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<div id="cf"><img class="bottom" src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/2.jpg" height="400"><img class="top" src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/1.jpg" height="400"></div><p align="right">Last weekend [[I|who]] moved my desk to the basement
from the North-facing den at the front
of the house.
I thought this would be a better [[place|landscape]]
to [[write|scholarship]],
to [[think|visceral knowing]]—
to [[think about writing]].
[[Why am I telling you this?]]
Because the reason for the [[move|sustenance]] is difficult for me to explain
in [[words]].
It has to do with the [[light]]
and the way I feel when facing South.
There is a [[visceral knowing]] unaccustomed to [[language|written material]]
which [[prefers|list]] [[silence]]
and [[birdsong|list]]:
Mourning dove,
[[Anna's hummingbird|UBC]],
Red-winged blackbird,
Northern flicker.
There just wasn't [[enough|growing]]
light.</p><center><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/crow.png" ></center>
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[[Begin Again|start]][[Begin Again|start]]
This is not an easy thing to do, to write this...whatever it is. (I hesitate to name it both for fear of strapping it into confines from which it specifically fights to be free, as well as because it defies the signification of naming itself.)
I endeavour to create something—a piece of academic writing—of scholarship (where I am the scholar and this is my -ship)—that resists existence in typical or expected forms. As I begin, a [[silence]] envelops me and I find myself unable to think my way out of the Western Enlightenment ways of representing research, knowledge, thinking, understanding I have learned. I find myself still tending toward linear rational argument.
I do not have this problem when I am outside, walking my dog. There the silence is rife with sound and meaning. Words, but not words, thoughts, but not thoughts simply flow through my being—my body—as I move over the earth without beginning or end. A [[web of silent commune|list]]. All of it is ephemera unlike the artifacts of thought caught in dusty tomes no one reads.
<blockquote>
Do not mistake me:
This is not a poem about nature.
Nor is it a plea
to be included among the voices
of the Others.
</blockquote>
I am as implicated in the fabric of colonization as anyone.
And, therefore, it is also my responsibility, as a scholar of education and literacy, and as a human being uncomfortable operating within the paradigms promulgated by the parental voice of the dominant narrative—it is my responsibility to do something: to write against this privileged way of writing and representing. To do so, I must question all the underlying assumptions I have about what it means to do scholarship, to be a scholar, to learn about and teach literacy within institutions that only have a colonial history steeped in a dangerously narrow definition of what it means <i>to be and to know</i> as a human being.
<<back [Back]>>[[Begin Again|start]]
<i>“How, then, do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity? How do we nurture our own voices, our own individualities, and at the same time lay claim to ‘knowing’ something?” [[~ Laurel Richardson, 1997, p. 2|refs]]</i>
As I embark on this journey, there is a threshold
a point of entering—a passage
into a place demanding
certain things of me.
Some of these things are expected
As I prepare to begin
I become preoccupied
I find myself wanting
shed hubris
awareness dawns
begin to imagine a place
<center><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/change.png"></center>
<<back [Back]>>education grounded in [[Western epistemology|think about writing]]
we take for granted knowledge
are required to read and write
enter school
a [[way of knowing|landscape]] that supersedes
others:
presence
heightened
to [[quality|written material]]
<<back [Back]>>
[[Begin Again|start]][[Begin Again|start]]
<i>We "do well to consider the senses deeply since we cannot make sense apart from the body. If we truly teach who we are, then it is through our bodies that we are teaching. We don’t have bodies, we are bodies." [[(Wiebe and Snowber, 2011, p. 104)|refs]]</i>
<blockquote>
I have a theory that Descartes, in his grave, is thrashing about, unwittingly quoting lines from Eliot's <i>The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock</i>:
<blockquote>"That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all." </blockquote> But, in Descartes' case, screaming it at the top of his undoubtedly decomposed lungs.
I have a thought that theories are unnecessary when dealing with knowledge but, unfortunately, those of us caught in the web of [[western rationalist thinking|think about writing]] cannot quite theorise ourselves out of having them (myself included).
I have a feeling that perhaps we are all born knowing but lacking the language to put that knowledge into words and, therefore, communicate it to others. What is a word for [[pre-linguistic epistemology|light]]?
