Contributing to the literature on translingual pedagogies outside the US or Canada, this article discusses the design of a hybrid instructional format for advanced multilingual doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers offered by a bilingual writing center at a mid-sized university in Germany. Meant to prepare for future careers in academia and professional demands in different national, cultural, and linguistic environments, this format gives participants the opportunity to explore academic genres that tend to receive less attention in graduate education than journal articles, book chapters, or others needed to complete degree requirements. By the end of the course, participants will have a submission-ready portfolio including an academic CV, a job letter, a (sample) letter of recommendation, and teaching and diversity statements. To achieve these specific outcomes and to develop the advanced professional academic writing competencies needed in multicultural and multilingual contexts, participants will have to draw on their diverse linguistic backgrounds and prior experiences in these kinds of settings. Informed also by other recent theoretical and empirical work on translingualism and translingual pedagogies in global contexts, this format adopts the use of translation proposed by Horner (2017) to move beyond the monolingual and, to a lesser extent, the multilingual paradigms. While it has yet to be tested empirically, the design represents an alternative to more traditional (and usually monolingual) modes of instruction. This article concludes by discussing limitations and implications of the approach to translingual pedagogies taken here.
As ecocriticism emerged as a distinct discourse in literary and cultural studies in North America and in Great Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many scholars working in this burgeoning field were compelled to reconsider the viability of contemporary critical and theoretical frameworks and tried to establish new analytical paradigms that would be appropriate for ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ (Glotfelty xviii). In a 1994 proposal for the future direction of the increasingly interdisciplinary and institutionalized field, influential first‐generation ecocritic Scott Slovic urged his peers to practice narrative scholarship, that is, to ‘tell stories,’ to ‘use narrative as a constant or intermittent strategy for literary analysis,’ to ‘[e]ncounter the world and literature together,’ and to ‘report about the conjunctions, the intersecting patterns’ (‘Ecocriticism’). Although some (eco‐)feminists and ecocritics questioned the originality of this proposal and some even pointed to the potential harm that an overtly autobiographical approach might cause in an academy highly skeptical of new referential discourses such as ecocriticism, Slovic’s ideas have nevertheless exerted considerable influence on environmental literary and cultural studies in the U.S.‐American academy. Although they do not use Slovic’s designation, prominent first‐generation ecocritics such as John Elder and Ian Marshall have published monographs that can be regarded as narrative scholarship or, more accurately, as complex composite texts that transgress the boundaries of autobiographical environmental literary scholarship and full‐fledged ‘ecobiographical’ or ‘eco‐autobiographical’ self‐representation (the terms are Cecilia Konchar Farr’s and Peter F. Perreten’s, respectively). The Canadian critic Catriona Mortimer‐Sandilands, in an article entitled ‘Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body Politic’ (2007), also fuses different modes of writing, but in contrast to Marshall and Elder, she ‘deploys queer theories of corporeal materialization (Butler), and queer histories of corporeal‐ecological abjection, toward a political account of embodiment oriented to creative opening and transgression’ (19), thereby positing a radical re‐conceptualization of human identity with profound political implications. In their textual hybrids, Mortimer‐Sandilands, Elder, and Marshall thus also explore ecological or embodied conceptions of human identity. In this respect, their narratives represent, on the one hand, distinct types of relational and academic autobiography as well as ecobiographical or eco‐autobiographical writing and, on the other hand, provocative new contributions to the long tradition of autobiographical criticism.
Located at the gradually emerging juncture between the current discourses on the global and art in ecocritical scholarship, this article explores how contemporary works of art such as EARTH Sticker (2005) by the North American artist Philip Krohn and artist residency and exhibition projects such as Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet (2008) parse, represent, and imagine the political, socioeconomic, cultural, and especially ecological implications of globalization. EARTH Sticker and two contributions to Human/Nature, the sculptures Sapukay: Cry for Help and Teko Mbarate: Struggle for Life by the Portuguese artist and current San Francisco Bay Area resident Rigo 23, present different environmental imaginaries that challenge and simultaneously rely on the material contexts and conditions on which the increasingly globalized production of art is always predicated. As Krohn and Rigo 23 demonstrate, even art that is created in an environmentalist context (Human/Nature) or with an ostensible activist purpose (EARTH Sticker) cannot escape this double bind. To identify this dilemma is not to dismiss these works of art as self-contradictory failures, but to highlight precisely Krohn’s and Rigo 23’s important insights with regard to this embedment for other global environmental imaginaries and particularly for further ecocritical analysis. Emphasizing the material and institutional conditions, current means and sites of cultural production, and technologies for the dissemination of information, these works of art thus foreground and perform what is often erased from the equation and from critical analysis.ResumenSituado en la poco a poco emergente coyuntura entre los discursos sobre lo global y sobre el arte en la ecocrítica, este artículo examina cómo trabajos de arte contemporáneo como EARTH Sticker (2005), del artista norteamericano Philip Krohn, y residencias de artistas y proyectos de exposiciones como Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet (2008) analizan, representan e imaginan las implicaciones políticas, socieconómicas, culturales y especialmente las ecológicas, de la globalización. EARTH Sticker y dos contribuciones a Human/Nature, las esculturas Sapukay: Cry for Help y Teko Mbarate: Struggle for Life del artista portugués Rigo 23, actual residente del área de la bahía de San Francisco, presentan diferentes imaginarios medioambientales que desafían y al mismo tiempo dependen de los contextos y las condiciones materiales en las que se fundamenta la producción de arte, cada vez más globalizada. Como Krohn y Rigo 23 demuestran, incluso el arte creado en un contexto medioambiental (Human/Nature) o con un propósito aparentemente activista (EARTH Sticker) no puede escapar esta coyuntura. Identificar este dilema no es desestimar estas obras de arte como fallos contradictorios, sino precisamente poner de manifiesto las importantes apreciaciones de Krohn y Rigo 23 en lo referente a esta inclusión para otros imaginarios medioambientales y en particular para un mayor análisis ecocrítico. Poniendo énfasis en las condiciones materiales e institucionales, los actuales medios y sitios de producción cultural, y las tecnologías para la difusión de información, estas obras de arte ponen de relieve y representan lo que a menudo se elimina en la ecuación y en el análisis crítico.
Book Review of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert by Catrin Gersdorf
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