Modern Language Studies — Issue 54.1 — Summer 2024
My daughter only knows to respond with love. Her voice unfurls my clenched hands, into rose petals. What’s wrong? Wanna talk about it? she asks as though she’s lived seven lifetimes. I stir her maple & brown sugar oatmeal into a syrupy sweet. Too much hot water this time. Maybe another time, Honey. Toast fires from the toaster. Bullets catapult from unforgiving barrels, pierce the veil of innocence, rapture children & parents alike. Daddy? Explosions leave bodies untraceable, voices muffled beneath the buildings that once kept them. Yes, too much water. Let’s use less next time. For those who remain, water is as scarce as finding shelter—collect three days’ worth in case they have to wait ten more days. Daddy? They won’t stop firing. They’re killing the poets. They won’t stop firing. They’re killing the videographers. They won’t stop firing. They w— Daddy? I think the oatmeal is ready. I stare into her earthy, obsidian eyes before serving up a warm bowl, garnished with a forehead kiss. Hoping every bite leaves the swallow sweeter for the stomach—cleans wounds left for dead.
front matter
54.1
VOLUME 54, NO. 1
SUMMER 2024
staff
LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR
AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR
PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiction and Poetry
ANGELA FULK ASSOCIATE EDITOR Profession and Pedagogy
RANDY ROBERTSON ASSOCIATE EDITOR Reviews
NICK STEPHENSON WEBMASTER
CRYSTAL VANHORN SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER
ALLEE MEAD COPYEDITOR
about NeMLA
The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.
NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 56th Annual Convention, to be held March 6–9, 2025 in Philadelphia. This year's theme, "(R)EVOLUTION," asks how the Humanities—in all their infinite variations, genres, and productions—have changed (in) our world, or failed to do so, or have maybe offered more or less progressive and imaginative mappings for more or less radical change. What role can the Humanities play in society, to honor our cultural and global diversity in all its dimensions.
NeMLA is delighted to host, for the Thursday opening address, Benjamin Fraser, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. His most recent books are Down Syndrome Culture: Life Writing, Documentary and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and Beyond Sketches of Spain: Tete Montoliu and the Construction of Iberian Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2023). The Friday keynote event will be given by the celebrated and award-winning writer Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, and a new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Please see the NeMLA web page at www.nemla.org for information on joining the organization and about the fellowships, awards, and publications available to members.
Modern Language Studies appears twice a year, in the summer and winter, and is a publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association.
NeMLA board of directors 2024–2025
EXECUTIVE BOARD
VICTORIA L. KETZ, La Salle University President
SIMONA WRIGHT, The College of New Jersey Vice President
MODHUMITA ROY, Tufts University Past President OFFICER
DEREK DIMATTEO, Gannon University Associate Executive Director
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
NICOLE LOWMAN, University at Buffalo American and Diaspora Studies Director
ANGELA FULK, SUNY Buffalo State College British and Global Anglophone Studies Director
MARIA PLOCHOCKI, City University of New York CAITY Caucus President and Representative
ERNESTO LIVORNI, University of Wisconsin–Madison Comparative Literature Director
MARIA MATZ, University of Massachusetts–Lowell Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director
JULIA TITUS, Yale University Cultural Studies and Media Studies Director
ANN MARIE SHORT, Saint Mary’s College Diversity Caucus President
OLIVIER LE BLOND, University of North Georgia French and Francophone Studies Director
ANDREA BRYANT, Appalachian State University German Studies Director
CHRISTIAN YLAGAN, Western University Graduate Student Caucus Representative
ESTHER ALARCON-ARANA, Salve Regina University Hispanic and Lusophone Studies Director
GIUSY DI FILIPPO, College of the Holy Cross Italian Studies Director
KATHLEEN KASTEN-MUTKUS, Rutgers University Libraries Professionalization and Pedagogy Director
MARIA ROVITO, Penn State University at Harrisburg Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Director
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MLS 54.1 contents
55th Annual NEMLA Convention Opening Address
Reproductive Justice and the Dobbs Decision
Rickie Solinger
Introduction, Mary Thompson
Articles
Narrational Montage, Crime Fiction, and Domestic Noir: Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train
Robert Lance Snyder
Profession & Pedagody
Making Across Modalities: Rethinking the Digital/Analog Binary in a First-Year Seminar
Alexander Cohen, Camille Frazier, Lisa Propst, and Blair Stein
Ungrading for Learning: Alternative Forms of Assessment in the Language and Literature Classroom
Nicole Coleman Poetry
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh: Notes for a Motherwork Manifesto
Savannah S. Miller: Down Record Low Mississippi River
Thomas Kneeland: POV: your favorite Black superhero’s pilot episode
Review
Erich Hatala Matthes. Drawing The Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies
Bryony Dixon
55th Annual NEMLA Convention Opening Address
Introduction: Mary Thompson, James Madison University
It was a pleasure to introduce Rickie Solinger at NEMLA’s annual convention in Boston on March 7, 2024. Her work on behalf of social justice has inspired and informed many of us who share Laura Briggs’ belief that “all politics are reproductive politics.”
NEMLA’s 2024 convention theme, surplus, prompted Solinger to push the idea beyond its common associations with capital and profit to include her concern that our historical moment reflects a surplus of ignorance, misinformation, and “unremembering.” No wonder, she mused, we feel today as if we stand on a precipice. Solinger urged her audience to seek a proper relationship between our past and present as we confront new challenges to human rights, which are (or should be) visible to us in recent instances of reproductive injustice. The 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is not a wholly new assault on freedom but rather “a new phase of the essentialized idea of woman and the use of reproductive ability to service national identity.” A better sense of continuity with past struggles can only invigorate our response and activism. The ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, Solinger reminded us, was never really enough. Today we are challenged to dream bigger.
Rickie Solinger earned her Ph.D. in History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. An independent scholar, she has produced a body of scholarship on the history of reproductive, gender, racial, and welfare politics in the U.S. that
has vitally raised and applied intersectional awareness to the feminist conceptual touchstone of choice.
She is the author of Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (1992, 2000), which exposed the contradictory social principles presiding over men’s and women’s sexual activity as well as the double-standards applied to unwed, pregnant White women and women of color. Wake Up Little Susie reveals how, following WWII, the pregnancies of unwed White women were valued for adoption while unwed African American women’s pregnancies were perceived as illegitimate bids for welfare benefits. In addition to being recognized with numerous awards, Wake Up Little Susie was a NYT Book Review Notable Book of the Year.
Her other publications include The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (1994, 2019) , a work of feminist recovery about Ruth Barnett, an abortionist who lived in Portland, Oregon, between 1918 and 1968; Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in the United States (2007, 2019); and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (2001), which importantly exposes the compromised efficacy of choice as a concept for defending reproductive freedoms under the current neoliberal regime.
Solinger is the editor of Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000 (1998), a collection
of essays on policy, prenatal testing, and providers. In the introduction, she observes how abortion came to occupy a “dedicated space in public discourse” for the expression of fear, outrage, hatred, ideology, and justice—a discursive arena previously dominated by civil rights and communism. Now, over twenty-five years later and after the ruling in Dobbs, the rise of telemedicine and abortion shield laws, and the Alabama Supreme Court’s recognition of the legal rights of frozen embryos, her insights into this space of politics, affect, and rights are as crucial as ever.
In addition to numerous articles, reviews, and essays, Solinger is the co-editor (with Gwendolyn Mink) of Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics (2003), as well as being the co-editor of Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims (2008) and Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in America (2009). She is a member and co-founder of Women United for Justice, Community, and Family, which is committed to welfare justice. She is also a curator whose exhibits include the photographic installation, “The Faces of Women in Poverty: Strength, Dignity, Determination.”
Solinger is the founder and Senior Editor of the University of California Press book series, Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the TwentyFirst Century. With her collaborator and friend, Loretta Ross, she co-authored the first volume for this series, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017). This timely primer provides the definition and essential history of reproductive justice as a movement and human rights framework. Her newest co-edited volume (with Krystale Littlejohn) is Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade (2024).
First off, it seems fitting to mark the theme that conference organizers chose to encourage coherence and continuity in a time on the edge. I have to say, if I were assigning a conference theme in spring 2024, I’d call it precipice . The organizers, however, chose the theme surplus . Perhaps we can say that since surplus is swamping every feature of U.S. society today, we are living on the precipice
In the spirit of the reigning theme, I’d like to introduce this opening event that I am honored to share with you, with my own brief take on surplus. First, I’d like to name two forms of surplus that structure the clotted circulatory system of contemporary society: the surplus of ignorance—an unfortunate abundance due to 40 years of defunding education, the death of local journalism, the burgeoning of internet-based misinformation, among many other causes—and the surplus of lies—tied into a dynamic, vampiric relationship with its partner, the surplus of ignorance.
The surplus of lies springs from so many causes as well, including the attenuation of media integrity; the poisonous relationship between corporate capital and politics; and the rise of politicians whose commitment to their own—and to their party’s—power is so fierce as to totally eclipse any concern with fact, if they see lying as an opportunity to engross power.
The third member of this unholy menage a trois is the death of history, that is, the surplus of unremembering. This surplus of unremembering must have something to do with why I’m here. I was invited by a person who wishes to remember, as I wish to remember, the violences of the past; the violence of a present that persistently and coercively neutralizes and forgets; and, of course, the violence that certain politicians promise us is coming.
None of these forms of surplus is unique to this moment in U.S. history. But right now, each
and together, perhaps uniquely, they are producing nasty, suppurating seepages, threatening the body politic.
Given my sense of surplus, I think of being here as an occasion for conjuring a proper relationship, between the past and now, for doing some history. But first a few words about where I come from.
Eagerly, perhaps over-eagerly, I need to let you all know that I was a literature person first, before I left the field to become a historian. This may have been a mistake for an aesthetic, curatorial type such as I am, because perhaps I am looking at more interesting faces in this literary society, better clothes, than in a history gathering. Did I lose my way?
But aesthetics aside, carrying my materialist commitments with me, I changed disciplines at the bright dawn of women’s history, where, in the early 1980s, despite my sense that I was in the right place, I continually had annoying conversations with the gents in my graduate school’s history department about whether the intersecting topics of sex, gender, pregnancy, race, and class could yield a legitimate, scholarly dissertation. When I came to write my dissertation about unmarried pregnancy and race, these folks literally accused me of wanting to write a piece of pulp that would sell at airport kiosks. It turned out that the “conversations” with the gents were never more than annoying. They were simply trivial, if depressingly telling, once I sensed that they would let me pass. I’ve always thought that the rapt hours I spent with Henry James prepared me to be a patient, analytical reader of government documents, institutional reports, trial transcripts, and desperate letters.
Also, upfront here I need to adapt the ubiquitous contemporary practice of acknowledging the ground on which we live and work, so as to signal consciousness of and indebtedness to those who founded, inhabited, and tilled the territory I stand on: the
framers of Reproductive Justice. In relation to that, I want to make the case here that it’s worth it to have worked for decades on understanding how one can be a White person speaking with some authority about Reproductive Justice, a framework and a movement founded, promulgated, and sustained by Black women.
Now, given all that, the most important idea I want to underscore today is that, as interdisciplinary scholar Laura Briggs puts it, all politics are reproductive politics. The politics of immigration, education, real estate, the environment, social provision, medicine, taxation, zoning, and more, plus of course the politics of public representation in all its manifestations—these domains all embody reproductive politics. That is to say, all of the institutions that define these and other domains are centrally and consequentially concerned with questions of who gets born to whom—who is a legitimate parent and who is not, who is a valuable future citizen and who is not, and other such matters.
Reproductive Justice, the foundational and essential frame that has defined my thinking—and the work of an ever-larger number of activists, scholars, policymakers, and organizations—is an exemplar of super-intersectionality. It exists to reveal how all politics are reproductive politics and to press these politics into a force for attaining the principles of Reproductive Justice:
The human right to own our bodies and control our future
The human right to have children
The human right to not have children, and
The human right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
My second most fervent point is that the policies and practices of institutions such as schools, banks, corporations, medicine, the real estate industry, and so forth—and the impacts of these policies and practices on the reproductive lives of individuals—are heavily inflected by White supremacy in the U.S. and also profoundly inflected by class bias.
For example, we see the persistence of school segregation in U.S. cities and rates of school funding that reflect the race of students and the value of the real estate in neighborhoods where parents live. We see the persistence of red-lining and the preservation of its historic impacts—the segregation and physical degradations of built communities into which millions of children are born. We see hideous, racially disproportionate maternal and infant mortality rates all over this country. We continue to see toxic dumps in low-income neighborhoods, poor access to fresh foods, few grocery stores, lower-quality healthcare services (if any), and no abortion services in more than 90% of counties in the United States. We see campaigns to harm immigrants and destroy voting rights.
All of these expressions of White supremacy (think in vetro fertilization: nothing could get Republicans to support abortion except IVF, a fertility treatment involving selection among fertilized eggs and destruction of unselected eggs, pursued by people who are 91% White) and many more expressions of White supremacy—the results of private and public policies and practices—directly impact reproductive politics and the lived experiences of people who reproduce.
What does choice even mean in communities with poor schools, indecent housing, lack of access to reproductive healthcare, few jobs paying living wages, and toxic environmental conditions?
Reproductive Justice is framed and is promulgated as a strategy, a movement, that makes an
existential case for the proposition that the range and richness of the resources that people can access in their community determine the lived experiences of people living in that community, including their reproductive lived experiences. People can make what we think of as reproductive choices only when the communities they live in have the resources to support choices, including the choice—the human right—to be a parent.
Using these ideas that define reproductive justice presses us to understand that reproduction is and has been, historically, for all of us—those born and those giving birth—a foundational process deployed to underwrite White supremacy and also White class privilege. I am underscoring how race and class differences in reproductive lived experiences undergird and sustain a society where the so-called choices of some people depend on—and sustain—the choicelessness of others. Conversely, the perceived and/or enforced choicelessness of some people aggrandize the others, the “noble,” “legitimate” choicemakers. This is one fruitful place to direct our concern about this capacious dynamic, process that Reproductive Justice captures, exposes, and mobilizes to dismantle.
And more: since reproduction functions and has always functioned in the U.S. as this essential marker—I will focus on race here—we face the mandate of paying attention to the fact that racially unmarked sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood are deeply unhelpful as categories—categories that remind me of my optician, a man, who suggested that my study of reproductive politics sounded like a “very esoteric, narrow” endeavor; and my primary care provider, a woman, who wants to complain to me about why [some] girls don’t use contraception when they just should; and somebody else who looks at me with confusion, maybe annoyance, when I refer to “reproductive politics” in the 18th century, and not because
I’m inaptly using a 20th-century term to describe the past, but reflecting a belief that reproduction and power were not partnering in the 18th century.
When we express, anywhere, on paper, in casual conversations, anywhere, an unmarked, universalized idea of pregnancy or parenthood, White audiences may identify, locking in their sense that Whiteness defines the human. And brutally, affirming their shadow sense that reproductive “non-Whiteness” is a species of crime.
Which inevitability, of course, raises questions about the usage of the unmarked term “people who can become pregnant.” We know the gender content in this expression, a descriptor that will surely describe ever-larger swathes of human reproduction in the future, but what does it elide? And how does it fit with or represent the lived experiences of hundreds of millions of people across the globe who live, coerced or by choice and in concert with their foremothers, as women?
Iwant to be a full-blooded historian here for a bit, spelling out the foundational purposes of racialized reproduction in the making of the United States. As well, of course, as laying down the context for American literature. To do that, I want to draw attention to the most difficult problem facing White settlers on the North American continent and facing the founders of the United States: the ongoing effort to make and fix the United States as a wealthy, powerful country for the benefit of White people. This aim, over several centuries in which no effective methods of contraception or other kinds of modern medicine existed, entailed enacting policies and laws, pursuing military operations, labor policies, and organizing everyday lived experience so as to shape and control population growth and mark the destiny of newborns according to fully racialized policies.
"I AM UNDERSCORING HOW RACE AND CLASS DIFFERENCES IN REPRODUCTIVE LIVED EXPERIENCES UNDERGIRD AND SUSTAIN A SOCIETY WHERE THE SO-CALLED CHOICES OF SOME PEOPLE DEPEND ON —AND SUSTAIN—THE CHOICELESSNESS OF OTHERS."
National leaders pursued initiatives rooted in racialized ideas about “populations.” They wrote laws and policies based on ideas about the inherent and inherited rights and abilities—or lack of rights and inabilities—of each racialized population, its rights or utter lack of rights to various forms of freedom and the transmission of these to the next generation; its rights to education, to command payment for their labor, to own land, to transmit property across generations, and to own other forms of wealth, such as enslaved persons. Crucial to White supremacist nation-building were racialized laws governing inherent, inherited, and transmissible rights to citizenship, to social and economic opportunities, and to personal dignity and safety, as well as laying down the laws governing the inherent, inherited, and transmissible status of enslaved people.
If the United States were to be a country for the benefit of White people, then federal leaders, state leaders, and elites who presided over towns and cities, and financial and manufacturing enterprises had to create and support institutions—legal, medical,
educational, religious, and other—enforcing racial difference, racial separation, and White supremacy. Racial slavery in the 19th century and its aftermath, the federal government’s war to exterminate Native Americans, and the government’s strategies for managing a racialized population of immigrants— these were the most brutal expressions of this intention, much of it accomplished via forms of population control, that is, by way of reproduction.
These approaches to population control were favorable to White reproduction, predatory toward the reproduction of Africans and African Americans, murderous toward Native groups and their progeny (until governmental authorities forced Native groups onto reservations and devised a program for separating children from their families and tribal communities, for murdering Native cultures), and mixed toward various groups of immigrants arriving in the United States from Europe, Asia, and Mexico, depending largely on the racial classifications imposed on the arrivals.
In the meantime, chastity, or sexual purity, was at the core of prescribed identity for White women
in the 18th and 19th centuries, while others—White men, enslaved and emancipated persons, Native women and “non-White” immigrants—were, according to law and White culture, fundamentally alienated from chastity. According to law and White culture, White women’s value was dependent on this attribute, absolutely. Chastity gave White women (especially those with a male patron who possessed resources) a measure of security against sexual vulnerability. It gave these White women value as wives and authority as mothers, in a culture that defined every iconic White family as “a little state, or empire ... governed by its patriarchal head.”1 White women’s enforced tie to chastity (and perceived chastity) was, paradoxically, their ticket to freedom: the freedom of disassociation from unchaste enslavement and from unWhiteness, generally.
