. Anthropology remains a substantial partner and its department head, Dr. Andrew Orta,
sits as an ex officio member of EUI’s Advisory Board.
Our New Co-Director – Merinda Hensley
We welcome Merinda Hensley, Instructional Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at U of I. She
is also the Co-Coordinator of the Scholarly Commons, a library unit that serves the emerging research
and technology needs of scholars in data services, digital humanities, digitization, and scholarly
communication. Merinda teaches, coordinates, and provides leadership for “The Savvy Researcher,”
an open workshop series addressing advanced research and information management needs of
graduate students and faculty (http://www.library.illinois.edu/learn/).
Merinda has been involved in EUI since 2006, when she began organizing the poster session as part of the bi-annual EUI
Student Conference. Merinda’s research focuses on the roles of librarians in teaching undergraduate students about the
entire publication process, an essential part of the undergraduate research experience. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in
Political Science from the University of Arizona and a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
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3
Annual Report for AY 2012/13: Major Accomplishments
Karen Rodriguez’G – Now a Full-Time Program Coordinator
Karen Rodriguez’G is now our full-time Program Coordinator, an academic professional position. Karen, an advanced
doctoral candidate in the Department of History, has pioneered technical and teaching innovations for EUI-affiliated
courses, developed special projects such as the undergraduate-curated library exhibit on LGBT@UIUC, and presented
about EUI as a model of course-based research to various constituencies, locally and nationally. In addition to these
innovations, Karen continues to recruit, train, and support faculty and students in the use of Moodle, Institutional
Review Board (IRB) protocols, multimedia tools, and curriculum development; she also amends IRB protocols and
evaluates and monitors the submission of research documents for IRB approvals. She also organizes the student
conference each semester and implements continuing and new U of I cross-campus and inter-university partnerships,
such as the multimedia collaboration between U of I and Parkland College. EUI has benefited enormously from Karen’s
dedication and leadership!
2014 Special Issue Devoted to EUI in
Learning and Teaching: The
International Journal of Higher
Education in the Social Sciences
This special issue emerges from an EUI
panel that was organized by Teresa
Ramos, the author of the first PhD
dissertation to have emerged from EUI,
for the 2010 annual meeting of the
American Anthropological Association.
Editors from Learning and Teaching
attended the session and invited a special
issue on EUI. The issue includes an
introductory essay by guest co-editors
Gina Hunter and Nancy Abelmann, and
seven additional essays by staff and
faculty who have taught with the project:
Tim Cain, Priscilla Fortier, Soo Ah
Kwon, Cathy Prendergast, Junaid Rana,
Teresa Ramos, and Siobhan Somerville.
This special EUI issue is available online
at: http://go.illinois.edu/EuiLatiss
A New Publishing Venture: Peer Review
We are excited to announce the launch of our new undergraduate
research journal, Peer Review: The Undergraduate Research Journal of the
Ethnography of the University Initiative. Peer Review will be an open-access,
digital journal published once per year, with our inaugural issue slated
for May 1, 2014. The journal will publish research-based articles and
multimedia projects by current and recent undergraduates who
participated in EUI-affiliated courses (this may include independent
study/thesis coursework), as well as other undergraduate research on the
university. We also will include short commentaries and reflections on
the EUI research or teaching experience from former EUI-affiliated
students and faculty. Peer Review is part of an initial consortium of
undergraduate research journals to be launched in academic year
2013/14 at the U of I with generous support from the University Library.
Nancy Abelmann, Merinda Hensley, and Karen Rodriguez’G serve as
Advisory Board members.
The Peer Review’s editorial team includes T. Jameson Brewer, our
graduate student Senior Editor, and 5 undergraduate managing editors:
Marc Chua, Katrina Halfaker, Victoria Machen, Hannah Park, and
Alanna Smart. Merinda Hensley has organized a partnership between
the Writing Center and the University Library to develop training in
writing, research, and the editorial process for Peer Review’s new and
future undergraduate editors.
