Sarah D'Adamo | McMaster University (original) (raw)
Papers by Sarah D'Adamo
The Innovative Instructor, 2021
A "Best Practice" article on integrating accessibility best practices into postsecondary instruct... more A "Best Practice" article on integrating accessibility best practices into postsecondary instructional materials and delivery, with a focus on the accessibility checker in document creation software as a core tool with which to build habits toward accessible instruction.
A book review of Cathy Davidson's _The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prep... more A book review of Cathy Davidson's _The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux_ (2017) and Malcolm Harris's _Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials_ (2017), that queries how pedagogy might be better oriented toward the conditions under which today's students learn & labor (focused on US higher education).
Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studie... more Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studies:
This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorised beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalisation studies frequently offer. Within the shifting paradigms of Cultural Studies, the work of this conference (as well as the current project) moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2011), this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which Cultural Studies emanates and to positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.
Drafts by Sarah D'Adamo
A portrait of institutional sentimentality exhibited by US university leadership in the first mon... more A portrait of institutional sentimentality exhibited by US university leadership in the first months of the pandemic, examining the newly public embrasure of an institutional pedagogy of risk and risk management. Based in a small archive of crowd-sourced emails from university presidents and their surrogates.
Talks by Sarah D'Adamo
Abstract for upcoming Critical University Studies Roundtable, SAMLA 2019 Special Session
In the human capital paradigm that dominates contemporary higher learning, connectivity has becom... more In the human capital paradigm that dominates contemporary higher learning, connectivity has become a loaded moral good. It performs its value in institutional cultures as a public pedagogy that promotes global citizenship, digital cultural production or participation, and intra-institutional networking as modalities of civic innovation, social wealth, and personal growth. Yet despite this prosocial patina, in each of these conceptions the institution acts as a delimiting enclosure, grounded as it is in mechanisms of exclusivity, privatization, and financialization that continually (re)produce material and epistemic inequity and substantiate the assertion that the university is “a way to think antisociality as the grounds for relation” (Ashon Crawley). Pedagogically, the capacity for individual agentic experience is often bound up with the digital or curricular interface in a sleight-of-hand that elides its situation in the political economy of higher ed and educational technologies. How might instructors, within the confines of today’s precarious and uneven learning and laboring conditions, reorient the roving expansiveness of the interface such that it provides tactics for reading and resisting the strictures of institutionalized learning and credentialing? This paper summarizes original interdisciplinary research on the affordances of multi-scalar thinking, infrastructuralism, and cognitive mapping for a critical global pedagogy. Its aim will be to suggest possible approaches that encourage students to interact with global connectivity as an occasion to map their own situation within institutional processes, to trace global problems of mobility, migration and enclosure with a critical regionalist lens, and to develop knowledge frameworks invested in convivial research and community application rather than institutional capital.
Within the current political and economic surge for the ‘disruption’ and ‘deconstruction’ of inst... more Within the current political and economic surge for the ‘disruption’ and ‘deconstruction’ of institutional norms, the university is conspicuously exposed to competing visions of its devolution. Some are marketized and dispossessive, and others are equity-based and collectivizing; some claim the university is not merely mutating from its ruins, but dying. This paper will explore the unique potency cultural studies has in this moment for developing counter-institutional literacy with the tactics of critical pedagogy. In keeping with Lawrence Grossberg’s description of the responsibility of cultural studies practitioners to tell “the best story that can be told, about any context, within that context,” this discussion will have a global focus, commensurate with the globalist policies and pedagogies universities still promote, to account for the political affordances of reflexively attending to cultural texts and political economy within the interdisciplinary framework of global studies. My dissertation research surveying global studies curriculum has revealed a relative lack of critical pedagogy approaches to global studies, including in its global cultural studies forms, where thematic and pluralistic approaches are more dominant than structural, aesthetic or autoethnographic modes of inquiry about global life and processes. This surveyistic pattern effectively minimizes opportunities to develop sociocultural maps that center the situation of the student in global processes administered by institutions such as the university.
