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Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental philosophy has found a home for literature within philosophic discourse (and vice-versa). That is the backdrop for this special issue. The topic is suffering, as a concept and an experience. The theme of suffering is broad enough to accommodate many different approaches and texts. And that is hopefully borne out by the multiplicity of themes and topics the authors have chosen to discuss.

The article “Class, Capital and Colonies in India and Palestine/Israel” studies the way Indian and Israeli Communist intellectuals conceptualized and understood European Colonialism. In contrast to present day settler-colonial theories – that disregarded Marxist critic of European expansion – Indian and Israeli Communists developed a Bolshevik colonial thinking. For Communists the triple forces of imperialism, capital and class devastated the “archaic” native way of life. In doing so they clear a path for European domination, settlement and class differentiation of both colonizers and colonized. The article traces Bolshevik colonial thinking to its origins in Marx’s and Lenin’s writings. It continuous to further examine the way these Marxist classics were interpreted by Indian thinkers as M.N. Roy, R.P. Dutt, and Israeli ideologies Eliyahu (Alyosha) Gozansky, Moshe Sneh, Meir Vilner and Tamar Gozansky.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary Israeli literature possesses a more “advanced” historical imaginary than that of contemporary “post-post-Zionist” Israeli historiography, and I relate this gap to the neoliberalization of the Israeli economy. I begin by arguing that contemporary literature’s historical imaginary marks a departure from its 80s and 90s postmodern predecessors. I show that this departure is evident in contemporary Israeli literature’s explicit recognition of an inability to relate subjective experience to larger history. This recognition constitutes a dialectical overcoming of Israeli postmodernism’s playful dismantling of the national historical narrative. I then argue that Israeli “post-post-Zionist” historiography constitutes an entry into a postmodern phase, in contrast to literature’s departure from postmodernism. Thus, I argue that literature seems to be “ahead” of historiography, in terms of each field’s temporal imagination. I conclude this essay by suggesting that one can explain this gap by taking into account the effects of Israeli neoliberalization on each field. While state–supported and owned print industry and presses were privatized early in Israel, the privatization of higher education started later, and is still taking place. I thus suggest that the reason literature seems “ahead” of academic work is a result of the stronger and more immediate coupling of literary institutions with the capitalist market than the more mediated relation between the capitalist market and the academy.

In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. The article analyzes four feature films from four different Israeli male generations – Uri Barabash's The Salt of the Earth (2006), Yaki Yosha's Still Walking (2010), and Tom Shoval's Youth (2013) and Jonathan Gurfinkel's S#x Times (2013) in order to define the post-ideological shift that Israeli cinema has chosen. Through their representation of gratuitous violence, the four films selected reveal the unspoken social and political dead end that contemporary Israeli society has reached.

In her article "Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case" Tamar Berger discusses the nature of the new building in Israel in the last 3-4 decades. Israel, she claims, has been going through a process of massive suburbanization, which is drastically changing the face of the country. Some of the features of the new space are similar to those of other places, globally, but it has its particularity, the result of both the local spatial history and the nature of Israeli society. Suburbs in general are hard to define. Still, a set of typical features of the Israeli suburbs can be noted: they are decentralized-centralized spaces; Typically, they are spaces of the middle classes; They rely heavily on the car and in fact cars determine to a great extent the morphology of these spaces; and "stage value" is particularly present in them, leading to a sterilization of the political.

This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as “post-post-Zionist.” We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate “big” history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to the making of history. We then explain how each of the contributions to this special issue takes this task upon itself—some more and some less explicitly.

In her article "Coping with Fear: Frontier Kibbutzes and the Syrian-Israeli Border War,” Orit Rozin discusses the practices and norms of border kibbutzes coping with daily hostilities. The Israel-Syrian border was a constant point of friction. Hostilities erupted over the cultivation and the control of the demilitarized zones and over water resources. Northern Kibbutzes both took part in triggering Syrian violence and were victims of that violence. Covering the interwar period 1956-1967, Rozin traces the subjective emotional reaction of kibbutz members exposed to Syrian violence. Focusing on fear and employing Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, she shows that members developed unique cultural practices to cope with the emotional challenge. However, despite genuine feelings and gestures of solidarity demonstrated by the city residents, these emotional norms were considered alien. Rozin shows that the emotional norms developed in the pre-State period and still nurtured in the kibbutzes were losing their grip.

