Social Sciences Forum
Guadalupe Moshan Álvarez, principal attorney, Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Bárbara Suárez Galeano, Interpreter, Autonomous University of Social Movements, Centro Autónomo de Albany Park, Chicago

Thursday, September 24 | 4:30 p.m.
Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery  

Mexico is at a critical moment: the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa rural teachers and college students set off a tidal wave of indignation and massive protests. In the context of a war on drugs that has left more than 25,000 disappeared, Guadalupe Moshan Álvarez will speak on the human rights situation in Chiapas, Mexico, FrayBa’s work, and the role of international solidarity.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; the Department Sociology and Anthropology; the Language, Literacy & Culture Program; the Global Studies Program and the Department of Political Science.

In the wake of the unrest in Baltimore earlier this year, several UMBC faculty were interviewed by Diverse to share the projects they are doing with students and colleagues to work with the city as it recovers from its first uprising in nearly 50 years.

Beverly Bickel, a clinical associate professor in the language, literacy and culture program, discussed the Imagining America conference, which is sponsored by UMBC in partnership with MICA and Morgan State University. Many conference sessions will focus specifically on Baltimore and address topics such as race, inequality and community-based approaches to spur collective action.

“Part of our commitment in doing that was about how we could use this conference to develop the work in Baltimore,” said Bickel. “We want to use it as an organizing process to strengthen the arts community [in] Baltimore.”

Lee Boot, associate director of the IRC, said that he and some of his colleagues are cautious about not appearing as to have all the answers: “These issues are real[ly] complicated. The whole idea that [the] university alone is [the] purveyor of knowledge is insane,” he said.

“And we’re trying to level that. Another thing that came up is that Baltimore has to take its stories back. … An opportunity that comes out of what happened in April is that now [there is] a wider understanding that those events were results of things that had happened before. We’re trying to say [that] this is not a bunch of bad players, but results of decisions we have made. That’s a line of thought most people are not interested in listening to most of the time.”

Denise Meringolo, an associate professor of history, is working with community partners to create a website that includes original content and documents history in the days surrounding Freddie Gray’s death. The goal is to provide a historical record of diverse perspectives from the people whose lives were directly impacted by the events.

“The thing that’s most important for me [is] that it’s broadly collaborative and puts [the] needs and interests of community first,” Meringolo said. “At this point this is a collection project. … Healing at this time feels like skipping over their pain. I think we’ve got to stop skipping over the pain, so people don’t go from trauma to forgiveness and skip over the hard work. I feel like this [is] the beginning of the hard work.”

Read “Baltimore Higher Ed Institutions Fight to Restore the City” in Diverse.

Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC) Professor and Director Craig Saper, with contributions to the manuscript preparation and index from LLC doctoral students Felix Burgos and Kevin Wisniewski, has co-edited and introduced a new book Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments (2015).

According to a description on the book’s website, “‘Textshop’ in the title refers to a pedagogy for teaching rhetorical invention, with application to any form of production of texts or works in Arts and Letters fields, or for teaching creative thinking in general. More specifically this book provides background and context for the published work of Ulmer, filling in gaps between his books, and showing the genealogy of Ulmer’s innovative approach to media education.”

Growing out of the book, Burgos and Wisniewski have started a peer-review scholarly journal on Textshop Experiments. To learn more about the project, click here.

On April 12, 2014 over one hundred graduate students, faculty, staff, and community partners gathered in UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building for the Rethinking Intellectual Activism graduate student conference. Presenters represented UMBC’s Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) Doctoral Program and the departments of Geography and Environmental Systems, Public Policy, Psychology, and Sociology, as well as universities across the country, such as UCLA, MICA, George Mason, and the University of Louisville, and the world, such as University of Oxford, England, Sabancı University, Turkey and North South University, Bangladesh.

Presenters and attendees discussed a variety of topics connected to the notion of Intellectual Activism. They included: Social Justice Through Critical Participatory Action Research; Politics of Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender; New Critical Perspectives on Service Learning and Community Engagement; Researching Political Action, Discourse, and Organizations; and Politics of Art and Art as Activism.

Dr. Kaye Whitehead, Assistant Professor of Communication at Loyola University and a graduate of the Language, Literacy and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC, delivered the keynote speech, titled In Search of Your Magis: Taking a Moment to ReThink, ReEvaluate, and ReDiscover Intellectual Activism. In her speech grounded on the central question, “What kind of a scholar do you want to be?” and interwoven with episodes from her own inspiring life story, Dr. Whitehead talked about the importance of scholars finding their own paths to be/come intellectual activists or activist intellectuals who fight for social justice and make a difference in both others’ and their own lives through their knowledge practices.

Thanks to all the co-sponsoring academic departments, programs, and offices across the campus, whose support made this conference possible: LLC Doctoral Program; Office of the Vice President for Research; Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; LLC Graduate Student Organization; Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Department of American Studies; Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Department of English, and B’PAR Graduate Student Organization. Thanks also to the campus community of students, faculty members, and staff members, without whom this conference would remain as a dream. Next year’s LLC Graduate Student Conference is expected to add to the critical dialogues stimulated in this year’s conference.

Language, Literacy and Culture doctoral student Kevin A. Wisniewski was recently named a 2014 Michael Denker Chesapeake Chapter Fellow at the American Printing History Association. The fellowship is named after a former Chesapeake Chapter president, and it offers a one-year membership and active participation in the association’s various activities throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, including a presentation of original research at an upcoming symposium on the history of colonial printing and typography.