Instead, I argue global cultural studies should publicly stage the development of agency, critical consciousness and articulation about the embeddedness in global capitalist social relations and uneven development of the classroom and its members. This project would necessarily be enacted through both individual and collective practices of dialogue, through textual study and composition-based creative assessment that stage encounters for a range of global subject positions (including one’s own), and group practices such as peer learning, technology-assisted collaborative composition, and progressive research on the infrastructure of global processes extending from the classroom’s local situation. In order to avert the cosmopolitanizing effect of the institution’s default global studies framing of ‘global citizenship’, and to address the exclusionary and immiserating reality produced within and without the institution, I will place my own critical pedagogy practices in dialogue with a growing body of work on contemporary abolitionism. In particular, this dialogue will feature the abolitionist pedagogy of a grassroots thinktank in Baltimore, working with the tactics of non-reformist reform, to consider the affordances of abolitionist praxis for cultural studies pedagogy and how these might translate in the space of the university, its ongoing intensification of inequality and indebted personhood, and the neoliberal project of human capital development. Rather than aligning a theory of critical global pedagogy for cultural studies with particular set of objects, questions or methods, this dialogue with abolitionist praxis will expand upon the ways in which classroom frameworks might afford students the imaginative space and potential agency to apply the institutional literacy they have cultivated through their human capital upbringing: to jam up, remake, and shrink those institutions themselves, while imagining alternative and more just uses and houses for those skills.
How does a critical pedagogue approach composition? Writing is generally a highly individualized ... more How does a critical pedagogue approach composition? Writing is generally a highly individualized task, and writing for assessment is typically structured in order to be manageable inside of the labor conditions of the undergraduate classroom. This task is often organized by supporting apparatuses like rubrics, generic conventions, peer evaluation and learning outcomes, which represent a mixture of administrative and disciplinary parameters for instruction and skills. While these mechanisms encourage facility in the norms of academic learning and writing, their constraints hinder openly collaborative approaches to composition. These norms also orient students away from the collectivized inquiry that can foster critical literacy in the social structures that produce the very unevenness of skills and knowledge constituting the semi-public space of the classroom. However, because the content of such writing and the form it takes is indeterminate, there remains space for cultivating reflexivity between the subjects and objects of these compositions.
This paper proposes that instructors consider this indeterminacy as a pedagogical opportunity, especially generative for an ethics of instruction that holds the additional labor required from dispossessed and minority students as its central concern. This approach relies on assessment, textual analysis and academic essay conventions, but prompts the students in an exercise of cognitive mapping by tracing the infrastructure of world knowledge presented in the text. Students develop critical skills by describing objects of knowledge in their texts in comparison with their own epistemological positioning and critically examining their affective responses to the text (i.e. resistant states like boredom, disinterest, alienation and confusion alongside imaginative and sentimental attachment). Regardless of skill or experience level, students can develop academic writing techniques alongside imaginative literacies that seek frames for understanding their epistemic situation and developing modes of desire or criticality that could foster a transformative orientation toward the world.
A paper to be presented at The 48th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 23-26, 2017 Baltimore, MD, themed
"Translingual and Transcultural Competence: Toward a Multilingual Future in the Global Era."
Presented for the 2016 meeting of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Languag... more Presented for the 2016 meeting of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Languages Studies (CACLALS)
This paper will think through passivity in the context of the university classroom. My dissertati... more This paper will think through passivity in the context of the university classroom. My dissertation project
focuses on the classroom’s mixed terms in the global university, or the contradictions of labor and
positionality it hosts as a space of “impersonal intimacy” (Ellen Rooney) inside of institutionalized and
internationalized life. Amongst the de facto entanglement of the public and private, individualism and
collectivity, privilege and precarity, embodiment and abstraction, and affective, technological and
preprofessional labor, in what way is passivity operative as a classroom dynamic? In addition to the
administrative imposition on learning through standardizing metrics, through disciplinary training
students learn not to vocalize knowledge passively (the infamous “passive voice”), yet also to reproduce
rhetorical, epistemological, and political conventions under the banners of humanism and critical
thinking. While we might use administrationfriendly words like “mastery” or “valueadding” to frame
this product of classroom labor, the labor of reproducing complexity also forms an “institutionalization of
antiinstitutionality” (Mark McGurl). In what ways does this mixed situation induce passivity? How
might that passivity be foregrounded as pedagogically substantial or productive in the real time of the
classroom encounter between instructors, students and their texts? Achille Mbembe recently observed, in
the conditions of the university, “that to be a subject is no longer to act autonomously in front of an
objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. We
therefore have to shift away from the dreams of mastery.” I hope to respond to his observation by
gathering the remainders of embodied or disobedient knowledge that present themselves throughout the
pedagogical process (or, Spivak’s “uncoercive rearrangement of desires”). Building on sociological and
ethnographic research into the student encounter with the globalized situation of the undergraduate
classroom, I will theorize practical exercises that might foreground postures of passivity in the classroom,
with focus on the intimacy and reflexivity of the encounter that the classroom constitutively hosts yet
overdetermines.
