Inclusivity Statement

Having studied across the country and around the world, I understand how interacting with diverse peoples and ideas can benefit students. In my classes, students engage texts produced by a wide array of authors, while confronting how dominant culture sidelines certain voices. As someone with mild dyslexia, I am aware of the necessity of designing learning experiences, and creating a classroom environment, that position all students for success. In my teaching and research, I remain conscious of my privilege while supporting those underrepresented in the academy.

I realized my responsibilities as an instructor during my first semester teaching at Indiana University. The textbooks assigned to Public Speaking instructors contained pronunciation guides and visuals implying that ideal speakers are non-accented white people. Readers were warned about pronouncing “ask” like “ax,” and a pair of photos compared a good presenter (a white woman in a suit) to a bad one (a disheveled and stooped black man). This type of instructional material was of little use to most students, and Public Speaking was a class that few IU students could avoid. Indeed, advisors often directed non-native speakers to the class in order to improve their English. Given the instructional material and the relatively diverse nature of the classroom, I made time in our discussions to address the biases informing public speaking standards. Through critical engagement, students recognized how they could work with or around cultural expectations of public address. This improved the performances of most students, since confidence is a major part of public speaking. In evaluations, students mentioned that I created a learning space in which they could excel. One wrote: “The class made me feel comfortable and it was a safe environment.” However, working around a bad text only has so much value. Several colleagues and I alerted the Course Director to our concerns about the textbook, leading to a change in instructional materials.

This experience emphasized how issues of inclusivity matter in all courses, perhaps especially in technical classes where the topic could be overlooked. I have carried that lesson forward in my teaching. While at the University of Florida, I taught Strategic Communication – a course tailored to advertising and PR majors. One of their first assignments was to produce a place-based advertising campaign for UF that was targeted to a particular demographic. Several students struggled with this concept. As they were conceptualizing their projects, they tried to frame their work as having universal appeal. I pushed them to interrogate what ‘universal’ means by having them compare pieces of travel writing. Students had already been assigned a reading about the branding of Austin, Texas as a “weird” location, in order to introduce them to the place-based ad concept. I built off that example by giving my students two recent articles about Austin. One was a New York Times travel piece, addressed to an unspecified audience and highlighting a wide range of the city’s hip locations. The writer operated on the unspoken assumption that their reader could go anywhere and do anything. Another was by a black travel blogger reflecting on the discomfort of navigating Austin, a predominantly white city, and the hunt for niche places where they could feel welcome. This comparison helped students recognize the relevance of their own subject positions and blind spots. While encouraging greater sensitivity among students, I avoid creating the sense that diversity manifests as a minefield they must navigate. My work highlighting the value of diversity is readily apparent in my film and media studies pedagogy.

My teaching statement describes how working in film studies can require helping students process offensive or alienating materials. The media industry has long been a hostile workplace for many, and academic courses risk reinforcing this issue by focusing on a canon of white male auteurs. Instructors must address unpleasant realities about the industry, while also showcasing the contributions of diverse talents. My UF course on race and ethnicity in cinema did not just address issues of oppression or stereotyping, although we did examine how artists process the legacies of racist representation in films like Hollywood Shuffle and Watermelon Woman. Examining films like Moonlight and The Farewell, our primary focus was celebrating how the inclusion of diverse voices enriches artistic expression. While it is important to consider how artists engage identity issues, works by underrepresented filmmakers should not be reserved solely for use in conversations about identity. In my discussion sections for USC’s Intro to Cinema, I did not highlight texts by filmmakers like Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, and Guillermo del Toro in order to make points about their race, gender, or ethnicity. I chose their films as exceptional texts illustrating formal cinematic principles. Similarly, underrepresented students can speak to identity issues but should not be made to feel that their primary value in the classroom comes from their serving as emissaries for a larger group.

Issues of equity and representation also matter in my research. My doctoral work on animals and landscapes connects with my interest in colonial studies. Anxieties about non-humans and the earth often allegorize concerns about human differences. In my dissertation, this element comes through most forcefully in my chapter on The Ghost and the Darkness – a film that stages a nostalgic colonial-era narrative in a South African nature reserve. This chapter was recently adapted into an article for The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies. In order to develop the connections between my environmental humanities work and the transnational legacies of colonialism, I present at Georgia Southern University’s postcolonial humanities conference regularly (I have attended every year since my senior year as an undergraduate). Looking ahead, critical race theory and environmental justice issues will be a significant part of my next major project on location shooting, which focuses on the industrial activities within, and the cultural depictions of, racialized and marginalized environments. This project developed out of anthology publications I wrote while working on my dissertation, which focused on the presentation of Harlem and Detroit in genre cinema.