NOW
I’m teaching two doctoral courses this winter.
Foundations of Critical Whiteness Pedagogies
Covers foundations of critical whiteness studies from historical, theoretical, and applied scholarship. Draws from readings across English education, racial literacy studies, and ethnic studies, as well as novels, film, criticism, and creative works. Prompts multiple ways to theorize and understand whiteness as foundational to anti-racist education research and practice. Reading load: minimum one book per week, with some flexibility for tailoring to individual areas of interest.
I can trace some of my early design work for this course back to my young adult lit + anti-racist teaching course and assignments like this critical race literature discussion. Going all the way in this time, here are some of the course materials:
- The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
- Black Reconstruction in America (excerpts) by W.E.B. DuBois
- Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (excerpts) by Marimba Ani
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Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evengelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
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Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides
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Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach (novel)
- Blindspotting directed by Carlos López Estrada (film)
- Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist by Eli Saslow
- Readings by Zeus Leonardo, Cheryl E. Matias, Samuel Jaye Tanner, Tim Lensmire, etc.
Experiments with Multimodal Genres of Scholarly Communication
Covers emerging genres of scholarship including podcasts, audio papers, albums, comics, and web texts across education and humanities. Focuses on the multimodal and multisensory aspects of these genres under the framework of radical open access. Explores how these genres afford scholarly communication and the relational practices among humans, objects, and technologies that make them possible.
This course is really an outgrowth of my own move toward emerging genres in the past few years. Much of the course will be experiencing multisensory / modal scholarly projects and looking at their design features, affordances, and strategies of scholarly communication. I hope the course expands – with respect to genre and form – what graduate students think is possible for scholarly life, including the capstone dissertation. The anchor text for the course is Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities by Janneke Adema. The book isn’t about multimodal genres, per se, but it brings some perspectives on the object formation of scholarly projects that, I think, fit perfectly with the focus of the course.
- I’m continuing work on a
smallbook about sound, literacy, loops, and other forms. The deeper I get into this writing, the more I realize the ideas have gathered from many different sources: courses I’ve taught, reserach project, ideas from creative sound practice. Specifically, right now, I’m aiming to finish the chapter on loops, which has been pushed in an exciting direction by the super fantastic Now and Forever: Toward a Theory and History of the Loop. This direction brought me back to some ideas in Breaking & Making that I want to take further in this chapter. - Putting what I hope will be final revisions on an article from Sound Making Publics about solidarity among Black and Latinx youth songwriters.
- Drafting and giving a talk at AERA about multi-sensory genres of scholarly communication –especially ones that leverage sound and sound design. I am using the paper to think about the design features and affordances that might amplify the utility, reach, circulation, and influence of these scholarly genres.
Here are a few items I have at the top of my reading (and listening) list this season. Some are connected to projects, and others I’ve simply been wanting to read for a while. As I always say, the books ain’t gonna read themselves!
- New issue of audio papers in Glissando.
- "Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism” by Christoph Cox.
- “Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time: Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing Within the University” by Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore.
- “The Essay as Form” by Theodore Adorno.
I made my short pilgrimage to “the hum” in Times Square recently. Next up, I plan to visit Dream House and catch the Steve McQeeen BASS installation at Dia Beacon. I’ll be sure to catch the Rashid Johnson exhibit A POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS at when it opens in April at The Guggenheim.
[This is a “now page.” What is a now page?]