This paper locates a transhistorical critique of “imaginative geography” in a nineteenth-century ... more This paper locates a transhistorical critique of “imaginative geography” in a nineteenth-century colonial backwater. Though popular amongst his contemporaries, Canadian novelist James de Mille remains underacknowledged beyond national literary scholarship, and A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) has been largely shelved as a failed narrative suffering from “indeterminacy.” Emerging from the backdrop of Victorian high imperialism, this novel satirizes dominant orientalist discourses through popular genres of its time, including a nascent science fiction, popular romance, fantastic adventure, and ethnographic travel narrative, which, in part, seems plausibly based on research of the actual, travelled world. However, it also satirically engages with the conventions of colonialist textuality in a project of critical cognitive mapping: to conduct a reflexive politics for its readership, de Mille frames the travel narrative’s seeing man and his hermeneutics of the other with a theoretical mapping of the (neo)colonialist travel narrative as genre. I argue that de Mille’s novel models a form of anticolonial critique by performing a hermeneutics of encounter, here a “strange” discursively-embedded European self alongside its anxious representation of others. This provocation offers a way of destabilizing center-periphery representational flows that may solidify in the globalized cartographies of world literary study, and further, elaborates the relationship between reflexivity and dissent. By placing a taxonomy of colonialist discourses of knowing and mapping at the centre of its instability, this text invites its readers to position disconsolation and skepticism as a basis for the ‘worlding’ impulse's transnational comparisons.
Accepted for the 2013 Annual Meeting, "History, Postcolonialism, and Tradition"; see attached doc... more Accepted for the 2013 Annual Meeting, "History, Postcolonialism, and Tradition"; see attached document for abstract
In this presentation, I will consider the framework by which we teach and engage in “global studi... more In this presentation, I will consider the framework by which we teach and engage in “global studies” in the Canadian classroom, with focus on the civic and ethical implications of reading literature. I will aim to generate discussion about these curricular and pedagogical goals of the English classroom, to whatever degree they can be distinguished from concrete, skill-, exam-, and standards-based assessments: Why do we include texts from culturally-other locations and histories? How do we situate them for student understanding – in terms of thematics, language, and form, or other factors? How does the juxtaposition of world texts with canonical texts of the Anglo-American tradition challenge as well as reinforce dominant understandings of cultural norms in a Canadian classroom? I want to explore two difficulties in intercultural reading, which can be broadly described in terms of cultural sensitivity and of cultural position. On sensitivity, I will present some examples of “global” texts to consider reading as an encounter with otherness, and promote discussion of the range of responses to this encounter that might develop amongst the students. This discussion hopes to show how a global perspective requires a fundamental engagement with difference, but to warn against the use an overtly political or ideological frame for instruction. Using some of my own teaching anecdotes, I will try to account for reading as it produces a sensitizing experience, both ethically and socially, as well as an an experience of incommensurability, or an encounter which does not generate sensitivity, sympathy, and connection with the reader. If we are to teach critical thinking skills, our pedagogy must account for both possibilities. Toward this educational goal, I will introduce a teaching strategy for global studies that foregrounds reading as a process of reflexivity, or a kind of critical ethnocentricism. Through reflexive reading, or a constant attention to one's own social and cultural framework, students might understand more clearly that difference is present within communities (especially within multicultural Canada) as well as across cultures. How difference is registered and interpreted, I mean to emphasize, ought not to be prescribed, but instead encouraged as the basis of written analysis and critical engagement with current affairs. This aspect of global awareness also promotes an attention to cultural position, and a comparison across positions within a globalized, Anglophone culture that is marked by social,economic, and historical interdependence. These two vocabularies – of sensitivity and of position – will be treated through concrete pedagogical and literary example to be examined by the group in attendance. Through this work, I hope we might outline how “global citizenship” is a process of critical reflection on difference as it can be communicated by literature, and ways in which we can update the curricular canon to register social interdependence across the globe.
