Teaching intersectionality: Pedagogical approaches for lasting impact

Recently there have been calls to study and apply critical theory and tools around social justice, and intersectional approaches of race, anti-racism, gender, sexuality, disability and accessibility, and class in Library and Information Studies (LIS). But applying lasting techniques in the LIS classroom require pedagogies that are intersectional, assessable, and apply lasting change for the student. This article argues for impactful approaches to intersectionality – the inclusion of multiple identities and subjectivities such as race, gender, sexuality, and class – to LIS in three parts: (1) Teaching critical theories alongside traditional LIS texts, (2) using systems of assessment for cultural competencies and analysis, and (3) classroom activities that implement metacognitive change. These approaches in the LIS classroom can demonstrably move LIS students into a deeper critical analysis of power in libraries that will be applied throughout their careers

Bawdy Tales

Hansu Siirala is a Finnish-Canadian craftsperson currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Twelve years ago at the age of fifty-five, she suffered two strokes, which paralyzed her left side and required her relocation to a long-term residential care facility. Via writings to her family, Hansu shares hilarious, bitingly sharp observations about life in the assisted care facility in Vancouver. Her stories chip away at social stigmas, make us laugh at ourselves, and celebrate life in unexpected ways. “Bawdy Tales” is a project that utilizes her writing as the foundation of a series of pieces hosted via a website, providing honest depictions of how one’s body interfaces with others when it is not in their full control. Hansu has never shied away from being crass, frank, or bawdy. She tells stories about her own farts, her lady parts, and poop. When told first hand, these stories redefine taboos as shared human realities. In this project, Bawdytales.net is used as a “skeletal” element and a framework to share Hansu’s perspective on feelings of isolation, the way she connects to family, her community, and the policies that shape the conditions in which she lives. Though the body is used as a theme for each story, Hansu’s stories defy what it means to be restricted physically. She uses humor, sass, and confidence to find agency and transcend her own physical limitations. “Bawdy Tales” includes animation, illustration, and video to create a platform for Hansu’s writing. As a result of her stroke, Hansu is partially deaf and blind. The site has been made with accessibility as a foundational principle in order for her, and those like her, to be able to experience it with ease

“Being Myself Paid Off:” Blackness, Feminized Labor, and Authenticity in Black Beauty and Lifestyle Content on Youtube

My thesis centers Black women in conversations of digital feminized and aspirational labor online, reframing prior scholarship that has generally identified digital content creators as young, white, female, cisgender, and upper class. I use an intersectional, Black cyberfeminist approach to better understand how race and gender impact digital feminized and aspirational labor. In a 2015 study of fashion bloggers, Brooke Duffy and Emily Hund identified three elements of entrepreneurial femininity: discourses of “the destiny of passionate work,” staging “the Glam Life,” and sharing “carefully curated” intimate details of one’s personal life on social media. My thesis applies these three elements of entrepreneurial femininity as a framework to explore how they shape content created by Nigerian-American vlogger Jackie Aina. I analyze beauty and lifestyle videos and vlogs posted to Aina’s channel from 2018-2021, as well as popular press interviews and posts from Aina’s personal websites and social media to better understand how she frames the labor she engages in. Focusing on labor and the discourse of “passionate work,” I argue that Aina performs multiple levels of paid and unpaid labor by developing a distinct persona and branded identity, building affective communities with her audience, and navigating racism online

A Systematic Review of Artificial Intelligence in Assistive Technology for People with Visual Impairment

