twitter – Page 7

Twitter and Feminist Pedagogy

Note: The following is a sample class discussion on feminist pedagogy, digital literacy and twitter. The purpose of this discussion is to generate a feminist curiosity about feminist digital literacy and twitter and to get students thinking critically about social media in the classroom.

To tweet or not to tweet…that is not the question.

Consider the following passage from Academic Hack in their entry, “On What it Would Mean to Really Teach ‘Naked”:

Teaching without digital technology is an irresponsible pedagogy. Why? The future is digital, love it or hate it. We can argue later about whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. (Hint: the answer is both.) But to educate students, or to attempt to educate students without developing their digital literacy is to leave them ill prepared for their futures. Eliminating technology produces not the affect [sic] of a more engaged literate student populous, rather it produces the reverse, an ill informed, uncritical, unengaged student populous who will become at the very best passive consumers of the technology being resisted, and at the worst its willing victims.

I want to take AcademicHack’s claim seriously (not necessarily to agree, but to take it seriously by critically engaging with it) and think about the importance of digital literacy in terms of feminist pedagogy and practicing and theorizing about twitter. How can/should feminist educators discuss digital literacy in relation to twitter? What sorts of conversations should we/they have and what practices should we/they engage in order to develop feminist digital literacy?

Twitter Basics

Before moving into a discussion of twitter and feminist digital literacy, I want to offer up some twitter basics.

1. What is twitter? According to the official about twitter site:

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

At the heart of Twitter are small bursts of information called Tweets. Each Tweet is 140 characters in length, but don’t let the small size fool you—you can share a lot with a little space. Connected to each Tweet is a rich details pane that provides additional information, deeper context and embedded media. You can tell your story within your Tweet, or you can think of a Tweet as the headline, and use the details pane to tell the rest with photos, videos and other media content. See it in action.

2. How does twitter work? Here are just a few basics. If you want more, check out: twitter basics, How to Start Tweeting (and Why You Might Want To), and this twitter cheat sheet

disclaimer: People/organizations are using twitter in all sorts of ways that I haven’t even begun to imagine–especially since I just started experimenting on twitter this past August. My discussion merely touches upon some basic ways that twitter logic works.

Brief posts (called tweets) are limited to 140 characters or less
Post updates about what you’re doing, thinking, reading
Share others’ ideas by retweeting (RT) their posts
Create lists of people on twitter, organized under a topic (e.g.: class list)
Use hashtags (#) to tag post as related to a particular topic (e.g.: #fp2010)
Reply directly to other twitter accounts (tweeps/tweeple?) or mention them in your tweets by including @ + their twitter name in your tweet.
Tweets are posted in “real time” with most recent tweets at the top–the twitter timeline
Tweets often include links to blog posts or pictures (twitpics).
Other people can find you and follow your twitter timeline. You can also follow them.

3. How is twitter different from facebook?

Twitter is a public site. There is not an expectation of privacy.
People who read your tweets are your followers, not friends.
Twitter has a 140 character limit.
Twitter relies on crowdsourcing and how it is used is driven more by how people are using it and experimenting with it. Example: hashtags

Here’s a helpful youtube video that explains a key purpose of twitter: “real life happens between blog posts and emails. And now there’s a way to share”

Uses of twitter in the classroom

If we have time, we can return to this discussion. For now, here’s just a few ways I’m using it for research and teaching:

live-tweeting class (tweeting comments/summaries of what is being said in class as it is being said)
live-tweeting class readings (tweeting passages from and questions about the text as I read it)
answering questions tweeted by class members
posting announcements
posting questions/queries to the class
sharing links to relevant sources
live-tweeting extra office hours (haven’t tried this one yet)
experimenting with different accounts (tweet as class administrator + tweet as myself: undisciplined)

Here are some more ideas from AcademicHack. Also, some reflections on the art of the tweet. Also, check out my three twitter accounts: qued2010, femped2010, undisciplined

Discussion: Twitter, authenticity, lived experience, and daily habits

We could talk about the limits and possibilities of twitter in many different ways in relation to feminism and feminist pedagogies. For example, how does twitter work for (and/or against) activism? Lots of folks are critically reflecting on this question. Check out Malcolm Gladwell’s article about twitter and “Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” Over at DigiActive, they put together a guide to Twitter for Activism. And Ronak Ghorbani offers up a series of podcasts + analysis on tweeting feminists.

