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February 24th, 2020
We talked to Dara Wald and Anna Peterson, authors of Cats and Conservationists: The Debate Over Who Owns the Outdoors about feral cats and the conversation surrounding them.
Cats and Conservationists is the first multidisciplinary analysis of the heated debate about free-roaming cats. The debate pits conservationists against cat lovers, who disagree both on the ecological damage caused by the cats and the best way to manage them. The book aims to see through the smoke of the debate, and facilitate collaboration in order to manage outdoor cats and minimize the damage they cause.
Q: Could you briefly explain the debate surrounding feral cats, and what the two sides in the argument are purported to be?
Anna Peterson: The two sides are sometimes framed as “bird people” and “cat people,” who are supposedly at odds with each other in every possible way. “Bird people” think outdoor cats kill huge numbers of wild animals, including song birds and endangered species, and want to eliminate outdoor cats in order to protect wildlife and ecosystems. They often think that trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs are ineffective ways to reduce the cat population and that stricter measures, including lethal ones, are required. “Cat people,” on the other hand, think that outdoor cats do not contribute to minimal ecological damage, that TNR programs usually work well to reduce or stabilize cat populations, and that outdoor cats have as much “right” to exist as other animals. This is very simplified, but it’s a common way that the debate is framed.
Dara Wald: The problem with simplified framing is that it often dismisses or ignores value-based differences driving public debate over outdoor cats. The folks involved in this debate have strongly held beliefs about the world, about science, and about animals. These beliefs are associated with specific worldviews or orientations (e.g., conservationist vs. animal welfare) that influence how individuals’ select and interpret information. Thus, conservationists are more likely to pay attention to and accept widespread scientific consensus that cats kill birds. While TNR supporters are significantly less likely to be exposed to this message, and when confronted with it, they are less likely to agree that cat predation poses a risk to wildlife or environmental health. So, this simplified framing could actually be reinforcing the differences between these groups and contributing to greater polarization between interested parties. That’s why it’s important to identify alternative voices and pathways to promote constructive conversations.
Q: It seems that many intend to frame the two sides of this conflict as being uncompromising and combative, your book talks about that framing, could you explain?
Peterson: The simplistic bird people vs. cat people frame does portray the two sides as rigid and mutually exclusive, as though there are no common values or interests. Our research finds that while the conflicts are real, there are many shared values. While some people may be uncompromising, many other people who care about this debate are open to conversation and compromise. We think that constructive conversations among different stake holders – conservationists, cat advocates, local residents – can help reveal common interests and goals and provide people with the information they need to make better policy decisions. For example, it’s important to know what ecological damage cats might be doing in a given area, because their impact is really different in a disturbed urban or suburban area than it is in an ecologically fragile place like a coastal or island environment. Good information about issues like that can help people have better conversations and reach constructive policy solutions.
Wald: The language and frames we use to describe an animal or a topic can send a signal about how much we value a species, which identity group we belong, and whose science we accept. Think about the difference between the terms “evolution” and “creation” or “global warming” or “climate change.” Using a specific frame or term can unintentionally send a signal to your audience about your position. This positionality can make it hard to start a constructive conversation. The goal of this book is to encourage constructive conversations among all the communities interested in this debate. To do this, we looked at the common frames employed by prominent voices and groups. You’ll also notice that we use the term “outdoor” cats instead of “feral” cats throughout. We chose the more neutral term because we want this book to be accessible to all the groups involved in this debate.
Q: What do you feel are some of the other major misconceptions the general public may have about this debate?
Peterson: I think one misconception might be about how important this issue is to many conservationists. While many people in the “general public” aren’t aware that there is a conflict, and maybe not even that there are lots of outdoor cats running around, the people who are aware of the issue often feel very strongly. The first time this issue came up in a classroom for me, it was with a bunch of environmental science grad students, and I was surprised at how passionate they were about this issue and how heated the discussion became.
Wald: Agreed. I was also surprised once I started studying this issue that it has really important implications beyond cats. The debate over outdoor cats is an example of what happens when strongly held beliefs and values drive conflict over environmental issues. There are important parallels between this issue and public debate over the safety of GM foods, the benefits of wind energy, and the risks associated with climate change. Unlike these national/international issues, decisions about how to manage outdoor cats can be addressed at the local level. There are groups already involved and committed to developing solutions that save the lives of birds and cats and yet they are often dismissed, ignored, or belittled by the media and the environmental community. This is a pattern that can create resentment, distrust, and a sense that environmentalists, and other expert groups are not acting in the public’s best interest. My goal is to encourage constructive discussions and community-led solutions that are inclusive, supportive, and sustainable – whether the topic is cats or other complex, contested environmental issues.
Q: Many are relatively comfortable considering certain animals (moles, snakes, raccoons, opossums, etc.) as pests to be exterminated/captured. How do you feel this does/should affect the debate around feral cats?
Peterson: Most people, at least in the US, put cats in a very different category than “vermin” – they see cats as pets, even if they are unowned, and not pests. Our research and other studies show that even “bird advocates” often have pet cats of their own, whom they love. That’s why there is a debate about what to do about outdoor cats, when there is not nearly the same level of conflict about other invasive predators. In some ways, as certain conservationists will argue, this distinction is not well-grounded: if we focus on cats’ intrinsic qualities or on their ecological role, they are not all that different from many other species. What makes them different is their relationships with us. Humans have a historical relationship with cats, as our two species have interacted for thousands of years, in addition to the personal relationships that many people have with cats today. For better or worse, these relationships profoundly shape how people feel about the “feral cat problem,” and we cannot ignore them, if we want constructive solutions.
Wald: I agree. One major difference is the human connection. In addition, people are generally attracted to and interested in charismatic mammals. As much as I love snakes, birds, and raccoons, I understand why the World Wildlife Fund has a panda on its logo.
Thank you so much to Dara and Anna for their time! You can read more about outdoor cats and the debate surrounding them by getting your own copy of Cats and Conservationists or picking it up from your local library!
You can get 30% off Cats and Conservationists and any other Purdue University Press books by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: UncategorizedFebruary 19th, 2020
In this interview, we talk with author William F. Causey about his forthcoming book John Houbolt: The Unsung Hero of the Apollo Moon Landings.
John Houbolt tells the story of NASA engineer John Houbolt, and his advocacy for Lunar Orbit Rendevous (LOR) as the preferred method for getting American astronauts to the moon and back.
Q: What piqued your interest into the story of John Houbolt and the LOR decision?