Think about it? What does it mean to know something? Google it, if you must. Sadly, the answers are quite definitive which makes me suspect that may not be all there is to know about this.
I think therefore I write
in such a way as to show I can
think (and write) in the ways
sanctioned by the hegemony
That is one of <i>their</i> words.
</blockquote>
<<back [Back]>><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/04/beach.jpeg" alt="beach" width="600" height="600" align="left"/>
<p align="right">I imagine I am a giant looking down:
a worn piece of earth
Humans too small to see
Or maybe they are not even there
at all?
The [[undulations|list]] of the tidal forms
[[patterns|light]]
I see echoes in every surface
Even the wide dome of the sky
Thin clouds caress concave
blue smoothness
Reflections of time immemorial
off every surface
of this sphere
The silence tells us
It is so. It has always been so.</p>
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[[Begin Again|start]]<<back [Back]>>
[[Begin Again|start]]
<u>References</u>
Ball, C. E. (2004). Show, not tell: The value of new media scholarship. <i>Computers and Composition, 21</i>(4), 403-425.
Bridge, C. H. (2018). <i>Land education and reconciliation: exploring educators’ practice</i> (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada). Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca
Casey, E. S. (2001). Between geography and philosophy: what does it mean to be in the place-world?, <i>Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91</i>(4), 683-693. doi: 10.1111/0004-5608.00266
Dion, S. D. (2007). Disrupting molded images: Identities, responsibilities and relationships—teachers and indigenous subject material. <i>Teaching Education, 18</i>(4), 329-342.
Dunlop, R. (1999). <i>Boundary Bay: A novel as educational research</i> (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada). Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca
Fels, L. (1999). <i>In the wind clothes dance on a line: performative inquiry--a (re) search methodology: possibilities and absences within a space-moment of imagining a universe</i> (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada). Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca
Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. <i>Journal of education, 171</i>(1), 5-17.
Gouzouasis, P. (2007). Music in an a/r/tographic tonality. <i>Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 5</i>(2), 33-59.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. <i>Feminist studies, 14</i>(3), 575-599.
Hare, J. (2001). <i>Aboriginal literacy: Making meaning across three generations in an Anishinaabe community</i> (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada). Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca
Hare, J. (2005). To “know papers”: Aboriginal perspectives on literacy. In Anderson, J., Kendrick, M., Rogers, T., & Smythe, S. (Eds.). <i>Portraits of literacy across families, communities, and schools: Intersections and tensions</i>, (pp. 243-263). New Jersey: Routledge.
Irwin, R. (2003). Toward an aesthetic of unfolding in/sights through curriculum. <i>Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1</i>(2), 63-78.
Jackson, S. (1997). <i>My body: A wunderkammer</i>. Retrieved from http://www.altx.com/thebody/body.html
James, K & Leggo, C. (2017) Process, remix, juxtaposition, assemblage and selection: How the 21st century poet makes poetry out of autobiographical material. <i>Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 7</i>(2), (online). Retrieved from https://axonjournal.com.au/issue-13/poetry-matrix-mother-nature-and-mother-board
Kincheloe, J. L. (2011). Critical ontology and indigenous ways of being: Forging a postcolonial curriculum. In K. Hayes et al. (Eds.) <i>Key works in critical pedagogy</i> (pp. 333-349). Boston: Sense.
Krause, S. D. (2007). Where do I list this on my CV? Considering the value of self-published websites–version 2.0. <i>Kairos: A Journal or Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 12</i>(1). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.1/binder.html?topoi/krause/index.html
Kubota, R. (2019). Confronting Epistemological Racism, Decolonizing Scholarly Knowledge: Race and Gender in <i>Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics</i>, 1-22.
Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (2006). The" academic literacies" model: Theory and applications. <i>Theory into practice, 45</i>(4), 368-377.
Leggo, C. (1999). Research as poetic rumination: Twenty-six ways of listening to light. <i>The Journal of Educational Thought (JET)/Revue de la Pensée Educative, 33</i>(2), 113-133.
Mangen, A. (2008). Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion. <i>Journal of research in reading, 31</i>(4), 404-419.
Marker, M. (2016). Indigenous knowledge, indigenous scholars, and narrating scientific selves:“to produce a human being”. <i>Cultural Studies of Science Education, 11</i>(2), 477-480.
Marker, M. (2017). Indigenous knowledges, universities, and alluvial zones of paradigm change. <i>Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, (online)</i>, 1-14. doi:10.1080/01596306.2017.1393398
Marker, M. (2018). There is no place of nature; there is only the nature of place: animate landscapes as methodology for inquiry in the Coast Salish territory. <i>International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(</i>6), 453-464.
McBride, M. (2017). <i>Tangible inquiries: A study of aroma materials and sources in the built and botanical environments of Grasses, France.</i> (Doctoral dissertation, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada)
Paré, 2011 Paré, A. (2011). Publish and flourish: Joining the conversation. In Kumar, V. & Lee, A. (Eds.), <i>Doctoral Education in International Context: Connecting Local, Regional and Global Perspectives</i>, (pp. 172-191). Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia Press.
Prendergast, M. (2006). Found poetry as literature review: Research poems on audience and performance. <i>Qualitative Inquiry, 12</i>(2), 369-388.
Prendergast, M. (2015). Poetic inquiry, 2007-2012: A surrender and catch found poem. <i>Qualitative inquiry, 21</i>(8), 678-685.
Priem, J. (2013). Scholarship: Beyond the paper. <i>Nature, 495</i>(7442), 437-440.
Purdy, J. P., & Walker, J. R. (2010). Valuing digital scholarship: Exploring the changing realities of intellectual work. <i>Profession, 2010</i>(1), 177-195.
Richardson, L. (1997). <i>Fields of play: Constructing an academic life.</i> New Jersey:Rutgers University Press.
Sameshima, P. (2007). Seeing red: A pedagogy of parallax: An epistolary bildungsroman on artful scholarly inquiry. New York: Cambria Press.
Smith, L. T. (2012). <i>Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples.</i> New York: Zed Books Ltd.
Stewart, P. R. R. (2015). <i>Indigenous architecture through indigenous knowledge: dim sagalts’ apkw nisiḿ [together we will build a village]</i> (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada). Retrieved from https://circle.ubc.ca
Sugiyama, M. S. (2001). Food, foragers, and folklore: The role of narrative in human subsistence. <i>Evolution and Human Behavior, 22</i>(4), 221-240.
Szto, P., Furman, R., & Langer, C. (2005). Poetry and photography: An exploration into expressive/creative qualitative research. <i>Qualitative social work, 4</i>(2), 135-156.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). <i>Final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Summary : honouring the truth, reconciling for \ the future.</i> Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Wiebe, S., & Snowber, C. (2011). The visceral imagination: A fertile space for non-textual knowing. <i>Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27</i>(2).
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To situate my knowledge [[(Haraway, 1988)|refs]] then: "a short list of critical positions" [[(Haraway, 1988, p. 586)|refs]] that I occupy, sometimes distinctly, sometimes simultaneously, and [[none of which define me|list]] or my work particularly well.
I am a first generation South Asian lesbian cis-gender woman in her early to mid-forties.
I grew up and currently reside in a middle to upper-middle socio-economic class.
I have lived on the West Coast of British Columbia (BC) my whole [[life]] and am deeply affected by the sensous [[landscape]] of my home.
All of my post-secondary academic education has been taken at the [[University of British Columbia|UBC]] (UBC).
I have held a few public service positions in my working life and am currenty a teacher in the Langley School District.
I am also a graduate student at UBC about to begin a PhD in Language and Literacy Education in the fall of 2019.
This is my first conference presentation and piece of public scholarship.
To my supervisor, I am a charge and my job is to do well what is required to earn my degree. This includes successfully completing all requirements, applying for funding, and, possibly, publishing.
To the university, I am an investment in the future and a potential feather in their cap, assuming I am able to do what needs to be done.
To my family, students, and colleagues, I am an example; and it is for them that I work to disrupt the norms of academic writing—to work toward an unsettling of what it means to know something and to express that knowing as a part of one’s writing. To them I have always been unconventional. I believe that doing this degree conventionally would be hypocritical. And so I seek research methodologies which allow latitude in conception, action, and representation—especially representation—so that what results is a communication of knowledge that appeals to them first. I write to be read, not by the prevailing powers, but by the people I care about.
