word~river literary review (2009)

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program also are eligible.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/word_river/1002/thumbnail.jp

Queers, Cupid’s Arrow, and Contradictions in the Classroom: An Activity Theory Analysis

“Third generation” activity theory can help instructors support and also deal with gay romance in the classroom

Relationship Literacy and Polyamory: A Queer Approach

The field of rhetoric and composition has embraced queer theory and broader understandings of sexual literacy in order to dialogue with students, teachers, theorists and other learners about the problematics of normativity when applied to sexuality. Although discussed in a variety of other academic fields, polyamory—the practice, identity, and theory of an ethical engagement in multiple loving relationships with the full knowledge and consent of all involved—has not yet been broached within rhetoric and composition. This project is the first step in starting such a conversation. By providing a synthesis of the extant scholarship on polyamory across the disciplines and explaining how polyamory can be viewed as an organic outgrowth from current conversations about queerness and identity, I coin the term “relationship literacy” as a way to provoke new dialogues about what it might mean to make and maintain intimate, consensual relationships that do not necessarily fall in line with the status quo. Through the lens of queer theory, I advocate the importation of polyamory studies into rhetoric and composition because it can stimulate existing conversations about feminist pedagogy as well as the generative social justice theories and activisms that form the basis of the field. Through a queer approach to polyamory, new insights in both theory and pedagogy become possible, as scholars and teachers begin to understand the force of mononormativity as nearly ubiquitous

Mapping of Photochemically-Derived Dityrosine across Fe-Bound N-Acetylated α-Synuclein

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurological disease and belongs to a group of neurodegenerative disorders called synucleinopathies in which pathological aggregates of N-terminally acetylated α-synuclein (NAcα-Syn) accumulate in various regions of the brain. In PD, these NAcα-Syn aggregates have been found to contain covalent dityrosine crosslinks, which can occur either intermolecularly or intramolecularly. Cerebral metal imbalance is also a hallmark of PD, warranting investigations into the effects of brain biometals on NAcα-Syn. NAcα-Syn is an intrinsically disordered protein, and metal-mediated conformational modifications of this structurally dynamic protein have been demonstrated to influence its propensity for dityrosine formation. In this study, a library of tyrosine-to-phenylalanine (Y-to-F) NAcα-Syn constructs were designed in order to elucidate the nature and the precise residues involved in dityrosine crosslinking of Fe-bound NAcα-Syn. The structural capacity of each mutant to form dityrosine crosslinks was assessed using Photo-Induced Cross-Linking of Unmodified Proteins (PICUP), demonstrating that coordination of either FeIII or FeII to NAcα-Syn inhibits dityrosine crosslinking among the C-terminal residues. We further demonstrate that Y39 is the main contributor to dityrosine formation of Fe-bound NAcα-Syn, while Y125 is the main residue involved in dityrosine crosslinks in unmetalated NAcα-Syn. Our results confirm that iron coordination has a global effect on NAcα-Syn structure and reactivity