New Episode: The Quality of Mercy Project Part 2!

In this episode, Geoff talks with another group of collaborators from the Qualities of Mercy Project about how they felt about the process and the end results of the work they did with their students and The Merchant of Venice in production. What were some of the challenges of production/quality? What impact did the region/cultural milieu of the students have on the way they interpreted Shakespeare's ideas? Moreover, the guests chat about how much the project made students consider their institutional position as their performances were paired with performances from students all over the country. How did the institutions/administration respond to the project? How do you manage a variety of views and interpretations coming from the students while still needing to impose a coherent theme? What were some of the more important and significant staging choices these students made in making the text resonate with them and their communities?

Joining Geoff this time are Vanessa Corredera (Andrews University), Ruben Espinosa (University of Texas El Paso), Katherine Gillen (Texas A&M - San Antonio), and Katheryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University).

Listen to the new episode here! And if you missed part one, you can find it here.

And you can watch the fruits of the project here!

Please remember to share, rate, review, and subscribe! We can be found on Twitter and Facebook at humanitiesremix, and reach us via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

New Episode: The Qualities of Mercy Project, Part 1!

In our latest episode, Geoff talks with some of his co-participants in The Qualities of Mercy Project, an initiative among Shakespeare instructors who collaborated to bring The Merchant of Venice to college campuses nationwide and to discuss what "mercy" means in a regional sense. Our guests discuss the ways their students responded to the plays notions of forgiveness and mercy, ostracization, and racism/antisemitism in the wake of some of America's deadliest shootings, as well as the implications of anachronism and letting Shakespeare "off the hook." Also, what does it mean for pedagogy when we literally ask students to "embody" Shakespeare's plays and cultural discussions?

Joining Geoff for this conversation are Jonathan Burton of Whittier College, Ambereen Dadabhoy of Harvey Mudd College, Brooke Carlson of Chaminade University, and Mary Janell Metzger of Western Washington University. Check out the episode here!


We'll be back in two weeks with another group of participants in this incredible project. In the meantime, you can watch the project here!



Please remember to share, rate, review, and subscribe! We can be found on Twitter and Facebook at humanitiesremix, and reach us via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

New Episode! Colleen Kennedy talks about her journey from the adjuncting to the Shakespeare Theater Company

                                                              Dr. Colleen Kennedy


This week, Remixing the Humanities sits down for a brief chat with Colleen Kennedy, the publicist for Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theater Company and talks about the road from academia to the "alt-ac," or, as Colleen calls it, "IRL jobs." She talks about how she tailored her job materials for a position off the tenure-track, and how she feels graduate students and humanities programs could do a better job of preparing students to work outside the academy. Additionally, she gives some advice on how graduate students can make sure that they are thinking of writing/communicating to readers of all stripes, and how cultivating a writing career outside of your dissertation or academic journals can be one of the wisest career moves you make. Also, she talks about how her new career provides something that is often lacking in academia - a work/life balance!

Check out the new episode here!

For more information on the Shakespeare Theater Company, head here!
Colleen is happy to share her experience with the curious! You can find her on Twitter at @ReadColleenK.

Please remember to share, rate, review, and subscribe! We can be found on Twitter and Facebook at humanitiesremix, and reach us via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

New Episode! We talk to Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro about race, racism, and medieval/Anglo-Saxon studies.

 Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm                                    Dr. Adam Miyashiro


Mary Rambaran-Olm and Adam Miyashiro are no strangers to discussions of race and racism in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies. Within the past few years, they helped found the organization Medievalists of Color, which aims to create a space for scholars who find themselves marginalized in a field with pernicious strains of white supremacy and Euro-exceptionalism. Mary recently drew even more attention to the matter by publicly resigning her position on the executive board of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at the second meeting of the Race Before Race symposium in Washington DC. Even now, members of the society are struggling to find a way to re-name and re-brand as a means to shed recent accusations and to ideally make the society more inclusive.