Finally, to myself, I am something else entirely. Yes, I am a writer and a poet and a chef. I am a teacher of English and Home Economics in a middle to upper-middle class high school remarkably like the one I attended in the late 80s and early 90s. I am a mother, partner, sister, daughter, and aunt. But, I am also <i>becoming</i> something more.
As I begin to imagine my place in the knowledge-creation continuum, I ask myself questions I have never before entertained: How will my language and choices support or detract from my imagination of my (future) being? With whom will I find professional, intellectual community? What do I think and believe and how do I choose to express and represent this?
Will any of this, at all, count?
<<back [Back]>>
<a href="http://blogs.ubc.ca/gunitagupta/" target="_blank">Me</a>
I do not have a language for the way I am affected by my surroundings. The way I am formed by my sensuous experience of the natural landscapes in the place I live. The way I understand myself in relation to my environment, and it to me. This is not something I was taught to express in words, though my parents did counsel me to "pay attention to my surroundings" in much the same way I now counsel (or admonish) my own children. Do I risk saying that my understanding is innate? Pre-linguistic? Something born in me over millenia of evolution?
Or is it something else? I was not taught to honour this other thing. I know no linear equation that yields a viable answer here—no mathematical function to explain the coordinates of this affect.
<blockquote><b>Confessions of a Functional Illiterate</b>
I do not have a language for the way I am
affected by my surroundings
formed by the [[sensuous experience|visceral knowing]]
of the enveloping landscape
I live myself folded
in relation
to this concatenation
of places
sadly un-a-where?
I do not have a language for the way I am
my knowing entirely sub-conscious
I have not learned how to say this
about my self. </blockquote>
<<back [Back]>>[[Begin Again|start]]
[[Carl Leggo (1999)|refs]] explains the word scholarship thusly, “<i>Scholar</i> is derived from the Greek <i>schole</i> which signifies 'leisure employed in learning.’ In much scholarly writing, "learning" is defined as research, explication, logic, reason, argument, and persuasion…In most scholarly writing, learning is not born out of leisure” (p.116).
<blockquote>Confession time:
Carl, I need to tell you
becoming a scholar
has been anything but leisurely.
I'd much rather be
a poet like you.</blockquote>
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The first English research journal was created in 1665 [[(Paré, 2011)|refs]] "to improve the dissemination of scholarly knowledge" [[(Priem, 2013, p. 437)|refs]].
Once one enters academia, print literacy requirements only increase as an academic's worth is determined by what she writes and where she publishes her written work. These locations or “places” are usually [[blind peer-reviewed journals|footnote]] that have strict guidelines for submission. But guidelines notwithstanding, if a scholar is to be published, she must have what [[Lea and Street (2006)|refs]] call “academic literacy,” which “is concerned with meaning making, identity, power, and authority, and foregrounds the institutional nature of what counts as knowledge in any particular academic context” (p. 369). Academic literacy “[pays] particular attention to the relationships of power, authority, meaning making, and identity that are implicit in the use of literacy practices within specific institutional settings” (p. 370). Such practices can be general (e.g. writing in English) or discipline specific (e.g. the use of certain citation systems). A scholar’s fluency in such discourses [[(Gee, 1989)|refs]] determines the extent of one’s literacy and confers the corresponding power and authority upon her. Those scholars who are not as fluent, though, or those who wish to change the way things are done, often suffer predictably.
However, there are some who succeed.
<b>Alterity</b>
[[recreate the landscape|wings]]
including
infinitely varied ways
Do not mistake me.
not re-<i>place</i>-ment
[[expansion]]
<<back [Back]>>[[Begin Again|start]]
I wonder how I might expand how and what I write to include as-yet-unsanctioned thoughts, insights, sources, forms, and habits in order to unsettle conventional academic scholarship. I invite you, dear reader, to join me in my wandering so that you, too, may interrogate your own beliefs and practices. As we [[forage|sustenance]] along this path, we promise to keep only that which sustains us.