Predictably, in the mid-20th century, when the meanings of race were so violently contested and the goals of the Civil Rights Movement pointed toward a kind of conceptual racial indeterminacy that would, exquisitely, result in non-racialized citizenship, then female reproductive bodies, their chastity and unchastity, once again became vehicles for resisting challenges to White supremacy. I am talking about the mid-20th century invention of adoption and the simultaneous association of women, iconically Black and collecting welfare benefits, with prostitution, culminating with the invention of the Welfare Queen.
The invention of adoption blended a crucial raft of tactics that served White supremacy as a national interest: hiding the White girl (typically the one whose parents lacked the resources to secretly carry her to New York or to Europe for an abortion), secreting this race-traitor who had sex and got herself pregnant, just like a Black girl, until she could resurface postpartum, unpregnant, and nobody would know. The emergence of Freudian theory accomplished a
miracle, cleansing the White girl’s baby from genetic taint (a White girl associated with pre-marital sex in the past had outed her relation to degraded forebears—drunks and idiots—like Carrie Buck, and nobody wanted that baby) and transforming the “illegitimate White baby” into an expensive commodity, for purchase by thoroughly vetted White couples on the newly invented adoption market in White-family-obsessed postwar America. A winwin-win, reinscribing Whiteness in so many ways.
At the same time, using putative sexual taint, disassociating Black girls and women from the freedom fight, from upright citizenship and decency, politicians, policymakers, and social service providers emphasized that these people who had sex, got pregnant, and had valueless, expensive children were many bad things; most obviously, they were not White. They wore their unchastity in public, and its wages hit White taxpayers hard. They were illegitimate mothers of their illegitimate babies, as only “non-Whites” could be.
These dual constructions of racialized reproduction, designed and promulgated by White elites, served as key markers of the meaning of Whiteness and Blackness in the Civil Rights era and worked as an important feature of the anti-civil rights strategy. A mid-20th-century update of 18th- and 19th-century reproductive politics.
Iread Dobbs as another phase and dimension of this same project, the sectional achievement of a centuries-long project to sustain or revive an essentialized idea of White “womanhood,” much frayed, possibly ruined, in the decades since Roe v. Wade. Another brutal intervention to use reproductive capacity as a key strategy for serving and servicing national interests, again. In the case of Dobbs , White nationalists and others support criminalization of abortion because they abhor the
1. Heman Humphrey, Domestic education, Amherst: J.S. + G. Adasms, 1840, P.16.
blurring of gender status as much as they have hated the blurring of racial status, both of which hit White males hard. The forces behind Dobbs aim to impale people—which people for which purposes is a racially complex matter and demonstrates how “having a baby” is still always a racialized event for policymakers—on their reproductive capacity, enslave them to it, force reproduction, force and raise up the meaning of female identity. Make it brutally and specifically undeniable, yielding, and reproductive. The parallel, simultaneous wide-ranging attacks on gender ambiguity constitute another strand of the project that features Dobbs. As does the hostility trained on those who just simply appear to complicate the concept of American Identity. These strands make a braid. Color it white.
I’ve heard a lot of relatively privileged women complain about the lack of visible, in-the-streets outrage after the Dobbs decision. Yes, maybe it’s hard to build a cohesive national response when the country is split: nearly half the states have banned or severely restricted abortion, and the rest have not. And in those states with bans, it’s very different, more personally threatening, to go into the streets than it is elsewhere. And elsewhere, it’s complicated by the persistence of Roe-like rights.
But the resistance to Dobbs is massive. We see this in state referenda results and in all the work across the country to get people the healthcare they want and need, no matter the laws in the state where they live. Nevertheless, in Texas, the teen birth rate is rising after Dobbs, as are unwanted pregnancies and forced births, and, as we’ve seen, the rise in real and desperate threats to pregnant people’s health and lives. In other criminalizing states, the stats are similar. It will be a long, hard, titanic slog to resist Dobbs effectively, to overturn Dobbs, to protect everyone’s reproductive health and lives.
It’s true that many progressive people are scared and worried in 2024, including people who believed that, after Roe v. Wade, abortion would always be a right in the United States. But some of the most exciting and heartening developments since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision have been in the most unlikely places: Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana—Republican states, where big majorities have turned out to vote for abortion rights. These are the people who are reinvigorating the domain of information, calling out lies, revitalizing history, reinvigorating the movement. Also, the abortion providers who move their clinics from states like Tennessee, where abortion is now illegal, to acrossthe-border states like Illinois, where it’s legal: these are the people reinvigorating the movement. And the people organizing and the hundreds of thousands contributing money to abortion funds so that people can travel to facilities to get their reproductive healthcare. And so many others. This time, it’s not so much about only marching in the streets for rights. It’s about taking concrete action on many levels, including voter registration and voting, to protect history and information, to protect health and life. This is what my book with Krystale Littlejohn, Fighting Mad , is about: 52 voices on what resistance looks like around the country. Sometimes, a book is a strategy for political organizing.
As one of our contributors, Coya White HatArtichoker—clarifying, for one thing, how for so many people, Roe was never enough—writes, now that Roe has fallen, we have an opportunity to “be bolder, dream bigger, and push at all points of resistance.” Fighting Mad and the news from thousands of points of resistance offer a glimpse of how so many people are doing just that. Indeed, there is no surplus in the struggle that aims to resist the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
I.
My mother’s eyelids stopped jumping after the third child in three years turned two. When her children went away to college or basic training or left the country, my mother flipped a basement light on with a long, yellowing string, went to the filing cabinet drawer like a secret lockbox, and saw among the baby pictures, the one taken at Sears, which, at the time, she wasn’t sure she would buy because of her shaking eyelids, but the children around her like three small mountain tips, were all shiny, gleaming because the photographer was flailing a muppet around and singing in a helium voice, cried hard, seeing that plaid top with the pearl snap buttons, At least, everybody liked me then, when they were babies.
The ewe lambed a stillborn, bleated and fought when the shepherd took her baby away. Again, the life went out of her womb in high-voltage: the slamming of century-old shutters against the sky. But the next thing takes some imagination: in the same flock, a new mother with twins shares a beginning, a miraculous natality. From her bleeding body, her swollen vulva, engorged, slightly red udders, having just now lambed the twins on a very steep slope because only there could she sense almost all the dangers for miles, she gives one of her lambs to the mother ewe who had been shuffling, lying, oozing cries on the steep slope where loss was prism. Let her raise one of the twins as her own.
Sometimes, shepherds sprinkle salt on the lambs, pseudo-science so mothers accept their odd and perfect gift, right-away lick their newborn. The grieving mother smothers, nurses this lamb-gift, salted or not. Comes back to the living slowly with a petal-soft mouth around her teat. It happened so fast, a beginning newer than the last. These two ewes, twinning each other, licking small paths of salty wool, parting the baby hair. And you who hate this tenderness, do you discard the philosophy of natality, because it’s unthinkable, indescribable, quaint, graphic, sentimental, dangerous, exploitative, enraging, and downright embarrassing to what, exactly— to want a beginning?
My mother is always telling me, Don’t do that, it’ll take you over the edge. It might be taking my three kids on a plane by myself, and she’s sure it’s too much for me. Of course, I worry she’s right, do it anyway. My mother was driven off the edge once, her husband under the ocean, on a nuclear submarine, leaving her to manage an unexpected baby in her belly, three other children underfoot, but she made it back to shore.
IV.
The birth I wanted, I couldn’t have. Natural birth, lavender oil smothered across my temples. Grape Gatorade. My husband with me, the one who’d been whisper-patting against my womb, like I had, all along. Saltine, blueberry, Lil’ Salty, Christmas baby, monster, sapling. I read Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” to her. My friends texted me about my animal mother powers. Bath bubbles, Pilates ball. I was going to be a palm tree along Canal street, rows of spunk leaf and limber trunk wrapped in holiday lights, I was going to be strong and bright. After all that birthing, mothering through sharpness on the toilet, wheeling in the tub, after stomaching the nurses’ pleas, Stop wasting your energy on all that noise, and breathe, I was going to die. Pushing the baby into the wall across from me, but nothing. Beeping tangle of wires, naked heft of a sculpture by Henry Moore. All shoulder and cunt and breast. I was weak. I was not the woman I thought I could be. Would not manifest glory. Disappointment of my friends with their miraculous legs, motherline of who’d survived for others. We were all going to die, leaving my husband bereft in a dim maternity ward. Shaking in a blanket, fuzzy with a big needle, in the end, I’d be cut, the baby pulled out of my belly. My birthing, an emergency of angles. Trapped head in a wicked pelvis. The baby had to be shoved, bobbed upwards to slice me, to be birthed by hospital staff. I was exhausted, I was free. Bring me her lips, pouty and red, photographed beside my exaltant colostrum, weeping wounds, and puffy smile, un-gowned and home to the Wonder Woman house on Franklin Avenue.
V.
The queen of mommy bloggers, five days before Mother’s Day, killed herself. I wasn’t one of the eight million readers in the early 2000s, but it’s as if I was. She was trying to stave off ocean. Undo crisis. Wake up wanting to be alive, and scream for joy like messy-bunned daffodils popping out, before anyone else even notices how Spring it is. How petal-soft. She turned her brain off, went into a fifteen-minute coma, ten times, her mother watching over her. The mind a broken washing machine you can hit and shake, while cursing, then you take a deep breath. She thought she tried everything, and failed. No one wants to be the mother in stories, an Anna Karenina on the tracks. Better to be someone filling in the gaps, feeding a sojourner another bowl of soup and a stack of letters, like in Toni Morrison. When you’re a mother, you’re on a train and there’s no getting off. Plath was depressed in the coldest winter of the century in London. She wrote a note to call the doctor, stuck her head in the oven: did she want to be brought back?
VI.
Spring, and all, I saw a squirrel carrying her sick child for days around her neck like a silk scarf, and bounding up the maple tree out front with such care, then one morning, unable to bury (if squirrels bury) the baby on its back in the grass.
VII.
The news we all saw, through tears: a family at the mall, there to return their son’s birthday clothes: mother, father, baby, all shot dead, save the six-year-old. His birthday clothes with the tags on, receipt in the bag. Another mother writes to her state rep, informing them, as if they don’t read the news, that guns kill children, the leading cause of death: “Fuck Mother’s Day, we want systemic support.”
VIII.
A single enraged female leads a pod of twenty, perhaps an elder in her 60s, maybe even the infamous White Gladis, and together they overturn a yacht on the coast of Spain. Scientists speculate a crisis of agony led her, and the others, being social animals, followed suit, feeling for her. They killed no one, simply bit the rudder, as it reminded her of what tried to entrap her, her children, any living thing.
54.1
The
Paula Hawkins’s
Narrational Montage, Crime Fiction, and Domestic Noir:
Robert
The macroscopic structure of Paula Hawkins’s debut novel The Girl on the Train (2015), which has sold over 23 million copies worldwide, resembles that of the classic whodunit. If it seems somewhat reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington (1957), however, Hawkins’s text deals with nothing as hermetically sealed as a homicide committed on board a train. The crime scene instead is the trackside fringes of a suburb located midway on Rachel Watson’s hour-long commute from outlying Ashbury to Euston in central London. While passing by her previous home at 15 Blenheim Road in Witney, now occupied by ex-husband Tom and second wife Anna, 33-year-old Rachel is accustomed to envisioning “a perfect, golden couple” residing four doors away whom she idealizes as “Jason” and “Jess.” The former is “well built, strong, protective, kind” and Jess “one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty” (4). As Emma V. Miller notes, “The woman that Rachel sees from the train window [...] she at first classifies through the male gaze, describing her as ‘the perfect blonde’, and imagining Jess’s married life as a patriarchal fantasy” (100). Two days later Rachel expands on the idyll. Jason is said to be a doctor for an overseas organization, constantly on call to save lives threatened by natural disasters, and his attractive partner “works in the fashion industry. Or perhaps in the music business, or in advertising—she might be a stylist or a photographer. She’s a good painter, too, plenty of artistic flair” (9). The indefinite creativity that Rachel attributes to the phantasmal Jess reveals much about her own bitter disappointments in life. Divorced by Tom two years ago, in part because she was incapable of conceiving a child, and now living in a cramped flat with a former college friend named Cathy, Rachel has been fired from her public relations
job for berating an important client. Pursuant to her termination she fills her empty days by adhering to the routine of commuting to and from the metropolis while indulging her alcoholism. Fond of trains as moving platforms for voyeuristic observation, the desperately lonely Rachel idealizes Jason and Jess because “They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be” (10). All this psychological background complicates immensely the architectonics of Hawkins’s novel as a tale of detection.
Tzvetan Todorov maintained that the genre traditionally “contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation” (44). More recently Rita Felski, expanding on Todorov’s typology, has pointed out that the first part of this double narrative, the originating “transgression,” logically precedes the second: there must be a corpse before a killer can be determined (92). The Girl on the Train confounds this trajectory in several ways. For one thing, a corpse is not found until midway through the novel, eliminating the linearity of a focused and steadily narrowing search for the killer based on telltale clues. For another, events unfold in a non-sequential fashion from the perspectives of three female characters over a span of time extending from May 16, 2012, to September 10, 2013. The main narrator is Rachel Watson, but the sections devoted to her are intermixed with asynchronous reveries by Megan Hipwell, a murdered and unfaithful spouse, and former Anna Boyd, the second wife of Tom Watson. Further multiplying the text’s challenges is Rachel’s lack of credibility, as reviewer Jean Hanff Korelitz noted in observing that this lead character “might as well be wearing a sign that reads ‘Unreliable Narrator.’” Writing in 2020, Heath A. Diehl reflected insightfully on this dimension of the novel:
Rachel does not merely provide readers with a possibly untrustworthy, albeit complete, account of the narrative events, as is typical with an unreliable narrator; rather, Rachel leaves readers completely adrift within the narrative, not simply unsure if she is telling the truth, but confused as to what exactly Rachel experienced, if, indeed, she experienced anything at all, since she also has a proclivity for confusing the real and the imagined. It is as if readers are, to some degree, experiencing the very same blackouts that Rachel experiences. (83)
Not only is Rachel a self-confessed binge drinker, but she also is subject to amnesia concerning the evening of July 13, 2013, when Megan disappeared. All that Rachel can recall is that “Something happened, something bad” (38), yet this vague sense is tied to her being bludgeoned on the head that night in a railway underpass near Megan and Scott Hipwell’s home at 23 Blenheim Road. As a novel of suspense, in other words, Hawkins’s work is primarily concerned with what Marcello Giovanelli terms “event construal” rather than with a self-evident crime and its forensic solution.1 The person who murdered Megan is identified five weeks later, but even then the case is solved purely by accident. The Girl on the Train thus sunders any diegetic connection to an antecedent, notably androcentric tradition in crime or mystery fiction and its faith in the inerrancy of logical deduction.
That “Golden Age” era of whodunits featured, of course, such infallible male sleuths as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. Without exception the seeming clairvoyance of these proponents of ratiocination derived from
the axiom that once the impossible had been ruled out, the improbable should be sifted carefully based on small or easily overlooked clues. The Girl on the Train, however, immediately dispenses with the fixity of a closed room as the scene of forensic investigation and plunges readers instead into the shifting perspective of a moving train as Rachel records her obviously fanciful projections. In short, we have no evidence of a prevenient crime, only the neurotic fantasies of an obviously lonely woman.
In light of such subversion of an earlier genre, Hawkins’s experimental narrative is best described as domestic noir. Novelist Julia Crouch coined the term in 2013 to designate an emergent mode of crime fiction that “takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants” (Crouch, n.p.). Other notable examples include Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), A. S. A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife (2013), Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me (2016), and A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window (2018).2 If homes are the new sites for “geographies of fear” (González), we can expect to find enacted there insidious patterns of manipulation by a sexist order that also exercises its power of control in the public sphere. Now disconnected from both of these worlds and having “lost control over everything, even the places in my head” (9), Rachel Watson becomes the amateur sleuth who exists “‘inside’ the [hegemonic] ideology” but, arguably, “works to find a place for the ‘feminine’ within masculine-dominated society” (Dilley 96). While so situating her protagonist, Hawkins’s novel succeeds via narratological montage in
presenting a trenchant critique of gender dynamics in contemporary England.
An obvious starting point for analysis is the triad of female characters whose testimonies comprise the text as a whole. In this ensemble, writes Carla Rodríguez González, “Rachel stands for the barren hag, Megan is the femme fatale that has been punished for her transgression, and Anna is the angel in the house” (120). The pathos of Rachel’s self-image is that she has internalized a dismissive construct of herself as the “hag.” When on the homeward-bound train, for instance, she happens to notice a man about her own age sitting across the aisle, he “looks up suddenly” from his MacBook and “his glance travels over me, over the little bottle of wine on the table in front of me. […] There’s something about the set of his mouth that suggests distaste. He finds me distasteful” (10-11). Rachel’s susceptibility to such perceived repugnance, though earlier she had said of her fellow passengers that “I don’t know whether they see me [...] for what I really am” (5), is manifest when she sketches this profile of herself:
I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. (11)
The foundation for Rachel’s diminished sense of autonomy and self-worth was laid by former husband Tom, who betrayed her in an affair with younger Anna after nearly five years of marriage. Although Rachel, in asking herself “Where did I take the wrong
turn?” thinks “Not when I met Tom, who saved me from grief after Dad died,” she is slow to realize how this implied replacement for a lost father manipulated her.3 Readers cannot infer this pattern of behavior by Tom until much later in The Girl on the Train, partly because the abject Rachel, conditioned by her dependence on men, is always ready to indict herself for their breakup (“I let him think that he wasn’t enough” [51], says Rachel of her earlier desire for a child) and partly because Tom is portrayed as unusually tolerant of her many pleading telephone calls to him since then. Hints of her former husband’s actual view of Rachel crop up, though, when to Anna he criticizes his former spouse for “her fat arse” and admits, “Sometimes I want to kill that woman” (140, 110).
