Transcript
Lalitha Vasudevan:
My name is Lalitha Vasudevan, I am a professor of technology and education here at the college, and also vice dean for Digital Innovation and managing director of this year DFI. I'm so happy to welcome you all virtually and in person. Oh, there's a little doohickey there. Lucius?
Lucius Von Joo:
Thank you.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
To not only the space for those of you who might be new here, but to this particular conversation. It's a long time coming, especially in terms of thinking about bringing together questions around research, questions around multimodality, and questions around what is happening when we do this thing called pursuing the doctoral dissertation. I'm going to say a little bit about the panel and panelists in just a moment, but I wanted to take moderator privileges and just say two more small points.
Multimodal scholarship is an area of focus at DFI. And over the last couple of years, we've been really focusing on both internally and also with partners outside of the college, on the development of experiences and resources to help faculty and students here at the college and outside, to think more broadly about what are the ways we might explore multiple modes in inquiry, in the representation of research, and in the dissemination in multiple outputs of research. I'm excited to announce that, this week, we published a multimodal toolkit, which can be found on our website. There's some of the wonderful people. I think Kyle has a contribution to it, Moira is manning the camera back there, and then several members of our media team have also contributed to various pieces of the broader media and scholarship resources. So, we encourage you to take a look at those. And we're going to keep adding to those.
The other piece that I wanted to point your attention to, and we'll talk more about this, is that, we're sitting in the DFI Gallery. This mode's exhibition is, I think, the third or fourth. I'm looking at Lucius, but he's busy. The one we've had in here, and this one has been beautifully curated by Chris Moffitt, who is a research scholar here at DFI, and Lucius Von Joo, who is a research assistant, but also a leader extraordinaire of our design studio, and they have collaborated together to create a kind of really interactive and inviting experience, that we'll have a chance to say a little bit more about later.
Finally, I just wanted to thank you all, both for your interest in being here, but also for this panel. So, let's turn to that. I'm joined by five people who have some affiliation to Teachers College. What I'm going to invite them to do first... And I say some affiliation because some are alumni, some are current alumni and current faculty, some are postdocs. We have five people, so you can probably surmise from all the sums that some people wear more than one hat. And I'm going to invite them just by way of starting off to say who they are, point to the particular piece of the exhibition, because this exhibition reflects each of their work, in some way, and just briefly describe the mode that your particular dissertation took.
We're going to try to keep this fairly brief because we want to talk a little bit more about the depth of the process itself. Abby and Nick, can you hear me? Did that sound okay? Super. So, we're going to start off with Tran.
Tran Templeton:
Okay. My name is Tran Templeton. I actually was a doctoral student in Curriculum and Teaching until 2018, at which point I left for a few years to work at another university. I've recently come back, so now I'm an assistant professor in early childhood. So, that's one part, right?
So, my dissertation is here. It's represented here. And I really want to thank Lucius and Chris for actually... This is not the thing I turned in, this is the thing that Lucius and Chris envisioned and brought to life. I think they made it much more multimodal than actually what my dissertation was, but I can talk about that later.
So, my dissertation takes shape in... It probably is the most traditional out of these five, I would say. I work with young children, two to five years old, children who are two to five years old in making photographs. So, the children are the photographers in this work. There are other modes that aren't actually visible within my dissertation, and those are the modes of inquiry that I take up to do my analytic work with the images. And one of those is represented here with the tracing of images.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thank you, Tran. Abby?
Abby Emerson:
Sure. Hi, everyone. Is my audio okay? All right. My name is Abby Emerson and I graduated from Teachers College from the Curriculum and Teaching EDD last year, a hot six months ago. And so, now, I'm an assistant professor at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island in their Elementary and Special Education department. And my dissertation, I guess, took two modes, sort of. It was almost like two parallel projects in a way, which I think was helpful and hurtful, perhaps, in some ways, that I would love to unpack down the road or maybe even start that unpacking here together.
But I did have a qualitative dissertation manuscript where I had artwork and visuals embedded throughout the Word document with everything like that. But then, I also did an art exhibit as well. So, while the manuscript was academy facing and dissertation committee facing, my art exhibit was practitioner and participant facing. I wanted the information and kind of what I was processing to be shared. And so, I shared my findings in an art exhibit format.
So, that was kind of the two different pieces that I had for my dissertation. And the art, if you're in the room, you can see is visual art. And so, I used paint, wire, thread, textile, glue, I did some animations, some zines. I really was very non-discriminatory about the type of visual work that I did.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thanks, Abby. I'm going to actually skip to Kyle. Kyle, I'm going to invite you to share a little bit.