[[Scholarship|scholarship]] is born out of something calculated and precise: A way of being and knowing that students and scholars, like me, learn (despite what our bodies, families, and relationships teach us) as we make our way though institutionalized education in all its various forms.
I now find myself rejecting this learning, like a body rejects a foreign material, slowly moving it toward the surface until, one day, it simply falls away. My rejection, though, is not a mutiny—an attempt to usurp or undo a tradition which, though built on the backs and sufferings of others, is nevertheless part of a "dominant" narrative and tradition of scholarly work. Rather, as [[Christine Bridge (2018)|refs]] puts it, my intention is to contribute to an expansion of a definition of scholarship, which “respects the epistemological and pedagogical foundations provided by both Indigenous ways of knowing and those associated with Western society and formal education" (p. 11), as well as all/any minority ways of knowing and being.
Knowledge comes in many varied forms—not all of which might be rendered in print: “There are many ways to know the world, and the world can only be known in many ways, and even then, only ever known a little” [[(Leggo, 1999, p. 114)|refs]]. Carl was learning to listen to light. Indeed, the different ways in which all humans read, experience, respond to, listen to, and tell stories about our immediate surroundings—including and especially [[light]]—is what allows for the continued existence of humans on earth [[(Sugiyama, 2001)|refs]]. These are the ontological and epistemological commitments I seek to celebrate in my own work and teaching practice.
<<back [Back]>><p><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/04/sakura.png" alt="sakura" height="500" align="center">
UBC is built upon the land of the <a href="https://www.musqueam.bc.ca" target="_blank">Musqueam</a> people. UBC has a long tradition of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars entering into dialogue with scholarly traditions. In my work, I merge my understandings and gleanings from the writings of these and other scholars with my own ways of knowing the world to create a [[form]] of scholarship that pays homage to all my situations and allows me finally to write myself into my work with intellectual and spiritual integrity.</p>
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[[Begin Again|start]][[Begin Again|start]]
Form must be a key consideration for all scholars—not just those wishing to decolonize academic literacy practices. In order to include diverse epistemological positions in the production of knowledge, new ways in which we transmit understandings must be created (or assembled) to fit the content, not the other way around as has been common practice.
If a scholar’s academic literacy has been, until now, measured by her ability to adhere to conventional Western forms of scholarly expression, the future of a decolonized scholarship (especially in literacy and education) demands that the scholar be attentive to formal considerations for her work and be willing to experiment with non-conventional means of expression that allow her to sound more like herself [[(Marker, 2017)|refs]]. For some, this may be the conventional form of the Western academic article, written in English, and following a linear trajectory of rational argument. For others, like me, while I may be able to write in this form, it is not [[the preferred means of expression|start]].
In a foraging poetics, what is found and who does the finding determines the form representation ultimately takes. Not everything we think is best communicated in words, and there are also myriad ways to use words to communicate what we think and know. Attending to the best ways that what I think and know might be represented means becoming attuned to my surroundings, and then making conscious choices regarding form with respect to these surroundings. In this case, while I might have composed a typical academic paper to say everything I have said thus far, I chose, instead to use a form of expression that respects and responds to all of my subject, my onto-epistemology, and the rules and scope of the journal I have submitted to.
By combining a quasi-conventional academic paper with a hypertext piece, I get to write academically, but also include poetry and images (photography, drawing, and collage) to create something that more fully represents me in all my onto-epistemological diversity. Poetry, specifically, is a fundamental means by which I understand the world and communicate what I know and believe about the nature of reality, as it were. While I have learned to use academic language and form to express myself, it is really only in the poetic use of language that I feel completely centred within myself and the world. Hence, when you read the hypertext half of this work, what you will find is a multi-genre rendering of the contents of my own foraging—a rendering which, I feel, is much more expressive of my situation as a scholar who—like you, maybe?—embodies many conflicting forms of consciousness. Such expressivity is not to be mistaken for reconciliation in the sense that this work is not seeking to resolve the conflict of my consciousness, rather, it seeks to bring together the disparate parts in order to form a unified, <i>poietic</i> response.
