Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 412 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. I welcome to the show Céline Cantat, Ian Cook, and Prem Kumar Rajaram, to discuss their book, Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees.

Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m, Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

I’m excited to be welcoming three co-editors to today’s episode, Céline Cantat, Ian Cook, and Prem Kumar Rajaram. Let’s begin with Céline. She’s an Academic Advisor at the Paris School of International Affairs. Previously, she was a research fellow under Marie Curie Individual Fellow at Central European University. Céline also acted as Academic Program Manager at the Open Learning Initiative or OLIve, which you’ll hear a little bit about in this episode, a higher education access program for displaced learners.

Also joining me on today’s episode is Ian Cook, from Central European University, Budapest. He’s an anthropologist who works on urban change, environmental injustice, podcasting, and Opening Up the University. Finally, Prem Kumar Rajaram, is professor of sociology and social anthropology at Central European University, and head of the OLIve unit at the same university. He works on issues to do with race, capitalism, and displacement in a historical and contemporary perspective. During the interview, you are going to be hearing me read from the book, and much of what I share is from some of the authors who submitted chapters from the book. The conversation today is with the editors, but we’re going to get to hear even more voices represented in the book, Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees. Ian and Prem, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Céline Cantat: Hello.

Prem Kumar Rajaram: Hello.

Bonni: I feel like the first part of our conversation, at least for me, as one who read your book, is important to be precise in our terminology. Prem, would you speak a little bit about what you believe to be just the importance of how precise we are, when talking about displaced learners versus refugees?

Prem: I think one of the things that we try and do in the book, one of the really, I think foundational elements is to think about how ways in which language is used socially and politically can actually be a means of exclusion and marginalization. A term like refugee has on paper, a specific legal definition, but it’s a legal definition that is limited. It doesn’t cover the reality of the refugee movements, of people fleeing persecution and people seeking asylum. On the other hand, the term refugee also loses a lot of its grounding. A lot of it’s mirroring and it becomes almost a derogatory term that’s used in, for example, authoritarian political structures. Then we have this strange duality. On the one hand, a certain call for legal precision that excludes some people in category of refugeeness and in a certain inflation of the concept in ways that really seek to cause pain and harm to people who have experienced displacement.

We try and do two things in the book. In many ways, we try to re-appropriate the term refugee, and the term refugee as a term that describes the manifold and complex histories of displacement that different types of people go through, the types of displacement that are not recognized by legal categories. On the other hand, we also … always use the term displaced by just reminding that if we connect the term refugee to the term displaced, we remind people of the way in which a term refugee has been used, both in this strange limiting and inflationary way and the damage that it causes.

Céline: Prem, if I may just jump in here, Bonni, perhaps to say how this also translates in more concrete frames in which we think our roles as educators in higher education. What we also feel is, that the category of refugee students is a very static category that associates a student learner with a very specific experience, with a very specific care, legal status, as well as their transit. The whole process of this book, is about thinking about transformations within the university, within us as teachers, and instructors, within students hopefully, and even beyond the wall of the universities.

We feel that for instance, in terms of displaced learners, has a lot more fluidity and motion about it, and it allows for different presence and hopefully also different futures in a way which feel refugee perhaps does not.

Bonni: I’d like to read a little section that refers to this as well. Refugee aesthetics, whether produced by or about refugees are bound up in an international discourse of refugee ethics in which refugees are objects of humanitarian concern and require immediate pragmatic solutions. What both of you shared just that temporary label that we place on people in the ways in which it can really be limiting in terms of their present conditions and also futures as well. Thank you for that.

Ian, another thing I know that we definitely need to be thinking a lot about and talking a lot about not just in this context, but certainly here, is the importance of our clearness on the role of education. Could you speak a bit about that?

Ian Cook: Yes, sure. I think about this a lot. I think about it listening to episodes of your podcast. I think about it every day if I have to teach a class, and we think about it a lot, those of us who work in education for displaced learners, is just ask ourselves, “What are we doing and why are we doing it? What’s the purpose of a university? What’s the purpose of education?” Because you can’t forget that very often, because it becomes a job or it just becomes something that you do. For a student, if we can remember back to where we’re students, when were students, we all can because we’re all very young, but then it was like very much the case that sometimes you went to a university excited and at some point during your years at university, might become a bit of a slog. Sometimes you might be doing it just to pass an exam, to get a piece of paper or something like this.

