Every Wednesday, within the walls of the Ashmolean Museum, the Krasis Scholars gather for an object-centred symposium – and a cup of tea.
Devised by classicist Dr Sam Gartland and Teaching Curator Dr Jim Harris, Krasis is an interdisciplinary, museum-based teaching and learning programme for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at the University of Oxford. Each termly iteration addresses one overarching theme, ranging from ‘Power and Imitation’ to ‘Absence’, with each afternoon symposium led from the disciplinary specialty of one of the eight Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellows. The fellows and scholars, weaponed with notebooks and underneath the eye of Dr Harris, explore first-hand how the Ashmolean’s objects, galleries, and collections can teach what you do not yet know.
In this conversation with Dr Harris, we discuss why he brought the symposium back to life in the Ashmolean.
“Krasis,” Dr Harris tells me, “is a Greek word meaning ‘a good mixture.’ The name is perfect for it.” The name aptly reflects the purpose of the program as a series of disciplinarily-mixed symposia – an admittedly Grecocentric framing, favored by classicist Dr Gartland.
But why create such a program? Dr Harris tells me that the point is “knowledge creation… knowledge exchange. We have people from anthropology, linguistics, and all sorts of disciplines; there’s you – a philosopher and theologian. They’re able to bring an informed perspective and answer the same question in eight different ways, depending on who they are. And that is exciting. So that’s the point of Krasis, and why I do it is because of the point of it.” And, above all, “because it’s fun!”
Part of this programme’s aim is to ensure that participation in Krasis remains undemanding for all involved. The scholars and fellows, all Oxford students or academics, are “already under the cosh all the time,” Dr Harris tells me. You might be asked to complete a short reading beforehand, or watch a play, or perhaps even listen to music, but otherwise the only requirement is to bring your mind – sharpened and prepared to bear.
This term, the 23rd iteration of Krasis, the theme is beauty. At the start of every term, the teaching fellows meet with Dr Harris to choose the theme and discuss how they might bring their research to bear on the theme. Then they think about kinds or types of objects, resources, collections, and galleries to use for the symposia. “Sometimes,” Dr Harris tells me, “the joy is that we’ve got exactly the thing they need. But sometimes we do have to think more laterally about things.” But that, to teaching curator Dr Harris, is one of the most exciting things – to see how the collections can be drawn on, to see how never-used-before objects can be put to work in teaching. “The objects have just been sitting there,” Dr Harris tells me, “kind of waiting for the right person to come and look at them.” In this sense, the Ashmolean space itself shapes the kinds of conversations in Krasis. If the symposia took place elsewhere – “Pitt Rivers, for example” – there would be a vastly different array of material to work with, and would “no doubt” attract a different kind of participant and a different kind of teaching fellow.
So far, our symposia have taken us from the witch-hunts of the early modern period to the mythic culture of the viking age. At first glance, neither era seems particularly concerned with ‘beauty’ as we now understand it. But after studying a fascinating array of objects – The Four Witches (1497) by Albrecht Dürer, Viking brooches, and the like – I came to see things differently. The early modern witch hysteria echoed the Platonic view of aesthetics as morally charged; consider the stereotypical image of a witch: an ugly, decrepit female whose external appearance reflects internal moral corruption. On the other hand, the art of the Viking Age shows its rich decorative traditions: beasts, filigree, ornamentation, runestones, stave churches, all following conceptions of beauty preserved in Old Norse literature.
None of the things which we conventionally want to know about the object – who made it? How did it get here? – are accessible in the study room. We don’t read a label or understand the object in relation to a gallery or other objects. The object is, effectively, “mute.” This exactly is the benefit: There is a lot to be understood simply from examining an object. There is a life to be established, a life which you cannot establish from a simple lecture or pre-reading.
During the symposia, I noticed that Dr Harris takes a back seat: he observes us quietly and with a smile. When I ask him why this is, he laughs. “Because it’s not mine,” Dr Harris explains to me, “I can’t quite get stuck in it the way that I would like to. That’s not my job in this; it’s not to steer the symposia, but to labor it. The ‘sinister lurking’ is the outcome.”
Why should a student think about becoming a Krasis participant? Dr Harris tells me that “there’s something liberating about being in a place where you have the chance to think, but where there is no demand on you, and where you are not being assessed.” He also hopes that the fellows take away a confidence and a capacity to bear upon their teaching.
The museum should be a place of teaching, learning, and human ingenuity. “Because the museum otherwise,” Dr Harris concludes, “is in danger of dying.”
