Nadya Pittendrigh | University of Houston - Victoria (original) (raw)

Published Work by Nadya Pittendrigh

Mostly it's not helpful if anyone sees your anger, but I have a hard time not raising my voice wh... more Mostly it's not helpful if anyone sees your anger, but I have a hard time not raising my voice when people don't understand my instructions. And, as it happens, the soundtrack to fascism involves escalating insect noise, while a railroad boss directs multiple bodies to hammer at a single spike. The work of connecting lines of transport to send products of the factory to distant cities, as if distance were non-existent, to build a railroad to the contours, to build a trestle or a viaduct, everyone must hammer the same spike. So I took it hard when I spoke in the meeting and no one listened.

Bodies of Knoweldge, 2022

the analysis that follows, I refer to this category as intrabody resonance, which I distinguish f... more the analysis that follows, I refer to this category as intrabody resonance, which I distinguish from empathy, sympathy, pathos, and identification for its nonratiocinative characteristics. Though it is not all-powerful and not decisive, it is a common but underrecognized element of grassroots persuasion. Based on my participation in a campaign in Illinois to close the state supermax prison, my observations of the contributions of former prisoners to that activism, and my own experience of their effects, I argue that even though intrabody resonance does not always supersede other obstacles to solidarity, it had a role to play in the prison-reform campaign that provides the impetus for this discussion. Using the situation of the supermax, which is widely characterized in the United States by indefinite solitary confinement, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and a lack of human touch, this chapter articulates intrabody resonance as a subcategory of persuasion that operates routinely between bodies. Following the publication of Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect in 2004, many scholars have theorized affect as at least in some sense communal, providing a prompt for this investigation of intrabody resonance and its implications for community activism. As Brennan asserts, if I walk into an "atmospheric room. .. and it is rank with the smell of anxiety, I breathe this in" (68). Her claim that "we are not self-contained in terms of our energies" challenges individualist conceptions of our presumed separateness (6). Similarly, in her contribution to Thinking Through the Skin, Jennifer Biddle defines corporeality as explicitly not a "private individual experience or expression" and "not determined by the muscular skeletal conceptions that physiology and biology afford us" (190). Biddle suggests instead that our "bodily potentiality" or permeability "derives from a literal sharing in the bodies of others" (190). This volatile sharing points to an overlooked communal dimension of embodiment, which Sara DiCaglio also discusses in this collection, arguing, "The question of scent is ultimately one of boundaries; odors link us, are difficult to contain or to control" (chapter 4). Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey also address the volatile borders of bodies in their very title, Thinking Through the Skin, and their conception of "inter-embodiment" articulates "a politics attuned to the fleshy interface between bodies" (1). Likewise, the term intrabody resonance also gestures towards Karen Barad's conception of "intra-action;" her focus on "the entanglements and responsibilities of which one is a part" hints at ethical entanglement as part of our proximity to one another (ix). If these authors all emphasize interconnectedness through various forms of affective permeability, then the conditions of isolation that characterize

Writing Across Difference, 2022

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment gr... more We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning
pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate
instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we
participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago
Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how
our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led
to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to
research, teaching, and service and on our professional and
personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we
offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation
for the intentional design and assessment—both formative
and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor
objectives and outcomes.

Extreme Punishments

This text was published in Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration an... more This text was published in Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement, ed. Keramet Reiter and Alexi Koenig, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Brian Nelson speaks fast, and his Chicago "dees" and "dats" promise to spare his audience some of the usual fluff; he evokes sympathy in his audience while handling his own outrage or recalling tough memories. In the spring of 2010, Brian was released from Tamms Closed Maximum Security prison (CMAX), the Illinois supermax, after spending twelve years in solitary confinement. Opened in 1998, and closed in 2013, Tamms was originally meant to function as temporary added punishment for prisoners already serving time in other state prisons.

This article examines a community-based writing assignment that invited first-year students to in... more This article examines a community-based writing assignment that invited first-year students to intervene in controversies surrounding Chicago's Millennium Park. Despite the apparent diversity of student arguments, a single ideology permeated all student texts. Whether selfidentifying as liberal or conservative, students deployed almost identical rhetoric to assert that the park either embodied or failed to embody "democratic values." We learned that, however threatening it may be to our own ideological investments, we must push students to interrogate their foundational assumptions. Given current orthodoxy about the morality of any action or idea labeled "democratic," it is important that teachers work to stimulate true diversity of opinion by challenging "democracy" as a trump argument.

Papers by Nadya Pittendrigh

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Jul 31, 2015

Following state legislation mandating corequisite support in lieu of remedial prerequisites for u... more Following state legislation mandating corequisite support in lieu of remedial prerequisites for underprepared students, this article tells the story of a specific corequisite program piloted in South Texas. Our model transformed certain sections of our institution s first-year seminar into corequisite courses, which were paired with required gateway classes. We argue, this model helped to extend existing networks of student support beyond classrooms and beyond advising.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015

Brian Nelson speaks fast, and his Chicago ‘’dees’ and ‘dats’ promise to spare his audience some o... more Brian Nelson speaks fast, and his Chicago ‘’dees’ and ‘dats’ promise to spare his audience some of the usual fluff; he evokes sympathy in his audience while handling his own outrage or recalling tough memories. In the spring of 2010, Brian was released from Tamms Closed Maximum Security prison (CMAX), the Illinois supermax, after spending 12 years in solitary confinement. Opened in 1998 and closed in 2013, Tamms was originally meant to function as temporary added punishment for prisoners already serving time in other state prisons. Yet many prisoners, including Brian, wound up being held in isolation at Tamms for many years—some for the duration of its operation. During Brian’s incarceration at Tamms, he suffered severe depression, became a central figure in litigation over the treatment of Tamms prisoners with mental illness, and organized a prisoner-written newsletter and hunger strike for improved conditions. Since his release, he has been a vocal activist, attempting to persuade members of the public that the conditions of extreme punishment in US supermax prisons inflict invisible but lasting psychological harm. Like the other former supermax prisoners who provide the impetus for this chapter Brian possesses considerable personal and political agency. Yet when he speaks about Tamms, he becomes visibly upset, often choking back tears and shrugging as though he has momentarily given up trying to explain his experience.

Utah State University Press eBooks, Feb 15, 2022

Subjects: LCSH: English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching (Higher)-Social aspects-United State... more Subjects: LCSH: English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching (Higher)-Social aspects-United States. | English language-Composition and exercises-Study and teaching (Higher)-Social aspects-United States. | Individual differences. | Interdisciplinary approach in education-United States. | Discrimination in higher education-United States.

Extreme Punishment, 2015