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Spring 2005

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Citizen Keene
Under a new professorship, Art Keene advances the study of community

—Faye S. Wolfe




	Anthropology professor Art Keene is the first Terrence Murray Professor. The position was established with a $1 million gift from the FleetBoston Financial Foundation in honor of Terry Murray, former chairman of FleetBoston Financial. Believing that the key to success of the honors program is top-notch faculty, the foundation endowed the chair to enable such faculty to develop innovative courses and programs. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

ART KEENE OF THE UMASS Amherst anthropology department has a passion and a gift for finding connections between theory and experience, for bringing them together into praxis. As the first Terrence Murray Commonwealth College Honors Professor, he will combine propensity with opportunity: The professorship allows him to create courses for Commonwealth College, the state’s honors program, which will explore the identity and dynamics of community through praxis.

When Keene came to UMass Amherst in 1979, having just received his PhD in archaeology from the University of Michigan with a dissertation studying small scale societies before the advent of capitalism, he brought with him a professional and a personal interest in community. He was a member of day care, food, and car-repair co-ops at the time. He felt frustrated by the academic dictum that one should keep lived experience separate from scholarly, scientific work. After his first sabbatical, spent on a kibbutz in Israel, where rules about maintaining what educator and sociologist Parker Palmer calls “a divided life” didn’t hold, Keene made a decision. “I merged my roles as a scholar, teacher, citizen, parent, and partner,” he says. Keene ran for Amherst town meeting, began coaching at the high school, and over time has come to focus on cultural and applied anthropology and community service learning. His innovative approach to teaching has led him to develop highly participatory courses, ones where, he says, “the connection of theory to action is built in.”

As the disheveled appearance of his Machmer office indicates—every level surface is stacked with books and papers—connecting theory and action keeps Keene busy. In addition to teaching an introductory anthropology course for majors, he works with two programs related to community service learning that he founded. His approach combines work with community organization and academics, an idea that has been gaining ground in higher education over the last two decades.

Keene codirects the Citizen Scholars Program, sponsored by Commonwealth College, which awards scholarships to students who are integrating their studies with community service. He also directs the Curricular Alternative Spring Break (CASB). The program sends students to rural locales like New Road, Virginia; by painting churches, reading to preschoolers, and otherwise donating their labor, students assist struggling communities and also come face-to-face with social issues. Poverty, racism, and injustice become real when students spend time with families living without heat or indoor plumbing, when they meet fishermen whose livelihood has suffered from pollution of fishing grounds.

“Very creative work is being done in community service learning at UMass Amherst,” says Keene, “some of the most innovative work in the country.”

Thanks to the professorship, Keene will add to the innovation. He will spend the next year creating a course focused on the ethnography of the campus. Students enrolled in the yearlong program will research their peers to develop a collective self-portrait of sorts. In the process, faculty should gain a clearer picture of their students’ backgrounds and beliefs, and the student will gain, says Keene, “useful knowledge, a concrete skill, self-awareness, a new lens, and the satisfaction of knowing that what they discover will have an impact on teaching.” To help design “The Ethnography of Us” course, Keene plans to convene a consulting group of faculty. “Younger colleagues within the Anthropology Department have the creative genius, expertise, and experience to help determine what teachers need to know about their students,” says Keene.

The Murray Professorship will also allow Keene to teach an important course in community organizing that was developed by Marshall Gantz at Harvard University and is currently being taught by UMass Amherst doctoral candidate Mary Hannah Henderson. In the course, students learn how to organize, then put their learning to work on an organizing project of their own devising. Both courses will qualify as Commonwealth College capstone courses—alternatives to completing an honors thesis—and enable students to explore a topic in depth.

“It’s very exciting, having the time to do curriculum development. It’s a luxury, an extraordinary experience,” says Keene. And one guided by a question he’s been asking since his own student days: “How do people find common interests and act on them?”

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