Journal Articles by Anna Zeemont
Journal of Independent Technology and Pedagogy, 2021
We write this piece as a collective of activist students, doctoral teaching fellows, and adjuncts... more We write this piece as a collective of activist students, doctoral teaching fellows, and adjuncts from our home campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) because our varying experiences of surveillance are deeply felt, though profoundly contradictory and asymmetrical. We highlight the deeply rooted, white supremacist, classist, and ableist surveillance practices that have long been in place in higher education in general, tracing the history and legacy of those at CUNY in particular. Our article suggests that grading systems in higher education settings are part of a larger network of surveillance technologies that students and faculty are subjected to and/or enact, reflective of schooling’s place in a “carceral continuum” (Shedd) premised on anti-Blackness and colonialism. We do not believe that grading is something that can be made more fair, just, or anti-racist. To resist surveillance in higher education is to embrace the end of grading. After an overview of these contexts and assertions, we offer a series of reflections, tracing juxtaposing moments where we individually or collectively taught, learned, and/or organized outside/against grading systems. Our experiences emerge from a range of contexts—a campus writing center, CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, pre- and post-COVID college classrooms, an adjunct-led campus grade-strike campaign, counter-institutional learning and mutual aid spaces—and offer spaces of overlap and divergence. Ultimately, we aim to not just critique but suggest entry points toward the unthinking and undoing of surveillance toward a truly anti-carceral, liberatory university.
Community Literacy Journal, 2020
This article highlights how contemporary structural forces--the intertwined systems of racism, xe... more This article highlights how contemporary structural forces--the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism--have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.
Teaching Documents by Anna Zeemont
This site--supported by the New Media Lab at the City University of New York (CUNY)--features the... more This site--supported by the New Media Lab at the City University of New York (CUNY)--features the projects of students in Anna Zeemont‘s English 201 class, Digital Writing//Digital Worlds, taught in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY.
Over the course of the class, we investigated the ways in which digital technologies influences how we express our identities, process information, build communities, and participate in activism. We kept coming back to the metaphor of the internet as a “double-edged sword”: the internet can be a tool for coalition- and community-building–while also dividing people and perpetuating inequality. Overall, we explored how the internet offers new rhetorical tools and ways of conveying information that matters to us.
At the end of each semester, students created public-facing, multimedia projects building on ideas they’d developed throughout the class. Students took these projects in many different directions–check out their work!
HASTAC, 2017
This is a syllabus is for a first-year writing course I created called Literacy, Culture, and Ide... more This is a syllabus is for a first-year writing course I created called Literacy, Culture, and Identity, which was inspired by scholarship in critical race and feminist pedagogies and originally intended to be taught as English 101 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). John Jay’s English 101 class is essentially supposed to be about how to write a research paper and includes a number of required assignments, which limit the number of outside readings teachers can bring in. However, instructors are free to select the course theme; for my class, I chose literacy and its relationship to identity (particularly race, gender, and culture). My updated syllabus aims to pay greater attention to student engagement and active learning, writing and reading across multiple forms of media, centering texts by authors of color (especially LGBTQ women of color), and student choice. You can download the full syllabus and, at the end, read a longer reflection about the choices I made in designing it.
Other Writing by Anna Zeemont
Black Feminist Pedagogies, 2018
This project thinks through the pedagogical, aesthetic, and political implications of remediating... more This project thinks through the pedagogical, aesthetic, and political implications of remediating a classic work--Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred--into a new form--a graphic novel, adapted by John Jennings and Damain Duffy--over forty years after its original publication date. These issues take on a new dimension given that the original author and the novel's protagonists are Black femmes, whereas the adapters of the 2017 best-sellers are both male and one is white, while violent depictions of misogynoir are now made "graphic."
Ultimately, this project focuses on how these issues might be pedagogically generative for English or writing students in two diffeparts: a lesson plan aimed at undergraduates that involves comparing a section of the original Kindred with the same section in the adaptation, and a reflection contextualizing the lesson plan.
HASTAC, 2017
As three graduate teaching fellows interested in feminist pedagogies, we reflect together creatin... more As three graduate teaching fellows interested in feminist pedagogies, we reflect together creating lesson plans and student-centered learning activities that engaged both literary and expressive culture through the teaching of the following texts: Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life. In the following blog post, you will find several lesson plans and activities we designed to make these rich and also difficult texts come to life for our students. Following the lesson plans, you will also find a brief dialogue between the three of us, reflecting on the assignment and the process of collaborative teaching as well as learning.
Papers by Anna Zeemont
Community literacy journal, Apr 1, 2021
This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xen... more This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.
Community Literacy Journal, 2021
This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xen... more This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.
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Journal Articles by Anna Zeemont
Teaching Documents by Anna Zeemont
Over the course of the class, we investigated the ways in which digital technologies influences how we express our identities, process information, build communities, and participate in activism. We kept coming back to the metaphor of the internet as a “double-edged sword”: the internet can be a tool for coalition- and community-building–while also dividing people and perpetuating inequality. Overall, we explored how the internet offers new rhetorical tools and ways of conveying information that matters to us.
At the end of each semester, students created public-facing, multimedia projects building on ideas they’d developed throughout the class. Students took these projects in many different directions–check out their work!
Other Writing by Anna Zeemont
Ultimately, this project focuses on how these issues might be pedagogically generative for English or writing students in two diffeparts: a lesson plan aimed at undergraduates that involves comparing a section of the original Kindred with the same section in the adaptation, and a reflection contextualizing the lesson plan.
Papers by Anna Zeemont
Over the course of the class, we investigated the ways in which digital technologies influences how we express our identities, process information, build communities, and participate in activism. We kept coming back to the metaphor of the internet as a “double-edged sword”: the internet can be a tool for coalition- and community-building–while also dividing people and perpetuating inequality. Overall, we explored how the internet offers new rhetorical tools and ways of conveying information that matters to us.
At the end of each semester, students created public-facing, multimedia projects building on ideas they’d developed throughout the class. Students took these projects in many different directions–check out their work!
Ultimately, this project focuses on how these issues might be pedagogically generative for English or writing students in two diffeparts: a lesson plan aimed at undergraduates that involves comparing a section of the original Kindred with the same section in the adaptation, and a reflection contextualizing the lesson plan.