Crip Pedagogies for the Apocalypse, Adan Jerreat-Poole
Knowing, Seeing, and Accompanying Suffering: An Undergraduate Essay Course, Amy Robillard
Can you hear me?: Exploration and ethics in an online writing workshop, Cheryl O’Byrne
Crip Pedagogies for the Apocalypse, Adan Jerreat-Poole
Abstract
This presentation calls for an ethical digital set of pedagogies that centres the experiences and wisdom of Mad/crip/disabled bodyminds and resists narratives of speed and efficiency often applied to digital platforms and processes. As we turn to digital media to teach life writing, we can reimagine our relationships with our students and technology through an ethics of care, intimacy, and interdependency. Inspired by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s concept of “crip technoscience,” alongside Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s theory of “cripping the apocalypse,” I call for online teaching practices based on flexibility, access, slowness, rest, glitches, failure, and collective care.
Bio
Adan Jerreat-Poole is a Mad/crip settler scholar working at the intersections of digital media, disability, and life writing. Their work has appeared in a/b:Autobiography Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Game Studies. They are a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University
Knowing, Seeing, and Accompanying Suffering: An Undergraduate Essay Course, Amy Robillard
Abstract
In the middle of a pandemic and a renewed fight for racial justice following the deaths of Taylor, Arbery, and Floyd, this undergraduate course on the personal essay asks what it means to ethically witness the suffering of others. How do we respond to the suffering we see regularly? How do we want others to witness our own suffering? How do we make sense of the suffering we know is happening but cannot see? The course argues that when suffering happens—to us or others—there is a human urge to tell the story. There is an urge to essay.
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Bio
Amy E. Robillard is professor of rhetoric and composition at Illinois State University and author of We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories. She teaches courses in rhetorical theory, writing studies, and life writing.
Can you hear me?: Exploration and ethics in an online writing workshop, Cheryl O’Byrne
Abstract
The directive to transition from in-person to online learning came a quarter of the way into the Creative Nonfiction Workshop I was teaching at the University of Sydney. In previous years, guest authors travelled to our material classroom to speak with students about writing craft. This year, however, these guests joined our virtual classroom from their homes. This paper engages with the work of Maria Tumarkin as it proposes a correlation between the exposure of these guests’ unpolished domestic spaces and the open, exploratory, ethical quality of the personal essays this cohort of students produced.
Bio
Cheryl O’Byrne is a PhD candidate and Associate Lecturer in the School of Literature, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. Her PhD project explores the ways daughters write about their mothers and the ethics of their varied approaches. Her work has been published in Life Writing and Philament.