"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Physical Dimensions","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Compression","Item Type Metadata:Producer","Item Type Metadata:Director","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:Email Body","Item Type Metadata:Subject Line","Item Type Metadata:From","Item Type Metadata:To","Item Type Metadata:CC","Item Type Metadata:BCC","Item Type Metadata:Number of Attachments","Item Type Metadata:Standards","Item Type Metadata:Objectives","Item Type Metadata:Materials","Item Type Metadata:Lesson Plan Text","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Player","Item Type Metadata:Imported Thumbnail","Item Type Metadata:Referrer",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured
"Quotidian moments",,"A note I wrote from April 16, 2020
From my dining room table: My two children, ages four and six, have now been at home for 35 days. Aside from waving to neighbors from our driveway and driving by a friend’s house to shout “Happy Birthday!” from the car window, they have not seen or spent time with family members, teachers, or friends.
As I write this reflection, thinking about the intersections of parenting, research, and what I would write about for this first humanities moment, I look back through photos of all of the art work my children and I made together this past year. Photos of drawings, yard signs, letters, and baby chickens in the skirts we made and decorated for them using cupcake holders (yes, that’s a thing). I have been thinking for a long time about how parenting and research are integrated together, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, and now sitting here looking at these photos of fairy houses, sun prints, and posters we made for neighbors, it seems more relevant and prescient than ever.
Madeleine Grumet (1988) posits, “Theory grows where it is planted, soaking up the nutrients in the local soil, turning to the local light” (p. 14). For myself, theory and research are planted in the intersections of motherhood, teaching, artistry, and care. They overlap and intertwine until one cannot be understood without the other. My research can not help but turn towards my children, as well as young learners in my community, especially during this uncertain time in which we’ve found ourselves. As a researcher and parent, my biggest fear is that in this wait for the return to “normalcy” we will miss the quotidian happenings that are packed with nutrients for growth and light.
In my mind, the quotidian moments of this past year, specifically the sharpened memories of making art with my kids at home, is one great, big humanities moment- a pause to refocus on what matters. I do not wish to glorify any parts of this horrible pandemic, which has affected so many and changed lives forever. However the pause, quite literally from my dining room table, and the experience of making intentional art with my kids on a daily basis was something that had been missing for quite some time. Grumet explains, “The dining room table became the locus of this research not because its design was conducive to meditations on eidetic form but because of its proximity to the lifeworld being carried on in the adjoining kitchen” (p. 5). During my time as a doctoral student, I felt that success in my academic career came with the price of failing as a mother. Although I’ve been writing and teaching about the importance of art education for many years, it was quite often neglected at home. Before the pandemic, there were many days my dining room table was (hypothetically) empty, our lives too busy to come together in this space to sit, talk, learn. But, during the days of shelter-in-place, my table truly became the locus of my life, my heart, my research. It was covered in books, art supplies, worksheets, Play-Doh, lunch: the materials of our lives. I found myself trying to be fully present to these lifeworlds, to both the human and non-human things we are surrounded by. What lessons were learned from our time making art together around our table, and how are we changed from these experiences?
Nel Noddings (2013) argues that “It is important for the young, in addition to being cared for, to see and assist in the genuine caring done by adults” (p. xiv). The more practice we all have in caregiving, the more likely it is for us to not only develop a method of caring and empathy but to also transfer this care to others. I found that intentional art-making, together, can be an act of care and empathy. I understand more fully how art-making can give young learners a language to express themselves during uncertain times, and how making art together opens up space for relationships to grow and conversations to be had.
Navigating the intersections of parenting and doctoral research is hard work and not without its share of failure. However, I feel challenged to continue to centralize myself to the lifeworlds carrying on around me, even as we move towards a return to “normal”. My hope for myself, and the reader, is that we take note of and show care for these quotidian moments we may have been overlooking for so long, even if it is something as simple as making a portrait out of leaves and flowers. These opportunities can be rich with opportunities for building relationships and finding beauty in the everyday.
