We would like to thank our co-sponsors and co-funders: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Connected Academics Davis Humanities Institute Mentoring at Critical Transitions, UC Davis
humwork.uchri.org
@humanistsatwork
HUMANISTS@WORK Schedule 8:00AM BREAKFAST
Hot breakfast bar with–yes, you guessed it–plenty of caffeinated beverages
9:00AM Welcome & Introductions Kelly Anne Brown, UCHRI’s Assistant Director
9:15AM THEORIZING OUR MOMENT: WHAT HUMANISTS@WORK LOOK LIKE
Part I of a two-part conversation moderated by the Humwork Graduate Student Advisory Committee. Continuing the interactive, DIY activities began in San Diego last year, the Humwork grad committee will facilitate a conversation about issues such as: the possibilities for work outside/alongside academia, graduate student education and support, the general conditions of the humanities in higher education and society more generally, and the role of gatherings like Humwork to intervene in the many structural, cultural, and practical issues surrounding humanities work.
9:45AM Stories From the Field
UC Humanities PhDs share their stories as humanists@work in the world. Featuring J. Guevara, Economic Development Manager for the City of Santa Cruz (PhD Literature, UCSC, 2012); Amy Jamgochian, Academic Program Director, Prison University Project (PhD Rhetoric, UCB, 2010); Susie Lundy, Bay Area Program Director, Youth Speaks (PhD Cultural Studies, UCLA, 2008); Marty Weis, UC Davis English PhD, 2015; Moderated by Simon Abramowitsch, UC Davis English PhD and Humanists@Work Graduate Advisory Committee Member.
11:00AM Coffee/Networking Break & Poster session Connected Academics New York City Proseminar on Careers Stacy Hartman from the Modern Language Association will discuss the proseminar on careers that the Modern Language Association is running in New York City this year. Twenty graduate students and recent PhD recipients from eleven institutions are taking part in the year-long initiative. The proseminar provides a model for what a career exploration seminar designed specifically for humanities PhDs might look like. Attend a poster session during a coffee break to find out more.
11:30AM RÉSUMÉ REDUX: USING THE WRITING PROCESS AS A TOOL FOR CAREER DISCOVERY
The quest to create a replicable résumé development framework for humanities PhD candidates exploring a variety of careers continues! Since UCHRI’s February 2015 Humanists@Work workshop in San Diego, Jared Redick of The Résumé Studio, Kelly Anne Brown of UCHRI, and selected
UC humanists have been hard at work refining the process of presenting academic experience within the boundaries of a non-academic résumé. This iteration of the workshop builds on the work of past presentations at Berkeley and San Diego, focusing on how the writing process is being used as a tool for career discovery. Highlights include: • A glimpse into how current PhD candidates and other graduate students have used the Job Description Analysis to translate their academic and dissertation experience into transferable skills useful within a reimagined résumé. • Before and after samples from graduate students who have gone the distance and turned their backgrounds into marketable résumés, several resulting in new jobs this year. Unsurprisingly, the work focuses on the student’s ability to convert academic activities into work experience that resonates beyond academia. Sounds easier than it is—which is why this series continues. UCLA PhD candidate Dana Linda joins the discussion to share her own experience, as well as insights she learned while going through the process. Important: • Please be sure you have watched the full 1.5 hour Berkeley video before you attend, otherwise you may not gain the full value of this presentation. • Bring your current CV and/or résumé attempt (no matter how rough, printed or on your laptop) so it’s on hand for ideas you may capture along the way. Jared Redick , The Résumé Studio and Dana Linda, UCLA Comparative Literature PhD Candidate
12:45AM Lunch
In addition to a hot lunch, participants will have access to view Al Farrow’s Bay Area Figurative Drawings in the special collections gallery.
1:45PM BREAKOUT SESSIONS SESSION A: SKETCHING YOUR CAREER’S UNIQUE CHRONOLOGY IN THE RÉSUMÉ CONTEXT CROCKER ATRIUM | Jared Redick, The Résumé Studio Working one-on-one with University of California PhD candidates and other graduate students this year, one of the surprising elements Jared Redick has discovered has been the complex task of distilling the hierarchy of one’s career within the limitations of the chronological résumé. And chronological résumés are essential in the world beyond academia because functional résumés—while sometimes useful—are frequently regarded by recruiters and hiring managers as tools for masking periods of unemployment.
