Revisiting This Girl Is on Fire: Seeking a Home for the Narrative During Lockdown to Uncover the Burning Embers

This article relates the author’s insights about writing as inquiry that emerged while reading This Girl is on Fire: Seeking a Home for the Narrative during lockdown. It describes how the contemplative and expansive space of this narrative resonates with the in-between feeling of being locked down during a pandemic. Writing to inquire within in-between spaces is vital for exploring the rich and vibrant possibilities of the unknown.

Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. As a critical intervention in mainstream media literacy education, CML education integrates a cultural studies lens with a critical pedagogy orientation. In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography and personal reflective narratives or “anti-biography” to explore the dynamics and tensions of teaching CML in the posttruth era. We locate the shift to posttruth in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump, which produced a resurgence in far-right discourses promoting distrust of media and state institutions. We show how this shift created openings to criticality that made teaching CML easier in some ways; however, as we look deeper, what appears as an opening may in fact be an impasse. Through personal narratives, we illustrate what these openings and impasses looked like, how they felt and how they played out, to theorize about the possibilities and tensions of teaching CML in the current political moment. We argue the posttruth era necessitates a change in how we teach CML but not, as commonly argued, by teaching students how to fact-check or identify reliable sources. Instead, we must learn and teach about how the right uses media in transgressive ways to promote and normalize a racist, sexist, and authoritarian political agenda. We must also work to better understand students’ experiences of economic precarity and the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Shifting the Frame: Theoretical and Methodological Explorations of Photography in Educational Research

In this article, I focus on the relationship between photography and educational research, situating this conversation at the interstices of fact/fiction, indexical/imaginary, and art/data. I ask: How has our understanding and use of photography, the camera, and the photographer been shaped by the field of qualitative research? What possibilities exist for reimagining the role of photography in educational research and practice? Drawing on a diverse body of theoretical, empirical, and artistic works, I respond to the questions by looking at three key elements shaping image-based visual research: the ontology of photography, collaboration and photography, and thinking with art/photography. Across these three key elements, I interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about the camera, photographs, and the relationships between the photographer-photographed in the context of educational research and articulate some shifts that help reframe our understanding of photography and how it is used within educational research and practice.

Power, Resistance, and Place in Appalachia

This essay is an analysis of the power and resistance dynamics at work in West Virginia. Because identity constructs are often place-based, place and the meaning of place in Appalachia inform identity construction and are a powerful tool to harness for resistance. With extensive outmigration pulling Appalachians from home and local communities, the facets of identity tied to place become even more complex. Loss impacts the salience of the “idea” of home for many Appalachians. Identity that is place-based can offer a framework for building a deeper understanding of a region. At the same time, to comprehend resistance, it must have a specific context and location. Places are made up of many different identities that make creating solidarity extremely difficult. Resistance must be place-based but in order for movements to be effective, it must not rely solely on place. Appalachia has a strong history of resistance and resilience. The role of power in resistance provides context to explore West Virginia’s rich history of protest.

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Unapologetic Educational Research: Addressing Anti-Blackness, Racism, and White Supremacy

We explore “ Unapologetic Educational Research: Addressing Anti-Blackness, Racism, and White Supremacy” to engage scholars in thinking about and reflecting on what it means to conduct qualitative research from a standpoint that honors Black lives in the research process while also disrupting racism and white supremacy. First, we unapologetically take up topics including engaging “diversity” in qualitative research, interrogating the etic perspective in the “new” focus on race, using critical perspectives to inform research and practice, examining the racialization of positionality, focusing on Black women educational leaders, and engaging schools and communities. Next, we engage in dialogue with each other to push ourselves—and you/the reader—to think more deeply about the serious and potentially dangerous implications of our research decisions. Given the unprecedented historical present we are all experiencing in our lifetime, we are committed to shifting the landscape of qualitative research as well as using research to shift our sociopolitical context toward racial equity and justice.

No Man’s Land: Mutant Natures in Canadian Eco-Horror Film

This essay aims to analyze the significance of Canadian “eco-horror” film within the so-called “Anthropocene” era, wherein it functions as a form of nostalgia and vehicle for imagining the liberation of nature from under the yoke of cultural repression. Assuming Canadian director Adam MacDonald’s critically lauded natural horror film Backcountry as its centerpiece, this essay surveys eco-horror’s reversal of heteropatriarchal masculinity and settler thinking by confronting it with a monstrous image of nature wholly distinct from the Canadian mythos of “beneficent” natural world submitted to the will of Man.

To Vaccinate or Not? Decision-Making in the Time of COVID-19 Vaccines

Decision-making has become an important component of the COVID-19 pandemic. A particular decision that we are currently presented with is whether to take up COVID-19 vaccines or not. Through the lens of autoethnography, I present my personal “vaccine decision-making” process as a social scientist who, despite having mixed emotions toward COVID-19 vaccines, made the decision to get vaccinated. Recognizing the subjective nature of my narrative, autoethnography is valuable to produce knowledge that is meaningful, evocative, and relatable to different audiences. This article thus offers valuable insights into decision-making related to COVID-19 vaccine uptake, shedding light on the importance of vaccine literacy, trust, and social responsibility in this process.

High Fidelity: Pedagogy and Postatomic Japanese Chronicle

With the 75th anniversary of 1945 barely in our cultural rearview mirror, the generations who experienced World War II firsthand have ceded their stories to the generations that follow. This article focuses on the 1945 bombings of Japan, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who experienced the bombings, known generally and collectively as hibakusha, worked to preserve accounts of their experiences in acts of transmission across generations that were intended to prompt particular kinds of praxis. Now the accounts—at least those for public consumption—are collected in a variety of memorial archives and exhibitions, available in translation and via a range of media. This article asks, How can we think about the ‘afterlives’ of these accounts, or how might we understand the body of archived testimony in a way that is available for engagement by subsequent generations at temporal, geographic, and linguistic remove? To address this question, I frame witnesses’ acts of memorial transmission as teaching acts. I argue that their lingering power is a pedagogical power, meant to lead the audience, the students, toward care, attention, and action. I argue that the “lesson” takes the form of Benjaminian chronicle and its activity is one of appeal and response prefigured by Japanese ritual actions of irei, or making amends with the dead. The form and activity of these lessons frame a memorial relationship with testimonial literature that moves beyond moment of production and transmission into an enduring and accessible space of critical pedagogy.

“China Virus” and “Kung-Flu”: A Critical Race Case Study of Asian American Journalists’ Experiences During COVID-19

The researchers designed a critical race case study to represent media coverage by and experiences of Asian American1 journalists during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. After analyzing data inductively, the researchers drew upon critical race theory scholarship to apply the theoretical concepts of race consciousness, whiteness as property, and the hegemony of racial hierarchy to analyze Asian American journalists’ experience during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers used the Asian American Journalists Association’s repository of news coverage, webinars, and panels written and presented by Asian American journalists; in-depth interviews with Asian American journalists; and their social media posts about Asian American experience and the pandemic as data sources. Triangulated across the data sources, the following themes are represented: (a) Asian American Journalists: Living and Reporting Multiple, Intersecting Crises; (b) Anti-Asian American Discrimination and Racism; and (c) The Paradox of Asian American hypervisibility and invisibility; the subtheme is “Calling for Diversity, Equity, and Transformation in the Newsroom.”