Workshops

The Modernist Studies Association is pleased to offer the following workshops during the Chicago 2024 conference. You will have the opportunity to sign up for these workshops during the online registration process.

Film Studies SIG Workshop

Leaders: John Hoffman, Hayley O’Malley, and Alix Beeston

This year’s session will again focus on workshopping in-progress essays on topics in the fields of film studies and modernist studies. Participants are welcome to contribute an essay, which will be solicited by the organizers and pre-circulated in advance, or to take part in the breakout sessions as respondents. This format should give participants the chance to receive in-depth feedback on work at various stages of completion: from rough drafts of book chapters to articles in the final stages of preparation for publication.

Climate Crisis and Modernist Praxis: Forms and Methods for Regenerative Futures

Leaders: Anne Raine and Molly Volanth Hall

Many of us are feeling the need to renovate our research, teaching, and service work in response to the climate crisis--but it can be hard to find time and bandwidth to figure out how. With that in mind, this workshop will open a space for collaborative discussion, brainstorming, resource-sharing, and community-building around how to integrate climate policy, science, and activism into our work.

Participants will be invited to share works in progress of any kind: position papers, teaching materials, creative works, community engagement or digital humanities projects, field notes on climate action you’ve tried or would like to see happen, or anything else that makes an effort to connect modernist studies with climate issues. These will be pre-circulated for discussion during the workshop. Participants are welcome to contribute a work in progress or to take part as respondents.

This in-person workshop will be prefaced by an online discussion series on climate migration and climate justice, hosted by the Modernism and Environment SIG in the months leading up to the conference. At the online events, we will screen selected recordings from the latest UN Climate Summit and discuss how we might use this information in our work. The discussions will be recorded and made available for later viewing for those unable to attend.

We hope this combination of in-person and online events will foster conversation between the Chicago conference and the wider community of MSA members who are unable to travel or choose not to fly for environmental reasons.

However, anyone is welcome to register for the in-person workshop, regardless of whether they attend the online sessions.

Suggested (not required!) reading: Siperstein, Hall, and LeMenager, eds, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities Caroline Levine, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis

Stories from Off the Tenure Track

Leaders: Kate Schnur, Laura Hartmann-Villalata, Nika Mavrody, Shilo McGiff, and Shun Kiang

This workshop will create a space to share stories and strategies for making academic life work off the tenure track. Contingent, public, and independent scholars navigate questions of agency and precarity as we seek to imagine careers and futures that may not have been presented to us while we were in graduate school.The current structure of academia also means that as we do this work we are often siloed from other scholars who are all making the same choices and asking the same questions that come from designing “non-traditional” careers. In this workshop, we will therefore meet with and draw inspiration from our colleagues in order to collaboratively strategize working within and outside of academia and negotiate the ever-blurring boundaries between these spaces.

Our facilitators will first share their own work stories and will address questions including: How did they come to their work? To what extent do they still engage with modernism and their research interests? What drives them to continue their research or to reimagine their “traditional” research outside of academia? How do they navigate the potential precarity of their position? What are the emotional benefits or costs of working outside of tenure? What are the pragmatic choices they have made to chart their career path? What advice would they share with recent graduates and with those struggling to work in academia due to the neoliberal disenfranchisement of the humanities and higher education? We will then turn outward to the audience and use these questions to together write and share the narratives of our lives outside of tenure. We will also brainstorm platforms on which to share these stories in order to make more visible and legible the lived experiences of scholars in all forms of employment as an aid in fostering more directed advocacy for--and greater visibility of--our work out of tenure.