Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Discursive Power And Resistance In The Information Worlds Maps Of Lgbtqia+ Community Leaders, Vanessa Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner, Alexander N. Vera

Faculty Publications

Purpose: This qualitative study explores how discursive power shapes South Carolina LGBTQIA+ communities' health information practices and how participants resist this power. Design/methodology/approach: Twenty-eight LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina engaged in semi-structured interviews and information worlds mapping – a participatory arts-based elicitation technique – to capture the context underlying how they and their communities create, seek, use, and share health information. We focus on the information worlds maps for this paper, employing situational analysis – a discourse analytic method for visual data – to analyze them. Findings: Six themes emerged describing how discursive power operates both within and outside …

Proving Our Maternal And Scholarly Worth: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Textual And Visual Storying Of Motherscholar Identity Work During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Elizabeth Spradley, Sarah S. Leblanc, Heather Olson-Beal, Lauren Burrow, Chrissy Cross

Faculty Publications

Pivoting to remote work as female academics and to schooling our children from home as mothers in March 2020 marked a dramatic shift in how we enact our MotherScholar identities. This collaborative autoethnographic study employs a modification of interactive interviewing and photovoice to produce verbal and visual text of COVID-19 MotherScholar identity work for analysis. Thematic analysis results in themes of maternal interruptions, professional interruptions, maternal recognition, and professional recognition. Of note, our MotherScholar interactivity functioned as identity work as we sought and granted legitimacy to one another’s’ COVID-19 MotherScholar identities. Of particular concern to us is how institutions of …

Using The World Café Methodology To Support Community-Centric Research And Practice In Library And Information Science, Vanessa Kitzie, Jocelyn Pettigrew, Travis L. Wagner, Nick Vera

Faculty Publications

The World Café (TWC) methodology is a form of action research that develops collective knowledge among individuals and communities to address shared problems. TWC can complement LIS research and practice that is increasingly participatory and community centric. The potentials and pitfalls for TWC are illustrated by ongoing research examining public library service to LGBTQIA+ communities for health information. The authors used TWC in a community forum between LGBTQIA+ community leaders and librarians/paraprofessionals in [name removed for blind review]. Per TWC conventions, participants engaged in day-long rotating café-style table conversations that encouraged new ideas and collective dialog. Discussion centered on two …

Not So Minor Feelings, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Faculty Publications

This creative nonfiction essay by Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt about race, silencing, and families originally appeared in Entropy.

In Our Own Words: Institutional Betrayals, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Faculty Publications

When Dr. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, professor of English at Linfield College, asked a large group of underrepresented faculty members why they left their higher education institutions, they told her the real reasons for their departures — those that climate surveys don't capture.

This essay originally appeared as part of Conditionally Accepted, a career advice blog for Inside Higher Ed providing news, information, personal stories, and resources for scholars who are, at best, conditionally accepted in academe. Conditionally Accepted is an anti-racist, pro-feminist, pro-queer, anti-transphobic, anti-fatphobic, anti-ableist, anti-ageist, anti-classist, and anti-xenophobic online community.

Minimizing And Addressing Microaggressions In The Workplace: Be Proactive, Part 2, Shamika Dalton, Michele Villagran

Faculty Publications

Our nation’s history plays a huge role in the way we perceive underrepresented groups. From slavery to segregation, to the inequality in compensation for women and people of color, to the refusal to wed same sex couples, discrimination and opposition has plagued the United States for decades. Since the Civil Rights Movement, discrimination towards underrepresented groups has shifted from overt acts to subtle and semiconscious manifestations called microaggressions. These manifestations reside in well-intentioned individuals who are often unaware of their biased beliefs, attitudes, and actions. They can lead to inequities within our relationships and affect our work productivity.

Minimizing And Addressing Implicit Bias In The Workplace: Be Proactive, Part One, Shamika Dalton, Michele Villagran

Faculty Publications

Librarians and information professionals cannot hide from bias: a prejudice for or against something, someone, or a group. As human beings, we all have biases. However, implicit biases are ones that affect us in an unconscious manner. Awareness of our implicit biases, and how they can affect our colleagues and work environment, is critical to promoting an inclusive work environment. Part one of this two-part article series will focus on implicit bias: what is implicit bias, how these biases affect the work environment, and best practices for reducing these biases within recruitment, hiring, and retention in the library workplace.