<img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/hash.png" height="700" width="850">
<<back [Back]>>[[Begin Again|start]]
This piece is a rendering that seeks a way, like [[Stewart (2015)|refs]], "to find a passage through the swampy cross-cultural academic terrain of conflicting forms of consciousness" [[(Marker, 2017, p.7)|refs]] in a “<i>sensuous display</i>—the panoply of features sensed on its surface that make it into a variegated scene of perception and action” [[(original emphasis, Casey, 2001, p. 690)|refs]].
<blockquote><b>VIRTUAL KNOWING</b>
Movement through—
a meandering
commanding
attention
drawn
down to the
[[heart|start]]
slow down (active interaction)
forage (in a virtual landscape) and find:
[[sustenance]].</blockquote>
<<back [Back]>>[[Begin Again|start]]
Foraging means to search for provisions or resources—food, in the most literal sense, sustenance to put it more figuratively. In a foraging poetics, foraging occurs both in the creation of a work and in its reception. As the scholar making scholarship, I do so by foraging from the landscape of my surroundings according to the literacies I possess. Less lyrically, this means I experience the world sensually—which includes reading widely according to my interests—and take from these diverse landscapes varied and multiple understandings. I then form my understandings into something according to a poetics that aligns <i>both with my tastes and the contents of my foraging</i>. The reader or wanderer through the landscape of what I create then does the same as she encounters the panoply of features I use to populate my work. The result is a cyclical, recursive, reflexive experience of ideas that has the potential not only to resist the homogenizing influences of the dominant onto-epistemology, but also to harmonize with a person’s distinct way of being in the world. Think of a moment when you have read a [[novel|list]], and the author describes an event or a sensation in such a way that it seems to resonate with a fundamental aspect of your being. All of a sudden you know and understand something vital—something that, to this point, had only been sensed, never uttered. Although this example is based in textual production (because this mode dominates, it seems most likely readers will be able to relate), it is absurd to think that only text can have this effect. It is even more absurd to limit scholarly knowledge production to a very narrow aspect of [[textual mode|conclusions]], and expect such knowledge to have truly profound effects on the world (outside academia).
In a foraging poetics, what is found and who does the finding determines the form knowledge representation ultimately takes. Not everything we think is best communicated in words, and there are also myriad ways to use words to communicate what we think and know. Attending to the ways what I think might be best represented means becoming attuned to my surroundings, and making conscious choices about form. Using hypertext according to my own "literacies" allows me to create what I describe here. Within a [[hypertext]] piece, [[I may write academically|think about writing]], but I also include poetry (photography, drawing, and collage) and images to create something that more fully represents me in all my onto-epistemological diversity. Poetry, specifically, is a fundamental means by which I understand the world and communicate. While I have learned to use academic language and form to express myself, it is really only in the poetic use of language that [[I feel completely centred within myself and the world|light]]. As you read this piece of hypertext scholarship, what you will find is a multi-genre rendering of the contents of my foraging—a rendering which, I feel, is much more expressive to [[my situation|who]] as a scholar who embodies many conflicting forms of consciousness.
<img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/science.png">
<<back [Back]>><b>BLIND PEER-REVIEW REVEALED</b>
<b>Reviewer 1:</b>
Content is appropriate. Topic fits this special issue very well. Overall, I consider it a well-written and thought-provoking article. In particular, I appreciate the author’s reflexivity when probing the issues of onto-epistemologies in a wider academic setting.
Theory-wise, the supporting ideas were well articulated and of great relevance to decolonization and academic literacy. It is, though, hard to trace the methodological approaches in a rather conceptualizing paper.
<b>Me:</b>
THAT IS BECAUSE METHODOLOGY IS NOT MY CONCERN—AT LEAST NOT IN THE SENSE THAT IT IS USED IN ACADEMIC WRITING. CONSTRAINING ONESELF TO THEORETICAL OR CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS, METHODOLOGIES, ETC. IS TO ALIGN ONE’S WORK WITH A VERY PARTICULAR MODE OF CONCEPTION AND EXPRESSION. I REJECT THIS MODE.
<b>Reviewer 2:</b>
This paper begins with a clear and engaging thesis. I was enthusiastic to read it. The writer has a strong voice and an energetic style; the writing is for the most part pleasing.
