(Un)Becoming Working Class? Living Across the Lines

I am writing this piece as a white self-identified gay male raised working class associate professor in art who is actively reconnecting with my past/roots, trying to better understand my sense of isolation in academe and my slowly seething anger directed at many of my academic colleagues. By working class I mean 2nd and 3rd generation Polish-American, devout Catholic, white privilege, contractor father, housewife mother, large family, in and out of poverty at times, racist with no real information. By academe I mean working for six years to achieve and be granted tenure at Texas Tech University in visual studies

Fenced In/Out in West Texas: Notes on Defending My Queer Body

In this article, I utilize autoethnography to describe and reflect upon my experiences as a queer artist, associate professor, and activist living in West Texas (1996-2012). To date, I believe there exist too few testimonies in art education that document how queer educators/artists manage myriad social, political, and everyday issues in their lives and workplaces. Such stories are necessary if I am going to equip present and future art teachers with anti-homophobia classroom strategies. I believe such stories are also necessary to counter cultural homophobia and violence and let queer students and teachers know they do not stand alone. Stories can assuage and possibly heal some of the brutality that occurs in schools. I offer this as one of many testimonies

A National Labor Project: Recovering Unprecedented Numbers of Working Class Lives and Histories through Art

I consider this essay an initial mapping where I reconstruct multiple ways of knowing and understanding the lived realities and plights of workers, whether they are manual workers, teachers or artists (Zandy, 2004). I use autobiography from a perspective of Standpoint Theory where I use the lives of working people as theory, method and evidence. I speak from my standpoint of my experiences as being raised white working class and my shift in salary and education to middle class

Living the Discourses

Factors of social class, race, gender, and sexuality are important to any understanding of the social processes of art. Often, art educators discuss these factors in abstract terms, thereby confining discussion in art education to a set of identifiable variables constructed as static, universal, and homogeneous. The particularities of living and working in educational spaces structured along racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic lines remain largely unexplored. Recent scholarship in art education has begun to examine the particularities of these social relations (Garber, 1995; Stuhr, Krug, & Scott, 1995). But the fractures, dangers, and the erasures are not being articulated in ways that highlight the experiences—and the analyses—of those most marginalized by the dominant discourse

Notes Toward a Theory of Dialogue

Multiple dimensions of dialogue as pedagogical practice are examined in the following three essays. In the first piece, “When Life Imitates Art: Notes on the Nature of Dialogue,” poet and essayist Jane Vanderbosch reflects about the politics of silence and voice in graduate school. She analyzes how power and politics charge the atmosphere of the classroom. In “The Pedagogy of Dialogue: A Relation Between Means and End,“ Grace Deniston-Trochta focuses on self-examining the possibility of dialogue in a large “pit” classroom. She proposes teacher as listener/learner, a teacher who is self-reflective and respectful. In the final essay, “Managing the Silence of Children,” Ed Check considers how power and control are mediated in the lives of students and teachers. He implicates himself in his discussion as he reflects on a conversation with his nephew. Throughout, the writers dissect pedagogy as dialogue through the personal as political. Each reveals how telling one’s truths is a site to rethink institutionalized strategies and self-imposed silences

Cancelling the Queers: Activism in Art Education Conference Planning

This paper examines how individual and collective strategies and interventions countered homophobia and censorship in a public venue, in this particular case at a state art education association annual conference. We reveal our personal actions and reactions to hysteria, institutional homophobia, and find solutions. Our individual and collective responses demonstrate how layers of emotional, intellectual and activist energy co-exist and that harmony and quick solutions to such complex social problems involve sustained and dedicated efforts

Bayesian molecular clock dating of species divergences in the genomics era

It has been five decades since the proposal of the molecular clock hypothesis, which states that the rate of evolution at the molecular level is constant through time and among species. This hypothesis has become a powerful tool in evolutionary biology, making it possible to use molecular sequences to estimate the geological ages of species divergence events. With recent advances in Bayesian clock dating methodology and the explosive accumulation of genetic sequence data, molecular clock dating has found widespread applications, from tracking virus pandemics, to studying the macroevolutionary process of speciation and extinction, to estimating a timescale for Life on Earth