William F. Causey: Beginning with the 15-minute Mercury flight of Alan Shepard in May 1961, through all the Apollo moon landings and then with the thrilling robotic landings on Mars and probes to the outer planets, I have been fascinated with our space program. As a youngster I followed every flight and read every book on space flight. In 1995, I read Jim Hansen’s Spaceflight Revolution, his book on the history of the Langley Research Center, and I became enthralled with the chapter on John Houbolt and the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) decision. I wanted to learn more, but there was not much material on Houbolt or how the LOR decision was made. I began to compile my own research, and during one summer, I examined Houbolt’s voluminous papers that he had donated to the University of Illinois. Upon my return to Washington, I wrote him a letter (before the days of email) asking if I could meet and interview him. To my surprise, Houbolt invited my wife and me to Maine where John and his wife Mary were retired. We had a marvelous weekend talking about NASA and John’s role in the LOR decision. I had the good fortune to talk with John several times before his death in 2014 at the age of 95. I realized from these discussions that the LOR decision brought together all the amazing management and engineering talent that was at the core of the great adventure we call Apollo, and that it was largely this mid-level engineer from Langley who eventually convinced everyone that LOR was the only way to land astronauts on the moon and return them safely to earth by the end of the decade. I decided that Houbolt’s role in the LOR story needed a more complete examination, and my book tells that amazing story.
Q: Why do you think it took so long for this story to get told in full?
Causey: The Apollo story – perhaps the greatest adventure and achievement in human history – was told largely through the eyes of the astronauts, the people who took the journeys, which we as a nation followed with awe and wonder. Our collective experience in space involved watching dramatic launches and looking at captivating colorful photographs of the earth from space and of the gray and black “desolation” of the lunar surface. Very little attention was devoted during Apollo to the thousands of men and women who worked behind the scenes to make Apollo a successful endeavor.
The John Houbolt story of lunar orbit rendezvous took place during the early days of Project Mercury – indeed, Americans had been in space a total of six and one-half hours when NASA adopted the LOR lunar mode in July 1962. At that time, space rendezvous and docking were still years in the future. Although many people, primarily at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, contributed to the development of the LOR concept, John Houbolt was the Langley engineer who perhaps knew the most about orbital rendezvous. He became the person to promote LOR to a skeptical and at times hostile NASA management. While we understand today that thousands of people built the space hardware and software, manned the control and tracking stations, and worked with the astronauts during the training and flights, we did not know at the time that the idea of how to land men on the moon and return them safely to earth largely was the result of the persistence and tenacity of one person.
The Houbolt story was not widely known outside NASA until Jim Hansen’s book Spaceflight Revolution, published in 1995, about the history of the Langley Research Center. Hansen’s book contained only one short chapter on Houbolt and the the LOR story. My book attempts to expand on Hansen’s excellent chapter and provides the historical foundation for how NASA made the LOR decision that produced the astonishing feats of the Apollo program.
Q: How does telling Houbolt’s story affect the legacy of the Apollo program as a whole?
Causey: The lasting legacy of the Apollo program was that this nation could accomplish a seemingly insurmountable but truly momentous undertaking when the minds and resources of the country focused with laser precision on that one national goal. My book shows how dozens of truly remarkable and brilliant people fought hard to achieve the objective of getting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. John Houbolt was one of many great minds who participated in that thrilling adventure, but it was his tenacity and persistence in promoting the LOR idea, at first against enormous opposition and even open hostility, that finally provided NASA with the direction to get to the moon.
Q: Do you feel the fate of the program would be different without Houbolt’s persistence? Were any of the other methods truly viable?
Causey: When President Kennedy proposed in May 1961 that America should achieve the goal, before the end of the decade, of landing a man on the moon and returning him to earth, NASA had no idea how to do that. Although NASA considered two landing options, called Direct Ascent and Earth Orbit Rendezvous, it became apparent that neither plan was technically feasible. Several engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, led by John Houbolt, proposed a third option, called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. The LOR mode involved sending two crafts to the moon. The smaller, lighter spacecraft, called the lunar module, would take two astronauts to the lunar surface while the third astronaut stayed in lunar orbit in the larger command module. The two astronauts would take off from the moon and rendezvous in lunar orbit with the third astronaut before all three would return to earth in the command module. At first NASA flatly rejected Houbolt’s LOR idea, with several NASA planning committees even refusing to consider the concept. But after Houbolt wrote two letters to NASA management that placed his career in jeopardy, and after spirited internal debate involving the clash of powerful egos, NASA finally adopted Houbolt’s LOR idea in July 1962. And, of course, the United States landed men on the moon in 1969.
It is virtually certain that America would not have landed astronauts on the moon by the end of the 1960s if NASA had not adopted the LOR concept. There would not have been enough time to build and test the lunar lander and Saturn V rocket, perfect orbital rendezvous and docking techniques, conduct long-duration flights in the Gemini program, and master the mathematics of trajectory to and from the moon. Although it is likely that the United States would have eventually landed on the moon given enough time and money using Direct Ascent or Earth Orbit Rendezvous, what makes the Houbolt story so compelling is that without his persistence, Apollo 11 surely would not have landed on the moon and returned safely to earth in July 1969.
Q: It seems in the process of getting to the moon it took some pretty big pushes (e.g., John Houbolt’s persistence, the Apollo 1 tragedy), to get NASA going in the correct direction. It’s been quite some time since the US has been to the moon. Do you think the country is missing that push now?
Causey: The Apollo program was a huge undertaking that began months before President Kennedy committed the nation to a manned lunar landing. Engineers and scientists began seriously thinking of sending men to the moon years before NASA was created in 1958. But once President Kennedy proposed a manned lunar landing in May 1961, NASA had to quickly agree on a way to get to the moon. Fortunately, the idea of landing a man on the moon captured the imagination of Congress as well as the public, and there was more than adequate public funding and private initiative to get Apollo started and underway. As my book shows, the LOR decision –a major aspect of getting to the moon and back – was not an easy decision for numerous technical and managerial reasons. The significant events that led to the ultimate success of the Apollo moon landings, such as the accomplishments of Projects Mercury and Gemini, the development of the Saturn V rocket, remarkable advancements in computer technology, and a largely workable but expensive partnership between government and private industry, enabled the United States to land a man on the moon by July 1969.
To be sure, there were major delays, disappointments, and tragedies along the way as well. The March 1966 aborted Gemini 8 flight that almost took the lives of the crew made NASA appreciate with greater acuity the dangers of space flight. The Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 that took the lives of the crew on the test pad was a major setback that demonstrated the poor design and shoddy workmanship of the Apollo command module, but that resulted in a much-improved spacecraft. The long delays in the development of the lunar lander that led to the bold but risky flight of Apollo 8, and the delays in the development of the Saturn V booster that required an expedited all-ups testing schedule, helped NASA come together and overcome the tragedy of Apollo 1. Indeed, one of the central threads of the remarkable Apollo story is how NASA adapted to the vagaries of the program to meet the end-of-the decade deadline.
