English Faculty Research and Publications

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Open Access
Slow Violence and Water Racism in Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri
(2018-11-01) Madan, Anuja; amadan
This paper claims that Sarnath Banerjee destabilizes the narrative of national economic progress in his graphic narrative All Quiet in Vikaspuri by highlighting ecological crises and destruction of communities in India. The graphic narrative makes visible the slow violence of ecological destruction and mass displacement triggered by neoliberalism. It shows that the sharp inequality in access to water in Delhi entails a denial of hydraulic citizenship to refugees and the poor. The only solution to this crisis, the text suggests, is water democracy and resistance against neoliberal monopolies. The working-class hero’s alliance with erstwhile water criminals – one which transcends ethnicity and class – is illustrative of how social justice may be achieved. However, I argue that the underrepresentation of women in the graphic narrative is a significant limitation of the text, especially since it inadvertently perpetuates the invisibility of women prevalent in development models.
Open Access
Language, literacy, and social change in Mongolia : traditionalist, socialist, and post-socialist identities
Marzluf, Phillip P.; marzluf
Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia is the first full-length treatment of literacy in Mongolian. Challenging readers’ assumptions about Central Asia and Mongolia, this book focuses on Mongolians’ experiences with reading and writing throughout the past 100 years. Literacy, as a powerful historical and social variable, shows readers how reading and writing have shaped the lives of Mongolians and, at the same time, how reading and writing have been transformed by historical, political, economic, and other social forces.
Open Access
The pastoral home school: rural, vernacular and grassroots literacies in early Soviet Mongolia
(2014-12-20) Marzluf, Phillip P.; marzluf
Literacy before and after the 1921 People's Revolution in Mongolia has been largely represented by socialist historiography and post-socialist urban perspectives, which have rendered unofficial and non-pragmatic literacies invisible. This study explores rural, vernacular and grassroots literacy theories to recontextualize the pre-revolutionary category of Mongolian home schooling and to offer a new perspective – pastoral literacy – which enables historians and other researchers of Central Asia to represent the literacy practices of non-urban semi-nomads more accurately and vividly. This study applies the pastoral literacy perspective to literacy narratives extracted from University of Cambridge Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia interviews and demonstrates that pastoral home schooling was a socially and culturally salient domain for acculturating young Mongolians into the 1960s. Mongolian pastoral home schooling consisted largely of personal, male teacher–student relationships, authoritative teaching models, alphabet-based curricula, as well as texts and materials adapted from dominant religious and state literacies.
Open Access
Common Book Selection: Game of Thrones Edition
(2018-02-10) Coleman, Tara L.; Vaughan, Mariya; tcole2; mbjv
Selecting a common book can feel like a battle for the Iron Throne. To ensure that our book isn't chosen by the faction with the biggest dragon (power) or biggest cache of gold (resources), we employ various strategies to ensure the rightful heir is crowned the ruler of Westeros (K-State). This session provides an insight into the committee selection, data collection processes, and qualitative coding used to determine the final book. We'll share specific strategies that have helped us keep our selection process equitable while validating our claim to the throne and avoiding tyrant kings.
Open Access
What's the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare?
(2018-11-20) Hedrick, Donald; hedrick; Hedrick, Donald
To judge by its cover, this book is a mess — a deliberately instructive one. Its visuals combine an eroded font as well as an ink-splattered Shakespeare signature and an Etch A Sketch incongruously displaying Shakespeare’s Chandos portrait. The media mix embodies the authors’ provocative approach: Shakespeare as “multimedia archive” — Latour’s “iconoclash” of time-spanning formats in material “substrates” of texts, media, and human “wetware.” The Folio’s “media launch” by Shakespeare’s friends cannily initiated a fetish community around the “strategically imperfect” object’s gaps, urging us to read “him” — book and man composite “bio-bibilion” — “again and again.” The “worst” becomes not reading him, the condition defining the “unreadable” spaces made visible in adaptations. The study deconstructs dazzlingly, drawing readers into the brilliant, imitative high spirits of the authors’ animated, collaborative anonymity; their playful preface even occludes which coauthor speaks. Chapter transitions imitate radio or telephone: Hamlet’s ends with a “call coming through” from the next chapter’s Juliet (45). Their introduction highlights foundational scholarship for their project: McCleod on unediting; de Grazia undoing Hamlet’s post-romantic rebranding; Middleton’s authorship now altering Shakespeare’s “gravitational field”; Stallybrass’s and Lesser’s recovery of reading for sententiae, so that Hamlet was “never read”; Eagleton’s apocalyptic “worst” — that Shakespeare must be destroyed before becoming readable again.