A Multimedia Exhibit
In Fall 2012, Karen worked with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center, the Social Sciences,
Health and Education Library and two EUI undergraduates, Harrison Hakes and Dominique Moore (from Siobhan
Somerville’s GWS 467 course), to mount a University Library Exhibit entitled "It's Not Because I'm LGBT, It's Because
I'm Human." This exhibit grew out of a multimedia conference presentation produced by students in an EUI-affiliated
course, ART 191/RHET 233 “The Ethnography of Allen Hall: A Documentary Project in Word and Image.” An
ongoing project guided by UIUC faculty members Carol Spindel and Brad Hudson, “The Ethnography of Allen Hall”
seeks to investigate and understand the culture of student life in Allen Hall through interviews, photography, and the
ethnographic technique of participant observation. The exhibit, which ran from December 1, 2012, to January 31, 2013
in the University Library’s Marshall Gallery, was based on several of the photographs from “Q” and documented the
history of UIUC's LGBT Center and LGBT issues on this campus.
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4
Annual Report for AY 2012/13: EUI Goes Multimedia!
EUI on the Road:
High Schools Here We Come!
This past summer, EUI co-directors
Nancy Abelmann and Gina Hunter
participated in the Chicago Humanities
Festival’s 17th annual Summer Institute
for Teachers (SIT). Over two days, SIT
participants worked in small groups,
developing their own research questions
and producing an "ethnographic toolkit"
of cross-disciplinary research methods
easily applied to the high school setting.
This participation has now led to a
collaboration with the Oak Park High
School Ethnography Workshop (including
multimedia research projects) for teachers,
led by EUIers Gina Hunter and Karen
Rodriguez’G. More information about
SIT and related programs can be seen
here.
Campus Outreach
Nancy Abelmann, Tim Cain, Sharon Irish and Karen Rodriguez’G
presented at the UIUC 2013 Annual Faculty Retreat sponsored by the
Center for Teaching Excellence, themed “When Teaching and Learning
Meet Undergraduate Research.” Their panel, “The Challenges and
Possibilities of Course-Based Research: Lessons from the First Decade of
the Ethnography of the University Initiative,” centered on EUI’s decadelong sponsorship and facilitation of course-based undergraduate student
research. The session considered the approaches, infrastructure, and
partnerships (with the Institutional Review Board, the University Library,
Student Life and Culture Archival Program, Library/IT Fee Advisory
Committee, CITES Academic Technologies and Digital Media Group,
etc.) that have allowed EUI to sponsor more than 150 classes from
departments both across campus and across the nation, as well as to
archive more than 1,000 student projects and presentations in IDEALS.
Discussion included the challenges of course-based undergraduate research
and some pedagogical and curricular approaches that EUI instructors have
undertaken to overcome them. They also discussed how changing
technologies, such as multimedia, have affected the EUI course offerings.
A New Technology: SCALAR
Karen Rodriguez’G is currently working with Kevin Hamilton, Associate Professor in the School of Art + Design and
IPRH Coordinator for Digital Scholarly Communication, and Sarah Shreeves, Coordinator/IDEALS, Cocoordinator/Scholarly Commons, and Associate Professor of Library Administration, to link EUI-IDEALS multimedia
materials and SCALAR digital books. Both Andrew Moss, Rhetoric 105-Service Learning at UIUC, and Karen
Rodriguez’G, History 259/EUI-LLC, will be utilizing SCALAR in their affiliated courses in Spring 2014. Professor and
EUI Co-Director Sharon Irish and Professor C.L. Cole are also utilizing SCALAR in their Fall 2013 EUI-affiliated
course, Dialogues on Feminism and Technology. A Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC), Dialogues is part of a
consortium of 16 institutions, organized collectively by FemTechNet, and offering a feminist rethinking of Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
EUI helps Orient New Freshmen to University
Life: Summer Academic Achievement Program
(SAAP) Pilot
In July and August 2013, EUI was invited by the
Office of the Provost to take part in the Summer
Academic Achievement Program (SAAP) pilot,
a five-week residential program at the U of I
designed to acquaint select incoming freshmen
with tools and resources to manage the
challenges of college life. Students met with
various academic and student affairs officials,
and
attended
preparatory
seminars
in
composition (Writing Across the Curriculum),
STEM, and humanities and social science
research. EUI Co-Director Sharon Irish and EUI
Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez'G each
taught a cohort of 15 incoming freshmen in the
humanities/social science (HSS) sequence. In
the HSS seminar, students were able to conduct
original, human subject-approved and archival
research, present their findings, and publish their
work in EUI's archives in IDEALS.
EUI Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez’G
– On and Off Campus
In Fall 2012, Karen Rodriguez’G presented “Lights! Camera!