Mary and Adam join Remixing the Humanities to discuss recent developments in the field given the attention and fallout from Mary's speech at Race Before Race. We talk about what it means to have the scholarly and the public-facing conversations operating in tandem, and the dangers of "cloistering" academic inquiry within the confines of perceived prestige and rigor, as well as the real harm caused by ivory-tower gate-keeping. What cost to graduate students of color bear when they enter a field that wants them as students, but not necessarily as co-contributors? How do we push forward to make all fields of study more inclusive and welcoming? Does one need to operate within the per-existing system in order to affect change, or at what point does breaking with the norms become the catalyst for a real movement?

Please check out our new episode here!
And, as always, remember to like, share, rate and subscribe. Reach out to us on Twitter at @humanitiesremix, or via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

For more background information on Mary's speech at Race Before Race, click here.
Mary's piece for Medium can be found here.
A statement in support of Mary after her resignation can be found here.
A helpful anti-racist Twitter thread here.
More information on the long-unfolding drama of the fraught term "Anglo-Saxon" here and here.
Adam's piece on decolonizing Anglo-Saxon studies for In the Medieval Middle can be found here.

New Episode! Jenn Stewart (The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) talks about FYC and the importance of talking about diversity

                             Dr. Jenn Stewart - The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Join us this week as Devori talks with Dr. Jenn Stewart, the director of composition and assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jenn tells Devori about her research with first-year composition courses and texts that focus on issues surrounding diversity. They talk about how important it is that humanities courses provide a necessary touchstone to diversity for college students, as well as what sort of data can be derived from such initiatives to help steer humanities programs into public-facing pedagogy that helps create an informed electorate and conscientious citizens, and avoid the dreaded "indoctrination" accusation.

Check out the episode here!


As always, be sure to like, share, rate, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you're interested in talking with Remixing the Humanities, you can reach out to us on Twitter at @humanitiesremix, or via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

New Episode - Jason Farr and Travis Lau talk queer/disability studies, embodiment, and vulnerable pedagogy.

                                  Jason Farr                                                Travis Lau

On our first episode of our third season, we’re joined by Jason Farr and Travis Lau. Jason and Travis talk with us about disability/queer studies and how those areas of interest intersect with issues of embodiment. We also talk about how social media is a problematic but potentially fruitful space for public-facing engagement that moves us out of the ivory tower, and the value of collaborative work in the academy. Furthermore, we discuss how questions of disability should be influencing both our pedagogy and how we interact with one another in scholarly spaces like conferences.

Find the episode here!

Please check out Jason and Travis’s work:

Jason Farr, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/novel-bodies/9781684481071

Travis Lau, The Bone Setter from Damaged Goods Press: http://www.damagedgoodspress.com/product/2019-chaplet-series/

Jason and Travis's ASECS post on accessible conferences: https://asecsgradcaucus.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/accessibility-at-asecs-and-beyond-a-guest-post-by-dr-jason-farr-and-dr-travis-chi-wing-lau/

Please be sure to like, share, review, and subscribe. If you’re interested in talking with Remixing the Humanities or contributing a short piece to our blog https://humanitiesremix.blogspot.com/ , reach out to us on Twitter @humanitiesremix or via e-mail at humanitiesremix@gmail.com.

New Episode - Looking Forward to Season Three!

Hello, listeners!

We're back for season three of Remixing the Humanities! In this short preview episode, we tease some of our upcoming content, as well as solicit some more participants for both our "Remixing Teaching" and "Humanities from the Margins" series. If you're interested, or know someone who's really remixing humanities education in research in interesting ways, please send them our way! They can reach us on Twitter at @humanitiesremix or via email at humanitiesremix@gmail.com. Or, comment below!

We'll be back with our fascinating discussion with Jason Farr and Travis Lau in early September!

Check out the episode here!

The State of the Humanities Revisited: Toward a Public Humanities

We ended our second episode (over a year ago) with a discussion about the humanities’ digital future. Flash forward. In a recent public talk, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the 21st Century has given rise to humans as “hackable animals,” by which he means our current predisposition to allow algorithms to make our choices for us. From Netflix to Spotify, or Blue Apron to Stitch Fix, Harari surmises that we frequently give over our free will for the convenience of tailored content. The stakes of such tailoring are high (much like that of an intrusive inseam): we’ve placed too much trust in the tailor, and now we’re walking (and thinking) with a limp. More to the point: we trust algorithms more than we trust ourselves. Why not, so the logic goes, let the computers make choices for us? In effect, digitization of this sort has the potential to beget dehumanization. Or so Harari warns. 