Humans have not walked on the moon since December 1972 – a span of almost five decades. Although the United States has expressed a desire to return to the moon by 2024, it is unlikely that that will happen. To begin with, we need to have the same collective national will that we had in 1961, and it does not appear that such collective will exists at this time. Returning men – and women – to the moon will be an expensive and complex project that will equal or surpass the Apollo program. And returning humans to the moon will have to compete with the less expensive and safer means of space exploration with robotics. In all likelihood, NASA will have to partner with the existing private space industry, and the United States will have to partner with other nations such as China, Russia, India, and Japan, to share the cost and risk of future human space travel. Returning to the moon will have to be a global undertaking in all respects.
Yet, we can be certain that one day people will walk on the moon again, and journey to Mars and the asteroids, just as we knew in the 1950s that humans would travel beyond the bounds of earth. It is an adventure worth pursuing.
Thank you to William Causey for taking the time to answer our questions! If you would like to learn more about the book, you can find him at Politics & Prose on Sunday, March 15 from 1-2 pm.
You can get 30% off John Houbolt and any other Purdue University Press books by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: PurduePressJanuary 27th, 2020
In this interview we talk to Steven G. Kellman, the author of Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism.
Nimble Tongues is a collection of essays that continues the author’s work in the fertile field of translingualism, focusing on the phenomenon of switching languages.
Q: Could you explain the concept of literary translingualism?
Steven G. Kellman: Literary translingualism is the phenomenon of writers who write in an acquired language. It includes writers who switch from a native language and write exclusively in another language – e.g, Joseph Conrad (who wrote in his third language, English, rather than Polish or French), Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew rather than German), and Ha Jin (English rather than Chinese). And it includes writers who write in more than one language – e.g., Samuel Beckett (English and French), Vladimir Nabokov (Russian, French, and English), and Yoko Tawada (German and Japanese). Literary translingualism is as ancient as the writers of antiquity who employed the imperial languages of Latin, Persian, or Sanskrit rather than their native vernaculars. And it is as current as the wave of immigrants who are enriching contemporary literature with texts written in the languages of their adopted homes.
Q: Why do you feel that it is an important concept to study?
Kellman: There is an intrinsic literary value to translingual texts written by Apuleius, Petrarch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Isak Dinesen, Edwidge Danticat, and other outstanding authors. Any reader can appreciate how very difficult it is to write well in one’s first language – and marvel at the achievements of those who excel in a second, third, or even fourth language. However, linguistic switching also raises compelling questions about the relationships among language, thought, and identity. If, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” writers who switch languages free themselves from the limitations of one world, only to place themselves within the limits of another world. The choice of language is not a trivial matter; it determines the text. After Ariel Dorfman wrote his memoir Heading South, Looking North in English, he duplicated the feat in Spanish, as Rumbo al Sur, deseando el Norte. However, it was not exactly a translation as much as a reconception – of the autobiographical project and of the self that is its subject. There are certain themes, moods, and thoughts that come more easily to André Brink when he writes in Afrikaans than when he writes in English.
Q: Perhaps uniquely, you mention that no one scholar can possibly claim mastery in the field, could you expand on that?
Kellman: No one researcher possesses the linguistic equipment or energy to exhaust the study of translingual literature. If there are approximately 5,000 languages in the world, the number of translingual possibilities would equal 5,000 X 4,499 ÷ 2 = 12,497,500. And that is only calculating the number of bilingual translingual possibilities; authors who, like Kamala Das, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Steiner, move among three or more languages add even more possibilities to the challenge of mapping out the universe of translingual literature. Not even the most formidable polylingual scholars of comparative literature such as René Wellek or Erich Auerbach are equipped to master the field. The burgeoning study of translingual literature is a collective effort, pursued through books, dissertations, journals, and conferences throughout the world. Scholars approach it through the lenses of comparative literature, linguistics, language pedagogy, psychology, postcolonial studies, and other disciplines.
Q: Taking all of this into account, how do you feel this title contributes to the field of study?
Kellman: Nimble Tongues expands on earlier work I have done in The Translingual Imagination (2000) and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003). Standing on the backs of giants, I have benefited from the growing community of specialists in translingual literature I have read and met throughout the world. The book discusses some translingual writers who have not received much attention, such as Hugo Hamilton, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Francesca Marciano. It also goes beyond just literary criticism to examine the strange case of a film made in Esperanto, the epidemic of xenolinguaphobia in the United States, and the challenges faced by the United Nations in producing a document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, intended to be universally valid and equally authoritative in all of its hundreds of linguistic iterations. The opening chapter of Nimble Tongues is titled “Does Translingualism Matter?” I hope that the book provides a persuasive positive answer.
You can get 30% off of any Purdue University Press books by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: UncategorizedJanuary 27th, 2020
In this interview we talk to Steven G. Kellman, the author of Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism.
Nimble Tongues is a collection of essays that continues the author’s work in the fertile field of translingualism, focusing on the phenomenon of switching languages.
Q: Could you explain the concept of literary translingualism?
Steven G. Kellman: Literary translingualism is the phenomenon of writers who write in an acquired language. It includes writers who switch from a native language and write exclusively in another language – e.g, Joseph Conrad (who wrote in his third language, English, rather than Polish or French), Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew rather than German), and Ha Jin (English rather than Chinese). And it includes writers who write in more than one language – e.g., Samuel Beckett (English and French), Vladimir Nabokov (Russian, French, and English), and Yoko Tawada (German and Japanese). Literary translingualism is as ancient as the writers of antiquity who employed the imperial languages of Latin, Persian, or Sanskrit rather than their native vernaculars. And it is as current as the wave of immigrants who are enriching contemporary literature with texts written in the languages of their adopted homes.
Q: Why do you feel that it is an important concept to study?
Kellman: There is an intrinsic literary value to translingual texts written by Apuleius, Petrarch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, Isak Dinesen, Edwidge Danticat, and other outstanding authors. Any reader can appreciate how very difficult it is to write well in one’s first language – and marvel at the achievements of those who excel in a second, third, or even fourth language. However, linguistic switching also raises compelling questions about the relationships among language, thought, and identity. If, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” writers who switch languages free themselves from the limitations of one world, only to place themselves within the limits of another world. The choice of language is not a trivial matter; it determines the text. After Ariel Dorfman wrote his memoir Heading South, Looking North in English, he duplicated the feat in Spanish, as Rumbo al Sur, deseando el Norte. However, it was not exactly a translation as much as a reconception – of the autobiographical project and of the self that is its subject. There are certain themes, moods, and thoughts that come more easily to André Brink when he writes in Afrikaans than when he writes in English.