Fear Of Etiolation In The Age Of Professional Passion, Kathleen F. Mcconnell

Faculty Publications

Recent analysis of academia credits neoliberalism for its destabilization. Neoliberalism alone does not explain academics’ conflicted attachments to a precarious professional life or the tendency to embrace normative conceptions of passion and shun professional decline. The quarantine on decline is analogous to the exemption that J.L. Austin imposed on theatre: both deny constitutive power to certain statements and harbor a fear of queerness. Four essays published in Text & Performance Quarterly illustrate how academics quarantine professional fears and doubts. A fifth finds that the deterioration of professional accomplishments loosens normative associations to make space for other, queer relations.

The Role Of Hypermasculinity, Token Resistance, Rape Myth, And Assertive Sexual Consent Communication Among College Men, Autumn Shafer, Rebecca R. Ortiz, Bailey Thompson, Jennifer, Huemmer

Faculty Publications

Purpose

A greater understanding of how college men's gendered beliefs and communication styles relate to their sexual consent attitudes and intentions is essential within the shifting context of negative to affirmative consent policies on college campuses. The results of this study can be used to help design more effective sexual consent interventions.

Human Library Visit., Xiaoming Xu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Strange Fruit: Race, Terror, And The War On Terror, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This poem examines drone warfare as a form of lynching. “Strange Fruit” links the deaths of Pakistani children Zeerak and Maria Khan to the murders of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, documented in the most infamous lynching photograph in U.S. history.

Of All Days: Critical Pedagogy Outside The Classroom, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

A student at the author’s college pens a racist column on immigration for the school newspaper. Two departments, including the author’s, send campus-wide emails denouncing the rhetoric. A firestorm erupts, as much over the emails as over the op-ed. Years later, the student visits the author unannounced.

The Complicity Of Silence: Race And The Hamilton Holt/Corra Harris Friendship, 1899-1935, Jack C. Lane

Faculty Publications

From the perspective of the large race issue in the early twentieth century America, this article closely examines the perplexed personal relationship between Hamilton Holt, 8th president of Rollins College (1925-1949) and Corra Harris, one of Holt's original "Golden Personality" faculty members who carried the unique title of "Professor of Evil" at Rollins.

Friendship As Method, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

“Friendship as Method,” appendix of the book In Solidarity: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight (Routledge 2015), overviews the author's approach to and philosophy of research. She defines friendship, posits it as a kind of fieldwork, and lays the methodological foundations of friendship as method. After arguing that friendship as method involves researching with the practices, at the pace, and in the natural contexts of friendship, the author describes this approach’s strengths and considerations for both researcher and participants. To learn more, visit the book's website: http://www.insolidaritybook.com.

Remembering A Cool September, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This ethnographic short story chronicles the author’s emotional journey following September 11, 2001. After weeks of disconnection, she encounters a display of patriotism by two gay male friends, provoking her to process what it means to be both patriotic and gay in contemporary U.S. culture.

Father's Blessing: Ethnographic Drama, Poetry, And Prose, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Following interpretivist traditions focusing on how individuals make sense of and make meaning from their lived experience, the author, a heterosexual woman, travels with a gay male friend/participant to visit his estranged father, a retired Air Force pilot and elder in the Mormon Church. The work attempts to show the dialogic construction, negotiation, and transformation of identities and relationships.

Passings, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

The author, a heterosexual woman, and Gordon Bernstein, a gay man, have been friends and research collaborators since 1995. In 2004, the author accompanied Gordon on a trip to his hometown of Philadelphia to conduct fieldwork and interview family members. This project ethnographically explored personal and relational opportunities and challenges associated with coming out in a family system defined by avoidant communication, hegemonic masculinity, and terminal illness.

Revisiting Don/Ovan, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

In this piece, the author, a heterosexual woman, travels to her hometown of Lake City, MN to reconnect with Donovan Marshall, a gay man she last saw in 1986. "Revisiting Don/ovan" explores opportunities and challenges of coming out, leaving, and returning to live in a small town.

State Of Unions: Politics And Poetics Of Performance, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

At the 2005 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, the author delivered a poem and slide show, “The State of Unions: Activism (and In-Activism) in Decision 2004.” The performance processed the election in the context of her research community, a network of gay male friends—marginalized by sexual orientation but privileged by sex, gender expression, race, class, and education. Audience members offered mixed responses, some praising its provocative content, others criticizing the author’s position and tone, which some perceived as hostile, even as “gay bashing.”

