Closing Keynote

How Stories Matter: rethinking citational practices and disciplinary knowledges

Thursday, May 2, 2024
2-3 p.m.
Online via Microsoft Teams

Dr. Ann Braithwaite
Professor and coordinator of Diversity and Social Justice Studies
University of Prince Edward Island

In 2013, in her feminist killjoys blog, Sara Ahmed provocatively asked, “who appears? And: who does not appear?” in our academic curricula and conferences, positing that “the reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.” The issue of citational practices, these questions remind us, reflect often unacknowledged assumptions not only about what gets taken for granted as important knowledge or as “the discipline,” but about who is included—and who is excluded—as knowers in any field. What perspectives and voices are made visible and centered in the everyday repeated and even taken for granted knowledges of what we teach—and who and what is overlooked or rendered invisible? And how do these questions matter? To ask (as this conference description does) “what makes a curriculum ‘relevant’ to students today as well as for their future?” is thus to challenge us all to (re)imagine what we’re doing as teachers—in our syllabi, in our program structures, in our disciplines? In this presentation, I want to invite us all to consider how our everyday citational practices and disciplinary knowledges in any field might be perpetuating a number of largely unrecognized presumptions that—if we are to think otherwise and imagine other (necessary) futures—need rethinking.

Biography

Dr. Ann Braithwaite is professor and coordinator of Diversity and Social Justice Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, where she has taught since 1998. As the only faculty member appointed to the program, she teaches a wide variety of courses at every level, on topics such as Identities and Place; Monsters, Freaks, Zombies, and Cyborgs; Disability Studies; Race and Whiteness; and Theorizing Social Justice.

The co-author or co-editor of four books, Dr. Braithwaite’s scholarly work examines the ways in which disciplines—such as Women’s and Gender Studies—are constructed through languages and narratives that reflect a set of embedded ways of knowing, asking what versions of a discipline these assumptions make possible, what possibilities they shut down, and how attending to those questions matters.

Dr. Braithwaite is the chair of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE / SAPES) Equity Committee, in addition to serving on several EDI committees at UPEI and on the UPEIFA; both at UPEI and beyond, her passion is to engage others in exploring how to bring questions of inclusion and justice to the classroom and to curricular programming. She is the recipient of numerous teaching, educational leadership, and service awards at UPEI, was awarded the 2014 AAU Anne Marie MacKinnon Educational Leadership award, and is a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow.