Tuka Al-Sahlani

First and foremost, thank you Adrianna, Brie, and Nelson for these readings! I resisted highlighting everything, especially in Bailey’s article. Also, Adrianna, I very much appreciated the annotated pdf! I need to do this for my students! Thank you for setting this example. 

Now on to Bailey…

I want to agree with everything Bailey says because  it resonates with me as a PhD student, a DH researcher, a former K-12 teacher, a parent, and just living in New York City, but I kept thinking of the affordances and privileges that are required to make Bailey’s proposal feasible. I had this conversation with my observer only yesterday: pace and funding. First, this being a post observation conference, I asked her where I could improve and she mentioned I could consider slowing down, although my students were able to match my pace, it would be good to consider pace. I agreed with her because, well, as a trained K-12 teacher, one is trained to meet objectives and complete the curriculum and I need to remind myself I am in an institution (despite our grievances with it) that allows me more room to conduct a course with more flexibility. Second, as a graduate teaching fellow, she asked what I anticipated to do in the future and I told her I am more concerned of doing as much as possible with these five years of guaranteed funding. This brings me back to Bailey: I believe in the proposal and know that DH is exemplary in nurturing movement at “the speed of trust”, but this will require more than a community to create an ideology of process vs product or practicing “ethics of pace”. 

On “ One Way to Think with Precarity in the Classroom”…

I chose to read this article because although I know precarity exists in the classroom, I wanted to read an intentional implementation of it in the course. I decided to copy the quotes I favored and my thoughts. 

“mutual accountability and community” I want to be brave enough to do more. 

“What do they need to learn, then, to inhabit this world well?” Shouldn’t this be the purpose of all higher education, if not the essence of education itself? 

“such as precarity, can liberate the curriculum from canonical restrictions” love it

“inside/grievable – outside/precarious” I find this nothing to signify whose life should we value and I’m reminded of all the injustices ( sanctioned and unsanctioned to stem from this expandable quality of the life on the outside.

“ A course on precarity keeps history and the state of the present live and “in play” in ways that focusing on the -ism alone might not. “ This is an actionable item–something to think about and apply. 

“Precarious Bodies accomplishes this by engaging phenomenology and its tools, connecting to issues of precarity and its differential distribution, and inviting students to consider the interplay between what they’re learning in class, how it meshes with their experience (or challenges them), and how they’ll take that learning into the wider world.” I think I was trying to express this last week when I said we need this course “Power, Precarity, and Care to be a core course offering–this is why?

I look forward to our class discussion!