Q: Perhaps uniquely, you mention that no one scholar can possibly claim mastery in the field, could you expand on that?
Kellman: No one researcher possesses the linguistic equipment or energy to exhaust the study of translingual literature. If there are approximately 5,000 languages in the world, the number of translingual possibilities would equal 5,000 X 4,499 ÷ 2 = 12,497,500. And that is only calculating the number of bilingual translingual possibilities; authors who, like Kamala Das, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Steiner, move among three or more languages add even more possibilities to the challenge of mapping out the universe of translingual literature. Not even the most formidable polylingual scholars of comparative literature such as René Wellek or Erich Auerbach are equipped to master the field. The burgeoning study of translingual literature is a collective effort, pursued through books, dissertations, journals, and conferences throughout the world. Scholars approach it through the lenses of comparative literature, linguistics, language pedagogy, psychology, postcolonial studies, and other disciplines.
Q: Taking all of this into account, how do you feel this title contributes to the field of study?
Kellman: Nimble Tongues expands on earlier work I have done in The Translingual Imagination (2000) and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003). Standing on the backs of giants, I have benefited from the growing community of specialists in translingual literature I have read and met throughout the world. The book discusses some translingual writers who have not received much attention, such as Hugo Hamilton, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Francesca Marciano. It also goes beyond just literary criticism to examine the strange case of a film made in Esperanto, the epidemic of xenolinguaphobia in the United States, and the challenges faced by the United Nations in producing a document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, intended to be universally valid and equally authoritative in all of its hundreds of linguistic iterations. The opening chapter of Nimble Tongues is titled “Does Translingualism Matter?” I hope that the book provides a persuasive positive answer.
You can get 30% off of any Purdue University Press books by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: UncategorizedDecember 6th, 2019
We talked with author Pavel Soukup about his book with Purdue University Press, Jan Hus: The Life and Death of a Preacher.
The book records the life of medieval Czech university master and popular preacher Jan Hus, who was one of medieval Europe’s most prominent reformers.
Q: Who was Jan Hus?
Pavel Soukup: Jan Hus was a late medieval Czech university master and popular preacher in Prague, an adherent of the teachings of the English thinker John Wyclif, and a proponent of Church reform. Through his dedicated pursuit of what he understood as his mission, this medieval intellectual generated conflict, and eventually brought execution upon himself. In 1415, he was condemned at the Council of Constance and burned at the stake as a heretic. Thanks to his contemporary influence and his posthumous fame in the Hussite movement and beyond, Hus has become one of the best known figures of the Czech past, and one of the most prominent reformers of medieval Europe as a whole.
Q: It must provide a challenge to write about someone with the notoriety of Hus. Was there anything new you intended on adding to the conversation around him?
Soukup: The new facts I was able to add Hus’s biography are rather detailed findings that matter mostly to specialists. More important was my ambition to provide a comparative perspective on Hus. I did not want to see him as a titan with no peer, but rather as a member of a large group of reform-minded medieval intellectuals. What puzzles us is the fact that many of these reformers belonged to Hus’s opponents and some most prominent of them were among the judges who sent him to death. It is only through comparing their grounds, aims and approaches, that we can understand the religious split and the emergence of the Hussite dissent. While much work remains to be done, my book identifies the key areas in which this comparison should be done, and provides answers to the question of why an ecclesiastical reformer was condemned by a reform church council.
Q: Why did you choose to write about Jan Hus now?
Soukup: The book was written upon request by the German publisher of the original version. Otherwise, I would not think of writing about a person of such prominence in Czech historical research and public debate. Nevertheless, I accepted the invitation immediately. I understood it as both a chance and a challenge. Writing about Hus, one finds himself part of a long and venerable tradition. Czech patriotic discourse always spoke about Hus in impassioned, affected language. Today, big words like ‘truth’ and ‘martyrdom’ make us somewhat bashful. While literature on Hus certainly needs more sober language, the central themes of Hus’s story remain topical. Hus had to make hard choices facing repressive institutions, and the former Czech president Václav Havel had a point when he emphasized the principal of individual responsibility that cannot be delegated to anyone else.
Q: You say that the central themes of Hus’s life remain topical. What are some of these main themes?
Soukup: Jan Hus is often seen as someone who chose death instead of betraying the truth. This stance might be questioned by pointing to the subjectivity of personal convictions, especially when they are rooted in religious beliefs. Yet it is precisely these days, in the age of disinformation, that we need to care again about truth and reliability. Another theme crucial for grasping Hus is his public activity which led to the emergence of a group of determined followers who, not much later, started a religious revolution. I devoted the key chapters of the book to communication, media, and propaganda, as well as to preaching and political networking of Hus. Given the importance of communication networks and social media in today’s world, I believe that the social impact of communicative behavior represents a highly relevant topic of cultural-historical studies.
You can get 50% off Jan Hus during our Central European Studies Sale, just enter discount code CES50 when ordering directly through our website. The sale ends on December 1.
Filed under: UncategorizedNovember 11th, 2019
In anticipation of the current issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, we spoke with poet and novelist Ellen Galford about her writing, as well as topics in Jewish studies more broadly. Galford composed three original poems for issue 37, volume 3, a special issue titled “Narrative Spaces at the Margins of British Jewish Culture(s).”
You can access Shofar through your institutional log-in via Project Muse or JSTOR, visit the Shofar website, or follow Shofar on Twitter @ShofarJournal.
Q: You’ve written fiction and poetry on Jewish themes and topics in the past, and for this special issue of Shofar you’ve written three poems: “The Museum of Margins,” “Mixed Marriage,” and “Curator.” Do you find that one form (poetry or prose) lends itself especially well to exploring certain aspects of Jewish identity or history?
Ellen Galford: There’s an old saying that God’s real reason for creating humankind was to satisfy His/Her/Their (??) voracious appetite for stories. When an image or a theme starts jabbing me between the shoulder blades, I don’t ask it whether it would like to be a poem or a piece of prose when it grows up. Either way, it’s going to be a story that I hope will keep a reader, divine or human, entertained.
