Her interests lie in outcomes research in health psychology and program evaluation more broadly. Jodi has been involved in numerous small-scale research studies in Canada and the United States as well as large-scale national projects. She has been involved in STEM evaluation for the National Center for Engineering and Technology Education since May 2007.
When the last U.S. Census canvassed Slab City, a remote, self-governed community of artists, retirees, anarchists and homeless people in southern California’s desert, most of its residents claimed ownership of the plots they occupied as “free and clear.” And yet Slab City itself occupies land that is public, as firm in this designation as the resolve of those who live there. Often called the “last free place,” this square-mile plot is one of the remaining Section 36 areas, which were originally reserved for the state’s public schools when each township was laid out by the National Ordinance’s land surveys that blanketed the American West in an invisible but all-encompassing grid. Consequently, the state of California hosts an array of one-square mile pockets of land. Among these, Slab City is a camp that bears the ongoing question of how land—environmentally inhospitable yet relatively hospitable in its public status—might host practices of self-determination, self-regulated community, and national identity. Veritable blind spots of land management, Section 36 areas contrast other more regulated, though comparable, practices on public and private lands. The Bureau of Land Management oversees Long Term Visitor Areas where campers can park trailers across vast territories for extended periods of time, and Walmart plays host to cross-country travelers who overnight in its parking lots—a permutation of recreational camping known as boondocking. But what happens in the absence of oversight? In places where the campsites become permanent? In times when those living there have arrived not only by choice but also in many cases out of necessity? Legacies of a country’s organizational matrix, Section 36’s pockets of land linger as residual pieces of frontier mythologies, as testaments of the arbitrariness of the grid and its land policies, and as fertile ground for alternative practices of adapting to inhospitable environments and making home in improvised communities. This essay seeks to understand how Section 36 land hosts contemporary intersections of public space and freedom.
What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk’s poetry of memory and place. Buildings become materials for poetry, and poems become material for building. When a literary critic and an architect build on overlaps they have discovered in syllabi for American Poetry and Architecture Studio courses, their teaching collaboration becomes a sustainable maker-space for student work—and for the Humanities more generally. We found that linking a literature survey to an architectural design studio brings materiality and resourcefulness to working with poems and that interacting with the Humanities demonstrates praxis (theory + practice) from the perspective of architectural pedagogy. Our classes also engaged each other through The Repurpose Project, a community space that promotes reuse and diverts waste from the local landfill. The profusion of readily available materials at Repurpose afforded students with a rich sampling of architectural textures and languages, opening new possibilities for thinking and making. In an academic climate that groups literary studies and architecture as “not-STEM,” we designed sustainable and resilient pedagogies that go beyond problem solving. Finding the same quality of renewable resourcefulness in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we offer 13 tactics for teaching poetry as architecture.
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