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Papers by Julie Rak

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2006

��| Rak attracted Fulford's ire since he writes about these himself, but popular culture re... more ��| Rak attracted Fulford's ire since he writes about these himself, but popular culture research influenced by the politics of cultural studies, which aims to critique the conservative values Fulford holds dear. Fulford chooses to cloak that discussion of politics in contempt for the subject matter, and that's where things get really interesting. Fulford's strategy of expressing contempt for serious studies of popular culture on the one hand while writing about popular culture seriously on the other isn't so different from the position of popular ...

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, Aug 1, 2008

CBC's The Greatest Canadian as Celebrity History hen Tommy Douglas won CBC Television's... more CBC's The Greatest Canadian as Celebrity History hen Tommy Douglas won CBC Television's contest to name ��the Greatest Canadian�� in November 2004, the real victor was not Douglas but a genre whose development is unique to television: the serial biographical vignette. Popularized by the Biography series developed by ASCE Television and widely imitated by other networks��including the CBC��the serial biographical vignette presents the life of its subject through interviews with friends and family, the voice of an unseen ...

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2016

Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, 2013

Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Nov 12, 2006

A Review of Cormack, Patricia. 2002. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mill and Baudrillard. ... more A Review of Cormack, Patricia. 2002. Sociology and Mass Culture: Durkheim, Mill and Baudrillard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

English Studies in Canada, Mar 1, 2007

Canadian Journal of Communication, May 8, 2015

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, 2016

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2008

The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001

Journal of American Studies, 2010

In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find ou... more In June, 2016 a group of six MLA members traveled together to the West Bank and Israel to find out what it was like for Palestinian academics and students trying to study, teach, and research at universities in the occupied territories and within Israel itself. In addition to learning about academic conditions under occupation, the group also wanted to hear directly from Palestinian scholars and students about their thoughts on the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. They also met with a number of Jewish Israeli leftwing academics and activists to hear about the opportunities for change from within the regime. In the course of their eight day trip the group met with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and university administrators at six universities in the occupied West Bank — Birzeit University in Ramallah, Bethlehem University, An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestinian Technical University–Kadoorie in Tulkarm, and Hebron University – as well as both Palestinian and Jewish academics and students from a number of Israeli universities. The report includes a detailed account of how Palestinian education has been undermined by Israeli checkpoints, impediments to travel, obstacles to getting materials, raids on campuses, arrests, denial of entry to foreign faculty, and restrictions on research. It also addresses the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the occupation and the unequal treatment of Palestinian faculty and students in Israel. The report presents the positions of Palestinians and Israelis on the academic movement, making a convincing case for an MLA resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The report is also available here: https://mlaboycott.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/report-on-mla-members-trip-to-the-west-bank-and-israel/

Biography, 2015

Biography 38.1 Winter 2015 Special Issue "Auto/biography in Transit" Guest Editors: Jason Breit... more Biography 38.1 Winter 2015
Special Issue "Auto/biography in Transit"
Guest Editors: Jason Breiter, Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, & Lucinda Rasmussen

Prose Studies, Jan 19, 2013

Th is paper analyses the process of the media in British Columbia and in Canada in the stigmatizi... more Th is paper analyses the process of the media in British Columbia and in Canada in the stigmatizing of members of the radical Doukhobor Russian religious community known as the "svobodniki" or the Sons of Freedom. Th is process lasted from the late 1920s through to the end of the 1960s.

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006

This paper considers the implications of teaching narratives about trauma in a university setting... more This paper considers the implications of teaching narratives about trauma in a university setting. As researchers begin to teach narratives which are part of what is beginning to be called "trauma studies," it is necessary to think about how to teach narratives about atrocity. I argue that narratives like Elly Danica's Don't: A Woman's Word do not portray trauma in a confessional mode, but seek to enact secondary trauma within readers or viewers as part of an individual or social transformation. This enacting produces a specific type of silence. In this silence, the readers or viewers are called into being as witnesses in very special ways. The pedagogical challenge which teachers of testimonial narratives of trauma face is twofold. First, there is the challenge of silence as a necessary part of the response to trauma, and second, there is the ethical challenge of bearing witness to trauma in a classroom situation. I consider work by Dori Laub on trauma witnessing and challenge assumptions by Shoshana Felman about teaching to a crisis in order to see how students can become witnesses.

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2006

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, Aug 1, 2008

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2016

Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, 2013

Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Nov 12, 2006

English Studies in Canada, Mar 1, 2007

Canadian Journal of Communication, May 8, 2015

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, 2016

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2008

The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001

Journal of American Studies, 2010

Biography, 2015

Prose Studies, Jan 19, 2013

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit... more Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

NOTE: This book is NOT available for free download. Please order it through the publisher or a bookseller.

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse’s training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Ontario, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Life Among the Quallunaat was first published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the third book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or underappreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This critical edition of Mini Aodla Freeman’s groundbreaking work includes revisions based on the original typescript, an interview with the author, and an afterword by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak.

From Facebook to Twitter and beyond: How do we create identities in cyberspace? Identity Techn... more From Facebook to Twitter and beyond: How do we create identities in cyberspace?

Identity Technologies is a substantial contribution to the fields of autobiography studies, digital studies, and new media studies, exploring the many new modes of self-expression and self-fashioning that have arisen in conjunction with Web 2.0, social networking, and the increasing saturation of wireless communication devices in everyday life.

This volume explores the various ways that individuals construct their identities on the Internet and offers historical perspectives on ways that technologies intersect with identity creation. Bringing together scholarship about the construction of the self by new and established authors from the fields of digital media and auto/biography studies, Identity Technologies presents new case studies and fresh theoretical questions emphasizing the methodological challenges inherent in scholarly attempts to account for and analyze the rise of identity technologies. The collection also includes an interview with Lauren Berlant on her use of blogs as research and writing tools.