Rachel’s loss of identity as a wife, exacerbated by her infertility, makes her an obsessive-compulsive woman who seeks to insert herself by proxy into the tableau of marital bliss she thinks of as epitomized by “Jason” and “Jess.” When during her morning train ride of July 12, 2013, she then sees Jess in her backyard garden being kissed by a man who is not Jason, Rachel “feel[s] as though I have been cheated on,” and “[a] familiar ache fills [her] chest” (29). Her glimpse of this infraction of conjugal fidelity soon propels Rachel into intervention because, her illusions about a perfect couple having been shattered, “I feel like I’m part of this mystery, I’m connected. I am no longer just a girl on a train, going back and forth without point or purpose” (89). Hoping to set things right as she could not in her own marriage, Rachel musters the courage to contact Scott Hipwell, the fantasized Jason. During her initial visit at his residence Rachel lies about having met Megan at an art gallery that Scott’s wife formerly managed, but once aware of Rachel’s fabrications
the aggrieved husband becomes ironically both more dependent on and hostile toward her. When he later reveals that Megan was pregnant at the time of her disappearance, Rachel, still unable to “conjure up the killer I saw” owing to her amnestic blackout on the evening of July 13 (207), surmises that Scott may have had a reason for murdering his wife. Before then, however, in interviews with two detectives assigned to the case, she allows suspicion to fall on Dr. Kamal Abdic, a therapist whom Megan Hipwell had been consulting about her panic attacks and insomnia. As the amateur sleuth who, according to Kimberly J. Dilley, “works to find a place for the ‘feminine’ within masculine-dominated society,” Hawkins’s protagonist is throughout most of the novel a failure because of her tacit acceptance of that hegemonic order.
Rachel’s foil is Megan Hipwell, who figures as the totemic femme fatale. Considering herself “a mistress of self-reinvention. [...] Runaway, lover, wife, waitress, gallery manager, nanny, and a few more in between,” 29-year-old Megan is now asking herself, “[W]ho do I want to be tomorrow?” (20). If Rachel’s crippling orientation is the past, Megan also has not yet accepted that dimension of her life and consequently has an unstable sense of identity that can be offset
“Rachel stands for the barren hag, Megan is the femme fatale that has been punished for her transgression, and Anna is the angel in the house.”
only by seducing men. This pattern of behavior began after her older brother Ben’s motorbike death on the A10, a trauma she attempted to buffer by cohabiting at age sixteen with an older man named Craig “Mac” McKenzie in a remote seaside house near Holkham before giving birth a few years later to a daughter named Libby. As Megan reveals to Dr. Abdic, the newborn drowned because of her mother’s inadvertence when both were in a bathtub trying to stay warm. After being abandoned by Mac because of the tragedy, Megan worked a series of makeshift jobs before marrying Scott Hipwell. Three years later, though, she knows that “I can’t just be a wife” (23). A page earlier she confides, “All I know is, one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again” (22).
The sentence’s syntax strung together by coordinating conjunctions reveals Megan’s ontological disequilibrium, a condition that links her obliquely with the otherwise very different Rachel. Meanwhile, realizing that no matter how much she loves Scott “it won’t be enough,” Megan has been meeting Tom Watson for sexual trysts at a nearby hotel, confident that in doing so she is “being true to [her] real self, the self nobody knows” (46). She
also engages in this illicit behavior, however, because she enjoys “having power over someone. That’s the intoxicating thing” (47). For “someone” can be substituted “a male” because she suffered the trauma of being abandoned at age nineteen by Craig McKenzie and also because her controlling husband Scott routinely surveils her internet browser history. If a femme fatale, then, Megan is also a victim of emotional abuse, as Dr. Abdic suggests to her (59), resulting in a woman who defiantly asserts that “I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away” (131).
"Technically the novel’s climax after its montage of three women’s seemingly unconnected but obliquely impinging testimonies, the passage paves the way for a resolution that limns the modern suburban tract home as a recrudescence of the Gothic castle of catatonia."
Typologically the angel in the house, Anna (née Boyd) Watson is— until The Girl on the Train’s ending—basically a cipher. As the stigmatized “other woman” in Tom’s life during his marriage to Rachel, Anna takes pride in her ability to give birth to a daughter named Evie, with whose arrival in their lives she likes to imagine neighbors on Blenheim Road thinking, “ What a beautiful family” (138). Doting on her toddler and devoted
to conjugality, Anna is still unnerved by an incident that occurred during the summer of 2012 when Rachel, not “know[ing] what [she] intended to do that day” (104), clambered over a backyard fence at her former residence and briefly abducted Evie. The episode leaves Anna mystified by Tom’s excuses for Rachel’s behavior, though after driving Rachel home that evening Tom threatens to kill her if she ever harms his daughter. Months later, while Tom is supposedly “meeting some of his army buddies” one weekend (177), Anna finds herself becoming bored without him and subsequently disgruntled by the hypocrisy of gossipy friends at the National Childbirth Trust who, upon seeing the newspaper headline “Was Megan a Child Killer?” revel in their “thinly disguised disapproval” of the fact that Anna employed Megan on occasion as a nanny (196). Matrimony and motherhood under these circumstances fail to comport with what Anna Boyd expected when she agreed to marry Tom Watson, but on the whole Anna defers to him until the novel’s explosive conclusion.
González’s gender-based taxonomy of Rachel as “barren hag,” Megan as “femme fatale,” and Anna as “angel in the house” is not intended, of course, to derogate any of these three female characters. It suggests instead how each woman’s existential complexity is traduced by male perspectives that to one extent or another they have internalized or accepted as valid. In an ironic way these constructions constitute a kind of mosaic of how males, with the sole exception of Dr. Abdic in The Girl on the Train, categorize women to their own detriment. The consequences of such reductive and obviously sexist pigeonholing do not appear until the work’s closing pages, but until then the text allows such issues to fester dormantly. Montage again comes to the fore as Hawkins’s favored way of writing a contemporary crime novel.
On the other side of the gender gulf, the leading male characters share a generational trait linked to their controlling behavior. Like Scott Hipwell, Tom Watson is alienated from his parents. At one point Anna, anxious to live in another house than the one formerly occupied by Rachel, broaches the idea of moving, asking Tom whether his parents could help them financially because “they have plenty of money— but he said he wouldn’t ask them, that he’d never ask them for anything again, and he got angry then, said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore” (198). In the work’s conclusion, however, it is revealed that Tom:
was never in the army. [...] The story about his father was a lie, too—he’d twisted it all round. He took his parents’ savings and lost it all. They forgave him, but he cut all ties with them when his father declined to remortgage their house in order to lend him more money. He lied all the time, about everything. (319)
Although Scott, a self-employed IT consultant, is not an inveterate liar like Tom, he has a strained relationship with his mother (no father is mentioned) and, when he is under suspicion by police in connection with Megan’s disappearance, feels that she is “driving me insane, cleaning, tidying up after me all the time” (153). He also is tormented by the fact, as he confides to Rachel regarding his suspicions of Megan’s infidelity, that the last words he said to his pregnant wife before she left him were “Go to hell you lying bitch” (183). In short, whatever their other differences, Tom and Scott are deeply insecure, damaged men who compensate for their inadequacies by holding the women in their lives accountable. In sharp contrast is Dr. Kamal Abdic, a psychotherapist whom both Megan Hipwell and Rachel
Watson consult for guidance in dealing with their problems. Especially important in this context is that the thoroughly professional Dr. Abdic is an outsider or ethnic Other, as Rachel discovers from televised news coverage after she has implicated him with the police investigating Megan’s disappearance. “I learned that he is a Muslim, a Bosnian, a survivor of the Balkans conflict, who came to Britain as a fifteen-year-old refugee. No stranger to violence, he lost his father and two older brothers at Srebrenica” (142). When the same source adds, altogether improbably, that Dr. Abdic has a conviction for domestic violence, Rachel is sure that she was right in sharing her suspicions about him with both the authorities and Scott Hipwell, but shortly thereafter the gentle psychotherapist whom Megan earlier had tried unsuccessfully to seduce is cleared of all charges. That development in Hawkins’s narrative leaves the mystery of who was responsible for Megan’s disappearance up in the air, but the situation begins to change nearly four weeks later when Rachel begins to emerge from her fog of amnesia and psychological dependency on Tom.
The process of Rachel’s understanding the past unfolds slowly because, pitted against her visceral fear of the railroad underpass,4 is a doctor’s argument in a book she read “that blacking out wasn’t simply a matter of forgetting what had happened, but having no memories to forget in the first place” (67). Tom, significantly, buys this book for Rachel at a point in their marriage when she begins to feel it incumbent on her to apologize for supposed infractions of which she has no recollection. Rachel later comments that she rejected the idea of hypnosis “because, as my previous reading suggested, we do not make memories during blackout. There is nothing to remember” (92; emphasis added). What Hawkins is exploring,
then, is not amnesia per se but instead gaslighting, as Diehl argues in his recent monograph Addiction, Representation and the Experimental Novel, 19852015. This “concept of psychologically manipulating an individual as a means of convincing that person to question her/his/their sanity” (85), he notes, is intended in the words of one of his sources to “overwrite someone’s reality” and make her believe “she’s imagining things” (Waldman). Tom Watson’s endeavors to confuse and unhinge his first wife largely succeed, not least when at the novel’s midpoint Rachel tells him that she has impugned Kamal Abdic as Megan Hipwell’s killer and Tom glowingly reassures her, “You did the right thing, coming forward” (151). Ever so gradually, through the chinks of Rachel’s fixation on Tom, Hawkins allows readers to form a gathering suspicion of him, given his pathological need to control women, as Megan’s killer. Meanwhile the novel’s leading narrator tries to “piece together, from the memories and the flashbacks and the dreams, what happened on” the evening of July 13, 2013 (160), but a breakthrough does not come until, more than three weeks later with the help of Dr. Abdic, she realizes Tom’s responsibility for their broken marriage (193).
Not yet grasping fully her former husband’s agenda to invalidate her through gaslighting, Rachel is regaining confidence in her independent judgments and perceptions. Her progress gains momentum when she begins to recognize that Scott Hipwell is not the all-sufficient “Jason” she once projected him as being. In contrast to “Kamal with his delicate hands, his reassuring manner” is “Scott, huge and powerful, wild, desperate,” such that Rachel is forced to admit that she “do[es]n’t know what Scott was before all this” (207). Disencumbering herself further from former idealizations, she reflects that “Megan isn’t what I thought she was anyway. She wasn’t that beautiful, carefree girl [‘Jess’] out on
the terrace” (209). At this juncture Hawkins’s main narrator is still swayed by sensationalist news reports that earlier in life Megan Hipwell was a child killer, but this bias changes dramatically when, waking up in Scott’s bedroom that she mistakes for the one she formerly shared with Tom, Rachel experiences a flood of suppressed remembrance about the immediate present:
It hits me like a wave, I can feel blood rushing to my face. I remember admitting it to myself. [...] I wanted to be with Jason. I wanted to feel what Jess felt when she sat out there with him, drinking wine in the evening. I forgot what I was supposed to be feeling. I ignored the fact that at the very best, Jess is nothing but a figment of my imagination, and at the worst, Jess is not nothing, she is Megan—she is dead, a body battered and left to rot. (217)
This insight abruptly dispels the girl on the train’s proclivity to fantasy and prepares her to confront things as they are. For Rachel that means coming to terms, through recovered personal memories, with both Megan and Anna for who they were and who they become after meeting her former husband Tom Watson.
As one of two epigraphs for her second novel, Into the Water (2017), Hawkins uses this statement by neurologist Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations: “We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection” (154). The claim captures perfectly the syncretic, fluidly dynamic process of remembrance replicated through montage in The Girl on the Train as it moves toward Rachel Watson’s recovery of agency. The process transpires largely through flashbacks in which “the
original trauma may be reexperienced in its totality with every sensory modality and with every emotion that was felt at the time” (Sacks 237). The first déjà vu occurs a full month after Megan Hipwell’s disappearance when Rachel imagines that she sees from her slow-moving train “a pile of clothes on the side of the tracks. Dark-blue cloth. A dress, I think, with a black belt” (225). Certain that she has seen someone wearing the dress before but unable to recall when, Rachel lapses into a brief dreamfugue in which “Jason” is strangling “Jess” on the back terrace of their home. Traumatized by the episode, she consults Dr. Abdic, who advises her to retrace her steps on the night of Megan’s murder, a process that later resurrects a distinct memory of Rachel’s seeing from the underpass Anna, attired in a belted blue dress, getting into Tom’s car. The vignette is as yet incomplete, though filling her with a “familiar sense of dread” (227), but it is enough to make her want to talk with Tom about the night when Megan went missing. Paralleling this development is Anna’s growing realization that her husband is a habitual liar, prompting her guiltily to search his laptop computer for password-encrypted communications. The next day a distraught Scott, pleading with Rachel to visit him at his residence, reveals that postmortem DNA tests had proved that Megan’s fetus was neither his nor Kamal’s, at which point he flies into a rage, drags her upstairs, and locks her in a spare room. Rachel’s terror at this eruption of male violence reminds her that “I’ve done this before, felt this before, but I can’t remember when” (249). The haziness of that half-memory dissolves the next day, after Scott releases her, and Rachel ruminates, “All this time, I’ve been thinking that there was something to remember, something I was missing. But there isn’t” (254). Even so, reflects Rachel on the basis of her partially restored recollection, “something still feels off” (257).
Rachel’s sixth sense proves accurate. Early on August 18, 2013, she recalls Tom’s telling her toward their marriage’s end that, allegedly drunk at the time, she had swung a golf club at him and left a hole in the wall’s plaster, but before drifting back to sleep she has a hypnagogic revelation that “I saw it”: “I was in the underpass and he was coming towards me, one slap across the mouth and then his fist raised, keys in his hand, searing pain as the serrated metal smashed down against my skull” (262). A few hours later comes Rachel’s full epiphany:
Everything is a lie. I didn’t imagine [Tom] hitting me. I didn’t imagine him walking away from me quickly, his fists clenched. I saw him turn, shout. I saw him walking down the road with a woman, I saw him getting into the car with her. I didn’t imagine it. And I realize then that it’s all very simple, so very simple. I do remember, it’s just that I had confused two memories. I’d inserted the image of Anna, walking away from me in her blue dress, into another scenario: Tom and a woman getting into a car. Because of course that woman wasn’t wearing a blue dress, she was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. She was Megan. (271-72)
Technically the novel’s climax after its montage of three women’s seemingly unconnected but obliquely impinging testimonies, the passage paves the way for a resolution that limns the modern suburban tract home as a recrudescence of the Gothic castle of catatonia. And the presiding ogre in this tale of domestic noir is of course Tom Watson.
I draw this connection to Gothicism in fiction because the one thing that links earlier such novels ranging from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)
to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), besides their outlandish settings, is the obliquity by means of which an intrinsic evil or principle of malevolence eventually is exposed. Montage rather than direct or linear narration suits such Gothic fables because the malignity it postulates is diffuse and difficult to apprehend. So also for psychologically manipulated Rachel Watson in Hawkins’s tale is the web of dependency on males by which her sense of self-worth has been shaped. Rachel can only escape these imprisoning forces by recognizing how the milieu from which they stem, in Freudian terms das Unheimliche, exerts its power over her capacity for self-determination.
The Girl on the Train’s ending, appropriately enough, is set in the kitchen, living room, and backyard of Rachel’s former home. Taking it upon herself to safeguard Anna and Evie from the man who murdered Megan, the scene of which in nearby Corly Wood is briefly recounted by the victim, Rachel urges Anna that same Sunday morning to leave with her before Tom’s return. Showing up earlier than expected, Tom quickly sizes up the situation when Rachel blurts out that she remembers his assaulting her in the underpass and when Anna reveals that she has found the hidden cell phone by means of which Tom once arranged his trysts with Megan. Female solidarity in this case is not a given because Tom has conditioned Anna to depend on him exactly as previously he had done with Rachel. What ensues is a triangulated standoff. Apologizing to his second wife that his involvement with Megan Hipwell amounted to “just a bit of fun” and “was never going to interfere with us, with our family” (299), he invokes the concept of a nuclear unit that transcends all violations of its cohesion. Although not wholly convinced, Anna proves of no help to Rachel when Tom prevents her from calling the
police and drags Rachel back inside to the kitchen, where “Anna sets about making lunch for her daughter and puts the kettle on to make the rest of us a cup of tea” (301). Even when Tom, after describing how he killed Megan, smashes Rachel’s head with a beer bottle to prevent her escape, Anna does not intervene but complies with his directive to leave the room. Then comes the moment of overdue reckoning, a settling of accounts. While Tom compares her to a mistreated dog that comes back to its master before debasing Rachel further by lewdly kissing her, she slips her right hand into a utility drawer, stamps on his instep, and drives her knee into his doubled-over face. When “spitting curses through blood” he overtakes his former wife as she flees toward the backyard fence, Rachel “jam[s] the vicious twist of the corkscrew into his neck” (317). As Miller observes, this violent act of penetration “mimics that of rape” (103), and the symbolism is compounded when in a final installment we learn that Anna comes to Tom’s side and “[t] wist[s] the corkscrew in, further and further, ripping into his throat” (322).
If any default victory emerges from this novel of domestic noir, it is that by its end the houses up for sale at 15 and 23 Blenheim Road in Witney are empty, toured only by “estate agents mostly escorting ghouls around those rooms” (318). Meanwhile, the Gothic psychodrama of gender-based exploitation having played out, Rachel a few weeks later drives north to visit the Holkham graveyard where Megan’s ashes and her daughter Libby’s bones are interred. This quiet coda restores a sense of the respect owed to the otherwise unmourned dead as victims of male abuse, but before then The Girl on the Train compensates readers in two complementary ways: “intellectual satisfaction due to the solution of the murder mystery (temporal immersion), as well as
satisfaction resulting from the protagonist’s psychic recovery and revenge (emotional immersion)” (Grebeniuk 45). This, of course, explains crime fiction’s popular appeal ever since Edgar Allan Poe, but as both González and Eric Sandberg note, the genre today has embarked on a new phase. González writes that “in the twenty-first century it has entered the realm of high culture, due in part to the malleability of its boundaries” (110). Sandberg concurs, maintaining that “the feature of contemporary literary production that seems most likely to define our era in future works of literary history is its tendency to intertwine ‘high’ literature and ‘low’ genre fiction” (9). Well after Michael Holquist as well as Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney heralded the “metaphysical detective story” epitomized by the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges, crime fiction has recaptured its roots in the quotidian here and now.
