Anne Rademacher - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Anne Rademacher
Technical University of Munich

Dear Shivi, 

The decades are many, but the moment stays clear: I rise before my fellow graduate students, before faculty, before deans and provosts and parents and alumni with a message more powerful than my nervous trembling. I’m announcing the students’ choice for the FES graduate teaching award, and the recipient is, of course, you. I remember that moment because for so many of us, it was our chance to set our gratitude into an institutional choreography of recognition; for so many of us, it was a way to amplify our sense of unspeakable good fortune for having learned together in one (or several) of your transformative Yale seminars. The sharp contours of that awardmemory snapshot will forever hold me first and foremost as a student shaped by your teaching and mentorship, even as that sense of grateful good fortune would later multiply across the many decades we have worked together in collaborative explorations of ecologies of urbanism. 

As a student, I knew then, and know ever more fully as I walk my own scholar-life pathway, the field-changing and impossibly comprehensive depth of your contributions to the intellectual lives of history, anthropology, environmental studies, and their many, many tendrils. But I also knew then, and know ever more fully now, the extraordinary gift of you as a model for what is possible and desirable in our shared vocation. You have shown us that one can live an anthropological practice in which research is possibility, creativity is an imperative, and scholarly responsibility is a given. You have shown us that steadfast integrity is not only thinkable, but livable. You have modeled, and continue to show us, how to truly come together in learning communities that forge radical new ways of mobilizing research commitments as action in the world. 

Our shared pathway through ecologies of urbanism leaves three volumes to the archive, but its imprint is far fuller and livelier than our books can ever contain. It leaves me with a deep well of further wonderings, core questions that anchor all of my thinking about ‘natures made, and made meaningful,’ and a vastly textured tapestry of colleagues and friends with whom the pathway is now shared. 

How, then, can I do more than tell you that you have been for all of us a marvel, a mentor, a model, a friend? We can try to fit it into awards and celebrations and written words, but in the end our gratitude to you lives through us, rising every day to think, to write, to teach, and to be in the learning communities that transforms us. 

Thank you, Shivi, for guiding us beyond our given ways of wondering, beyond our given categories and ways of knowing. Thank you for the gift of you as a mentor, a scholar, a colleague, a collaborator, and above all, a friend.