Collective Meeting - November, 25, 2013

Collective Meeting Minutes 
Monday, November 25, 2013

In attendance: Dave Henderson, Jorge Leal, Cherry Lui, Johanna Peterson, Johnathan Abreu, Teresa Walch, Nick Hirsch, Mary Klann, Michele Brewster, Sarah McCullough

Sarah McCullough, Associate Director, UCSD Center for the Humanities
Sarah McCullough came to the Collective meeting to ask about what needs we have as graduate students and what we would like to see from the Center for the Humanities. The Center for the Humanities is geared towards helping people connect beyond our own departments and for promoting research by providing resources (including grants and funding) and services for reviewing grant applications. Sarah asked us what we would like to see from the Center for the Humanities. 

Jorge Leal mentioned our upcoming Collective speaker, and noted that we would like to hold a graduate student workshop in conjunction with the speaker’s academic talk, where the speaker would be able to speak to different issues of professionalization, transitioning from grad school to the academic job market, and tips for navigating the graduate school process. Sarah noted that the Center for the Humanities could play a role in promoting the speaker to a wider audience outside of the History department. 

Mary Klann mentioned that the Center for the Humanities’ grants page is a good resource and more options for research funding would be useful for graduate students. Sarah noted that the grants page is currently being re-vamped to be a more easily searchable database. She also noted the Office of Research’s database, Pivot, as being a good resource although it is such a large-scale search database that it can be overwhelming. The Center for the Humanities is considering having a workshop about how to access this tool. She also noted that she is able to review grants and give tips on how to reconfigure the grant to address the specificity of the particular call for funding. 

Sarah also mentioned an upcoming broad-based humanities calendar that the Center for the Humanities is putting together, as a place to see all the humanities related events on campus. It would be easy to access and easy to update with other events that would appeal to humanities students on campus. 

Nick Hirsch asked about opportunities relating to connecting people thematically across disciplines for workshops and funding. Sarah noted two options that the Center for the Humanities currently has available:

• Research groups that are funded by the Center for the Humanities, which provides opportunities for graduate students and faculty to meet and discuss research. There is a new call for these groups every year, so be sure to look out for it in the future.
• Weekly informal “conversations” (every Monday at noon, lunch/snacks usually provided). These are a low-level commitment to interdisciplinary conversations, and the Center for the Humanities is currently looking for suggestions for scholarly and practical topics that could be featured. The idea is to bring people from different departments together to have a discussion. This would be an ideal place to have a conversation with faculty members that we don’t know that well, especially from other departments. 
• Topics for conversations could be scholarly or methodological topics, or more “nuts and bolts” topics like how to access grants, use archives, etc. 
• Sarah is currently soliciting ideas for upcoming talks, and if anyone has an idea please email her at smcc@ucsd.edu. 
• She pitched it as a good tool to get to know different faculty better. If we have a certain idea and a faculty member in mind we can contact them directly, or the Center for the Humanities could contact them and invite them. 
• Possible workshop ideas we discussed included one on mentoring relationships and forming committees; the mechanics of research style and writing (including tips for how to use specific programs and software); technology and archival methods. 

Sarah encouraged everyone to “like” the Center for the Humanities Facebook page, where she frequently posts notifications of grants, upcoming talks, and articles of interest. 
The Center for the Humanities website is: http://humctr.ucsd.edu.

Collective Blog Updates
As a group we discussed possible ideas about how to improve our new Collective blog. 
Ideas included: 

• link to the website in the about page of the Collective Facebook group and a link to the Facebook group in the blog
• place for polls to be used when voting for the upcoming Collective speaker
• page or link on the blog that describes what the Collective is and a copy of the Constitution
• space for prospective students to find links to current student emails if they have questions
• info page on Admit Day activities and schedule
• link to the blog in the departmental website

Note - If anyone else has suggestions, please leave a note in the comments below!

Collective Speaker Nominations
Due to budget concerns, we decided to once again limit the nominations to speakers coming from West of the Mississippi. 
The nominations do not have to solely be for traditional academics - if people have in mind activists, authors, or independent scholars please feel free to nominate them as well. 
An email will go out to the list-serve specifying the nomination process -- commenting on the post in the blog with the name, affiliation, and a brief description of the scholar’s work. Field group reps should be encouraging nominations from their respective field group members. 
The deadline for nominations is Week 10 (Tuesday, December 3) and by finals week we should have the voting process completed. 

The speaker will ideally be coming to campus in the first few weeks of Spring Quarter. Hopefully we will also be able to hold a more informal grad student lunch workshop in addition to the talk, for purposes of professionalization and asking the speaker questions about applying for grants, jobs, and the grad school process. 

Miscellaneous
Lastly, we discussed obtaining from Amber a list of emails of grad students by field group to be used by field group reps. 
The GSA Social hosted by History on November 15 was well-attended, although the space (GSA Lounge) is a little small. We discussed the possibility of holding the next social in the Mandeville Suite instead of the GSA Lounge. 

The next Collective meeting will take place during the first few weeks of Winter Quarter.