Kyle Oliver:
Great. Hi, everybody. My name is Kyle Oliver, and I graduated from the CMLTD, Communications, Media, and Learning Technologies program in 2022, so a year and a half ago, something like that. Is that right? I think that's right, yeah. And I am currently a communications director at an Episcopal seminary on the west coast, but lived, just to confuse things more in a far north Chicago land.
I am a religious education person. And so, my dissertation was an ethnographic project embedded in a foster youth mentoring program, run by a couple of my clergy colleagues out west. They thought they were planting a church whose mission was going to be care for foster youth, they ended up doing a different thing and it's much more of a sort of non-traditional church built around a model of team-based networking. Or excuse me, team-based mentoring.
The project was an ethnographic audio documentary. So, the thing that I handed in and sitting in the library somewhere, I guess, is a script for a podcast that I recorded and lots of multimodal dimensions we could talk about. But for me, what's especially significant about it, I think, is the sort of multivocal sense that my voice, the participants' voices, and many of the scholars that I cites voices are present within this audio artifact. And also, I think there are modes of analysis and storytelling interwoven throughout. Trying to answer research questions in the form of stories was an interesting part of the project.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thanks, Kyle. Ore.
OreOluwa Badaki:
Hi, everyone. My name is OreOluwa Badaki. I graduated from the Critical Literacy Studies program at University of Pennsylvania in 2022, and I am now postdoc here at Teachers College, at an affiliation with this lovely center, this lovely institute, DFI, as well as with the Tisch Food Center and the Center for Sustainable Futures.
My work is around environmental education, embodied storytelling within environmental education, and this piece right here is called Seed and Sound. It is a short dance film that came out of one of my dissertation chapters, and I'm going to jump on the sort of Lucius and Chris bandwagon celebration, because while the piece itself came from my dissertation, I think the iterative exhibit on how we represent this work in different modalities also came from conversations here.
But my field work itself, my dissertation was a critical ethnography with Black and brown youth working in urban agriculture in Philadelphia. So, I was interested in how they were defining what it meant to be environmentally literate or food literate, and focusing on their multimodal practices. I myself am a dancer, so I focused a lot on the embodied ways that they were either questioning, challenging, or expressing what it meant to be food literate.
So, a couple of products, multimodal products came out of that. The dissertation itself happened, I wrote it. And I also think it's important to talk about the multimodality of the written word, in and of itself. So, that's something I'm really passionate about, mostly because even though I was focused on embodied storytelling, this film was based off of field notes that I had taken. The text, at the beginning, is straight from my field notes. And then, also, we wrote a screenplay as part of a writing group that I started at the farm, and that also sort of speaks to the ways that the written word invites and calls forth embodied storytelling. So, I'll end there.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thank you, Ore. And Nick.
Nick Sousanis:
Thanks. Thanks for having me. Sorry, I couldn't be there. And I think I got the sound right. Is that working well?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yes.
Nick Sousanis:
Cool. I found the hidden button. Yeah. So, I'm Nick Sousanis. I graduated from TC in 2014, in Interdisciplinary Studies in Education, whatever that means. And I wrote and drew my dissertation entirely in comic book form, which was published the following year as the graphic novel unflattening, pretty much exactly as it was in what I submitted to the library, without the cover and things. And now, I run on a Comic Studies program out in San Francisco State, and I've had the good fortune to be a supervisor or an external supervisor on a couple of projects that have been the second and maybe third dissertations in comic book form.
So glad to be here. I wish I could see what's all set up in the room, but someday. Thank you.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thank you all for doing that. I wanted to give the audience a sense of the range and variation of not only what we see in the room around us, as Ore said, the sort of the iterative representations that we have, but also the different ways into the work that you all had. And I think with the exception of Abby, who I hope I meet someday, I've had conversations with all of you, and in two cases served on your defenses, which is really fun.
And so, one of the questions I wanted to invite you all to reflect on, and I would like to do this as a conversation, so if you all feel like you want to jump in, please do with each other. But this question is about the doctoral process, and specifically the dissertation process and where and how the notion of a kind of multimodal form or approach or process entered into your work, and how that kind of took form.
And in particular, I'm really taken by Abby, you saying, "I had the academy facing thing, and then I had the practitioner facing thing." And then, Kyle saying, "The thing I handed in." So, I think it's really interesting to think about the thing that we do, and the things that we put in various places, and the role of audience.