In her essay “The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility” Shiri Goren discusses Matalon’s novel Bliss (Sarah-Sarah, 2000) as a complex and bleak account of domestic and political decline. On the backdrop of the first Intifada, a Tel Avivian marriage falls apart and a lifelong powerful and intimate friendship between two women ends abruptly. In another geographical location and slightly different timeframe, early November 1995, a French-Jewish family prepares for the cremation of one of its sons, who died of AIDS. Rejecting potential interpretations of national allegory, Goren argues that one of the foundational assumptions of the novel is that the realms of political public trauma and personal calamity are ultimately not far apart. The harsh outcomes of violence become entwined with intimate, personal stories and are expressed in every realm of private and public life. The metaphor of malaise and the physical disintegration of the private and social body in Matalon’s narrative reflect both the internal and external experiences of living in Israel during such troubled times. Matalon’s poetics, Goren suggests, aims at mapping brutality and inquiring into the origin and anatomy of violence both in and beyond the Israeli context.

In this article I discuss the logic of “complicity” and “dissent” that, under current forms of ultra-neoliberal capitalism, is no longer (if it has ever been) one of opposition but rather corresponds to a logic of unrealized potentials, or “as ifs” that “manage” dissent and complicity in conjunction, and erase the dividing line between them, or their value as separate concepts. I examine the genealogy of this opposition and its dilution as a symptom of our contemporary political reality. Michel Foucault presented a paradigmatic view of this genealogy in his analysis of power and the taxonomic separation of three regimes of power: the sovereign, the disciplinary and the biopolitical. While sovereign power maintains a “negative” distinction between acts of complicity and of dissent, implemented in the decision over life and death, both the disciplinary and the biopolitical power adopt a “positive” paradigm that relates, as I will argue, to figurations of the minor, inferior or infamous. It is precisely within these figurations that the paradoxical logic of “complicity” and “dissent” becomes more palpable, inasmuch as they demonstrate that acts of complicity can turn into acts of dissent; and vice-versa, that any act of dissent can also function “as if” it was an act of complicity. Thus, there is no outside of power. Instead every power challenges strategies of counter-power, that at once interrupt and fuel the existing structures of domination.

Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) is a seminal work in the study of political violence. It famously draws a distinction between power and violence and argues that the latter must be excluded from the political sphere. Although this may make Arendt’s text an appealing resource for critiques of rising political violence today, I argue that we should resist this temptation. In this article, I identify how the divisions and exclusions within her theory enable her to explicitly disavow violence on one level, while implicitly relying on a constitutive and racialized form of violence on another. In particular, Arendt leaves legal and state violence presumed, but untheorized, focusing her critique instead on dissident action, especially that of the Black Power movement. Any analysis that incorporates Arendt’s conceptual distinctions is therefore susceptible to reproducing a political theory that neglects state violence in the service of White rule, yet charges those who resist it with breaching the peace.

This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language of horror to that of love involves an extreme depoliticization, which accounts for its popularity in Israel and worldwide. The reification of intimate love by Amichai neutralizes any possibility for resistance. This a-political stance is a result of Amicai’s writing of universalistic civic poetry, which made it possible for him to neutralize the war poet’s need to bear responsibility for the Palestinian Naqba (in which many Palestinians fled Palestine, or were deported from it), which made Israel a state with a Jewish majority. The neutralization of the literary (and political) opposition between the language of Israeli citizenship and the language of nationhood in Israel, which could include Palestinians, is a powerful too of oppression. However, Amichai ignores the fact that the unethical results of the 1948 war still inhere in the Israeli state’s refusal to grant equal citizenship rights to all Palestinians, by recognizing their right of return. This essays discussion of Amichai’s novel deals with the way in which Jewish sovereignty is constructed in the novel. The novel exposes this sovereignty’s founding after the war, through linguistic representations of the power that turns illegitimate the desire to exact revenge on the Germans, which exists outside the law of the Israeli sovereign.