This paper will seek to take up the dislocation of the other through the sovereign consciousness ... more This paper will seek to take up the dislocation of the other through the sovereign consciousness of the cosmopolitan narrative persona. This textual address of “another other” tracks the ethical process of non-identity, or of self-difference, through a narrative of encounter and its provisional positionality of the subject. While discussion of this strategy should not be limited to capacious, experimental narrative form, the mode of engagement presented by Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses serves as a productive response to Rita Felski’s call that we expand our interpretative vocabulary by offering both aesthetic and hermeneutic possibilities for thinking through otherness. I propose to read the mid-point episode of “Lestrygonians,” which is shaped by encounters and imagination of otherness throughout Bloom’s studied deferral of self, alongside the novel’s final ‘other’ narrative in Penelope, rendered (and gendered) by Molly Bloom. This pairing poses a series of questions for giving voice to otherness, or reading alterity as a process of textual encounter: 1) Through a shared linguistic inflection and historical referent, how do the pair’s voicings of each other generate a community of memory and identification through the acknowledgment of Bloom’s otherness? 2) How does Joyce’s strategy of a gendered, othered “language of flow” in “Penelope” help to locate Bloom’s relationship to his own otherness? 3) How do the aesthetic and narrative productions of otherness in Ulysses invite the ethical imagination of the reader, as a kind of deep engagement with the mode of narrative as process of thinking through otherness? These questions allow a reading of ethical engagement via narrative as process of acknowledgment, suggested by positionality and relationality rather than articulated as an event or act of encounter. Through the risk of representing the disunified self, I will argue, Joyce’s meditation on alterity helps to generate a reflexive ethical voice and to renew hermeneutic engagement with our interpretative position.
Conference Presentations by Sarah D'Adamo
A presentation for the MLG's ICS 2023 ROUNDTABLE: “FUNDING, DISCIPLINE, GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERING ... more A presentation for the MLG's ICS 2023 ROUNDTABLE:
“FUNDING, DISCIPLINE, GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERING THE UNIVERSITY TODAY”
with Dennis Hogan, Rithika Ramamurthy and Shannan Hayes
American Studies Association Online Roundtable, 2022
Books by Sarah D'Adamo
Dissertation, 2022
Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the ... more Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the reproductive condition for these postsecondary education systems and their infrastructures that has emerged within regional conditions of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials. Across its chapters, university globalism is defined and cataloged via institutional practices that shape learning and labouring conditions for students, their surrounding environments, and the pedagogies administered to market and credential student experience. Chapters examine the global university, the global learning interface, the global curricular programme, the global student and the global classroom as multi-scalar sites for observing university globalism’s forms and their effects, especially on the situation of undergraduates. This formation is studied via infrastructuralism as an analytic shortcut to questions of social reproduction, political economy and their geohistories in these Global North contexts as globally dominant, mass cultural sites for global education.
I posit the framework of connectivity, defined as the social and infrastructural good through which globalism is variously represented and embedded into undergraduate study, to periodize this shared regional institutional culture from the 1990s to the present. Connectivity links higher ed’s digitalization with its cosmopolitan modes of networking, identity formation, and human capital development that emerge across the institutional spectrum in public pedagogies and curriculum studied herein. This infrastructure is managerial, extractive, and socially reproduced, conditioning ambivalence and pessimism into the institutionalist modes of learning, networking and credentialing promoted by university globalism. Connectivity’s pro-social ideologies of global citizenship, inclusive excellence and social innovation are analyzed against higher ed’s proletarianizing material conditions and its anti-social foundations in racial capitalism and settler nationalism within US and Canada. This study aims to illuminate global study’s contradictory terms for undergraduates alongside their organic intellectualism within university conditions, and their affordances for critical global pedagogical practice to meet the crises of the present.