So, let me just start by inviting, whoever wants to start, with thinking about where and how the kind of seed of multimodality entered into, and how it kind of grew in your dissertation process. I see Nick motioning. Go for it, Nick.
Nick Sousanis:
Only because no one was moving. I came to it really naively and ignorant of the academy. I think that's the best way to explain my role as a comics maker, sort of a lapsed comics maker. And I returned to it in postmaster school or about then... I returned to it and saw how much I could do with it. And I loved being part of the academy, but I didn't like how it tended to stay in the academy. So, I saw what I was doing with comics as a way I could both have conversations there, but also reach outside of it, and really put, I think, my whole self forward. I could do smarter things through the ways I used images and text together.
So, I applied, again naively, with like, "Here's comics I've made. This is what I want to do when I come there." So, there was never any thought that I was going to... It was never an afterthought like, "Oh, I should try this. This is what I'm doing. And if they don't want me to do it, I'll do something else because I'm not going for any other reason."
So, I'll just say one more thing about it. I think because I knew so little, I just assumed I could do it. And then, in the process of becoming a doctoral student, the work became very much an argument for itself, which I hadn't anticipated. It became a defense of why this kind of work auto exists, and I certainly became a proselytizer for comics in other multimodal forms in scholarship. That part, I didn't anticipate at all, and I'm glad to have embraced it, but that caught me off guard.
Tran Templeton:
I will say that I did not set out to do a multimodal. I mean, I rarely use the word when I talk about my dissertation. My work is multimodal because I work with very young children who are inherently the most multimodal types of people that you can imagine, right? They're using their bodies, they're speaking in different ways. The aesthetic of the child is quite different from the aesthetic of the adult, so it forces me to have to think about how I inhabit that space of childhood, and I cannot inhabit the space of childhood through simply the written word or analyzing through coding and all the typical ways that one would analyze. The children are really what drive the work and the kinds of modes, I guess, of inquiry that I take up.
OreOluwa Badaki:
I think just building on that sort of the way that the work necessitates multimodality versus going out and saying, "I'm going to be a multimodal person." What in your work makes it so that that's necessary? And similarly, I think when you're doing collaborative work and when you're in collaborative spaces... I was in intergenerational spaces, a lot of my interviews were done on the farm, harvesting or planting, and you have to... For me, anyway, it necessitated an understanding of the different ways of expression. It manifests different types of expression, how their hierarchies, some forms make more sense in some contexts, some forms make sense in different contexts.
And I think, for me, it was also a way of inviting my body, my whole self into this space. I wasn't studying dance, but I am a dancer. So, I was thinking about what sort of dancer sensibilities are helping me to see this space differently, understand the way communication exists in this space differently. But I really appreciate, I think, the two former points, thinking about, "Well, what's the work and what does the work require?" And often, that does require some sort of multimodal sensibility.
Kyle Oliver:
Go. I don't know which way to gesture.
Abby Emerson:
I got it. Yeah. I think similarly, I entered into... I didn't venture into this, anticipating that this would be the direction that my work went. But I took an arts and visual methods course, and when I started the course, I was like, "Oh, this will be great for my participants as an avenue to get into their emotions around racial learning", which is my topic around teachers learning about race in schools. And so, I was like, "Oh, images will be this great way to elicit responses from them that might not be so readily available in just sharing in a traditional qualitative interview setting."
But something about that course... Actually, the instructor I had, Gene Fellner at the CUNY Grad Center, he was like, "Well, you're going to make art. We're all going to make art." And something about it gave me permission and kind of license or something. I don't know. It cracked something open in me. And then, I just was incessantly, almost compulsively making art while I was running my kind of qualitative study, and then I kind of reached a point where I was like, "I have all this work that is in response to the data I'm collecting, that is intermingled with the data." And so, then, I kind of reached a point where I was like, "Well, I guess, I'll make an art." It was not a planned thing, but it kind of reached a point where I was like, "I think I have to do this."
And my dissertation advisor, when I was kind of floating this idea to her, and she's a qualitative researcher that, I think, the art space or visual space is a little newer to her as well. But she was asking me, "Okay, why do you want to do this?" And I was like, "Well, I think I'm terrified." And she was like, "Well, then you have to do it. You have to do the thing that you're scared of and nervous to do." And so, even though I have no art background in a formal way, I kind of just decided I was going to go that way. And I learned a lot by doing that.
