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A Question Of Affect: A Queer Reading Of Institutional Nondiscrimination Statements At Texas Public Universities, Sarah Dwyer

English Faculty Publications

Grounded in my embodied experiences as an openly-queer faculty member at a Texas public university and drawing from Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and institutional diversity, I argue that nondiscrimination statements at Texas public universities are affective objects which serve as straightening devices on the queer bodies that they affect, even as they purport to and often do protect them. The goals of my critique are twofold: 1) to support the work of those tasked with writing revisions to these policies by offering a few practical suggestions to allow for greater enforcement of the nondiscrimination practices that these policies espouse; …

Poets In The Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Sabrina San Miguel, Cecilia A. Macias

English Faculty Publications

About the Poets:

Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press 2013) and A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre Press 2015). Her latest collection, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Texas Christian University Press. She has held consecutive positions as Poet Laureate of the city of San Antonio (2014-2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College, an MFA in poetry from Drew University, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. …

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …

Gameful Engagement: Gamification, Critical Thinking, And First-Year Composition, Sarah Dwyer

English Faculty Publications

Students often struggle with the transition to writing in college, both in first-year
composition (FYC) and in the disciplines. This report describes a curriculum that addresses this problem by turning the FYC course into a Role-Playing Game. This style of gamification, grounded in bell hooks’ concept of an engaged pedagogy, can help facilitate the critical thinking skills that are key elements of learning transfer from FYC to writing in the disciplines.