In this breakout session, Dana Linda joins Jared Redick for focused table work that utilizes the simplicity of post-it notes to wire frame your experience (institution names, job titles, dates, buckets) in a way that is readily understood by recruiters and hiring managers. This breakout is intended for people who are, or will soon be, deeply focused on the résumé development process. Important: • Bring your current CV and/or résumé attempt, no matter how rough, printed or on your laptop. • Please be sure you have watched the 1.5 hour Berkeley video before you attend, otherwise you may not gain the full value of this breakout session.
SESSION B: DECODING WORK: A VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING CAREERS FOR HUMANITIES PHDS CEMO MEETING SPACE | Annie Maxfield, UCLA In this session students will connect their unique strengths and value system to career trajectories by surveying how values are expressed through work, organizations and industries. We will identify concrete UCHumanities PhD career paths, and discuss ways to “decode” jobs, imagine possibilities, and identify starting points.
3:00PM Coffee/Networking Break & Poster session Connected Academics New York City Proseminar on Careers
3:30PM A MINDFUL INQUIRY INTO THE RIGHT KIND OF WORK Lauri Mattenson, U CLA Writing Programs Many of our assumptions about the job search are predetermined by the routines and rules of our educational institutions, and accordingly, we learn to package ourselves like products for sale to potential employers. If instead, we regard ourselves as in-process and engage in mindful practices with an attitude of receptive non-judgement, we can free ourselves from fixed notions of self and success. In this participatory workshop, we will practice “generative mindfulness” exercises designed to inspire greater insight into what might bring us true professional pleasure and fulfillment. Mindful meditation is known to facilitate decision-making and cognitive flexibility and enhance well-being, creativity, social performance, and health (Langer, 1989; 2005; 2009), so a mindful inquiry into the right kind of work may help us conceptualize and create a career deeply aligned with our skills and values.
4:30PM PART II: THEORIZING OUR MOMENT 5:30PM Concluding Remarks
Humanists@Work SPEAKERS While J. Guevara was taking his qualifying exams for his Ph.D in Literature at UCSC, he was already working full time in local government in the fall of 2008 when Bear Sterns went bankrupt and the economy tanked. His academic research focuses on the cultural studies of the bicycle, tracing how the bicycle functions as a figure of liberation in the theoretical work of Ivan Illich, sports and anti-colonial work of C.L.R. James, Roland Barthes, and Gayatri Spivak, the bicycle in commodity production in world film, as well as unrecognized liberatory roll of the bicycle in the experimental poetry of African American poet C.S. Giscombe. Now spin and shift gears: as the City of Santa Cruz Economic Development Manager, Guevara has honed economic development for over seven years, specializing in broadband policy, redevelopment, and economic gardening (especially in the tech and creative sectors). Most recently, he lead development for a community calendar aggregator (CruzCal.org), led the creative strategy for rebranding and redesigning business retention and recruitment with ChooseSantaCruz.com, and is the chief negotiator and project lead for Santa Cruz potentially becoming the first gigabit city in Silicon Valley with a municipally-owned fiber optic network with the largest bond issuance in the city’s history at over $45 million. You can learn more about J. at www.linkedin.com/in/jjoshguevara or follow him on Twitter @_jguevara. Stacy Hartman is serving as the Project Coordinator for the MLA’s Connected Academics Project. Stacy earned her PhD in German Studies from Stanford University in 2015. While at Stanford, she ran speaker series related to alternative careers for humanities PhDs, the public humanities, and humanities education. She also wore a number of hats that let her try out different types of connected careers within the university, such as academic adviser, academic skills coach, teaching consultant, and instructional designer. She holds an MA in German from the University of Manchester and a BA in Literature and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She welcomes all questions and inquiries about Connected Academics at shartman@mla.org. Amy Jamgochian started working as Academic Program Director at the Prison University Project after being a lecturer in Rhetoric for five years and a Ph.D. student in the same department before that. At the Prison University Project, I am in charge of recruiting, training, and supervising the volunteer instructors who teach our courses at San Quentin State Prison. I also oversee the curriculum and am working to develop the academic program to be more robust, systematized, and replicable, as well as to address the specific needs of our student population more thoroughly. As a lecturer in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, I specialized in rhetorical theory, hermeneutics, and queer and gender theory, and also dabbled considerably in the work of David Foster Wallace. I’ve copyedited scholarly manuscripts on the side for many years. My dissertation focused on ethics and sexuality in 19th century British novels.