Kyle Oliver:
I think for me, I would want to say that, how I ended up doing what I did is partly related to the sort of ecosystem of learning experiences that happen in the midst of doctoral study. We tend to think that it's about a certain amount of coursework and a certain amount of time with your advisor and whatnot, but we all know that there are all of these other things going on. And for me, one of the things going on was that, we started a MASCLab podcast, and that felt like an interesting way of telling stories about the research that people in our lab were doing.
But then, around that time... This was during the flourishing of this golden age of podcasts in the mid-2010s, the S-Town podcast came out, and I remember Yoana sending me an email about it and saying, "This is nothing I have heard before. It's like audio ethnography, almost." And that sort of planted a seed that kind of wouldn't go away. I tried to make it go away because I wanted to get out of here in a timely fashion, and I came out to defend the proposal. And Yoana again was like, "Where's the podcast? We've been talking about podcasts for two plus years. I know you want to do this thing as a podcast."
And then, the fact that that's the way that we ended up doing it, meant that there were all of these voices that could be present in the artifact that, again, I think, reflects this ecosystem. You hear a lot from the directors of the group that were my partners in this work, voices of some of the young people, and voices of the committee members. And shout out to Anna Williams who, I think, was the first dissertation podcast, My Gothic Dissertation. It's an English lit podcast. You should definitely check it out if you haven't.
There's a similar sort of transparency of process in that. She's breaking down... The gist of it is that, getting a doctorate is kind of being stuck in a gothic novel. And so, there's a little bit, like Nick mentioned, there's a little bit of the making a case for the thing in the midst of making the thing. But I also think what was so powerful about it, in a way that doesn't always, I think, translate in a traditional written format is just a little bit of the bringing in of all the other pieces that are contributing to our learning and development in this process, but that don't always get sort of registered in another way.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I mean, you've all mentioned audience, in some way, and I also appreciate the kind of impetus that several of you or a few of you have mentioned around the work necessitating a way of being with the work, with the people with whom you were engaged. And I'm curious to know, because a few of you have talked either around this or directly about this, we'll play a little game, we'll call it spark or snuff. Can you say what is one thing that kind of sparked or served as a spark for your creative engagement with ideas in your dissertation and/or whether there was a particular moment that either threatened to or could have snuffed it out?
And I think I say this, and you can have a minute to think about this, because one of the things you've all brought up in some way was that, you had either a person or people who were important in providing openings among the people you interact with when you're doing a dissertation and your committee members. They play an important role in, at least, the final piece, right? And sometimes along the way. And so, I'm curious to know if you could say a little bit about, what were those moments of sparking? Or hopefully, not too many moments of snuffing. It's a bad word. What's another word for it? I'm thinking of candle snuffer, but it's probably a better extinguishing.
OreOluwa Badaki:
There we go.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Was there something that extinguished your creative flame or were there things that sparked it?
OreOluwa Badaki:
It's a good question.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
If you can jump in.
Tran Templeton:
I was going to add, after Kyle talked about the ecosystem, I do want to also mention that I took a course with Lalitha, in 2013, around multimodal ethnography, and that was something that sparked it, along with the course with Wendy Luttrell at CUNY, and then having the most supportive committee. I think we all had supportive... My sponsor, Haeny Yoon. My partner is an artist, he's over there. And the tracing that you see here happened because Chris happened to have an iPad with an app that he was using to do drawings on, and I just... I don't know. I probably took it from him and started playing with it. I put one of the kids' photos onto the iPad and started playing around with the tool, and realized I could trace the children's images. And I don't know what happened, but I decided to keep tracing this one child's images, all the details of it, and making discoveries with that tracing. So, this tool was so pivotal to my coming upon this mode of inquiry.
Snuffing it, I would say, there are moments when I tried to do things with the children. I put images in motion, I made videos of them, I turned them into books to kind of do member checks. And the children, they didn't want anything to do with it. They were like, "That's cool, whatever you want to do, but can I go play?" So, that's not really snuffing, but it helped me to see what was important to them, and maybe what was important to me, and kind of parsing that out a little bit.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I think that's an important point, too, that as you're thinking about the invitation that I put forth, that among the audiences are also the people with whom you were working at the farm, at the youth center, in the preschool classroom with teachers. And I think that's an important piece of how you are open to or not, being redirected, which is a sort of key aspect of not only qualitative work, but the particular kind of responsive participatory engagement that all of you are engaged in.
