Founding convenor of Weaponised Etiquette, a field she is fond of describing as "paradigm-defining" and which currently has one department, hers.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University Department of Applied Incivility
- p.vance@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for anything about the course's shape or its marking; bring week-to-week questions to a Drop-in Session instead.
Dr. Vance spent eleven years studying crowd behaviour before concluding that the interesting data was in the exceptions, not the crowd, and founding Weaponised Etiquette on that basis alone — a field she describes, in every introductory lecture, as “paradigm-defining,” despite it having produced, by her own department’s count, one undergraduate course and no other departments anywhere else in the world.
She holds strong, frequently restated opinions about the elevator door-close button (week 3) and weaker ones about almost everything else, which she nonetheless delivers with identical conviction. In the department’s founding year she used to describe it as “running a department of one and a half people” — a line that stopped being accurate somewhere around hire number four, and that she now only trots out to make the newer staff wince, followed immediately by a reminder that she remains, as founding convenor, “the field’s principal theorist.”
Consultation hours are posted on the Drop-in Sessions page each teaching period; email gets a reply inside two working days, usually accompanied by a citation to her own prior work.