The Innovative Instructor, 2021
A "Best Practice" article on integrating accessibility best practices into postsecondary instruct... more A "Best Practice" article on integrating accessibility best practices into postsecondary instructional materials and delivery, with a focus on the accessibility checker in document creation software as a core tool with which to build habits toward accessible instruction.
A book review of Cathy Davidson's _The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prep... more A book review of Cathy Davidson's _The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux_ (2017) and Malcolm Harris's _Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials_ (2017), that queries how pedagogy might be better oriented toward the conditions under which today's students learn & labor (focused on US higher education).
Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studie... more Introduction to a Special Issue of Critical Arts Journal on South-North Cultural and Media Studies:
This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorised beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalisation studies frequently offer. Within the shifting paradigms of Cultural Studies, the work of this conference (as well as the current project) moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2011), this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which Cultural Studies emanates and to positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.
A portrait of institutional sentimentality exhibited by US university leadership in the first mon... more A portrait of institutional sentimentality exhibited by US university leadership in the first months of the pandemic, examining the newly public embrasure of an institutional pedagogy of risk and risk management. Based in a small archive of crowd-sourced emails from university presidents and their surrogates.
Abstract for upcoming Critical University Studies Roundtable, SAMLA 2019 Special Session
In the human capital paradigm that dominates contemporary higher learning, connectivity has becom... more In the human capital paradigm that dominates contemporary higher learning, connectivity has become a loaded moral good. It performs its value in institutional cultures as a public pedagogy that promotes global citizenship, digital cultural production or participation, and intra-institutional networking as modalities of civic innovation, social wealth, and personal growth. Yet despite this prosocial patina, in each of these conceptions the institution acts as a delimiting enclosure, grounded as it is in mechanisms of exclusivity, privatization, and financialization that continually (re)produce material and epistemic inequity and substantiate the assertion that the university is “a way to think antisociality as the grounds for relation” (Ashon Crawley). Pedagogically, the capacity for individual agentic experience is often bound up with the digital or curricular interface in a sleight-of-hand that elides its situation in the political economy of higher ed and educational technologies. How might instructors, within the confines of today’s precarious and uneven learning and laboring conditions, reorient the roving expansiveness of the interface such that it provides tactics for reading and resisting the strictures of institutionalized learning and credentialing? This paper summarizes original interdisciplinary research on the affordances of multi-scalar thinking, infrastructuralism, and cognitive mapping for a critical global pedagogy. Its aim will be to suggest possible approaches that encourage students to interact with global connectivity as an occasion to map their own situation within institutional processes, to trace global problems of mobility, migration and enclosure with a critical regionalist lens, and to develop knowledge frameworks invested in convivial research and community application rather than institutional capital.
Within the current political and economic surge for the ‘disruption’ and ‘deconstruction’ of inst... more Within the current political and economic surge for the ‘disruption’ and ‘deconstruction’ of institutional norms, the university is conspicuously exposed to competing visions of its devolution. Some are marketized and dispossessive, and others are equity-based and collectivizing; some claim the university is not merely mutating from its ruins, but dying. This paper will explore the unique potency cultural studies has in this moment for developing counter-institutional literacy with the tactics of critical pedagogy. In keeping with Lawrence Grossberg’s description of the responsibility of cultural studies practitioners to tell “the best story that can be told, about any context, within that context,” this discussion will have a global focus, commensurate with the globalist policies and pedagogies universities still promote, to account for the political affordances of reflexively attending to cultural texts and political economy within the interdisciplinary framework of global studies. My dissertation research surveying global studies curriculum has revealed a relative lack of critical pedagogy approaches to global studies, including in its global cultural studies forms, where thematic and pluralistic approaches are more dominant than structural, aesthetic or autoethnographic modes of inquiry about global life and processes. This surveyistic pattern effectively minimizes opportunities to develop sociocultural maps that center the situation of the student in global processes administered by institutions such as the university.