“Montage rather than direct or linear narration suits such Gothic fables because the malignity it postulates is diffuse and difficult to apprehend."
like those about Beckford’s Drowning Pool in Hawkins’s second novel and by the simple process of aging in A Slow Fire Burning (2021). In the latter narrative, for example, the otherwise alert Irene Barnes “couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blank. No, not a blank, it was fogged . There were things in there, memories, important ones, only everything was shifting about, hazily; she couldn’t fix on anything” (50). But it is also this 80-year-old widow who, reading an embedded crime mystery titled The One Who Got Away , wonders why its story “jumped about.”
Earlier I suggested that Hawkins’s debut novel explores not clinical amnesia but rather gaslighting, an induced form of forgetting that serves certain males’ manipulation of women in The Girl on the Train. At the same time it is clear that this author is drawn in all her fiction to the vagaries of memory as shaped both by the stories we tell each other,
“Experimentation for its own sake,” she asks, “who did that serve? What was wrong with the traditional crime novel, after all, with good prevailing, evil vanquished? So what if things rarely turned out like that in real life?” (217). Irene’s last query contributes to understanding why Hawkins has constructed all three of her fictional narratives to date on the paradigm of overlapping montage. Truth by itself may be irreducibly simple, but how we arrive at it, given all the impediments to its revelation in a culture still divided by genderbased inequities, requires a new form of storytelling. Hawkins’s achievement is to have risen to that challenge.
NOTES
1. In describing The Girl on the Train as a “novel of suspense” here, I am provisionally accepting Todorov’s argument that the whodunit’s “geometric architecture” gave way “just before and particularly after World War II” to the thriller, wherein “[w]e are no longer told about a crime anterior to the moment of the narrative; the narrative coincides with the action” (45, 47). That modality in turn, proposes Todorov, was succeeded by the suspense novel, which “keeps the mystery of the whodunit and also the two stories, that of the past and that of the present; but […] refuses to reduce the second to a simple detection of the truth” (50).
2. See in this regard Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Domestic Thriller Is Having a Moment.” Terrence Rafferty discusses many other examples of domestic noir in “The Deep Secrets of the Gone Girl Era.”
3. Rachel’s arm’s-length relationship with her mother suggests that she always identified primarily with her father. In a telephone message proposing to meet for coffee in London, Rachel’s mother says, “Darling, it’s not a good time for you to come and stay now. There’s ... well, I’ve got a new friend, and you know how it is in the early stages” (171-72). After that revelation she promises her daughter a loan of £300.
4. González points out that Rachel’s “exploration of the geographies of fear makes her traverse spaces traditionally considered dangerous for women, most notably the dark underpass [...]. Initially depicted as one of the most likely scenes of the crime, and the place where Rachel was attacked by a man, [...] the underpass eventually becomes the counterpoint to the supposed spaces of security represented by the two homes that Rachel idealizes” (118).
WORKS CITED
Crouch, Julia. “Genre Bender.” Julia Crouch, 25 Aug. 2013. juliacrouch.co.uk/blog/genre-bender Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
Diehl, Heath A. Addiction, Representation and the Experimental Novel, 1985-2015. Anthem, 2020.
Dilley, Kimberly J. Busybodies, Meddlers, and Snoops: The Female Hero in Contemporary Women’s Mysteries. Greenwood, 1998.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.
Giovanelli, Marcello. “‘Something Happened, Something Bad’: Blackouts, Uncertainties and Event Construal in The Girl on the Train.” Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, vol. 27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 38-51.
González, Carla Rodríguez. “Geographies of Fear in the Domestic Noir: Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 56, 2017, pp. 109-27.
Grebeniuk, Tetiana. “Narrative Unreliability in Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train as a Strategy of Reader Immersion.” American and British Studies Annual, vol. 11, 2018, pp. 36-48.
Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train. Riverhead Books, 2015.
---. Into the Water. Riverhead Books, 2017.
---. A Slow Fire Burning. Riverhead Books, 2021.
Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1971, pp. 135-56.
Korelitz, Jean Hanff. Review of The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins. New York Times, 30 Jan. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/books/review/the-girl-on-the-train-by-paula-hawkins. html?_r=0. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. “The Game’s Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story.” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, U of Pennsylvania P, 1999, pp. 1-24.
Miller, Emma V. “‘How Much Do You Want to Pay for This Beauty?’: Domestic Noir and the Active Turn in Feminist Crime Fiction.” Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction, edited by Laura Joyce and Henry Sutton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 89-113.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Domestic Thriller Is Having a Moment.” Review of The Woman in the Window, by A. J. Finn. The New Yorker, 19 Feb. 2018, www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2018/02/26/the-domestic-thriller-is-having-a-moment. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
Rafferty, Terrence. “The Deep Secrets of the Gone Girl Era.” The Atlantic, vol. 318, no. 1, 2016, pp. 100-09.
Sacks, Oliver. Hallucinations. Vintage, 2013.
Sandberg, Eric. “Contemporary Crime Fiction, Cultural Prestige, and the Literary Field.” Crime Fiction Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 5-22.
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 42-52.
Waldman, Katy. “From Theater to Therapy to Twitter, the Eerie History of Gaslighting.” Slate, 18 Apr. 2016, slate.com/human-interest/2016/04/the-history-of-gaslighting-from-films-topsychoanalysis-to-politics.html. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
54.1
profession & pedagogy
Making Across Modalities: Rethinking the Digital/Analog Binary in a First-Year Seminar
Alexander Cohen, Clarkson University; Camille Frazier, California Strategic Growth Council, Governor's Office of Planning and Research; Lisa Propst, Clarkson University; and Blair Stein, Clarkson University
Introduction: Digital Natives?
Over the past two decades, scholars of pedagogy have engaged the challenges and opportunities associated with “digital natives”—a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to describe students who grew up surrounded by technology (“Digital Natives”). Digital natives, Prensky argues, are underserved by traditional education. This observation led other scholars to suggest that education should better accommodate a growing population of digital natives who are uninterested in linear thinking (Gaston), embrace digital tools and gamified learning (Long), and require fast-paced education (Prensky, “Digital Natives”). Yet the idea that students are unilaterally digital natives has been roundly criticized. Mounting evidence demonstrates that college students are not universally skilled at utilizing technology (Kennedy et al.; Jones et al.; Bennett et al.; Janschitz and Penker). So-called digital natives are not the multitaskers that they are often believed to be (Kirschner and De Bruyckere; Calderwood et al.), to the point that those who text in class or use instant messaging while studying have consistently lower GPAs (Junco and Cotten; Bellur et al).
Certainly, the internet and smartphones have fundamentally transformed students and higher education (Twenge). Many of the effects are pernicious, such as apparent associations between screen
time and depression and emotional instability (Twenge and Campbell). However, the assumption that university students are so ensconced in digital technology and social media that they are universally proficient in its use, and prefer it to alternative "old-fashioned" teaching and learning tools, continues to provoke considerable discussion, scholarship, and policy making (for example, see Cozma and Hallaq; Sarkar et al.). Research often recommends an increased use of technology as a teaching tool, and there is pressure across colleges and universities to increase technology in teaching, especially since the onset of COVID (Janschitz and Penker). Yet much of this research continues to point out that so-called digital natives can deeply misunderstand technology and some are functionally digitally illiterate (Neumann; Emanuel; Creighton).
While it is clear that students are shaped by their environment and that this environment is shaped by experiences with digital technology, social media, and the internet, it is far less clear that students’ exposure to these things throughout their developmental years has uniformly made them proficient digital natives, or even prompted them to prefer learning through strictly digital tools. Providing further clarity into this question has implications for how we teach our students. Not only should we question whether college students
are truly digital natives, but also why and how their digital literacy matters to their educational trajectories. Furthermore, what other kinds of technological literacy can be mobilized in helping students approach their own learning?
This study has two objectives. First, it explores the concept of the student as a digital native by engaging students in an experiment designed to probe their use of both analog and digital technology as media for thought, expression, and communication. To achieve this comparison, we approached digital and analog as two separate categories. Analog tools convey information using continuous signals that represent physical measurements analogous to other physical variables. Digital tools, in contrast, rely on discontinuous variables (0s and 1s) to convey physical measurements in either a continuous or discontinuous manner. Despite this distinction, we recognized from the start (and will address throughout this paper) that this binary severely oversimplifies people’s relationships to digital and analog information and tools. While we began with a strict digital/analog binary in order to see how students interacted with these categories and how the digital/ analog dualism was both upheld and undermined, students persistently challenged a strict dualism between the two, often working in a liminal space between analog and digital media.
A second objective of this study is to consider how the act of "making" can bolster the educational experience and the extent to which these pedagogical gains depend on the materials and methods used—in this case, digital versus analog. We asked our firstyear students across six sections of an introductory writing-intensive course to create two products that expressed their learning using only digital media and only analog media. They shared their products in an in-house museum exhibit, then reflected upon the results in individual essays.
Our analysis reveals a very deep and often trenchant ambivalence about the use of digital technology as a teaching tool and its overall impact on humanity, bolstering the argument that students are not universally digital natives nor singularly committed to the use of digital tools in education. It also suggests that effective teaching requires mixed-modality approaches to appeal to a wide range of students while effectively building both digital and non-digital skills necessary for success in life. This seems particularly pertinent in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has opened the floodgates for more digital teaching tools to proliferate throughout the academy. Finally, our analysis underscores the importance of making in an undergraduate curriculum, especially in terms of how students use technologies such as modeling clay and markers, rendering software and social media, to complement essay-writing as opportunities for problem-solving and self-expression.
Making across Modes as a Pedagogical Tool
We explore these questions through the lens of "making." Making, particularly in the form of contemporary "makers" and "makerspace" movements, has received considerable attention in regard to learning and argumentation from social scientists, rhetoric and composition scholars, and education scholars. Our examination of making in a first-year writing course places this project in a tradition of multimodal composition (composing work in multiple modes or media) introduced by the New London Group in 1996 and popularized by scholars such as Gunther Kress and Cynthia L. Selfe. Our analysis emphasizes that multimodal making can cut across the analog/digital divide to assume a wide range of forms. While early arguments for multimodal composing took a capacious view of multimodality, scholarship on multimodal composing
quickly moved to a focus on the digital (see Selfe, Multimodal Composition; Selfe, “The Movement of Air”; Alexander and Rhodes). Particularly influential in this turn to a digital focus were ongoing dialogues in the journals College Composition and Communication and Computers and Composition about how to adapt composition pedagogy to a world of rapidly expanding technological media (see Selfe, “Technology and Literacy”; Yancey; Alexander). The growing interest in digital modes of composition intensified as colleges started adding digital literacy to learning outcomes, and many education scholars embraced multimodal composition as a tool to prepare students for careers in a digital age (Gagich). However, our exploration is in line with scholars such as Jody Shipka who challenge the focus on digital media in multimodal composition scholarship and who emphasize the value of making as broadly as possible, from the digital to the analog and from linguistic text to artistic and tactile objects (see Shipka; Tham; Breaux). This approach also situates our study in line with recent scholarship on the intersections between making and its cousins "objectbased learning" and "design thinking," which in the past decade have become shared points of interest for scholars incorporating multiple modalities into higher education. Object-based learning, as Helen Chatterjee and others have argued, is a way to incorporate sensory-based "active learning" techniques in the classroom through objects such as museum collections and artworks. Design thinking encourages thinking with objects as well but is more interested in approaching making—objects, creative works, or pieces of writing—as problem-solving. In the realm of higher education pedagogy, design thinking imagines the product of new work as content creation, using creative thinking to create content that solves problems for a particular audience (see Buchanan; Marback; Tham). All three of these
approaches think about both things themselves and the process of designing and making things as a way for students to problem-solve and engage critically with the world around them, making arguments without relying entirely on writing. As digital humanist David Staley bluntly points out, “a humanist using a 3-D printer to fashion a material object [rather than writing a paper] reflects a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind” (37).
Making is especially salient to this project for three primary reasons. First, as media studies scholar Shipka has pointed out, making helps divorce technology from computers. “We need to consider what is at stake—who and what it is that we empower or discount—when we use the term” technology, she argues, “to mean primarily, or worse yet, only the newest computer technologies and not light switches, typewriters, eyeglasses, handwriting, or floor tiles” (Shipka 21). Focusing on the process of making and its value to interdisciplinary humanities and social science pedagogy helps navigate the liminal space between analog and digital and suggests that students can find meaning in process rather than exclusively product.
Second, making is an affective pedagogical practice that elicits students’ self-reflections while simultaneously asking them to engage with the course materials on a personal level and think about how to communicate their ideas to their peers. This movement between one’s own understanding and expectations of others’ interpretations means that students are thinking on several levels about how to process and produce complex ideas.
Finally, making allows students to approach one of the central goals of a first-year seminar— developing argumentation—without being overwhelmed by their limited control over their writing skills, which is a common frustration among students. Incorporating making helps turn the “irresolvably
complex” problem of attempting to simultaneously develop writing and argumentation skills, as Carrie S. Leverenz has suggested, from a bug to a feature. It helps students accept their “limited control over the materials … and the contingent nature of the effects” their work produces, even as they “must continue to engage with those materials in an attempt to produce an effect” (4). Making across media allows students to explore argumentation and analysis in new modalities, what Staley might call “creating physical objects as an interpretive act” (32). Framing this project and its students’ products—written, analog, and digital—using making centers student agency, rewards risk and even failure, and encourages critical thinking and retrospection.
Our analysis is organized as follows. First, we contextualize this project by describing the institution and the course that hosted this activity. Second, we explain what students were asked to do, create, and write, the products of which serve as the data from which we draw conclusions. We then discuss four key observations: (1) making across modalities can serve as an important part of the undergraduate curriculum by challenging students to express ideas in new ways that facilitate learning and exploration; (2) students approached the task of creating digital and analog products with very different levels of experience and confidence, challenging the notion of a generation of monolithic digital natives; (3) the binary between analog and digital tools is difficult to parse and exposes students’ ambivalences toward and frustrations with the use of singular technological modalities; and (4) students valued both digital and analog media, though not always for the same reasons, and many appreciated digital media for their ability to convey information to a wide audience and valued analog media as means to elicit open-ended interpretation and emotion. We
conclude with a discussion of implications for course delivery, course design, and university administration.
The Course and Assignment
Clarkson University is a private, rural, STEMfocused university in northern New York with a student body of approximately 4,000. All first-semester students are required to take UNIV 190: The Clarkson Seminar, an interdisciplinary critical reading and writing course integral to the university’s Common Experience (essentially, its unified general education offerings). This course afforded us an opportunity to explore perceptions of digital and analog learning tools among a student body that might be expected to immediately and unequivocally embrace digital tools because so many major in science and engineering.
The Clarkson Seminar is taught by professors across the humanities and social sciences. Each professor develops their own "big picture" theme, focused on an issue important to students’ lives beyond the classroom, and selects appropriate readings and assignments. Classes are small, generally capped at 19 students, with frequent opportunities for discussion and collaborative work. While dayto-day learning in The Clarkson Seminar varies widely from one section to another, the course is unified by shared learning outcomes focused on critical reading and effective writing and shared workload parameters (all students write at least three expository essays and twenty pages of formally graded work).
In Fall 2021, the authors of this article taught six sections of The Clarkson Seminar, with a total of 110 students. Sixty-three students agreed to allow us to anonymously cite their work in this paper.1 Due to the need to protect student confidentiality with such a small sample size, we collected limited
demographic information. According to an anonymous survey, 13% were high school students attending our university. In addition, 66% of survey respondents self-identified as middle-class, 15% self-identified as wealthy, 6.8% self-classified as low-income/working-class, and the remainder were unsure. The age distribution was 6.8% 17 years old, 74.6% 18 years old, 13.6% 19 years old, and 5.1% 20 years old. Also, 66.1% identified as male and the rest female. While we did not collect specific information about race or ethnicity, the vast majority of Clarkson Seminar students were drawn from the first-year class admitted in 2022, of whom 72.98% were Caucasian, 8.04% international, 6% Asian, 4.79% Hispanic, 3.56% Black, 1.44% American Indian/Alaska Native, 0.19% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 3% not specified. These categories are collected by the institution and align with the federal definitions used by the federal OMB (Office of Management and Budget), which are operationalized in the U.S. Census.2
We worked together to develop a customizable assignment to explore how students experienced the use of digital and analog tools to develop and convey ideas. Because we each framed the assignment differently based on our own course themes, we briefly outline the four themes and associated assignments below.
• “Stuff” focused on everyday material culture. Students engaged with issues surrounding the design, acquisition, use, meaning-making, and disposal of different objects across time and space, such as bicycles, menstrual pads, and blue jeans. For the assignment, students chose an object that wasn’t included in the class and answered the question, “What ‘stuff’ should be added to this class next year, and why?” Students were encouraged to avoid
simply recreating their "stuff" and to instead make something that makes a point about their chosen topic as a literature scholar, historian, or social scientist might. The design of this course and the way the assignment was incorporated meant that the act of making— creating more ‘stuff’ for a class about stuff— was a point of focus.
• “The Quest for Truth” explored truth, the search for truth, and our responsibility as human beings to understand truth, with an emphasis upon the subjective nature of truth. Students were challenged to consider that the ability to define truth provides opportunities to confuse, deceive, or control, which places responsibility upon them to understand the world as it is, not necessarily as others represent it to be. This final project asked students to imagine a post-apocalyptic world. They were required to make objects that would be rediscovered later to teach future iterations of humanity about truth.