The same can be for educators. At some point you get to the point, you need to get the students from this place to that place so they get this qualification, so they get somewhere in their life. This is important and it’s especially sometimes important for people who are displaced, because sometimes they find themselves very marginalized, very insecure in a completely new country and they need that piece of paper just so they can get on in their life. We don’t want to say, okay, you should forget that. At the same time, when you have such massive radical diversity in your classroom, and by this, I mean people from very different cultural contexts, but also of different ages of very different learning backgrounds. They all come there and you have a classroom and people want to learn and sometimes people want to learn for the sake of learning and that’s really exciting.

It’s really exciting when you have people who might not need to get, or might not be able to get or want to get a qualification, but just want to learn, because maybe they have a job which they feel is a little bit lower what they did back from where they were from. Now they find themselves cleaning dishes, not to put anyone down who cleans dishes, but some people feel like, oh my God, and they come on a weekend to like a Refugee Education Program, and they’re like, “Wow. This is great. I get to learn new things, learn new concepts, really explore new things.” Let their imagination on, and curiosity run wild.

This is brilliant. If we can take that and also imbue that into our education programs more broadly, then it’s brilliant because that’s why we do what we do, that’s why we teach. That’s why we design education programs, because education can be radically transformative, both for individuals, but more importantly, that for communities of people, that’s why I do that. I think it’s fundamentally important for democracy to basically have a populous, which has critical thinking skills, which is excited to learn new things, which knows how to deconstruct the sort of nonsense we often get, we get thrown at us in media and by politicians and elsewhere. Because of that, then get to set the terms of your own place in society.

Both of you are someone who was born in the country, or if you find yourself in and another country because of war or other sorts of reasons that you can’t stay from where you were born. That’s when the purpose of education suddenly becomes really, really important. It forces us to think that not only when we’re thinking about education programs for displaced learners, but I think more broadly when we think about why we wake up every morning and go to work in a university.

Bonni: I know one of the big distinctions that you talk about is to help us see the difference between education programs versus humanitarian programs, and having that separate in our mind as well. Who could speak a little bit about that?

Celine: Maybe I can pick up on this regarding, as Ian was saying, the end goal of education. I think in the process, the definition and the boundaries of education also expand. What we’ve seen in a lot of the programs that we’ve been involved in is that we’ve expanded as domains that we bring to the classroom, to university. We went beyond textbook type of learning to go more into practical, artistic practices, to experiment with different formats, and to try also to find nonverbal ways to bring different forms of knowledges out in the conversation.

This means that we take students as actors of their own education processes, rather than restrictions of it. I think that’s a key difference between developing education programs for learners rather than humanitarian programs for those we often see as beneficiaries or passive recipients of unchanged knowledge that’s just a top-down approach to students. It relates to a question we address, as well, regarding the specificity in that sense of refugee students, or displaced students in our words, but those who are seen as refugees, and for whom very often education is rarely seen as a means to integration.

Integration very often means that we expect the change to happen in the students, but in very specific ways, which are not open-ended, which have a very particular goal, which is their integration into an imagined consistent, stable, static and non-transformative and non-transformable type of social community or polity. The process of learning and of knowledge, both production and reception, is very unilateral when we think of higher education as an integration tool or as a humanitarian approach.

As Ian was saying, our own aim in the book is to recognize the needs for critical students to be very disruptive as learners and to be able to bring to the classroom, to the curriculum, to the syllabi, to their teachers, learners, instructors, and to their peers, radical critique. This requires we really challenge the humanitarian and integration frames, we think.

Bonni: It is not too often that that word, disruptive, is celebrated in that way. Prem, what can you tell us about some of the parallels between other demographics or groups of people who are marginalized based on race, status, class, and other factors?

Prem: Maybe I can try and answer that by picking up on the point that Céline raised about disruptive learners. I think what’s really important is trying to understand how groups of people who have been marginalized in society are often allowed to enter into university if they reframe themselves, if they reframe their past, if they reframe, sometimes, identity, certainly the previous one so that it is recognizable to the mainstream structures of education.

This often means that the disruptive quality of coming from the margins is something that becomes ameliorated. It is in many ways as an act of power, not necessarily conscious like the power, but an act in which university maintains its structures, which we’ll talk about later, maintains its idea of prestige, its ideas of who gets to get into university and for what purposes.

