Academic & Other Work
Scientists and Poets #Resist
Sandra L. Faulkner and Andrea England, Editors
Scientists and Poets #Resist is a collection of creative nonfiction, personal narrative, and poetry. This volume is a conversation between poets and scientists and a dialogue between art and science. The authors are poets, scientists, and poet-scientists who use the seven words—"vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based"—banned by the Trump administration in official Health and Human Service documents in December 2017 in their contributions. The contributors use the seven words to discuss their work, reactions to their work, and the creative environment in which they work. The resulting collection is an act of resistance, a political commentary, a conversation between scientists and poets, and a dialogue of collective voices using banned words as a rallying cry— Scientists and Poets #Resist—a warning that censorship is an issue connecting us all, an issue requiring a collective aesthetic response. This book can be read for pleasure, is a great choice for book clubs, and can be used as a springboard for reflection and discussion in a range of courses in the social sciences, education, and creative writing.
Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, and Practice,
Sandra L. Faulkner
Routledge, 2020
Poetry as Method examines the use of poetry as a form of research, representation, and method used by researchers, practitioners, and students from across the social sciences and humanities. The book maps out what doing and critiquing poetry as/in/for research entails. It begins with a discussion of the power of poetry, moving to the goals and kinds of projects that are best suited for poetic inquiry, then describing the process and craft of that writing. Crucially, it answer questions about how we can use poetry to represent research and the research process.
Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice
and Political Response
Sandra L. Faulkner and Abigail Cloud, Editors
Vernon Press, 2019
This volume speaks to the use of poetry in critical qualitative research and practice focused on social justice. In this collection, poetry is a response, a call to action, agitation, and a frame for future social justice work. The authors engage with poetry's potential for connectivity, political power, and evocation through methodological, theoretical, performative, and empirical work. The poet-researchers consider questions of how poetry and Poetic Inquiry can be a response to political and social events, be used as a pedagogical tool to critique inequitable social structures, and how Poetic Inquiry speaks to our local identities and politics. The authors answer the question: "What spaces can poetry create for dialogue about critical awareness, social justice, and re-visioning of social, cultural, and political worlds?" This volume adds to the growing body of Poetic Inquiry through the demonstration of poetry as political action, response, and reflective practice. We hope this collection inspires you to write and engage with political poetry to realize the power of poetry as political action, response, and reflective practice.
Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment
Real Women Run: Running as Feminist Embodiment is a series of linked essays, haiku, and analysis of women's embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women's activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. This ethnography investigates how women's narratives and experiences of running subvert mainstream discourses of what being female and being active mean in terms of identity, motivation, and practice. Through ethnographic investigation, including interviews with women runners, poetic inquiry, participant observation at the 2014 Gay Games, and textual analysis of women's web-based writing about running, Real Women Run paces readers through women's embodied running experiences: identities in motion, the inseparable mind-body connection, and running as social and solitary, pleasurable and painful, dangerous and empowering.
Queering Families, Schooling Publics: Keywords
Anne Harris, Stacy Holman Jones, Sandra L. Faulkner, and Eloise Brook
At a time of increasingly diverse and dynamic debates on the intersections of contemporary LGBTQ rights, trans* visibility, same-sex families, and sexualities education, there is surprisingly little writing on what it means to queer notions of family and kinship networks in global context. Building on the recent wave of scholarship on queerness in families and how families intersect with schools, schooling and educational institutions more broadly, this book considers how we are taught to enact family at home, at school and through the media, and how this pedagogy has shifted and changed over time. Conceived as a collection of keywords that take up the vocabulary of queerness, queering practices, and queer families, the authors employ a nuanced intersectional approach to connect the damaging and persistent invisibility of their subject to the complex and dominant and normalizing discourses of marriage and family. Offering post-structural, post-humanist, and new materialist perspectives on kinship and the family, this book moves the conversation forward by critically interrogating and expanding upon current knowledges about gender diversity, queer kinship, and pedagogy.
Writing the Personal:
Getting Your Stories onto the Page
Sandra L. Faulkner and Sheila Squillante
Here's the inaugural book in the new Teaching Writing series. This series publishes user-friendly writing guides penned by authors with publishing records in their subject matter. Through detailed exercises, exemplars, and a breakdown of the key elements and considerations of personal writing, Faulkner and Squillante provide a lively introduction and guide for writers to the art and craft of personal writing. Their conversational tone about audience, point of view, form, structure, ethics, research, and finding and making time for writing practice is a not-to-miss primer and reference. This book is appropriate for classes focused on poetry, creative nonfiction, ethnography, qualitative research, memoir, narrative inquiry, and other types of life writing, as well as individual writers honing their craft. Writing the Personal invites us all to find our stories and instructs us how to shape them for an audience and for ourselves.
Family Stories, Poetry, and Women's Work:
Knit Four, Frog One (Poems)
This book is a memoir in poetry about family stories, mother-daughter relationships, women's work, mothering, writing, family secrets, and patterns of communication in close relationships. Family stories anchor family culture and provide insight into relational and family life. They also create family; communication takes place inside families and offers us a way to sustain, create and alter family culture. This work may be used as a teaching tool to get us to think about the stories that we tell and don't tell in families and the importance of how family is created and maintained in our stories. Faulkner knits connections between a DIY (do-it-yourself) value, economics, and family culture through the use of poems and images, which present four generations of women in her family and trouble "women's work" of mothering, cooking and crafting. The poetry voices the themes of economic and collective family self-reliance and speaks to cultural discourses of feminist resistance and resilience, relational and personal identities. This book can be read for pleasure as a collection of poetry or used as a springboard for reflection and discussion in courses such as family communication, sociology of gender and the family, psychology of women, relational communication, and women's studies.
Trigger Warning: Poetry as Feminist Response to Media Headlines
Qualitative Inquiry, 2020
In a chapbook of feminist poetry titled, Trigger Warning, the author responds to media headlines about violence, gender, race, and class through verse. The author uses poetic inquiry as a form of feminist methodology to collapse the false divide between the private and the public, as a form of embodied inquiry, and as feminist political response. The author wrote response poems to news headlines that "triggered" memories of past inequities as a way to speak to media representation and personal experience and presents them in the form of a chapbook—a short collection of poetry organized thematically. Trigger Warning wrestles with themes of sexual harassment, gun violence, sexual violence, and media representations of class, race, and gender identities to show how feminist poetry uses personal, embodied experience to critique existing systems and structures of oppression.
Postkarten aus Deutschland
Liminalities, 2016
The chapbook, Postkarten aus Deutschland, maps a three and a half month feminist ethnography on embodiment in Germany through ethnographic poetry and self-made photo-postcards.
K4, M1: Knit Four, Make One
Kattywompus Press, 2015
With two needles and a ball of string, we learn the art of multiplication.
Hello Kitty Goes to College
Dancing Girl Press, 2012
When she passes by her professor's door, Hello Kitty spits on his creepy poetry.
Or she would, had she gone through with the plastic mouth surgery. That feminist class she took last semester slackened her spine in the surgeon's office. She felt like a naughty kitten dangling in big mother's jaw and left sans alteration. H.K.'s classmates sighed that actually having no mouth authenticates Muted Group Theory better than their final project –a duct-taped mouth protest of male language outside the football team's practice room. Still, when she passes by his elegies to dead cats, sonnets for weepy relatives and speaking proper English, she feels a tangled hair ball pushing up the back of her throat, an uncontrollable cough to exhume her fear, a sandpaper tongue that could work sick ink off the paper. H.K. fights her desire for words that would erase the taped up lines of trash, stops the professor from pressing his chair too close to her tail.