We'd like to begin our December Instructor News by welcoming four additional new colleagues who have just joined us in early December to teach for PWR in winter and spring this year. Please be sure to welcome them in you see them in Sweet Hall! Read on after our new instructor profiles to learn what some of your returning colleagues have been up to this fall.
Who's Coming to PWR for Winter/Spring 2022
Bob Bathrick. Bob is joining us from the University of San Francisco, where he has been teaching both ESL and Rhetoric and Composition for over 10 years. His academic interests center on languaging and translanguaging, and issues of access to the academic community (for both students and faculty). His winter PWR course is “Writing for and about Success”.
Efrain Brito. Efrain is joining us from the Stanford Graduate School of Education where his dissertation work focused on a dialogical quest together with a group of girls of color to take a step back and understand how we can help students read and write the world before engaging in the process of teaching them to write. His winter PWR course is “Changing the Story.”
Kahdeidra Monét Martin. Kahdeidra, BA '06, was previously a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Urban Education at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and her dissertation is entitled, "Counterstories of Black High School Students and Graduates of NYC Independent Schools: A Narrative Case Study." Her fall PWR course is "Rhetorics of Race, Inequality, Language, and Education."
Olesya Shayduk-Immerman. Olesya is joining us from UC Berkeley where she got a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation is about the current rhetorics on infatuation of the Soviet Jews with Judaism and/or Israel in the 1970s and 1980s and the political outcomes of these rhetorics. Her winter PWR course is "The Rhetoric of Freedom and Unfreedom".
Instructor News from Returning Instructors
Nissa Cannon had an article published in Cultural History: "‘Essentially an American Institution Planted on Foreign Soil’: The American Library in Paris, the Paris Herald, the Paris Tribune and Ex Libris."
Norah Fahim and Jennifer Johnson co-edited (with Eunjeong Lee & Brooke Schreiber) Building a More Linguistically Just Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Writers. Multilingual Matters, hot off the press and as an e-book this week. (Dec 6, 2021). They share their reflections in Multilingual Matters blog post, How Do We Work Towards Linguistic Justice for Multilingual Writers on Campus?, Dec. 10): “We have learned that a key component of linguistic justice work for multilingual students is bringing to light what's usually hidden by typical, normative university practices...We offer here three key principles to help educators move beyond this limiting monolingual approach and enact more linguistically just practices in classrooms, writing centers, and professional development.”
Harriett Jernigan's former PWR 1 student Naryeong Kim published her RBA, "Racial Disparities in Neurological Care in the United States: An Internal Mechanism," in the Harvard Public Health Review.
Jennifer Johnson co-authored (with Eunjeong Lee & Brooke Schreiber) the chapter "Why linguistic justice, and why now?” in the book she co-edited (see above, Building a More Linguistically Just Campus). Focused on a separate strand of her research, Jennifer was invited to give a talk to undergraduates at the University of Houston about the multimodal discourse analysis presented in her 2019 Applied Linguistics article, "Participation in a global hearing culture: Hearing mothers’ translation of their children’s Deafworld."
Kevin Moore's chapter, "Wrestling with the Far Right: Ellison's Representation of Fascism," was published in early December as part of the new collection Ralph Ellison in Context (Cambridge University Press, Ed. Paul Devlin).
Becky Richardson writes, "My book is officially available now from JHUP! The inspiration behind Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature was reading Samuel Smiles's lost bestseller from 1859, titled Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (the Perseverance was added to subsequent editions). Smiles's text is a great example of bad Victorian prose -- but it's also fascinating to read today next to what we consider more canonical Victorian titles. Whereas Victorian novels -- from David Copperfield to Vanity Fair -- tend to feature ambitious characters as villains and scapegoats, Smiles holds up examples of hard work and perseverance as models for readers to follow. My book suggests that there's a cultural tension here that's still very much with us -- a recognition that ambition is a needful thing in an ever-expanding and globalizing economy, but also a fear about what might happen when many ambitious individuals compete for limited prizes."
Selby Wynn Schwartz received an artsCatalyst grant for Winter 2022, as part of her PWR 2 course "Are We There Yet? The Rhetoric of Mobility."
Kathleen Tarr was interviewed during Beloved Economies and Avalon: Story's The Light Ahead: Live! about "Home of Plenty: A Bedtime Story," the piece she wrote for their podcast about what an economy that works for everyone would look like in the year 2030. In addition, another one of Kathleen's interviews is featured in the documentary "Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power" that has just announced its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. You can read more about Brainwashed at brainwashedmovie.com.
On October 13, 2021, Roberta Wolfson presented on a panel called "The Containment and Revolt of Antiracist Literature" at the American Studies Association 2021 Convention. Her paper, "(Anti)Racist Reading Practices and the U.S. War on Terror in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist," argues that Hamid's novel rewrites the history of the 9/11 tragedy from a position of counter-colonial resistance in order to denounce the post-9/11 U.S. counterterror state’s misinformed and damaging attempts to read the racialized Muslim body.