Instead, I argue global cultural studies should publicly stage the development of agency, critical consciousness and articulation about the embeddedness in global capitalist social relations and uneven development of the classroom and its members. This project would necessarily be enacted through both individual and collective practices of dialogue, through textual study and composition-based creative assessment that stage encounters for a range of global subject positions (including one’s own), and group practices such as peer learning, technology-assisted collaborative composition, and progressive research on the infrastructure of global processes extending from the classroom’s local situation. In order to avert the cosmopolitanizing effect of the institution’s default global studies framing of ‘global citizenship’, and to address the exclusionary and immiserating reality produced within and without the institution, I will place my own critical pedagogy practices in dialogue with a growing body of work on contemporary abolitionism. In particular, this dialogue will feature the abolitionist pedagogy of a grassroots thinktank in Baltimore, working with the tactics of non-reformist reform, to consider the affordances of abolitionist praxis for cultural studies pedagogy and how these might translate in the space of the university, its ongoing intensification of inequality and indebted personhood, and the neoliberal project of human capital development. Rather than aligning a theory of critical global pedagogy for cultural studies with particular set of objects, questions or methods, this dialogue with abolitionist praxis will expand upon the ways in which classroom frameworks might afford students the imaginative space and potential agency to apply the institutional literacy they have cultivated through their human capital upbringing: to jam up, remake, and shrink those institutions themselves, while imagining alternative and more just uses and houses for those skills.
How does a critical pedagogue approach composition? Writing is generally a highly individualized ... more How does a critical pedagogue approach composition? Writing is generally a highly individualized task, and writing for assessment is typically structured in order to be manageable inside of the labor conditions of the undergraduate classroom. This task is often organized by supporting apparatuses like rubrics, generic conventions, peer evaluation and learning outcomes, which represent a mixture of administrative and disciplinary parameters for instruction and skills. While these mechanisms encourage facility in the norms of academic learning and writing, their constraints hinder openly collaborative approaches to composition. These norms also orient students away from the collectivized inquiry that can foster critical literacy in the social structures that produce the very unevenness of skills and knowledge constituting the semi-public space of the classroom. However, because the content of such writing and the form it takes is indeterminate, there remains space for cultivating reflexivity between the subjects and objects of these compositions.
This paper proposes that instructors consider this indeterminacy as a pedagogical opportunity, especially generative for an ethics of instruction that holds the additional labor required from dispossessed and minority students as its central concern. This approach relies on assessment, textual analysis and academic essay conventions, but prompts the students in an exercise of cognitive mapping by tracing the infrastructure of world knowledge presented in the text. Students develop critical skills by describing objects of knowledge in their texts in comparison with their own epistemological positioning and critically examining their affective responses to the text (i.e. resistant states like boredom, disinterest, alienation and confusion alongside imaginative and sentimental attachment). Regardless of skill or experience level, students can develop academic writing techniques alongside imaginative literacies that seek frames for understanding their epistemic situation and developing modes of desire or criticality that could foster a transformative orientation toward the world.
A paper to be presented at The 48th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 23-26, 2017 Baltimore, MD, themed
"Translingual and Transcultural Competence: Toward a Multilingual Future in the Global Era."
Presented for the 2016 meeting of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Languag... more Presented for the 2016 meeting of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Languages Studies (CACLALS)
This paper will think through passivity in the context of the university classroom. My dissertati... more This paper will think through passivity in the context of the university classroom. My dissertation project
focuses on the classroom’s mixed terms in the global university, or the contradictions of labor and
positionality it hosts as a space of “impersonal intimacy” (Ellen Rooney) inside of institutionalized and
internationalized life. Amongst the de facto entanglement of the public and private, individualism and
collectivity, privilege and precarity, embodiment and abstraction, and affective, technological and
preprofessional labor, in what way is passivity operative as a classroom dynamic? In addition to the
administrative imposition on learning through standardizing metrics, through disciplinary training
students learn not to vocalize knowledge passively (the infamous “passive voice”), yet also to reproduce
rhetorical, epistemological, and political conventions under the banners of humanism and critical
thinking. While we might use administrationfriendly words like “mastery” or “valueadding” to frame
this product of classroom labor, the labor of reproducing complexity also forms an “institutionalization of
antiinstitutionality” (Mark McGurl). In what ways does this mixed situation induce passivity? How
might that passivity be foregrounded as pedagogically substantial or productive in the real time of the
classroom encounter between instructors, students and their texts? Achille Mbembe recently observed, in
the conditions of the university, “that to be a subject is no longer to act autonomously in front of an
objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. We
therefore have to shift away from the dreams of mastery.” I hope to respond to his observation by
gathering the remainders of embodied or disobedient knowledge that present themselves throughout the
pedagogical process (or, Spivak’s “uncoercive rearrangement of desires”). Building on sociological and
ethnographic research into the student encounter with the globalized situation of the undergraduate
classroom, I will theorize practical exercises that might foreground postures of passivity in the classroom,
with focus on the intimacy and reflexivity of the encounter that the classroom constitutively hosts yet
overdetermines.
