Working Against Hierarchical Curation and Working Toward Community-Based Academic Dialogues

• In Event: Pluriversal Scholarship: An Intergenerational Discussion of Writing and Literacies

Abstract

Building on Past Dialogues. Four years ago, the Writing & Literacies SIG Communication Team started a podcast to document the origins of the SIG, expand on current directions, and look to the future.This past podcast series represented ways that our SIG was pushing methods and epistemologies as well as including representative content around the SIG’s shared concerns with writing, literacies, and education. When we were in the process of sorting through communal podcasting artifacts, listening to these past dialogues and deciding how to pick up these trajectories in the next iteration of the podcast, we felt a pluriversal connection across time and space with previous podcasters. Our first objective was to continue this communal meaning-making in intra-active ways through the digital and multimodal affordances of the podcasting medium.

Evolution Toward Community-Based Dialogues. The current podcast team considers how to celebrate/engage our intergenerational SIG, especially voices of emerging graduate scholars and scholars of color. A ‘pluriversal literacies’ frame compelled us to enact equitable, networked, participatory practices, and the idea of a crowdsourced podcast was born as “an ongoing and complex interplay of experiences, materials, events, and encounters” (Perry, 2020, p. 1) of SIG members. Thinking about the podcast as an assemblage allowed us to foreground the interconnectedness and vulnerabilities of bodies-in-power-relations and manifest ‘pluriversality’ amidst traditional academic hierarchies. The resulting process began with an invitation to SIG members to share their current work in 1-minute videos. We offered relevant resources, including models and technical support. After reviewing submissions, we grouped them thematically and are working to distribute them across SIG channels. Throughout this process, we were mindful of how unique histories/positionalities would co-construct vulnerabilities when made visible to wide audiences. Thus, mobilizing a ‘pluriverse’ meant scaffolding more porous borders to sharing via the podcast platform.

Dreaming for the Future. Our team has engaged in critical conversations about our respective positionalities and the extent to which our understandings of pluriversality are constrained. Looking ahead, we seek to iterate and improve on our current podcast crowdsourcing model. One planned improvement is to allow SIG members to curate their own podcast submissions. Curation and citation are political and ideological acts. To allow for a multiplicity of ontologies and epistemologies to emerge in the curation process, our team now seeks to make podcast curation processes public, collaborative, and consensual. Currently, our plan is to create an open-access folder in which SIG members can create thematic folders, submit artifacts of their scholarship, and invite others into conversation with their work.
We acknowledge that questions of accessibility are constantly in flux during this global pandemic, as historical notions of access, vulnerability, discourse, power, and relationality are being both reinforced and rewritten at any given moment. However, it’s for this precise reason that our graduate student board is intent on documenting the ongoing scholarship of the SIG--it’s imperative that we continue to analyze both how the current moment in scholarship connects to historical vulnerabilities and marginalizations, and how each change impacts us as a scholarly community.

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

• April Camping, Arizona State University

• Gemma Cooper-Novack, Syracuse University

• Alexander Power Corbitt, Boston College

• Jessica L Lough, West Virginia University