Dana Linda is a PhD Candidate at UCLA focusing on Caribbean literatures and gender studies. Dana brings both a strong passion for and grounding in the Public Humanities through her existing experiences across California’s higher education and non-profit settings. A comparatist by training and inclination, Dana is happy to share this peek into the process of career translation and looks forward to continuing the dialogue with her fellow connected academics. Susie Lundy is the Bay Area Program Director for Youth Speaks. She has worked in community arts programs as an artist, teacher, and administrator in Boston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area over the past seventeen years. In addition to having a Masters in Teaching from USF, Susie received an M.Ed. in Arts in Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and earned a doctorate in Culture and Performance at UCLA. She has been on the local Board of Directors of Urban Arts, Youth Together, and World Bridges. Susie has helped to create programs at the Museum of Children’s Art, Eastside Arts Alliance, Oakland Leaf, Youth Speaks, The Estria Foundation, Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artists for Humanity, and La Peña Cultural Center. Annie Maxfield has been advocating for PhD professional development and support for the past five years. Currently, she is the associate director for graduate student services at the UCLA career center, where she leads campus-wide initiatives. Prior to UCLA, Annie was the assistant director for graduate student and employer relations at Duke University. She is also an experienced teacher, having taught digital and strategic communication courses at the University of Utah, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Westminster College, and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Lauri Mattenson has been teaching writing to undergraduates and training graduate instructors at the University of California, Los Angeles for twenty years. Her website, www.LauriMattenson.com offers motivational articles for teachers and students as well as personal essays inspired by the main theme of “Trusting the Body to Teach the Mind.” She represents the UCLA faculty in a series of welcome speeches for incoming freshmen orientation groups totaling over 6,000 students each summer. Previous publications have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Mother Company, The Jewish Journal (“Finding my Place in History: A Love Letter for Father’s Day”; “Small Steps on NewGround for Muslims and Jews”), Massage Magazine, Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism, Bruinlink, and The Daily Bruin. Her ebook, BACKBONE: A BodyMind Breakthrough, illustrated by Arnel Baluyot with foreword by Darren Levine of Krav Maga Worldwide, is currently available on Amazon.com.
Jared Redick is a problem solver. For seventeen years, he has used the résumé writing process to help people reverse engineer their career intentions and plan for the future. Whether working with future leaders or top earners at the world’s largest companies, Jared has become known as a strategic resource for stealth job seekers. Educated in music, Jared began life as a pianist and regularly draws on practice and composition principles to make the hard stuff seem easy. Connect and learn more about Jared’s work at www.linkedin.com/in/jaredredick/. Martin Weiss As a graduate student in the English department at UC Davis, my research focused on the biopolitics of video games, and my dissertation argued that the virtual biologies featured in video games often have real political effects. In addition to my own research and teaching, the six years I spent in the program involved a variety of professional roles, including graduate student co-chair, events coordinator, and digital media lab team member and researcher. Through these various roles, I realized that I was no longer interested in an academic career, and that what I wanted instead was to pursue a career in Marketing and Strategic Communications—which is what I have been doing since I graduated in June. After becoming more familiar with Sonoma County’s job market, I decided to apply for my MBA, which I am currently completing as a part-time student at Sonoma State.
Humanists@Work Advisory Committee Members Dana Linda A PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA, Dana brings to the Humanists@Work initiative both a strong passion for and grounding in the Public Humanities. Her experience spans California’s higher education and justice systems in various professional platforms, including top-ranked research, student affairs, and non-profit settings. Most recently, she has worked as a Teaching Consultant and Content Developer at UCLA. José Manuel Medrano received his BA from UCLA in 2010 with Departmental Honors and Latin Honors. In May 2015 he earned his MA from UCR. He is a current Graduate Student in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside where he also teaches Spanish language courses. His research interests include Linguistics (Hispanic bilinguals and code-mixing), Gender Studies and Digital Humanities. Simon Abramowitsch I am a humanist at work. I am a PhD candidate in English at UC Davis, always interested in the work that humanists and the humanities do in and for society. My dissertation, “Under the Sign of the Rainbow: The Production of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1960s-1990s,” is literary history and an investigation of the the multi-ethnic as idea. And at its core it is also a story about a public humanities movement for racial justice, American cultural diversity, and the crucial role of arts and culture in understanding ourselves, others, our nations, and our planet.