• “Body Politics” used the framework of the “biosocial body” to encourage students to analyze how the human body figures as a site of power and struggle in diverse cultural and historical contexts. This assignment asked students to consider how best to represent the interplay between biological and social factors in the making of human selves.
• “When the World Falls Apart: Confronting Cataclysm” explored ways of confronting the challenges posed by major upheavals to individual and communal self-definition. For this assignment, students were asked to pick a contemporary event or development that caused
or had the potential to cause upheaval in people’s lives. Their task was to represent this development in a way that would push people to pay more attention or consider it from a perspective they felt was overlooked.
While students worked independently in the first three classes listed above, students in “When the World Falls Apart” worked in groups of three to five. Since the assignment in this section involved doing research about a contemporary issue, working in groups let students pool their research and learn from one another’s expertise.
To ensure that students were responding to the same core ideas, all assignments included common parameters. Students developed two creative projects in response to a prompt that related to their course theme. One project represented students’ ideas solely using digital tools and one represented their ideas solely using analog tools. We each described the categories of analog and digital differently, according to our own specializations, but our approaches shared two critical characteristics: (1) we asked students to collaborate in defining digital and analog tools, and
(2) we relied on commonly used examples, such as the differences between digital and analog clocks, to assist students in working through the primary distinctions between these forms of technology. Students shared their work with one another in two venues:
(1) Informal class presentations
(2) A collective museum exhibit set up in a classroom. Each class’s prompt was displayed beside its students’ work. Digital projects were accessible through QR codes located beside the corresponding analog projects. Each class involved in the project toured the museum, and the university community was invited to visit the space.
All students were asked to reflect on their experiences by answering the following questions in writing:
• Experience. In what ways did the tools you chose (analog or digital) influence the choices you made in creating your
"FOCUSING ON THE PROCESS OF MAKING AND ITS VALUE TO INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE PEDAGOGY
HELPS NAVIGATE THE LIMINAL SPACE BETWEEN ANALOG AND DIGITAL AND SUGGESTS THAT STUDENTS CAN FIND MEANING IN PROCESS RATHER THAN EXCLUSIVELY PRODUCT."
product? How did your experiences, processes, feelings, successes, and failures change when the media changed?
• Idea. Did the use of analog versus digital tools make you think differently about the ideas you were setting out to express? If yes, how?
• Communication/audience. Which product do you think better communicated your argument to others? That is, which one do you think more effectively got your point across? How?
Below, we describe our four primary findings: (1) making allowed students to focus on process and find new ways of expressing themselves, (2) students varied in their level of skill and experience with digital and analog tools, (3) the digital/analog binary is challenging to distinguish and maintain, and (4) students found value in making and expressing their ideas across digital/analog modalities.
Making as a Process of Self-Reflection
Like much of the scholarship on making and design thinking in rhetoric and composition (see George; Marback; Purdy), our results present making as a valuable way to shift students’ focus from product to process. Making enabled students in our classes to prioritize experimentation over completion and to focus on the forms of “play and tinkering, experimenting and learning new tools [that] are at the heart of the maker movement” (Elam-Handloff). It gave them the opportunity to think of self-expression and meaning-making, in the words of the New London Group, as “an active and dynamic process, and not something governed by static rules” (74). Students recognized the value of focusing on
process and meaning-making. A number of students in our classes suggested that the experimental nature of "making" allowed them to express themselves in new ways. For some, the experience reflected anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conception of making as “a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming” (31). Some students in this project certainly imagined their analog work in particular as correspondence and suggested in their responses that they felt like they were in dialogue with their materials. They claimed that the ability to touch and manipulate their media—to “see and feel” the project come together, as one student suggested—brought them in closer conversation with the essence of what they were attempting to project in their work. In this vein, students described their analog products using emotional language, suggesting that the sensorial and embodied efforts they applied to their materials allowed their analog products to convey thoughts and feelings. “Trying to figure out what was happening with my analog object was more inventive and exciting,” said one student. “In today’s day and age, things are rarely done solely using analog materials, which made me think especially hard about that item,” said another. Some also pointed out that making things—analog especially, but also digital— changed the way they approached their subject matter. Compared to having to write a paper about their topic, students felt like they were forced to approach their subjects from unconventional directions, which inspired them to think of their subjects in unconventional ways.
Because all four of the seminars included in this study had different themes and incorporated this assignment slightly differently, the ways that students saw their products relating to the tenets
of making, object-centered learning, and design thinking differed. “The Quest for Truth,” for example, focused on a post-apocalyptic future; students therefore imagined their products as solving problems for an audience that does not currently exist. In their responses, some students in that seminar wondered if their “analog object would be a better choice for a post-apocalyptic setting where the audience could not read, write, or comprehend complex thoughts.” Students in “Body Politics” often reflected on the role of social media in making and governing bodies, sometimes critiquing the impacts of virtual worlds on lived experiences. Because students in “Body Politics” and “When the World Falls Apart” generally focused on contemporary social issues, they frequently thought about how their products intersected with their everyday lives in the “real world,” as one student put it. Yet this theme came up in the other two courses as well. One student, who created a social media page about an environmental issue, saw “success” when their account reached 30 followers.3 Students in the “Stuff” sections placed a premium on “making” and object learning because the theme was everyday material culture. They learned about Bill Brown’s “thing theory” and the class held discussions on technological failure and the symbolism of things in everyday life, which meant that students were primed to think about their products through those lenses.
Regardless of how making-as-pedagogy was formally incorporated into the project, students from across the sections often thought about their products somatically. Making, object-centered learning, and design thinking all approach making and interacting with things as “practice-centered research,” a somatic experience that allows students to “‘embody’ learning” (Morrison 214). Even in their digital preparations, students thought critically
about the bodily experiences of both making their products and experiencing their classmates’ products on display. “Once I started,” one student wrote about their digital product, “my hands just flowed and it was as if they had their own thought.” Other students pointed out that their classmates would be viewing their digital products on their mobile phones as they moved through the museum display. This felt like they had a “choose-your-own-adventure” sensorial experience because the digital displays were more individualized to the user; every viewer engaged with the digital products on their own personal device, whereas the analog products tended to be viewed in groups as students passed through the displays. In this way, then, students thought about how their products would be both made and viewed as embodied practice. Having an audience, too, was therefore part of how students imagined their creations; rather than a written essay that only their instructor would see, they had to think about how their products would appear to an audience of their cohort.
All of this points to making as key to how the students in this project understood the value and impact of what they produced across the semester in terms of their digital and analog products as well as the associated written work. Recently, Chet Breaux has argued that making is far from incompatible with writing pedagogy: “like it or not, we are all makers” (29). Because “[m]aking not only involves the creation of objects, but a set of processes that are important” (Breaux 31), what students create and how they create it was both elided and sharpened in this project. Making their digital and analog products, sharing their digital and analog products, and reflecting on their digital and analog products in writing came together in a way that students saw as particularly valuable in its multimodality.
A Spectrum of Skills and Experience
While it is clear that the act of making can help students cognitively and emotionally connect with objects and ideas, the act was not bereft of frustration. Students approached this exercise with very different levels of pre-existing skills in working with both digital and analog materials, furthering the argument that students are not monolithically digital natives. When surveyed about their previous experiences, only 56% said they had a strong background making things with digital tools, compared to 67.9% with a strong background using analog tools. Some students were deeply stressed by the notion of making a digital object as they had no pre-existing experience rendering or drawing. Not all students are software whizzes. One commented that they “had a very tough time using the software … it made me very angry.” Another reported “stress and insecurity” due to general inexperience with digital tools. Another remarked, “I don’t know how to use software like that, [and so] I wasn’t sure if people would be able to understand what it even was.” Despite the pervasive assumption that “[m]ore and more young people are now deeply and permanently technologically enhanced” (Prensky, Teaching Digital Natives 2), it was clear that frequent exposure to certain digital technologies did not translate into comfort with all digital technology. On the other hand, many students expressed familiarity with analog products, such as one student who said that “art is something that I understand.”
While students did not uniformly appear to be digital natives, neither were they uniformly confident using analog tools for self-expression. Some felt that making analog objects was more difficult because they lacked preparation and skills in drawing, woodworking, construction, or art. One student indicated that such tools were foreign: “this part of the project challenged me as I am not used to creating
things with just my hands.” Another felt that analog tools are no longer a part of their daily lives. A lack of confidence was a recurring theme, and this was often associated with a lack of experience with art or poor grades in art classes. Another student felt that analog tools are “not common for educational purposes.” Some students ordered materials that were ill-suited for their plans and were unable to conceptualize how materials might be combined.
Likewise, students expressed varied views about the feelings evoked by making across these mediums. Many expressed frustration at creating analog objects as errors were difficult to correct; the presence of an "undo" button eased creative anxiety surrounding digital items. One student said that “when using analog media the failures hurt more because … I couldn’t just ctrl+Z to undo my mistake.” However, the same student commented that the successes felt “a lot more real because I could tangibly hold the object,” which was “a lot more therapeutic.” Some found that the physicality associated with analog creation could be “triggering” because feelings were so tangibly evoked, to the point where one student felt physically ill while cutting out and gluing together images of models for a collage.
Yet the physicality of the analog project led some to greater consideration and revelation. To these students, construction of a real object was intimate and personal, particularly when abetted by gathering items from around a dorm room. One student, who was part of a group focusing on the impacts of wildfires, reflected that the analog project changed their perspective in ways that the digital project could not. The physical presence of a sculpture made the student think about the issues from multiple angles. Their group built a bridge out of popsicle sticks to symbolize how the environment supports human and animal life. Then the group charred sections of the bridge, weakening it, to symbolize
the way wildfires weaken the environment that supports us all. In their reflection, one student commented:
The use of the analog project made me think differently about the theme of a diminishing foundation in our environment. When we finished the bridge, it was more evident that there was a more prominent issue at hands [sic] ... Prior to the project, I never really thought of the environment in this way.
They felt that the digital project, an Instagram account, did not change their views on climate change or wildfires, though the research involved in developing the account made them more knowledgeable about the issues.
Students who preferred digital creation did so for many reasons. Prominent among these motivators was the perceived information density of digital items. For a number of students, it was easier and more efficient to express complex ideas using the many data points provided by digital media. But even among those who valued digital media, there was some fear about what digital communication will do to the world. Critiques of the viciousness and misleading nature of social media were common. One student commented negatively on the effects of social media on self-image, taking special aim at beauty filters. Students who critiqued social media were deeply afraid of how digital representations would impact “real life.” In part, this reflected an uneasy relationship with digital and analog objects and worlds. Students challenged and were challenged by a strict line drawn between digital and analog. In our contemporary world, the distinctions between these two categories are difficult to maintain, making the idea of a ‘digital native’ all the more incomplete.
An Ambiguous Binary
From the beginning, the distinction between digital and analog tools proved difficult to parse. As researchers, we drew a line between these forms and discussed this distinction with our respective students. The four assignment prompts varied in terms of how narrowly “analog” and “digital” were defined. For example, students in “The Quest for Truth” were told that digital tools were those that use electricity, have a screen, and require a human interface to generate output. The written assignment prompt in “When the World Falls Apart” simply told students to use digital tools “as much as possible,” and the instructor of that section stated that when in doubt, students should make an argument about why they believed a particular tool should count as analog or digital. However, all four prompts gave students similar examples of which tools were digital, such as computers, digital cameras, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and which were not. Taken literally, as media studies scholar Charlie Gere does in Digital Culture (2008), digital technologies are those that store and manipulate data in the form of discrete elements, such as the zeroes and ones of electronic computers. However, the “digital” has come to “stand for a particular way of life”: instantaneous connectivity across time and space, the global “world of wired capitalism,” and the cultures and communities associated with them (Gere 16). Thus, we told our students that ordering supplies off the internet, driving their cars (many of which have onboard computers) to the store, or paying for supplies using a digital credit card reader were unavoidable breaches of the analog/digital divide. Subsequently, students were faced with aligned, but not identical, approaches to the “analog” and “digital.”
Conversations with students and their resulting work suggest that many students had a difficult time in maintaining a clear binary between digital and
analog tools. As one student put it, maintaining a separation between these categories was a “major challenge.” For some students, the collapsing of digital and analog was an explicit part of their engagement with the assignment prompt. For example, one group of students in “When the World Falls Apart” created a stop motion short film for their digital object. There was some concern as to whether the use of a digital camera to film the movement of analog objects complied with the assignment prompt to use only digital or analog tools for each product, but the instructor told students they could proceed as long as they justified their decision in the essay that went along with the project. The students explained their group’s decision thusly:
For our digital project we made a stop motion film. There were some concerns about whether this could be considered a digital project because it does have a physical aspect to it. However, stop motion would not be possible without the digital component and it is also presented in a digital manner. It can be shared and appreciated in the way that it was intended by watching it on a computer screen or phone.
The students’ assertion that stop motion “would not be possible without the digital component” captures an assumption about the relative ease and accessibility of digital tools in relation to analog formats. Several students changed their plans for their analog projects when they realized that their original designs would entail seeking out harder-to-access technologies such as film. For many students, the distinction between digital and analog tools was unproductive when it limited their ability to express their ideas, and they often sought creative solutions. One group
of students in “When the World Falls Apart” made an analog representation of a suitcase that included both digital and hand-drawn images. They admitted that the printed images were from digital sources, but, as one student put it, “the digital age has made it difficult for public mediums to be analog without limiting design and creativity.” For these students, conveying their message fully required transgressing an absolute binary between digital and analog tools.
This use of digitally derived media that was printed and incorporated into analog products was a common way in which students blurred the lines between digital and analog. In some ways, what most clearly marked students as a “digital generation” was the pervasive sense of digital and analog media as intertwined and inseparable in their day-to-day lives. In some instances, as above, students blurred the analog/digital boundary explicitly, and in others, students did not directly address how the use of a computer and printer incorporated digital tools into their otherwise analog objects. For example, some students in “Body Politics” made collages with images that they printed themselves. Other students thought through this distinction and chose to use magazine clippings in creating their analog products. The instructor had conversations with students about this plan and agreed that they could proceed, given that the assignment prompt specified that the tools that students used had to be either digital or analog; while magazines are made using digital tools, the students used only analog in creating these designs. As this conversation makes clear, students often felt the need to talk with their instructors about what "counte" as digital or analog products.
Other students submitted analog products that were made using primarily digital tools. For example, one student used a 3-D printer to create a prosthetic arm. Another student wrote a poem in a word processor and printed it to read aloud to the class.
"UNIVERSITIES SHOULD EMBRACE THE JOY AND FRUSTRATIONS OF MAKING IN ALL FORMS. THOSE THAT ALREADY DO SO SHOULD CONTINUE—IN THIS RESPECT, THE PROLIFERATION OF MAKERSPACES CERTAINLY INFUSES THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE WITH SPACE AND TOOLS FOR CREATIVITY.
These examples, among many others, speak to students’ perception of digital as immaterial, in terms of one’s interaction with the content, and analog as something material, regardless of the tools used in its creation. This disjuncture poses challenges for parsing digital and analog. For many students, making something analog required creating a tangible object, regardless of whether the tools to make that object involved digital forms, while digital meant that the object was consumable only through a digital interface such as a phone or computer screen.
In other words, students’ perceptions of the digital/analog binary often rested on the way an object was consumed, rather than its creation. For digital objects, consumption was mediated by a screen and engagement with digital technologies, while for analog objects, consumption happened materially—an object was held or heard ‘in real life.’ Students often found that digital and analog technologies were both necessary, or at least expedient, to produce their desired products. These reactions demonstrate the value of pedagogical
activities that give students freedom to combine digital and analog forms of learning in varied ways.
Making and Communicating Value
Many students’ comments suggested that digital and analog tools produced different effects and affects in the makers and the viewers, but both modes were valuable as means of developing and conveying ideas. In our survey, 88.2% of students found digital tools effective at expressing their ideas and 83.1% found analog tools effective at expressing their ideas. A number of students felt that digital media conveyed clearer messages, while analog media were better at provoking emotional responses and created room for active interpretation.
In their reflections, students often highlighted the amount of information they could convey using digital platforms. For example, one student mused that their analog project, a clay sculpture of a shoe, “narrowed down my choices” because “I could not tell with words what my argument was.” In their view, the digital project “was far superior” because “it used words to back up my statement and was far
more blunt and direct.” Yet ultimately, the capacity to express their central idea was not what they valued most about the project. In the end, they wrote, “getting my hands dirty made the experience of finishing the object more intense and gave me more pride than the digital object did.” Throughout the reflective papers, the physical experience of making, the affective power of the projects, and the potential for open-ended interpretation all vied with the expression of information as sources of student satisfaction.
Many students echoed the above claim that the digital projects communicated more effectively because they could state central ideas explicitly. A student in a group that made a choose-your-ownadventure game wrote, “In my opinion, the digital artifact better communicated our group’s central argument to the audience since it is more accessible and informative.” Another student felt the digital project let them communicate more because the volume of potential information was greater, enabling them to integrate many pictures. By contrast, students felt that the analog projects “had to be explained a lot more.” One person observed, “The analog project required more in-person explanation in order to mean anything … viewers may not have understood our ideas to their fullest extent without a group member there to elaborate.”
Another student felt that the two projects worked together to express their idea, “but if the audience were to only look at the products and not receive any background knowledge … the digital [product] would best communicate an argument” because it “has captions and visuals that outline the message.”
The analog projects were often more abstract than the digital ones, creating anxiety that they might not be well understood without a ‘maker’ there to explain them, whereas the digital projects seemed to speak for themselves.
Students also valued the power of digital projects to reach a wide audience. For some, producing digital projects helped them reach beyond the classes scheduled to attend the exhibition and share their work more broadly with friends and family. The group that made the Instagram account about wildfires expressed pride that friends and relatives outside the class had followed them. One student reflected that this audience created increased pressure, which in turn pushed them to work harder on the project. They commented, “When designing the Instagram account, I had to be very careful that my facts were correct and that I sourced all my information properly. The polls I made were carefully put together and I made sure all my pictures were clear in relation to wildfires. The digital project made me act more as a perfectionist since the account is out there for anyone to see.” Despite this pressure, the potentially broad reach of the Instagram account contributed to this student’s satisfaction because it created an avenue for real-world impact in a way that is rare for class projects. As they put it, “The Instagram account is out there for anyone to see so of course it’ll bring more awareness to the issue of wildfires. If my group wanted to continue to grow the account after this project, I’m sure more people would follow and interact with posts. Our small awareness account could potentially become a big account in the future.” In “Body Politics,” many people critiqued social media for the pressures and stigmas they propagate about body image, but students also harnessed the power of social media to express their ideas.
