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Instructor News: December 2020

book on a bookshelf

We want to start this Instructor News section by first recognizing the often invisible work of all our PWR parents and caregivers who have gone to great lengths to balance their family and professional responsibilities over the past few months, working incessantly to help others navigate this difficult time in so many ways.  We also want to recognize the many instructors who spent hours writing postcards, texting, and making calls as part of election season, modeling grassroots activism and a strong civic commitment.

Below are other PWR accomplishments of mention.

Alex Greenhough’s new film, Dreamlines, will show at the VAST Lab Experimental Festival in Los Angeles this December.

Emily Polk received an Advancing Racial Justice grant from the Haas Center for her Advanced PWR 91 course, Introduction to Environmental Justice: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender and Place, which she co-teaches with Dr. Sibyl Diver. The grant supported a public EJ speaker series, and an annual EJ symposium with national leaders focusing on indigenous land rights, clean air and water campaigns, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Emily also helped to lead the team that received a Stanford Sustainability Seed Grant to help institutionalize environmental justice at Stanford. Emily’s work focuses on integrating EJ writing, rhetoric and communication into sustainability curriculum.

Harriett Jernigan served as a Panelist at the Harriett Inaugural GSA Forum on Diversity, Equity and Social Justice in early October.  in addition, she also was a guest lecturer for Core Studio 1: Photo Practices at the Parsons School of Design, at The New School.

Hayden Kantor published an article, “Locating the Farmer: Ideologies of Agricultural Labor in Bihar, India,” in the Anthropology of Work Review. In addition, he published a book review of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India by Benjamin Robert Siegel, in Global Food History.

Jennifer Johnson and Norah Fahim (with Lee, E. Schreiber, B.) co-edited a special issue of Composition forum: Promoting Social Justice for Multilingual Writers on College Campuses. Composition Forum. See the issue here and the editors' introduction here.

In addition, Jennifer is pleased to share that her PWR 2 student, Heajune Lee, published her RBA, "Preserving Cultural Identity in English Language Use by Korean Immigrants". In her linguistic analysis, Heajune demonstrates how humility and social deference shape language choices. She writes, "Rather than endorsing a normative view of English language practices, I call for greater sensitivity to the cultural roots of Asian immigrants’ linguistic practices."

Kathleen Tarr is one of twelve screenwriters for the Beloved Economies podcast The Light Ahead. To be launched early 2021, this project creatively explores the question, What would 2030 look like if the U.S. had an economy that truly worked and cared for everyone? Through short narrative fiction episodes, The Light Ahead podcast brings to life scenes from beloved economic futures.

In addition, Kathleen was nominated for StateraArts's 2020 Martha Richards Visionary Leadership Award for leadership in uplifting, amplifying, and advancing women and nonbinary people in the arts, actively creating pathways to success and advancement for marginalized arts workers, and upholding the values of intersectional gender equity.

Kevin Moore's article, "Readapting Pandemic Premediation and Propaganda: Soderbergh's Contagion amid COVID-19," was recently published in the Special Issue: Art and Adaptation in Film and Video Games for Arts.

Nissa Cannon's article, "The Institution as Infrastructure: The International American Chamber of Commerce and Transatlantic Trade" just appeared as part of a research cluster on Modernist Institutions on Modernism/modernity's Print+.  In addition, Nissa will be part of an MLA roundtable on “Just in Time: Caregiving, COVID-19, and Precarity in the Academy at on Sunday, 10 January 9-10:15am PST.  

Selby Schwartz’s Fall 2020 PWR 1 "Radical Acts of Art in Public: Rhetoric and Artivism" partnered with Mesro Coles-El, graffiti artist and poet currently incarcerated at San Quentin who is the Project Manager @PrsnRenaissance@Prison_Zine 

In addition, Selby wrote a chapter for Feminismo(s) y/en Traddion - Feminism(s) and/in Translation, a multi-lingual anthology, edited by a scholar at the University of Valencia in Spain and published by Editorial Comares. Her chapter is titled, "Dalla parte di lei: A Transfeminist Translation for Alba de Céspedes." 

Last, but hardly least, Selby’s 2019 book, The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, has received significant recognition and acclaim.  In Spring 2020, it was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. Earlier this fall, it was named a Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. Then, just this month, it won the biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research). This prize "honors the publication (book or essay) that best explores the intersections of theatre and dance/movement in the previous two calendar years"; it is judged based on these categories:

  • Innovation in methodological approach;
  • Critical and/or historical rigor; and
  • Potential for encouraging future scholarship that will strengthen exchanges between theatre and dance/movement.

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