This paper locates a transhistorical critique of “imaginative geography” in a nineteenth-century ... more This paper locates a transhistorical critique of “imaginative geography” in a nineteenth-century colonial backwater. Though popular amongst his contemporaries, Canadian novelist James de Mille remains underacknowledged beyond national literary scholarship, and A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) has been largely shelved as a failed narrative suffering from “indeterminacy.” Emerging from the backdrop of Victorian high imperialism, this novel satirizes dominant orientalist discourses through popular genres of its time, including a nascent science fiction, popular romance, fantastic adventure, and ethnographic travel narrative, which, in part, seems plausibly based on research of the actual, travelled world. However, it also satirically engages with the conventions of colonialist textuality in a project of critical cognitive mapping: to conduct a reflexive politics for its readership, de Mille frames the travel narrative’s seeing man and his hermeneutics of the other with a theoretical mapping of the (neo)colonialist travel narrative as genre. I argue that de Mille’s novel models a form of anticolonial critique by performing a hermeneutics of encounter, here a “strange” discursively-embedded European self alongside its anxious representation of others. This provocation offers a way of destabilizing center-periphery representational flows that may solidify in the globalized cartographies of world literary study, and further, elaborates the relationship between reflexivity and dissent. By placing a taxonomy of colonialist discourses of knowing and mapping at the centre of its instability, this text invites its readers to position disconsolation and skepticism as a basis for the ‘worlding’ impulse's transnational comparisons.
Accepted for the 2013 Annual Meeting, "History, Postcolonialism, and Tradition"; see attached doc... more Accepted for the 2013 Annual Meeting, "History, Postcolonialism, and Tradition"; see attached document for abstract
In this presentation, I will consider the framework by which we teach and engage in “global studi... more In this presentation, I will consider the framework by which we teach and engage in “global studies” in the Canadian classroom, with focus on the civic and ethical implications of reading literature. I will aim to generate discussion about these curricular and pedagogical goals of the English classroom, to whatever degree they can be distinguished from concrete, skill-, exam-, and standards-based assessments: Why do we include texts from culturally-other locations and histories? How do we situate them for student understanding – in terms of thematics, language, and form, or other factors? How does the juxtaposition of world texts with canonical texts of the Anglo-American tradition challenge as well as reinforce dominant understandings of cultural norms in a Canadian classroom? I want to explore two difficulties in intercultural reading, which can be broadly described in terms of cultural sensitivity and of cultural position. On sensitivity, I will present some examples of “global” texts to consider reading as an encounter with otherness, and promote discussion of the range of responses to this encounter that might develop amongst the students. This discussion hopes to show how a global perspective requires a fundamental engagement with difference, but to warn against the use an overtly political or ideological frame for instruction. Using some of my own teaching anecdotes, I will try to account for reading as it produces a sensitizing experience, both ethically and socially, as well as an an experience of incommensurability, or an encounter which does not generate sensitivity, sympathy, and connection with the reader. If we are to teach critical thinking skills, our pedagogy must account for both possibilities. Toward this educational goal, I will introduce a teaching strategy for global studies that foregrounds reading as a process of reflexivity, or a kind of critical ethnocentricism. Through reflexive reading, or a constant attention to one's own social and cultural framework, students might understand more clearly that difference is present within communities (especially within multicultural Canada) as well as across cultures. How difference is registered and interpreted, I mean to emphasize, ought not to be prescribed, but instead encouraged as the basis of written analysis and critical engagement with current affairs. This aspect of global awareness also promotes an attention to cultural position, and a comparison across positions within a globalized, Anglophone culture that is marked by social,economic, and historical interdependence. These two vocabularies – of sensitivity and of position – will be treated through concrete pedagogical and literary example to be examined by the group in attendance. Through this work, I hope we might outline how “global citizenship” is a process of critical reflection on difference as it can be communicated by literature, and ways in which we can update the curricular canon to register social interdependence across the globe.
