Reimagining Group Work through the Lens of Care Webs "What does it mean," disability justice acti... more Reimagining Group Work through the Lens of Care Webs "What does it mean," disability justice activist and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, "to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it's disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore. .. to a collective responsibility that's maybe even deeply joyful?" (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019). Considering the networks that Black and Brown queer people create to support each other, Piepzna-Samarasinha provides a framework and an invitation for weaving what she terms care webs, which are lines of support, access, and care for sick and disabled people that are made up of disabled and nondisabled people, and extend beyond the state and the biological family household. Piepzna-Samarasinha's concept of care webs opens up exciting possibilities for reimaging classroom pedagogy. In the context of education, care webs might initially seem like a form of collective caregiving far different from the practice of working together on course assignments. Afterall, group work in an educational setting is not linked to survival. That said, the disability justice work of creating care suggests ways we can foster supportive learning communities that create space for vulnerability, encourage learning and creating new things, and are conducive to meaningful interactions and building solidarity through working with others to achieve a goal. My initial steps for weaving classroom care webs involved expanding existing classroom practices such as peer tutoring. The aftermath of online courses and the "Zoom fatigue" many students experienced as isolation served to increase anxiety or depression and focused renewed attention to systemic
Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, 2023
that oriented our work of tying place and people's everyday material experiences to struggles for... more that oriented our work of tying place and people's everyday material experiences to struggles for social and spatial justice. 1 The class examined multiple methods for mapping shared urban ecologies with an eye toward collectively creating digital maps and visualizing how space is co-produced and contested in places that are meaningful to us and to communities surrounding our own Fox Cities of northeastern Wisconsin. Students used Omeka-an open-source platform for online exhibits-together with the Neatline plugin to create maps with layered timelines, annotations, and narratives that were interactive and visually compelling. 2 These digital tools have a low barrier for entry into the visual and interpretive vernacular of digital humanities, which allowed students to focus on developing the intellectual concerns and diverse perspectives of the four maps they ultimately completed.
The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and hum... more The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and humanitarian emergency surrounding the border has negatively impacted students and schools. Responding to the impact of U.S. border politics on education, we taught a week-long institute for local teachers to learn about the histories and lived experiences connecting the Central American, Mexican, and U.S. borders. During the institute we asked participants-who were predominantly white K-12 teachers-to reflect on their learning experiences in personal journals. The aim of this study was to investigate the racial politics of emotion when confronting border issues in a classroom setting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our analysis, we conducted qualitative content analysis and close readings of twentyone teacher's journals to determine patterns in the emotional response's teachers had to the histories, testimonies, audio, and visual accounts to which they were exposed through readings and seminars. The results of our analysis reveal that emotions were used by participants to maintain racial boundaries and reinforce race-based notions of national belonging, but also to challenge injustice both in and beyond classroom settings. The findings have significant implications about the impact that ethnic studies programs and critical race theory curriculum may have on teacher education.
Sigma Colon earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2017 and is currently an N... more Sigma Colon earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2017 and is currently an NEH Fellow in the Humanities at Lawrence University. Her research and teaching explores the intersections of environmental issues with systems of social injustice.
As part of the reflexive approach on the diversity of research practices in the field of American... more As part of the reflexive approach on the diversity of research practices in the field of American Studies, the organizers of the 2016 AFEA conference, “America in the Works,” invited Michael Denning not only to give a keynote speech entitled “Decolonizing the Ear: The Transcolonial Reverberations of Vernacular Phonograph Music,” but to present, along with nine current graduate students, the research and methodology of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, which he coordinates at Yale University.
This article explores the ecological and social processes by which some species become invasive a... more This article explores the ecological and social processes by which some species become invasive and the prominent environmental and commercial role they play as such. The deliberate introduction of non-native species to novel environments is as old as the history of human migration but in recent years their accelerated movement globally made strikingly visible the impact of these nonhuman occupations of the natural world. Methods for dealing with the problem of invasive species highlight the intercon-nections among degraded ecologies, the social transformation of local environments, and processes of globalization. The example of the Asian carp demonstrates how the natural world intrudes on human infrastructure and landscapes, exceeding the uses to which humans endeavor to put it, occupying and altering the organic and built environment alike.
