Among the many issues within academia, one that is particularly frustrating for us in the humanities is the ways various institutional forces demand that our work fit into narrower and narrower categories. Within our disciplines we shrink into our fields, eras, methodologies, texts, claims, and politics, staking out smaller and smaller territories so that we may assert our individual value to our departments and institutions. Yet, such a tendency runs contrary to the goals of humanities research and education, which emphasize the constant reevaluation and critical exploration of our world through a plurality of texts, art or media forms, experiences, and more. At a time when the federal government has put such work so directly in its crosshairs (along with its flagrant disregard for both the realities and actual lives of so many millions), we should be not just wary of but actively resistant to the ways our institutions and the academy at large separate us and demand we produce knowledge within our individual and narrow expertise. Now is the time to reimagine our work as a collective endeavor that sees us co-producing knowledge across our disciplines as well as with our students and communities.

Although my doctorate is nominally in “English,” my dissertation, Subcultural Textuality: Skateboarding and the Politics of Subcultural Media, is a diachronic look at the skateboarding subculture and its engagement with media forms beginning in the mid-1970s and going through today. In various lecture halls, conference rooms, libraries, breweries, and wherever else academics gather to discuss our niche scholarly interests, I am often referred to as the “skateboarding guy” (although I should clarify that I do not actually know how to skateboard). Despite my reservations about the way the academy forces us to categorize our work, I wear the “skateboarding guy” title pretty proudly. My dissertation is not narrow, but rather interdisciplinary. By looking at the skateboarding subculture and its mediations in various historical moments, I combine textual analysis, media history, cultural studies, and other critical approaches in order to interrogate not only skateboarding and its politics, but also the politics of different media platforms and their supposedly subcultural potentials. I am extremely thankful that my graduate education empowered me to combine these different methodologies in order to explore what has long been a personal interest. However, in that sense, my project is no anomaly (“skateboarding guy from an English department” jokes notwithstanding). As humanities scholars, what we explore is always deeply personal. We can only combine texts, historical periods, and methodologies in ways that make sense to us and us alone. This is what pushes the humanities forward and why interdisciplinary work is so essential to our continued critical interrogation of the world around us.

And yet, as much as we value the unique aspects of our frequently solitary research, this work requires going beyond traditional scholarship and reimagining how our interests intersect with our identities as both educators and community members. For example, as a Visiting Professor at SUNY Morrisville, my various courses, whether introductory composition, literature, film studies, or otherwise, seek to have students not merely “learn” material, but also seriously reflect on their own interests. Since my field is film studies and media history, I frequently ask students to consider the texts and media forms they regularly engage with in order to interrogate those experiences and complicate our notions of what is worthy of rigorous academic analysis. My desire for students to think, discuss, and write about their interests and media habits stems in part from my own love of skateboarding media, from its magazines and videos to the Jackass franchiseand Tony Hawk video game series, none of which are traditionally “academic” fare. In making this a regular approach for every humanities course I teach, my goal is to encourage students to see not just their own interests, but also–through various in-class exercises and discussions–those of everyone in the classroom as worthy of the same intellectual rigor. This plays an important role in setting the expectation that one of the most valuable aspects of a humanities education is that it empowers students to recognize the agency of themselves and others, becoming part of a community where learning happens while we are together. As with my research motivations, I am hardly unique in this. Still, it is a shift in perspective for how those of us in the humanities can envision our research and teaching as interconnected.

However, I also believe that truly practicing this means going beyond the classroom and engaging with the communities we live and work in. One of the best choices I made in my graduate education was getting involved in a publicly engaged humanities project. Write Out is a community writing collective that runs weekly creative writing workshops at Syracuse-area afterschool programs that serve students traditionally underrepresented in higher education, including immigrants, New Americans, and young girls of color. Along with Lauren Cooper, one of the current Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows, I serve as one of Write Out’s Community Program Directors for our team that works with the 9-12 year-olds at Girl’s Inc, an organization whose mission is to inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and bold, and runs their programming at the Syracuse YWCA. Since Write Out began in an MFA class in Syracuse University’s English department, our mentors often have some connection to the school, frequently graduate and undergraduate students as well as faculty and staff. But one of the most fundamental aspects of Write Out’s mission is that it is not school. We do not seek to go into community spaces and “teach” young students to be in some way more like us. Instead, it is about recognizing these students and their already profound cultural agency. Our weekly activities emphasize that students can express themselves however they desire. Such creative expressions can be any form of writing in whatever mode or language a student wishes, as well as drawings, skits, songs, dances, or anything else. Write Out mentors help students however they may need it. This could very well be help with spelling and grammar or to write while a student dictates, but it could also be to help a student generate ideas, simply talk with them about their day, or even be a prop or character in the work a student wants to share. Having students share their work loudly and proudly is foundational for Write Out. Not only do we do so during every week of programming, but we also publish annual chapbooks of student work and celebrate them with end-of-year readings open to the public. Thus, we seek to empower students who are traditionally underserved by existing models of education while making reading and writing far more joyful experiences.

It can certainly be tempting, given the differences between academic research, teaching at institutions of higher education, and doing engaged work in community spaces, to view these things as separate. However, it is more fruitful to recognize that these three modes, while distinct, are very much intertwined. My academic interests directly influence my pedagogy in the college classroom as well as my motivations and practices for co-producing new forms of knowledge and creative works with my students and fellow community members. In doing so, I seek to reimagine the humanities as a collective undertaking that can potentially wield far more power at a time when so much great work that celebrates diversity and interrogates various societal injustices and inequities is being threatened. This is harder than it sounds. It requires us to think responsibly about our communities and approach our work in a new way that does not prioritize our individual goals (which we have for so long and in so many ways been told are more important than anything). Regardless, if you truly believe in the work and what it can accomplish, it is always worth it.