Research! Building an Infrastructure for Multimedia Student
Learning” as part of the Teaching with Technology Brown Bag
Series. Her presentation explored the impetus behind EUI, the
challenges of building technology infrastructure for student
research, and the lessons learned from incorporating technology
into syllabi, courses, and the broader university culture.
In January 2013, representing EUI, Karen served as a fellow with
the Digital Humanities Winter Institute at the Maryland Institute
of Technology in the Humanities. As a fellow, she worked with
faculty and administrators from national and international
universities to develop both pedagogical and curricular models for
incorporating multimedia into traditional coursework, and the
creation of a central clearinghouse and forum for ongoing
discussion.
In October 2013, Karen presented “Putting the ‘I’ in Archive” at
an Office of Undergraduate Research brown bag for humanities
and social sciences faculty, talking about EUI as a unique
pedagogical model of course-based research.
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Annual Report for AY 2012/13: New Horizons
A Generous Grant
In Spring 2012, we applied for and were awarded a second grant ($38,000) from the University of Illinois Student
Library/IT Committee for AY 2012-2013 to further support and implement our multimedia course program. Beginning
in AY 2011-12, we successfully integrated digital technologies into a cluster of EUI courses. In our second year, we
awarded six instructors (including one at Parkland College) an IT Teaching Award, which provided the use of audio,
video, and “back pocket” equipment to support student research, and assist with incorporating technology into syllabi
design, with up to 100 hours per course of embedded technological training and support. This new award allowed us to
expand our pilot program to six courses per semester. Key to our success has been our partnership with CITES Academic
Technology Services and Digital Media Group, the new Undergraduate Library Media Commons, and the substantial
commitment of Karen Rodriguez’G to designing and implementing the infrastructure of our program, including: presemester meetings with faculty for syllabus design; in-class training on equipment use and post-production editing;
creation of user-best practice guides; back-up data storage plans for each course; equipment loan policies; and a central
site for draft student collaborative projects and for final project submittal. Karen has worked hard to amend our
Institutional Review Board protocols to allow for these new media courses. We have now created an efficient (if
evolving) template for future EUI multimedia courses, one that can be of use to other university units interested in fully
integrating technology into undergraduate learning environments.
New Affiliated Courses
Archive Stories
We continue to add new affiliated courses to our roster. In Fall
2012, Co-Director Nancy Abelmann took on our multimedia
program, offering “The Ethnography of Contemporary East Asia”
and writing an essay on her experience teaching that course, “The
Intimate University: Researching and Teaching Transnational
Korea,” for Antoinette Burton and Mary-Ann Winkelmes, eds., An
Illinois Sampler: Talking about Teaching on the Prairie, forthcoming
from University of Illinois Press.
We plan to add a new cluster of Archives-based
courses, namely, thematic courses that feature
University-housed archives, among them, for
example, the Kolb-Proust Archives, the Sousa
Archives and Center for American Music, or
the newly acquired Gwendolyn Brooks archive.
We imagine courses devoted to the content of
particular archives housed at the U of I that
focus a portion of the course on students’
examination of the life of our archival
collections – e.g., how they have been collected,
sustained, used, and published. We will also
inaugurate this cluster of courses with a Spring
2015 lecture series in which we bring to campus
scholars with longstanding records of research
in our archives. Already 14 faculty members
have written to express an interest in affiliating
their courses with this project in Spring 2015.
Spring 2013 was one of our most robust semesters ever, with 14
affiliated courses, six of which were multimedia offerings:

EALC 285 – Intro to Korea through Film (also part of our
new Living and Learning Communities partnership)

History 472 – Greater China in Illinois

Anthropology 103 (Parkland College)

ARTH 491 – Collecting East Asia

LIS 592 – Evolving Archives Initiative
Last semester (Fall 2013), we welcomed Andrew Moss’s Rhetoric
105 course on Service Learning, C.L. Cole’s Media and Cinema
Studies multimedia freshman Discovery course on sports, and our
own Sharon Irish, C.L. Cole, and Sharra Vostral’s graduate seminar
on feminism and technology. This semester (Spring 2014) Program
Coordinator Karen Rodriguez’G is offering a new EUI/LLC course
– History 259: 20th Century World from Midcentury: “Kitchen
(En)Counters: Food and Identity in a Postwar World”; our
multimedia partnership with Parkland College is continuing; and
we hope to offer a new course in collaboration with the U of I’s
Living-Learning Communities and the Office of Undergraduate
Research. The course will be an undergraduate research practicum
for freshman and sophomores focusing on service-learning and
community engagement. The first course will be taught in Spring
2015 by Karen Rodriguez’G.
