Seminars

Susie J. Pak will present the introduction of a manuscript that investigates the stories that universities tell about themselves. A crucial point the book makes is that university storytelling is both integral to and reflective of how universities learn, and by extension, what they teach. The text is concerned with how university storytelling teaches ways of seeing and knowing that also include modeling ways of not knowing, not seeing, not hearing, and not listening, which impact student learning and well-being. In this particular presentation, Pak will introduce an untold story or a story, which belongs to a university and was derived from its archive, but that the university has refused to tell, raising questions about what and why a university would want to limit its knowledge about itself and how and why it would be able to do so. For those of us who work in universities, our presence in these spaces necessarily implicate us in this process of storytelling (including those stories not told), compelling us to consider what its impact has been on ourselves, our research, and on the communities we are purported to serve and have served.