Simon Hawkins
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
E-mail: shawkins@fandm.edu
Phone: 717 358-4674
Fax: 717 358-4500
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1987
M.A. (Education), The George Washington University, 1992
M.A. (Anthropology), University of Chicago, 1997
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2003
Interests: Social anthropology; language and culture; nationalism and globalism; anthropology of education; North Africa and the Middle East.
Courses: Social Anthropology; Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa; Language and Culture; Anthropological Methods; Language, Power, and Society; Words as Sound and Symbol; Schools and Social Domination.
Condensed Academic and Professional Career
After graduating with a BA in Anthropology, I was not quite sure what career path I wanted to follow, although I was fairly certain that I did not want to become an academic. I thought about law school, and worked as a paralegal for a year, but found it uninspiring. After a year or so of paralegaling, some traveling, and other adventures, I decided on the Peace Corps. This was something of a return to my interests in anthropology, a desire to learn more about people and the world. I ended up in Tunisia more or less randomly. There was an opening, and I took it. (I thought to myself, "Tunisia, a former French colony, Arab population, in North Africa. The food must be great." And it was.) I served as a general agricultural agent in a small community of about 40 families near the central Tunisian town of Feriana.
Returning from Tunisia I decided to teach and began a Masters in Education at The George Washington University. At the same time I worked as a freelance researcher for National Geographic, working on educational CD-ROMS. Eventually I got a position teaching social studies at Suitland High School in Prince Georges County, Maryland outside of Washington, DC. The teaching was sometimes exciting (I recall building the Alps out of classroom desks when discussing Hannibal's exploits), but some of the other chores of high school teaching were less appealing. After my first year, I took a summer job as a research associate for a DC think tank, The National Center for Improving Science Education, and stayed on when the school year began again. I continued there for a few years, but came to realize that I wanted more. I enjoyed the research, but felt that the methodology and questions used in educational research did not address the issues that interested me. Further, I missed teaching.
So I left my rather comfortable professional life in DC to return to graduate school in anthropology at the University of Chicago with the eventual goal of obtaining a position at a small liberal arts college. Focusing on Tunisia seemed like an obvious decision and one I have never regretted. While completing my dissertation, I was offered a temporary job at Montana State in Bozeman. It was a wonderful place, with a truly diverse community of students, and I very much enjoyed my time there, but there was no full time position. That was followed by a temporary position at Vassar, which was also very enjoyable, not least because it marked my return to the kind of college in which I wanted to teach. From Vassar I was able to win this tenure track position at Franklin and Marshall.
Research
My doctoral dissertation focused on language learning in Tunisia. Tunisians have long prided themselves on their cosmopolitan knowledge of the rest of the world and command of languages; however, there are differing perspectives on what it means to learn a language and what learning a language is for -- does one prove competence through school exams or through communicating with people? Further, different languages have different ideological associations, such that English, French, and Arabic can be seen as very different kinds of entities by Tunisians, although different Tunisians will have different associations. The understandings of language and learning in turn relate to contested ideas about national identity and forms of power and authority. While much of my work focuses on language, I am less concerned with the niceties of formal linguistics than with language as a repository of social and cultural meaning. Why, for example, do Tunisian teenagers say English sounds romantic? Why are Tunisian teenage girls accused of speaking French too much and why do some people get very upset about this? Why do Tunisians call English the language of science and technology, but end up doing so much work in these areas in French?
The site for my dissertation was somewhat amorphous. I taught at the University of Tunis and with the British Council, took courses with Tunisians at the Bourguiba School, and interviewed people throughout Tunis. My current project has a far more specific geographic focus. I work in a plaza at the center of the old city of Tunis, the medina. Beyond being the symbolic heart of the city, it is a major tourist destination. During my initial trip in the summer of 2006, I was initially interested in the ways that tourists and merchants used language in their interactions, however my focused quickly expanded as I found myself doing something closer to a standard ethnography of a small community, albeit one nested in a much larger community. So far my writing has addressed specific facets of the community, but it is my goal to unite them all into a more comprehensive book. The core members of the group are the men (women do work in the medina, but not in the plaza) working in the various shops lining one side of the plaza.
The larger community includes a wide range of hustlers, civil servants, students, and others who stop by the plaza to conduct business or hang out with friends, often in the adjacent coffee house. And of course, the sporadic stream of tourists.
It is a diverse collection of people, but one that has never failed to generously welcome me. My status as a quasi-member of the group was solidified by a Geertzian near tragedy in the summer of 2006. One hot afternoon, the massive tile-covered wooden awnings along one wall of the plaza began to creak ominously before crashing down. Thankfully no one was hurt (it is unlikely that anyone would have survived the crashing impact). In the stunned aftermath, I took a few pictures, before joining the community in cleaning up.
Soon the police arrived and began clearing the area. Only those with a reason to be there were allowed to remain, but no one tried to shuffle me along. I was deemed to be among the people who belonged there. (That's me in the white shirt in the back.)
I eventually printed many copies of those initial pictures, as they were the only record of the event. The head of secret police for the area was given a copy and gave me a nod and a thumbs up (at an official level he could not talk to me, as I am not supposed to know who he is), and when I came back the next year for Ramadhan, I was introduced to the owner of several of the shops as the one who had taken the photos. I soon became a regular member of his table in the coffee house.
Publications
1994. Michelsohn, Arie and Simon Hawkins. "Current Practice in Science Education of Prospective Elementary School Teachers" in The Future of Science in Elementary Schools. Senta Raizen and Arie Michelsohn (eds.). San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Inc.
1996. Hawkins, Simon, Matthew Gandal, and Edward Britton. "Examination Systems in Seven Countries" in Edward Britton and Senta Raizen (eds.). Examining the Examinations. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
1996. Britton, Edward, Simon Hawkins, and Matthew Gandal. "Comparing Examination Systems" in Edward Britton and Senta Raizen (eds.). Examining the Examinations. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2008. Hawkins, Simon. "Non-national Englishes and their Alternatives: Academics and the Internet in Tunisia," International Journal of Multilingualism, V. 5, N. 4, pgs. 357-374.
2008 "Hijab: Feminine Allure and Charm to Men in Tunis," V. 47, N. 1, pgs. 1-21, Ethnology.
Forthcoming. Hawkins, Simon. "Cosmopolitan Hagglers or Haggling Locals? Salesmen, Tourists, and Cosmopolitan Discourses in Tunis," City and Society.
Forthcoming. Hawkins, Simon. "National Symbols and National Identity: Currency and Constructing Cosmopolitans in Tunisia," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
