An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.
On the Yucatán Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine R. Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.”
Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented “the Maya” as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.
In Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, Ian Barnard argues that composition still retains the bulk of instructional practices that were used in the decades before poststructuralist theory discredited them. While acknowledging that some of the foundational insights of poststructuralist theory can be difficult to translate to the classroom, Barnard upends several especially intransigent tenets that continue to influence the teaching of writing and how students are encouraged to understand writing.
Using six major principles of writing classrooms and textbooks—clarity, intent, voice, ethnography, audience, and objectivity—Barnard looks at the implications of poststructuralist theory for pedagogy. While suggesting some evocative poststructuralist pedagogical practices, the author focuses on diagnosing the fault lines of composition's refusal of poststructuralism rather than on providing "solutions” in the form of teaching templates.
Upsetting Composition Commonplaces addresses the need to more effectively engage in poststructuralist concepts in composition in an accessible and engaging voice that will advance the conversation about relations between the theory and teaching of writing.
Librarians know that information literacy is much more complex and nuanced than the basic library research skill that it's often portrayed as; in fact, as outlined by the ACRL Framework, research is a contextual activity. But the settings in which we teach often constrain our ability to take a more layered approach. This book not only shows you how to teach information literacy as something other than a basic skill, but also how to do it in whatever mode of teaching you’re most often engaged in, whether that's a credit-bearing course, a one-shot session, a tutorial, a reference desk interaction, or a library program. Taking you through each step of the research process, this book shares ideas for adding context while exploring topics such as
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