Hayden Kantor, John Petersen, Mark Gardner, Olesya Shayduk-Immerman, and Jenne Stonaker at the VPUE picnic.
As always, the PWR team has been busy over the summer–with personal and professional activities. This summer, this included a series of social get togethers, kicking off in San Francisco on a gloomy June day, then traveling to Oakland, the peninsula’s Wunderlich Park, and a toasty day on campus at the VPUE picnic.
Harriett Jernigan
In July, I conducted a workshop on developing tasks for classroom-based research at the annual Summer School for U.C. Davis and Université Catholique Louvain. I also participated in a workshop in Leipzig, Germany, ideally to weave DEI into German as a Foreign Language instruction. I went to Bauhaus University, where I taught a German language course and experimented with anti-racist curricula and collaborative creative writing.
I spent some time in Europe relaxing. Made Ritter Sport customized bars in Berlin with my partner, spent time in Paris with friends and took a crepe-making course, took long walks and toured a couple of wineries in Tours. Since there's not much going on in Weimar, I spent the weekends in Berlin goofing around with friends, like taking pictures in a life-size Barbie Doll box.
Sangeeta Mediratta
Summer was spent hanging out with my parents and extended family/ friends in India. Given how old my folks are, I don’t take it for granted that the times will be happy ones but they were indeed happy with some curveballs to keep things interesting.
Jenne Stonaker
The online exhibit about the Arizona Garden is done! You can view it at: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/arizonagarden This project started in my PWR 91JSA: Communicating Science in Public Spaces class this past spring quarter. The students created amazing materials for our in person exhibit in June, but we didn't have time to finish the online exhibit in class. I've spent the summer putting the students' materials up online, and I'm so excited that it is ready to share with the broader community. I'm now working on getting signs installed in the Arizona Garden that will point people back to the exhibit, so that anyone who visits the garden can learn more about its history and unique plants.
Kath Rothschild
I was lucky enough to have a week-long funded writing retreat at the Wellstone Institute, where I worked on a new book!
Kevin Moore
This was an eventful summer involving a lot of travel! A PWR Research Grant allowed me to visit an archive in the Basque Country (Spain), I officiated a wedding for the first time for friends in Ohio, and we spent a week in Tecate, Baja California with my partner Erika's family. I also taught SOAR for the first time and loved it.
Beyond my trip to the Basque archive, which is part of an ongoing collaboration, I wrote an essay for an anthology on trigger warning practices. This piece rehistoricizes trigger warnings in the context of other kinds of warnings and alerts that emerged amid the post-9/11 media and security landscape. I also finished a draft of my novel, a political satire titled The Dog Massacres.
Lisa Ramée
There wasn't a whole lot going on this summer other than taking my daughter's rambunctious dog for walks, however I did do final edits for my fourth book (currently titled, The Everybody Experiment--which means I'll get to make a lot of "TEE" jokes next year) and I taught a class on writing/publishing for the children's book market for The Writing Salon. Funny side story on that experience was I had created a really great slide presentation for my class only to find out there was no wifi or projector in the class. (I figured y'all could relate!) Extra credit to all who answer the question in the picture--which was not posed by me--What book changed your life?
Nissa Cannon
This summer’s highlight was a week at Camp Mather family camp, just outside Yosemite. We got to do archery, ropes course, horse shoes, swimming, hiking, and just generally unplugged for a week. I declared sitting in a chair on the lake reading a book from 1906 the opposite of sitting in front of my computer.
Roberta Wolfson
I am excited to share that my latest research article was published in the most recent edition of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (vol. 50, no. 2-3). In this paper, entitled "(Mis)Reading in the Age of Terror: Promoting Racial Literacy through Counter-Colonial Narrative Resistance in the Post-9/11 Muslim Novel," I examine how two novels, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, rewrite the history of the 9/11 tragedy from a position of counter-colonial resistance in order to denounce the post-9/11 US counterterror state's misinformed and damaging attempts to read the racialized Muslim body. In addition, I recently signed a contract with The Ohio State University Press to publish my book manuscript! I'll be sure to update the PWR community when I have more information about its release date.