Not all students agreed that their digital projects conveyed their ideas clearly. In cases where students struggled to express themselves digitally, they typically attributed the challenges to lack of experience with digital technology or to the complexity of the tools they had selected. One student, who had opted
to use a CAD program, found that lack of experience at computer-aided design limited—and reshaped— what they could say. The student ended up focusing on the social aspects of their topic—beer—rather than the physical ones because they could figure out a way to make the social aspects visible. These reactions offer important reminders that student experiences, skills, and artistic and technological comfort levels are highly variable. Students’ perceptions about what platforms and media best serve them rely on a wide variety of factors.
Students who preferred the analog projects to the digital projects often cited the ability of the analog projects to evoke emotion and invite multiple interpretations. A student from the group that made the Instagram account reflected:
I feel as if our analog project did a better job of getting our point across. The analog project was meant to be an interpretative artifact. While visiting the project museum, I feel as if our analog project could have had a lot of different meanings to different people. The Instagram was an outlet to get more information about wildfires out to the public. While it does a good job of this, I feel as if information, specifically numbers, can have a hard time provoking the same feeling of passion, as something physically visible.
This group’s essay expressed pride in both the digital and the analog projects. The students celebrated the Instagram account’s ability to spread awareness and their analog sculpture’s emotional power. In their words, “We wanted our viewers to have a feeling of passion while seeing the weakened bridge. Ultimately, our analog project did a great job of educating, while evoking feelings of passion and need for change.”
Not all students attributed emotion primarily to analog media; some embraced the potential for digital tools to evoke emotional reactions. For instance, one student embraced the way the digital project let them multiply sensory perceptions; adding music helped “viewers feel the sensations” they were trying to express. Most often, though, students attributed the greatest emotional impact to their analog projects. Several students proclaimed that the physical presence of an object made it more powerful. One person argued that “the digital component doesn’t hold as much meaning as a physical object. Even in a world where digital components make their way into everyday life, the ability to feel and look at a physical object will always be more impactful.”
Students also credited analog projects with inviting open-ended analysis, though some worried that open-ended projects risked misinterpretation. One group from “When the World Falls Apart” set out to show how the decrease in travel due to COVID had temporarily improved air pollution. For their analog project, they found a branch in the Clarkson woods and created a sculptural timeline. The ends (before and after lockdown) were burnt, with detritus hanging from them; the middle (during lockdown) was unscathed and strung with ferns and pinecones. A group member mused, “When someone looks at our project, they are able to make their own interpretation of what we were doing. I found this to be more effective, as it allowed for us to create a more ambiguous piece.” A student from “Stuff” suggested that their digital project communicated better “via actual words” but their analog project promoted more active analysis. The student wrote that “being a hands-on learner, I thought that imagination and trying to figure out what was happening with my analog object was more inventive and exciting. I liked the idea of them having to touch and look at
"THESE RESPONSES
ILLUSTRATE THE POTENTIAL OF MULTIMODAL MAKING
AS A TOOL FOR CRITICAL THINKING, SYNTHESIZING KNOWLEDGE, AND EXPLORING VARIED FORMS OF SELFEXPRESSION."
the design … in order to determine in their own minds what was going on.”
Notably, many of the distinctions that arose in students’ reflections are not inherent to digital versus analog media, but reflect the kinds of digital and analog projects students undertook. The analog projects were often sculptures and paintings, with occasional poems and collages. Digital projects varied widely, including social media accounts, stop motion video, a choose-your-own-adventure game, digital art, digitally composed music, and (again) poems, but despite this variety they were often text- or photo-based. In principle, digital art can be as open-ended and affectively powerful as analog art, and of course analog paintings, sculptures, and collages can integrate text. At the same time, digital media are conducive to high volumes of prose and images, as in websites and social media platforms, which can promote the transfer of information. Student comments suggest that even when digital and analog tools produce similar products, such as a painting or poem, the immediacy of a physical object unmediated by a screen can have a powerful emotional effect.
Conclusion
These observations illustrate the risks of oversimplifying student experiences and skills by labeling them collectively as digital natives. Our results reaffirm the pedagogical importance of multimodal forms of making and of engagement with other forms of technological literacy besides digital. This is important because making asks students to translate complicated theoretical ideas by confronting their own preferences and abilities and getting comfortable with relinquishing control over materials and outcomes. At the same time, they must think about others’ preferences, perceptions, and abilities. So at the end of the project, the teachers learn a lot
about the students, and the students learn a lot about themselves and one another. Student responses to our survey bear out these observations: 76.3% of students stated that this assignment helped them think about how they communicate, 94.9% stated that seeing objects created by others made them think about their products and their creation, and 84.8% stated that they learned from carrying out this assignment. These responses illustrate the potential of multimodal making as a tool for critical thinking, synthesizing knowledge, and exploring varied forms of self-expression.
Our observations have considerable implications for course design and university administration. First, they reaffirm that good pedagogy should blend the use of digital and more traditional analog tools. This renders the learning environment more accessible and students will learn more through exploring and pushing the boundaries of their comfort. Where possible, assignments should permit—or even demand—student contributions that span the digital-to-analog spectrum. Such multimodal assignments enable educators to move away from the question of whether or not their students are "digital natives," acknowledge the wide range of experiences and skills students bring with them, and let students increase their skills starting from where they are. While not relevant to all courses, our experience suggests that this flexible approach to course design is particularly useful in first-year seminars and general education courses, where students approach learning from different vectors of pre-existing knowledge and interest. University administrators and instructors alike should consider the value of mixed-modality approaches in institution, program, and course design.
Second, universities should embrace the joy and frustrations of making in all forms. Those that already do so should continue—in this respect, the
proliferation of makerspaces certainly infuses the student experience with space and tools for creativity. Instructor buy-in is key to the enrollment of makerspaces in student learning. However, while the introduction of makerspaces to campus is an ongoing trend, designers of such facilities should be aware that the best opportunities for making require options for digital and analog means of self-expression and communication. While virtual tools like video recording have become trendy in pedagogy during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project has shown that students continue to find meaning in technologies such as paper, pencil, scissors, glue, and clay. Asking students to make with and across the digital/ analog binary inspires introspection far beyond the boundaries of one particular assignment and facilitates consideration of how they learn, how they communicate, and what they value.
NOTES
1. The Clarkson University IRB approval number for this project was 21-62 E.
2. The authors recognize that these demographic categories are contested. In a future, potentially larger study, students would be given opportunities to self-identify in more specific categories with respect to gender and ethnicity.
3. We use they, them, and theirs as singular pronouns throughout in order to maintain participant anonymity.
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there is something inherently demonic about elevators maybe that is why a young couple press together once inside stealing kisses as the metal doors entomb them within whispering words of adoration to each other when no one sees she fills his cup and he fills her up with sweet nothings that amount to little more than a false sense of security and she will swear she is in love with the stranger in her arms he feels beneath the fabric of her shirt as they descend confident that he will win before they reach the bottom and she signs her soul away in blood to a charmer who sticks his tongue between her lips as if to consume she has drifted into a dream where she is safe and loved buying the lies that linger in the stale metallic air smiling as uvulas crash and hungry breaths are traded oblivious to the fact that when she awakens alone she will be in hell and abandoned by lucifer himself
RECORD LOW MISSISSIPPI RIVER
running along delta banks beneath the Frisco and Harahan screaming at the passing cars that try to kill her with every screech of a brake crushing against the levee with all the power she can muster even at her weakest a titan angry that we would ever dare to challenge her on her 70-millionth birthday exhaust fumes for balloons discards as her presents presenting her a cake of gasoline and the things we no longer find important failing to remember that once she sheltered Huck Finn from violence fed the Choctaw and Sioux split the country from itself and inspired the movement of generations now repaying her kindness with a slow unnoticed death
SAVANNAH S. MILLER
Ungrading for Learning: Alternative Forms of Assessment in the Language and Literature Classroom
Nicole Coleman, Wayne State University
There is overwhelming evidence that grades are not just inconsistent, unfair, inaccurate, or meaningless forms of feedback but also detrimental to learning. Yet, we still grade. One reason certainly is that the research presenting this evidence is not more broadly known. A 2022 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out that the vast scholarship of teaching and learning often does not affect classroom practices because many instructors are “unsure how to apply it to their teaching, or skeptical of its value” (McMurtrie n.p.). In this article, then, I want to offer insights into the ungrading movement and the scholarship of teaching and learning on alternative forms of assessment; apply it to our discipline of languages, literary, and cultural studies where it has not gained much attention yet; and offer practical advice on implementation.
A first step is to question the merit of grades. Despite our misgivings about “grading hell,” “grade grubbing,” and “grade inflation,” grading is easy. It is what we have always done, students expect it, and it is much faster (and simpler) than giving informational feedback. It is also a convenient way to force students to do what we want them to, be it reading a text or studying vocabulary. Grades work as a carrot-and-stick method and as a means of controlling learning, but, and here lies my main argument, grading does not fulfill the actual goals we have when teaching. We might want to induce some curiosity and interest for our subject matter. We also want our students to learn certain skills and
knowledge throughout a semester and to continue on the path to learn more about the cultures and languages we teach. If these are indeed our goals, then we have to stop grading, so that our classrooms become spaces of learning, not of performance. In this article, I will make the case for just that.
I will not claim that the changes involved are easy. It takes additional work to give meaningful, informational feedback that allows students to learn and improve. It also takes additional work to change some of the curriculum to allow for different pathways or choice. The transition does not have to be complete, however. We do not have to overhaul all of our courses at once. We can begin small with a few activities because ungrading does not necessarily mean to go completely “gradeless.” The movement includes many different practices that all have in common that they attempt to reduce the impact of grades and shift the focus away from points gained to skills attained. These approaches take into consideration that most of us have to assign a final grade. Therefore, how each of us participates in ungrading is largely personal, but the “why” is not. The research is clear: grades are inconsistent (across courses and teachers), are arbitrary (what counts per course or teacher), are not objective, require uniformity of students and learning which is detrimental to a socially just pedagogy, discourage risk-taking, reduce interest and motivation, give no meaningful feedback, limit learning, and stifle creativity.
The best-known early studies that proved the subjectivity and inconsistency of grades are almost as old as grades themselves (for a history of grades see Schinske and Tanner; for an overview of early studies see Guskey and Brookhart 16-17). In 1912, Daniel Starch and Edward Charles Elliot published a study about the unreliability of grades. The researchers had sent sample English exams to high school teachers across the country with the request to grade these papers on a 100-point scale. The results were astonishing: between the highest and lowest scores given for the same paper lay 47 points; 15% of teachers had given the paper a failing grade and 12% a score above 90 (Starch and Elliot, see also Hargis 16). While papers in the humanities may seem more likely to receive subjective grading, the researchers found an even greater range for a math test (Hargis 16). The conclusion from this study was that grading on such a fine scale of 0-100 points is impossible to do reliably. Instead, the authors suggested that scales of up to 10 points may produce more reliability, although they preferred scales of just 5. This suggestion led to the letter grade system many of us use today. Despite the broader increments used for letter grades, studies in the 1950s continued to show that grades remained unreliable, arbitrary, and inconsistent (Hargis 21). In a 2011 replication of Starch and Elliot’s study, Hunter M. Brimi found a range of 50 to 96 points for the same high school English paper.
In Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education (2023), David Clark and Robert Talbert address the issue of seeing a grade as numerical or statistical data when assignments are weighed. In an anecdote, they detail the class results of two students. One student consistently scored 60% throughout the semester and thus received a D at the end of the class. The
other student failed the first assignment but scored 100% in the cumulative final. Since the assignments were weighed, the second student also completed the class with a final grade of 60% (Clark and Talbert 17-19). This example struck me because this approach is exactly what we often do: we add up grades throughout the semester and calculate a final grade based on that instead of using grades as indicators of what a student can do at a point in time. The final grade, if calculated in this way, cannot accommodate for learning or growth. The second student had learned the material by the end of the class, which was evident in the final exam, but was punished for not doing so at the arbitrary point in time the instructor had set for specific assignments. An early low grade, thus, took the opportunity away for this student to finish the class with a grade that represented what they had achieved throughout the semester.
Additionally, research has shown gender and racial achievement gaps (see Levy et al.; Chemaly). Some scholars have investigated the role stereotypes and unconscious bias play in grading that add to equity issues of grades and grading (see Van Ewijk; Rauschenberg; Reyna). Asao B. Inoue, who employs labor-based grading contracts as one form of an ungrading practice, writes that “all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly” (3). In a chapter of How We Take Action: Social Justice in PK-16 Language Classrooms, Steffen Kaupp and I explore further the issue of social justice and grading and argue for nontraditional grading approaches to reduce bias, increase accountability of students, and empower learners.
Based on the evidence for subjectivity and inconsistency, Thomas R. Guskey and Susan M. Brookhart suggest ways to make grades more reliable:
instructors need to be specific about criteria, focus on consistency, and use simpler scales with fewer categories (27-28). While these suggestions can make grades more consistent and objective, they cannot solve the motivational problems with grades.
Grades harm and reduce engagement and interest because grades are an extrinsic form of motivation. Thus, the grade itself, not learning, becomes the goal. This shifted focus leads directly to less learning because students are quite smart to do the least amount of work necessary to achieve the greatest possible reward, which is a good grade. Risk-taking is directly related: if a grade is the goal, risk-taking may endanger achieving this goal; therefore, students may choose the easier task (Kohn 62). In principle, grades mean a discouragement to take risks, which means students are less likely to challenge themselves (Kohn 65). In turn, creativity is undermined by grades because creativity often takes more work and is riskier than going the predetermined, safe path to a grade. Simultaneously, cheating and plagiarism only become strategies in a system that focuses on the ultimate goal of a good grade (Blum, “Introduction” 3). Grades, then, do not actually increase but decrease engagement and, as a consequence, learning.
Most publications related to ungrading address extrinsic and intrinsic motivation when proposing alternative forms of assessment. Alfie Kohn writes: “If our goal is quality … no artificial incentive can match the power of intrinsic motivation” (68). If, however, people appear less interested in the assignment when it is graded—and studies show that “ extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation ” (71)—the only solution is to go gradeless or at least minimize the visibility and impact of grades. Ali H. Al-Hoorie et. al. point to some problems regarding motivational research, which does not consider all factors that may influence the psychology of
motivation. Based on their recommendations, I see grading as one of the contextual factors of grading (142) but not in itself determinative of a student’s motivation. I will thus speak of engagement rather than motivation as it “allows us to take into account motivation but in specific tasks, in certain environments, and under certain conditions” (145).
As a form of feedback, grades are quite meaningless because a letter grade or points do not tell the student anything about what they can already do and what they have to improve. Some teachers may add carefully written feedback to give additional information about these exact aspects, but if informational feedback is paired with grades, the grades overshadow that feedback (see Butler). If the goal, however, is learning without the punishment and/ or justification that a grade provides, students may attempt to learn a skill by and for themselves and be willing, even eager, to improve on the skill after receiving informational feedback (see Pulfrey et al.).
The summarized research so far has come from psychology and education scholarship as well as some disciplines in which instructors have tried ungrading approaches. Languages are conspicuously absent from the scholarly conversation so far. I am only aware of one recent article that discusses assessment strategies of writing assignments in the target language (Dlaska and Krekeler). Another article is about proficiency-based grading, which can be used as a foundation for alternative forms of assessement (Fisk). I have found no discussion of going gradeless in language classrooms specifically. A rich field of research that is closely related to our teaching, however, has come from composition studies where contract grading in particular has been used and studied for many years (e.g. Danielewicz and Elbow; Inoue; Mandel).
As language instructors, we know that there is no way to learn a language without trying and failing,
without making mistakes and learning from them. For successful language learning, we need to encourage risk-taking and create opportunities for improvement after failure. Therefore, we need to shift the focus away from grades and minimize their impact. When choosing alternative forms of assessment, there are several principles we can keep in mind: grade fewer assignments, give comments without grades as often as possible, do not grade while students are still practicing a skill, include self-evaluations, reduce the number of gradations (e.g. giving complete/incomplete or check-plus/check/check-minus grades), and do not use grading curves (Kohn 208-209). These recommendations are in line with some other approaches to grading, such as minimal grading (see Elbow), specifications grading or specs grading (see Nilson), contract grading (see Katopodis and Davidson), labor-based grading (see Inoue), or standards-based or proficiency-based grading (see Fisk). Even when going gradeless, there are many versions of what this approach can mean (see Blum, Ungrading). Based on these recommendations, I will now explain different methods I have used to add to the repertoire of possibilities of ungrading with a specific focus on our own discipline.
I began experimenting with tweaking traditional approaches to grading in a sixth-semester language class. The class was a perfect laboratory for a few reasons: it was a small class for mostly majors and minors and I could count on some interest. I started small: students filled out a self-assessment that included their goals for the class and the opportunity to shift 10% of an otherwise traditional grade to an area they wanted to spend time developing. Not every student took that route—10 students used the traditional grading I had suggested—but four students created their own category of learning. Without knowing the research back then, I had hoped they would not
choose something they could already do well but rather something they truly wanted to improve, and they all did. Now it makes sense that giving students self-efficacy and agency will lead to a wish to learn, but back then I was positively surprised and determined to take this route even further.
In the subsequent year, after I had read Linda B. Nilson’s Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time (2014) with a group of like-minded colleagues, I implemented specs grading in the same class. For those new to ungrading, specs grading can be an entrance to rethinking our classes. This approach is a way to change the conversation around grades in a classroom, to offer flexibility, and to emphasize learning without being too time-consuming. The additional workload consists of the design process and is therefore frontloaded. Grading itself takes less time throughout the semester because of the planning process before class starts.