One of the things that often ends up happening is that the disruptive quality of thinking from the margins, of thinking from the position of social structures that are not fully a part of society, it becomes lost in the university. One of the things that becomes important is maybe trying to understand and trying to work with and for people who are at the margins to see how their previous experiences can have a resonance at telling an important disruptive residence in the university leading to broader changes in curricula, yes, in syllabi, yes, but also in the very idea of the university of its purpose and its mission, connecting to the points that were raised earlier by Ian and Céline about opening up the university and making it a space for radical critique from the position of people who have been marginalized.

These groups who are marginalized, they’re often displaced people, but they’re also people who are displaced in other ways. We work with people who’ve been spatially displaced. They’re people who have been displaced from social structures, from economic structures, and from politics. The experience of displacement is common. Our focus is geographical displacement. That intersects with all sorts of other forms of displacement, economic, political, social.

Bonni: Much of our conversation has been reminding me of this, perhaps, overused example, but that too many of us see education as something that is done to someone, versus something that they’re very much a part of. This to me, I think Ian will take us nicely into. I’d love to hear from you a bit about the role of the learner.

Ian: The role of the learner, we would hope is the most important role that we can think of inside the university, as when we think about teaching. When we think about our classrooms as teachers, or even as administrators, I believe we have to try to create classrooms within which the diversity of students’ experiences and knowledges can be brought into conversation through a real attempt to make communication the forefront of the things we work through. If we can do that, then I think, we have great learning moments.

We mentioned before about then disruptive learning and disruptive learners, but I think to put the role of the student front and center, it also means disrupting our teaching practices very often. It’s a wonderful thing to do, I think. We have a lot of the work that we do. We sometimes work with brand new teachers in the sense when we set up education programs for displaced learners, a lot of the teachers that come to teaching them are PhD students who maybe don’t have loads of teaching experience. Sometimes we also have faculty come in, and tenured professors come in and give sessions here and there.

They’re also disrupted by our students, which is wonderful because then you see the students have learned how to be in a classroom in a way which allows their voice to be heard and allows communication to truly take place in a way that can allow for change. What’s key for that is starting from a position sometimes where you don’t know what’s going to happen, where you enter the classroom. Of course, when you teach in any class, you have your lesson plan, and that relates to your broader syllabi and your course plan, and that relates to the broader goals of your department and the program, and so on.

Sometimes when you’re working in programs, which have much less clear defined goals, then the role of the learner almost becomes even more central because if it’s not, then where are you going? Of course, it’s great because you don’t know where you’re going when you went to that classroom, but it’s really then through communication with the learner that you can find your own steps through. I think that’s super exciting for teachers to do.

Bonni: One of the things we know that’s going to happen when we attempt to live up to this promise of what education can be with and through others, is that things are going to get messy. It’s difficult because I feel like too much of the time we end up on one side or the other in real extremes where we can over plan, or we cannot plan at all. That, at least for myself, doesn’t turn me up in very good spaces either. It’s a tension between these two practices, and one should be shaping the other. Céline, I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about just this whole messiness of it all. It definitely comes out in the book.

I encourage people to read the book, but if they haven’t read it yet, what can you tell us about some of the messiness that can ensue when we rethink radically the role of education we spoke about and the role of the learner?

Céline: [chukles] I think as Ian said, if we are willing to open space for learners to be disruptive, we obviously allow for as teachers or instructors to be destabilized. We are, of course, not used to this because of the form of hierarchies that exist inside higher education institutions that structure it. Very often, when we move from being PhD students to teachers, we feel we can safely contain ourselves to the role of teachers that will be less challenged, and perhaps will not be the target of diversity questions or difficult, destabilizing comments and suggestions.

I think for my part, I remember one particular seminar I gave earlier in the early program, which just didn’t work at all. In a way, I wanted to take the students, didn’t happen. They were just questioning the very premises of how I built my old seminar about anti-globalization, social movements, and it just didn’t connect to their own experience. It really made me think, “How do I build syllabi, but also individual lesson plans that take into account and start in a genuine way from the experience of the students and that gives space for students to come in with their own visions. How, as you said, do I build the possibility of evolution within a plan class outline?” I guess, again, it connects with some of what we’ve said about living space for openings and for open-ends and being able to be destabilized and being humble as teachers and not seeing this as a weakness, but rather as a strength. Of course, it’s not easy, especially when you are more junior or your start, but for me, that was one of the most important lessons, and actually I really carry it as a strength in my own professional and teaching experience until now.

