CHID's Inaugural CLIP Fellows Program

Graduate student instructors and part-time faculty have always played a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the vibrant learning community that is CHID. In recognition of this, the CHID Collaborative Learning and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (CLIP) Fellows Program was created to support their participation in innovative, collaborative teaching and research that incorporates faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in a diverse learning community organized around a central theme. The 2015-2016 academic year will be its inaugural year.

Drs. Nancy White, Kathryn Gillespie, and David Giles are the first CHID CLIP Fellows—their appointments will run through the academic years 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. Through the CLIP program, these three instructors will teach two classes per year and engage in extracurricular activities focused on the theme of “Food, Environmental, and Multispecies Justice.”

In these classes, students will think critically and carefully about how capitalism, racism, sexism, classism, and ecological degradation are (re)produced in society through food and our relationships with animals and the environment. Students will critique the global agricultural industrial complex, animal slaughterhouses, extractive practices like fracking and mining, and other violent agricultural and environmental practices. They will also examine resistance movements and struggles for justice, and evaluate whether they serve to perpetuate the existing system, suggest modest reform, or open pathways for radical systems transformation. They will study food and environmental justice issues at various scales, from the individual human and animal body and local Seattle-based organizations, to U.S. national policies and discourses and the global corporate food regime and resistance movements. Students will engage with literature and film, examine and articulate their own personal ethics and politics, and participate in and reflect on on-the-ground activism and alternatives.

The 2015-2016 CLIP courses will be the following:

FALL 2015

• CHID 250: Exploring Human and Nonhuman Animal Bodies in Literature and Film (with Nancy White & Katie Gillespie)

WINTER 2016

• CHID 480: Life in Excess: Waste, Want, and the Politics of Surplus (David Giles)

SPRING 2016

• CHID 250: Animals, Environment, Food and Justice (Katie Gillespie)
• CHID 250 Eating in the City: Food, Ethics, and the Urban Environment (David Giles)
• CHID 490: Food for Thought (Nancy White)

About the Fellows:

David Giles’ research experience includes five years of ethnographic participant-observation in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Melbourne (Australia), and smaller North American cities, with chapters of Food Not Bombs—a globalised movement of autonomous groups that scavenge, glean, or dumpster-dive for food discarded by local markets, distribute it freely in public places, and in the process contest local geographies of homelessness and disparity. This research reflects his commitments to an anthropology that is both public and politically-engaged. His teaching interests have included the Political Economy of Homelessness, Urban Studies, Protest, the History of Liberal Political Philosophy, Post-Colonial Studies, Existentialism, and the Anthropology of Popular Culture. He has also studied and performed extensively within a range of musical traditions, including free jazz, ska, and punk rock. And he is an avid fan of the television show Doctor Who.

Kathryn (Katie) Gillespie (PhD, Geography UW) is a part-time lecturer at UW in Geography, Honors and CHID. Her work explores geographies of food and agriculture and structures of power and privilege related to nonhuman animal lives, bodies and deaths. She is working on a book, The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 [under contract with University of Chicago Press], about the lives of cows in dairy production in the Pacific Northwestern United States. She is co-editor of Critical Animal Geographies [Routledge, 2015] and Economies of Death [Routledge, 2015].
 

Nancy C. White’s research and scholarship focus on new media, cinema studies, popular culture, textual theory, and classics. She received a Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Textual Studies in 2011 from the University of Washington, along with Doctoral Certification in the Cinema and Media Studies Program and the Program in Theory and Criticism. Dr. White has taught English, Comparative Literature, Film, Comparative History of Ideas, and Classics courses, both at the University of Washington in Seattle and at Hunter College in New York on topics such as comics, food, mythology, the undead, and detective fiction, amongst others.