Education Commons^™

The Animal In The Wild In Hwang Sun-Mi’S The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, Sarah Yoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children’s story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her “baby,” with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral …

Continuing Education At Purdue University, 1975–2019, Thomas Robertson, Michael Eddy

Continuing Education

Continuing Education at Purdue University, 1975–2019 is intended to provide a follow-up to the monograph written by Dr. Frank K. Burrin after his retirement as director of Purdue Continuing Education in 1984, Continuing Education at Purdue University: The First Hundred Years (1874–1974). Burrin became ill shortly after his retirement, and he was not able to complete his project. His notes were later compiled, edited, and published by Elizabeth Boyd Thompson.

This monograph presents forty-five years of the history of Continuing Education and Conferences at Purdue under the leadership of eight deans and directors.

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Queer Contingency In Writing Center Administrative Work, Patrick Greene, Travis Webster

Writing Center Journal

Using a sprinkle of Queer Theory, their on-the-job experiences, and writing center scholarship that challenges disciplinary orthodoxies, two intersectionally queer and contingent writing center researcher-administrators examine the constraints of contingency; discuss the underlife of queer labor; and point to queer labor nuances and possibilities alongside contingent writing center work.

Front Matter

Writing Center Journal

Front matter for Writing Center Journal 41.3.

Trading Spaces: Space As Metaphor For Contingency In Writing Centers, Genie N. Giaimo

Writing Center Journal

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), …

Beyond The Two-Tiered System: Contingency As A Tool For Academic Upward Mobility, Wonderful Faison, Tatiana Glushko

Writing Center Journal

This article explores the scholarly endeavors upon which writing center directors and coordinators must embark to effectively run their centers. Additionally, the authors explore ways to use their contingent statuses as leverage for either tenure or promotion by linking their scholarly work to departmental and university tenure/promotion requirements.

Contingency As A Barrier To Decolonial Engagement: Listening To Multilingual Writers, Grace Lee-Amuzie

Writing Center Journal

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of …

Comfort, Contingency, And Writing Center Work: An Essay In Three Illusions, Ana Maria Guay

Writing Center Journal

In this hybrid essay, I engage creatively with the illusory nature of contingent work, presenting three episodes from my personal experiences as a contingent writing program administrator (WPA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I interrogate these experiences by building on past critiques of “comfortable” writing centers, applying Sara Ahmed’s work on the affectiveness of (dis)comfort in order to examine comfort and its uneasy relationship with labor. For whom is the writing center expected to labor to provide comfort? Whose comfort, and moreover whose safety, is jeopardized or made invisible in the process? In answering these questions, this …

The Paradoxes Of Contingency: Stories Of Contingent Professional Tutors’ Lived Experiences, Beth Sabo, Kaia-Marie A. Bishop, Kristine M. Gatchel, Rachel Dick

Writing Center Journal

Despite comprising the majority of labor in higher education in general and writing centers more specifically, contingent workers’ voices and experiences have often been overlooked. The contingent voices that have been represented have predominantly been those in director or administrative positions, not the professional tutors who engage in centers’ day-to-day consulting. This lack of representation in the literature perpetuates institutional inequities and belies a larger paradox: that contingent workers attempting to ameliorate the precarity of their situation may jeopardize their livelihood. Because contingent workers’ identities and roles have historically been ignored and marginalized, few research and publication options are available …

Writing Tutor Alumni Takeaways: Pros And Cons Of Contingency, Glenn Hutchinson, Xuan Jiang, Mario Avalos

Writing Center Journal

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of …

Back Matter

Writing Center Journal

Back matter for WCJ 41.1.

An Imaginary* Interview With A Philippines Collections Museum Donor, Camille Ungco

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Ontological distance is the dehumanization that emerges from uninterrogated coloniality between colonized subjects and the oppressive systems. This distancing has occurred in the histories of U.S. teachers both domestic-based and abroad, especially in Southeast Asia. In Steinbock-Pratt’s (2019) historiography on the relationships between early 1900s U.S. teachers and their Filipinx students, ontological distance was “The crux of the colonial relationship was intimacy marked by closeness without understanding, suasion backed by violence, and affection bounded by white and American supremacy” (Steinbock-Pratt, 2019, p. 214). This dehumanizing psychological or ontological distance existed during U.S. colonial regimes abroad, specifically in Southeast Asia and …

Veteran–Novice Pairing For Tutors’ Professional Development, Xuan Jiang, Jennifer Peña, Feng Li

