Concept

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Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase Global Village circa 1964 in reference to the way electric media had, even by then (e.g., prior to the internet) interconnected the entire planet. We are revisiting and working with McLuhan's concept in light of current events and circumstances.

We are also working with the Montagnard community the North Carolina Piedmont region --part of the global village in our own backyard, so to speak. Many Montagnards came to NC after the war in Vietnam ended, bringing with them rich cultural and artistic traditions that we are learning about and entering into dialogue with. 

Our basic approach is to explore and document the intersection of McLuhan and Montagnards in contemporary life by taking a human-relationships/social-networking based approach that we are calling inside-out or autobiographical anthropology. Rather than starting with abstractions (culture, identity, etc.) we are starting and staying with actual people, their stories, and interactions. 

This project is inevitably situated within the current discussion and experimentation about the fate of formal education in the 21st century. With so many of us now having ample, constant access to vast amounts of information and perspectives, what becomes of schools? The response this project offers is, in part, that schools can be re-contextualized as 'nodes' in a larger network that includes social service agencies, online information, and personal and professional social networks. In other words, what becomes of schools in the 21st century? They become networked in a way that is much deeper and expansive than having the internet in every classroom, integrating technology into teaching and learning, etc.

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