Wednesday, November 29, 2017

My Bread Loaf Student in BLTN Journal

A Great Podcast Interview with Rajwinder Kaur by Tom McKenna

The BLTN Journal site has a great podcast interview with my student from last summer, Rajwinder Kaur, about her final project that she created for my Multicultural Digital Storytelling class. Raja details how she is working to incorporate this kind of storytelling into her classes, although she notes difficulties she faces because her students still face issues of access to resources, which she is working through.





I am also embedding her video below:


Raja mentions the Digital Storytelling text we discussed in the class Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (Digital Imaging and Computer Vision)

Monday, November 13, 2017

Fall 2017 issue of Composition Studies

My piece "Identity, Decolonialism, and Digital Archives"

I am proud to be included with a great group of Latinx scholars in rhetoric and composition who have contributed pieces for this issue of Composition Studies on current Latinx research. I begin my piece by discussing UTEP's Rhetoric Symposium where I spoke on decolonizing digital platforms and the rest of my piece is framed around a Google Doc that serves as a growing archive of citations from members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus and the decolonial potential for archiving knowledge at the margins. If you're unsure about the term Latinx, Christina Garcia offers an explanation of the term in her contribution, and there are great contributions from other great scholars who I am honored to share journal pages with. 



See the Table of Contents below or here: http://www.uc.edu/journals/composition-studies/issues/archives/fall-2018-45-2.html




Link to my piece in SCU library: https://works.bepress.com/cruz-medina/12/ 

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Frederick Aldama coming to SCU in February

Reading from his Bilingual Flash Fiction Long Stories Cut Short

On February 27, 2018, writer and scholar Frederick Aldama will be reading from his book of bilingual flash fiction Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands (Camino del Sol) at Santa Clara University.


“Buzzin’ from start to finish, an unexpected bilingual knock-out punch!”—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Aldama’s is graphic reality, in bold typeface, lines as abrupt as single words—go, allá, fast, ya.”—Dagoberto Gilb , author of Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories


Long Stories Cut Short exists in that borderland space where fact frictively rubs up against fiction in the lives of Latinx peoples. From Xbox videogamer cholo cyberpunks to philosophically musing Latinx tweens and undocumented papás and romancing abuelitas, these dynamic bilingual prose-art creative flash nonfictions probe deeply the psychological ups and downs of Latinxs surviving a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty. These flashes of creative nonfictional insight bring gleaming clarity to life lived for Latinxs across the Américas where all sorts of borders meet and shift.


Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and University Distinguished Teacher. He is the author, co-author, and editor of over 30 books. He is editor and coeditor of 8 academic press book series. He is founder and director of the Ohio Education Summit Award and White House Hispanic Bright Spot winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment & Research. He is founder of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He has been honored with the 2016 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education Award. In 2017 he was inducted into the Academy of Teaching as well as the Society of Cartoon Arts.