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“A good teacher will lead the horse to water; an excellent teacher will make the horse thirsty first.”

— Mario Cortes

Inside the academic classroom, we instructors face a number of pedagogical challenges, ranging from constant apprehension regarding proper time management, to confusion over how to best incorporate new media technologies in diverse lesson plans. If the multitudes of our profession may be encompassed by so simplistic a maxim, a good amount of the efforts toward leading our students toward the proverbial well of knowledge involves acknowledging the limits of our ability to engage, and the students’ ability to stay engaged.

Try as we might to liven up lectures on nineteenth-century textual portrayals of class and gender struggles, or lead animated discussion on symbolic content and elements of stylistic form, just to name a couple of personal examples, the passion of an instructor may not always yield a similar investment from those they teach. Here, the learning curve inherent in pedagogy applies to us as well. We acknowledge that students may have chosen to take our course for the purpose of filling out credit hours, anticipate the potential difficulties of teaching the disinterested, and yet do our best to construct inclusive syllabi, encourage open discussion, and foster an environment defined by dialectical learning.

Even in the face of such apathy, within the classroom setting, an instructor retains the authority to insist on certain standards of behavior. Students are expected to pay attention to the material, despite their personal level of enthusiasm for the subject, or lack thereof, and often must display their acquired knowledge through active participation.

Outside of the classroom, however, the authority to instruct has always been a tenuous thing at best, undercut by the style of one’s delivery, the power of one’s rhetoric, and the ongoing struggle to make one’s voice heard at all. There are no quantitative grades to earn in what so many have termed the “real world” outside of academic institutions; no controlled learning environment in which anyone is obligated to respect the notion of a “safe space,” and certainly no imperative to engage in critical discussion or any measure of empathetic self-reflection.

Moreover, in the wake of the U.S. Presidential election, the anti-intellectual impulse now seems to be morphing into a frightening American norm. Never mind leading horses to water – in a “post truth” world, if words aren’t enough, what is left?

Empathy, many say. Following a seemingly never-ending election season distinguished early on by threatening speech, stunningly vitriolic ideological premises, and outlandish promises now turned very real dangers, those grieving for the loss of a democratic ideal were told to empathize with those we had grown to view with fear, anger, and even disgust. Among increasingly convoluted dissections of what the concept of empathy means [1], voices from all over the political spectrum, mainstream news outlets, and media platforms urged those on the “losing” side to swallow the bitter pill – at least for the next four years – and unite. Accept. Get over it.

In other words: don’t fight.

But for many of us, there is no other choice. At the end of the day, we are thinkers. Letting things go unquestioned, unexamined, and unanalyzed is something we cannot do. Easy acceptance and complacency go hand-in hand, joined together in a desperate flight from grappling with our own mistakes, and pushing to change what we cannot tolerate, much less endure.

Instructors, researchers, public thinkers and scholars affiliated with the academy have all been students at one point or another. As such, we consider the intellectual process as one requiring constant and self-conscious revision – not only must we often admit our own shortcomings, but we must also anticipate learning from those we may initially oppose.

Crafting a common vocabulary is perhaps the first step toward building a rapport with bored or uninterested students, but deconstructing the complexities of hegemonic ideology and the semantic battle over what has been fashionably debated and dismissed as “identity politics” takes the concentrated work of months, if not years. Effective communication becomes much more difficult with the assumption that empathy and cooperative understanding rests upon mutual mute compliance, instead of examination and accountability. Engaging in productive discussions with political opponents is far from impossible. Historically, however, conversations require equal measures of willingness to listen and learn from all those involved.

How do we reach those who see no reward in critical reflection, and harbor no desire for intellectual engagement? To what extent are we meant to empathize and “break bread” [2] with those who would much rather imagine the well of knowledge empty, than deign to be led anywhere?

In an op-ed piece from The New York Times, R. Derek Black shares another personal narrative tracing the unlearning of hatred-driven ideology through experiences at a liberal college:

“Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there – people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me – I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it…

People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can’t offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn’t understand why anyone would fear me…

I never would have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with. Now is the time for me to pass on that outrage by clearly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House.” [3]

On one hand, there are no easy answers. But on the other, admittedly, easy answers aren’t our forte. We press for deeper truths than that.

Buck up, academics. We have our work cut out for us.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

The post Empathy and Education Revisited: Fight or Flight appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As a first-generation immigrant who first grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese, which then became superseded by English as my entire family struggled to learn the ins and outs of this truly ridiculous language, reading student papers submitted by those wrestling with the language will always provoke a bit of extra compassion from me. Working toward a doctorate’s degree in English may be no small feat, but attempting to spell things like femininity or choosing between discrete versus discreet will always give me pause. These difficulties persist even when my entire dissertation project revolves around scrutinizing discursive representations of Victorian femininity, analyzing discrete case studies across a number of significant texts while discreetly counting how many commas I’ve used in any given paragraph so far.

(Four. There are four commas in the previous paragraph. You’re welcome.)

In recent years, linguistic studies and heightened awareness toward the use of vernacular, such as African American Vernacular English — more commonly known as “ebonics” — has changed the approach some academics take toward writing voice and line-by-line edits. With ever-more inventive uses of language on the rise, taking root in dictionaries from popular culture, and making it big on the Broadway stage, one has to wonder – do things like sentence diagraming and telling the difference between a preposition and a proposition still matter?

Everyone has an opinion, it seems, and everyone has a place to showcase it.

As it turns out, however, academic linguists and those in charge of adding words to dictionaries aren’t the only ones in charge of different practical acquisitions of language. In my years of teaching, memes have gone from inconsequential pastiches or pieces of pointed satirical critique to genuine artifacts of cultural meaning. Seeing as memes have an extremely high turnover rate, since they live and die at the mercy of the ever-changing interests of those who make social media — or the internet more generally — a place to do most of their reading, a wide majority of these variations on linguistic and visual play have sputtered out after fifteen minutes of fame. What is truly incredible, though, is just how much we can all pick up from a single glance at a seemingly nonsensical image and a string of text.