This summer I worked on finishing up the final materials for my book manuscript but also made sure to enjoy the warm weather with my family. I took a weekend trip to San Diego with my husband Arman and daughter Cassidy for a wedding, which was super fun. Cassidy is now a 17-month-old toddler and eager to explore the world, so we also took her on lots of local outings, such as to the zoo and the beach. We also had a great time exploring town with an out-of-town guest. I've attached a selfie that we took while visiting the Tilden Animal Farm in Berkeley (and with me repping PWR in full-on Stanford gear). A major highlight was going on a hike in Wunderlich Park with several PWR folks during one of the PWR summer social gatherings. Many thanks to Nissa Cannon for getting these gatherings started!
Zandra L. Jordan
Over the summer, I had the joy of attending a family reunion with nearly 100 of my relatives. We gathered in Atlanta for a day of storytelling, games, and fellowship. My mother’s red velvet cake won the best dessert contest, and I received a prize for traveling the farthest distance. We concluded the reunion with worship at Mt. Prospect Baptist Church, which my great great grandfather, a former slave, founded in Villa Rica, GA in 1887. I also spent a transformative week in Israel with Academic Exchange learning about the Israeli/Arab conflict. Highlights included co-teaching the Shabbat lesson with a local rabbi, touring the excavations in the Western Wall Tunnels, and taking a helicopter ride over the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Sea of Galilee. Finally, I’m pleased to share that I am one of the contributors to Writing Centers and Racial Justice: A Guidebook for Critical Practice, available now for pre-order. My chapter, "Beyond the Tutor Training Seminar: A Womanist Approach to Ongoing Professional Development for Racially Just Writing Tutoring," calls for sustained engagement with antiracism and racial justice education for tutors.
Christine Alfano
I bookended my summer (which involved teaching for the pilot of LSPxSOAR -- a really great experience!) with two relaxing trips: one to the mountains and one to the ocean. In Wyoming, I indulged my inner cowgirl, hiking, riding, and drinking sloshies while staring at the stars twinkling above the Grand Tetons; on Martha's Vineyard, we hung out on a very chilly beach (no sun that week), read lots of books, walked in the woods, and ate lobsta rolls. I'm lucky to have friends who live in such amazing places!
Book/Media Recommendations from PWR folks:
“Finally able to process the pandemic, I've listened to many early episodes of our colleague, Laura Joyce Davies podcast, Shelter in Place and highly recommend it!” (Kath Rothschild)
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler; Race, by Toni Morrison, and the short story collection Murder in a Heatwave. (Harriett Jernigan)
“A favorite book that I read this summer was This Is the Way It Always Is by Laurie Frankel, which tells the story of how a family learns to navigate life with a transgendered child. I devoured it within a matter of days. It was a powerful read: beautifully written, deeply thoughtful, and very gripping. I really appreciated how the author captured the messy, complicated, and rewarding experiences of parenting with such accuracy and humor. I highly recommend it!” (Roberta Wolfson)
“I've been really enjoying The Santiago Boys podcast, which is about the techno-utopians who worked alongside Salvador Allende in the early 1970s in Chile before the US-sponsored coup (and their Silicon Valley afterlives).” (Kevin Moore)
Ruth Starkman says, “Only cuz Stanford students submitted reviews of these books to GRACE did I get such wonderful summer reading."
- Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide, by Hawon Jung
- Carceral Liberalism: Feminist Voices Against State Violence, edited by Shreerekha Pillai
- Set Fear on Fire: The Feminist Call That Set the Americas Ablaze, written by Lastesis and translated by Camila Valle
- Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y Chen and Eunjung Kim
Hayden Kantor shares three TV shows he enjoyed this summer: The Bear, What We Do in the Shadows, and Only Murders in the Building.
