Creating Our Better Selves: The Fruits of Katie Cannon’s Womanist Pedagogy

Katie Geneva Cannon equipped generations of students with analytical tools to reckon with the past and present and to creatively construct previously unimaginable futures. Her body of work teaches us to find new paths as we critically plumb our own historically situated epistemologies and put them in conversation with a variety of traditions. As my teacher, dissertation advisor, and mentor during my graduate studies in religion at Temple University from 1993-2000, Dr. Cannon taught me to examine rigorously my own story in its larger historical and geopolitical contexts, to parse the privileges and perils of pursuing the academic study of religion as a white woman, and to engage deeply with multitudinous ways of knowing. See companion contributions to this Forum written by Edwin David Aponte, Miguel A. De La Torre, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, and Angela D. Sims.

Creating Our Better Selves: The Fruits of Katie Cannon’s Womanist Pedagogy

Katie Geneva Cannon equipped generations of students with analytical tools to reckon with the past and present and to creatively construct previously unimaginable futures. Her body of work teaches us to find new paths as we critically plumb our own historically situated epistemologies and put them in conversation with a variety of traditions. As my teacher, dissertation advisor, and mentor during my graduate studies in religion at Temple University from 1993-2000, Dr. Cannon taught me to examine rigorously my own story in its larger historical and geopolitical contexts, to parse the privileges and perils of pursuing the academic study of religion as a white woman, and to engage deeply with multitudinous ways of knowing. See companion contributions to this Forum written by Edwin David Aponte, Miguel A. De La Torre, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, and Angela D. Sims.

It Must have been Burnout: Prevalence and Related Factors among Spanish PhD Students

Recent studies in different countries indicate that PhD students are more vulnerable to psychological disorders compared to the general population. No such data are available for the Spanish population. This study addresses this issue by studying prevalence rates and factors related to a common response to prolonged stress such as burnout syndrome. Burnout, emotional abilities, resilience, satisfaction with the dissertation advisor, and sociodemographic data were collected from 305 PhD students. The results indicated that the burnout rates are high in this group, especially for the emotional exhaustion dimension. Different linear regression models explained between 14% and 41% of the overall burnout scores variance and its dimensions. The psychological variables and the satisfaction with the dissertation advisor were the most relevant predictors. Consistent with what has been found in other countries, the evidence found indicates that the mental state of PhD students in Spain is alarming. The results of this study have important implications for the design and implementation of interventions to alleviate this problem.

The Intersection of Andragogy and Dissertation Writing

Andragogy is a theory that attempts to explain how adults learn in contrast with pedagogy which attempts to explain how children learn. In many universities, doctoral students struggle to complete the final requirement for graduation, the dissertation. Little research has been conducted on this issue. Two studies were conducted to assess the effectiveness of the ten-year-old doctoral program in education at the author's university. The author believes that using andragogy theory it is possible to modify the doctoral program to allow a higher percentage of students to complete their dissertation and for all students to experience less frustration with the process. Both interviews and statistical analysis were used to better understand what was working, what was not, and to suggest potential modifications to the program. Certain variables such as dissertation advisor, emphasis area, and previous teachers proved to not be significant. A student's reported self-motivation emerged as significant.

Kokoro Confidential

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Edwin McClellan (1925–2009) translated into English the most famous novel of modern Japan, Kokoro (1914), by Natsume Sōseki. This essay tells the story of how the translation emerged from and appealed to a nascent neoliberal movement that was led by Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), the Austrian economist who had been McClellan’s dissertation advisor.

Once Upon a Time in Ecuador: Memories of Miki

I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1961, joining the relatively new Department of Anthropology under the direction of Joseph B. Casagrande. Muriel (Miki) Crespi (nee Kaminsky) had already been a graduate student for a full year. We became fast friends immediately. Shy, timid, quiet, and midwestern, I was not exactly a likely running buddy. But from the beginning, she was my mentor. After all, she was already wiser in the mysteries of graduate school; and as time passed, I came to know her as a wonderfully warm, intelligent woman from New York who also happened to be Jewish. I had never before connected with anyone who was so urbane and effortlessly gregarious. Mick's and my friendship further blossomed in our shared selection of Dr. Casagrande as our dissertation advisor and of Ecuador as our fieldwork area. Early on, Miki knew she wanted to study the impact of land reform on a government-owned hacienda high in the Ecuadorian sierra, working primarily with Indios or campesinos. She saw nothing out of character to live at an elevation of 11,000 feet, nor to speak Quechua. She left Illinois briefly to go to Cornell to learn the rudiments of Quechua. (Later she was devastated to find that the Quechua taught at Cornell was a different dialect altogether.)