Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

The politics of the street: Street art, public writing and the history of political contest in Chile

This commentary focuses on the politics of public space in democracy and dictatorship. It delves into what Peter Winn calls the revolution ‘from below’ from the perspective of urban conflict, suggesting a political history that attends to urban and visual culture as a crucial arena of political practice. It suggests that the often-conflictive battle over public spaces was, and continues to be, a mechanism by which an unprecedented range of citizens entered into an ongoing debate over the boundaries of citizenship, practice, politics and that this practice was adapted, transformed and reimagined over the last five decades. The struggle over streets and walls continues to be central to Chilean political history, and urban space remains a field of ongoing contest and debate: the estallido of social unrest in contemporary Chile connected a new generation of activists to this longer history of creative politics of protest and protest art and gave them the opportunity to articulate new forms of intersectional political thought in public space, even in the face of state-sponsored violence. Studying these forms of unrest reveals that theirs is an incisive, intersectional critique of the limits of the ‘transition to democracy’, of neoliberal democracies and of the legacies of dictatorship.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s World War I writing developed, first, as he honed his distinctive style and progressed toward completing his first novel. In the 1930s, Hemingway shifted approach, however, and his World War I-related writings came under the influence of his interest in social inequality (To Have and Have Not); his shift toward showing instead of implying interiority in Across the River and into the Trees; and the general imposition of his ego into his private and public writing. He remained committed, however, to the idea of the inherently complex nature of warfare.

More than a case of mistaken identity: Adult entertainment and the making of early sexology

Sexology emerged as a discipline during a period of keen concern about the social effects of sexually explicit media. In this context, sex researchers and their allies took pains to establish the respectability of their work, a process that often involved positioning sexual science in opposition to erotic literature and images. This article argues that this presentation of sexual science obfuscated sex researchers’ complex relationship with erotic print culture, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided sexual scientists with access to explicit material that served as evidence for theories about human sexuality, facilitated transnational exchanges of sexual-scientific thought by bringing sex research across borders, and introduced sex research to wider audiences. Erotic print culture can thus be seen as one of several fields that contributed to the interdisciplinary development of sexology and facilitated the diffusion of sexual-scientific theories. Sex researchers’ shifting, often ambivalent relationship with erotic print and its producers emphasizes that while the boundaries of sexology were extremely porous, they were also heavily policed: Working to establish a modern, respectable new branch of science, sexual scientists reframed the output of other fields of enquiry as products of their own, blotted their reliance on these sources from the historical record, and denigrated them in public writing.

Arctic ice in cross-disciplinary undergraduate education: Experiences across natural science, social science, international policy, and public writing

<p>With the Arctic currently warming at a rate at least twice that of the global average, the coupled Arctic ecosystem is losing ice. This includes significant land-ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic ice caps and glaciers, reduction in extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice, and thawing permafrost. This scale of environmental change significantly affects Arctic people, wildlife, infrastructure, transportation, and access. Societal response to these changes relies on advances in and application of research spanning multiple scientific disciplines, with policy-making done in partnership with Indigenous people, governments, private agencies, multinational corporations, and other interested groups. Everyone will interface with outcomes due to a changing climate and the challenge is mounting for the next generation of leaders. The cross-disciplinary nature of the challenge of Arctic ice loss and climate change must be met by cross-disciplinary undergraduate education. While higher education aims for disciplinary training in natural sciences and social sciences, there is an increasing responsibility to integrate topics and immerse students in real-world issues. And, in our experience the undergraduates we teach are eager for courses that can do this well.</p><p>What is immersive undergraduate education? We consider this as either immersing students in a focused topic in the classroom, immersing students in a place (especially while abroad), or combining the two through targeted lectures, informed discussions, travel, and writing. With regard to the Arctic, it is necessary to bring scientific understanding to learning activities otherwise focused on societal impacts, policy making, and knowledge exchange through public writing.</p><p>We share from our practical experience teaching Arctic-focused courses to classes each with 10-30 students with majors from across the University of Washington (UW) campus (total undergraduate student body of 32,000). Three recent activities that integrate the state of science with impacts on society in undergraduate courses include: 1) a four-week study abroad course to Greenland and Denmark focusing on changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet and sea-level rise, 2) a 10-week Task Force course in Arctic Sea Ice and International Policy in partnership with the UW International Policy Institute at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies that includes one-week in Ottawa where students develop a mock Arctic sea ice policy for Canada consistent with Inuit priorities, and 3) a 10-week seminar in public writing where students write mock newspaper articles, book reviews, and policy summaries about ice in a changing climate. These courses were designed to include a similar subset of earth science, atmospheric science, and oceanography, but the distinct structure and application of the science in these three separate courses led to distinct learning outcomes. In addition, we present how the academic minor in Arctic Studies at the University of Washington has allowed students to design their own integrated understanding of Indigenous and nation-state Arctic geopolitics, Arctic environmental change, and policy by taking a selection of courses and engaging in research and report writing.</p>

Memory politics in transition: Nostalgia tours and gilded memories of Petsamo

The paper examines politics of memory related to the Arctic Finnish-Russian-Norwegian borderland, Petsamo-Pechenga. How it has been remembered, shared and interpreted after the Second World War by refugees from Finnish Petsamo and their offspring, on the one hand, and Finnish public writing, on the other hand? Which means have been used to revitalize their collective and personal narratives and construct the geohistorical space of Petsamo? During the Second World War, Petsamo was the focus of the Arctic conflict, and at the end of the war, Finland lost the region to the Soviet Union. Our source material comprises 521 articles, which we analyzed using qualitative and text mining methods. We conclude that compared with the other war refugee communities in Finland, Petsamo is peripheral to Finnish public post-war memory politics and nostalgia tourism. This is for several reasons: the fact that people from Petsamo constituted a minority among the Finnish evacuees (5200 of 420,000) and were subdivided into two groups (Finns and Skolt Sami people), the devastated and polluted environment, militarization and closeness of Russian Pechenga until the 1990s. The politics of memory about Petsamo – such as nostalgia tourism, written memories, monuments, intergenerational experiences of landscape and history books – can be seen as a manifestation of collective sorrow for a lost homeland, both as individual therapeutic surrender and creating a special emotional community of ex-Petsamo people.

Remembering George W. Smith’s “Life Work”: From Politico-Administrative Regimes to Living Otherwise

This article revisits activist ethnographer George W. Smith’s intellectual and political legacy, with a focus on his engagement with and conception of “life work.” In the context of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smith contributed to reframing the way in which AIDS was problematized and confronted. Rather than treating people living with HIV/AIDS as “disease vectors” to be isolated from the general population, as had been the case under the prevailing public health regime, he started his research and organizing from the standpoint of people living with HIV/AIDS – investigating the everyday work that they did in accessing the services that they needed in order to survive. Drawing from archival research, activist interviews and his published works, this article traces how Smith deployed the concept of life work in his research as part of the “Hooking Up” Project, in his public writing in the gay and lesbian press, and in his organizing with AIDS ACTION NOW! in Toronto. Beyond the reproductive labour of individuals in accessing particular politico-administrative regimes, which Smith focused on in his research, we explore how life work can be theorized more broadly to include collective efforts to confront social, biomedical and institutional barriers to living. Hence, in considering Smith’s AIDS activism, we argue that his theorizing and political organizing, taken together, should themselves be seen as forms of life work.