CONTRIBUTORS
Olivia Banner, Lauren Berlant, Suzanne Bouclin, Rob Cover, Mary L. Gray, Melissa Gregg, Helen Kennedy, Philippe Lejeune, Laurie McNeill, Alessandra Micalizzi, Aimée Morrison, Lisa Nakamura, Anna Poletti, Julie Rak, Courtney Rivard, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson.

Widens the field of auto/biography studies with its sophisticated multidisciplinary perspectives ... more Widens the field of auto/biography studies with its sophisticated multidisciplinary perspectives on the theory, criticism, and practice of self, community, and representation. Rather than considering autobiography and biography as discrete genres with definable properties, and rather than focusing on critical approaches, the essays explore auto/biography as a discourse about identity and representation in the context of numerous disciplinary shifts. Auto/biography in Canada looks at how life narratives are made in ...

... Page 5. © 2008 Andrew Gow and Julie Rak for the introduction All stories © estate of Nello Ve... more ... Page 5. © 2008 Andrew Gow and Julie Rak for the introduction All stories © estate of Nello Vernon-Wood Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Wood, Tex, 1882 ...

Origin stories are key to the genre of superhero comics. They are records of the precise moment i... more Origin stories are key to the genre of superhero comics. They are records of the precise moment in two ways: an ordinary person acquires superpowers and decides to use them for good (or evil), or an alien or god decides to fight crime on earth. They are also important for nations, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out in a small section called " The Biography of Nations " in Imagined Communities. Anderson says that the search for national origins reveals that it is not possible to say where and when a nation begins. National origins are therefore mythic, much like origins in biography, because " What cannot be remembered…must be narrated. " The origin is constructed for nations in serial time, gesturing towards the future of completely realized nationhood. Whenever we look for the " first " national indicator of anything, the first Canadian novel, the first contact, we are engaging in the economy of origins, exchanging the past for the future, the origin for the horizon of identity. It has proven to be a seductive economy, in that it is often assumed in a settler and Western context that authenticity for nations, national literatures, identities, participate in an update ideas about identity from Romanticism and psychoanalysis, which both assume that origins, and stories about origins, have much to tell us about who we are or where we live. In comics, and particularly in comics that were either made to support the idea of nation or to think through national history ironically, origins for heroes are connected to comics' position as ephemeral and part of print culture. Companies like Marvel and DC Comics in the United States created origin stories (and sometimes more than one) for their characters because their readership was interested in origins and would buy comics with that theme. Origins in comics therefore reveal, in a style I would call super/affective, how provisional origins are. They can be altered (the details of Batman's origin story have changed many times) to suit changing times or changing markets. They are dramatic (a human being is exposed to radiation, or a man comes from another planet, or an Amazon is made from clay) and are often about radical change because of the work of science, military conflict or abstract concepts of justice that must be made material.

As video games become central to the leisure worlds of adults as well as children around the worl... more As video games become central to the leisure worlds of adults as well as children around the world and as games become part of the everyday fabric of both online and offline life, the idea of studying them in a scholarly context is becoming more important too. But so far, scholars are still working on understanding how the study of video games might look different from the study of other objects in popular culture. As Will Wright, the developer of the Sims has said, "it's time to reconsider games, to recognize what's different about them and how they benefitnot denigrate -culture." In order to contribute to that effort, I would like to consider game sexuality, and in particular, queerness as an identity and as a practice, as a way to think about what the methodology of studying something like in a game context might look like. My examples of doing this will include Grand Theft Auto IV's expansion game The Ballad of Gay Tony and the Sims 3, which will look at what the activity of an avatar in each game could be, and how we can understand whether an avatar can be queer, or queerly played. SLIDE So far, most scholars who want to study gaming beyond theoretical studies about design or content analysis about ideology (that is, counting how many games have controllable female characters) have focused on gamer cultures, identities and play strategies as a way to do scholarship about this area. They do ethnographic investigations of game worlds and interview gamers. The early euphoria about the possibilities of online life as free from racisim because (in the work of Shelly Turkle in particular) life lived on the screen had utopian and postmodern

Mediatized environments (online and offline) are rapidly changing our understanding of what it me... more Mediatized environments (online and offline) are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity might come to mean in virtual worlds. In auto/biography studies, the growing interest in comics and forms of online media representation is a reflection of a wider investment in online and visual identifications, and in the creation of life stories and identities in new media. But, is our terminology and our assumptions about narrative creating a problem in auto/biography studies, with its twin emphases on the importance of "life" and "writing"? Can newer media teach us anything about what "life" looks like when the first person becomes an avatar who both is and is not the player of a game? Should we even refer to the activity of world-building in a game as writing, or as narrative at all? This paper poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia, which is my term for the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment. With a case study from the sandbox game The Sims 3, I will think about what it means when terms like "life," "writing" and "self" are put into motion in a game about living, but not about life as a product or even as a narrative.

Since 1760 when Horace-Bénédict de Saussure put up a reward for a successful summit of Mont Blanc... more Since 1760 when Horace-Bénédict de Saussure put up a reward for a successful summit of Mont Blanc in the French Alps, climbing the highest mountains in the world have played a central role in the way that much of the world has imagined conquest, human achievement and the place of wilderness in social life. Many scholars have noted that the activity of climbing these mountains and writing about that experience has been one of the key ways that modern, western ideas about human activity, the idea of the body and idea of masculinity have been formed. (SLIDE, SLIDE) In this reproduction of the famous 1818 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Kaspar Friedrich, for example, you can see classic Romantic ideas about the self and about the so-called mountaintop experience of climbing. We cannot see the face of climber in