Brian Mooney

Brian Moody:

There's a long history and tradition of what makes something scholarly, what makes something knowledge. But that's part of what we're doing is we're refashioning the narrative around what counts as knowledge, what counts as data, how is it represented, how do people come to it and make meaning of it. To me, to create something that is not multimodal in the 21st century especially is a lost opportunity.
But I say that to also say there is beauty in the written word. There is complexities and nuances that you can tease out on the page with the written word that maybe you can't in a musical format or in visual art. And so that's why I sort of chose to combine both. And the substance was really the songs, lived and breathed around those songs. Those were the art pieces that I made.
My name is Dr. Brian Mooney. I am a graduate of the English Education Program here at Teachers College, and my dissertation was in album format, and it was called To Speak a True Word: Remixing Hip Hop Pedagogies, Poetics, and Literacies. Ultimately, it was about how youth poets make sense of the world and themselves through spoken word. It really stemmed from my time as a high school English teacher and co-constructing this youth poetry slam that was for 10 years it was ongoing.
And so many young people found their voice and identities through the poetry that they were writing and performing on stage. And so much of that was about sound. I couldn't make sense of that phenomenon without thinking about the sounds of that space, the snaps from the audience, the thud of a microphone, the cheers, the applause, and the voices of those young people.
Ultimately, it took the form of an album with liner notes, for those of you who are old enough to remember when CDs or vinyl records came with liner notes. And that was intentional because the liner notes were a space for me to do some of the theoretical work and contextualize each of the songs on the album. So it was multimodal in many facets because I designed it in Adobe InDesign, and that was a program I learned sort of on the fly.
But it was great because I was able to think about the aesthetics of the whole project, how text was laid out, how the sound was embedded in the document. Just lots of aesthetic decisions in the way that I tried to represent the experiences, the knowledge of these young folks who I was collaborating with. First of all, I really feel strongly about democratizing research and getting it out from behind the paywall.
I spent a lot of time thinking about where will this live? Where will this exist? And I had this scholar, Gunther Kress, who's one of the first scholars to write about multimodality. And I remember I sampled him for one of the tracks, his voice on an interview from YouTube, and he was saying, "Who do I have in mind as visitors to this site?" So I was like, what is my audience?
And that was a helpful question for me as a researcher to think about where will this exist? Who will come to this? How will they interact with it? How will they take it up and remix it and make something of their own? So I was able to get the audio version of the album out on Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, all these platforms. And it was liberating in a lot of ways because I was able to share it on my own terms.
It wasn't locked in ProQuest. There was a panel that Nick Sassanis was on years ago and some other multimodal scholars, and I forget who said this, but they said that they hacked the dissertation publishing process by putting the URL link to their dissertation in the title of the dissertation. So when it gets uploaded to ProQuest, you redirect people to your own website or a place where it exists.
And I thought that was brilliant. And I've written a lot and thought a lot about hip-hop and spoken word poetry in classrooms, in K-12 classrooms, and that felt like a very hip-hop thing to do for me. It was like, let me take the limitations that you're imposing on me and flip them to make it something that I have agency over. And so the link to my dissertation is in the abstract on ProQuest and then the TC Columbia Library.
So folks see it, and I put an embargo on it for five or 10 years or something. So I have control over it, which is something I came up against when I was thinking about how to archive this work. And that's something multimodal scholars are thinking about. Where does it exist beyond the temporality of a platform like YouTube? What if a link expires and it's broken?
How do we store this work and deserve it? Those conversations were happening in my head and with my committee and with other scholars in my program. I've tried to figure out how to do this right. I had conversations with the library. I had to explain my project, and that's a whole effort in and of itself. But ultimately, I decided to just follow the formatting guidelines that they recommend.
So everything was converted into plain text. I think there's hyperlinks in that document to SoundCloud, but that's just the very ground level of multimodality, right? Sure, hyperlinks are. So to me, that's not the dissertation. The dissertation is what I designed at Adobe InDesign that lives at a specific URL that I control and is embedded on my website. That's the full multimodal document.
So what's in the library is just a placeholder. I could have just submitted the link to them. And then I don't know, that probably would've went against their formatting guidelines to some degree. But yeah, these are things we are thinking about as scholars who work across mediums and modalities that don't fit neatly into the expectations. Now I have an opportunity to chair dissertation committees for scholars, and that's super rewarding.
So I think it's so much about what we have seen and what we've been exposed to. I didn't have too much pushback from my committee, but they challenged me to be systematic, intentional. And those are things that characterize traditional research. So I've argued that it's almost more rigorous to take a multimodal approach because there's more decisions, there's more aesthetics, there's more substance things to touch and think about.
We're refashioning the narrative around what counts as knowledge, what counts as data, how is it represented, how do people come to it and make meaning of it. To me, to create something that is not multimodal in the 21st century especially is a lost opportunity. But I say that to also say there is beauty in the written word. There is complexities and nuances that you can tease out on the page with the written word that maybe you can't in a musical format or in visual art.
And so that's why I sort of chose to combine both with the liner notes to do some actual writing. And the substance was really the songs, lived and breathed around those songs. Those were the art pieces that I made. Sampling is such a beautiful art form and aesthetic that I'm pulling on the hip-hop tradition of sampling, of remix. And there were scholars who... I think it's a Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities.