We could also talk about how twitter works in encouraging back channel conversations in classrooms (during lectures and discussions) and in conferences. We could discuss this in relation to class distractions and the need for paying and shifting attention. Check out “Designing Choreographies for Attention” for more. Sample Reality offers up an interesting take on the value of “snark” (or, sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or the instructor’s teaching). In terms of using twitter for conference conversations, check out how it was used in the 2010 NWSA conference (they had the live feed on their website).

While these are all great conversations to have (and ones we could continue on this blog), I want to focus on one other way in which to discuss twitter and feminist digital literacy: authenticity, lived experience, and daily habits.

My focus on authenticity, lived experience and daily habits is partly inspired by Berenice Malka Fisher and her claim, in No Angel in the Classroom, that we “try to bring our most authentic [read: complicated, uncertain, multiple, honest] selves” into the classroom (51). Can we achieve authenticity through the documenting of our lived experience? Through the repeated archiving and sharing of our daily habits? Can we “authentically” connect with others through our engagement with their tweets? What are the limits and possibilities of this archiving/documentation/sharing/engagement?

The following represent two different “moments” related to twitter and the above questions:

Moment One: I tweet, therefore I am, but if I don’t tweet it, did it happen?

Two related events:

a. Peggy Orenstein is sitting with her daughter in her front yard, enjoying the beautiful weather and listening to a download of E.B. White reading “The Trumpet of the Swan.” Instead of “being fully present in the moment,” she reflects on how best to capture the experience with a tweet. She wonders: “when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?” And concludes: “The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.”

Does tweeting “alienate us from our own humanity”?
What sort of authentic expressions are possible via twitter?
Is authenticity counter to/in conflict with performativity/performance?
How does twitter work differently for different bodies and different expressions?
Can we use twitter to express (and value) our lived experiences?
What are the problems and possibilities of expressing/relying on/invoking lived experiences?
In a youtube video about twitter it is suggested that twitter is concerned with documenting “the real life that happens between blog posts and emails.” What value do you see in expressing and documenting these aspects of real life?

b. BIll Nye (the Science guy) is giving a lecture at USC. Suddenly he falls to the floor. Instead of rushing to his aid, it appears that students quickly whip out their smart phones and begin tweeting about the event. The Lookout, a Yahoo news blog, describes it as an example of “civic indifference” and “youthful digital passivity.” The Lookout article links this event with what it describes as “an even more disturbing” example of civic indifference: the posting of images online, in real time, of the shooting and death of “Messy Mya,” a New Orleans comedian and youtube sensation. The Lookout article makes the rounds on facebook, possibly serving as further evidence of the evils of social media.

Do social media like twitter encourage “civic indifference” and “youthful digital passivity”? How?
Are there other ways than “youthful digital passivity” to read what was happening with the posting of the image of Messy Mya’s death? How do the events (and the bodies of the “victims”) differ in these two cases? Are these differences important in thinking critically about how twitter works and what it does (or what we can do with it)?
(How) does tweeting an event make it more “real”? Does this type of “realness” = authenticity and truth?

Moment Two: Following others’ tweets and the limits of sharing

Joel Johnson writes a blog entry entitled, “Why I Stalk a Sexy Black Woman on Twitter (and why you should too)” for gizmodo. He encourages readers to follow someone on twitter that they wouldn’t encounter in everyday life. In a follow-up post, largely written to respond to intensely negative reaction to his initial post, Johnson writes:

You’ve been on Twitter, haven’t you, @shani_o? It’s a website where people post things they choose to display to the public, including—unless one has a perfect follower-to-follows ratio or a private account—several people you don’t know at all who choose to pay attention to your life, your thoughts, and whatever else you choose to share. Rather than worry that I might be viewed as a sociopath for using Twitter exactly in the way for which it was designed, I choose to instead be excited about all the new people and perspectives that are right at my eyeballs’ fingertips. But that doesn’t mean I want—or am even capable of—becoming fast friends with every single person I observe (or read, or watch, or whatever) on the internet. No one really wants that—except for creepy people.

How are the expressions of our lived experiences valued and/or devalued when presented in twitter-logic (with 140 characters + random followers + the impulse to be witty and “cute” and quick)?
What happens when our authentic/crafted/performed tweets are taken up by others?
What are the dangers and limits of tweeting?
Is Twitter designed in order to “other” people? Does it encourage us to pay attention to each other in ways that are objectifying and oppressive? Can we imagine sharing and expression of self in ways outside of this model? Does twitter allow for that?

A few final questions: Is twitter fundamentally flawed? Is it possible to use it subversively and disobediently (in ways that it was never intended) in order to further our feminist goals? How might we use it in tandem with other methods (a both/and instead of either/or model)? What important conversations about twitter should we have inside and outside of our feminist classrooms?

Resources Round-up

I am always using this blog as a space for experimenting with new ways to archive my research (and to document who I am as a scholar, thinker, teacher, troublemaker). Sometimes these experiments work and sometimes they don’t. Here’s another one to add to the pile: Resources round-up. In this (type of) entry, I want to archive some resources (mostly articles, but some blogs) that I found and started reading this week. Hopefully, I can return to these resources later for future syllabi, articles, and/or blog entries. Perhaps if I become disciplined about it (ha ha! Even though I embrace being undisciplined, I still see value in developing specific sets of repeated practices–habits–on the blog. In fact, habitual writing is one thing that I really like about blogging.), I could do one of these resources round-ups every (other?) week? Possibly. But before I get ahead of myself, I need to write the first of these round-ups.

1. The Ethics of Waste
by Gay Hawkins

I have already started writing about this book on Unchained, a diablog that I started with my partner this summer (and haven’t written in since the beginning of August when the s**t hit the fan and I had to start working on multiple syllabi and finish up an article on feminist pedagogy and blogging). Originally I picked up this book in late August; I briefly thought about using it in my queering desire class in tandem with other sources on the abject. I imagine (but I can’t remember) that I was also intrigued by the author’s reading of waste through/in relation to ethics and daily practices. Now that I have read the introduction and first chapter, I am considering using it in my queer ethics class. Still not sure.

2.Developing a corporeal cyberfeminism: beyond cyberutopia
by Jessica E. Brophy

I haven’t read any of this article yet. Here’s the abstract:

This article discusses – and rejects – cyberutopia, an idealized theory of internet use that requires users to leave their bodies behind when online.The author instead calls for a cyberfeminist perspective in relation to studying the internet and other new media, centrally locating corporeality and embodiment. The underutilized concept of intra-agency is then employed to develop liminality in relation to the experience of going online.The author then outlines different versions of cyberfeminism and endorses that which addresses the relationships between the lived experiences of users and the technology itself.The article concludes with a call for theorists to expand and enrich the concepts used to study new media.

After a quick glance at the bibliography (which looks really helpful) and a skim through the article, I am convinced that this essay is a good one to revisit. The author hits on a lot of my areas of interest (including agency, Butler, performativity, liminality) and offers a good overview of cyberfeminism in relation to cybertopia.

3.DIGITAL WHITENESS, PRIMITIVE BLACKNESS: Racializing the “digital divide” in film and new media
by Janell Hobson

I am excited about this essay because of the author’s approach to thinking about the digital divide. While I recognize that access to technology (who has computers/who can get online) is a very important issue that needs to be addressed repeatedly, I worry about how “the digital divide” can be used to shut down any discussion about the transgressive and transformative potential of social media and Web 2.0 technology. I also worry about how discourses surrounding this divide work to reinforce certain binaries and ignore/erase experiences that don’t fit the binary–Hobson talks about this in relation to whiteness as progress/technological advancement and blackness as primitive. Here’s the abstract:

This essay argues that cultural scripts, such as popular films and other forms of visual culture, have constructed a racial ideology about technology, especially in conceptualizations of the “digital divide.” By associating whiteness with “progress,” “technology,” and “civilization,” while situating blackness within a discourse of “nature,” “primitivism,” and pre-modernity, the digital divide amasses cultural and racial weight and highlights hostile interactions with digital technology among marginal groups. However, a growing corpus of work by digital artists of color and web 2.0 participants has exposed these mythic constructions by re-imagining blackness and womanhood beyond technological exclusion and surveillance.