Prose has prevailed throughout most of my writing life—screeds of bespoke nonfiction texts for the day job, fiction for the sake of love and politics and taking my imagination wherever it wanted to go. But it was only after novels about lesbian bad girls in Jacobean London, folklore and feminism in the twentieth-century Outer Hebrides, and a satirical slap at the Thatcher government that I came out of the closet as a Jewish writer with novel number four. And at that point prose—with its leisurely story arcs and ample room for any number of digressions—opened the door into the surreal, heretical Jewish world inside my head.
After I stepped across that particular threshold, I came out of the closet as a writer of poetry, too. For years I’d felt uneasy about showing my poems to anyone (apart from a few very personal pieces with specific readers in mind). But maybe it’s because I’ve travelled far enough along in my own personal timeline to acquire a bit of chutzpah and just go for it. Sometimes writing poetry feels like wrestling with an angel (or a pack of noisy demons) all night long. Call it some kind of cockamamie optimism, but I don’t think there is any theme or topic, Jewish or otherwise, that a poem can’t tackle. Making it good enough is another story.
Q: You were originally born in New Jersey but spent much of your life in Scotland. Do your American origins shape your experience in Scotland? Additionally, does your Jewish identity inform the ways you understand national identity, the ways you might personally locate yourself within national or global communities or as a writer?
Galford: I’ve lived in Scotland for a very long time. When I left the US, Nixon was still president. I am what’s sometimes defined as “Scottish by formation.” Politically I view the world through a leftish, internationalist Scottish lens, appalled by Brexit and hoping that we’ll get our independence while I’m still around to see it. But any time I start up a conversation with a stranger, the first question will be “Where’s that accent from?” As soon as I open my mouth, it becomes clear that my origins lie much closer to the banks of the River Hudson than to those of the River Clyde. And although I tend to look at whatever is happening in America as “foreign news,” I know that culturally I am also very much a product of my New York/New Jersey upbringing. Middle-aged taxi-drivers are particularly impressed when I tell them that the TV mafia saga The Sopranos was based on the suburb where I grew up.
Many years ago I did a reading at a feminist bookshop in Massachusetts to mark the US publication of The Dyke and the Dybbuk. The shop manager confessed that “We can’t decide where to put you. The lesbian shelf? The historical fiction shelf? The fantasy shelf? American feminist fiction or European?” I suggested very tentatively that if she ordered a few extra copies she could put them in all the right places.
Like everybody else I know, I belong to several different tribes, some of them Jewish (you can be 98.6 percent secular and still want to learn Talmud). We’ve all made journeys, some of them generations-long, to reach the places where we feel at home, changing and maybe even reinventing ourselves in the process. This certainly informs my thinking not only about national identity but about the ways people define themselves over time in terms of religion, gender, sexuality, political perspective, and so forth. And I can’t understand how any Jew with even the vaguest sense of history can collude with the builders of walls.
Q: Many scholars in the upcoming special issue discuss the ways historians, sociologists, and artists have in the past often limited their explorations of British Jewishness to England. Do you think Jewishness is experienced differently in Scotland than it is in England? How would you describe the relationship between Scottish identity and Jewishness?
Galford: Scotland is a small country (5 million people) with a tiny population of Jews. The Jewish spectrum runs from traditional Orthodox through progressive Liberal to those who wouldn’t put their foot into any shul at all. Most of us live in Glasgow or Edinburgh but we also turn up in remote Highland glens, out on the islands and in tiny fishing villages along the Fife coast. We don’t all know each other.
Heaven forbid I should speak for everybody, but I think I’d be safe in saying that Jewish Scotland is in no way a smaller, rainier version of Jewish London or Jewish Manchester. In Scotland you’d have to be very determined indeed to live in what one might call a separatist Jewish environment, devoid of friends, partners, colleagues, or neighbors from outside the tribe. And Scotland, as we are forever reminding the rest of the world, isn’t England. Our educational systems, legal systems, historical perspectives, and social attitudes differ in many ways. One current sore point is that the Scottish electorate voted by a substantial majority to remain in the European Union, and there is a widespread feeling that we are being dragged out against our will by our southern neighbours.
I’m trying hard to avoid sloppy generalizations here, but I do think that the reasons for this include a much more positive attitude to immigration. This is partly because it is widely understood that Scotland needs more people—demographically and economically—to flourish. But there is also an underlying internationalism. Scots, like Jews, have experienced all manner of displacements and diasporas, forced and voluntary alike. You’d be hard-pressed to find a native-born Scot without family connections in Canada, Australia, the United States, or elsewhere. Like Jews, Scots of all breeds and creeds have long memories, and know what it feels like to look over your shoulder and see the place you came from disappearing from sight.
Q: In two of the poems you’ve written for this special issue, “The Museum of Margins” and “Curator,” you reference the museum space, a library, “draughty corridors,” and “tattered photos.” These poems revolve around the past, including not simply spaces to preserve history (museum, library) but also memories. How would you describe the relationship between place, memory, and the act of writing in your work?
Galford: The one word answer to this question would be: Inseparable. But to make a short story a wee bit longer, I’d say that I’m an inveterate time-traveller. I’m obsessed with places and the sense of place, random objects and the mysteries behind them. If they had an Olympic event in Urban Flâneuring, I’d be a good bet for a gold medal. Yet even though I try hard to stay in the here and now, I find myself drifting across timelines. Sometimes this involves leaping across space as well as time, wandering through my own memories, personal or inherited. And living in Edinburgh, with a medieval castle and a long-dead volcano at its heart, means that any ordinary morning dog walk can take me through many centuries of local history and into deep geological time.
I think these tendencies are probably hard-wired into every Jewish writer’s DNA. They definitely run in the family. My father was a history teacher and my mother a librarian. Both were inveterate sentimentalists and the curators (not always willingly) of a massive horde of family photographs, battered kitchen utensils with a tale attached to every dent and scratch, a cellar and attic crammed with files and boxes of ephemera bearing the fingerprints of at least four generations.
Q: You mentioned that you’ve recently been studying Yiddish and experimenting with Yiddish poetry. What motivated you to learn Yiddish? Is your experience significantly different when writing in Yiddish rather than English?
Galford: It’s only in the past dozen years or so that I’ve begun studying Yiddish in any formal way, but its words and cadences have provided the background music to my life since the day I was born. My maternal grandmother, who lived with us throughout my childhood, was the first American-born child of a large (and talkative) family that emigrated from Riga to New Jersey in the mid-1880s. She and her nine siblings grew up speaking English as their first language but shifted easily into the mameloshn when any passing child drifted into earshot of a juicy conversation. The next two generations followed the old familiar pattern: My mother used a few Yiddish phrases; I knew only a random collection of Yiddish words.