Writing Center Journal

This mixed methods study examines whether veteran–novice mentorship between tutors, as part of continuous in-service professional development, would have a positive effect on either party’s transferable skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, and professionalism). Quantitative findings from pre- and postsurveys about the veteran–novice mentorship suggest that tutors have significant gains in some transferable skills, such as oral/written communication skills, teamwork/collaboration skills, digital technology skills, and career management skills, after attending the continuous in-service professional development. Quantitative findings from the pre- and postsurveys further indicate that novice tutors improve more, compared to veteran tutors, in their self-perceived oral/written communication skill levels. Qualitative findings …

Front Matter

Writing Center Journal

Front matter and editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 40:2 (2022).

Listening To The Outliers: Refining The Curriculum For Dissertation Camps, Bradley Hughes, Elisabeth L. Miller, Nancy Linh Karls

Writing Center Journal

Seeking to support graduate student writers, writing centers at research universities have developed highly successful dissertation camps over the past 15 years. Previous research from North American dissertation camps has demonstrated significant benefits from these camps, as dissertation writers developed new writing habits and increased their productivity. In this study, however, a closer look at initial and follow-up survey responses provided by participants from dissertation camps at two institutions—an Upper Midwestern university in the United States that has held camps for 11 years and an Eastern European university that held an online camp during the 2020 pandemic—suggests that focusing on …

Writing Centers And Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified And Exported As U.S. Neocolonial Tools, Brian Hotson, Stevie Bell

Writing Center Journal

The editors of the Writing Center Journal and Purdue University Press, publisher of WCJ, are retracting the following article:

Hotson, Brian, and Bell, Stevie. (2022). "Writing Centers and Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified and Exported as U.S. Neocolonial Tools." Writing Center Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, article 4. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1020.

This article contains two significant factual errors that the authors have agreed to correct. The Writing Center Journal is committed to the highest standards of publication ethics and has accepted the request of Dr. Ron Martinez and colleagues from the Universidade Federal do Paraná and the article’s …

On Networking The Writing Center: Social Media Usage And Non-Usage, Amanda M. May

Writing Center Journal

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about writing center social media use and nonuse using survey data keyed to five factors: reasons for nonuse; purposes for use; platforms used; approaches to use that consider platforms and target audiences; and recommendations to other writing centers to use or not use social media. While the 91 writing centers not using social media commonly cited a lack of time, lack of staff, and lack of experience as reasons, the majority of writing centers in this study maintained a social media presence. These 153 writing centers tended to use multiple platforms, commonly …

Graduate Writing Groups: Evidence-Based Practices For Advanced Graduate Writing Support, Wenqi Cui, Jing Zhang, Dana Lynn Driscoll

Writing Center Journal

Writing centers seek to expand their services beyond tutoring and develop evidence-based practices. Continuing and expanding the existing practices, the authors have adopted graduate writing groups (GWGs) to support graduate writers, especially those working on independent writing projects like a dissertation or article for publication. This article provides an effective model on how to develop and assess virtual graduate writing groups (VGWGs). This replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research applied a mixed-methods design with pre- and postsurveys over the three semesters of running the VGWG. It found that the VGWG offered a full range of writing support that met graduate …

Translanguaging Views And Practices Of Indiana Dual-Language Bilingual Education Teachers, Amanda Shie

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

As of fall 2018, the United States had 5 million English language learners (ELLs) in the public K–12 education system (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Within this population, ELL students in Indiana number over 50,000, or 5.9% of all public K–12 students in the state. Dual-language bilingual education (DLBE) programs often neglect the strategy of translanguaging in the classroom, disadvantaging ELLs. Translanguaging is defined as drawing “on all the linguistic resources of the child to maximize understanding and achievement” and is demonstrated in the natural switching of languages in bilinguals (Lewis et al., 2012). Further, translanguaging attempts to correct …

Review: Counterstories From The Writing Center By Wonderful Faison And Frankie Condon, Alexandria Hanson

Writing Center Journal

Counterstories from the Writing Center is a book that centers the perspectives and experiences of peoples of color in writing centers as tutors, administrators, and students. The book aims to educate all readers, but specifically “white, straight, cisgendered women (WSCGW)” (p. 5), whose presence has permeated writing center scholarship and work, about how writing centers often engage in representational change or practice, applying Band-Aid solutions that fail to enact social justice and antiracist practices. The goal of the book is to get readers to exercise a certain level of humility, to reflect on and accept responsibility, in order to enact …

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …

Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …

Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …

Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …