March 2020

Academia, Pandemic Pedagogy

One More Week!

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In a lot of ways, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for Bemidji State University. While losing two weeks of class sucks, BSU didn’t choose to rush into the university-wide shift to remote learning. The result? A lot more breathing room (for me). So in addition to all of the things I’ve been doing to keep my mind off the nightmare sweeping across the United States (today: taking a walk, playing some video games, and petting my cat), I’ve also been working hard on adjusting syllabi…and tempering my expectations. Even two weeks doesn’t feel like it’s enough…

SF/F Commentary

Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction

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Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of Subterranean Press’ new anthology, Edited By. The book collects notable works of short fiction that have been, well, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most notable short fiction editors in the world of SF/F/H. It’s a beefy book full of stories by some incredible writers, including Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and many others. Part of what interests me about this book is the concept behind it and the way it highlights the weird imbalance of awareness about editors in publishing. It is comparatively easy to collect work edited by one short fiction editor than it is to do the same for novel editors. Short fiction editors also seem, in my opinion, much more visible, perhaps because they work with so many authors at a time (a benefit of the short format) than their novel-editing peers.[efn_note]I’m aware that some editors work in both lengths.[/efn_note] This makes it rather easy for us to recognize the work editors do even if we don’t actually know what it is that they do.

Academia, Adventures in Teaching, Pandemic Pedagogy

Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 2A

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I made it through a week of isolation. Mostly. I still went “out,” but in my car to play Pokemon or to occasionally go to the store to get things I wasn’t able to get earlier. At odd hours. In that time, I’ve apparently decided to blog on a regular basis, catalogue my books (finally), watch an absurd amount of TV, schedule an impromptu podcast recording, and prep my classes for remote learning. It’s been a weird week, y’all. A scary week. The one upside to all of this is that I’m pretty sure most of my classes are going to be OK once we switch over to remote learning. While it won’t be ideal, most of my classes are already fairly embedded in digital tools anyway. For those classes, simply upping the stakes on managing the course wiki and wiki-based assignments is a no-brainer. For the other classes, the big question will be whether we can keep certain things “as is” or whether I need to adjust certain assignments and structures for a different mode.

Academia

The Science Fiction Research I Didn’t Present This Weekend

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As many of you know, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been cancelled. I am a regular attendee and have presented my research there several times. This year, I was set to moderate a panel and present an essay entitled “Postcolonial Thought, Decolonizing the Anthropocene, and Tobias S. Buckell’s Climate Change Novels.” That project is now on hold until I can find the time to put in edits and submit it somewhere. However, I will talk a bit about the research that went into this project. Strap in!

SF/F Commentary

Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)

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As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes.[efn_note]In actuality, I really hate the treatment of most reptiles in genre, but snakes get it worse than most. They used bearded dragons (the inland or central subspecies, Pogona vitticeps) in Holes (2003) even though they’re not from the United States and don’t fan out their heads like some kind of Jurassic Park monster, and there was a recent film called Crawl (2019) set in Florida that was wildly confused about both the way alligators behave and the relationship Floridians have to the creatures. It’s really frustrating, y’all.[/efn_note] In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear.[efn_note]All of my examples will be from films. However, I’m sure some of the problems I discuss in this post apply to literature, though probably to a lesser degree because a lot of novel writers are weirdly obsessed about research. :P[/efn_note] There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points:

Adventures in Teaching, Pandemic Pedagogy

Online Coursework, Here We Come!

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I’ve received official word that classes at Bemidji State University will switch over to remote learning for an undefined amount of time starting on Friday (3/20). I’d assuming this was going to happen when I talked about this stuff a few days ago, so it wasn’t a surprise. And that means all my little preparations for such an eventuality were spot on. Not that I planned to have in-person classes during a pandemic that has a decent likelihood of killing me (asthma FTW!). With that in mind, I’m scrambling to rework my syllabi, put together online resources for instruction and for student activity, and doing my best to work with the technologies I have available to me. So far, I’ve got the following in the pocket:

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