Wisniewski will also be presenting a paper at the upcoming American Literature Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. with professors from Ohio University, the College of William and Mary and the University of Massachusetts from May 22-25 in a panel entitled, “Graphic Humor in the 19th-Century Periodical.”

Finally, Wisniewski’s review of Michael David Cohen’s monograph Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2012) is forthcoming in the journal Civil War History, and he is awaiting the publication of sections he completed on the early American republic for a forthcoming online, Open Access American History textbook entitled American Yawp. 

The project is edited by Joseph Locke (University of Texas-Pan American) and Ben Wright (Rice University) and boasts an impressive editorial board that includes Edward Ayers, Kathleen Brown, Joyce Chaplin, Woody Holton, James Merrell and Richard White.

Language, Literacy and Cultural (LLC) doctoral candidate John Fritz has been named editor of the “reflective practitioner” section of the new Journal of Learning Analytics published by the Society of Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). Earlier this year, the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) published Fritz’s research bulletin “Using analytics at UMBC: Encouraging student responsibility and identifying effective course design” (free Educause login required until October 30, publicly available thereafter).

Several LLC students have published book reviews in HyperRhiz, the peer-reviewed online journal specializing in new media criticism and net art:

• Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front review by Romy Hubler
• Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures review by Christopher Justice
• Maurice Berger, For All the World to See review by Diane Kuthy
• The Third Space and Beyond: H. Campbell, Digital Religion review by Laura Rutter Strickling
• Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked review by K. A. Wisniewski
• Jeffrey Jones, Lighthole review by Tymofey Wowk

Additionally, LLC PhD student Erin Berry will present “‘The Vivid Memoirs of an Obnoxious Slave…’ Unearthing Sylvia Wynter’s Revolution in Jay Electronica’s Rap Narratives” at the upcoming Africana Studies Conference as part of the panel “Revolution: Reclaiming Traditions, Redefining Change in Africa and the Diaspora.“

UMBC Language, Literacy & Culture doctoral student Kevin Wisniewski is publishing the lead chapter in the new anthology Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media(Bloomsbury, January 2014). The chapter, “Betwixt and Between: Reading the Child in M. Night Shyamalan’s Films,” appears at the start of the first section of the book, “Rites of Passage and Impasse.”

Wisniewski will also present a paper at the upcoming conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) & Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), Nov. 8-10. Wisniewski will present his paper, “Improving the Art of Paper War: Francis Hopkinson and the Performance of the Press in the Early Republic,” alongside colleagues from Duke and the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the session “Making Meaning in American Print Culture.”

Teresa Foster ’09, gender and women’s studies and history, ’11 M.A. historical studies, and a LLC Ph.D. candidate, is the winner of the 2013-2014 Wing Graduate Fellowship in Colonial Chesapeake History from the Maryland Historical Society.

The purpose of the Wing Fellowship is to assist a graduate student in undertaking a significant project in Chesapeake colonial history.

Joan Shin, clinical assistant professor of education,recently published a chapter in the 4th edition of “Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language.”   Jodi Crandall, professor emerita of Language Litercy and Culture, also has a chapter in the book.

“Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language” is the most widely used TESOL Methods book in the world.

Craig Saper, professor and chair of Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC), has been named the Bearman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship.

“Dr. Saper is a scholar of large achievement and great energy, whose talents and interests make him a superb choice for the Bearman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship,” said John Jeffries, dean of the college of arts, humanities, and social sciences (CAHSS).

The Bearman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship was established by The Herbert Bearman Foundation to acknowledge and honor the contributions of Dr. Arlene Bearman to the UMBC community. This chair recognizes and supports outstanding teaching skills, an interest in entrepreneurship, and a strong record of scholarship in entrepreneurial studies or a field related to entrepreneurship.

“Since arriving on campus, Dr. Saper has been a whirlwind of research and teaching activity deeply anchored in commitments to social entrepreneurship,” said Bev Bickel, associate professor and former chair of LLC.

This three-year endowed position will provide Saper with funding to integrate entrepreneurship concepts into classroom instruction, advising, and scholarship. Saper will also work with the Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship and Kauffman grant activities, and with the Administrative and Managerial Sciences program.

“My research is deeply anchored in commitments to social entrepreneurship that I have been studying throughout my career,” said Saper.  His recently-released book, Intimate Bureaucracies, examines social entrepreneurship during the creation of the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1960s-1980s.

Saper is planning two projects during the course of his Bearman chairmanship.  The first will examine the social entrepreneurship involved in the building of shared memorials and monuments. His research will focus on the entrepreneurs who organized and made the memorials possible.

Saper’s second project will explore the possibility of establishing a digital e-press at UMBC, which is he doing in collaboration with colleagues in the Library, the English department, the media and communication studies program and LLC as part of the campus’s larger Digital Humanities efforts.

“I’m interested in being a participant-observer of this group-entrepreneurial effort that works within, and for, UMBC’s institutional structure and the larger demands of academia and legitimate scholarship,” he said.

But Saper’s objective as the Bearman Foundation Chair isn’t just to achieve his research goals – it’s to offer a new vision of what entrepreneurship can mean.

“Hopefully, at the end of my term I will have promoted a progressive model of entrepreneurship that offers an alternative to Ayn Rand’s outlaw heroes. In the new model, entrepreneurs are part of communities working cooperatively for public space, public schools and the public good not renegades and raiders,” he said.