References:
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
",,,,2020,"Amber Pitt, 35, Ph.D. Candidate in Art Education, University of Georgia",,,,,,quotidian-moments,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Residency,"Art,Children,COVID,Family,Parenting,Quarantine,Research",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/492/IMG_0038.jpeg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Random Research Gems",,"I’m deep in research for an article, searching through the National Library of Wales’s digital archives of the South Wales Echo newspaper for coverage of a specific coal mine explosion. Yes, there is a search function, but it turns out that computers don’t always correctly process the words in scanned documents (no surprise there!), so I am going issue by issue, within certain parameters. The monotony of clicking into an issue and then clicking to each page to scan it, fumbling with the zoom feature so I can actually read the headlines, is broken when I stumble across “Fun For Christmas. Conundrums” in the December 25, 1880 issue. This is clearly not relevant to my article, but I’m curious about these conundrums.
My favorite: “What vegetable is dangerous on board an ironclad? – A leek; because a little leak will sink a great ship.” Note: an ironclad is a nineteenth-century warship. Why is this my favorite, you might ask? Because we have that same joke today! Remember the official trailer for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t reference that)? “Aaah! There’s a leak in the boat!!!” Switch to a shot of an anthropomorphic leek sitting in the boat. It amazes me how some things can change so much in 140 years, but apparently a love of food puns is not one of them.
I make it to the February 5, 1881 issue before my eye is drawn once again to an article not related to coal mine explosions: “Grand Display of the Borealis”. It’s a short article, so here it is in full: “The plains of Llanbyther were on Monday evening lighted up with brilliant coruscations. The arch of a long bank of cirrus formed a back-ground, from which fan-like beams expanded to the zenith; the chameleon colours of the Aurora being, by a double reflection from the fleecy clouds, bent to the earth with a brilliancy that dimmed the light of the stars and rendered print easily readable.”
I don’t know about you, but that shift from the soaring language of “brilliant coruscations” (I had to look up that word) and “fan-like beams” expanding to the “zenith” to the quotidian “rendered print easily readable” makes me laugh every time. Both the conundrums and the article have me scrambling haphazardly out of my research rabbit hole because I have to share them immediately. I interrupt whatever my husband is doing to read them to him; I text screenshots to my family and friends.
These are the random research gems that may not ever make it into whatever I’m working on, but who cares? They make me smile and laugh; they bring me joy and demand I share that joy; and they put the human back in the humanities when it has lost its humanity in the looming idea(l) of the objective researcher.",,"Issues of the South Wales Echo newspaper from 1880 and 1881",,"April 17, 2021","Emily Beckwith (she/her), 31, Ph.D. Student in British Literature, University of Georgia",,,,,,random-research-gems,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC GSSR","British Empire,Cultural History,Journalism,Newspapers,Research",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/470/E326F5EE-851F-4DC7-8EE3-94F92CDD8A16.jpeg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Finding My Long-Lost Grandmother",,"In 2013, as a new college student, I started exploring genealogy. I learned to use the research skills that I developed from college history class to explore primary sources documents on my own. I reached out to extended family members, made new email contacts, and asked questions. I looked at courthouse records, newspaper clippings, and church records to not only determine where my ancestors are buried, but who their immediate family members are. I decided that I would make a genealogy book for my dad’s Christmas present, and I included him in the process. I loved when I could convince my Daddy to spend his Saturdays walking around cemeteries, locating relatives.
It is this process of researching and investigating that led me to the discovery of my 5 times great-grandmother, Hannah Parker. Hannah was born around 1735. During the late eighteenth century, she left Northern Ireland for America with her husband and children. They eventually settled in what is present-day Grayson County, Virginia. When my 5 times great-grandfather, John, passed away, Hannah moved with her son and her daughter-in-law to Deep Creek in Yadkin County, North Carolina. Hannah died in 1806 and is buried at Deep Creek Friends Meeting.
My father and I walked row by row, looking at heading stones dating back centuries. Then, just like that, we found her. The stone reads, “H.A. Parker.”
Obviously, Hannah Parker lived centuries before I was born, so I never knew her. Yet, suddenly I felt so connected to her because I realized that if she had not left her home and crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship, I would not be here today.
Finding my long-lost grandmother. That’s my humanities moment. Knowing who she was made me want to know more about the circumstances under which she lived, the time of the American Revolution, colonial-era beliefs about women in society and the church, the layout of the surrounding counties, and the people she may have encountered. I began asking hard questions and contextualizing the time in which she lived.
