Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times

After a remarkable career in higher education, Sidonie Smith offers Manifesto for the Humanities as a reflective contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the Humanities in the 21st century. Her focus is on doctoral education and opportunities she sees for its reform. Grounding this manifesto in background factors contributing to current “crises” in the humanities, Smith advocates for a 21st century doctoral education responsive to the changing ecology of humanistic scholarship and teaching. She elaborates a more expansive conceptualization of coursework and dissertation, a more robust, engaged public humanities, and a more diverse, collaborative, and networked sociality

New genres, new subjects: women, gender and autobiography after 2000

En este ensayo se proponen tres conceptos teóricos —performatividad, posicionalidad y relacionalidad— para explorar cómo los actos y las prácticas autobiográficas se entrecruzan con posicionalidades y relaciones de género. Estos conceptos se aplican a seis dominios de las narrativas de vida de mujeres desde el año 2000: vidas transnacionales; vidas gráficas; vidas en línea; vidas de ciudadanas modernistas en el estado nación; vidas vulnerables; y vidas personificadas y materiales. Concluye que, a pesar de que el feminismo se ha mercantilizado de diversas maneras bajo un capitalismo global, se puede revigorizar y reorientar de modo flexible a través de actos de narración personal. Al intervenir en la teorización de los discutidos ámbitos de experiencia e identidad, estos dominios de la producción de historias personales indican cómo el feminismo contemporáneo, en palabras de Ella Shohat, continúa siendo “un lugar polisémico de posicionalidades contradictorias” (1-2)This essay presents three theoretical concepts —performativity, positionality, and relationality— for exploring how autobiographical acts and practices intersect with gendered positionalities and relations. It then applies these concepts to six domains of women’s life narrative since 2000: Transnational Lives; Graphic Lives; Online Lives; Modernist Citizen Lives in the nation state; Vulnerable Lives; and Embodied and Material Lives. It concludes that, although feminism has become commodified in new ways under global capitalism, it can be energized and adaptively reoriented by acts of personal narration. As these domains of life story production intervene to theorize the contested grounds of experience and identity, they indicate how contemporary feminism, in Ella Shohat’s words, continues to be “a polysemic site of contradictory positionalities” (1-2)

A Study of Direct Author Subvention for Publishing Humanities Books at Two Universities: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by Indiana University and University of Michigan

This report was produced as the main deliverable from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant 41400692, “A Study of Direct Author Subvention for Publishing Humanities Books at Two Universities.” The Indiana University team led by PI Carolyn Walters, consisted of Jason Baird Jackson, Scott Smart, Nick Fitzgerald, Gary Dunham and Shayna Pekala. The University of Michigan team led by PI James Hilton consisted of Paul Courant, Sidonie Smith, Meredith Kahn, Charles Watkinson, Jim Ottaviani, and Aaron McCollough. Lead authorship of the different sections in this report is indicated in the opening paragraphs. Supplemental data to this report is available at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/20358.This white paper presents recommendations about how a system of monographic publication fully funded by subventions from authors’ parent institutions might function, based on research activities supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Indiana University and the University of Michigan. While the contributors present a strong argument for implementing such an “author subvention” system, they describe a number of challenges and potential unintended consequences. Particular issues discussed include how to determine which publishers would be eligible for support, how best to support untenured faculty, and how to avoid disenfranchising scholars at less well-funded institutions.Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

Dr. Godfrey Mbaruku: A tribute and review of the life of a maternal health crusader in Tanzania

Dr. Godfrey Mbaruku, an obstetrician-gynecologist and one of Tanzania’s most dedicated maternal health researchers, passed away in September 2018. His professional career spanned over four decades, with the last decade of his life dedicated to maternal health research, advocacy and policy in Africa. We undertook a review of the key global milestones in maternal health policy, funding and research that took place during Dr. Mbaruku’s career until his untimely death in 2018. We then reflect on the progress of the maternal health agenda from 2018 to 2021 as lower middle income countries (LMICs) continue to strive to reach the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the midst of a global pandemic. Dr. Godfrey Mbaruku’s commitment to improving maternal health in Tanzania through his advocacy and research contributions over his professional life will forever serve as foundational pillars for the ongoing global effort to reduce maternal mortality.   Le Dr Godfrey Mbaruku, obstétricien-gynécologue et l'un des chercheurs en santé maternelle les plus dévoués de Tanzanie, est décédé en septembre 2018. Sa carrière professionnelle a duré plus de quatre décennies, la dernière décennie de sa vie étant consacrée à la recherche, au plaidoyer et aux politiques en santé maternelle en Afrique. Nous avons entrepris un examen des principales étapes mondiales de la politique, du financement et de la recherche en matière de santé maternelle qui ont eu lieu au cours de la carrière du Dr Mbaruku jusqu'à sa mort prématurée en 2018. Nous réfléchissons ensuite aux progrès du programme de santé maternelle de 2018 à 2021 en tant que milieu inférieur. Les pays à revenu intermédiaire (PRFI) continuent de s'efforcer d'atteindre les objectifs de développement durable (ODD) au milieu d'une pandémie mondiale. L'engagement du Dr Godfrey Mbaruku à améliorer la santé maternelle en Tanzanie grâce à ses contributions de plaidoyer et de recherche au cours de sa vie professionnelle servira à jamais de piliers fondamentaux pour l'effort mondial en cours pour réduire la mortalité maternelle

Feeling gender speak: intersubjectivity and fieldwork practice with women who prostitute in Lima, Peru

This article discusses a dimension of fieldwork methodology often overlooked. It concerns the act of feeling (inferences) and how this subjective ability contributes to understanding cultural meanings, which are unspoken or encoded in dialogue, but remain unarticulated. The discovery of this dimension in fieldwork eventually brought several epistemological principles into question pertaining to power and intersubjectivity subscribed to in a feminist or critical anthropology. Simultaneously, the use of this dimension in fieldwork gave insight into the relational construction of gender identity - the author’s own, that of the women and a male assistant. The article illustrates this by reconstructing different ethnographic moments during fieldwork practice. Moreover, it aims to put these theoretical assertions into practice by presenting an ethnographic narrative intended to evoke meanings that contribute to feeling the construction of identity through interaction in fieldwork practice

The Textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical

In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text. There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents. The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers), Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more accurately.1 Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives, remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical enquiry.” 2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective (“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states. “Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than) fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Afric

Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing

Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s intimate photo-memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

In this paper, I look at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engage in a critical dialogue with an assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir. In doing this I draw on Hannah Arendt’s take on narratives as tangible traces of uniqueness and plurality, political traits par excellence in the cultural histories of the human condition. Being aware of my role as a reader/viewer/interpreter of a woman artist’s auto/biographical narratives, I move beyond dilemmas of representation or questions of unveiling “the real Leonard”. The artist is instead configured as a narrative persona, whose narratives respond to three interrelated themes of inquiry, namely the visualization of spatial technologies, vulnerability and the gendering of memory. Key words: gendered memories, narrative persona, spatial technologies, photo memoir, vulnerabilit

Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art