In his article, “Facing the Ruler, Facing the Village,” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite seeks to broaden the boundaries of the discussion about complicity by taking it away from late 20th-century and contemporary debates about it. At the same time, he wishes to highlight the many faces that the problem of complicity could have in different historical moments. Following Czesław Miłosz, this article understands that there are many roads to complicity that have been articulated in different ways across time and space. This article is, therefore, an integrated meditation on complicity bringing together two radically distant approaches to the question. Reading the ancient Chinese thinker Mengzi, this article highlights two key situations leading to what we should call “complicity.” The first is concerned with the thorny issue of the intellectual at the court "facing the ruler." The second place the intellectual within the people, “the village” in Mengzi's words. Mengzi identifies both of these situations as highly problematic and potentially leading to the deviation from past moral principles to which one must adhere. With this insight, this article turns to Julien Benda's famous, notorious, portrayal of the “treason of the intellectuals,” and discusses it along the parameters articulated by Mengzi.

In this article, I draw on the major works of two Palestinian intellectuals—Edward Said and Hanan Ashrawi—and I compare the experiences of Palestinian intellectuals living in the United States with those living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. The writings of these two exemplary figures shape the conceptual underpinnings of my exploration of the way Palestinian academics navigate questions of complicity with the different hegemonic political systems that govern their lives. I argue that Said and Ashrawi model a steadfast refusal to be complicit in the state-led repression around them at the same time as they engage in principled dissent from their own national institutions in the name of a broader vision of universal emancipation. Yet, Said and Ashrawi embody two distinct modes of intellectual and political activity, shaped by their relative proximity to Palestine. The critical difference between their forms of dissent reveals how, for Palestinian-Americans, engagement with the question of Palestine is discursive and intellectual labor, while for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, it can require interfacing one’s body directly with the coercive apparatus of the state. In both cases, however, the Palestinian intellectual faces systematic assaults on his or her academic freedom.

In his article, “Remnants of Dissent,” Thomas Docherty explores the relation of dissent to guilty complicity in post-war Europe. The article opens with a consideration of the position of Karl Jaspers in 1945 and examines how Jaspers worked through the various modes of guilt that flowed from diverse modes of living under Nazism. Of particular interest is the status of silence in the face of tyrannical Nazi oppression and murders. The essay explores how the workings of language, and its manipulations by the Nazis, helps to normalize such tyranny and to make resistance to it both dangerous and difficult. The detailed examination finds, via individuals such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Václav Havel, that there is a vital distinction to be made between dissent and dissidence and that this distinction depends upon the ways in which political discourse is regulated.

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a result of these will be a substantial argument throughout the text represented in the historical and fictional character of the Venus Hottentot. She was seen as the icon of sexual deviancy and became a victim of the white colonizer as the embodiment of black racialized sexuality for Europeans. However, despite her vulnerability, in the narrative she gains agency in resistance in Butlerean terms. In the Hottentot Venus, Barbara Chase-Riboud tries to bring to light the experience and the memory of slavery as they constitute a key element in the reconstruction of the past and in the construction of a better future. Similarly, the process of recovery and identity construction in a postcolonial era determined by the traces of colonial trauma is an important element in the fictionalization of Sarah Baartman’s life as an icon of the idealization and problematization of South-Africa. These issues bring to the fore questions of race and feminism, the idealization of the colonies and colonized people in contrast with white imperial subjects, and the consideration of the contemporary neo-slave narrative as a neo-Victorian genre.

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted on their bodies by advanced capitalist societies, the main characters in these movies are considered as alien, marginal and/or non-human beings. Their body organs are but commodities to be literally traded and removed to be given to the privileged ones in order to preserve the latter’s integrity and “humanity”. These commodified subjects do not construct a “liveable” sense of the self in the face of multiplicity, ambivalence, contradiction, inequalities and oppression, as materialist feminism advocate, but remain, however, on a marginal side. As this article sets up to contend, both movies denounce the commodification of the body or “life” trading by positioning viewers on the side of the marginal, allowing us to become part of the post/in human experience. Hence, Dirty Pretty Things and Never Let Me Go offer instances of commodified beings whose fears, pains, vulnerabilities, thoughts and feelings are available to mass audiences. In this sense, the immigrant/illegal/artificial/exploited body becomes a repository of the characters’ troubled subjectivities, allowing spectators to situate themselves and reflect upon the intricacies of contemporary ideologies upon certain bodily practices. The body becomes, then, a valid tool for criticism that connects to current understandings of power and subjectivity.

Activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement embrace anger. Owning their rage sets these activists in opposition to an older generation of black leaders, invested in respectability, who narrate anger as an emotion to be overcome. Younger activists worry about complicity with the status quo – with white supremacy – of these older activists, yet embracing anger is no surefire way of avoiding complicity with the status quo. This essay investigates the ambivalence of black anger, drawing on philosophy and feminist theory while also locating the current eruption of black anger in an ambivalent history of black political affect. In laboratory conditions, anger tracks moral wrongs, but we do not live in a laboratory. We live in a world filled with systems of domination, including white supremacy, and in such circumstances, the wrongs to which anger points are often obscured. Feminist theorists including Audre Lorde and María Lugones offer strategies for clarifying and embracing rightly-directed anger in such circumstances, and for allowing such anger to be politically productive. These strategies help in attending to the anger described in recent memoirs written by young, Black Lives Matter-associated activists. Yet deep ambivalence remains: anger as an affect, anger as a rhetorical strategy, and anger as a trope slip into each other in these texts. Embracing anger may promise a way of escaping complicity, but subtle worries about complicity are unavoidable.

This paper analyzes the ways in which complicity and dissent feed and subvert one another, or the ways in which the subjugated self becomes a political subject. The formative event of Palestinian collective identity is the loss of home and homeland in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948. “The Catastrophe” divided the Palestinian community to two: Those who remained within the borders of the Israeli state and became Israeli citizens, and the Palestinian refugees, who came to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and led an armed struggle. While examining the two narratives, I also explore two communal modes of resistance: Palestinians who struggled with a psychology of defeat, and came to challenge the authority of the state; and PLO supporters who began as members of a militant liberation movement, and ended up signing the Oslo Accords and contributing to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA). In short, complicity brought with it resistance, and resistance ended in complicity. If resistance ends in complicity, and complicity could turn into resistance, then the Palestinian is the example for where this interplay—between subjectivity and subjugation—takes place.

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature to cinema, theatre and media, the articles address literary and cultural representations of historical, as well as racial, medical, and neo-liberal violence, in order to explore individual and collective forms of resilience emerging from vulnerability and marginalization.

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological punishment. When Roland accidentally perishes in the grotto Nina has been restoring, the ensuing guilt she experiences sends her into a profound state of depression. A psychiatrist helps her begin a cathartic, healing and redeeming process by which she may experience an inner revolution and a symbolic rebirthing. This study explores how Nina’s vulnerability as a mother and wife in distress is projected onto her son, Roland, whose abnormal behavior forms an element of unaddressed psychic disturbance in her own life. This work also examines the psychoanalytic dimensions of the strategies she implements to resist the hegemonic discourse and social practices in favor of domesticity, marriage and motherhood in Ireland. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach towards the maternal and Judith Butler’s, Zeynep Gambetti’s and Leticia Sabsay’s views on vulnerability and resistance are employed to analyze the topic.

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of suffering and act as a vehicle for the very social and psychological needs suffering fulfills.

In his article "Subjectivity, Institutions and Language in Contemporary Israeli Film" Ari Ofengenden analyzes the transnational characteristics of contemporary Israeli films (from 2000 until today). He claims that a new regime of globally networked production and distribution of Israeli film has articulated a specific kind of subjectivity presented in these films. In this article, he will concentrate on two characteristics of this subjectivity: the relations of protagonist with social institutions and use of language. Relations with social institutions starts with the highly prevalent representations of a sensitive and individualist protagonist who suffers under collective and coercive institutions like the army, religious courts, or the kibbutz. The fact that this individual does not really belong to his or her place is signaled by their multilingual use of language. Using western-European languages simultaneously present a certain kind of semi-European subjectivity. Global production, however, has meant the decline of subjectivities that would like to transform rather than strengthen existing institutions, as well as demise of the playful, expanding Hebrew of the 1970's.

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter two works opens up a relatively untrodden domain for Sinophone studies while the comparative optic establishes “assemblages” (Deleuze) between different scriptworlds, avoiding therein enervating debates over compositionality while fostering “South-South” or “Bandungist” knowledge production and exchange. For Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies, a set of such ensembles would make up a global assemblage.