Here’s another excerpt in which Hobson provides a concrete overview of the essay:

In what remains, I first delve into the history of the technological divide between whiteness and blackness, as reflected in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world fairs and mid-twentieth-century films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, prior to assessing contemporary themes of race and technological surveillance in the late-twentieth century science fiction films The Matrix and Strange Days. I then connect these cinematic representations to the work of black artists, such as Keith Piper, Julie Dash, and Damali Ayo, who underscore the black presence in the realm of digital technology. Finally, I conclude by ruminating on whether or not social “revolutions” for racial equality and inclusion can, in fact, be “digitized” (114).

I’m excited to read this essay; I imagine it will provide me with some useful ways for thinking beyond/outside of a narrow vision of the “digital divide.” Here’s one more passage that seems helpful in complicating the “digital divide”:

As these artistic models suggest, the “digital divide” is less about “access” and more about the technological dominance of a privileged few with global repercussions that threaten all of us, especially now that we have become so closely connected in the information superhighway. Marginalized groups, in particular, feel the impact of the high-tech age in profoundly personal and political ways. However, they are not just acted upon by technology; they have a creative and dynamic role in shaping our digital culture (122).

I really appreciate how Hobson envision agency here: marginalized groups are acted on by technology, but they also negotiate/resist/transform it.

Okay, these aren’t the only sources that I found this week. Because I am running out of energy and time, I will list a few more sources that I reviewed this week without any commentary:

4. Commentary and Criticism on Social Media and Intimacy

This commentary on Feminist Media Studies provides a series of mini-essays, including: “The New Architectures of Intimacy? Social networking sites and genders” by Usha Zacharias and Jane Arthurs and “This is not a Blog: Gender, intimacy, and community” by Catherine Driscoll.

5. The Digi-active Guide to Activism for Twitter and The Digi-active Guide to Activism for Facebook

In addition to these two guides, the Digi-active website is filled with information about digital activism, including this youtube video:

Also, check out their mission statement. I might use this in future classes. Maybe a class on digital activism–the possibilities and limits of thinking, acting and reflecting online (and, in tandem with offline)?

Live-tweeting class: an experiment

As I have mentioned before, I am experimenting with twitter this semester. In both of my classes (qued2010, femped2010), students are required to use it for various assignments and I am using it to communicate with class. Over the past month, several of my students in feminist pedagogies have live-tweeted class as a way to take notes for our discussion (I suggested it as an option for their note-taking assignment). Because I always like to try the experimental assignments that I suggest to my students (for lots of reasons, such as: I need to be willing to take the same risks that I expect my students to take and I want to make sure that the experiments that I come up with our actually doable), I decided to live-tweet my queering desire class yesterday. I’m really glad that I did. Here are some reflections on the process–I will include a transcript of my tweets after the jump).

Background: The class usually has 25+ students in attendance. It is an upper Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies course that is cross-listed as a mid-level GLBT Studies course. Blogging and tweeting are central to the class. Yesterday’s class was devoted to a discussion lead by a student group (part of their diablog assignment). We were talking about James Kincaid’s essay “Producing Erotic Children” in Curiouser. Because I was not responsible for leading class, I thought it was a good opportunity to try out live-tweeting. Instead of tweeting as the class administrator (qued2010), I tweeted as myself (undiscplined)

Some Thoughts:

1. I enjoyed it, but found it to be difficult. At first, I was a little scared. Documenting what students are saying in class is a big responsibility–what if I miss an important point or exclude student voices? It is also stressful because of the pressure to quickly post ideas in a very limited number of words.

