2-3 pm | Closing Keynote

How Stories Matter: rethinking citational practices and disciplinary knowledges

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

Online via Microsoft TeamsIn 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.

1:50-2 pm

Break