Ian: I remember one session about environmental justice, when gathering of questions from the students like, what are the main issues around environmental justice? The usual questions that should come up, but instead one of the students from Afghanistan said, “Well, war and bombs.” The teacher didn’t know how like, oh yes, wait a minute. That’s actually an environmental question. The teacher, who’s a guest speaker faculty, who’s super nice and she’s like, “Oh, wow, what a great calibration of my teaching moment.”

I think it also happens in the level of program design or initiatives as well, and the need to be open is there as well. For example, OLIve, where we’ve all worked, started not as a sole university initiative, but started in a cooperation with a solidarity group from outside the university called MIGSOL Migrant Solidarity. It’s very important that as a university, then there’s an openness to speak to people outside the university so that we can grow as educators, because I think there is a problem.

We mentioned this in the introduction of sometimes we get too much in our bubble inside the university, thinking that we are the site of everything. We are the site of politics. We are the site of change. We are the site of education. Well, we’re a small part of the world. Once you open your doors and let people come in and they push you to try different things, and that’s certainly the case what happened with the establishment of OLIve.

Bonni: Thank you so much for that. You’re bubbling up all these thoughts and ideas. I’d actually like to read another section of the book and then just pose another question to you related to this messiness. I’m reading from your book. “The process was messy and often chaotic from the outset, often mirroring the lives of the women who participated in the project. As academics, we had to learn to unlearn our pursuit of perfection, be ready for constant surprises and help each other unpack those surprises in our debriefing sessions with the aim to move the project further.”

The tension that I’m seeing in this moment is that I don’t think that the goal is that you completely come in with no plans like that there wouldn’t be any endpoint. What I heard, Céline, you say is just that maybe the endpoint gets adjusted, but also perhaps the path on the way we understand better the context, the terrain, I’m not sure if my analogy is going to hold here. I’m thinking about in a class I’m teaching right now, I’ve been teaching some information literacy skills by a guy named Mike Cofield.

He has a whole framework for how any of us can use really simple practices to increase the likelihood of assessing the credibility of the news that we’re reading, and it’s one of those things. I had a young man. He clearly feels very comfortable to confront me and say, “I don’t think I’m ever going to use this after the class.” And I didn’t feel insulted by that. I said to him, and what I hope was a very caring way because I don’t think he was meaning to be rude. Like I said, “I actually think you might be wrong about it, but I’d love to hear like, “Please get back in touch with me.””

I’m wondering if you’ve wrestled with those tensions too where it’s sometimes in our learning, we all can’t see far enough what it’s like to have practiced some of these things, some of the chapters you talk about teaching video production. When you’re creating things, you’re teaching our classes. Whatever it is we’re trying to produce and create, sometimes all learners can’t see a vision for beyond those initial struggles with the learning. Is this resonating at all?

Céline: Well, I think you might answer more to the point, Ian, but I just wanted to pick up on on what you said, Bonni, because I think there’s one very complicated tension for us, which I think came through what we’ve said until now, but the way you put it, I think resonated with me, which is, in the end, if we are trying to prepare displaced students to integrate existing higher education structures, however much we hope that our programs, our initiatives, our reflections, will make them change, we still have to a certain extent to prepare students for those existing structures at one particular moment.

We know those have tendency to marginalize, to exclude, to recognize only certain forms of learning of knowledge. We also need to equip our students to critically understand where they are, where they stand, and how they can perform in that particular setting. That did create tensions and not just in terms of knowledge and learning, but also it got messy in the classroom, it got messy outside the classroom when we tried to administratively register our students. When we tried to get credits and recognitions for the kind of courses that we do, when we try to translate previous university experience before displacement happened so that they get recognized for continuing studies.

There are plenty of levels in which messiness occurred and plenty of improvisation, I think now part and on the part of the other authors. That’s definitely one of the structuring tension I think that we really wrestled with.

Ian: I maybe just wanted to mention the problem of time in this because very often students quite understandably want to get somewhere fast because they want to get themselves on their feet and they want to find things to do within the country where they found themselves other than what they’re doing. Some skills seem quicker to learn, but they’re very important, like language, digital skills, and so on, which is why there’s chapters written by authors that talk about the importance of these things and how programs try to integrate these sorts of skill-based courses into their program design.

Then at the same time, things like critical thinking skills, which are the basis of genuine inclusion in society, they don’t come overnight. They’re related to things about confidence. Of course, they’re related to language as well, but they’re about being exposed also to different ideas, being made to think that your experience and your ideas are also are valid. Being able to have those critiqued and not be defensive about them and stand up for them and then come to some communicative, further point. All of these things don’t happen overnight.