I joined a Yiddish class to reclaim that inheritance and learn the language properly but it’s the literature that keeps me going. I had no particular intention to write poetry in Yiddish (doing it in English seems challenging enough) but sometimes Yiddish words and phrases slip on to the page. The finished poems are, of necessity, short and simple. I’m not the whizz-bang linguist I was in my youth. Despite the best efforts of our wonderful teacher, my grasp of grammar and retention of vocabulary still have a long way to go. It’s probably an act of sheer hubris/chutzpah to try writing Yiddish poetry at all.
Q: Your novel The Dyke and the Dybbuk was the winner of a Lambda Award for Gay and Lesbian Literature, and you’ve written about and been involved with LGBTQ communities in the past. What would you say are the key intersections between LGBTQ identity and Jewish identity? (For you personally or for the communities more broadly).
Galford: I grew up in the pre-Stonewall era of Compulsory Heterosexuality—a time of toxic stereotypes, parents cutting ties with their “deviant” offspring or sending them to shrinks for a “cure.” It took many of us, me included, a longer time than it might now, and quite a few wrong turnings, before we found our ways into who we are. Today’s Jewish and queer communities would have been beyond our wildest imaginings: out and proud gay and lesbian rabbis (indeed, any female rabbis at all), discreet support groups for those in flight from fundamentalist communities (Jewish or otherwise), the etiquette around preferred pronouns.
For all the positive developments, we’ve not quite reached the Promised Land. We can’t even agree what that Promised Land should be or who should have the right to be there. A long history of vicious persecutions, whether at the hands of anti-Semites or homophobes or fascist dictatorships, doesn’t automatically make us all lovely souls. In the particular communities I inhabit—the LGBTQ and the Jewish worlds as well as that turbulent political sphere called “the Left”—there are still those with more appetite for widening schisms than for finding common ground. Case in point: It can sometimes feel more problematical to come out as Jewish than it once felt to come out as a lesbian. This gives me an uncomfortable and very personal sense of déjà vu. But nobody reading this needs me to tell them that we’re living in dangerous times.
Filed under: UncategorizedOctober 16th, 2019
We talked with celebrated writer, author, and humorist John Norberg about the second edition of Wings of Their Dreams: Purdue in Flight, his second book with Purdue University Press this year.
The second edition of Wings of Their Dreams continues and updates the story of an aeronautic odyssey of imagination, science, engineering, technology, adventure, courage, danger, and promise. It is the ever-evolving story of the human spirit taking flight, expanding Purdue’s legacy in aviation’s history.
Q: What originally inspired you to write Wings of Their Dreams?
John Norberg: I started working on it in 1999 as the 2003 centennial of flight approached. Purdue has a great history in flight and space and I thought the centennial of flight would be the perfect time to highlight it. There was no book where the stories of all our historical figures in flight and our astronauts were brought together in one place. As with several of the books I’ve written I talked about the idea with Joe Bennett, then vice president for university relation. This was before I started at Purdue in October of 2000. Joe liked the idea and took it to President Steve Beering who authorized it with financial support from the Purdue Research Foundation.
Q: Purdue is often referred to as the “cradle of astronauts”, what do you think are some of the main reasons Purdue has been so successful in producing astronauts?
Norberg: I have researched this and talked with all our astronauts about it. I’ve concluded there are five specific reasons we have so many astronauts.
Q: What’s something you think that people may not know about Purdue’s history in flight?
Norberg: People are always interested in stories about Neil Armstrong and the first landing on the moon. It’s in the book. I also wanted to give readers surprises, stories they didn’t know about. Most people don’t know that a Purdue alumnus worked with the Wright Brothers in the earliest days of flight. They don’t know Purdue graduates taught flight to Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold – icons in U.S. military. They don’t know one of the nation’s first test pilots was a Purdue graduate, that a Purdue graduate and Charles Lindbergh were involved in a mid-air crash, an incident that marked the first time two pilots parachuted to safety. They don’t know about a Purdue graduate who flew beneath a balloon to the stratosphere. The first pilot to be called “Mr. Space” when there were no astronauts was a Purdue alumnus. The second person to break the sound barrier studied at Purdue (and some say he was the first). There is much more. Wings tells the history of flight and space through the stories of Purdue graduates. I think people will also be surprised that some astronauts apply four or five times before being selected. It is very competitive. The man who assigned astronauts to flights says Grissom would probably have been the first person on the moon, had he survived.
Q: What was the thing that surprised you most when you did the research for this book?
Norberg: If I tell all the surprises they won’t be surprises. The most pleasant surprise was that Neil Armstrong agreed to let me interview him for the book, something he rarely did. It was before Jim Hansen released his excellent biography of Neil, First Man but they were working on it. When I finished Neil’s chapters I sent them to him for accuracy review. He responded that the chapters were good, but he thought they were “about one-third too much me.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. So, I took quotation marks off some of his statements and paraphrased them. I sent it back and he said it was perfect. Shortly after Wings was published, Purdue held an event at the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Neil was there and spoke. He started telling stories about pilots in Purdue’s history. The first one I recognized as someone in the book. Then there was a second and third. It finally dawned on me that he was repeating the stories from the book. I sent him a copy of the book and he had read it. That surprised me. At the end of his talk he said “All these stories are from John Norberg’s book Wings of Their Dreams that I heartily recommend.” I thanked Neil after he spoke. Someone came up to me and told me I needed to go to the table we were using to sell and sign books. There was a line of people waiting that stretched down the first floor of the museum. Neil wrote a statement for the cover of another book, Spacewalker, I wrote with Purdue astronaut Jerry Ross: “Spacewalker is the book for anyone who ever dreamed of flying in space.” There are many surprises in the stories about the people I wrote about in the book. I hope people enjoy them.
Q: What is new about the second edition of Wings of Their Dreams?
Norberg: Much has changed from 2003 to 2019. All the profiles and stories that were in the first book are in the second edition, but many of them have been updated. I interviewed all our living astronauts again (there are 24 associated with NASA and one commercial astronaut) and updated their information and thoughts. In addition to Grissom and Chaffee, who died in 1967, four other Purdue astronauts have died since 2003 – Janice Voss, Armstrong, Cernan, and Don Williams. I updated those stories. I added profiles on two additional astronauts since 2003. I also added a chapter on Sullenberger’s 2009 landing of a commercial airplane on the Hudson River, saving all the souls onboard.
You can get 30% off of Wings of Their Dreams by entering the discount code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.