Overall: This paper is fresh and engaging. But the paper needs to be revised to fill in the logical holes. If the writer can rework the paper to have a stronger logical argument, the paper could be truly disruptive. I really admire the idea of “expansion” that the writer introduces on p. 6. Could they do more with it?
<b>Me:</b>
HONESTLY, THIS CRITICISM ABOUT "LOGICAL HOLES" IS EXACTLY MY POINT ABOUT THE COLONIZING EFFECTS OF ACADEMIC REPRESENTATION. IT AMAZES ME THAT THE REVIEWER DOES NOT SEE THE IRONY OF THIS INITIAL STATEMENT.
Reviewer 2 goes on for four and a half single-spaced pages, detailing
- 2 substative points,
- 11 revisions,
- and 4 minor revisions.
<i>It was enough to compel me to write the editors of the journal and gracefully decline the revise the resubmit.
I wrote the email and saved it.
Then I put the paper away for a few weeks and got on with my work. When I returned to the criticism, I saw it differently: as a symptom of exactly what I am writing to change.
What if, in addition to expanding the way we write, we also expand how we review? What if review was collaborative and collegial? What might, then, become possible?</i>
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[[Begin Again|start]]<u>HOBBIES</u>
- walking my dog
- drawing
- reading fiction of varying kinds (see below; never YA)
- writing (poetry)
- [[cooking|sustenance]]
- riding my bike
- going to the gym
- making collages out of [[text and images|hypertext]]
<u>INTERESTS</u>
(see above) +
- [[science|life]] (especially medicine, diet, and nutrition)
- patterns (for instance, I like more "h" words than any other letter)
- [[design|growing]]
- other people
- [[data visualization|form]]
- [[birds|light]]
<u>[[WORDS|words]] (in alphabetical order</u>)
anastomosis
arduous
acrimonious
biliary
boat
cacophony
diphthong
egregious
entrepreneur
espionage
fastidious
fox
fractal
gibbous
goat
guinea (as in pig or fowl)
hackamore
halcyon
[[hegemony|visceral knowing]] (I know...I know!)
herbacious
[[heuristic|conclusions]]
horse
[[hubris|Why am I telling you this?]]
igloo
[[incorporate|hypertext]]
ink
(I do not like an "j" words, to date)
kaleidoscopic
kitsune (Japanese for "fox")
lambaste
lateral
limber
moon
[[nomadic|expansion]]
ocular
operatic
oracle
pistil
piston
[[panoply|sustenance]]
perambulate
[[quaint|UBC]]
quire
remuneration
retching
sigmoid
skeptical
stigma
tick
umbrage
undulate
unilateral
vox
waive
wax
withhold
xylophone (of course!)
yak
zebra (pronounced zebb'rah)
<<back [Back]>><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/fish.png" width="900"><div class="header">
<h1>CHOOSE WISELY</h1>
</div>
[[silence]]
[[Why am I telling you this?]]
[[footnote]]
[[start]]
[[form]]
[[landscape]]
[[scholarship]]
[[expansion]]
[[hypertext]]
[[conclusions]]
[[visceral knowing]]
[[written material]]
[[list]]
[[light]]
[[growing]]
[[UBC]]
[[think about writing]]
[[sustenance]]
[[who]]
[[end]]
[[words]]
[[wings]]
[[refs]]
<<back [Back]>>The beauty of this form
to my sensibilities
that is
my ways of knowing the world
is that
this form ever-expanding
like the scientists say of the universe
that it too is
limitless.
I could add to this piece of art (for this is how I conceive it) forever. I could make it bigger then any [[rational argument|think about writing]] could ever imagine. And this feature of this form—its potential foreverness—allows me to make this what I need it to be. Regardless of timeframes and submission deadlines. It [[lives|light]]. It is dynamic. It is vital.
However, deciding when it is "done" is a whole other matter. Even while I am sure that completeness is an illusion, there comes a moment when the thing (whatever it is) must be released. This is the state in which you find this piece of scholarship: done, but not forgotten.
For those of you interested in growing your own piece of hypertext multi-modal scholarhip, you can find the platform I used [[here|https://twinery.org]].
