BA in Individualized Studies Program
My life's course might appear meandering. To earn my livelihood, I've been a nurse and midwife, an aid and development worker, and an academic environmental historian, as well as a math tutor, a waitress, a library worker, and an archaeologist. Along the way, I've done a lot of unpaid work as a union organizer, a peace activist, a speaker on food issues, an anarchist bookstore collective member, and a homeschooling mother. The underlying unifier to all my ventures is a drive to make connections between abstract theory and everyday experience: between gender politics and the intimate lived realities of birth and breastfeeding; between the sociology of knowledge and how my daughter learns to ride a bike; between social power struggles and the soil biota in a farm field. I believe that to take effective action in the world, we must knit the fragmented knowledge offered to us by mainstream worldviews back into a single whole. Trying to apply the classic feminist insight that "the personal is political" continues to provoke fascinating questions and answers for me, and informs my life, activism and work.
Lest I appear too serious, let me point out that I love the peaceful domestic arts of sleeping, knitting, gardening, bicycling, New Year's mumming with the Vaudevillains New Year's Brigade and going to my husband's punk rock gigs.
I'd love to work with Goddard students who want to ask hard questions about familiar realities. I hope to think with students about how the intellectual content of 'academic' work can enable us to re-imagine and change the world around us. Fields I feel especially comfortable in include environmental studies, agriculture and food systems, and philosophies of history (historiography). I'm currently obsessed with popular historical consciousness, the sociology of science and reading about alternative educational theory. As I still work as a nurse-practitioner at a free-standing birth center and homeschool my 8 year old daughter, I also particularly welcome the chance to explore feminist women's health and issues of institutional education with students.
Educational Background : PhD in World Environmental History, Temple University; BA in Sociology, Temple University; AAS in Nursing, Community College of Philadelphia; Certificate in Midwifery, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
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Eva Swidler, PhD