NOW
I’m teaching two courses in July.
- Literacies and Technologies. The tagline for the course is “Podcasing and beyond,” so the course will focus on platforms/processes/etc. that allow for podcasting and transmedia storytelling. The “beyond” part of the course will sample some of the sound studies work and experiments in a sound writing workshop I recently taught, but this summer course will be less adventurous by staying pretty close to the podcasting format.
- Teaching of Writing. No tagline for this course, and it’s a course I’ve taught many times before. This time around, I want to place more emphasis on all the places writing sits throughout a curriculum in addition to final products. As has been the case in the last few years, it’s also essential to address the changing landscape of LLMs and what they mean for writing and teaching of writing.
- I’m writing an article with my friend and colleague Dr. LeConté J. Dill about solidarity exchanges in university classrooms. This is a practice I’ve been doing for a few years now, so the article is a chance to unpack the practice and tease out the ethical commitments that motivate it. LeConté and I have been writing back and forth to one another on a google doc for about a year – a type of epistolary writing between colleagues– exploring this practice and whatever else it spins us off into. We’ve been writing to one another not for the goal to publish but just as an outgrowth of our friendship and mutual respect. When the opportunity to write this piece came along, it made so much sense because it builds easily on what we had been writing and exploring together privately. Pieces that start in a place like that always feel right. The piece is for a special issue in Feminist Formations on “Feminist Visions and Struggles for a Gradeless University.”
- The final (final!) edits for a piece in Ground Works are in motion right now. The piece uses sound, image, music, and media from Forms of Freedom – led Ruth Nicole Brown and I – and is part of the broader arc of my work in emerging genres of scholary communication. The piece is in the copyedit stage, but there has been this interesting challenge about how to develop captions for the sound pieces that are not only accessible but also performative. Here is how I explained the challenge to the editor in an email. The editors have been wonderful in this regard by understanding how accessabilty, performance aesthetics, and tech come together in this dilemma.
- I’m waiting on reviews for two commentary pieces I co-wrote recently about Gulino v. Board of Education, a class action lawsuit that awarded $1.8 billion to Black and Latiné teachers in New York City in response to a racially discriminatory teacher licensure exam. The case has received little scholarly commentary, which is shocking given its magnitude and significance. I was asked to speak about this topic last fall for a small gathering my colleague Bettina Love put together, and it was a welcomed opportunity to order my thoughts about this case that I had been following for quite a while, given my previous work on this topic. There will likely be a full chapter on this case in the next book I write about teacher licensure exams and their relationship to the racial diversity of the teaching profession.
- I’m picking back up a piece I’ve been working on intermittently about charting a way between what I see as the two major paradigms of literacy and English education research. This year, I was the guest facilitator for a #Literacies chat, which was provocatively titled “If literacy is everything now, then what’s literacy?” The questions for the chat were basically the architecture
of this piece, and seeing how the chat unfolded inspired me to pick this piece back up and move it forward.
Here are a few items I have at the top of my reading list this season. Some are connected to projects, and others I’ve simply been wanting to read for a while.
- Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier.
- Musimathics, Vol. 2: The Mathematical Foundations of Music by Gareth Loy.
- "Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism” by Christoph Cox.
- “The Essay as Form” by Theodore Adorno.
- RAMMELLZEE: Racing for Thunder.
On my “fun list” this summer is visiting Dream House, experiencing some of the immersive exhibits at the Tribeca film festival and seeing RZA’s film One Spoon of Chocolate showing there, and catching Lorna Simpson’s Source Notes exhibit at The Met. I’m just about to cross the finish line on a cassette tape project from my single cycles, now officially titled Cycles After Human; it’s totally weird in the best way. I’m putting on a monthly event called Crate Missions at the vinyl bar BierWax in Brooklyn with my good friend J. Rawls too.
[This is a “now page.” What is a now page?]