As we move towards literacy in the raw, we're exploring the non-codified, informal, contingent nature of graduate literacy. In its slipperiness, we need a way to proceed in the margins, against the grain, down below. In her book The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam elaborates on the Foucauldian paradigm of subjugated knowledge--or what has become known as "knowledge from below"--those "forms of knowledge [that] have not simply been lost or forgotten [but] have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or 'insufficiently elaborated'" (11). Halberstam asks, and we echo, "How do we participate in the production and circulation of 'subjugated knowledge?'" (11). How do we make the particularities of lived experience in graduate school count as knowledge, as shared but not universalizing in its affect?
Here we embark on the difficult task of sharing stories as a collection without overwriting their individual, momentary emergence. We teeter on the edge of coherence and incoherence, placing arbitrary bounds around what we nevertheless insist should remain incomplete, in-process, unbounded. A view from above would ask us to interpret these stories as evidence of a grand narrative; a view from below invites us to acknowledge the patterns always-already inherent in the narratives themselves.
Jeff Park emphasizes how stories render knowledge; he writes,“it is possible that humans, for the most part, conceptualize the world and their reality through the construction of story. Narrative organizes experience into sequential and relational patterns as a way of knowing. […This] way of seeing the world becomes a way of understanding the world, which becomes the way to represent the world” (37-8). And it occurs to us that narrative has power in environments where ways of knowing, doing, and being are perceived as scripted and predetermined. It’s easy as a graduate student to feel upon entering a program that all the steps are laid out already; all we have to do is read the right books and write the right analyses—to jump through all the right hoops—in order to make it to the other end in tact and certified for professional practice. But the truth of the matter is, it's impossible to know what the "right" steps are, or even if there are any. We're chasing an unspoken ideal as if it is a real thing. Our perception of constantly falling short of this imagined ideal prevents us from sharing what we actually do. The more we talk and share our narratives, the more agency we gain in shaping what graduate school is and what it does to us. This shapes, in some part, what we are able to do. As Park writes, “Narrative in many ways creates, or constructs, the self; we are the summation of our stories" (40).
For us, stories about our literacy practices gain resonance through circulation. The power of story is not only in the talking, but also in my affective response to your story. Deborah Brandt claims that literacy is both "the ways we make sense through reading and writing and the ways we make sense of reading and writing" (331-332). In her article, "The Cognitive as Social: An Ethnomethodological Approach to Writing Process Research," Brandt investigates the space between the cognitive, social science paradigm of literacy and its counterpart, the sociocultural, hermeneutic paradigm. Searching for a third way, Brandt turns to ethnomethodology, a sociological method that "attends to the reasoning processes people use to make sense of here-and-now actions...reasoning processes that allow them to participate as people-in-the-know" (318). These constant and often implicit processes of sense making--the bridge from the cognitive to the social--are made observable to the ethnomethodologist through the social talk around practices. Thus we find resonance with this model as one of its fundamental insights is "as actors in the world we spend a lot of time (and language) making ourselves accountable for what we are doing and accounting for what others are doing" (319). This mutual accountability is something we see prominently as we capture our participants' attempts to make sense of literacies in their graduate school context. Furthermore, it is in the talk around and about those practices where meaning resides.
Similarly, Adler-Kassner reminds us of the impact of "personally grounded stories for individuals...and the ways in which those stories, when seen as a collective body, testif[y] and [give] witness to a larger one that had gone relatively unexplored” (4). But stories don't just do this work on their own; their power emerges through circulation. Kept to oneself, stories act as anecdotes or accounts of one's experience; once shared, stories achieve an affective, transcendent quality. Stories prompt, practically beg others to react, respond, interact, give back. Through sharing, stories transform from something expository to something dialectical. And with every act of sharing, with every interaction, the stories themselves change, collecting additional details, taking on new meanings, becoming for others experiential images that represent, speak to, and speak for particular bits of shared knowledge. As they join the collective consciousness, they comprise what we might think of as an archive. In fact, they become a model for what archives should look like in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, as institutions, archives have somewhat static reputations. When we think of the national archives, for example, we imagine a concrete destination one must visit to retrieve information. It functions as a storage space for cultural histories. But the advent and proliferation of digital technology, 21st century archives bring with it a tremendous opportunity to transform the way archives function as sites of cultural preservation: we can talk back. In acting differently within the archival space, we can turn a traditionally one-way experience into a multi-directional, dialectical one. When we make space for response, we unearth a potential to affect real, palpable, observable transformations of a collective consciousness or communal knowledge through circulation and "sayback" (Perl). Why wouldn't we interact with archives in this way; moreover, why wouldn't we design our archives to facilitate and encourage such interaction with its contents?
