Lecturing to learners and letting them pick the subject before going to the white board is one of my favorite high stakes adventures.

#Academodon #Orthodon

Can academia PLEASE retire the phrase "evidence-based"? I mean of course it is. Let's just assume your practice, interventions, solutions, &c. aren't based on nothing but imaginative fantasy, and get on with it.

#academia #academodon #academic #academicchatter

I recently chatted with Carmen Gomez-Galisteo of the New Books Network about my monograph *#FairyTales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them*
Carmen was a great interlocutor and she steered the conversation to all the saucy topics like #race, #religion, #AmericanHistory, and why I spend so much time talking about #Cinderella.

@litstudies @histodons #academodon #Litodon #histodon #DisneyPixar #DisneyStudies #DisNet https://newbooksnetwork.com/fairy-tales-in-contemporary-american-culture

We have officially reached the part of the #semester when living alone sucks. I miss having other humans with whom to trade care for each other in our respective busy times.

Shoutout to other single people eating “meals” that are actually a strange collection of randomnesses!
#academodon

This semester is rough. I am not at my best; my students are not at their bests. We are all struggling to keep moving forward through pandemic, climate, and geopolitical crises.

And worse, the particular way my students are not at their best pushes some of my personal buttons. I’m working hard to remember that this aspect of things is a me problem, not a them problem; to not take things personally; and to respond with patience. None of this is easy or simple.
#academodon #academia

#AcaWriMo accountability post 14 (Nov 21). Shifting away from death this week to read the edited collection /Alternative #Historiographies of the #DigitalHumanities/ edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, available as an #OpenAccess e-book from #Punctum Books.

Kim's introduction "Media Histories, #Media Archaeologies, and the Politics and Genealogies of the Digital Humanities" does the hard work of laying out succinctly the problematic history and historiographies the collection's essays are resisting, reframing, and speaking back to. She begins with the way that the early engineers and developers of Silicon Valley viewed the digital world they were building as a "version of the American West" steeped in the values of settler colonialism (17), supporting this point with an analysis of the use of master/slave language for disks and programs into the present (18).

This focus on power and violence continues as Kim moves on to discuss the dependence of digital development on its military usefulness, highlighting systems of digital mapping whose development has been funded thanks to military support (19-20) and which continues to be intertwined with settler-colonial ways of being (20).

Kim characterizes the volume as "engag[ing] with three main historical methodologies--media archaeology, the discussion of historiography in relation to "big data" and big humanities/digital humanities; and the discussion of silence and history making" (21). This is accomplished through six sections: Presents, Histories, Praxis, Methods, Indigenous Futures, and Black Futurities (24-29). The contributions throughout these sections, Kim asserts, share a focus on dynamics of power (23-24) and call on scholars in the field to "re-set discussions of the #DH and its attending straight, white origin myths" (24).

#academodon #histodons #litodons

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/alternative-historiographies-of-the-digital-humanities/

#AcaWriMo post accountability post 13 (Nov. 17-18)
In the 24.3 and 24.4 isssues of the journal /Mortality/, Marin Robert and Laura Tradii published a two part article "Do We Deny #Death? I. A Genealogy of #DeathDenial" and "Do We Deny Death? II. Critiques of the Death-Denial Thesis."

The first part offers a helpful overview of history and sociology scholarship on death denial in Western culture, highlighting the rise of this theory in the early to mid C20th with thinkers like Freud. Notably, they argue that the death-denial theory requires a kind of nostalgia for past relationships with death, a contrast between the present death industry as impersonalizing and commodifying and the past paradigm of death at home as intimate and personal.

At the end of Part I and throughout Part II, Robert and Tradii argue that death and the dead are actually very present in contemporary popular culture. While I can agree with this, I continue to think that US culture is very bad at coping with the deaths and the dead that we encounter. I would agree that we collectively are not denying death, but we are also not collectively responding to it. There is a sort of individualism in the lack of communal mourning and grief rituals beyond the immediate funeral and burial services.

#academodon #thanatology #AmWriting

#AcaWriMo accountability post 12 (16 Nov.).

In her monograph /Virtual #Afterlives: Grieving the Death in the C21st/, Candi K. Cann explores the present uses of #VirtualSpaces for #mourning and #grief in the contemporary US, with some comparative attention to other world cultures. The brief argument Cann presents in her preface suggests "that [in the US] memorialization has increased so much because death itself is disappearing" (para. 3).

Her introduction contextualizes these present practices as the culmination of several historo-cultural processes in the US over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War are key drivers. The first created the conditions of specialization of labor and population density in cities that contributed to the rise of the funeral home and mortuary industries (para. 2). The latter created the conditions for embalming to become a standard practice for all bodies (para. 3).

Cann then goes on to offer an extended discussion of #BereavementLeave policies, highlighting that the US has no federal laws or mandates that govern what companies offer to their employees. The federal government's #bereavement policies for their own employees are among the most generous in the US, but they have not trickled out into the private sector.

These policies influence both for whom we are able to grieve by enumerating particular relationships and degrees of kinship and for how long by limiting the time off (with or without pay) and requiring evidence in the form of a death certificate or obituary.

[side note]: One thing Cann doesn't mention is that it takes time to get a death certificate. In the case of my late husband, it was about a week after the funeral, so about 10 days after the death. Had anyone needed it for bereavement leave, it would not have been available to them.

Back to Cann--These limitations on the practices of #mourning and the processing of grief have a created a situation in which US society does not have a common framework for mourning, in contrast to the mid C19th when mourning clothes, armbands, ribbons identified the grieving and people withdrew from social life and work for an expected period of time.

Published in 2014, this book does not, of course, address our current pandemic or geopolitical situations, but I think it highlights the lack of memorialization we're seeing of the COVID dead, the climate change dead, and the armed conflict dead.

#academodon #DeathStudies #Thanatology
https://academic.oup.com/kentucky-scholarship-online/book/20771