Contributors
Susan B. Apel is a professor of law at Vermont Law School and adjunct professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. She is known for her work in legal pedagogy, family law, women and the law, and reproductive technologies. Her scholarly work has appeared in numerous legal and interdisciplinary journals, reviews and anthologies, as well as in the Bioethics Forum of the Hastings Center. Her essays have been published in Dartmouth Medicine, InTravel, American Vignette, and ShriverReport.org. She has been a featured guest contributor to Gender and the Law Blog, and has her own blog, A Woman of a Certain Age, www.turning60blog.wordpress.com. She currently lives in Lebanon, NH.
Sara Appel is a Dietrich School Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book in progress, "Going Nowhere Fast: Queer Kinesis and the Working Class in Contemporary American Culture," explores the relationship between working-class and queer ways of moving as depicted in various popular media forms (TV, film, comics, journalism, and web-based oral history).
Lynn Arner is an Associate Professor of English at Brock University in Canada. She is the author of Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace After 1381 (Penn State UP, 2013) and is currently writing a theorized book on working-class women in the professoriate. Arner has published articles on various late medieval English texts and on women in contemporary American academe; she also guest-edited a special issue of Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Arner teaches medieval English literature, gender studies, and contemporary theory to a predominantly working-class student body in the region where she was raised.
Katie Sullivan Barak earned a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University's School of Cultural and Critical Studies. She also attained a Master's degree from the Department of Popular Culture at BGSU. Her scholarship focuses on the exploration of representation, meaning-making, and women out-of-bounds. Currently on the academic job market, Katie is using her working-class skills to cobble together a semblance of existence.
Matt Bernico is a 3rd year PhD candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, CH. He is currently working on his dissertation, titled "Wild Aesthetics: A Metaphysics of Visual Culture." Matt is also an adjunct instructor at Greenville College in Greenville Illinois.
Raymond Blanton is a doctoral candidate completing his dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His primary research looks at the mythic, poetic, and rhetorical functions of the road in American culture. Additional interests include religious/sacred rhetoric, the blues, and working class studies.
Larry Busk is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Oregon, with particular concerns in political theory, contemporary European philosophy, and popular culture. He has written and presented on Adorno, Nietzsche, and Arendt, and is especially interested in the dialectical Marxism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar based in Sydney, Australia. She is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. The distinctive features of her work are her development of innovative social science research methodologies and their relation to the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophies. Her research explores the ethico-onto-epistemological relations through which particular social worlds are constituted. She is best known for her work on gender, for her development of the methodology of collective biography, and her writing on feminism and poststructuralist theory. Author of 17 books and more than 100 book chapters and papers, she now divides her time between writing and traveling. Her most recent books are Listening to Children. Being and Becoming, Routledge, 2014, and The Fairy who wouldn't fly, National Library of Australia, 2014.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and founder of the critical theory journal symplokē, editor and publisher of the American Book Review, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange. His recent books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2013), Turning the Page: Book Culture in the Digital Age (2014) and Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political (2014).
Joshua P. Ewalt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies and Graduate Fellow in the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. In his work, he takes a critical approach to the rhetorical processes of place, or the ways that places, and the mobile flows that hybridize to compose and/or represent places, become sites of civic and commemorative activity and in doing so contribute to, or assist in the dissolution of, persistent social problems. As such, his work is positioned at the intersection of a number of sub-fields including the analysis of places of public memory, regionalism, and activist practices, and has appeared in a number of venues including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Western Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture and Critique. He is from Troutman, North Carolina, Berrien Springs, Michigan, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Marquette, Michigan, but his home will always be that little slice of land adjacent to a dirt road in Berrien Center.
Ian Ho-yin Fong is currently working as Lecturer for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, responsible for teaching high diploma courses in popular culture and media studies. He is now working on a research project entitled "Walking in Chinese Modern Cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing."
Billy Goehring is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Oregon; he earned his M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University. His research interests are inevitably social and political in nature, and focus on 19th and 20th century European philosophy, with special emphasis on Deleuze, Althusser, Hegel, and Lacan. He also studies Northeast Asian philosophy, specifically the history of "Neo-Confucianism."
Barbara Jensen has more than 30 years experience training and teaching about class issues. She has led trainings in a wide range of settings, including schools, colleges, prisons, and mental health clinics, as well as for independent groups of therapists and the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services. She has developed and taught a variety of courses at Metropolitan State University,in both psychology and sociology. As a counseling and community psychologist, Barbara has worked in a variety of settings, including schools, homeless shelters, psychiatric residences, and in her private practice. She helped found the Working Class Studies Association in 2005, and co-chaired its first annual conference in 2007 at Macalester College. She is past president of the Working Class Studies Association. She has published articles about class in Women's Studies Quarterly, and wrote the closing chapter for What's Class Got to Do With It? (Zweig, ed. 2004). Her new book is Reading Classes: On Culture, and Classism in America by Cornell University Press. FFI: «www.barbarajensen.net»
Heidi J. Jones, Assistant Professor of English Education at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, is a working-class academic whose research and teaching is heavily influenced by a critical sociocultural approach to literacy. Currently writing a book for Sense Publishers' Mobility and Education Series about secondary English teachers from working-class backgrounds, Dr. Jones was recognized as a young scholar whose work shows promise for the field of working-class studies by the Working Class Studies Association in 2014.