(Take a look at the header image, for example. Can you decipher it?)

Spider Georg lurking out in his cave could teach students a thing or two about statistical outliers. There existed similarities between Craving that Mineral and Lik the Bred, but only one of those could instruct the casual internet browser about iambic diameter. The difference between a “Thanks for Coming to my TED Talk” textual meme and an “And in this essay, I will prove that” meme can teach a student the difference between a discussion-oriented conference paper full of theoretical ideas, and a tightly-focused essay with a clear and specific thesis statement.

(Will memes ever one day attain the status of academic speech and writing? Who knows, and who is to say? For the time being, if that previous paragraph reads more like gibberish, feel free to consult this database of old and current memes, which works just as well as any other encyclopedic resource.)

Personally, I have lost count of the number of times I wished I could grade student papers with GIFs or memes. It was a student who taught me the meaning of the phrase “It’s Lit!” and it was a student who told me they would “take the L but come back better and stronger” after a failed reading quiz. The wish to write dissertation chapters purely in memes, shortened speech, “unprofessional” language, and reaction images, has become a common refrain among myself and my peers, when words have become too difficult for the day.

Recently, my adviser encouraged me to stop thinking so hard about getting the gist of my argument just right on the first time. “Just play,” they suggested, hands moving around in space as if through the sandbox — or litterbox? — of mental debris that came from several weeks of cutthroat editing and agonizing over every single sentence. Yes, the dissertation is a serious project, but one can enjoy the process of working with language and generating ideas in a way that is uniquely our own, even when building on the shoulders of scholars and speakers who have come before.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

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Generally, there are few things that unite teachers more than a mutual aversion to grading. For some, the marking up of assignments and assigning of earned grades may be a mere annoyance; for others, the unavoidable nature of subjectivity inherent to that process, plus the amount of feedback necessary, multiplied by the time consumed makes for one distasteful equation. That being said, there are few things that further divide instructors of all stripes than asking them their preferred method for how to grade.

Those working and teaching in the humanities often find themselves faced with a number of different challenges in this regard, especially when considering what is most deserving of their attention. What can be done if a student writes a fair essay somewhat adjacent to the given prompt or topic, but for one reason or another, manages to completely miss the mark?  Does it bear repeating to stay away from broad and overly generic opening sentences proclaiming, “History has shown” or “Long has it been known” — or my particular favorite, “Since the dawn of time?” How many times can I point a student toward the multitude of online and print resources for proper MLA formatting, guidelines, and citations? How much time will a student truly take to run an eye over every correction of tense usage, verb-noun agreement, and improper uses of punctuation? (If by chance you are an individual who happens to enjoy grading, don’t hesitate to read on! This is neither a how-to guide for grammar police or self-proclaimed linguistic authorities of any kind, nor a tirade against the trials of reading the — occasionally trying, sometimes brilliant — work of our students. After all, aren’t we all still students ourselves, one way or another?)

In the papers of students past, present, and possibly future, two of the most common points of critique I have can be summarized by: 1) the structuring of sentences through passive versus active voice, and 2) the building and presentation of an argument.

The use of passive voice appears in a sentence where the subject receives an action, and is acted upon. In student papers, this typically reads as some variation of the following:

a form of to-be + verb

To correct this, one would remove the to-be, change the verb into its active form, and restructure the sentence so that the subject may perform the action. For example:

British women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote in 1918.

In 1918, Parliament granted British women over the age of thirty the right to vote.

Active voice encourages students to name a subject, focus on the responsibility of giving or performing that action, and keeps their prose from becoming cluttered with what I tend to call passive-aggressive voice. And yet as we all know, the use of active voice over passive voice is not a golden standard or an absolute requirement, but rather a suggestion to which there exist many exceptions to the rule.

On a larger scale, students have also tended to struggle with how to structure and organize an argument. “What is a claim?” they will ask. “Is it the same as an argument, or is it something different? Does this paper need a thesis statement? Is this too broad or too narrow? What do I do when I want to write about everything?”

Why are all of you so keen on restating the plot and leaving less room for your own original arguments? would be my common refrain, although it answers none of their questions. Usually, this cannot be achieved in a brief couple of paragraphs that comprise feedback on a student essay; this takes weeks of practice, and more than a semester of revising.

No matter the age difference or the amount of years we have spent writing, it seems we always need a group of readers to help take our draft, and then take it apart at different levels. My current dissertation committee consists of my main advisor, and two readers. The other two readers I have yet to approach, but at the moment, three are enough to take those same questions and turn them back my way.

• What is your thesis?

• Why have you close-read for ten pages, and left so little room for your own analysis?

• Footnote these critical arguments; you want your own to appear in the foreground, and for those to act as secondary support.

• Start with your largest claim, after which follow subsequent, subordinating, and scaffolding arguments.

Just this week, one of my readers warned me against using “ideological” when I meant “discursive,” due to the amount of baggage and theoretical weight the former carries with it. Maybe I’ll think of this the next time I circle a term or a phrase in a student essay and comment awkward wording. Yes, diagramming a sentence is difficult for most human beings, and no one likes verb conjugations in any language. Things like active voice and proper semicolon use can be taught or corrected; misspellings and comma splices happen even to the best of us.

Every writer can make use of an editor. 

It becomes much more difficult to show ourselves the same compassion when we think of writing as a skill, and one that we must have gotten good at by now; surely. Look at the years that have passed since undergraduate study! Look at the number of papers we have written. Pages upon pages of claims, material evidence, logical argumentation, and careful citation – how can we still look at an empty Word document with its blinking cursor and not know what to do next?

Truth be told, easily. But it is also fairly easy to accept that sometimes the mind falls fallow, for a season or for a day. Give it time. Give yourself some time.  

