By Cameron Miranda-Radbord It is a real loss for future generations of students in ANT 473 that Professor Li is retiring, but if the course continues to be taught, I have a scintilla of what I think is wisdom: your ethnography may not be everything you hoped it was. When I researched “anthropology disappointment” and … Continue reading
By Cameron Miranda-Radbord What the heck happened to the staff who were supposed to conduct Signature Program Assessments? No, really – as I spoke to a Student Life staff member, I was perplexed by her explanation of why many of the Signature Program Assessments were not completed. Administrators, she told me, had moved departments. If … Continue reading
By Cameron Miranda-Radbord Walk to Simcoe Hall, arrive at 9:10am – late, because administration doesn’t function on UofT time. Listen to financial update. Ask questions. Fight a losing battle against schoolwork that could have been done last night. I approached my ethnography of Accessibility Services from what I consider a unique standpoint – both “below” … Continue reading
By Amani Hassan ‘Student Life’ (SL) and similar student experience-focused entities in universities emerged within the last decade, partly as a response to the importance of “student experience” as a category on international rankings. However, departments such as SL’s Clubs and Leadership Development (CLD) now have an additional significance in the post-pandemic university, as they … Continue reading
By Amani Hassan The concept of the ‘ideal’ student is prevalent in universities, often shaped by expectations that reflect the institution’s prestige and effectiveness. The ideal student is typically understood as diligent, respectful, and engaged—traits that align with a ‘professional’ image. Universities further reinforce these qualities as desirable through scholarships, awards, and recognition. The University … Continue reading
By Angelina Nguyen, Norah Rahman and Richard Wu Our collective fieldwork revealed some ambiguity concerning how student roles are portrayed in Student Life (SL) discourse and how they work out in practice. Below we discuss student roles as labourers, consumers, and advisors. Student as workers: SL employs hundreds of work-study students and spends over a … Continue reading
By Amani Hassan and Hanisha Mistry Staff at the Centre for Learning Strategies Support take pride in the resource library which offers PDF documents on various topics designed to support academic success and help students adapt to university-level learning. Accessing this library involves three straightforward steps: “Student Life Homepage > Departments > Centre for Learning … Continue reading
By Georgia Hanson, Molly McGouran an Yihang Xu If you are familiar with something, how can it be strange? Our individual experiences with fieldwork in Student Life presented us with new avenues through which we could explore this question, each of us gaining a new perspective on the university that we had once so confidently … Continue reading
By Yunshan Li and Georgia Hanson Participant observation is the foundational method of ethnographic research. It requires the researcher to immerse themselves in the field site to gain insights into a culture. However, in the case of our research in Student Life, we were limited from such immersion, barred from participation, and limited to a … Continue reading
By Molly McGouran and Lukey Lu From our first meetings with Student Life administration, it was clear that our participant observation would be different from what we expected. Most of the staff work from home; therefore, much of the programming offered by the Centre for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS), where we conducted our work, was … Continue reading
Ethnography Lab 