Just to be clear, I’m not proposing that all things “digital” are the boogeyman. Rather, in the spirit of reflection, “digital” serves as a helpful interlocutor for conversations about “the humanities.” To return to Harari, the problem is not the proliferation of algorithms in contemporary culture. That ship has sailed and will likely never be returning to port. The problem is the potential for human willingness to give over our capacity to think for ourselves, turning instead to the slick comfort (some might say the apathy or indifference) of digital decidability. Let Yelp pick tonight’s dinner choice. Let Spotify choose music that I will like. Let Netflix decide what I want to watch. Let Trunk Club tell me what I should wear. Let OkCupid (or if you’re an academic, EliteSingles) pander to my need for intimacy. The peril here is the potential for scalable de-intellectualism: why bother thinking for yourself? There’s an app for that. 

Perhaps this is the true “crisis” in the humanities, or indeed the humanities’ perpetual state. The word crisis is etymologically derived from the Greek term “to decide.” As the OED can attest, crisis carries medical-pathological inflection (“the point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse”), as well as figurative meaning (“a vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point”). This medical language is telling. As Blane Greteman reminds us, Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise on melancholia places the humanities in direct contact with disease. Indeed, the humanities cause us great dis-ease (or they should). That is the whole point of the humanities. The “crisis” of the humanities is that of ever recognizing the turning-points within our cultural and historical currents in order to better navigate toward a more humane future--to choose recovery or death. 

Today, my hope is being renewed by the resurgence of a humanities whose public-facing works seek to challenge the anti-intellectualism so prominent in our culture. In this context, the famed (or perhaps infamous) Zizek vs Peterson debate comes to mind. Their exchange, “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” sold out a stadium this April. A stadium. To be more specific, Toronto’s Sony Centre, Canada’s largest sports and music venue. Such an event would suggest public interest in what we might call humanities thinking. Other (more personal) examples include ASU’s Symposium: Race Before Race and its follow up Race and Periodization: a #RaceB4Race Symposium, to be hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library this September. 

If, as we surmised at the end of our second episode, the future of the humanities will follow a digital trajectory, then this trajectory ought to leverage the potential of the digital to think with one another. Twitter, Podcasts, and YouTube all come to mind, as well as open-access digital print venues. The emphasis here lies in the potential for the digital to both create and leverage shared spaces for thought and engagement, for community building and social progress. 

On this note, I’d like to close this post with two gestures toward a public humanities. First, given the (necessary) brevity of blogging as a medium, I would encourage interested parties to explore the current issue of Profession (the MLA’s online magazine) which takes “Public Humanities” as its theme. Second, for those who are members of the Shakespeare Association of America (or those who wish to become members), I’d like to invite you to participate in our 2020 Seminar: “Public Shakespeares and New Media: Critical Approaches.” Let’s share ideas together, and, in the words of philosopher Andy Clark, work collectively “to build better worlds to think in.” 

The State of the University Revisited - A Case for Hope?

When we recorded our first episode in November 2017, we thought the natural place to start was assessing the state of the university as a whole. As relatively new graduates joining the ranks of full-time faculty at a wide variety of institutions with differing sorts of positions, we had definite opinions about how the university was holding up against the political and social environments of the early Trump administration.

Now, nearly two years later, it seems to me that the state of the university is much the same as we left it in 2017. On one hand, it's disheartening to see continued pressure put on higher educational institutions to corporatize – arguing tacitly, and sometimes verbally, that the same employment and "customer retention" models that work for Wal-Mart must work for your local community college. On one hand, the fact that the current administration has not been able to do significant damage to the university system during these two years is cause for some mild celebration. Despite proposals to do so, the education budget has not been thoroughly decimated. Financially, those who seem poised to suffer the most are college graduates who are slowly but surely being frozen out of the loan forgiveness programs that promised relief for those who worked in the public sector. Law students found themselves on the receiving ends of rejections from the PSLF program, despite meeting all published requirements. Of the first round of applicants to this program, less than 3% of applicants received their loan forgiveness, despite meeting all published requirements. Now, as it was last year, the program is on the chopping block again. Its termination seems politically unpopular, so there’s always hope that it will remain.

