Tom F. Wright's Transatlantic Rhetoric as an American Studies Teaching Resource

I first read Tom F. Wright's Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes in late summer 2020, while drafting the syllabus for a new undergraduate rhetoric course in my university's Writing major. I proposed “Writing across Cultural Differences” several years ago and had been waiting eagerly to teach it, only to find myself delivering the inaugural version over Zoom during the coronavirus pandemic. As I write this essay in December 2020, I am in the midst of syllabus-building email exchanges with a now-frequent teaching partner (Victorian literature specialist Linda Hughes), as we prepare to offer a graduate seminar in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature for the fourth time. (Our first foray into collaborative transatlanticism was in 2010.) While we plan for the upcoming class (also – sigh – being taught over Zoom), I am rereading Wright's book, this time focussed more on the “transatlantic” side of his title. A generative resource for my teaching in both these classes, Transatlantic Rhetoric enacts a global brand of American studies, modeling content and methodologies crucial to the field today. To illustrate, I will revisit some ways in which Wright's anthology is informing my pedagogy in this challenging COVID-shaped year.

From “Slow” to “Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down” and the Impact on Student Learning

This paper presents a case study on the measurable impact of a decolonized approach to the Slow Movement on student learning in a graduate seminar. The study operationalizes principles of Being Lazy and Slowing Down (BLSD)—that is, to make peace with not doing or being productive, to de-privilege the need for a result, and to decenter the mind as the primary source of knowledge in order to make space for the body and spirit. The study then examines the uptake of these principles into the seminar’s instructional approach, curricular design, and semester-long project. Textual analysis of the project shows minimal adoption by students of the principles of BLSD. However, student feedback obtained through semi-structured oral interviews provides insight into this minimal impact: it suggests that even a decolonized approach to BLSD is a privileged position not afforded to all.

Embodied Engagements: Body Mapping in a Sociology of Sexuality Classroom

Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we discuss body mapping as an embodied pedagogical practice for teaching sexuality. Body mapping centers stigmatized bodies through guided visual, oral, and textual self-representation. We begin by discussing embodied pedagogies and the bind of representation (ideas grounded in the work of feminists of color) in teaching and learning about sexuality. We then consider three body mapping experiences: in a sexuality education graduate seminar ( seminar mapping), as a remote synchronous practice ( remote mapping), and as a solo practice ( solo mapping). We explore challenges in representation, embodied difference, and the im/possibility of mapping the sexual. Finally, we consider the implications and applications of body-mapping exercises for sexualities classrooms.

Emulation of Historical Software as a Tool for Research and Pedagogy: A Case Study in the History of CAD

This paper presents an abbreviated summary of previous work using a distributed emulation network (EaaSI) to allow for the analysis of computer assisted design (CAD) tools including multiple versions of the popular AutoCAD system. It elaborates on the use of EaaSI in a graduate seminar on the history of computational design, presenting a design pedagogy use case for archived software objects and showing how their remediation through emulation can lead to new historical and design insights into contemporary software. It includes further clarification on the relevance of emulation to the archival community and highlights extended use cases not found in the original publication.

Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory by James Matlock

James Matlock’s Signs of Reincarnation discusses important issues related to the belief in reincarnation. These include the historical and social prominence of this belief in various cultures around the world, especially its place in spiritual and religious communities. Matlock also explores data seemly suggestive of reincarnation and attempts to develop a theory of reincarnation that can account for the data collected by parapsychological investigators and researchers. In this way, Matlock aims to show that belief in reincarnation is defensible as a conclusion drawn from what he calls “signs” of reincarnation. Matlock does a good job mapping out the wide range of beliefs about reincarnation across time and culture. His description of various case studies and their salient features is highly informative. And his effort to develop a theory of reincarnation—what he calls a “processual soul theory”—is a laudable attempt at trying to accommodate the various details of interesting case studies and a core idea of reincarnation in the spiritual traditions of the world. Unfortunately, this is where my praise ends. Like many other books on the topic, Matlock’s book suffers from a variety of serious defects. The cavalcade of poor scholarship, conceptual confusion, and impoverished argumentation is particularly egregious given that Signs is allegedly based on the lecture notes for Matlock’s course on reincarnation pitched at the advanced undergraduate or Masters-level graduate seminar. In what follows, I’ll explain why Matlock’s book is paradigmatic of nearly everything that’s wrong with survival research over the past thirty years.

Do You Know Where You Are? Bringing Indigenous Teaching Methods into the Classroom

Within sociological literature, Indigenous Studies and settler colonial theoretical frameworks are beginning to be regarded with greater respect and consideration. Yet, the discipline still struggles to emerge from the grasp of settler colonial assumptions; we continue to wait for U.S. Sociology to acknowledge and appreciate that all teaching, learning, and research on Turtle Island takes place on Indigenous homeland. It is a tall task to “decolonize” sociology as a field; however, Indigenous feminist scholars remind us of our responsibilities to critique problems and to offer a generative pathway forward. We take up this charge and offer our experiences and suggestions for how we can take steps toward decolonizing our college classrooms. In this article, a professor and two students write about our differing and shared experiences of learning together in an Indigenous Methodologies graduate seminar at a research-intensive university. We approached the class, and this article, with the following question: What if we were able to imagine a classroom experience that nurtured and inspired us to be in good relation with the Indigenous peoples and homelands on which our classrooms are built? We share our experiences and suggest tools we all may use to bring Indigenous teaching methods into our classrooms, and into our lives outside the classrooms.