Gender, Affect, Environmental Justice, and Indigeneity in the Classroom Amy T. Hamilton

 I watched a knowledge mobilization webinar and the speakers recommended piktochart. I tried using it today to create a summary of my reading notes, and it turned out okay. I had some issues cropping it. And I think that I probably need to use a different template for blogging purposes, because I don't think these are the ideal dimensions. But it's a fun tool to play with. I am also going to try venngage. 

Anyhow, just logging some reading notes here. This was a good article. Basically, the gist of it is that for a long time the author accepted the conventional notion that emotion has no place in analysis. But then she had a moment in front of her class where she felt emotional, and that moment inspired her to inquire into the role of emotion in analysis through the lenses of feminism, environmental justice, and Indigenous studies. And then she arrived at a place where she saw the value of emotion in analysis. 

Gender, Affect, Environmental Justice, and Indigeneity in the Classroom by Amy T. Hamilton

p. 92 “Since I was hired by Northern Michigan University (nmu) in 2008, approximately 70 percent of the courses I have taught have been upper division undergraduate courses in Native American literature. As of the spring 2019 semester, I have taught thirty-two sections of these courses at nmu, or roughly eight hundred students. As a white woman teaching Native American literature to a largely white student population, I am acutely aware that I have—and will always have—a lot to learn. Further, as a non-Native ally scholar and teacher, I have been wary about infringing on areas of cultural knowledge that are not—and should not be—available to me. This positioning has further complicated how I have thought about emotion in the classroom. How can non-Native students and I interrogate our affective responses to course readings without appropriating stories and experiences that belong to someone else? How can I make room in the classroom for multiple emotional responses from Native and non-Native students? How can I be an ethical ally when it comes to emotion?” 

Feminism: Naomi Greyser, bell hooks, Parker Palmer, Paula Moya 

Environmental justice: Kristie Dotson, Kyle Whyte, Sarah Jaquette Ray  

Indigenous studies: Malea Powell, Jay Dolmage, Robin Wall Kimmerer 

p. 96 uses the phrase “ethical analysis” 

p. 101 circulating within a text and among a text, its contexts, and its readers are affects and emotions that help create access to what Dotson and Whyte call “moral terrains,” where values, practices, and emotions are located in space, linking peoples and lands in a complex system that moves well beyond a personal reaction. It is in affective response that we can actually encourage students to craft the deepest and most rigorous, as well as the most meaningful, analytical interventions.

p. 101 As Moya suggests, readers connect to texts intellectually and emotionally, and it is that relationship between heart and head where space is created for interpretation.

p. 102 Far from self-indulgent, affective responses offer us an opportunity for an ethically engaged criticism, what Ray calls “critique as a form of active care.”