What began as a practical question for our large, interdisciplinary organization has taken on scholarly weight given active debate in the literature regarding professionalization of peer/student writing tutors -- as studies on beneficial tutoring outcomes turn away from difficult-to-assess outcomes for writers toward outcomes for tutors. What this literature says about professionalization, however, seemed troubling in that it is predicated on the assumption that tutors will necessarily go on to be educators -- patently untrue for this interdisciplinary group of student employees. Existing concepts of professionalism are also (troublingly) opposed to our center’s non-expert, collaborative approach to tutoring. Our team currently investigates two questions: (1) How might our tutors’ actual professional objectives/career paths differ from those imagined for them?  (2) How might tutors’ sense of appropriate professional practice diverge from other visions of professionalism in the context our non-directive center? Phase I of this investigation involved interviews with 50+ active tutors using a standard form we developed; tutors described both short-term goals for tutoring practice and longer-term career goals. Phase II will involve capstone interviews asking graduating tutors to report on specific experiences of professional development (transferable skills). In interviews to-date, tutors openly identified widely-varied short-term and long-term goals. Contradicting existing scholarship, we found that even tutors uninterested in writing-instruction-related careers articulated complex connections between their tutoring work and their future careers. Further challenging commonplace assumptions, interviewees articulated tutoring goals aligned in sophisticated ways with this writing center’s approach, suggesting that thoughtful tutor professionalization need not involve training in more expert, directive tutoring practice but instead can be flexibly self-directed in alignment with tutors’ own professional goals. Our methods and findings have important implications for those interested in: employee motivation and deep learning; grounded planning and programming that avoid administrative assumptions; richer professional development for students across fields.

Targeted Tutoring is a program designed by our writing center to support English language learners in reading- and writing-intensive courses. The program was first piloted in 2010-2011 in response to students’ requests and to provide a space to encourage peer conversation. Targeted Tutoring is currently offered for courses in departments including English, Philosophy, International Studies, and Political Science. In Targeted Tutoring, three to five students meet for weekly sessions in which the tutor facilitates peer discussion. Group tutoring sessions are qualitatively different from the Center’s usual one-to-one sessions and tutors need to learn and apply new skills. This project is designed to further develop training for tutors, investigate effective models of group tutoring strategies, and explore what the differences and similarities are in skills useful in one-to-one sessions vs. those useful in group discussions. This research will be conducted by observing group sessions, crafting transcripts of successful group interactions in these sessions, and interviewing tutors and students to discover which strategies are effective. The project will be presented in a poster format that will include the models, guides, and strategies found to be most useful for tutor training and group facilitation. These results have significance for all those interested in peer education models and more effective small-group, discussion-based learning.

 The HIV epidemic in Southern Africa is one of the most persistent threats to global well-being, representing over twenty-five percent of global AIDS infections. As such, an increasing emphasis has been placed on developing cures or vaccines and deploying treatments for HIV. This global effort has been stymied at every turn by resource shortages, opportunistic infections and cultural and political barriers. But as South African poet Roshila Nair remarks: "we are beginning to learn / how to make everything / out of nothing again." My research reads an anthology of poems and short stories titled "Nobody Ever Said AIDS" and attempts to uncover a space of possibility for representing HIV, which is a prerequisite to fighting it, or at the very least living with it. I use the work of Homi Bhabha, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others to show how culture represents itself through place (inhabited space) and imagined futures. I also read comparative surveys of historical and contemporary migrant mine laborers to suggest that neocolonial ideology has foreclosed a space for imagining a future in such precarity. I hope to suggest that questions of representing, fighting, and living with HIV are also always questions of culture, and that therefore developing a cultural imaginary of and response to HIV is essential to the longer-term human objective of “becoming with” HIV as a species. This cultural imaginary includes not only semiotic resources (that is, language with multiple possible meanings), but also the capacity to understand futures, and to transform spatial locales into inhabitable place.