They need sometimes long-term continued work with the students and with the teachers and the administrators as well. I was struck by how often, especially like in the informal weekend programs that we’ve all been involved with, how often students just return again and again and again. Some students, they come, they take a bunch of courses maybe for a semester or maybe for a full academic year, and then they go on, and it’s great. Every now and again, you see them around town, you say, “Hey, how’s it going?” Then you feel good.

Some students, they just come forever [laughs], and that’s also great as well because they feel community, they feel belonging. We also know, like from trauma informed teaching that just having a regular space where people can go every week and feel safe is really, really important. They just enjoy learning. There’s a messiness then how to say of having to create programs that not only account for people’s very different temporal needs in terms of some people in a rush, some people are happy to take it a bit slower, but also in terms of some people will just use a program– user program’s maybe the wrong word, will attend a program and gain valuable skills and learning from it for a year because that’s how the program is designed. Some programs allow for the flexibility for students to come back for many, many iterations of it.

That means that the messiness is built in there as well. That’s actually a wonderful thing. I think embrace the mess is a real important learning lesson. Plan a lot and then if you plan a lot, then you can embrace the mess without being too scared.

Bonni: From this, takes us perfectly to how I’d like to conclude this part of the show and that is to talk a little bit about ideas you have for educators that might even go beyond this particular context. How do we help learners remain curious and empowered?

Prem: Well, maybe I can try and pick up from the points that Céline and Ian raised. We do all of this program that we’ve all thought on and all worked in. It runs two types of programs and I think Céline and Ian both talked about each of these programs. One is a very informal in the best possible sense of word form of cultivating critical inquisitive learners.

The other has a very clear pathway. The idea is to get people into higher education degree programs, which means that educators sometimes– well, we have to teach sometimes very mainstream eurocentric syllabi that do not speak to the experience of students, that do not speak to their disruptive potential. It goes back to the idea of the plan and at the point in which we allow things to get messy, but I think it’s also really important to understand that students do cultivate a strategic, ironic detachment from these plans. They know that they need to learn this and also enjoy university. I think it’s good to reinforce the sense of ironic detachment. I have to do this. It helps me in university, helps me further my life on my own terms. I think this is the role of educator. It’s not simply about cultivating a syllabi. It’s not simply about helping to build a curriculum, but helping students and ourselves understand the power structures that cultivate certain ways of seeing, certain ways of knowing, and certain ways of thinking, and students can maintain this critical, ironic distance from that. I think that’s important.

Then more broadly about may be everything we’ve tried to talk about, everything we’ve tried to write about and authors have tried to write about in the book in terms of what educators can learn, I think one of the things that we try and do is that we say that– the book is called Teaching And Learning With Refugees. As we’ve said before, this is mutual, this interaction, this common relation. One of the things I think that’s really important for educators is that, as we start working with people who are systematically and structurally marginalized from universities in many parts of the world. Then we ask ourselves, if we’re doing this, then are we part of the purpose and the mission of the university? Of course, we are, we’re just picking up on a purpose and a mission of the university that is often clouded, often underfunded or unfunded and left to one side.

What does it mean then if we start thinking that we are working with people who have been excluded, we’re learning from them, we recall curricula, and so on? I think it’s about fundamental, and this is very broad, but about rethinking what the university is. It’s connection to broader society, how when we think about the university, not as a ratified space of exclusive learning or specific types of research, but a way of engaging with our structures of society. As a way of thinking the public role of the university and cultivating democratic knowledge and cultivating democracy, as Iand said right at the beginning.

Perhaps, we can do what we try and talk about in the last part of the book, which is the border at the university, open it up, understand its borders. See where these borders may be. Maybe questioned, rethought, and sometimes broken down.

Bonni: This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. This probably won’t surprise people listening to me, talk about your book. I’d like to begin by recommending that people read Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees. I come to this with very little knowledge of working with this population. I guess I could admit this to the authors or the editors of the book [laughs] wasn’t one that if I hadn’t known, Ian, I think in advance, I don’t know, I would’ve just said “Yes, this is exactly what I want to read on my vacation.”

I’ll tell you the first page in you had me. You had me because these are important questions for us to be asking ourselves. I feel like just continually, you talked about that a little at the beginning, Ian, of just really, really important things for us to be asking. It can be, I don’t know, we can lose sight of that.

I’m going encourage that people read the book. The other thing that I did on vacation is the second thing I’d like to remember. I did a little bit of binge reading and a little bit of binge-watching. I talked to my friend from college and she recommended the television show, Somebody Somewhere, and I’ll read from the description.

