Race enters writing, the making of art, as a structure of feeling, as something that structures feelings, that lays down tracks of affection and repulsion, rage and hurt, desire and ache. These tracks don’t only occur in the making of art; they also occur (sometimes viciously, sometimes hazily) in the reception of creative work. Here we are again: we’ve made this thing and we’ve sent it out into the world for recognition—and because what we’ve made is in essence a field of human experience created for other humans, the field and its maker and its readers are thus subject all over again to race and its infiltrations. In that moment arise all sorts of possible hearings and mis-hearings, all kinds of address and redress.
~ Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda
These words have both inspired and haunted me, both as a scholar of race, popular culture, and (intellectual property) law, and a teacher of those subjects. Rankine and Loffreda are perhaps not an obvious choice to anchor a teaching statement. Yet for me, their words are pedagogically valuable for understanding race, popular culture, law, and rhetoric. The notion that “[r]ace enters writing” suggests that it is an (unwelcome) interlocutor, one who is always present but often unobserved. We can, perhaps, identify a moment when the fleet-footed guest joins us, or their presence comes to our awareness. The notion that race enters writing as “a structure of feeling” points us to the role of public emotions in racist and racist thought but also to the amorphousness and stickiness of racial feelings. Rankine and Loffreda, incisive communication scholars as well as extraordinary artists, traces the relationship between production and text, audience reception and audience mis-reception. Together, Rankine and Loffreda remind us that we must always be mindful of the way that race infiltrates cultural spaces, written, visual, and aural, in ways which are perniciously invisible but deeply emotional. Attending to the contours of the racial categories which we inadvertently produce and reproduce is a central part of my goal as a scholar of race, media, law, and rhetoric. I am interested not in filling my students’ brains with facts and numbers, in a manner that Paulo Friere would famously critique as part of the “banking model” of education, but rather by offering them (and myself) space to cultivate tools, language, emotional self-awareness, that will help them navigate the complex racial landscapes to which Rankine and Loffreda allude.
My full teaching philosophy is posted here.
Please note that while I post my most recent syllabi for reference and inspiration, I do so with an expectation that scholars will not pass off the intellectual labor of creating these courses off as their own. I refer here to the statement of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal on citation practices as a reference for thinking about citation practices generally as well as in the context of new courses and areas of study:
Sara Ahmed (2013) describes citation practices as a “rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.” Citation ‘structures’ form disciplines, Ahmed tells us. “The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.” Indeed, our practices of citation make and remake our fields, making some forms of knowledge peripheral. We often cite those who are more famous, even if their contributions appropriate subaltern ways of knowing…Over time, our citation practices become repetitive; we cite the same people we cited as newcomers to a conversation.
For these reasons, I attempt to practice a writing, teaching, and citation style that privileges scholars and activists whose writings are marginalized instead of endlessly reinscribing the work of those whose paths are well worn.
COURSES TAUGHT
Instructor
Reading Race at the Millennium
Race, National Identity & Intellectual Properties (Law)
Essentials of Argument
Teaching Assistant
Black Cultural Studies
Introduction to Communication II
Discourse Analysis
Introduction to Communication I