Within the literary world, science fiction has been assigned an illogically negative reputation, often considered to be poor-quality and low-value literature. Yet, even those who do not enjoy science fiction cannot deny its intrinsic value as a way to imagine worlds and possibilities beyond our own. More than that, science fiction provides an entirely unique experiential mode of examination, creating a network of removed analytical "spaces" that we can use as lenses through which to examine reality. Thus, science fiction not only allows us to imagine what might be, but it in many ways surpasses the effectiveness of other genres in investigating what is. Curiously, the overlapping but not equivalent genre, utopia, performs its critical work using similar "spaces," but is generally accepted as a valid, useful form of literature. While utilizing these critical "spaces," works of utopia are able to provide additional levels of analysis that other genre forms are not necessarily able to address. This is possible because each utopic work provides the opportunity for a double-edged mode of critical investigation: the question of subjective versus general utopia, which allows readers to explore multiple conditions of the present as they shape the content of the text. My research examines the stigma of science fiction, navigates the complicated yet fascinating relationship between science fiction and utopia, and then examines the kind of critiques and commentaries made possible when science fiction and utopia are blended. Ultimately, the intersecting "spaces" of utopic science fiction produce an incredibly rich, multi-faceted form of literature and a superior vessel of social critique.

Jack London's American Naturalist novel is one of the greatest works the author had written, and along with "The Call of the Wild," appeared on newly formed American Bestseller lists for American novels after its publication in the early 1900's. While a popular novel, the Sea-Wolf is also a major literary achievement. As one of Jack London's early pieces, The Sea-Wolf exhibits London's efforts at responding to major philosophical and political ideas of the era's international climate: London explores in his novel, ideas of Social Darwinism, alongside the need of altruism in an age of the consolidation of the Capitalist system and its economic policies. These two ideas owe the attention given to them to the genre of Naturalism and Realism, whose division is controversially blurred, which was a literary movement occuring at the time of the novel's writing. These two ideas are accompanied by the Naturalist's focus on the individual in the city, and is foregrounded by an antecedent Romantic literary tradition, which put concerns of the individual in front of societal ones. In the Naturalist tradition, the opposite occurs, and the individual must survive in the face of an antagonistic and often mechanistic environment. My research will entail close-reading passages of the Sea-Wolf to show that it cannot be strictly one genre, and that its hybrid form is in fact an emergent one in which new methods are found to say new things. I will be using as my theoretical framework, and supplementary texts, Donald Pizer's definition of Naturalism and also Donna M. Campbell's examination of Naturalism under the lens of gender in her "Resisting Regionalism". My aim in this presentation is to show The Sea-Wolf trafficks in Naturalist themes, such as the inability to escape the forces of environment, and the transformative, and even the degenerative effect it can have on the human encased within it. I want to show London's novel deals with the grittier aspects of life, as many Naturalist novels do, but it also utilizes the strategies of a more feminine literary tradition in the creation of the displaced domestic space existing between the novel's Humphrey Van Weyden and Maud Brewster. I want to show that by the end, Maud's last line as she spots a search boat, "Rescue us from ourselves," has implications equivallently significant both for a Naturalist reading and a Local Color one.

After its publication in 1959, Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum roused a number of scathing reviews from its critics who found its treatment of the devastation incurred under the Nazi regime irreverent and its subject matter generally distasteful. Now widely recognized as one of the most significant anti-war novels of the twentieth century, disparities in the criticism remain in both focus and method for the treatment of a novel whose scope is at once immense and minute, its narration spanning nearly fifty years but its perspective anchored to the diminutive stature of Oskar, the “eternal three-year-old.” This study proceeds with the belief that the novel’s peculiar narrative situation, privileging the lives of individuals and devoid of the application of an “adult” morality or location of guilt, advances a portrait of pre-, inter-, and post-war Germany which is, nonetheless, profoundly ethical. To examine the function of the intimate ethics afforded by the literary text, my analysis of The Tin Drum is situated within a framework of theoretical and philosophical texts, including work by Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, all of whom address problems of ethics and history through the deployment of theory. This study takes as its objective the exploration of the relation between literature and theory, and literature and standard historical accounts, in terms of what can be seen or envisioned by each type of text. The analysis centers on numerous oppositional dualities staged by the novel, which, as models for understanding the identity of the inverse or the contrary, offer a singular illumination of structures of power and narratives of progress. The latter stands as Grass’ primary antagonist throughout his work, as that which obscures the presence of the past in our own time and the experience of the individual in the context of empire.