Perhaps one of the best lessons the dissertation process teaches us as graduate students is not another grammar admonition, but a good dose of humility and a flashback to the passive-voiced, plot-summarizing, incorrect-formatting student we all once used to be, and perhaps still are.

(Stop being afraid of using to be runs a close second.)

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

The post Learning Writing By Teaching Writing appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Read last week’s post from Melissa.

Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we? I had graduated with my PhD in English but had realized that a tenure track academic job was not for me. What does one do, then, to prepare oneself for a new career path? Again, I must echo what Staci emphasized—reach out to your networks.

As I mentioned, the head of the high school to which I had applied was a colleague of mine from graduate school (we had met through Syracuse University’s graduate student organization). After the dust settled from my daughter’s birth and my dad’s death, I reached out to this colleague to see what steps he would recommend to prepare myself as a candidate for independent school jobs. He suggested that I do whatever I could to gain experience working with older adolescents, as well as applying to be a client with the most well-known independent school placement agency: Carney Sandoe & Associates. With this advice in mind, I reached out to CS&A and, luckily, they accepted me as a client.

Working with CS&A, I crafted and collected my job materials (a statement of purpose that explained my shift in educational focus, my transcripts, resume, and letters of recommendation), posted them on their website, and waited for CS&A to send my materials out to independent schools who had hired the firm to help fill vacant positions. Like academic hiring, there are key points in the year when jobs are posted. For independent schools, it is the winter and early spring for a start date in August. I also sent out applications to jobs advertised on the National Association for Independent Schools website. I was teaching three classes at Syracuse at the time and only had daycare three days a week, so between that and job applications, I just could not find the time in my schedule to add on an activity that put me directly in contact with high schoolers. Nevertheless, I still received more possible interest from employers than I ever had on the tenure-track job market. But no campus interviews or job offers.

By the end of my first real independent school hiring season, however, I felt heartened by the fact that despite my lack of experience working with high school-aged students, I was still clearly an appealing candidate. Again, I reached out to my social network. Through my previous Weight Watchers (now WW) group, I had befriended a local high school social studies teacher. I reached out to her to see what she would suggest in terms of how I might begin building my resume experience, and she enthusiastically offered many suggestions, including substitute teaching. I was still teaching two classes at Syracuse, but luckily I was able to place my daughter in full time care and reserve my days off of campus for substitute teaching. I signed up with 4 local districts—two public (including the district in which my friend was employed), one private, and one a newly created charter school—to give myself as much and as varied teaching experience as possible.

And what an experience it has been! Occasionally it is very boring—teachers often design lessons for substitutes that involve little of their own input as one cannot guarantee their sub will be familiar with the material. Yet I have found that I truly enjoy meeting new students and learning new things as I engage with them and their materials. It is very rewarding to return to a school and see students with whom I have previously interacted. And, as my reputation has grown as a competent substitute, I have had the opportunity to return to the same classrooms and work with the same students.

*

My years as a teacher have taught me that regardless of the age of one’s students, a classroom runs best when students feel respected, supported, and appreciated as individuals.

And despite the difference in age between students one encounters in college and those in middle and high school, my training as a college professor has done quite a bit to prepare me to teach in this setting. Working with students from a variety of age ranges, disciplines, and intellectual needs at the college level, I have learned to navigate a diverse classroom setting. Teaching dense, theoretical material to undergraduates has taught me how to convey complex ideas in a manner that is comprehensible to non-specialists. And perhaps most importantly, my years as a teacher have taught me that regardless of the age of one’s students, a classroom runs best when students feel respected, supported, and appreciated as individuals.

I won’t lie: being a substitute teacher is at times frustrating. As school districts are often short on substitute teachers, they are willing to hire people at all levels of competence and expertise. Because of this, then, it is often assumed that I will not know what I am doing and have no experience. It’s an odd feeling—to be surrounded by people and students who have quite low expectations. I am often met with a slight look of confusion when I say I have a PhD: a look that says “why are you here then?” But when I explain, faculty and students are often very interested and kind. And throughout the past 6 months I have met many encouraging educators—two of which were generous enough to write me letters of recommendation.

*

I have already learned the lesson that one can find meaningful employment outside of academia.

We are in the middle of the 2019 hiring season and I have yet to hear from any potentially interested employers. This again has given me pause—what if this is not the career for me? Yet the beauty of being off the tenure track is that I now feel like I have the freedom to pivot and/or change course. I have already learned the lesson that one can find meaningful employment outside of academia. Who knows—I might even find something outside of direct classroom instruction. I am no longer tethered to a path with one, appropriate end. So, while I can’t leave you with a success story where I change course and land the perfect job, I can leave you with this lesson: no perfect job exists. There are jobs that suit you better than others at different times in your life, and if you’re lucky you find one that suits you for quite a while. I know I’ll find one eventually, and you will too. I do not regret earning a PhD—it has made me a stronger writer and thinker, has introduced me to wonderful people, and affirmed for me something I always knew: that I deeply enjoy and excel at cultivating meaningful relationships with others. I’ll find something, and you will too. And a PhD can be but one pathway for getting there.

Thanks everyone! Best of luck on your journeys—whatever they may be and wherever they may take you.

Melissa Welshans has a BA in English with Honors from George Mason University (2007) and a PhD in English with an emphasis on Renaissance literature from Syracuse University (2017). She is currently a Part Time Instructor at Syracuse University and a substitute teacher for a variety of school districts in the Syracuse area.

The post Back to School Shopping: Exploring Independent School Teaching appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Read last week’s post from Staci.

I begin this blog post with the title “We’re All Smart Enough” because, as has at least been part of my experience of graduate education, there is a perception that only the best and brightest get the coveted tenure track job in higher education. But I’m here to tell you—if you’re in a PhD program, you are one of the best and the brightest. You ARE smart enough. And deciding that you do not enjoy parts of the work, or do not want to make certain lifestyle choices to try and get that tenure track job, has nothing to do with intelligence.

