Show and Tell

It started out with an exemplary pedagogical exercise: “show and tell.” As a way to commence our seminar, we were all asked to bring objects to the SAA seminar room. Those writing essays were put to the challenge of somehow bringing their chosen object into the conference room, a task which proved quite simple for those who had selected tiny and compact objects and rather daunting, or loosely followed, in the case of those hunting larger, more elusive, legally touchy, or medically toxic objects. For the respondents, the task was far more open-ended: we could bring any object we wanted that might exemplify our own response to the open rubric of “objects and environs,” itself an already capacious formulation.