Reimagining Group Work through the Lens of Care Webs "What does it mean," disability justice acti... more Reimagining Group Work through the Lens of Care Webs "What does it mean," disability justice activist and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, "to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it's disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore. .. to a collective responsibility that's maybe even deeply joyful?" (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019). Considering the networks that Black and Brown queer people create to support each other, Piepzna-Samarasinha provides a framework and an invitation for weaving what she terms care webs, which are lines of support, access, and care for sick and disabled people that are made up of disabled and nondisabled people, and extend beyond the state and the biological family household. Piepzna-Samarasinha's concept of care webs opens up exciting possibilities for reimaging classroom pedagogy. In the context of education, care webs might initially seem like a form of collective caregiving far different from the practice of working together on course assignments. Afterall, group work in an educational setting is not linked to survival. That said, the disability justice work of creating care suggests ways we can foster supportive learning communities that create space for vulnerability, encourage learning and creating new things, and are conducive to meaningful interactions and building solidarity through working with others to achieve a goal. My initial steps for weaving classroom care webs involved expanding existing classroom practices such as peer tutoring. The aftermath of online courses and the "Zoom fatigue" many students experienced as isolation served to increase anxiety or depression and focused renewed attention to systemic
Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, 2023
that oriented our work of tying place and people's everyday material experiences to struggles for... more that oriented our work of tying place and people's everyday material experiences to struggles for social and spatial justice. 1 The class examined multiple methods for mapping shared urban ecologies with an eye toward collectively creating digital maps and visualizing how space is co-produced and contested in places that are meaningful to us and to communities surrounding our own Fox Cities of northeastern Wisconsin. Students used Omeka-an open-source platform for online exhibits-together with the Neatline plugin to create maps with layered timelines, annotations, and narratives that were interactive and visually compelling. 2 These digital tools have a low barrier for entry into the visual and interpretive vernacular of digital humanities, which allowed students to focus on developing the intellectual concerns and diverse perspectives of the four maps they ultimately completed.
The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and hum... more The militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and humanitarian emergency surrounding the border has negatively impacted students and schools. Responding to the impact of U.S. border politics on education, we taught a week-long institute for local teachers to learn about the histories and lived experiences connecting the Central American, Mexican, and U.S. borders. During the institute we asked participants-who were predominantly white K-12 teachers-to reflect on their learning experiences in personal journals. The aim of this study was to investigate the racial politics of emotion when confronting border issues in a classroom setting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to our analysis, we conducted qualitative content analysis and close readings of twentyone teacher's journals to determine patterns in the emotional response's teachers had to the histories, testimonies, audio, and visual accounts to which they were exposed through readings and seminars. The results of our analysis reveal that emotions were used by participants to maintain racial boundaries and reinforce race-based notions of national belonging, but also to challenge injustice both in and beyond classroom settings. The findings have significant implications about the impact that ethnic studies programs and critical race theory curriculum may have on teacher education.
Sigma Colon earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2017 and is currently an N... more Sigma Colon earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2017 and is currently an NEH Fellow in the Humanities at Lawrence University. Her research and teaching explores the intersections of environmental issues with systems of social injustice.
As part of the reflexive approach on the diversity of research practices in the field of American... more As part of the reflexive approach on the diversity of research practices in the field of American Studies, the organizers of the 2016 AFEA conference, “America in the Works,” invited Michael Denning not only to give a keynote speech entitled “Decolonizing the Ear: The Transcolonial Reverberations of Vernacular Phonograph Music,” but to present, along with nine current graduate students, the research and methodology of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, which he coordinates at Yale University.
This article explores the ecological and social processes by which some species become invasive a... more This article explores the ecological and social processes by which some species become invasive and the prominent environmental and commercial role they play as such. The deliberate introduction of non-native species to novel environments is as old as the history of human migration but in recent years their accelerated movement globally made strikingly visible the impact of these nonhuman occupations of the natural world. Methods for dealing with the problem of invasive species highlight the intercon-nections among degraded ecologies, the social transformation of local environments, and processes of globalization. The example of the Asian carp demonstrates how the natural world intrudes on human infrastructure and landscapes, exceeding the uses to which humans endeavor to put it, occupying and altering the organic and built environment alike.
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