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of numerous successful applications that utilize data to significantly enhance the quality of life for people with visual impairment. AI technology has the potential to further improve the lives of visually impaired individuals. However, accurately measuring the development of visual aids continues to be challenging. As an AI model is trained on larger and more diverse datasets, its performance becomes increasingly robust and applicable to a variety of scenarios. In the field of visual impairment, deep learning techniques have emerged as a solution to previous challenges associated with AI models. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of recent research on the development of AI-powered visual aides tailored to the requirements of individuals with visual impairment. We adopt the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology, meticulously gathering and appraising pertinent literature culled from diverse databases. A rigorous selection process was undertaken, appraising articles against precise inclusion and exclusion criteria. Our meticulous search yielded a trove of 322 articles, and after diligent scrutiny, 12 studies were deemed suitable for inclusion in the ultimate analysis. The study's primary objective is to investigate the application of AI techniques to the creation of intelligent devices that aid visually impaired individuals in their daily lives. We identified a number of potential obstacles that researchers and developers in the field of visual impairment applications might encounter. In addition, opportunities for future research and advancements in AI-driven visual aides are discussed. This review seeks to provide valuable insights into the advancements, possibilities, and challenges in the development and implementation of AI technology for people with visual impairment. By examining the current state of the field and designating areas for future research, we expect to contribute to the ongoing progress of improving the lives of visually impaired individuals through the use of AI-powered visual aids

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWithin the U.S., particular anxieties surrounding racially and ethnically marked "others" reflect particular historical moments, and today ours are prompted by contemporized fears of immigration and terrorism. In this dissertation, I take up these issues, focusing on contemporary instantiations and negotiations of hybridity within U.S. culture. While hybridity has been examined at length, the ways in which hybridity is mobilized in distinctive ways through or by various bodies have been relatively overlooked. Thus, I examine the ways in which hybridity is rhetorically embodied and mobilized within contemporary mainstream media. I take up these issues with a focus on two questions: (a) How is hybridity mobilized in distinctive ways in, through, or by various bodies, particularly as reflective of historical context? (b) How does "the body"-in particular, specific deployments of the body-feature in contemporary articulations of hybridity? I answer these questions through a critical analysis of texts, drawing from both critical rhetoric and critical performance studies. I focus on two competition-style reality dance shows, So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) and Dancing with the Stars (DWTS); the competition-style reality show America's Next Top Model (ANTM); and three Food Network cooking shows, Simply Delicioso with Ingrid Hoffmann, Aarti Party, and Everyday Italian. Analysis of these texts suggest that hybridity is mobilized in varied and distinctive ways by, through, and on variously marked bodies. Ultimately, this study refines extant theorizing on hybridity: While borders are inevitably critical to any conceptualizations of hybridity, this project reveals nuance and complexities of how borders are accomplished and navigated across these various embodied mobilizations and illuminate particularized contemporary anxieties regarding race/ethnicity. Hybridity in a current context appears to be articulated as-conflated with-individual uniqueness and authenticity, the expression of which is encouraged and celebrated, but only within very specific contexts or confines. Ultimately, then, via its location in and deployment by particular bodies, hybridity is articulated as a feature and expression of the unique, authentic self, as opposed to a politics of identity, in ways that justify discipline of race/ethnicity if and when hybridity "crosses the line.

Microaggressions in the Context of an Academic Community

There has been much discussion of the concept of microaggressions in the legal literature. These are statements made by members of a dominant group that serve to denigrate, delegitimate or insult minority members of the community. Often they are unintended and unnoticed by members of the dominant group. This article analyzes such statements in order to show 1)that they are not a simple matter of personal insult but that they work strategically to disempower minority members; 2)that their dual nature -- invisibility to one group and offence to the other -- serves to destabilize and polarize the community itself

Microaggressions in the Context of Academic Communities

There has been much discussion of the concept of microaggressions in the legal literature. These are statements made by members of a dominant group that serve to denigrate, delegitimate or insult minority members of the community. Often they are unintended and unnoticed by members of the dominant group. This article analyzes such statements in order to show 1)that they are not a simple matter of personal insult but that they work strategically to disempower minority members; 2)that their dual nature -- invisibility to one group and offence to the other -- serves to destabilize and polarize the community itself

SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University

This dissertation asks what hiphop is doing in predominantly white higher-educational contexts, specifically in composition classrooms. Using ethnographic, autoethnographic, and historical methods, it finds that hiphop’s work in composition classrooms at PWIs is contradictory. This mixed-methods investigation suggests that the contradictory relation of white fans, students, and institutions to hiphop is shaped on the one hand by white listeners’ increasing identification with the historical struggles of African Americans under capitalism, and on the other hand, by disidentification or abjectification of African Americans in an effort to “win” the zero-sum game of capitalism. This contradiction results in a paradoxical situation where white fans—and white institutions—love hiphop and yet harbor antiblack views about the Black communities and Black students who make hiphop possible. However, the findings also suggest that identifying this tension offers writing instructors an opportunity to be more explicit about working towards anti-racist goals in the hiphop composition classroom. The dissertation’s historical study, ethnographic and autoethnographic studies, and review of contemporary hiphop and composition scholarship suggest that teaching and practicing reflexivity are core solutions to the paradoxical rhetorical action of hiphop in predominantly white spaces. This entails teaching students to reflectively identify and write about their own positionalities as well as asking teachers and administrators to recognize and explicitly acknowledge their own positionalities. The first chapter introduces the problematic of hiphop’s significant presence in elite PWIs despite hiphop’s emergence as a revolutionary Black art form in 1970s New York and the contemporary mass closure of public educational institutions for Black and poor students in the United States. It argues that, given the widespread uptake of Black language and discourse practices by millennials and youth, all composition classes should teach Black language and discourse practices, including at PWIs. Chapter 2 positions critical reflexivity as the central methodological value of this mixed-methods research study, contextualizing the white female author’s relationship with hiphop and the development of her research within research and writing on whiteness in hiphop culture and hiphop pedagogy. Chapter 3, a historical study of the Open Admissions movement at the City University of New York, recontextualizes early hiphop culture within the creative production of Black and Puerto Rican youths’ artistic and educational movements of late 1960s and 1970s New York City, arguing for a reconsideration of the role that creative writing teachers of color and cultural rhetorics education broadly defined played both in the successes of Basic Writing under CUNY Open Admissions and the early history of hiphop. Chapter 4 offers hiphop as a critical intervention to the Writing About Writing movement, arguing that the movement’s prioritization of institutional writing practices over students’ extracurricular and power-saturated language practices constitutes linguistic innocence. A classroom study of 4 hiphop composition classrooms demonstrates the pervasive antiblackness of students’ attitudes about language and advocates a reflexive, literacy-focused hiphop composition pedagogy to teach students a socially conscious understanding of the major concepts of composition studies. Finally, chapter 5 considers hiphop composition in the context of writing program administration, including issues of labor, disciplinarity, and graduate student teaching, retention, and training. Using dialogue with and materials from Nana Adjei-Brenyah, who taught two of the classes studied in chapter 4, this chapter highlights the role hiphop can play in valuing the diverse language practices and writing expertises of graduate student composition instructors from non-normative identity groups. The dissertation closes with a call for composition instruction that recognizes how whiteness, Blackness, and power circulate through all students’ everyday language and composing practices

Bass Is My Religion: Syncretic Spirituality and Navigating the Potential for Misappropriation Among Participants in Electronic Dance Music Culture

At electronic dance music events in the United States, artists and attendees tend to appropriate religious and spiritual sounds, images, and dress, especially from India but also from elsewhere, to varying degrees. This project explicates the effects of adopting religious symbology, ethos, and atmosphere in the music and culture of EDM, specifically in bass music culture. It argues that although individual participants may adopt aspects of religious traditions in ways they perceive as authentic, the potential for misappropriation still exists. In other words, EDM culture creates opportunities for misappropriation that individual participants navigate in order to construct their own individual forms of spirituality in relation to the live music experience and EDM culture at large. Utilizing a set of seven interviews with individuals who have close ties to the EDM community, this project explores the ways that attendees navigate conversations about cultural appropriation, specifically in the bass music community. A set of common attitudes, opinions, and beliefs forges a syncretic spirituality among these seven interviewees, which inform how these individuals navigate conversations about appropriation in the EDM community. In addition to these seven interviews, three case studies that focus on specific artists who spearhead specific subscenes frame this project: the psychedelic downtempo duo Desert Dwellers, the multiethnic trap artist TroyBoi, and the cult dubstep DJ Bassnectar. Synthesizing ideas by these seven interviews with previous EDM scholarship and specific cases within these communities, I conclude that as artists and attendees negotiate meanings with one another, they must ultimately choose to justify their appropriation, often by claiming a syncretic sense of spirituality, or to avoid association with it entirely