Timelines, Trauma, Temporality

Hala Herbly — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:58:44 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

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I'm teaching Banned Books and Novel Ideas this year, and most of the books I've chosen focus on the experience of trauma, whether on the level of the individual or the mass. One of the ways that I explain the concept of trauma to my class is by referring to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he explains the concept of the repetition compulsion as a response to traumatic experiences. The repetition compulsion manifests as a constant reliving of the trauma, often taking the form of dreams or nightmares, daydreams, or even subconscious actions. These symptoms, Freud reasoned, were ways for the subconscious mind to rid itself of the psychic pain of trauma. By constantly reliving the intial trauma, perhaps the mind can figure a way to escape or resolve the traumatic incident.

Most of the texts we're reading focus on incidents of trauma and their aftereffects, and thus tend to present temporality as anything but linear. This is where timeline appications come in.

In my class we read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Both these novels are pretty creative when it comes to temporality. During our discussions, students would often admit that they were confused by what had happened in that day's reading--which was completely understandable. Instead of relating the events of the novel point by point ("then this happened...then this...") I have my students log into their computers and congregate on a timeline-creating web application. I chose to use Dipity, which allows everyone to log in and edit the same timeline. For The Handmaid's Tale, this excercise allowed them to visualize the monotony of everyday life in the Republic of Gilead, the distance between Offred's present and her much-treasured memories, and finally, the shocking gap between her writing and the discovery of her recorded diary far in the future. This visualization led to a discussion of the mundane experience of everyday time, and the less accessible monolith of 'history."

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Beloved is structured by the intimate thoughts of three characters, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Because these womens' experiences tend to strain against the coherence of formal narrative, it was essential for my class to have a forum where they could discuss what happened when. Once they understood who Beloved was, and how she came to be, they were able to recognize why Beloved would seek to relive her early, traumatic experiences. Once again, the timeline enabled them to visualize this. Additionally, they were able to augment the novel's timeline with historical events--the end of the Civil War, for example.

I think these timeline excercises really helped my students, not only to "figure out" these novels' complex plots, but also to understand the cyclical nature of trauma, and to really inhabit the subtleties of narrative.

N.B.: Dipity sometimes moves excruciatingly slowly--the website, for some reason, takes forever to load, and any addition to the timeline we create often doesn't show up until long after it's been published. The site seems to be working a bit better these days, but I would still test it out if you plan on using it in class. A quick google search reveals other timeline-making web applications as well.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.

Blogging Pedagogy - Dipity

Timelines, Trauma, Temporality

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Mapping Community

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