This was my struggle. Due to my own insecurities regarding my intelligence (hello Imposter Syndrome!) I was convinced for many years of my graduate program that my self-worth was tied to my intellect, and that my intellect was only demonstrable by publishing, graduating, AND landing a tenure track job. My sense of self-worth ebbed and flowed with my successes. Rejected from a journal? I’m an imposter. Accepted into a conference? Maybe I’m ok at this.

The cycle went on, and eventually was exacerbated by the emotional roller coaster that is the tenure track job search. Request for materials? Maybe I’m good enough! Rejected by my “dream job”? Utter failure. While a great deal of therapy, anxiety medication, helpful mentors, and the support of family and friends helped to mitigate these emotional trials, I too—like Staci wrote the last two weeks—hardly stopped to think if maybe this wasn’t the best career for me.

The constant bright spot in my education, however, was teaching. I loved walking into a classroom, meeting new students, and working with them to understand complex texts. Even on its worst days, teaching was a part of graduate school that did not cause me existential angst. I was good at it AND I enjoyed it.

Truth be told, I entered graduate school mostly because I wanted to teach college students. I had decided in 11^th grade that I would get a PhD because although I loved helping my peers and those younger than myself understand concepts in our coursework, I loathed high school; why would I condemn myself to a career where I would spend my days there?! The solution? Teach at a college!

*

I measured my worth against my publication record. In my estimation (and in that of professional standards) I was always found wanting.

But as I quickly realized, being a tenure track professor is far more than teaching. It’s research—publications, conference presentations, and research grants—that universities (i.e. university administrators) value, and it’s also these things that place you above the pack while on the job market regardless of the school that is hiring. And frankly, those were the activities that I enjoyed the least. Don’t get me wrong—I like researching and discovering new ways to interpret literature. But the angst I felt when it came time to present a published argument about those discoveries was anything but healthy. I measured my worth against my publication record. In my estimation (and in that of professional standards) I was always found wanting.

The spring before I was set to defend my dissertation, I was pregnant, coming off of another unsuccessful year on the job market, and beginning to do the IMPORTANT work that I should have done much earlier: I was beginning to ask myself whether or not a tenure track job was right for me, and if I wanted to do what was necessary to eventually get a tenure track job. By this time I had successfully published a journal article, a book chapter, and had attended many conferences and workshops, yet still felt immense anxiety and pressure surrounding my research. I was also mere months away from defending my dissertation. So why did it all still make me feel terrible?

One March day, an advertisement for a high school American Literature teacher at a local Independent School came across the graduate student listserv. The product of a rural, public education system myself, I was unaware of “Independent” schools. As I soon learned, Independent schools are those which are run independently by a board of trustees rather than, say, a church diocese or other not-for-profit company.

I did some more research on this (and other Independent) schools and I began to wonder…what if I COULD have a job where my sole focus would be students? What if I COULD compete in a job search where the strength of my teaching portfolio DID make me competitive? Could I teach high school???

Through happenstance, the Head of the Upper School at this institution had been my colleague in Syracuse’s Graduate Student Organization (like Staci wrote—networking!). I reached out to him about applying and eventually was even asked to participate in an on-campus interview—my first EVER. The energy and joy I felt while preparing for my interview was greater than I had ever experienced in three years of searching for a tenure track job in higher education. I did not get the job, but the interview process was enlightening—I had found an educational setting that truly spoke to my own strengths as a professional.

*

It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders as a new career path opened up before me. I would not have to publish or perish.

After this experience, my attitude started to shift. Maybe it wasn’t that I was not good enough or smart enough. Maybe I just did not like the pressure of publishing. Maybe I just would prefer to do other things. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders as a new career path opened up before me. I would not have to publish or perish (a cynical but true turn of phrase among tenure-track faculty hopefuls).

I continued to mull over this new career option as I worked furiously to complete my dissertation and prepared for my daughter’s arrival. I had not yet written academia completely out of my future.

Then, a mere 4 weeks after my daughter was born, I received a phone call: my dad had been killed in an accident on our family farm in Northern Pennsylvania. He was 54. I put my defense on hold as I went to PA to bury the man I had looked up to my whole life, and the person I was most excited for my daughter to know. I grew up on a dairy farm that my family had owned since the 1800s, and in the months after his death, I watched as my amazing step mom dealt with not only incredible grief, but the trials of selling cattle and equipment.

I finished the dissertation. I defended it successfully. But I now had a completely new perspective on what I wanted to prioritize in my life—the life I now knew not to take for granted. And for me, my new priority was choosing a job that would allow me to be geographically close to my family in Pennsylvania, and that would provide me with a lifestyle that enabled me to spend more time (and enjoy that time) with those I love. In the end, it made it easy to walk away from my “dream” of a tenure track academic job, because dreams change. Life changes. That’s ok. And we’re all smart enough.

Thanks for reading! Tune in next week as I discuss what I’ve done post PhD to position myself for a search on the Independent School job market!

Melissa Welshans has a BA in English with Honors from George Mason University (2007) and a PhD in English with an emphasis on Renaissance literature from Syracuse University (2017). She is currently a Part Time Instructor at Syracuse University and a substitute teacher for a variety of school districts in the Syracuse area.

The post We’re All Smart Enough: A Pep Talk for PhDs on the Job Market appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

My journey to an alt-ac position was a gradual one. I did not wake up one day and decide that it was time to wave goodbye to my long-held dream of securing a tenure-track job in the humanities. Rather, it was a series of small (and big) events that led me to eventually look around and decide to search for alternate employment avenues.