2. It’s a helpful way to document the process of class discussion. There are all sorts of ways that I could imagine live-tweeting a class. You could tweet main points or offer up your own commentary on the discussion. You could limit the number of tweets in order to have time to (quickly) process the ideas being discussed. In my live-tweet I tried a different approach: my goal was to try and tweet as much of what was being said as I could. This meant I did a lot of tweets and that I didn’t spend much time trying to process/reflect on the discussion. The benefit of this approach is that I was able to document a lot of our discussion. The limitation of this approach is that I was not able to reflect (or engage) as much as I would have liked. I just counted the tweets: I did 52 for the hour of class. That’s a lot for me, especially considering that I had only done about 140 tweets total prior to class. This experience makes me want to tweet a lot more; it seems to be central to the twitter experience.

3. Does this encourage active listening? Yes and no. In my feminist pedagogies class the concept of active (sometimes non-judgmental) listening has come up a lot in our discussion. Berenice Fisher focuses on it in No Angel in the Classroom. AnaLouise Keating promotes it in Teaching Transformation. And Alejandra C. Elenes reflects on it in “Transformando Fronteras. Chicana Feminist Transformative Pedagogies.” I imagine active listening to involve attempting to really hear/understand what others are saying. It requires that we don’t rush to interject with our opinions or judgements, but that we sit back and let others speak. In most basic terms, it requires that we stop talking and start listening. Live-tweeting helps facilitate the “stop talking” part of active listening. When you are trying to document what everyone else is saying quickly and succinctly, you really don’t have time to offer up your own opinions (I suppose you could through your tweets–I didn’t). In my experience yesterday, I didn’t talk at all (okay, I think I talked once); I was too busy trying to type up what people are saying. So, because live-tweeting encouraged me to stop talking and to really listen to what students were saying so that I could accurately document it, I think live-tweeting encourages active listening. However, even as my live tweeting experience was encouraging me to listen closely, it wasn’t always encouraging me to listen deeply. As I mentioned above in #2, it is difficult to process and engage with class ideas when you are trying so hard to document those ideas–especially when students are so excited to talk that they are (almost) cutting each other off in order to express their thoughts on the reading/topic. At one point during the discussion I briefly thought, “Wow, I hope they don’t ask me to say anything; I can’t image what I could contribute to the discussion!” Also, I wasn’t really engaging with the students. In addition to not speaking, I didn’t offer up any non-verbal expressions either–no head-shaking affirmations or looks of confusion (or whatever other gestures I usually do–not sure what those are…I wonder if students would be willing to point them out?). As a result, I felt distanced from the class; even as I was listening, I wasn’t really there. Is that always a bad thing, I wonder? Maybe my role as the instructor should (at least sometimes) be to step back and let them talk and work through the issues. I want to keep thinking about this idea of active listening and how it works.

4. I want to experiment with how to interject more brief reflections on the class as I am tweeting. In the midst of tweeting about what was being said yesterday, I offered the following observations:

It might be helpful to add in more observations like these in the hopes that students will reply with thoughts (maybe during class–that could be hard–or after class, when they are reading through the live-tweet). As I wrote this last sentence, I thought of something else that I would like to reflect on as I think about how/when to use live-tweeting: Should I have the twitter feed projected on the screen as I am tweeting? Would that allow for more students to participate in the discussion as we are discussing? When does this become too distracting? Does it take away too much from the in-class engagement? Is it more productive to offer up the feed after class–to help continue the discussion online?

5. Some quick suggestions: I have spent almost an hour writing this post and I am running out of steam; it’s time to offer up some sort of conclusion. Here’s mine–in the form of a few brief tips/thoughts:

I think more practice will allow for better live-tweeting. I need to get used to how to tweet, how to think quickly, and how to step back, while still engaging in the class.
Next time, I want to have a list of everyone’s aliases with me. Ideally I want to do what my students in my fem ped class did: I want to put in the students twitter names (I want to “mention them”–with @) as I discuss their ideas. By mentioning them, I make it easier for them to read and respond to how I documented their words (they can reply to me with corrections, clarifications, reflections). I was only able to do this with a couple of students (I must admit that I did know more of the aliases, but felt overwhelmed by trying to type in some of the longer or more complicated ones. Here’s another good tip: encourage students to put in really short and easy to remember aliases!).
Make sure to tell students that you are live-tweeting the class. I didn’t and I think it lead to some confusion and frustration with my lack of engagement in discussion. In the quick de-briefing at the end of class one student exclaimed, “I looked over and saw you on your computer all of the time and I thought, ‘She better not be on facebook while I’m trying to lead discussion!'”