This paper will seek to take up the dislocation of the other through the sovereign consciousness ... more This paper will seek to take up the dislocation of the other through the sovereign consciousness of the cosmopolitan narrative persona. This textual address of “another other” tracks the ethical process of non-identity, or of self-difference, through a narrative of encounter and its provisional positionality of the subject. While discussion of this strategy should not be limited to capacious, experimental narrative form, the mode of engagement presented by Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses serves as a productive response to Rita Felski’s call that we expand our interpretative vocabulary by offering both aesthetic and hermeneutic possibilities for thinking through otherness. I propose to read the mid-point episode of “Lestrygonians,” which is shaped by encounters and imagination of otherness throughout Bloom’s studied deferral of self, alongside the novel’s final ‘other’ narrative in Penelope, rendered (and gendered) by Molly Bloom. This pairing poses a series of questions for giving voice to otherness, or reading alterity as a process of textual encounter: 1) Through a shared linguistic inflection and historical referent, how do the pair’s voicings of each other generate a community of memory and identification through the acknowledgment of Bloom’s otherness? 2) How does Joyce’s strategy of a gendered, othered “language of flow” in “Penelope” help to locate Bloom’s relationship to his own otherness? 3) How do the aesthetic and narrative productions of otherness in Ulysses invite the ethical imagination of the reader, as a kind of deep engagement with the mode of narrative as process of thinking through otherness? These questions allow a reading of ethical engagement via narrative as process of acknowledgment, suggested by positionality and relationality rather than articulated as an event or act of encounter. Through the risk of representing the disunified self, I will argue, Joyce’s meditation on alterity helps to generate a reflexive ethical voice and to renew hermeneutic engagement with our interpretative position.
A presentation for the MLG's ICS 2023 ROUNDTABLE: “FUNDING, DISCIPLINE, GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERING ... more A presentation for the MLG's ICS 2023 ROUNDTABLE:
“FUNDING, DISCIPLINE, GOVERNANCE: CONSIDERING THE UNIVERSITY TODAY”
with Dennis Hogan, Rithika Ramamurthy and Shannan Hayes
American Studies Association Online Roundtable, 2022
Dissertation, 2022
Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the ... more Examining contemporary higher education in the US and Canada, this study posits globalism as the reproductive condition for these postsecondary education systems and their infrastructures that has emerged within regional conditions of degraded institutional legitimacy and downgrading credentials. Across its chapters, university globalism is defined and cataloged via institutional practices that shape learning and labouring conditions for students, their surrounding environments, and the pedagogies administered to market and credential student experience. Chapters examine the global university, the global learning interface, the global curricular programme, the global student and the global classroom as multi-scalar sites for observing university globalism’s forms and their effects, especially on the situation of undergraduates. This formation is studied via infrastructuralism as an analytic shortcut to questions of social reproduction, political economy and their geohistories in these Global North contexts as globally dominant, mass cultural sites for global education.
I posit the framework of connectivity, defined as the social and infrastructural good through which globalism is variously represented and embedded into undergraduate study, to periodize this shared regional institutional culture from the 1990s to the present. Connectivity links higher ed’s digitalization with its cosmopolitan modes of networking, identity formation, and human capital development that emerge across the institutional spectrum in public pedagogies and curriculum studied herein. This infrastructure is managerial, extractive, and socially reproduced, conditioning ambivalence and pessimism into the institutionalist modes of learning, networking and credentialing promoted by university globalism. Connectivity’s pro-social ideologies of global citizenship, inclusive excellence and social innovation are analyzed against higher ed’s proletarianizing material conditions and its anti-social foundations in racial capitalism and settler nationalism within US and Canada. This study aims to illuminate global study’s contradictory terms for undergraduates alongside their organic intellectualism within university conditions, and their affordances for critical global pedagogical practice to meet the crises of the present.