I entered my English PhD program right out of undergrad. I was a shiny 22-year-old with drive and energy to spare. I attacked coursework and teaching with rigor and enthusiasm. I read all the books, wrote all the seminar papers, attended all the conferences, taught all the classes. In essence, if there was a hoop, I was more than happy to leap through it. And I loved it.

When you’re a first-year PhD student, the threat of the sparse job market is a distant, fuzzy reality. Early on, you get to wrap yourself in the promise of time. There’s time to figure it out. There’s time for the market to become more robust. There’s time to do enough to prove yourself as worthy. You put your head down, you plow through your work, and hope that things will work themselves out by the time you’re ready for the job market.

Time is a tricky thing, though. When you’re in grad school, it seems like there’s never enough time. Because the knowledge of the market looms on the horizon, there is an imperative to make the most of your time every single day, week, month, break. I, for one, was not great at pacing myself. I thrived on constant productivity. A low hum of anxiety propelled me forward.

At some point, in the midst of zooming through my qualifying exams and cranking out my prospectus, I got sick. A couple of months after I began writing my first chapter, I was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus. (Yes, House fans, sometimes it’s lupus.) Soon thereafter, I was diagnosed with lupus nephritis as the lupus had begun to attack my kidneys. Lupus is a disease in which your immune system gets confused and, instead of fighting illness, decides to attack healthy cells and organs. No one really knows what causes lupus. It’s more or less the case that you have a genetic deficiency that can eventually be triggered by, among other things, extreme stress and then, voila, you forever have lupus. This is not to say that the PhD process gave me lupus. It is to say, though, that my unhealthy work habits turned my predisposition for an autoimmune disease into an actual ailment.

My diagnosis wasn’t what turned me to alt-ac, though. At least not right away. Rather, I treated my diagnosis like another problem to be solved, another task to be accomplished. The goal was to find the right treatment plan, get on the right medications, and get back to “normal” so that I could crank out work and stay on schedule. Propelled by heavy doses of steroids for the next year, I was pretty successful. I finished up my dissertation, I defended, and I graduated.

I then embarked on a gap year in which I planned to focus my energy on the job market. I was living with my partner in Oakland, California and picked up a side gig tutoring while I focused on my “real” career: jumping through the next hoop on the path to academic life. Something changed in me once I defended the dissertation, though. Once I didn’t have the institutional pressure to produce, produce, produce (and once my doctors had finally lowered my steroid dose), it was no longer clear to me why I was working around the clock without breaks.

I finally had the time to think about and come to terms with my illness. I learned that it was not something to be managed, fixed, and forgotten. Rather, lupus came with a new reality that I had to confront: stress and lack of sleep triggered flares and further damaged my body. As such, it was important to slow down and take breaks. In turn, slowing down made me realize the things which truly gave me joy: having the time to read a book for pleasure, going to the gym, and cooking meals that were good for my body. Traditional academia definitely allows for those things. I realized, though, that my personality was not suited for making space for them while still in the system. I only knew how to do academia one way: full throttle and anxiety-laden.

At the same time I was coming to this realization about academia and my illness, I was also loving my side gig. I had begun tutoring middle school and high school writing for a Bay Area tutoring company and found it incredibly fulfilling to make sustained, one-on-one connections with students and help them navigate the stressful, tricky world of secondary education. While I always vaguely knew that there were ways to engage in the educational landscape other than pursuing a tenure-track job, it was knowledge that I had to ignore for the most part in order to stay focused.

When I began to embrace the fact that there were other satisfying ways to involve myself in teaching while not hurting myself, I knew that I had to make some changes. It was for this reason that, while in the middle of submitting job applications my first year on the market, I simply…stopped. I began thinking about what other jobs I might enjoy, what skills I had to offer, and what opportunities were available to me in order to make that pivot. It was odd; I was trained in a profession that encourages and develops critical thinking skills but, somehow, while single-mindedly doing that work, I hadn’t taken the time to think critically about whether or not this was where I wanted to be. Having that gap year and the time to reflect about the hoops I was jumping through proved fundamental to removing myself from the academic fray.

While lupus forced me to take the time to think about this, I wish I would have taken a break from performing the academic dance a little earlier on in order to ask myself: What do I want to get out of this and what do I want my life to look like? I think, ultimately, the PhD did get me to where I wanted to be, though that endpoint was different than I originally envisioned. In my next post, I will discuss what my pivot from academia looked like and how I used the rest of my gap year making the skills I learned in my PhD legible to an alt-ac job market. In doing so, I will explain how I leveraged the skills gleaned from a career that was ultimately not the right fit for me.

Staci Stutsman holds a BA in English from Western Michigan University (2011) and a PhD in English with an emphasis in film and media studies from Syracuse University (2017). She is currently the Tutor Services Manager at Tutor Corps, a tutoring company based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, where she hires, trains, and manages a cohort of 150 tutors.

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For my first post I thought I would share a (very) condensed version of a paper I presented at Syracuse’s annual Future Professoriate Program Conference in Spring 2013. Last year, a colleague of mine (and, full disclosure, editor of this blog) organized a panel on “embodied pedagogy” and invited me and a fellow colleague to participate. I had never deeply considered the term “embodied pedagogy” before, yet a recent course evaluation had me questioning my physical presence in my classroom and its relationship to my pedagogical strategies. On an evaluation for my British Literature survey course, a student responded to a prompt to “comment on the quality of instruction in this course” with this remark: “She reminds me of Lena Dunham if she were a professor (This is a huge compliment).”

What was I to make of this?

Given my own research interests, I often discuss topics related to feminism and gender within my courses, possibly linking me with the self-proclaimed feminist Dunham. (For one of many examples of her discussing her feminism, you can read excerpts of her interview with NPR’s Terry Gross.) Yet I could not shake the feeling that, along with the contents of my course, my very body was enabling this comparison.