Okay, I am sure that I have plenty more to write about this experiment, but I need to stop now. I plan to post parts of this entry on all of my different blogs, including my queering desire class (I’m writing it initially on my trouble blog). I hope that my students in queering desire will comment on this entry with their reactions to the experiment and their thoughts on what I did/didn’t document about discussion.

The entire twitter feed is after the jump. To read it in chronological order, go from top to bottom.

Continue reading Live-tweeting class: an experiment

The undisciplined self via twitter

…and my 150th post! My pace of writing on this blog has definitely slowed down this past year; actively writing on four different blogs + other writing projects + teacher prep = less entries on each blog. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily…the great work that I started on this blog has inspired me to keep pushing and experimenting in my thinking, writing and teaching. This has necessarily led me to push beyond and outside the limits of this particular cyberspace.

Anyway, ever since I started thinking about using twitter in the classroom this summer, I have wondered what sort of self is performed/produced/crafted on twitter. This question became even more intriguing after I read Peggy Orenstein’s essay, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am”–particularly this passage:

The fun of Twitter and, I suspect, its draw for millions of people, is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression. I enjoy those things myself. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy? The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.

Shortly after this essay appeared on NY Times, I raised some questions about it on It’s Diablogical:

1. What is the relationship between authenticity and performativity? Is the performed (crafted) self necessarily a “packaged” self? Why can’t that self be seen as authentic?

2. Is tweeting (and blogging for that matter) only about confessing/documenting/making public the “excruciating minutia of our lives” (as Elaine on Seinfeld once uttered) or our unfiltered thoughts on anything and everything? How else are people using twitter and blogs to express their ideas/feelings and to reflect on life?

3. It seems to me that Orenstein is reinforcing a rigid boundary between I/you here. The stories we create and the accounts that we construct about ourselves are always in response/in relation to others. Accessing my “authentic” self (whatever that means) is always only done in relation to others (my favorite, JButler, has a lot to say about this in terms of vulnerability, giving an account of oneself and grief). Oh and Maria Lugones has some great things to say about selves-in-relation in an essay on theorizing about the streetwalker.

Now I admit that the intense popularity of twitter has provided lots of folks with a platform for spouting seemingly superficial snippets of their life (like what they had for lunch–is this superficial? not always), where they are encouraged to be as cute as possible and to re-imagine those they connect with online not as friends or dialogue partners but as followers (cult of personality anyone?). I’m sure that happens…a lot. But, it’s not all that happens on twitter. Twitter is used many different creative ways: for teaching, coalition-building, activism, outreach, curation, consciousness-raising and deliberately (and not so deliberating) crafting versions of the authentic self–or maybe selves who expresses themselves authentically? While there are lots of ways I would love to talk about twitter (many of those ways are very critical of the limits of it for teaching and troublemaking), I want to focus on this last point: people are using twitter to craft an authentic self…or a self who generates authentic expressions.

This is a big topic that will take more than one entry (even a ridiculously long one) to discuss. In fact, I have already started (and planned for) this conversation. Earlier in the semester, I raised the question of authenticity in relation to twitter/social media in both of my classes. And we will be explicitly discussing it in my feminist pedagogies class during our twitter week: Feminist Pedagogy and Twitter: Lived Experience, Daily Habits and Authenticity. Fun, huh? Since this is such a big topic, I want to use this blog entry as a space to begin my own reflection (theoretically/concretely) on the authentic self via twitter.

