Now a year into the pandemic, our PWR lecturers continue to inspire us with the work in the classroom as well as their contributions to larger disciplinary and public conversations. Read below to see some of the ways our instructors have continued their projects and intellectual work in recent months.
Angela Becerra Vidergar recently published the first episode of her kids podcast, Curiosity Engine, which she made with her son William. The website is http://curiosityengine.org. You can also listen and subscribe on SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
In addition, Angela was recently interviewed by Radio France Internationale about pandemic fiction, due to her research on disaster and post-apocalyptic narratives. The interview was featured on February 3 in the program le journal d'Haïti et des Ameriques. Radio France Internationale is a media network similar to the BBC or Voice of America, broadcasting worldwide to an audience of 40 million listeners. The interview is at around timecode 11:00.
Lindsey Felt writes, "I was interviewed by Bay Area disability activist Alice Wong for her Disability Visibility podcast about Recoding CripTech, an exhibition I curated back in the beginning of 2020, and also shared some exciting news about how this project is evolving into an incubator for disabled artists working with technology. The podcast is available here: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2021/02/07/ep-96-art-and-technology/ My co-curator and partner Vanessa Chang and I also published our website documenting the exhibition: check out the website here.
Donna Hunter was recently invited by a former PWR 1 Rhetoric of Criminality student to moderate a conversation with Dominique Morgan, National Director of Black and Pink, one of the nation’s largest abolitionist organizations supporting LGBTQ prisoners and HIV positive prisoners. The discussion was the last in a three-part series organized by Stanford’s Decriminalization Coalition, called "Questioning Criminality." If you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Morgan’s nuanced “abolitionist values,” see her TEDx talk on the underbelly of resilience.
Two students from instructor Jennifer Johnson's PWR 2 course, The Rhetoric of Language, Identity & Power, published their multilingualism-focused research studies, both centered on their home language contexts. Minha Khan published, "Designing Multilingual Classrooms: The Case of Tharparkar," in Stanford's The Cutting Edge: The Stanford Undergraduate Journal of Education Research. Gabriela Agustina Uribe's article, “¿Por Qué no Sabes Español?”: Pressured Monolingualism and Its Impacts on Mexican Americans" was published in Young Scholars in Writing.
Hayden Kantor's former student, Sahithi Pingali, published her PWR RBA, "Identity Struggles Growing up Indian American: An Analysis of Immigrant Personal Narratives" in the January 2021 issue of the Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Issues & Media. Hayden writes, "Sahithi was a student in my first class at Stanford, so it's very satisfying to see this in print."
Emily Polk was asked by Students for a Sustainable Stanford and the Woods Institute for the Environment to moderate Stanford's 9th annual Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture, featuring climate feminist, marine biologist and policy expert, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, founder of Urban Ocean Lab and co-founder of the All We Can Save Project.
In January, Kath Rothschild published her first novel, Wider than the Sky. You can hear her interviewed about it on the podcast, Authors & Agents (Episode 86), or on her Carly Heath interview on YouTube. In addition, watch a video of the virtual launch, with award-winning Philipino-American author Randy Ribay.
Selby Schwartz wrote a chapter for (Re:) Claiming Ballet, edited by Adesola Akinleye, which will be published April 23 by Intellect Books. Her chapter is called "The Ever After of Ballet" and analyzes Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo in light of Bordieu's framework of habitus.
Roberta Wolfson was awarded a Teaching Advancement Grant from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning to support her participation in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity's Faculty Success Program this summer. In addition, Roberta helped put on a virtual campus-wide event on March 2, 2021, "A Conversation on Anti-Asian American Sentiment and Violence," which was sponsored by the Asian Staff Forum and the Filipino American Community at Stanford and featured ABC7 News Anchor Dion Lim and Fremont Mayor Lily Mei. The event attracted over 400 participants from the Stanford community and beyond. At the beginning of the event, Roberta provided some historical framing for the conversation by presenting a brief overview of the history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States. You can listen to her remarks and read more about the event here.
Cassie Wright's WPA article, "Beyond Good Intentions: Learning to See and Address Race and Diversity in the Work We Do," was listed on University of Connecticut's reading list for Anti-Racist Pedagogy.