For in addition to her feminism, Dunham is also often discussed in terms of her physical appearance. A brief scandal erupted when New York Times writer Ruth La Ferla commented on Dunham’s “pulchritude” (a word associated with fatness) in relation to Dunham’s appearance at the 2013 Emmy awards, and it is perhaps no surprise that the artist’s rendition of this very photo which recently appeared above a critical essay of Dunham seems to exaggerate, among other features, her weight:

Dunham herself has suggested that one of the most positive aspects of her show Girls is its refusal to hide the bodies of “women who are not a size 0” or restrict them to weight-loss driven plotlines . Dunham’s feminism is linked, for many critics, reviewers, and fans, directly to her body and her refusal to cover it up.

Like Dunham, I am frank about my feminism. And, like Dunham, I occupy a body that does not easily fit into the Western ideal of beauty. What caused my student to compare me to Dunham, I believe, is best described by the scholar Kathleen Rowe in her book The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995).

Taking Roseanne Barr (among others) as a primary example, Rowe argues that women who refuse to bend to the will of patriarchy are “unruly.” Specifically for Rowe, an unruly woman is characterized by her inability or unwillingness “to confine herself to her proper place.” She is often “excessive or fat, suggesting her unwillingness or inability to control her physical appetites,” speaks in an excessive “quantity, content or tone” and “makes jokes, or laughs herself.” Her behavior might even be “associated with looseness and occasionally whorishness” and she is often perceived as a woman on the margins of polite society. I would argue that Lena Dunham, like the subjects of Rowe’s book, challenges patriarchal authority through her unruly behavior. Indeed, the recent outrage over some of her admissions regarding previous sexual experiences in her memoir Not that Kind of Girl underscore my point.

Now what does this all have to do with “embodied pedagogy?” From the tone of my voice and gesticulations to my dress size, my body’s unwillingness to be bound by patriarchal norms of femininity underscores the feminist commitments of my pedagogy. My insistence on voicing feminist challenges to patriarchy, particularly in a potentially unlikely class like a British Literature survey implicitly codes my pedagogy as unruly, for it refuses to limit conversations about gender to sanctioned academic spaces such as our Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Coupled with my occupation of a fat body, I signal as excessive and uncontained. By being a loud, large, female graduate TA who espouses explicit feminist concerns, I embody my feminist pedagogy. Thanks to Kathleen Rowe, I have a lens through which I might understand this at first perplexing, but now flattering, student response.

Melissa Welshans was a PhD Candidate in English at Syracuse University and was working on her dissertation, then titled The Many Types of Marriage: Gender, Marriage and Biblical Typology in Early Modern England. Melissa’s research is concerned with issues of gender and sexuality in early modern England, especially as it pertains to the institution of marriage. In her free time, Melissa still practices her nail art skills.

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This article below was the first time that I would publicly write about asexuality. I was not out when I wrote it. But response to this post was positive, and the editor of our web magazine (know as Metathesis at the time) began to show gentle allyship towards me. Over the next few years, I came out to more of my classmates, then to my students, until finally I just started being out professionally.

I wish I could say that society has radically changed for aces since 2014, but it hasn’t really. Our small achievements — ace characters in pop culture, a new definition added to a dictionary, a dating app — feel like enormous victories, if only relatively. What has magnified that feeling, though, is the community I’ve acquired from being out. Finding other aces at school, online, in other cities, and even among my best friends has happened only from taking the risk of being ace in public.

Thank you, Pub, for helping to blaze that trail.

— Ashley O’Mara

Coda: Asexual Awareness Week and the Future of Queer Theory (31 October 2014)

(view the original post)

Last week, I completed the Safer People, Safer Spaces training my university offers to learn better ways to be an ally, whether you’re a member or a supporter of the queer community. One of the activities we did involved matching vocabulary words (like lesbian, heteronormativity, drag, M2F) to their definitions and then discussing what we learned and what confused us. One of the words was asexuality, and to my surprise, no one had any questions about it!

In most settings, this is definitely not the norm. Even though, as one blogger pointed out, the US is home to more asexuals (or, as some prefer to be called, aces) than it is to Muslims, breast-cancer survivors, and Yale graduates, asexuality is not on most people’s radars. Even those within the LGBT community are sometimes unaware of asexuality as an orientation — indeed, the “A” in LGBTQIA+ more often stands for “ally” than “ace.” Thus, Asexual Awareness Week (this year, October 26–November 1) occurs at the end of LGBT History Month. Today, I’m going to sketch out the ways the conversations I see happening inside the asexual community might shape the queer theory of the future.

Only a handful of scholars in the humanities are doing research on asexuality studies.¹ Nevertheless, the language of asexuality as it exists in the everyday praxis of aces has been invaluable to helping me reconsider the ways we think about desire and relationships in texts. Because asexuality — that is, the absence of sexual attraction — does not preclude the formation of other attractions, aces have developed a vocabulary set to describe those experiences. They distinguish between sexual, romantic, affective (“friendly”), and aesthetic attraction, and the different conditions under which these occur and the objects that these take. For instance, “homoromantic” describes someone who falls in love with those of their same sex or gender; a “demiromantic” is someone who falls in love only after a long friendship; an “aromantic” doesn’t fall in love, but might desire intense friendship.²

These desires are not new, and certainly aren’t limited to aces: John Henry Newman’s romantic friendships look very much like the intimate relationships of a homoromantic ace, but the chaste “seraphick love” that John Evelyn and Mary Godolphin shared in the seventeenth century could be conceived of as a queerplatonic relationship of two otherwise sexual people. What is new is the way these words examine phenomena whose existence and uniformity have been taken for granted.

