Red Ed: Teaching Toward a New Internationalism

In this essay, I narrate part of my experience leading second-language college writing students through an activity that introduces them to some of the basics of ideology critique and critical discourse analysis. I also describe a Language Event Analysis assignment that invites students to analyze international language-related current events. In the process, I try to show why a dialectical multilingualism must be part of any radically internationalist socialist teaching praxis

DIY Methods 2023 Conference Proceedings

The act of circulating research through zines invites participants into the “gift economy” of zine culture, where knowledge is shared within a system of reciprocal generosity and pleasure in opposition to hierarchical and capitalist forms of knowledge exchange. As zines cut through the often strict and inaccessible boundaries of traditional, peer-reviewed publications, they also allow for the circulation of research to broader audiences, making knowledge more accessible. As such, academic zines transform research into a gift to be shared amongst unknown peers, while also situating the mobilization of knowledge as care work. And so, while we are excited to receive abstracts around diverse themes and across disciplines, we ask participants to think about knowledge as a gift and research as care work during their zine-making process. How do these visions of knowledge and research mobilization affect how you view your research, others’ research, and/or yourself

Grammars of Nature: Rhetoric, Climate Change, and Ecological Class Consciousness

The first half of this study (chs. 1-3) is a synthesis of secondary theoretical research from ecological Marxism, materialist media theory, world-systems theory, and critical development studies. Through a linked series of keyword excavations — nature, ideology, hegemony, Global South, class, infrastructure — this part of the study sketches the contours of an eco-socialist rhetorical theory and makes a case for the continuing value and relevance of historical-materialist ideology critique as a methodological framework (Cloud; McGee; Therborn). The second half (chs. 4-6) consists of three case studies that use this framework to illustrate in concrete terms the local, material effects of “bourgeois naturalism” as a set of ideological and rhetorical strategies deployed by the transnational capitalist class to rationalize the ecological violence (including climate apartheid and climate colonialism) that is an enabling condition of 21st-century global capitalism. By analyzing a handful of primary texts — including a documentary about the 2018 California wildfire season, government documents related to the 2014 expansion of the Mariposa Land Port of Entry on the US-Mexico border, and a memoir/manifesto by Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate — this half of the study shows how and why the ideological effects of “bourgeois naturalism” include particular kinds of cost-shifting, blame-shifting, and capacity-shifting. In the process, the study also examines the potential (and the limits) of the term “Global South” as a counter-hegemonic form of left-populist “constitutive rhetoric” (Charland) and “ecological class consciousness” (Barca) — i.e., an attempt by the “environmental proletariat” (Foster) to contest bourgeois ways of defining and relating to nature in favor of dialectical ones, and to foster an “eco-political common sense” (Fraser) that might serve as an organizing principle for future efforts by the global working class (broadly defined to include both productive and reproductive labor, paid or unpaid) to oppose capitalism’s threat to planetary livability and assert their right to democratic control over the means of production, the means of survival, and the means of communication. One piece of the study (§5.1-5.4) also considers the relevance to college writing pedagogy of climate justice struggles, structural class analysis, and critical ecological literacy

Prediction of CO₂ Adsorption Properties in Zeolites Using Force Fields Derived from Periodic Dispersion-Corrected DFT Calculations

We demonstrate a new approach to develop transferable force fields describing molecular adsorption in zeolites by combining dispersion-corrected density functional theory (DFT) calculations and classical atomistic simulations. This approach is illustrated with the adsorption of CO₂ in zeolites. Multiple dispersion-corrected DFT methods were tested for describing CO₂ adsorption in sodium-exchanged ferrierite. The DFT-D2 approach was found to give the best agreement with high level quantum chemistry results and experimental data. A classical force field for CO₂ adsorption in siliceous zeolites was then developed on the basis of hundreds of DFT-D2 calculations that probed the full range of accessible volume in purely siliceous chabazite (Si-CHA) via random sampling. We independently performed experiments with Si-CHA measuring CO₂ isotherms and heats of adsorption by microcalorimetry. Excellent agreement was obtained between adsorption isotherms predicted with our first-principles-derived force field and our experiments. The transferability of this force field was examined using available adsorption isotherms for CO₂ in siliceous MFI and DDR zeolites, again with reasonably good agreement between calculated and experimental results. The methods demonstrated by these calculations will be broadly applicable in using molecular simulations to predict properties of adsorbed molecules in zeolites and other nanoporous materials