Filed under: UncategorizedOctober 15th, 2019
We talked with James R. Hansen, Neil Armstrong’s authorized biographer, about his new book with Purdue University Press Dear Neil Armstrong: Letters to the First Man from All Mankind.
Dear Neil Armstrong publishes a careful sampling—roughly 400—of the thousands of letters sent to Neil Armstrong from the day of the moon landing to the day of his passing, reflecting the various kinds of correspondence that Armstrong received along with representative samples of his replies.
Q: You’ve already written First Man, the definitive authorized account of Neil Armstrong, what motivated you to take on this new project?
James R. Hansen: I find not just the biography but even more the iconography of the First Man on the Moon endlessly fascinating. “Definitive” is relative. There’s always more to know, to learn, to discover. For First Man, I did not have total access to Neil’s correspondence. For the past four or five years I did have access, in the Purdue Archives, and, as a result, I have a lot more to share with the world about Armstrong.
Q: What do you think is the most commonly misunderstood thing about Neil Armstrong, and how could looking through these letters remedy that misunderstanding?
Hansen: That he was ultra-private, closed off, a near-recluse. The letters show that Neil was not any of those things, not at all. He was very engaged in the world around him, though he had his own particular ways and standards of how he would engage with society and culture.
Q: There are some 75,000 letters stored in the Purdue University Archives and Special collections, what was it like paring it down to the roughly 400 that made it into the book?
Hansen: It was very hard to keep my selection of letters to that size, because almost every letter to Neil, and every reply from him, offered interesting new insights into who he was, and even more so into who we were, in terms of what we thought about our hero and what we wanted from him.
Q: Was there any overarching theme or trend in the letters that surprised you most?
Hansen: Nothing in the letters made me change my basic understanding of Armstrong. What they did, however, is add depth, richness, and resonance to everything I had already come to understand about his as a person and as an icon.
Q: Were there any letters that didn’t make it in the book that still stick out to you?
Hansen: I tried very hard to include all the letters that stuck out to me! Some of the truly crazy letters that were written to him, which included some threatening letters from stalkers and other disturbed individuals, I chose not to include: letters from people in mental asylums, criminal penitentiaries, or people who should have been. Some of the letters were so disturbing that I did not want to present them in the book.
Q: What do you most hope to accomplish with this book?
Hansen: Foremost, I hope people today and forevermore will understand and appreciate Neil Armstrong not just as a global icon but a flesh-and-blood three-dimensional human being, with faults, defects, and limitations, just like all the rest of us. But I also hope the reader stops from time to time to think, “Shame on us.” Shame on us for not being more considerate for the situation of our celebrities and great public figures. Day in and day out, we just ask way too much of them.
You can order Dear Neil Armstrong now, and get 30% off when using the discount code PURDUE30 on the Purdue University Press website.
Filed under: UncategorizedSeptember 12th, 2019
We talked with Alla Ivanchikova to discuss the author’s upcoming book, contemporary cultural production on Afghanistan, and the way this cultural production serves as a litmus test for a producer’s political and geopolitical beliefs.
Ivanchikova’s book, Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars, examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion.
Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?
Alla Ivanchikova: The two decades of the 9/11 wars have seen a production of thousands of titles on Afghanistan, and the book tries to make sense of what has transpired in this corpus of works. I argue that Afghanistan serves as a mirror upon which contemporary cultural producers project their values and beliefs, as well as their presumptions and biases.
Q: What are some of the most common ways this projection manifests?
Ivanchikova: The most obvious one is the belief in benevolent humanitarianism. Since the end of the Cold War, humanitarianism has become the only mode through which we were able to imagine relating to distant others and to their suffering. It was a direct consequence of the collapse of the socialist bloc. Humanitarianism replaced the relation of comradeship or solidarity as being on the same side of a common struggle, which defined the era of anticolonial liberation movements, of which many were left-leaning. Afghanistan is a case study in the humanitarian imaginary: the two cultural products that came to stand for Afghanistan are the Afghan Girl from the National Geographic cover and Khaled Hosseini’s bestseller The Kite Runner. Both give us striking, unforgettable images of suffering children on behalf of which we are compelled to intervene. The less obvious way in which this projection manifests is the anticommunist imaginary, still pervasive in the NATO-centric contexts and my book unpacks the distortions and mirages it creates.
Q: In the introduction to the book, you reference Afghanistan being referred to as a “dim object” prior to the 9/11 attacks. More specifically, “it emitted no light, attracted no attention, and the eyes of the world were not on it”. Do you think this absence of a cultural presence made it easier for these post 9/11 cultural producers to project Afghanistan in their own light?
Ivanchikova: Afghanistan’s cultural invisibility between 1989 (Soviet withdrawal) and 2001 reflects how cultural production is tied to geopolitics. The era between 1989-2001 was one when the Afghan state suffered a complete collapse and people’s suffering was the most intense, but hardly any works have been produced during this time period. So it’s not the intensity of suffering that determines the production of humanitarian images, but geopolitics, and humanitarian images and stories are used, again and again, to justify military interventions. You are right, however, in suggesting that after 2001, there was a sense that Afghanistan was somehow “rediscovered,” and was an unmapped territory. This resonated with many writers who were invested in neo-imperial fantasies of “wild” Afghanistan.
Q: What motivated you to take on this subject?
Ivanchikova: The conflict in Afghanistan spans the entire course of my life. I grew up in the USSR during the Soviet-Afghan war. My early adulthood in the US was dominated by the crisis of 9/11 and the foreign wars that followed. In both cases, the true nature of these conflicts has been largely withheld from the public. I wanted to investigate. As a cultural studies scholar, I did my investigation mostly through analyzing cultural texts—fiction, memoirs, graphic novels, and film. I discovered that Afghanistan poses very specific representational difficulties: whoever writes on it, has to struggle with how to articulate various aspects of its past: its socialist history, the invasion by the Soviet Union, the role of the US in the fuming the flames of the “Afghan” jihad, and the failures of the US-led intervention that followed the Taliban ouster. Immediately and inevitably, one finds herself in the domain of not only history, but ideology.
Q: So given the nature of Afghanistan, it’s very hard to cover while maintaining the appearance of being ideologically neutral, or without espousing some kind of ideology?
Ivanchikova: Yes, that’s correct. Afghanistan serves as a litmus test of a sort, either revealing your political and geopolitical positioning, or revealing your confusion as to how to position yourself. In my book, I don’t argue for objectivity, however, but insist on the value of having many different stories. Unfortunately, the first wave of writing and screening Afghanistan, between 2001 and 2009, produced texts that told only one type of a story—the story of Afghanistan as a relic of soviet barbarity, to be saved by the West’s helping hand. This was in line with the official US view, as articulated by Donald Rumsfeld, for example. There was particular investment in, and fascination with, the figure of the suffering Afghan woman.