And so I was living in that book, listening to those scholars, people like Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky, and they legitimized the work in ways that were really helpful. And then I was able to also draw on and sample from traditional theorists to talk about and frame this research. I sampled Paulo Freire's voice for a track. To me, that was so special because I spent years reading him.
And then to hear his voice, his actual voice on a YouTube interview from 20, 30 years ago, there was a materiality to it. There was three dimensions to hearing his actual voice and then taking that and manipulating it and putting it alongside the voice of one of my participants. This is a way of putting research participants or collaborators in conversation with actual theorists literally.
My first advice would be to be inspired, be creative, and don't take no for an answer. And also look to examples. Nick Sousanis' Unflattening was published by Harvard. We have A.D. Carson, who's a rapper at Clemson. I think that's where he did his doctoral work. I don't know where he is now, but he put out the first rap album dissertation and now is submitting audio papers as peer-reviewed publications.
I think this is part of the future for me of what the work could look like. So yeah, it is important for us to have a precedent and to look to it and draw on it and cite it and sample it and remix it. I think often about how I was challenged in a really helpful way to think intentionally about why I would put together an album as a dissertation. Because it can also come off gimmicky, right?
It's like, oh, and some of the modes exhibition creators have talked about this too, is that being intentional and methodological and really situating it in a history of multimodal scholarship felt important to me. So movement is a concept and idea that shaped this dissertation, and some of the ways were... In my coursework, I remember being in a course with Dr. Vins and her asking us to describe narrative research or a particular piece of narrative research that we were looking at.
And I remember saying, what if we thought about it as movements within a symphony? There's phases. There's segmented, compartmentalized, but interrelated movements. That's a musical term. And it sort of also brought me to some traditional narrative inquiry scholars like Bakhtin. I know Bakhtin actually uses musical terminology too, like polyphonic, discourse being polyphonic.
That's a musical term. These layered ways of thinking about sound that come together to form a melody or what have you. So the movement, the music to me and the storytelling, the narrative was an expression of movement. You could listen to the album almost in phases and movements, and I wanted it to tell a story. And ultimately, storytelling is about movement.
And in a lot of ways, spoken word poetry is about movement as well. Not just the movement of your own body as the poet expressing this on stage, but also how you move a crowd. And that's also a very hip-hop idea. An emcee is someone who moves the crowd. Those concepts really helped me to think about this not as a static fixed document, but a living, breathing, moving creation.
When I think about how I might want folks to cite the work, I would direct them to the link that I talked about earlier that directs them to my website, and then to create whatever citation practices makes the most sense for them. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the ethics of sampling copyrighted material, YouTube Talks, and there's a whole lot to think about there.
Because what happens if you don't own a particular artifact, but you appropriate it and remix it and change it into something that is new and different, sometimes unrecognizable. Who owns that? Who gets to say who owns that? And so I would encourage people to sample, remix, steal from my dissertation. I say that in a playful way, but I think good scholars and teachers are experts at stealing in creative ways or borrowing or what have you.
So yeah, I see the dissertation also as a form of resistance against academia in some ways, a form of resistance against academia and the definitely Eurocentric ideas about knowledge production and who gets to say what is knowledge. There was a scholar in one of the talks that I sampled, I think her name is Anne Burdick. She said that knowledge is design dependent, and I sat with that for weeks.
I said, knowledge is design dependent, so that means that the medium through which I create influences the actual knowledge. So there's an epistemological framing there when we work in sound or visual art or dance. There's implications about knowledge production that we can tease out and draw on and talk about and discuss. Oftentimes, colleagues might not understand. Students may not.
Or interestingly, when I'm doing dissertation sharing now, I have a student who's brilliant and part of her dissertation is an ethnodrama. She asked me about the format for the three paper dissertation, and I said, "Why don't you just do the whole dissertation as an ethnodrama?" She said, "I didn't know I was allowed to do that." There's that word allowed again. It's like, well, who told you that?
And so that's part of my work now is to encourage and support and build alongside scholars who are doing doctoral work now and master's degree work, and even my undergraduate students who I so enjoy working with. I think there's opportunities for them to think about multimodality in their coursework and et cetera. In terms of publication, I'm working on a few projects.
Most relevant to the dissertation is there are some digital platforms that publish scholarly research, particularly audio papers. This is a genre that I didn't know about while I was even doing the dissertation. It wasn't until after that a colleague, a mentor of mine, said, "Check out this journal, they support web texts peer reviewed. Check out this journal, they accept audio papers."
Not just accept. That's the medium through which they archive their research. And so I'm learning about those genres, and I'm working on a web text for one journal, two audio papers, some traditional research as well. But I constantly find myself coming back to a multimodal space and sometimes getting frustrated like, ah, I lose so much of what I intended when I convert this to plain text. And that was the spirit of my dissertation too.
It was like when I took the words, the poems of the young people, the participants in my study, and I translated it to just on the page, it felt like I was flattening it, to use Nick Sousanis' term. And that metaphor stuck with me throughout the dissertation process. So I asked myself, what would it look like to unflatten this project? And part of that was to bring in sound to introduce dimensions that get lost when you translate it into static text on the page.