Author: alexis
-
Using a “menu of options” assessment approach.
I have been experimenting with an approach to grading and feedback that I haven’t seen many other teachers doing, and a couple of people have asked for me to write it down. In the below I’m going to explain the “menu of options” approach I’m now using, and also say a bit about using pass/no…
-
Shary Boyle, Outside the Palace of Me – Virtual Spotlight Tour: Whiteness
(this was an access copy for a conversation about this work, Thursday, May 12, 1 – 2pm EST) On the stage of this show, but also in our lives, we enact different roles; our expressive intent does not control the interpretive uptake we might receive. Thus talking about something like whiteness invites us to dwell…
-
Ethical orientations toward repair in climate change
Hamburg, 21 April 2022 (this was the access copy for the live version of this talk) Jesuit priest, pacifist, and anti-nuclear activist Danial Berrigan once gave a famously short convocation speech at a New York high school. He came on stage and said only: “Know where you stand and stand there.” I’m interested in both…
-
Claiming bad kin (the published version)
A couple of people have asked for the actual final copy of this piece – it came out in this great broadsheet published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, available in a pdf in an issue called “Bearing.” I’m revising it for the book I’m working on, but of course that takes…
-
Solidarity Against Straightness – access copy
University of Hamburg, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Philosophisches Seminar November 22, 2021 My core argument in this piece is: We should be in solidarity against straightness. I want to be on the side of straight people, against straightness as norm, institution, and system. While my own political orientation remains toward queerness of many sorts, I’ve come to…
-
Porkopolis and The Secret Life of Groceries
There’s this ascendent form of writing showing up everywhere from self-improvement books to books about how complicated things are: Start with a story of a person, could be a person from history, could be someone who came to your workshop, could be someone who stands in as the exemplar of a situation too big and…
-
Choose your fighter
Writing advice! I have given so much of it. As part of a general feeling of not knowing what the fuck I’m doing, I’ve been revisiting giving advice at all. In particular, I’ve been wondering if it’s ever good to give writing advice. This is because it is literally my job to teach people to…
-
Getting traction as writers
This exercise is interested in the difference between what we academic writers need to get traction in order to write and what our readers need to have traction in their reading of our writing. The joke about all undergrad papers starting with the phrase “Since the beginning of time, humans have…” is about the disjuncture…
-
Getting it together as race traitors
“Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.” (Ursula Le Guin) White people in North America don’t know what racism is – how it feels, what it does to Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s lives, what it means to live entire lives…
-
One Hundred Words, Three Sentences
This is an editing exercise, using the power of constraint to liberate some creativity but also as a diagnostic to see what long sentences might be trying to tell us. Start by finding a long sentence in something you’ve written – usually longer than 60 or 70 words. Break that sentence into exactly three sentences…