The official blog of the Graduate Student Issues Committee for the Classical Association of the Middle West and South
In response to the tepid statement from CAMWS leadership, we wanted to say without reservation the Black lives matter, Black scholars matter, Black communities matter, and we — as a field and specifically in this committee — need to do more to support this.
Alright, so CAMWS 2020 isn't going to look exactly as we had originally planned. But your Graduate Student Issues Committee is still preparing some great content that you can get in on! Tuesday, 10:00 am CDT: Starting off THE ENTIRE CONFERENCE is our panel "Being a Classicist in the Digital World: Public Scholarship in the... Continue Reading →
We wish we could make grad students financially secure, and we know that a spreadsheet won't solve all of our worries. But in the meantime we can at least use our platform to try to make the CAMWS conference hotel situation less expensive.
I spend at least an hour commuting each day, which means that I, like a large number of other humans, follow a number of podcasts. What better way to fill those long walks than by indulging in aural entertainment? But while I'm no stranger to the podcast medium, I had never journeyed out into the world of classically-themed podcasts — until now, that is.
Today, August 8, 2019, is International Cat Day (alternatively, World Cat Day). This "holiday" began in 2002 as a way to raise awareness for cats, and I can't imaging anything that the internet was made more explicitly for than this! So feast your eyes on this collection of celebrating cats in the style of Classical Studies.
As we speak, tens of thousands of gamers are gathering in Indianapolis for Gen Con, the country’s largest table-top gaming convention. This seems like the appropriate moment to talk not about conferences on games but rather games at conferences. This is no new idea— gaming has been an increasingly popular topic within academia, as a pedagogical tool and research material. But gaming has a special place at conferences that’s worth diving into.
Academic conferences are expensive. Nevertheless, we are expected to have wide scholarly networks and a good record of conference presentations. Realistically, attending conferences (which usually take place in a different city, state, or country) is only possible for those of us who have the financial means to travel. In other words, this system favors those who have tenured jobs, consistent incomes, or financial support from their schools or families. Project Visiting Scholar is designed to help rectify this situation.
But while I’ve enjoyed being an audience to improv techniques, I’ve never thought about throwing my hat in the ring. It turns out, however, that improv skills can be applied to other environments and may even be useful in helping us survive graduate school.... In particular, using the principles of improv comedy may help the conference experience.
As she did with Circe, Miller has stayed faithful to the received narratives of Achilles and Patroclus without following them submissively, putting new twists on old stories and injecting them with poignant, powerful first-person perspective that students will respond to.
Though it’s only a few short weeks since the 2019 conference, GSIC is already hard at work planning our programming for the next conference. Part of this is inspiration from the amazing papers and panels at the last conference, but another part is inspired by some of the lacunae noted in the field by other graduate students.
CAMWSgrads 