Specs grading follows a mastery approach by aligning learning outcomes with grades in a backwards design process. Once an instructor writes the learning outcomes for a class, they decide what a student seeking an A, B, or C in this class would need to accomplish. As a general trend, A-seeking students would need to reach all learning targets, B-seeking students could miss one, and C-seeking students could miss two. In this approach, the number of hurdles differs for each grade. Another way is to tie the grades to the height of the hurdles. For example, I wanted A- and B-seeking students to practice their analytical skills when writing essays, whereas C-seeking students could write a descriptive essay that mostly summarized their findings.
Next, the instructor creates so-called grade-bundles that list all requirements a student has to successfully fulfill for a certain grade. Students are encouraged to think about their priorities, their
goals, and their time availability before deciding what bundle of assignments they are going to tackle. Students, then, do not have to take every assignment or take assignments with the same requirements as others, which allows students to forge their own path through the class. The bundles in the sixth-semester class included active participation points (20 for A, 16 for B, 12 for C), the number of successfully passed grammar quizzes with passing set at 85% (all 7 for A, 6 for B, 5 for C), the number of successfully written blog entries (all 11 for A, 10 for B, 8 for C), the number of weeks when students listened to podcasts (12 weeks for A, 10 for B, 8 for C), a successfully conducted interview (the same for all), a successfully written inquiry email (the same for all), a successfully written essay (at different levels: analytical for A and B, descriptive for C), and a successfully presented final project (for A and B
but not C). For each grade, all items of a bundle need to be fulfilled. If a student falls short in just one area, a plus or minus grade can be given. For example, a student who qualified for an A in all categories but missed a blog entry would receive an A-, and a student who aimed for a B but wrote one more blog entry would receive a B+.
Then, the instructor writes requirements or the specs for each assignment, all of which are graded on a two-point scale: satisfactory/unsatisfactory or complete/incomplete or successful/ not successful yet, where satisfactory does not mean minimally competent but having successfully achieved the learning outcomes of the assignment. The specs for each assignment are transparent and consist of statements that tell students what needs to be done to be successful in the assignment. See the sample checklist of statements for an interview assignment and a blog post below.
"FOR SUCCESSFUL LANGUAGE LEARNING, WE NEED TO ENCOURAGE RISK-TAKING AND CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT AFTER FAILURE. THEREFORE, WE NEED TO SHIFT THE FOCUS AWAY FROM GRADES AND MINIMIZE THEIR IMPACT."
Like with the bundles, all statements of the checklist need to be satisfied to receive a “satisfactory” on the assignment. This all-or-nothing approach could produce anxiety. Therefore, the opportunity to revise one’s own work is built into the system. I began with giving three tokens to each student that could be exchanged for the opportunity to revise and/or for a 48-hour extension on any assignment. In later semesters, I allowed revisions without tokens because if my intent was to allow students to practice until they had understood a concept, limiting the number of attempts seemed counterproductive. This approach could be time-intensive in larger classes and might not work for every situation. In my own classes of up to 25 students, the revisions were spread out and the kind of feedback I gave—targeted advice on how to revise—did not add more than about an hour of work per assignment.
It was not only my impression that the quality of the work as well as the atmosphere of learning improved with this system. The students reported these effects in their anonymous Student Evaluations of Teaching in 2018: “I am very happy the grading
was structured the way it was. I felt more relaxed and felt it was okay to mess up and learn from my mistakes. I definitely think I did better in the course because it was structured this way”; “Because of the grading style I was able to really enjoy this class which in the end helped me learn better”; “I loved the grading system. I felt like I was encouraged to learn instead of just get a good grade. I definitely feel like my German skills are improving.” The students here reported increased engagement and learning and related these effects directly to the decreased anxiety that grades usually induce. All these students received a final grade because my institution requires it but, because of the alternative approach to assessment, the impact of grades was kept to a minimum.
After the first attempt with specs in the sixth-semester language class, I extended the approach to other classes. The lower-level language classes followed much of the same set-up as the sixth-semester class with the goal to have all students who receive an A in the class to have a good working knowledge of all grammatical items introduced during the
semester, to have practiced and improved all productive skills, to have studied and expanded their vocabulary, and to have successfully communicated with their peers and people outside of the class in written and spoken forms. As with the sixth-semester class, grades went up with this system because students engaged more with the content, took advantage of revisions, and submitted higher-quality work throughout the semester. At the same time, students reported lower anxiety and more interest in what they were doing in their student evaluations at the end of the semester.
For a general education class, a global studies
class on intercultural competence taught in English, I tweaked the approach and introduced categories that align with Bloom’s Taxonomy. I chose this approach because the class was bigger, fully online, and for students who had little to no experience with college-level classes. Since specs grading requires some explanation, I felt more comfortable with a numerical approach that nonetheless offered a lot of flexibility. The categories I created were foundations, connections, analysis, and creation as well as interaction. The bundles listed the number of points students had to achieve in each category (see table below).
Some problems with traditional grades persisted in this system that still required students to earn points. A few students consistently asked about the points they had earned and how they could do better. While the grading was objective because the specs for each item were clearly outlined, I was still giving points and not just a satisfactory/unsatisfactory designation as in traditional specs. The gradebook became an issue because it worried students if they did not receive 100% on an assignment, even if they knew that they did not need to receive 100% to be on a path to an A. The least amount of effort for the utmost goal also played a role in this class, as two students (out of 30) worked ahead and then stopped engaging—therefore not taking advantage of the knowledge their peers collectively produced in the discussions. Another problem arose with a student who had shown consistent and successful engagement throughout the semester. This student had clearly already reached the learning outcomes although they had not collected all the necessary points for an A yet. Toward the end of the semester, they encountered a difficult situation that prevented them from completing two analysis assignments. Without those points, the student would have fallen to the C-bundle. I offered this student an incomplete and was glad that they took the opportunity and wrote their assignments over the break. Other students may not have taken this offer, however, and would have received a grade well below their skills. These problems made it necessary to rethink this class for a gradeless approach, which I had already implemented in my upper-level seminars and graduate classes.
In the subsequent semester, I thus went gradeless in the class. I left all instructions as they were but removed all points, replacing the points with informational feedback. This feedback still addressed the skills presented but did not put a number on it.
Students also completed several self-assessments; we met for regular check-ins; and, at the end of the semester, students wrote a letter of learning that they used to support the grade they believed to have earned in the class. Experience shows that I seldomly have to adjust such self-assessed grades because we have been in communication throughout the semester. For language classes, too, I have made this change with additional reasons.
Students in our language classes often enter with widely different backgrounds: we may have students who began studying the language in high school or at university or are heritage speakers. Grades, rubrics, and standards assume and often require a certain uniformity (Blum, “Ungrading” n.p.). A rubric supposes that students come with certain skills; will use and expand those skills in the process (that is the learning); and come to a certain result, which is then used to determine the grade. A rubric sounds relatively objective but is not equitable because students are not uniform in skills or life circumstances. Nonetheless, the results will be graded based on the same, allegedly objective rubric. If the heritage speaker presents a similar product (maybe a poster) as the student who began learning the language at university, they will fall into the same category of the rubric. But chances are that the heritage speaker did not learn as much from the assignment as the other students. Maybe they are not placed correctly, but often there is no other pathway through the program for them. Thus, our learning targets and assignments need to become more flexible to develop spaces where every student can learn.
Jesse Stommel argues for “emergent outcomes” rather than ones that have been predetermined (30). The best challenges are those that are neither too easy nor too difficult. It is demanding to create an assignment that meets these criteria when we think
of one assignment for every skill level present in our classes. We can also not be expected to create many different assignments: we simply do not have the capacity for the additional workload, and we are usually expected to list learning outcomes on our syllabi. A remedy could be to draft learning outcomes that allow for variation and prompts that build in flexibility. These outcomes could focus on what students should learn by doing an assignment. The many different results would then reflect each student’s learning and skill set, allowing success for everyone as well as continued engagement. Accordingly, and equipped with ideas from the recent volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), I rethought my third-semester language class to radically remove grades. An important step was to leave the learning management system and its gradebook. Without a gradebook, neither I nor my students could think about grades anymore. Instead, I used Slack.
Slack is a communication app with different channels, various integrations, and private messages. I used the free version then which has since been changed. In the 2023 free version of the tool, messages will disappear after 90 days. This change might still work for most classes if the instructor tracks messages outside of the tool but is not as convenient as it was. However, most benefits remain: The channels make chatting with students more organic than discussion boards can. Slack also allows reactions in form of emojis that show the whole range of potential feedback beyond mere “liking” that is also enabled in LMS discussion boards. I used Laura Gibbs’s idea of “declaration quizzes” (92) by asking students to react with a green checkmark once they completed an assignment, be it a unit in the workbook or a flash card set of vocabulary. Gibbs’s declaration quizzes in the LMS work with one true-or-false
question that asks students to say whether or not they have done a task. These quizzes then count as one point if students answer “true” and these points are the only ones that appear in the gradebook. Because I wanted to remove all points, a gradebook was not an option for me. With Slack I was able to ask students to show this accountability for their own learning by checking off a task while also staying away from any kind of grade. The students’ own accountability created space and time to focus on recurring problems that I could address in class because I could quickly glance at homework instead of assigning points.
From Christopher Riesbeck’s chapter “CritiqueDriven Learning and Assessment” that is about his ungraded programming class, I took the idea to do and redo assignments until they met specific requirements (123) to work with students on their writing skills. Students sent me one written homework assignment per chapter for feedback. Students could indicate a focus for feedback such as a specific grammar topic, register, or phrases. I would then give feedback accordingly. Otherwise, I analyzed the writing sample for a recurrent error and gave feedback for this error. Students then revised their writing and sent it back to me. If all errors were corrected, the do-redo loop ended; otherwise, I would give additional feedback and, if needed, ways of practicing the item first before putting it back into the context of a text, and students revised again. We did this four times per semester and focused on different items. Students acknowledged the merit of this approach in their anonymous evaluations. For example, in 2021, students wrote in their Student Evaluations of Teaching: “what I really liked is that she had you focus on what you really need to work on. This allowed for quality learning”; “Instead of being graded on how much work you do and how much is right, she grades on how well you are
improving.” The focus and the lack of grades inspired the students to continuously work on their skills.
Instead of the mastery quizzes set at 85% that I had used in all my specs classes before, I created learning checks. They looked almost the same; the only difference was that the students now assessed their attempt first by themselves to see whether there was any area that they would like to practice more before sending me their results. I could then give them additional material or talk through the problems that arose during an office hour. This approach did not only enable students to take charge of their own learning, it also saved time for me because I gave targeted feedback instead of grading every single item—time that could be used to go through multiple iterations.
The last element of the class is also the most important one, and it is self-assessment. This is the change that requires the most time and can add up to multiple additional hours per semester. I provided weekly learning targets that were based on ACTFL Can-Do Statements, and students reflected on whether they had reached those targets. There is flexibility built into these targets as students can
adjust them to their skill level. Metacognition, as Peter C. Brown et al. have shown, is an important tool to not only develop awareness of learning but also to retain much of that learning. Self-assessment builds on metacognition, helps students develop and keep track of their own targets, and allows students to identify areas that need more work. Self-assessment, thus, is essential to students’ successful learning, especially in a gradeless classroom (see also Blum, “Just One Change” 57-59). I took inspiration from different self-assessment samples (see Blum, Ungrading 67-73) and created monthly guided surveys. In these surveys, students took stock of their own learning targets, of what they had learned in the respective chapter, and of the assignments they completed. Then they evaluated their own progress, indicating the areas that they had improved on and those that still needed work. They formulated intentions for the next part of the class, which they would reference in the subsequent assessment. These self-assessments during the semester provided the basis for the final self-assessment in which students gave themselves a grade for the class. After reading the surveys, I would respond
"STUDENTS IN OUR LANGUAGE CLASSES OFTEN ENTER WITH WIDELY DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS: WE MAY HAVE STUDENTS WHO BEGAN STUDYING THE LANGUAGE IN HIGH SCHOOL OR AT UNIVERSITY OR ARE HERITAGE SPEAKERS."
"THE STUDENT CLEARLY EXPRESSED WHY UNGRADING WORKS: IT REDUCES THE STRESS, IT GIVES STUDENTS MORE AGENCY, AND IN TURN STUDENTS ARE MORE ENGAGED AND ARE FREE TO ACTUALLY LEARN".
to each student with affirmations or with advice on how to reach their goals. I needed about 15 to 20 minutes to write each email. This process is necessarily personalized and requires time. I estimate that communication in an ungraded class takes about ten hours of work more per semester than in traditional classes.
I am convinced that going gradeless has led to more and better learning in my classes, which has been evident in comparing assignments over the years. Students share this feeling, as one student poignantly wrote in their end-of-semester evaluation in 2021: “I loved that we did not receive grades even though I was weary of it at the beginning, it pushed me to work harder than I ever have in a German course.” In informal surveys, midsemester assessments conducted by our Office for Teaching and Learning, and end-of-semester evaluations, all my students have either not commented on my “unusual” grading practices or have enthusiastically embraced ungrading as something that lets them focus on learning rather than performing.
The evidence so far has been anecdotal and based on my and my students’ feelings. In the fall semester of 2021, I had the opportunity to add some empirical evidence. I taught one of three sections of the first-semester German class with an ungraded approach, whereas the other two sections used a more traditional approach. My ungraded section followed much of the same set-up explained above: everything graded complete/incomplete, revisions on writing activities until the standard was met, and self-assessments. For the two other sections, the instructor followed a minimal grading scheme where all homework was graded as complete/incomplete, and the larger writing assignments and projects received grades on a 0-60-80-100 scale. About the same number of students in all sections continued with the next class, which is still a required class in
our college and therefore to be expected. Consequences on retention would only show from the next class on and even then it would be difficult to determine causation because of individual students’ circumstances that may differ from one group to the next. Final grades at the upper end also looked similar, with about half of each section completing the class in the A-range. At the lower end, there were clearer differences: whereas all students in the ungraded class received a C or above and the A- and B-range were evenly distributed, in the traditional section there was a gap between half of the students who scored in the A-range and the other half of the students who received B to C grades. One caveat comparing the results is that I did not teach all three sections, so differences can be due to teaching styles and experience. However, there is one area in which I see clear differences that I can relate to the grading style: revisions and their direct impact on the final grade. I compared one writing assignment towards the end of the semester. In my ungraded section, 15 of 19 students submitted the assignment. Of those who submitted, four students received a complete right away. My focus was on comprehensibility and word order for this assignment and these four students had consistently placed the verb correctly. Of the eleven students who received incompletes with targeted feedback about word order and verb placement, only two did not revise. Nine revised their writing and received a complete. This readiness to revise is the usual process for writing in all ungraded classes I have taught so far and the effect is apparent in subsequent assignments. Students have a more solid understanding of the grammar topic that before was only tested in a quiz with fillin-the-blank exercises. Now, students are applying their knowledge and practice multiple times in the more authentic context of writing, which helps them to retain the skill. Several students commented on
their self-assessments that these writing assignments helped them the most to improve. Across the two other (smaller) sections, 14 of 19 students submitted the same assignment. The grades given were uneven and it was not always clear why some students scored a 100 with the same mistakes as someone who scored 80. This inconsistency is usually alleviated with the minimal grading scale and may have had to do with the fact that the two sections were graded on separate days. There were nine students who could have benefited from revisions because their word order was not consistent yet. Most of these students received an 80 on the assignment. In this class, students could use a token to revise for a better grade. Only one student took the opportunity and improved their grade. Eight students did not revise and therefore carried these mistakes forward into the final exam and the next class. Overall, the research on revision proved to be true for these classes: feedback led to revisions and therefore further learning, while a grade and feedback together led to almost no revisions. The learning that is missed because students pass on revisions or are not encouraged enough to revise impacts reaching the learning targets.
I want to end with a story about one student who only took German because they needed to take a language class. Contextually, motivation could not be assumed, and yet the student was engaged throughout the semester and reported a connection to the grading system. From the first self-assessment in September 2021 on, they reported the effect ungrading has had on their level of anxiety and on their motivation: “I really like the way the class is set up, especially the un-grading thing. I was a little nervous and stressed about having to learn a language on top of all the other things in school and life but I am pleasantly surprised at how natural and stress free it has been feeling.” They mentioned the grading
system briefly again in the second self-assessment in October 2021: “Again the ungrading is awesome and it’s been pretty fun learning a new language” and went into more detail in the third self-assessment in November 2021: “Again I just want to re-iterate how much un-grading has helped me … It never ceases to amaze me how it makes it less stressful, but in a way it also gives me more of a reason to want to do well because my grade is actually based on what you and I feel I have learned and not based on an arbitrary number that isn’t indicative of what is learned.” The student clearly expressed why ungrading works: it reduces the stress, it gives students more agency, and in turn students are more engaged and are free to actually learn. Even if the system had not had as clear an effect on other students, this case alone would strengthen my conviction in the system, its influence on engagement, and subsequent learning.
Despite these successes, I have also struggled and do not want to give the impression that the switch is easy (but necessary, which I hope I have demonstrated). The biggest difficulty I face is that my grading mindset often takes over. It is how we are socialized and trained: assignments are graded— this has been a fact of my own schooling and much of my career. So, when I look at a student’s work, I still often think, this assignment is “excellent” or “pretty good” or “lacking,” which is just code for grades (A, B, and C/D). I sometimes use language that is centered around how somebody did—when I write “well done” in the margin I give no feedback other than approval, which is another extrinsic reward (see Kohn 101). Instead, I should tell the student what worked well: did they make a convincing argument, or did they integrate a quote appropriately, or did they apply a grammar item correctly to express a thought? Any of these statements would make the feedback more meaningful for the students.
I am slowly getting better at letting go and letting students take over but I am still working on it. I want to acknowledge that letting go of control is also not equal for every reader of this article: contingent faculty, instructors who are just starting out, faculty who do not have tenure yet, and female and BIPOC faculty may face higher hurdles to implement such changes or may encounter more resistance from students when implementing these changes than white male professors.