Open Access
Archiving (for) the Future: Creating First-Year Experience Programs Digital Archives
(2017-02-11) Coleman, Tara L.; Eiselein, Gregory; Vaughan, Mariya; tcole2; eiselei; mbjv
K-State First is often contacted by schools interested in creating a first-year experience program. Between outside requests and internal needs, we decided to establish an archive in Kansas State University's institutional repository. We store, preserve, and showcase our work creating and maintaining our program in this archive. This session will provide an overview of how FYE programs can create their own digital archives documenting their programs' histories and successes. We will share concrete examples of K-State's decisions, the process of creating our Digital FYE archive, and we will provide recommendations for programs wanting to create their own archives.
Open Access
Religion in U.S. writing classes: Challenging the conflict narrative
(Universiteit Antwerpen, 2011-02-01) Marzluf, Phillip P.; marzulf
In the United States, composition researchers have consistently depicted First-Year Composition (FYC) teachers' responses to students' faith-based writing in terms of a conflict narrative. According to Goodburn (1998), Lindholm (2000), Perkins (2001), and Vander Lei and Fitzgerald (2007), FYC teachers hold strict secular expectations and reject the religious identity and expression of their fundamentalist Christian students. This study explores this conflict narrative by analyzing how 24 FYC teachers in the Midwestern United States describe their own religious identities as well as those of their institutions and respond to two faith-based student texts. The study results challenge simplistic depictions of the conflict narrative. The religious affiliations of the FYC teachers coincide with national averages and neither relate to how teachers described the religious environment of their institutions nor the grades the teachers gave the faith-based texts. Furthermore, rhetorical variables such as genre and audience awareness affect teachers' responses to faith-based writing. Composition researchers, this study concludes, need to complicate how they depict situations in which students express their religious identity within secular post-secondary institutions.
Open Access
Literacy Under Authority: The Mongolian Cultural Campaigns
(Cambridge Jouornals, 2016-12-06) Marzluf, Phillip P.; marzluf
In the twentieth century, authoritarian states throughout Asia mobilized mass populations to adopt modern subjectivities and national identities. Literacy campaigns and the development of formal education systems were key strategies in shaping these subjectivities and identities, a social process that continues to have enormous material, affective, behavioral, and epistemological ramifications, even long after the eclipse of the authoritarian governments themselves. To contribute more to the understanding about how these massive social projects coerced and persuaded nonurban, pastoral, and semi-nomadic populations, this article explores the 1950s and 1960s Cultural Campaigns in the socialist Mongolian People's Republic (1924–90), which emphasized hygiene, health, literacy, and ideology. Oral history accounts document how the socialist Mongolian state infiltrated the private spaces of Mongolians and shaped their attitudes toward reading and writing and other desirable social goals. Additionally, these accounts suggest ways that pastoral Mongolians subtly resisted and challenged the authority of the socialist Mongolian state.
Open Access
Comics for progressives: Coulton Waugh's Hank
(2014-08-27) Nel, Philip W.; philnel
Open Access
Words, borders, herds: postsocialist English and nationalist language identities in Mongolia
(2012-11-21) Marzluf, Phillip P.; marzluf
This article focuses on the sociolinguistics of globalism (Blommaert 2010) in Mongolia by examining two dominant language identities, postsocialist English and fundamentalist nationalist Mongolian. Postsocialist English, emerging as a vital part of the free-market capitalist economy in the 1990s, is analyzed in relationship with the now receding language identity of socialist Russian. Postsocialist English supports the values of transnational development, neoliberal economic policies, and post-industrial educational practices. The Mongolian fundamentalist nationalist language identity, on the other hand, responds to free-market globalism by appeals to the land and the traditional pastoral economy of herding. Yet, despite the fact that postsocialist English identifies Mongolians with anti-traditional and urban cultural and social values, the fundamentalist nationalist identity does not perceive of English as a threat; in fact, postsocialist English is used to mediate the anxiety that nationalist Mongolians feel towards China and their other new Asian trading partners. As free-market globalism continues to transform postsocialist Mongolia, including urban migration and the industrial mining of coal and other raw minerals, a sociolinguistics of globalism can continue to navigate the ways in which Mongolians craft their identity through language and, especially, the ways it relates to traditional notions of the land and the pastoral economy.