Sheridan Linnell leads the Master of Art Therapy and Graduate Programs in Counselling at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral and post doctoral work explores how subjectivity is formed and performed within contemporary regimes that situate moral responsibility primarily with the individual. Sheridan is interested in feminist, narrative and postcolonial approaches to therapy and worked for many years in community agencies and independent practice with individuals and families, particularly those dealing with the effects of abuse. She is a published poet and collaborative artist and has written a book about her experience of practitioner research in art therapy.
Teri McMurtry-Chubb is an Associate Professor of Law at Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law. She researches, teaches, and writes in the areas of discourse analysis and rhetoric, critical legal studies, hegemony studies, and legal history. She has lectured nationally on structural workplace discrimination, disproportionate sentencing for African Americans, racial and gender inequalities in post-secondary education, and African Diasporic cultural forms. She has also facilitated narrative mediations of racial disputes in the academic workplace. Professor McMurtry-Chubb has taught at Loyola Law School-LA, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, The University of Iowa, Des Moines Area Community College, Drake University School of Law, and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. While at Fairhaven College, she served as an Assistant Professor of Law and Hegemony Studies, and was the co-founder and first director of Fairhaven's Center for Law, Diversity and Justice. She is the author of the textbook Legal Writing in the Disciplines: A Guide to Legal Writing Mastery (Carolina Academic Press 2012), and a recent contributor to the three-volume series Controversies in Affirmative Action Volume II: Contemporary Debates (Praeger 2014).
Jamie Mcphie is a lecturer of Cultural Landscapes and Aesthetics in the Outdoors on the University of Cumbria's (UK) Outdoor Studies programmes. His (current) research interests lie in psychogeography, environ(mental) health, process externalism, 'becoming' and (Deleuzian and Ingoldian) Rhizomatic thinking. As a former performance artist, Jamie has combined his interests in creative approaches to outdoor education, mental health and environmental exploration (and occasional activism).
Sharon O'Dair is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. The co-editor of The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell 1994), O'Dair is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Michigan 2000), and she edited "Shakespeareans in the Tempest: Lives and Afterlives of Katrina," a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Fall/Winter 2010. She has published many essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, critical methodology (including new historicism, ecocriticsm, and the digital humanities), and the profession of English studies.
Justin Philpot is a doctoral candidate in the American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University. He earned his master's degree from the Department of Popular Culture, also at Bowling Green. Against all advice he remains interested in nearly everything.
An "accidental academic," Herbert Pimlott worked in a range of jobs prior to teaching communication studies at university: dishwasher, farm labourer, adult educator, radio journalist, video editor. His research and teaching interests include radical journalism, alternative media and social movement campaigns and his work has been published in Journalism Practice, Labour/Le Travail, Socialist Studies and Media, Culture & Society, and his first book should be out in 2015: Wars of Position: Marxism Today, Cultural Politics and the Remaking of the Left Press, 1979–90. Three and a half decades after graduating from secondary school as part of the "No Future" generation, his "career opportunities" have kept him "out the dock." He can be contacted at hpimlott@wlu.ca.
Tasha Rennels is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include critical/cultural studies of communication, media studies, autoethnography, women and gender studies, social class, and whiteness. She would like to thank Carolyn Ellis and Matthew Rennels for their insightful feedback, loving guidance, and ongoing support.
Stephanie Sellers holds a doctoral degree in Native American Studies specializing in Women of the Eastern Woodlands. Her most recent book is Native American Women's Studies: A Primer (Peter Lang 2008). Her poetry and essays have been published in American Indian Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Native Literatures: Generations, and Calyx: The Journal of Women's Literature and Art, among others. She has presented her scholarship on the Native American Traditions panels of the American Academy of Religion, the National Women's Studies Association, the Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Modern Language Association, among others. In 2013 she won the Faculty Award at her home institution.
Raechel Tiffe is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Merrimack College. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in Critical Media Studies with a minor in Feminist & Critical Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching interests include: social movements; gender, race, class, and sexuality in the media; carceral studies; critical pedagogy; food and health justice; social media; among others. Her work has been published in Cultural Studies and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Her public media contributions include interviews in Rolling Stone and USA Today, as well as speaking appearances on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Valerie Walkerdine is a psychologist, cultural theorist and artist. She is Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is currently working on issues of class, gender and intergenerational transmission, using methods that combine her three interests under the auspices of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.
Debbie Warnock is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Louisville, where she teaches courses in the sociology of education, social stratification, and statistics. Her research focuses on racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to and transitions to and from higher education.