{"id":270,"date":"2017-09-03T08:37:32","date_gmt":"2017-09-03T12:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/?p=270"},"modified":"2017-09-17T10:21:50","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T14:21:50","slug":"on-boats-and-ideas-and-stepping-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/2017\/09\/03\/on-boats-and-ideas-and-stepping-away\/","title":{"rendered":"On Boats and Ideas and Stepping Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a framed black-and-white photograph in my office that depicts Tim White, a former head of the Workshop on the Water at Philadelphia\u2019s Independence Seaport Museum<\/a>, fitting a centerboard case into a wooden boat under construction in his shop. I took the photo myself way back in 1995 while doing field research for my undergraduate thesis project. It captures at least two moments. One is evidentiary: a simple act of boatbuilding. The other is more oblique: a young photographer in a strange city, excited by ideas, fascinated by boats, and emboldened by the documentarian\u2019s gaze.<\/p>\n

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Tim White in the Independence Seaport Museum Boat Shop, Philadelphia, PA, October 27, 1995.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was that second moment\u2014not the first\u2014that I went hunting around for in my old field notes sometime toward the end of my first year on the tenure track. I had come full circle, landing back in Philadelphia after years away. And yet, life and work in the university hadn\u2019t turned out to be quite what I hoped for. Despite some bright spots, I found myself pretty quickly surrounded by unclear expectations, combative colleagues, and worse than crippling bureaucracies. Disciplinary orthodoxies turned out to be far more entrenched than I had suspected. More broadly, the in-crowd hierarchies that prevail across academia wore deeply on me, and still do. I found it harder and harder to recall what it was like to be excited by ideas, to be fascinated by anything, to be bold.<\/p>\n

The photo of the boat shop, I hoped, would be a reminder, encouragement to revisit the things and places that had put me on this course years ago. And so it was. Before long I had reacquainted myself with the Seaport Museum, finding there colleagues who remain today among my most valued. I even dusted off some old boat research and found a few new projects along the way.<\/p>\n

But the most important memories buried within that old photo had less to do with WHAT ideas excited me back then, than with HOW I got excited about ideas in the first place. I thought about the museums that thrilled me when I was a kid. I thought about how much I loved woodshop in high school. I thought about learning to do field research at the American Folklife Center<\/a> and with the National Park Service<\/a>. And I thought about professors I had respected for abandoning the classroom whenever it made more sense to show students how things work than to tell them.<\/p>\n

Since then I\u2019ve sought in my teaching to flee campus, or at least to get out of the classroom, whenever possible. I\u2019ve tried it all: fieldtrips, outreach<\/a>, partnerships<\/a>, scavenger hunts, bus rides<\/a>, walking tours, digital meet-ups, throwing pots<\/a>, really whatever it takes. This semester I\u2019m pushing further by staging an entire semester of course meetings at, where else, the Independence Seaport Museum. More than two decades since taking that photo of Tim White in his shop, I\u2019m returning to the same spot with my own students to stage the LESLEY Documentation Project<\/a>. Tim\u2019s not there any more, but the boats are, and so is the shop, and amid all of it we\u2019re getting excited about ideas that are all but impossible to conjure in the stubborn fixity of a seminar room.<\/p>\n

The modern American university is a difficult place, run through with contradictions and inequity. Much that is good remains there, but I\u2019ve become convinced that to find it we must step away as often as we can. Doing so, in my case anyway, amounts to an act of self-preservation. And for my students, especially in this age of anger and anxiety, learning to preserve ourselves may just be the most important lesson.<\/p>\n

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Seth Bruggeman interviews Tim White, Independence Seaport Museum Boat Shop, Philadelphia, PA, October 27, 1995. Photo by Chad Mahood.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

_____<\/p>\n

A bibliography of the rise, fall, and rise of my excitement about maritime pasts:<\/p>\n