Wedding Album: An Antiheterosexist Performance Text, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Historical and personal snapshots of weddings become poetic stanzas that advocate for marriage equality and for a social safety net strong enough to protect the human rights and meet the human needs of everyone, regardless of relational—or any other—status

Digital Storytelling: Empowering Feminist And Womanist Faith Formation With Young Women, Mary E. Hess

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"Fourth World" Values In A Spanish-Language Newspaper Serving An Immigrant Community, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

This study operationalized the Four Worlds model for mass media values in a new context — that of a foreign-language newspaper serving a recent-immigrant community within a First World society, namely a Hispanic community in central Arkansas, in the United States. The study established baseline representations of previously described “First World” and “Fourth World” values in a mainstream central Arkansas newspaper, and in Cherokee and Koori newspapers. The study speculated that the central Arkansas Hispanic community exists with a measure of physical and cultural separation from mainstream society — arising from informal barriers such as socioecomomic status, residential neighborhoods, language, …

Labor Pains In The Academy, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This piece offers autoethnographic reflections on crossroads to which many academics come: whether to seek (or postpone or avoid) parenthood and when. The author deeply explores the personal (her own trajectories from daughter and sister to potential mother and from graduate student to full professor) in order to reflect on structural constraints associated with graduate education, the academic job market, and institutional policies and politics.

Homophobia, Heterosexism, And Ambivalence In The Premier Issue Of Sports Illustrated Woman/Sport, Lisa M. Weidman

Faculty Publications

The arrival of a magazine dedicated solely to the world of women's sports was an exciting prospect for fans and proponents of women's sports. But the first issue of Sports Illustrated Women/Sport disappointed many who considered it did not put women's sports in the best possible light, who were worried and disappointed that its editors did not print the best stories or even focus on the most deserving athletes. Lisa Weidman decided to investigate further, using feminist theory and prior research findings to better understand the magazine's messages. Through a critical analysis of the magazine's editorial content - at the …

Review Of The Book "When Your Spouse Comes Out: A Straight Mate’S Guide To Recovery", Kristen Cole

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Legal Or Illegal? Documented Or Undocumented?” The Struggle Over Brookhaven’S Neighborhood Preservation Act, Jackson B. Miller

Faculty Publications

This critical essay applies the concept of “presence” as a theoretical lens for explaining the rhetorical efficacy of protest events surrounding a contemporary debate about immigrants’ rights in a suburban New York township. Specifically, the protests surrounding the town board meetings regarding Brookhaven’s “Neighborhood Preservation Act,” a piece of legislation geared toward making rental laws more stringent, are examined. A group comprised largely of white, upper middle-class citizens voiced their support for the proposed legislation, while a group of day laborers and those sympathetic with their cause characterized the proposed legislation as a form of racial discrimination disguised as a …

Men Kissing, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

The author, a heterosexual woman, uses the theme of men kissing to show relational dynamics in her fieldwork community, a network of gay male friends. Political implications of public same-sex kissing also are discussed. At the time the events described in "Men Kissing" occurred (1997) and for six more years, it was not legal for persons of the same sex to be intimate in Florida and 13 other states.

Between Gay And Straight-1 Before, Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

In chapter 1, “Before,” of the book Between Gay and Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation (AltaMira Press, 2001), I story the absences, silences, and stereotypes surrounding same-sex orientation when I came of age in the 1980s and early 90s.

Introduction To Between Gay And Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation [Book], Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This chapter sets a personal, academic, and cultural context for the author's PhD dissertation research (1994-98), an ethnographic and interview study of a network of gay male friends in Tampa, Florida.

Contact (Chapter 2 Of The Book Between Gay And Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation"), Lisa M. Tillmann Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

“Contact” is chapter 2 of the book Between Gay and Straight: Understanding Friendship Across Sexual Orientation (AltaMira Press, 2001). The timeframe portrayed extends from June 1994 to September 1995. It opens with my boyfriend Doug meeting David Holland, who would become our first gay male friend. David and his partner Chris introduce us to gay spaces around Tampa. Also in this chapter, Doug begins his four-year tenure with The Cove, a team in the predominantly gay Suncoast Softball league.