Q: Why is this problematic?
Ivanchikova: It is important to remember that the crisis suffered by Afghan women was a direct consequence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (a socialist state that championed women’s rights) being defeated by ultra-patriarchal radical Islamist groups supported by the Reagan administration. This is an uncomfortable story to tell in NATO-centric contexts, because instead of making the reader/spectator feel good about liberating Afghan women, it implicates them into the very scene of crisis. So barely anyone wants to tell this story. But these stories needs to be told for any work of transnational reconciliation to begin. The other story that needs to be told is one of the Afghan effort to build socialism. Afghanistan suffers from the same problem that affects the entirely of the former second world: the absence of a language in which to talk about the defeated socialist projects in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end. We need more stories that bring into view the Afghan revolutionary subject—women and men who dreamt of and fought for economic and social equality and fought for the revolution rather than against it. We have tons of books that romanticize anti-statist (patriarchal) insurgency in Afghanistan—men who fought against communists. How many stories do we have that feature Afghan revolutionary women? Almost none. Ultimately, it is this very erasure of Afghan revolutionary history that results in a humanitarian capture of Afghanistan’s present.
Q: Where do you feel a person would find the most accurate representation of Afghanistan in contemporary culture?
Ivanchikova: I especially like Nadeem Aslam’s work as he tries to unpack the multiple layers of Afghan history present simultaneously in a landscape, like a palimpsest. In my book, I talk about his two novels: The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden. I also recommend Qais Akbar Omar’s memoir, In a Fort of Nine Towers. It is a very accessible, didactic work by a survivor of the civil war era—precisely the era during which Afghanistan became a dim object. It has particular relevance for the current moment: by describing what it meant to have lived through the destruction of Kabul as it was captured by the warring jihadist groups in 1992, the memoir gives us a glimpse into what it means to have survived the sieges of Fallujah, Mosul, Palmira, Raqqa, or Aleppo in the twenty-first century.
Get 30% off Imagining Afghanistan when you order through our website and use the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: UncategorizedAugust 19th, 2019
In preparation for his forthcoming title Teaching in the Now: John Dewey on the Educational Present, we briefly talked to author Jeff Frank about the book, what motivated him to write it, and the reason for advocating for John Dewey’s work in the modern educational landscape.
Q: Could you briefly explain your book, for those who are not familiar?
Jeff Frank: I wrote this book out of appreciation for John Dewey’s thinking on how to create a meaningful educational present for students. Too often, we treat the present as mere preparation to do something rewarding or interesting in the future. When we do this, we lose student interest and engagement. Dewey argues that the best preparation for a meaningful future is learning to live meaningfully in the present.
Q: What prompted you to write Teaching in the Now, and what do you hope to accomplish with the book?
Frank: I wrote this book for two main reasons. First, I worry that we don’t do enough to value the present moment. Schooling can be tremendously interesting, but it loses its interest when we defer meaningful work to the future. Second, I wrote this book for students new to Dewey’s work in the hopes of showing them why they should take him seriously. Though his work may initially appear difficult, I wrote this book in the hopes that it might make it easier to stick with Dewey.
Q: What is it that motivates you to advocate for Dewey’s work in such a purposeful way?
Frank: A major motivation for this project is a sense of hope. John Dewey believed that each one of us harbor deep potential, and he also believed that activating that potential was one way to ensure the future of a strong democracy in the United States. My belief, one I share with Dewey, is that we need to do everything we can to make each moment in the classroom as engaging and rewarding as possible for students. Doing this is not only good for students, it is also good for our democracy. By helping students realize their potential in the present moment, we are helping to bring about a better future. My book is meant to aid teachers as they create these types of experiences for their students.
Q: You mention some treating the present as “mere preparation to do something rewarding or interesting in the future”. How do you feel this mentality come about? How have you seen it manifest?
Frank: In many ways, this is the key point. Dewey believes in the importance of thinking about how we acquire habits and what these habits make possible or foreclose. When it comes to “mere preparation,” Dewey might think about the habit many of us get into where we think things like: Once I have X job I will be happy, or Once I have X amount of money I will be happy, or Once I have tenure, or my own classroom I will begin doing the things I truly want to do. For Dewey, we should begin living the life we aspire to, as much as possible, in the present moment. For a teacher, this means trying to create the most engaging environment for students we can, in the present moment, not deferring until ideal conditions are met.
This brings up a related point. Someone may wonder: But aren’t there just some things we just have to learn? To this, I have two responses. First, I coached three sports in addition to teaching high school English, and there are indeed things one must learn before doing more advanced work. For example, if you don’t know how to spin correctly in the discus circle, there is no way to throw as effectively as possible. But there are ways to make the learning how to spin more or less engaging. The same holds true in the classroom Robert Frost, an excellent teacher himself, noted that explaining a joke doesn’t make it funny. The same is true with a poem. Spending time explaining why a poem is interesting in preparation for helping a student enjoy a poem is often counterproductive. A teacher should look for poems that are appropriately challenging and that they think students will actually find interesting, thereby giving students the most meaningful experience of learning in the present.
My second point is this. When we are learning how to do things outside of a school setting, how do we learn best? How do we prepare to cook or ski or develop a passion for music or movies? While some people may spend hours reading about skiing or testing skis out off of the slopes, more often than not we try things out. This experimenting allows us to see what we need to learn in order to improve, and this leads us to develop a passion for figuring things out so that we can make progress. Or to ask another question, when you want to share your passion with a friend, how do you do it? Do you make them do a lot of preparatory work, or do you try to use your pedagogical creativity so that the first experience your friend has with what you are passionate about makes them want to learn more and engage more deeply with that passion? Dewey would argue that we can approach teaching this way, seeing the goal of teaching as creating the type of present that makes students want to learn more. Far from leaving students unprepared, these are the experiences that instill habits of thinking and acting that make students more able to engage more deeply with their learning in the future.
Q: How would you explain the importance of your book, and your field as a whole, to a lay audience?
Frank: This book is important because it helps teachers and future teachers think about how to create an engaging and educative present for their students. It also makes Dewey’s work more accessible. Anyone who teaches Dewey’s Experience and Education or anyone reading Dewey’s educational philosophy for the first time will—I hope—find something of interest in my book.
Get 30% off your own copy of Teaching in the Now by ordering it from our website with the discount code PURDUE30.
Filed under: Uncategorized