There are, however, cracks in the edifice that show the weight of cultural shift we’ve undergone as a community these last three-ish years. The issue over campus “free speech” is once again in the spotlight. The president recently signed an executive order purportedly guaranteeing free speech on college campuses, claiming simultaneously that conservative ideas and speakers were routinely stifled at universities. (I’ll spare readers here the old joke about indoctrination and syllabus-reading.) As a result, federal funds to universities could potentially be denied if the Department of Education feels that the university has stymied free speech by not allowing the likes of Milo Yiannopoulous or Jordan Peterson to address students. This has continued to foment distrust amongst the conservative community and university faculty and staff, the former who still believe that universities are sites of “indoctrination.” In truth, more often than not, it is student bodies, not administration or faculty, who oppose these types of speakers. Although federal funding is a significant portion of any university’s budget, we must not forget that the most significant amount of funding comes from students who will be paying for their educations for the length of a mortgage. Do they not deserve a say?

These developments aside, I can tell you as a teacher on the front lines in a very conservative state that things are perhaps not as bleak as they seem in the classroom. I teach introductory composition courses frequently, and part of our curriculum is to adapt our required “campus read” into our course structure so students will engage with it more earnestly. This year, the selection is Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (2017). I teach in a boot-straps mentality state. If I have it, it’s because I earned it. If you don’t have it, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough/deserve it. While that mentality is part-and-parcel of most conservative thinking, it is worth noting that many of my students and their parents are extraordinarily hard workers in a state with the 10^th highest rate of poverty in 2017. As they’ve entered college, many of them doing so for that ephemeral promise of a “better life,” and the costs are burdensome. They work hard for classes. Then they go home and work hard at a minimum wage job and find time for homework in between. Although my university is certainly one of the more affordable ones in the state, many will still leave with close to $40,000 in debt if they are able to graduate in four years. Our state legislature recently approved extending two years of funding, typically only available to community college students, to university students as well – so this will make a huge difference. Yet as we read through The Broken Ladder and other texts exploring types of inequality, my students did not seem the same to me as other students from conservative bastions where I had taught before. While you still find a lot of vocal support for the current administration, students are much more at ease admitting that they find the system to be “rigged.” What used to be dismissed as complaining or a lack of ingenuity is now a common parlance for the course. “I feel like it’s bad that they’re making it so only rich people can afford to go to college or become doctors and lawyers,” one student said. We talked about the systemic problems that might arise in that kind of world. What does it mean to have a doctor who’s never tried to buy groceries on $150 a month tell you that your eating choices are “unhealthy?” What would it mean to have a lawyer who never had to financially struggle represent you in a small claims dispute? What does it mean to have an upper-middle-class teacher thrust into a public school in a high-poverty district with students whose parents are at work all day and have no time to help with homework or bake sales?

 It can be depressing to recognize that while the situation isn’t starkly worse in higher education now, it seems as though we are all holding our fingers in the dam praying that things don’t get worse. There’s a mighty institutional force on the other side of that dam chipping away with budget cuts, administrators who have “bold ideas,” worshiping big data and assessment, and a general fear of the power a university can wield in capable hands. But take it from me, although we find ourselves in much the same predicament as we were two years ago, the situation on the ground seems as if it there’s an awakening happening among young college-going students. A lot of my colleagues who have been teaching for years may not see it. Complaints still abound about entitlement, laziness, ignorance, etc. Where I see significant progress, though, is that many of them show up to college with a more progressive ideology than they’re perhaps comfortable admitting. They know they’re coming into a rigged system. They’ve watched it their whole lives. And they’re starting to figure out who rigged it. And they’re starting to figure out that they need to fix it. And the state of the university now is that we need to be the ones who stop griping about what they don’t know and give them the tools to fix it – for all our sakes.