Open Access
Comics studies 101
(2008-03-01) Sanders, Joe S.; joess
Open Access
Closure and power in Salem's Lot
(1999-03-01) Sanders, Joe S.; joess
Open Access
Queer theory, science fiction, and the dreamed-for child
(2002) Sanders, Joe S.; joess
Open Access
Reinventing subjectivity: China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun and the child reader
(2009-05-01) Sanders, Joe S.; joess
Miéville’s first novel for young readers was an instant success with scholars of children’s literature. Its violation of bourgeois models of subjectivity fit nicely with the current discourse about leftist literature and its ability to correct some of the most persistent problems of manipulation and moralism in children’s literature. The novel ingenuously fulfills many of the calls to action by scholars, but it also exceeds those calls by imagining a subjectivity for language and books themselves. The result is both a model of readers who avoid complacency and a kind of language against which readers can and must argue.
Open Access
Alan Seeger: medievalism as an alternative ideology
(2012-12-07) Dayton, Tim; tadayton
The American poet Alan Seeger imagined the First World War as an opportunity to realize medieval values, which were embodied for him in Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney epitomized Seeger’s three ideals: “Love and Arms and Song,” which contrasted with the materialism and sophistication of modernity. His embrace of “Arms” and the desire for intense, authentic experience led Seeger, who was living in Paris in August 1914, to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, in which he served until his death in combat in July 1916. As an infantryman Seeger had extensive experience of the Western front. This concrete experience of the war, of the indignities of life in the trenched and the dominance of technology, contrasted in significant ways with war as constructed in Seeger’s medievalist imagination. Seeger, however, reconciled this contradiction by seeing the war as part of the elemental Strife of nature. By this means, Seeger avoided the potentially unsettling consequences of confronting the profoundly modern nature of the war. Interpreting the war as a form of “Strife” and as an assertion of medieval values allowed Seeger to imagine himself and his comrades to be living outside the world of industrial capitalist modernity. Seeger shared with others involved in the war this medievalism and the belief that the war offered relief from the values of modernity, even if Seeger’s medievalism was more intense, more thoroughgoing, than was common. However, Seeger’s death as a result of wounds received from machine gun fire vividly displays the contradiction between his imagination and the reality of industrialized warfare. The example of Seeger thus suggests that the American effort in the First World War was underwritten in part by an ideology through which a modern, industrialized war was embraced in terms derived from the imagined medieval past. Insofar as this is true medievalism functioned to provide an ideology that constructed, in the terminology of Raymond Williams, an alternative to the industrial capitalist modernity from which the war emerged, an alternative ideology that allowed the war to be imagined differently from what it was, but which posed no substantive challenge to the war’s social and economic realities.
Open Access
The Gothic in Cristina García’s The Agüero Sisters
(2012-09-01) González, Tanya; tgonzale
Open Access
To allude or to, like, not
(2013-04-13) Sanders, Joe S.; joess
Open Access
A study of engineering students’ intercultural competence and its implications for teaching
(2012-03-12) Yu, Han; hyu1
Research problem: The purpose of this study is to examine U.S. engineering students’ intercultural competence and its pedagogical implications. Three research questions are addressed: [1] What are engineering students’ levels of awareness and sensitivity toward intercultural communication? [2] What are their perceived needs in learning intercultural communication? [3] Given these findings, what are some useful approaches and methods to teach intercultural communication in the engineering communication service class? Literature review: The literature review examines current studies on U.S. engineering students’ intercultural competence and establishes the scope of the study: intercultural awareness and sensitivity. The researcher consulted literature in intercultural studies, international education, and engineering education. Methodology: The researcher conducted a mixed method study, using surveys, textual analysis, and interviews. 272 engineering undergraduates at a Midwestern public university participated in the study. Participants were recruited from an engineering communication class. Data were collected through survey instruments, written responses to cross-cultural dialogs and critical incidents, and interviews. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results and Discussion: Participants exhibited vague and passive awareness of intercultural communication, average to high intercultural sensitivity (subject to self-assessment and social desirability bias), and partial acceptance of intercultural communication education. Based on these findings, the researcher suggests a cultural-general approach to teaching intercultural competence in engineering communication service classes. The study is limited to research participants at one institution and two aspects of intercultural competence. Future studies can involve diverse research participants, address more aspects of intercultural competence, and examine the use of cultural-general teaching methods in the classroom.
Open Access
Questions of travel
(2012-03-01) Dodd, Elizabeth C.; edodd