Bread Loaf Santa Fe Faculty Symposium

On July 9th, I had the privilege of taking part in a dialogue with Rachel Lee, professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. We asked one another questions about our books and discussed intersections that we saw in our works.

One of my students encouraged us to be more performative than a traditional presentation of research, so we began by asking volunteers to act out gestures for particular words that we introduced, which were related to our work.

Rachel's work The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies provoked some interesting questions about representation, the social construction of identity, and how biology might be discussed in the humanities within the context of racial identity.

I spoke a bit about the visual rhetoric that responded to the anti-Ethnic Studies billed passed in Arizona, and I was pleased to know that so many of the students were aware of the ban, with some having seen the documentary Precious Knowledge.

The Bread Loaf Faculty Symposium was an excellent way to discuss topics and themes related to the course I was teaching, while at the same time discussing past research that resonates into current projects.