Students Participate in Campus Studies:
Illinois State
Co-Director Gina Hunter's EUI course in
ethnographic methods has twice participated in
campus-wide research initiatives at Illinois
State University. In 2012, Gina's students
studied freshman and transfer student
experiences in conjunction with the campus'
participation in the John D. Gardner Institute’s
Foundations of Excellence self-study. In the
fall of 2013, students enrolled in the course
focused on the international student experience
at ISU and presented the results of their
investigations at the university’s International
Symposium in December 2013.
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Faculty Spotlight: Siobhan Somerville
Associate Professor of English/Gender & Women’s Studies
I have taught my course “Locating Queer Culture” (GWS 467) twice for EUI, since Spring 2009. This course
revolves around two key questions: How might we understand the role of Midwestern public universities like the
UIUC – and their surrounding communities -- in the production of queer culture? And how might such
knowledge revise our understanding of queer culture and its locations, both in the past and in the present?
Students who have taken the course tend to be majoring in Humanities and Social Sciences fields, including
Gender and Women’s Studies, English, History, Economics, Spanish, Anthropology, Psychology, and
Sociology. They do not all identify as “queer,” “lesbian,” or “gay.” Students are from a variety of racial and
ethnic backgrounds, including Latina/o, African American, Asian American, and white students. Using our
own university as both the object and site for primary research on queer culture, the course introduces
undergraduate students to two research methods: archival research and ethnography. There is, of course,
nothing inherently queer about either method, so the course involves first introducing students to the basic tools
of each approach. But we also consider the extent to which taking queer culture as the object of study might
require us to adjust these methods. What, in other words, are the possibilities for queering archival and
ethnographic research methods?
The course is designed to help students see that knowledge does not simply exist “out there” in the world, but
that it is actively produced and preserved by people like themselves. This is true for any culture, but is especially
relevant for queer culture, because it has historically been overlooked or minimized in scholarship on American
culture generally. Thus, the course focuses on a vital but contested element of the university and its surrounding
community that is often neglected in “official” university records, narratives, and histories. After reading and
studying examples of existing scholarship on queer culture, students do a series of short exercises that culminate
in two research assignments: (1) an archival research project on some aspect of
EU I Co - Dir e ct or s:
local queer history at the UIUC; and (2) an ethnographic research project on
Nancy Abelmann, Sharon
some aspect of contemporary queer culture at the UIUC. Thus students both
Irish, Merinda Hensley,
draw upon the existing archives of the university and contribute to these archives
Gina Hunter (Illinois State
by producing their own original research on queer culture.
University)
EUI Program Coordinator:
Karen Rodriguez’G
Internal Advisory Board:
Robert Baird, Priscilla
Fortier, Lisa Hinchliffe,
Joanne Kaczmarek, Lydia
Khuri, Soo Ah Kwon,
William Maher, Ellen
Moodie, Peter Mortensen,
Andrew Orta, Catherine
Prendergast, Deanna
Raineri, Junaid Rana, Bruce
Rosenstock, Beth Sandore,
Sarah Shreeves, Siobhan
Somerville, Ellen Swain,
Syndy Sydnor.
External Advisory Board:
Philip Altbach, Robert
Borofsky, Nancy Cantor,
Robin L. Chandler, Peter
Ewell, George E. Marcus,
Ernest T. Pascarella,
Ramon Saldivar, Cathy
Small, Nancy Somers, Lisa
Beth Spanierman, Erica
Vogel, and Michael Wesch.
Students have tackled an amazing range of subjects, from coming out in
fraternities, to the experiences of queer women of color, the history of lesbian
student activism, the university’s role as a resource for local queer youth, the
experiences of black gay men at the U of I, the intersections of LGBT and
Christian communities on campus, lesbian and gay issues in sexual health
programs at the U of I, and queering the curriculum. I’m very proud that this
course has provided space for students to pursue such impressive original
research, which they have all presented publicly at the EUI conference and which
is now archived in IDEALS. I’ve learned an incredible amount from my students
and look forward to the chance to teach this EUI course again soon.
GWS 467 students present at EUI’s biannual conference.
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