I have three different twitter accounts–two of them are for my twitter adminstrator/teacher self (femped2010, qued2010) and one is for my writer/thinker/learner/troublemaker self (undisciplined). In this entry, I want to focus some attention on what kind of self I am crafting via my tweets as undisciplined. The more I use the name undisciplined, the more I like it. I came up with it this summer, when I decided to make my twitter account tie in directly with my trouble blog (my original twitter account was named puotsy–a high school nickname–and consisted of two or three somewhat idiotic tweets posted way back in 2008). Every variation on trouble/troublemaker was already taken. I thought about using disciplinary problem (which I might like better because it seems to speak even more to my relationship to discipline: it’s not so much that I am undisciplined; I just like to always be a problem for discipline/s), but it was a lot of characters and I had been warned (by STA, of course) that if I used too many characters nobody would ever want to reply to me. So I settled on undisciplined. I must also add that undisciplined seems to be highly ironic since one of my main areas of interests is virtue ethics, which relies heavily on the idea that virtue is worked for through consistent (disciplined?) practice of virtuous habits. Ha! I do have more to say on that…but later.

I like the name undisciplined because it speaks to the role I aim to play (and the role that I usually can’t help playing) in academic/intellectual/teaching-learning spaces. As an intellectual, I am undisciplined; my PhD is in the interdisciplinary/anti-disciplinary field of women’s studies. While I have a strong background in religion and philosophy, my research has always been on the fringes of those fields. I often deliberately position myself as an outsider who tries to avoid definitions and fixing ideas in rigid and restrictive ways. And I always try to bring many disciplines, discourses, methods together in unconventional ways in my own thinking and writing. As a professional academic, I bristle at the notion of being rigorous (another definition of discipline), not because I don’t promote or practice serious engagement but because the call for rigor or the claim that one is not rigorous enough often seem to be used to dismiss ideas/theories/intellectual labor that is serious and smart and deep, but that doesn’t fit the standard of what is/who can be rigorous. (Addendum from 1.6.10: I just happened across this great post from the Crunk Feminist Collective that critically interrogates the call for rigor from within women’s studies.) I also like to question and expand what counts as intellectual labor and who and what it should be for–should research be motivated by a drive to know and be known? As a teacher, I constantly strive to unsettle my students and myself; I don’t give many answers, but focus on raising lots of questions. I try to rarely inhabit the role of “expert”. And I work to cultivate classrooms where students learn the value of not knowing and uncertainty and where they feel encouraged to break boundaries and claim their own education.

Here are a few tweets that I have posted in the past few months. They are part of my process of articulating who I am as a troublemaker and a troublestayer. While I have been engaged in this process of articulation for some time now, ever since I started my trouble blog in May 2009, these tweets enable to me to present a self-in-process that is more deliberately (than my trouble blog self) crafted in relation to some specific others. Is this a good or bad? More on that in a minute. But, first, the tweet images (is it possible to embed tweets in an entry?):

And, here’s the twitpic image to go along with this:

I think that I could write several entries about the differences between a pedagogical approach that begins with/encourages “Why?” and one that begins (and ends?) with because.

As I looked over my tweet feed (all 120 of them–which is not much at all, I know), I realized something. I don’t think I am nearly as funny and playful in my tweets as I am (or at least, I used to be) on my blog. Why is that? Is my lack of playfulness partly because I know that all of my students will be reading my twitter feed (it shows up on our class list)? Am I trying to be too professional on undisciplined and is that (not) authentic? For example, I usually like to make lots of random connections between readings and pop culture–where is that on my tweets? What sources am I drawing on to legitimize/authenticate my undisciplined self? How am I policing myself through my tweets? How can I use my tweets to present (more) authentic moments?

In a future entry about tweeting and being authentically (?) u/Undisciplined, I hope to reflect on these questions. Maybe I will ask some more questions too (because that’s what I do), like these: What is the value of being authentic? What does it mean to be authentic? Can we access (some of) our authentic selves? What’s the difference between authenticity and accountability (as in, J Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself)?

In the spirit of ending this blog post in an Undisciplined way, I want to offer up this fabulous Halloween video (via @madisonvo):

Tag: twitter

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