Christina Green is a PhD Candidate at UC San Diego in the department of Ethnic Studies. Her dissertation examines the gendered labor and migration of Black West Indian women to Central America during the late nineteenth -to mid-twentieth century banana booms. As a member of the Humanists@Work Graduate Student Advisory Committee, Christina is dedicated to informing other humanities and social science PhDs about alternative career paths outside and alongside academia. Sherri Lynn Conklin As a member of the UCHRI Humanists@Work Graduate Advisory Committee, I am concerned with diversifying career opportunities for PhD students in order to extend the value of the Humanities PhD. As a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at UCSB, I conduct research in moral worth, normative theory, and moral psychology. I’m currently working on Permissible WrongDoing or Responsibility without Blame. The idea is that we sometimes perform wrong actions for which we are morally responsible but not blameworthy.
UC Humanities Research Institute Kelly Anne Brown holds a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz (2011), with scholarly training in modernist and avant-garde literature and art from between the two world wars. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, Kelly worked in public policy and program administration for children and family programs at the city, county, and state levels of California government. A “hybrid” academic working at UCHRI since 2012, Kelly lives and breathes systemwide humanities program development while also pursuing her scholarly interests in public humanities and collaborative research. Anna Finn is the graduate student researcher for the University of California Humanities Research Institute where she supports a range of programmatic activities. She is a PhD candidate at UC Irvine focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and English poetry. Her dissertation explores metrical systems that divide the poetic line into temporal units and the way this “poetic time” is bound up with national and global time standardization. David Theo Goldberg, PhD, is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the Executive Director of the Digital Media & Learning Research Hub. He holds faculty appointments as Professor of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine.
ABOUT THE CROCKER MUSEUM
In 1868, Judge Edwin B. Crocker purchased the property and existing buildings on the corner of Third and O Streets. He then commissioned local architect Seth Babson (1830-1908) to renovate the home into a grander, Italianate mansion. In addition, Crocker asked Babson to design an elaborate gallery building adjacent to the mansion to display the family’s growing art collection. The first public art museum founded in the Western United States, the Crocker Art Museum was established in 1885 and is now one of the leading art museums in California. The Crocker serves as the primary regional resource for the study and appreciation of fine art. The Museum offers a diverse spectrum of special exhibitions and programs to complement its collections of Californian art, works on paper, European art, international ceramics, photography, Asian art, and African and Oceanic art. Babson envisioned the home and gallery as an integrated complex, unique in design and built from the finest materials. The gallery building included a bowling alley, skating rink, and billiards room on the ground floor; a natural history museum and a library on the first floor; and gallery space on the second floor. Completed in 1872, the Crocker family mansion and art gallery are considered the masterpieces of Babson’s career. The family mansion went through several uses and reconstructions until a 1989 renovation restored the historic façade and created a modern gallery interior. The original buildings, now connected, as well as the cast concrete Herold Wing addition of 1969, were renamed the Crocker Art Museum in 1978. The gallery building is a California Historical Landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) invites proposals for its Humanists@Work graduate student advisory committee. Who Can Apply: Currently enrolled UC Humanities graduate students. Level of Award: $1,000 stipend, plus travel and lodging for twice-yearly professional development workshops and a convening meeting at UCHRI. Funding Source: UCHRI Deadline: April 15, 2016 (11:59 pm PST). Funding Decision: It is expected that awards will be announced in late Spring quarter. Final awards are contingent upon available funding. Term of participation is May/June 2016-May/June 2017. UCHRI is pleased to invite proposals from humanities graduate students interested in participating in the UC-wide initiative supporting career regarding careers alongside/outside the academy. As part of the MLA-funded “Connected Academics: Preparing Doctoral Students of Language and Literature for a Variety of Careers,” we are seeking 3-5 humanities graduate students to serve as the Humanists@Work advisory committee for our annual workshop series. Building upon successful career workshops held in Berkeley (Spring 2014) and San Diego (Winter 2015), UCHRI is developing and coordinating two workshops a year in 2015-16, 2016-17, and 2017-18 to rotate among Northern, Central, and Southern California locations to support career preparation for interested graduate students. The term for the advisory committee is one year, beginning in Summer 2016 through Spring 2017. Working alongside UCHRI’s Assistant Director, advisory committee members will be expected to attend both workshops and participate in virtual meetings, including the collective development and production of 2-4 webinars on alt-ac topics each year. This is an opportunity for graduate students interested in shaping the conversations and work of professional development opportunities for humanities graduate students across the UC system while gaining valuable programmatic and logistical work experience. For more information, please visit http://humwork.uchri.org.