The advent of web 2.0 makes such interaction possible. Archival scientists have produced great volumes of work extolling the virtues of digital archive platforms. Whereas before, we might have had to travel hundreds, maybe thousands of miles to access records of one sort or another, we're now able to browse archive holdings from the comfort of our own armchairs. But archive 2.0 isn't simply the digitization of content; the socially-facing nature of new technologies has enabled archivists to build multi-directional interfaces, wherein users can not only access content but comment upon it, tag it, and otherwise interact with it in manner that enriches their own experience as well as the integrity of the archived materials themselves. This is not so much a unique function of web 2.0 technology as it is a function of the kind of thinking web 2.0 invites. As Joy Palmer writes in her article, "Archive 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?," "The emergence of Archives 2.0 is less about technological change than a broader epistemological shift which concerns the very nature of the archive, and particularly traditional archival practice which privileges the 'original' context of the archival object. [...In Archives 2.0], users can contribute to the archive, engage with it, and play a central role in defining its meaning" (Palmer para 4).
Through this democratizing effect, the "rules" that determine what is or is not worthy of being archived vanish. Users become archivists themselves, a crucial move as far as our project is concerned. Because the stories we seek to collect are so intimately tied to selfhood, as explained above, it is of the utmost importance to us that nothing stand in the way of an individual wishing to preserve his or her story. "Whether conscious of it or not, archivists are major players in the business of identity politics," Schwartz and Cook write in their article, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory." "Archivists appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions of identity are built. In turn, notions of identity are confirmed and justified as historical documents validate with all their authority as 'evidence' the identity stories so built" (16). Simply put, Archives 2.0 serve to collapse the distance between its authors and consumers; users, regardless of the role(s) they play, have the opportunity to commune with people across the hall as easily as with people across the world. With a subject as emotionally fraught as advanced literacy acquisition, that closeness--that "talk"--matters.
Such is our goal with this project. In the next section, we feature a collage of graduate student literacy narratives and provide links to dozens more housed at the DALN.
Here we embark on the difficult task of sharing stories as a collection without overwriting their individual, momentary emergence. We teeter on the edge of coherence and incoherence, placing arbitrary bounds around what we nevertheless insist should remain incomplete, in-process, unbounded. A view from above would ask us to interpret these stories as evidence of a grand narrative; a view from below invites us to acknowledge the patterns always-already inherent in the narratives themselves.
Jeff Park emphasizes how stories render knowledge; he writes,“it is possible that humans, for the most part, conceptualize the world and their reality through the construction of story. Narrative organizes experience into sequential and relational patterns as a way of knowing. […This] way of seeing the world becomes a way of understanding the world, which becomes the way to represent the world” (37-8). And it occurs to us that narrative has power in environments where ways of knowing, doing, and being are perceived as scripted and predetermined. It’s easy as a graduate student to feel upon entering a program that all the steps are laid out already; all we have to do is read the right books and write the right analyses—to jump through all the right hoops—in order to make it to the other end in tact and certified for professional practice. But the truth of the matter is, it's impossible to know what the "right" steps are, or even if there are any. We're chasing an unspoken ideal as if it is a real thing. Our perception of constantly falling short of this imagined ideal prevents us from sharing what we actually do. The more we talk and share our narratives, the more agency we gain in shaping what graduate school is and what it does to us. This shapes, in some part, what we are able to do. As Park writes, “Narrative in many ways creates, or constructs, the self; we are the summation of our stories" (40).
For us, stories about our literacy practices gain resonance through circulation. The power of story is not only in the talking, but also in my affective response to your story. Deborah Brandt claims that literacy is both "the ways we make sense through reading and writing and the ways we make sense of reading and writing" (331-332). In her article, "The Cognitive as Social: An Ethnomethodological Approach to Writing Process Research," Brandt investigates the space between the cognitive, social science paradigm of literacy and its counterpart, the sociocultural, hermeneutic paradigm. Searching for a third way, Brandt turns to ethnomethodology, a sociological method that "attends to the reasoning processes people use to make sense of here-and-now actions...reasoning processes that allow them to participate as people-in-the-know" (318). These constant and often implicit processes of sense making--the bridge from the cognitive to the social--are made observable to the ethnomethodologist through the social talk around practices. Thus we find resonance with this model as one of its fundamental insights is "as actors in the world we spend a lot of time (and language) making ourselves accountable for what we are doing and accounting for what others are doing" (319). This mutual accountability is something we see prominently as we capture our participants' attempts to make sense of literacies in their graduate school context. Furthermore, it is in the talk around and about those practices where meaning resides.
Similarly, Adler-Kassner reminds us of the impact of "personally grounded stories for individuals...and the ways in which those stories, when seen as a collective body, testif[y] and [give] witness to a larger one that had gone relatively unexplored” (4). But stories don't just do this work on their own; their power emerges through circulation. Kept to oneself, stories act as anecdotes or accounts of one's experience; once shared, stories achieve an affective, transcendent quality. Stories prompt, practically beg others to react, respond, interact, give back. Through sharing, stories transform from something expository to something dialectical. And with every act of sharing, with every interaction, the stories themselves change, collecting additional details, taking on new meanings, becoming for others experiential images that represent, speak to, and speak for particular bits of shared knowledge. As they join the collective consciousness, they comprise what we might think of as an archive. In fact, they become a model for what archives should look like in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, as institutions, archives have somewhat static reputations. When we think of the national archives, for example, we imagine a concrete destination one must visit to retrieve information. It functions as a storage space for cultural histories. But the advent and proliferation of digital technology, 21st century archives bring with it a tremendous opportunity to transform the way archives function as sites of cultural preservation: we can talk back. In acting differently within the archival space, we can turn a traditionally one-way experience into a multi-directional, dialectical one. When we make space for response, we unearth a potential to affect real, palpable, observable transformations of a collective consciousness or communal knowledge through circulation and "sayback" (Perl). Why wouldn't we interact with archives in this way; moreover, why wouldn't we design our archives to facilitate and encourage such interaction with its contents?
The advent of web 2.0 makes such interaction possible. Archival scientists have produced great volumes of work extolling the virtues of digital archive platforms. Whereas before, we might have had to travel hundreds, maybe thousands of miles to access records of one sort or another, we're now able to browse archive holdings from the comfort of our own armchairs. But archive 2.0 isn't simply the digitization of content; the socially-facing nature of new technologies has enabled archivists to build multi-directional interfaces, wherein users can not only access content but comment upon it, tag it, and otherwise interact with it in manner that enriches their own experience as well as the integrity of the archived materials themselves. This is not so much a unique function of web 2.0 technology as it is a function of the kind of thinking web 2.0 invites. As Joy Palmer writes in her article, "Archive 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?," "The emergence of Archives 2.0 is less about technological change than a broader epistemological shift which concerns the very nature of the archive, and particularly traditional archival practice which privileges the 'original' context of the archival object. [...In Archives 2.0], users can contribute to the archive, engage with it, and play a central role in defining its meaning" (Palmer para 4).
Through this democratizing effect, the "rules" that determine what is or is not worthy of being archived vanish. Users become archivists themselves, a crucial move as far as our project is concerned. Because the stories we seek to collect are so intimately tied to selfhood, as explained above, it is of the utmost importance to us that nothing stand in the way of an individual wishing to preserve his or her story. "Whether conscious of it or not, archivists are major players in the business of identity politics," Schwartz and Cook write in their article, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory." "Archivists appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions of identity are built. In turn, notions of identity are confirmed and justified as historical documents validate with all their authority as 'evidence' the identity stories so built" (16). Simply put, Archives 2.0 serve to collapse the distance between its authors and consumers; users, regardless of the role(s) they play, have the opportunity to commune with people across the hall as easily as with people across the world. With a subject as emotionally fraught as advanced literacy acquisition, that closeness--that "talk"--matters.
Such is our goal with this project. In the next section, we feature a collage of graduate student literacy narratives and provide links to dozens more housed at the DALN.
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