For these reasons and considering different situations, I recommend starting small. Take stock of the assignments you grade: do all of these have to be graded? Do all of these align with what you want students to do or know at the end of the class? Does an early grade impact the final grade in ways that does not represent a student’s growth in learning? Can you remove grades in certain places or introduce a complete/incomplete grading system where it works? Can you minimize the scale where grades are necessary? Another recommendation is to remove grades from drafts or from assignments more generally until a specific skill has been demonstrated. Writing assignments, be it shorter homework submissions or essays, are ideal for this approach. I grade these assignments as complete/incomplete but you could also grade them as “not done yet” and then give a regular grade for the final version. It is important that there are a series of smaller interventions that can work in any context without adding too much labor and that all shift the focus away from grades. And if these smaller changes work, you might consider restructuring a whole class. Specs grading is a great start here, or you could be gradeless throughout the semester even if you need to assign a final grade. Doing any or all of this will have one significant consequence: it will reduce the impact of grades and enable us to get to the real work, the learning.
WORKS CITED
Blum, Susan D. “Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade?” Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia UP, 2020, pp. 1-22.
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Brimi, Hunter M. “Reliability of Grading High School Work in English.” Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, vol. 16, no. 17, 2011, pp. 1-12.
Brown, Peter C., et al. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard UP, 2014.
Butler, Ruth. “Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58, no. 1, 1988, pp. 1-14.
Chemaly, Soraya. “All Teachers Should Be Trained to Overcome Their Hidden Biases.” Time, 12 Feb. 2015, time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/.
Clark, David, and Robert Talbert. Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education. Routledge, 2023.
Coleman, Nicole, and Steffen Kaupp. “Rethinking Grading for Social Justice.” How We Take Action: Social Justice in PK-16 Language Classrooms, edited by Kelly Frances Davidson et al. Information Age Publishing, 2023, pp. 31-36.
Danielewicz, Jane, and Peter Elbow. “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 244-268.
Dlaska, Andrea, and Christian Krekeler. “Does Grading Undermine Feedback? The Influence of Grades on the Effectiveness of Corrective Feedback on L2 Writing.” The Language Learning Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 185-201.
Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English, vol. 55, no. 2, 1993, pp. 187-206.
Fisk, Justin. “Implementing Proficiency-Based Grading in World Languages.” Proficiency-Based Grading in the Content Areas: Insights and Key Questions for Secondary Schools, edited by Wendy Custable et. al. Solution Tree Press, 2019, pp. 251-74.
Gibbs, Laura. “Let’s Talk About Grading.” Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia UP, 2020, pp. 91-104.
Guskey, Thomas R., and Susan M. Brookhart. What We Know About Grading: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next. ASCD, 2019.
Hargis, Charles H. Grades and Grading Practices: Obstacles to Improving Education and to Helping At-Risk Students. Charles C. Thomas, 2003.
Inoue, Asao B. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2019.
Katopodis, Christina, and Cathy N. Davidson. “Contract Grading and Peer Review.” Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia UP, 2020, pp. 105-22.
Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
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Thomas Kneeland
September 1997. The old Walmart was two doors down from Kroger. Travel carnivals brought everyone together, lined us up like degenerates—like toys exiled to the less desirable depository, but we were kings & queens that night, no matter the race or class. Grandma paid for my tickets & I ran over to the carousel lined with American muscle cars, autumn sun staining silhouettes out of stretched tarp & highway signs. I sat in the rustic yellow car, latched my seatbelt to the metal bar placed over my bird chest by the ridemaster. A girl sat beside me. Not white. Not Black. Just Brown. Lucia—my name is Lucia. Her voice was smooth cinnamon cast over a bowl of hot oatmeal. Can I ride with you? I looked over at Grandma for her approval. Yes. Before the ride began, the girl kissed me on the cheek, & I—unable to express my immense joy—sat there, a little fire wrapped in clay: a Black boy painted rouge & blue & brown, for all the words I wouldn’t say.
54.1
Drawing The Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies
Erich Hatala Matthes
Oxford University Press, 2021. 184 pp. $27.50/Hardcover
Bryony Dixon, Independent Scholar
Erich Hatala Matthes’s well-reasoned and digestible book, Drawing the Line, contemplates the impact that revelations of immorality may have upon our aesthetic understanding and appreciation of an artist’s work. A dissection of some well-known and personal examples leads the author to familiar, yet flawed, solutions in pursuit of “systemic change” (108). These proposals are somewhat tempered by his more classically liberal thesis, which recognizes art’s utility as the handle by which we may grapple with nuanced questions of human morality. Ultimately, Matthes argues against an overly paternalistic approach to art presentation and consumption.
Matthes begins by interrogating evolving perceptions of works of art pre- and-post discovery of an artist’s moral transgression. He argues that art adopts a particular perspective of the world, presenting it as a tool of moral expression while inviting readers to engage in both artistic and ethical criticism. Matthes effectively distinguishes between moral attitudes presented in the work and those prescribed by the work, laying out compelling investigations of normative and descriptive approaches to art
criticism. He disparages art functioning as a means for moral redemption of artists and instead encourages public appreciation of challenging art. Written within a contemporary culture obsessed with performative virtue, Matthes underlines consumers’ proclivity for signaling moral purity by disengaging from “problematic” artists. While acknowledging the role of consumer ethics, he avoids reducing art to its moral content alone. The book challenges readers to engage in “[r]eal criticism,” which Matthes argues “aims at understanding” (61), eventually concluding that if:
the defining feature of an ethical art consumer is the ability to thoughtfully evaluate the relationship between an artist’s immoral behavior and their art, then attempts to prevent people from consuming an artist’s work will preclude them from doing this. (95)
Drawing the Line’s most compelling moments include Matthes’s gentle attempts to restore personal agency in consuming and interpreting art, generally positing against the current infantilization of audiences. Matthes embraces “the acquaintance principle,” the
idea that to appreciate a song, “you need to listen to it yourself” (70). While many now try to censor seemingly problematic art, he instead offers ethical suggestions for art presenters wishing to establish important dialogue around a work’s morality without condoning it. In so doing, Matthes articulates a cogent defense of comedy’s imperative role in “navigating lines of appropriateness” (23), insisting that people “are sophisticated beings” (62) and that “moral complexity is part of what makes art so irresistible” (64).
In describing the surface morality of the art world more generally, with its “splashy progressive gestures,” Matthes highlights the susceptibility of cancel culture to “elite capture,” which scapegoats individual artists but leaves current hierarchies of power in place (99). He evokes subtle religious connotations that nod to the puritanical orthodoxy of superficial social justice activism. Yet he adheres to some of its most sacred tenets throughout, endorsing no-platforming at universities, for example. Still, by at least acknowledging cancel culture’s ultimate aim “to erase rather than excoriate” (79), Matthes once again impresses upon readers the importance of promoting intellectual engagement with all types of art, even if only to hold immoral
" HE DISPARAGES ART
FUNCTIONING AS A MEANS FOR MORAL REDEMPTION OF ARTISTS AND INSTEAD
ENCOURAGES PUBLIC APPRECIATION OF CHALLENGING ART."
artists to account, conceding: “there’s so much to lose in a world where we treat the boycott of immoral artists as moral bedrock” (68).
Deviating from auteur theory, Matthes outlines collateral losses from cancellation campaigns against collaborative mediums like cinema, inviting us to consider its horizontally punitive effects. However, this fleeting class analysis fails to address the subsequent effect on the zeitgeist, which undoubtedly shapes the Overton window of public morality. Inevitably, emerging creative dissidents are unable to gain influence, facing deplatforming, censorship, and lost funding which, given the socioeconomic realities of late-stage Western capitalism, serves to morph once independent artists into vessels of vapid state-sanctioned agitprop. Although Matthes claims that it is “difficult to evaluate how extensively free expression is actually dampened by cancel culture,” Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott in their recent book The Canceling of the American Mind have thoroughly explored the phenomenon and a “dysfunctional ... battle for power, status and dominance” (9) 1 while a survey found that 80% of today’s college students self-censor . 2
To his credit, Matthes insists that “[w]e cannot and should not aspire to a world where novelists and screenwriters only depict characters from their own communities” (105). Drawing the Line joins the growing literature skillfully dismantling the case against voice appropriation, echoing political scientist Yascha Mounk, who argues:
it is high time for a full-throated defense of cultural hybridity … rather than being something we should guard against, the
ever-present reality of mutual inspiration is one of the most attractive features of diverse societies. (151)3
Writers like Angel Eduardo have also described standpoint epistemology approaches to art criticism (one of the philosophical mechanisms behind cancel culture) as an “affront to [the] intellect.”4 BritishGhanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah goes further still: “Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.”5
Drawing the Line somewhat predictably depicts J. K. Rowling as “discriminatory toward trans and gendernonconforming people” (65), and it’s perhaps this misguided take that best illuminates the fickle nature of contemporary bourgeois morality. As gay playwright and social commentator Andrew Doyle notes in his book The New Puritans, Rowling “affirms anyone’s right to identify however they choose, [but also] believes that the reality of biological sex cannot be gainsaid and is crucial when it comes to upholding the rights of women” (217).6 Matthes’s lack of moral objectivity around Rowling is perhaps understandable, given the manner in which today’s public figures “come to be associated with certain political or ideological tribes, irrespective of their actual views” through continual smearing and “escalating partisanship of news media, and the online ‘echo chamber’ effect.”7
Later in Drawing the Line, however, Matthes doubles down on his uncharitable assessment by citing “Daniel Radcliffe’s reassurances to Harry Potter fans in the wake of J. K. Rowling’s transphobic Twitter activity” (124). Performative moralizing from
privileged child stars craving relevance is unlikely to reflect Rowling’s more nuanced moral outlook, whose self-made success arose from the unlikely circumstances of a single mother fleeing domestic abuse.8 Rowling’s lived experience both as a woman and survivor of sex-based violence undoubtedly informs her position on such issues, which invariably affect working-class women the most.
It appears that in stretches of Drawing the Line, Matthes falls prey to today’s technocratic manipulation of modern moral consensus alluded to by Hellen Dale: “Both social media (by dint of algorithms) and now conventional media (by dint of deliberate hiring and firing) are herding their viewers and readers into ideological silos.’’9 This state of digitally engineered morality is having a detrimental impact on the arts, emboldening censors and leading to the type of attempted erasure of morally ambiguous artists Matthes warns against.10 He also overlooks the point that “minorities on the ‘wrong side’ of an issue are the subject of special contempt,”11 as Lukianoff and Schlott observe, drawing on prior collaborations with Jonathan Haidt and the work of sociologist Émile Durkheim “to explore how group identity can escalate into these kinds of mass surges of moral condemnation and demands for moral purity.”12
Matthes eventually suggests that tensions around art consumption should be comparable to vegans and omnivores breaking bread—where friction is used to persuade rather than shun one’s opponents. He believes reformist solutions are preferable to erasing immoral artists, promising “to target the levers of power in the art world so that more forms of artistic expression can actually be heard” (110). While this may (correctly) relieve the onus of
presentism applied to deceased artists, it might also (wrongly) place the full burden on living artists to adhere to the facile whims of today’s cultural gatekeepers. For instance, Matthes rightly notes that “arts institutions have been set up to systematically favor the work of middle-class, white men” (108) —but appears oblivious to the many radical thumbs aggressively pushing the work of this (no less talented) group to the bottom of the pile for the last decade. The harmful implications for emerging artists on the wrong side of vogue identitarian politics presents a moral conundrum in and of itself.
Though Matthes observes that “cancel culture stepped in because institutions failed” (101), he underestimates just how far trust in institutions has been irrevocably damaged, particularly those cloaked in what Shivana Sookdeo describes as a “veneer of progressivism,” championing superficial morality over inconvenient truths (107). Matthes advocates for public pressure to drive institutional change and accountability but alludes to the same elitist DEI reforms that have so far proven divisive and even discriminatory—and which risk perpetuating the current “grievance fueled monoculture” and thereby further undermining trust in institutions.13
But the real missed lesson of the book may be forgiveness . While we would do well to follow Matthes’s advice and avoid the deification of artists, institutions should still hold space for human fallibility. In so doing, art lovers are afforded agency to bravely grapple with Matthes’s ”proverbial bull,” which he recommends grasping by both horns, moral and aesthetic (138)—without rendering society’s collective superego as fragile as the contents of the proverbial china shop.
NOTES
1. Lukianoff, Greg, and Rikki Schlott. The Canceling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
2. Camp, Emma. “I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead.” The New York Times, 7 March 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/campus-speech-cancel-culture.html. Accessed 29 Feb. 2024.
3. Mounk, Yascha. The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Penguin Press, 2023.
4. Eduardo, Angel. “Does Superman Have to Be White?” Center for Inquiry, 24 March 2021, centerforinquiry.org/blog/does-superman-have-to-be-white/. Accessed 29 Feb. 2024.
5. qtd. in Mounk, The Identity Trap 154.
6. Doyle, Andrew. The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. Constable, 2022.
7. Doyle, The New Puritans 216.
8. Rowling, J. K. “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues.” JKRowling.com, 10 June 2020, www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasonsfor-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2024.
10. Mackey, Maureen. “Transgender artist removes J.K. Rowling’s name from Harry Potter books, resells them.” New York Post, 13 Jan. 2023, nypost.com/2023/01/13/reseller-removes-j-k-rowlings-namefrom-harry-potter-books/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2024.
11. Lukianoff and Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind 124.
12. Doyle, The New Puritans 224.
13. Ray, Kevin. “Social Justice Activists Are Dismantling Theater: I Watched From the Inside.” The Black Sheep, 22 Jan. 2024, www.wetheblacksheep.com/p/social-justice-activists-are-dismantling. Accessed 1 Feb. 2024.
contributors
Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German and Director of Global Studies at Wayne State University where she teaches all levels of language and culture classes. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century German literature, particularly in relation to human rights, intercultural competence, and alternative modes of assessment. Nicole has “ungraded” her classes since 2016 and runs workshops on ungrading at Wayne State and other institutions. A co-authored chapter on specifications grading and social justice was published in the edited volume How We Take Action in 2023. A co-authored chapter on considering ungrading for language program directors is forthcoming.
After teaching at Wake Forest University, Georgia Tech, and Seattle Pacific University, Robert Lance Snyder retired as Professor Emeritus of English at the University of West Georgia. Most recently he is the author of John le Carré’s Post-Cold War Fiction (University of Missouri Press, 2017) and Eric Ambler’s Novels: Critiquing Modernity (Lexington Books, 2020), in addition to journal articles on the fiction of Graham Greene, Geoffrey Household, Len Deighton, Adam Hall, Charles McCarry, Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Forsyth, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Ian McEwan, Stella Rimington, Patrick Hamilton, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, Dan Fesperman, Ross Macdonald, Dorothy B. Hughes, Cornell Woolrich, Kenneth Fearing, Paula Hawkins, and James Lee Burke.
Alexander Cohen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Clarkson University. His research interests are focused on intersections between political science and pedagogy, with a focus on gaming as a learning tool, and artificial intelligence. Previously, at Augustana College, he managed the Upper Mississippi Center for Sustainability. He also co-founded and acted as a founding director for the nonprofit Live Lead Free Quad Cities, an organization dedicated to eliminating lead poisoning in the Quad Cities region of Illinois. He is the co-author of two books: Gaming the System: Nine Games to Teach American Government through Active Learning and Living with Zombies: Society in Apocalypse in Film, Literature, and Other Media, which explores the impact of zombies on popular culture and what this means during the Anthropocene. He has also published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Journal of Political Science Education, The Journal of Excellence in College Teaching, Midwest Quarterly, Field Methods, Modern Language Studies, and The Social Science Journal. He owns too many cats.
Camille Frazier is the Agricultural Land Equity Program Lead at the California Strategic Growth Council within the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. She is the author of Cultivating Livability: Food, Class, and the Urban Future in Bengaluru (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her work spans policy and academic frameworks and broadly concerns issues of food and land justice, agricultural transitions, and urbanization.
Thomas Kneeland is the author of We Be Walkin’ Blackly in the Deep and is a 2022 Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize finalist. He is a 2024 Speculative Play & Just Futurities Scholar-in-Residence, which is funded by Indiana University, the Mellon Foundation, IU Indianapolis (IUI) Arts & Humanities Institute, IUI Center for Africana Studies & Culture, and the Ray Bradbury Center. His publication credits include Southern Humanities Review, The Amistad, The Rumpus, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Kneeland holds a BA in English Writing from DePauw University, an MA in Ministry from Wesley Seminary, and an MFA in Poetry from Butler University.
Savannah S. Miller is a queer and disabled writer, theatre artist, and converted Memphian. She was the inaugural Young Playwright in Process through Young Playwrights' Theater in Washington, D.C., as well as a two-time winner of the Eleanor Frost Playwriting Contest. Her works have been published or are forthcoming with Jelly Bucket, Flash Fiction Magazine, the Sierra Club’s North Star Journal, and others. Read more at savannahsmiller.com.
Lisa Propst is an Associate Professor of Literature and Coordinator of the Clarkson Seminar, a firstyear critical thinking and writing course, at Clarkson University. She teaches a variety of courses, from world literature to dystopian fiction. Her research centers on contemporary British and postcolonial literature, with interests in the ethics of representation and the roles of narrative in constructing new ethical relationships after conflict. She is the author of Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), and articles in journals such as Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, among others.
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh is the author of the poetry collection, Hysterical Water (University of Georgia Press, 2021), and the literary analysis, Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother (University of South Carolina Press, 2019). She is working on a book of literary analysis about mothering and social justice as well as a second book of poems. She is an assistant professor of English at Hampton University and lives with her family in Virginia.
Blair Stein is an Assistant Professor of History at Clarkson University. She teaches broadly in the history of science, history of technology, and environmental history and researches how technologies have been mobilized to serve modern nationalism. In particular, she is interested in how aviation has guided changing perceptions of space, place, and belonging in Canada. Her first book, North Stars in Modern Skies: Technologies and Environments at Trans-Canada Air Lines, is under contract with McGillQueen’s University Press. She is an executive and editorial board member at the Network for Canadian History and the Environment, and her research has appeared in Scientia Canadensis, Journal for the History of Astronomy, and Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (UBC Press, 2018).