There are gaps in historical documentation, and I am aware that I will never learn everything about Hannah Parker. Even so, it is this desire to learn more about the time in which she lived that led me to my Master’s thesis work on women healers in colonial America. That project then led to the dissertation work on intercultural medical practice in the early American south that I do in my PhD program today.
A lot of people and different experiences influenced the path that led me to become a historian. Yet, this humanities moment of finding Hannah’s grave is different from the rest because for the first time, I realized the fruits of my labor. It took 7 months to finish that genealogy book for my father’s Christmas present. Because of this experience, when I now encounter names in census records, wills, and church records, I see them not as names and dates but as people. I have become invested in revealing the silences of their stories. Such instances make one very aware of one’s place in the world and the importance of uncovering the truth about what happened in the past, revealing people’s struggles, failures, and successes, and even understanding how people and events are influenced centuries later. We are all more connected to the past than we realize.
",,,,2013,"Jewel Parker, Age 27, Ph.D. candidate in History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro",,,,,,finding-long-lost-grandmother,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Graduate Student Summer Residency Program","Family Histories,Family Trees,Genealogy,Historical Markers,Immigration,Research",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/462/HM_Cemetery_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"You Cannot Copy That Map",,"In a lecture on the lived experiences of the local peoples of the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam, Dr. Christian C. Lentz, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Chapel Hill, shared this map of the Northwest Region of Vietnam and a short anecdote about why this map is of particular importance. He was in the middle of doing research in Hanoi at the North Vietnam Archives Center #3, and faced opposition when he attempted to make copies of many of the maps dating to the French colonial era in Vietnam, whether they be from the French or a Vietnamese production. This map alone Dr. Lentz was allowed to reproduce. This map represents for me the numerous layers that the themes of “contested” and “territory” manifest in Southeast Asia in this time period.
This seemingly little tidbit that he shared in the midst of his lecture is what really stuck with me, and cemented my understanding of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The “contest” for Vietnam extends much further past the initial creation of this map in 1952. The idea that a visiting scholar such as Dr. Lentz was strictly forbidden to copy any maps other than this one speaks to how hotly contested the memory of the Vietnam War is still today. As Dr. Lentz told the story, I created a mental image of a Vietnamese archival official standing over Dr. Lentz’ shoulder, closely monitoring what the American scholar copied. How do we remember this conflict? From which perspective? Controlling what can and cannot be recreated is an attempt to steer the narrative, which is very much still being written.
Dr. Lentz’ story on the “Black River Region after Northwest Campaign (Oct-Dec 1952)” map simplified for me all the complexities that contributed to the warfare in Southeast Asia into a single map, a visual representation of a territory that meant so many different things to so many different actors, each pulled into a conflict that continues to this day to be contested. I can only hope through continued scholarship, communication, and openness, that one day, the archival official will instead say, “Yes, you can copy that map.” ",,,,"July 2018 - NEH Summer Institute","Maggie Childress, 24, Teacher, Wake County, North Carolina",,,,,,you-cannot-copy-that-map,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NEH Summer Teachers Institute","Archives,Cartography,Censorship,Research,Teachers & Teaching,Vietnam,Vietnam War (1961-1975)",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/216/NW_Vietnam_Region.JPG,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0
"The Golden Line",,"
I started learning Latin in seventh grade because I decided it was the most difficult course I could take, and I had something to prove. I was an economically disadvantaged student in a wealthy private school, and all of my classmates knew it. I would never live in their mansions, or wear their expensive clothes, or go on their exotic vacations, so I set about making myself at least academically equal. Like most grade school students who read Latin, the poetry of Catullus was some of the first “real” literature I encountered. After the dry, contrived passages in my textbooks, the sensuous love poems and harsh invectives were a welcome change of pace. Catullus’ writing is the rare combination of accessible and beautiful — a perfect entry to Latin poetry.
I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.
My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.
First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.
Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.
",,"The poetry of Catullus",,,"Brooke Andrade, Director of the Library, National Humanities Center",,,,,,brooke-andrade-catullus-latin-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Books & Reading,Catullus,Classical Literature,Comparative Grammar,Horace,Joy,Latin,Librarians,Literature,Ovid,Poetry,Raleigh, North Carolina,Research,Virgil,Vocation",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/26/catullus-960x590.jpg,Text,,1,0