This thesis centers on the intersections between critical pedagogy and writing instruction in a prison college program with the aim of humanization. A theoretical framework is constructed that relies on the pillars of tenets from Liberation theology, critical pedagogy, an anti-racist and multicultural praxis, and generative culture-making. Writing as the foundation of education is the medium for supporting a humanizing and liberatory education.

Poems: Zemlja and Pioneer Day by West Australia born author Natalie D-Napoleon.

A poem. With corrections listed in an email of today's date

Plunging Down Under

Snorkel Virgin

The complete issue 1 of volume 9, Landscapes Journal.

The complete issue 1 of volume 9, Landscapes Journal.

A writing center performs the academic support function of developing independent writers as revealed by students’ writing self-efficacy—their perceptions of themselves as writers. Despite the apparent link between students’ desire to seek assistance from the writing center and their writing self-efficacy, no quantitative study to date has examined this association for online graduate students. This quantitative, correlational study investigated that potential relationship. Participants were online graduate students at a large, regionally accredited, faith-based, non-profit, private university in the southeastern United States with a substantial online student population who received assistance from the online writing center (OWC) multiple times. Writing self-efficacy data from a sample of 257 online graduate students was acquired using the Post-Secondary Writerly Self-Efficacy Scale (PSWSES). A bivariate correlation analysis was performed to evaluate the possible relationship between student help-seeking behavior, as measured by the number of completed OWC draft review requests, and writing self-efficacy. Results revealed no statistically significant linear relationship between the student help-seeking behavior and writing self-efficacy; the variables are statistically independent. The empirical implications of these results include the possible limited application of writing self-efficacy as a measure of writing center effectiveness, as well as the non-linear interaction of self-efficacy and help-seeking behavior. The results also lead to practical implications concerning students who use writing center services multiple times. Further research is needed in the area of student motivation for writing center usage, as well as help-seeking frequency on student writing self-efficacy.

In examining twenty-two summer bridge program websites across the country, this study focused on a particular type of student support at one of the most historically-contentious positions in a college student’s trajectory—the point of access. Diverse student populations bring specific strengths, resources, skills, and knowledge, or “funds of knowledge,” to the university space from other parts of their lives (Kiyama & Rios-Aguilar, 2018; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 2005). In light of the history of deficit-based explanations for student failure, funds of knowledge approaches to instruction and program design offer models that more fully describe the abilities and potential of diverse groups of students. Drawing on the diametrically opposed frameworks of remediation and funds of knowledge, this qualitative research study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) What do the website descriptions of bridge programs at a range of institutions reveal regarding assumptions about students and support they need?, and (2) In what ways, if any, do these descriptions connect to funds of knowledge?I engage in systematic qualitative coding and analysis of the bridge program websites. The emphasis on academic/study skills, college knowledge, and relationships in the data set (see Chapter 3) positioned bridge programs as the benevolent giver of these things instead of presenting students as capable of building on their skills and existing knowledges. In the figured world (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) of summer bridge, the underlying assumption goes as follows: Adjusting to a challenging new environment is possible as long as the university provides students with academic and social integration. Without these supports, students are not likely to succeed on their own due to their demographics as first-generation students, low-income students, or students of color or due to the intensity of their chosen major (in the case of the STEM-affiliated bridge p

In this project I create a digital experience using poetry to challenge standard ideas of the rhetoric surrounding LGBTQ identity and to learn about the ways in which the internet and social media enable alternative methods of expression. I explore the following questions: What is the potential for the internet, particularly social media, to change the ways LGBTQ people express their stories? How is the internet changing the ways LGBTQ poets are creating their work? This project involves the creation of several YouTube videos about LGBTQ poetry to be presented at an end-of-the-semester event. Two of the videos involve poets talking about their work and the ways in which the internet influences them, and the other is my performance of an original poem about my own identity and experience as a gay, non-binary individual in the internet age. This project is informed by rhetoric scholars such as Jacqueline Jones Royster (2003), and considers “non-normative arenas” of rhetoric as sites for challenging the dominant elite, white, heterosexual, and male-centered spaces of rhetorical thinking. It also works with Malea Powell et al’s idea of cultural rhetorics (2014), which sees storytelling and human relationships as integral to understanding meaning-making and culture creation. This project uses YouTube as a non-normative arena to engage with cultural rhetorics by telling my own story and the stories of other LGBTQ poets whose voices are often underrepresented in academia.