Trying the Way: Ethnographic Glimpses of York University
Book by Prof. Penny van Esterik and Dr Laurie Baker is now available for free download. In the public media, universities are often targets of anti-intellectual rants; but criticism of universities often comes from people who are not familiar with the complexity of university cultures. They felt that as anthropologists they should be able to capture and communicate that complexity by writing an ethnography. Underlying this intention was a concern that neither national surveys, nor Maclean’s ranking of Canadian universities, nor public relations branding campaigns could capture the essence of York culture or counter anti-York writing in the media. York was not well served by these approaches, and we thought that an ethnography might do better. The product of this project is the book “Trying the Way.” This book was meant to complement the history produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary of York in 2009 (Horn 2009). It is available as a free download here.
For more detail see our “Ethnography of the University” page.