A comprehensive set of videos to get you started can be found on [[Adam Hammond's website|http://www.adamhammond.com/a-total-beginners-guide-to-twine-2-1/]].
<b>BLUEPRINT</b>
<img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/10/WWW.png" width="800">
<<back [Back]>>
[[Begin Again|start]]When I first began writing this paper, it was a conference presentation paper-in-progress and, as such, remained unfinished even up until the moment of presentation. In responding to this journal’s call for submissions for a special issue based upon conference proceedings, I was compelled to submit a completed paper even though this work (I even hesitate to call it a paper for obvious reasons) actively resists completion as an autotelic—or having an end in itself—creation. Put another way, writing/creating this piece of work has been profound as a process, and, as such, I have paid little heed to what it might accomplish once completed and published. Indeed, if I am to be brutally honest, I would have to admit that this has not been my concern.
In order to be truly dedicated to a project of unsettling academic literacy practices, I cannot worry myself with what counts as scholarship for my CV or my professional career. And yet, earlier I wrote that a scholar’s work is to contribute to knowledge, and I predicated my argument for unsettling how we do this squarely upon an understanding that this work might serve as an example. CVs and jobs aside, the disruption I seek to exemplify can really only occur if this piece is seen by others—made public, published. Which means, for one, that it is accepted by a journal of some import. And herein lies the problem, for what I have created is a work of active resistance that remains highly critical of epistemological bias in academe, publishing practices of peer-reviewed journals, and scholarly writing as a colonial convention. If a paper could be accused of shooting itself in the foot, this would be the paper!
But let us, for a moment imagine that this paper is accepted and published (and you are currently reading it in a journal), would I, then, be a hypocrite? Does publishing work such as this further implicate me in perpetuating colonial epistemological practices, or does it indicate that things are changing? How do we truly unsettle dominant academic writing practices? Or, does the notion of dominance preclude our best attempts at disruption?
[[Joel Kincheloe (2011)|refs]] writes,
<blockquote>In a counter-colonial move critical ontologists raise questions about any knowledges and ways of knowing that claim universal status. In this context they make use of this suspicion of universalism in combination with global, subjugated, and indigenous knowledges to understand how they have been positioned in the world. Almost all of us from Western backgrounds or non-Western colonized backgrounds have been implicated in some way in the web of universalism. The inevitable conflicts that arise from this implication do not have to be resolved immediately. (p. 338)</blockquote>
But, they do have to be resolved (or discarded) in order for things to truly change. As I see it, one of the ways to accomplish this is to work within the structures we have created. The academic publishing industry has an immense amount of influence to be a powerful force for change. “What we see and hear in books, journals, or conferences are the results of the decisions to accept or reject certain ideas produced by real people” [[(Kubota, 2019, p. 17)|refs]]. But, just as we need courageous journal editors and publishers, we also need courageous scholars producing and creating research that explicitly questions the universality of Western onto-epistemological practices in academia. Such questions must be posed in form, as well as content. How we choose to represent our knowledges makes a profound statement about what ways of knowing we support, what ways we challenge, and what ways we reject. Choosing the way(s) that resonate with us—rather than unquestioningly perpetuating the status quo of academic writing—means seriously contemplating Laurel Richardson’s question of how we approach our work with integrity.
Freeing knowledge creation from the constraints of colonial discourse requires an active commitment to do scholarship differently. Of all the disciplines, language and literacy scholars specifically have the unique ability to use our disciplinary understandings to forage for unanticipated connections and modes of learning. Conducting language and literacy research is already a political statement. Perhaps we might also find different ways of representing our findings that manifest the highly political nature of our work—ways that attend to form as illustrative of content, ways that work to destabilize expected means of knowledge production and mobilization, and ways that illuminate possibilities of a different future for scholarship.
<<back [Back]>>
[[Begin Again|start]]
[[Recursivity|end]]The written work of scholars:
making
curtailing
arguing
placing
legitimizing
representing
inviting
walking
thinking
unsettling
allowing
understanding
emerging.
[[Begin Again|start]][[Begin Again|start]]
<center><img src="http://blogs.ubc.ca/beingmultiliterate/files/2019/05/wings.png"></center>
<<back [Back]>>