“Sam is a true canzon on the surface, but beneath it all, struggles to fit the hometown mold. Grappling with loss and acceptance, she discovers herself and a community of outsiders who don’t fit in, but don’t give up.” Boy, she did not disappoint. My friend from college is always so good about making movie and television recommendations that don’t disappoint and she still is scoring a 100% all these decades later. It’s just a delightful watch. I would highly recommend it and I didn’t realize she had recommended it to me when it had just first come out.

I feel very hip and cool these days, staying with [laughs] what’s popular and emerging in culture, which doesn’t usually happen. I’m making references to movies from the ’70s and ’80s. It was fun to do that for a change. Céline, I’m going to pass it over to you for whatever you would like to recommend.

Céline: Thank you, Bonni. Well, I’ve recently moved back to France, so I’ve been listening to a lot of French radio and reading a lot of French books, and I thought that’s not appropriate to recommend here. I’ve also moved a little bit in discipline and I’ve been working on environmental issues. I’d like to recommend a very nice podcast called Warm Regards, which brings together activists, researchers, policymakers, artists to just try to understand what it means to live in our warming world today, how people adapt, how they mitigate those effects, but also all the stories behind those big words. That’s a really nice podcast, there’s loads of episodes. I think it’s a good listen.

Bonni: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Ian, what do you have to recommend today?

Ian: I’m going to recommend going to have a bath. This is becauseb [laughs] living in Budapest, there are lots of these nice baths. I always was hesitant to go there. When I first moved here like a decade or so ago, I’d go there with my then-girlfriend now-wife, because it was like a date thing to do. Then once you get older and have kids and whatever, there’s less time, but now working very often on a Saturday, because we were in a weekend program, sometimes then I think, “Okay, I need to do something like on a Monday to like de-stress.”

I started going by myself. it’s really good just going to the thermal baths by yourself and sitting in there for a few hours. There’s no distractions from the world. You take some reading, and honestly, I just think much better afterwards. Sitting in a sauna and especially like on a Monday morning, there’s no one there, just retired people. It’s just like me and a bunch of old people sitting in a bath and sitting in a sauna, and it’s just wonderfully blissful. Afterwards, just my brain is just a million times sharper. I’m going to recommend having a bath.

Bonni: Oh, that is a podcast first, has never [laughs] been recommended. Now I’m thinking, when I was in on my vacation when I read your book and watched the television show, I was in a desert called Joshua Tree, it’s in California. They had– I’m going to have to look it up. I’ll put it in the show notes if I can find it. I think it was a noise bath. It was so unusual, I was thinking, “Why would you need a noise bath? I wonder what people do there.” [laughs] They had pictures of it on the advertisement on the website. I don’t think it’s very common for us. At least not in Southern California where I live, to go have a bath. I don’t know where I would do that, but you can bet I’m going to go look and see if I could have a bath somewhere. Besides in my own home, sounds a little weird.

Ian: That’s also good.

Bonni: Yes. My kids would definitely recommend that part. All right. Prem, the pressure’s on now. Do another podcast first, or are we going with an old classic?

Prem: Something a lot more boring the names, but something like that is important. It’s a website called globalsocialtheory.org. It’s a crowdsource collection of thinkers of social theory when we don’t normally read in the university. It’s a focus from the Global South and people who’ve been marginalized like academia for whatever reasons. A nice thing about it is that you can write in with ideas of people whom you think others should read. It’s quite eclectic. That’s a nice thing about it.

Bonni: I feel like we have just come up with the most delightful set of recommendations. I can’t wait till this episode airs and people can find out about your book and more about your work. I’m just so grateful for the connection. Ian, thank you for introducing me to your two colleagues and all your co-authors through your work. This has been delightful.

Ian: Absolute pleasure, Bonni.

Céline: Thank you, Bonni.

Prem: Thank you, Bonni.

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Bonni: As I close out, today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, number 412, I’d once again, like to thank all of you for listening. If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to rate the podcast on whatever service it is you used to listen, I’d greatly appreciate you rating it or giving it some kind of a review to share the podcast with others. IF you’d like to not have to remember to go get the show notes with all the great links and information at teachinginhighered.com/412, you could head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and that’ll subscribe you to the weekly updates.

You’ll get the most latest episodes, show notes, and also recommendations that don’t show up on the episode, related episodes, and other good resources such as that. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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[00:39:32] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.