Sometimes, the impulse to name certain desires can overwhelm the desires themselves, but what I think these concepts highlight is the plurality of ways in which people form attractions and desires, and that their objects need not be so neatly aligned. For instance, considering the ways in which Doyle’s John Watson might be simultaneously heterosexual (marrying and having a child by Mary Morstan) and homoromantic (in romantic love with Sherlock Holmes) helps us to grasp how a person can desire two objects in different, non-competing ways. In a way, asexuality has done for romance and sexuality what Judith Butler has done for gender and sex, by uncoupling one from the other (pun intended).

But the asexual community, of course, is not without its controversies. Some people don’t think that asexuality should be lumped into the LGBTQ+ “alphabet soup” because it’s technically not a sexual orientation but rather a not-sexual orientation. This, I think, ignores the great potential for intersectional solidarity, as homoromantic and trans* aces face oppressions that are very similar to those faced by their allosexual counterparts, and heteronormativity limits the experiences of sexual nonconformists indiscriminately.

Some have also criticized how white the movement is, with writers of color like Alok Vaid-Menon describing how to claim asexuality as an identity feels like a betrayal of their race. Some identity communities have long been de-sexualized as a means of discipline and disenfranchisement. Thus, self-describing as asexual plays into these enduring stereotypes, which certainly need dismantling. The asexuality leadership has been surprisingly self-reflexive about how race and gender authorizes (or fails to authorize) the perceived legitimacy of certain sexual orientations. At the same time, however, it’s no less important for us to question those structures that make sexuality compulsory, while we remain sex-positive.

I think the definition that we had to match at training put it best: “Each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.” Just delete “asexual” and you’ll have described everyone. As queer studies develops, we’re thinking more plurally to account for the many and colorful ways that our experiences and identities intersect, shaping our selfhoods and our positions in our communities.

Notes

1. NWSA’s Asexuality Studies Interest Group and the conference panels it has coordinated has been my primary source for asexuality studies in the humanities.
2. The Huffington Post put together a handy simplified infographic to depict this.

Ashley O’Mara is co-editor of Broadly Textual Pub and a PhD candidate in the Syracuse University English program. She studies celibacy and asexuality in literature after the English Reformation. In her down time, she writes op-eds and listens to Mashrou’ Leila. She has very strong opinions about hummus. Visit her website to learn more.

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The wonderful epigraph of the text gives voice to this issue:

Nil Sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio [nothing is more odious to wisdom than excessive cleverness]

Before we begin, we must note that the word “cleverness” here carries two very specific connotations. First, the word invokes a myopic perspective: a narrow attention to detail, and a lack of ability to connect small details to some sort of greater significance. This is, more or less, the sense of cleverness as we would use it in normal conversation. The second sense, draws attention to proficiency in a particular domain of knowledge, sometimes referred to as “acumen.” The subject is not so much general cleverness as it is a trained mastery of a specific field. If we shift our attention to the details of the story itself, they help to make the clear distinction between a shortsighted lack of insight and acumen.

In the story, Poe’s amateur detective Auguste Dupin, a precursor to Sherlock Holmes, takes on a case in which he must find an incriminating letter hidden somewhere in a hotel room. The text begins with the Prefect D of the Parisian Police soliciting Dupin’s help and describing his own failed attempt to locate the letter. The Prefect knows exactly what he is looking for, possessing a “minute account” of the letter’s physical appearance and its contents. He conducts a thoroughly “microscopic” search of the premises, drawing upon a battery of investigative techniques developed over his “long experience” with such matters. Much of this search involves focusing on minor details that he hopes will lead him to the letter. He probes furniture upholstery and book bindings with thin needles, dismantles furniture, and uses a microscope to look for displaced dust and wood-shavings. Unfortunately, this detailed search yields no results, and the Prefect turns to Dupin. After a brief survey, Dupin finds it exactly where nobody would expect to find it: in a card-rack full of letters, slightly torn and marked to change its external appearance.

This story is often used to emphasize a “too-close attention to detail” which illustrates a “hidden in plain sight” dynamic; sometimes the things that most deserve our attention “escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious.” In this first use, the story highlights the pitfalls of myopic perspectives. However, the story also comments on the second component of cleverness, “acumen,” or the specificity of a field of knowledge. The problem is not so much that the Prefect is incompetent or that his methods are poorly executed. On the contrary, Dupin calls the search techniques “highly ingenious.” Rather, the problem is the assumption that a particular framework can be universally applied to any situation, that the way the Prefect follows clues will always yield the thing for which he searches. The prefect “forcibly adapts his designs” to his skillset, and cannot imagine another way of looking for a hidden item. It is his training and experience that set limits on what he is looking for, how he can conduct the search, and ultimately what he is able to find.

In my first post in this series, I spoke about the work of mastery in precisely these terms. I described mastery as knowing what to look for, and noted that this knowledge is cultivated through consistent practice and training. I hope that the Prefect illustrates why I expressed reservations about mastery in that same post. In certain ways, mastery is little more than mere “cleverness.” On the one hand, these skills can make engagement with a text a gateway to entirely new perspectives, which last week’s reading of Hospital Sketches demonstrates. On the other hand, ill-applied mastery can easily become a limiting factor, narrowing the focus of what the reader is looking for in the text, and consequently what she finds in it.

Unlike the case of the purloined letter, such directed searches do not always result in complete failure. A reader could easily, having seen the importance of biographical information to Alcott’s text, turn to authorial biography as the key to unlocking meaning in any text. I’m sure that I could read Poe’s life into “The Purloined Letter” and develop a coherent reading. The question, however, is whether or not I should focus on that detail. Doing so certainly wouldn’t have developed the reading outlined above. And it’s this that causes me pause. If my students have learned to apply a framework of author biography, or symbolic objects, or metaphors to the works they read, I worry that this is the only way that they will approach texts once they leave my classroom. Mastery and cleverness, while valuable, may also result in uniform interpretations. It is possible to be clever and to decide what to look for in a text before even reading the first word. It takes an investment in the joy of studying literature, in the joy of discovery, to let the text offer up which details are important on its own terms.

Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

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