OreOluwa Badaki:
Just to build on that, I think, in some cases, they're the primary audience in the sense that, for me, anyway, I spent the first two years of my field of work just trying to be useful, just trying to be just hanging out. I worked on a USDA study, I taught classes, I just was trying to figure out what... I'm not a farmer, I'm not an ecologist, I'm not an agriculturalist, but I knew I wanted to be in the space and I knew I wanted to be useful. And it wasn't until the third year where I felt like, "Okay, it was a practitioner inquiry component of my dissertation", so I knew I wanted to start something based off of what I had already seen.
I wanted to start a dance group, obviously, but nobody was interested in that. The young people I was working with were like, "That's not really our thing." But they were interested in... We were having conversations on movies that came out. I think Black Panther had just come out, and a lot of conversations about, "Well, I don't like reading, I don't like writing, but I love watching these movies." And as a literacy person, I was just really interested in the fact that, well, these movies, people wrote these, right? People had to read and write to make these movies. So, what if we kind of turn the curtain, go behind the curtain, and think about that process of creating this media and what does that do to write for embodiment, write for people's bodies, how people move through spaces, how audience might see what you write. And this film came out of one of the scenes of the screenplay we were writing. So, that was really generative.
I think in terms of snuffing or extinguishing...
Lalitha Vasudevan:
[inaudible 00:29:20] to say.
OreOluwa Badaki:
I mean, that was, I guess, a moment of redirecting. And maybe that's what it is, more kind of redirecting because I think multimodality is ancient. That's not a new thing. Multiple scholarship is relatively new, right? And we all had to do dissertations. We all had to turn things in. But I was really grateful to be part of also a multimodal collective at Penn, which Lalitha had some hand in starting as well. And so, I found a lot of mentorship from folks who were doing this work but from different disciplines, and how they were navigating their committees, navigating the pushback.
But something that was difficult for me was, I ended up leading this collective, and it was, at the time, where I was supposed to be... I was ABD, I was all about dissertation, so I was just focusing on my dissertation. And I was supposed to be writing, but that was also the year I was leading this collective. And my committee was like... I mean, that multimodal stuff, not my entire committee, but some members of my committee were, "That multimodal stuff was cute and cool when you were taking classes, but you need to actually focus now. You need to do the thing." But it was in that community, the person who made this film, I had met through that community. I had met her and we really vibed, and so we collaborated on this film, and that sort of facilitated this process.
And so, trying to make a case, I think you both had mentioned how to make the case, but not just because it made my research richer. It actually made my work richer, and how to articulate that, I think, was where I really got a lot of support from other people who were... Like people on this panel who were also in the process of doing the same thing.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I think that intentionality is so important. And I do want to hear what the others have also thought about in terms of what redirected or sparked their creativity, but I just appreciate you saying, Ore, about describing a little bit about the sort of intentionality which the components were in conversation with one another, that it wasn't born out of a kind of, I woke up one morning, I took five photos, and I said, "This is what I'm going to do." And I say that not lightly. But really, to say that... I think all of you have set some version of, there was purpose driving the inquiry, but the inquiry also opened up different ways to be expressive, be representative, be engaging and inclusive.
And so, I just want to kind of underscore that kind of point around the intentionality, but also the spontaneity, the room for openness to spontaneity that you might not have had the intention for. So, I think both of those things are sort of intention, but that there is a kind of awareness with which you moved forward. So, I appreciate that.
Yeah. Kyle, you were saying?
Kyle Oliver:
So, my spark that immediately came to mind for me was... And both of these, I think, have to do with the material realities of doing research. The spark for me was the process of pushing my less than 1-year-old daughter around the streets of San Francisco in the middle of COVID, trying to get some purchase on this project in that phase that... I've heard lots of people talk about this phase of where, you know you should be writing but it's just not quite there yet, and you're trying to just get full of a word.
And for me, I was listening to journal articles, and I figured out how to get my Kindle to read to me, and I just spent hours and hours... I lost 20 pounds just pushing my daughter around. And there was something really generative in the experience of listening. This phenomenon that many of us know, maybe who are podcast obsessives, you might go to an intersection and you remember some episode of some podcast that you were listening to the last time you were at that intersection. I just, in some ways, still, if I walk around San Francisco, I'm connected to the scholars that I was engaging with, out on those walks. And I don't know exactly what that meant. It did very much put me in touch with the possibilities and limitations of spoken prose, in a way that helped me sort of reign in my own writing style a little bit, to make this thing more listenable. So, I think that was a piece of it. But in ways that I'll probably be thinking about for a long time, that process was really generative for me.
Like others, I think the redirection piece came, in this case, through... We were just sort of beating our heads against the wall, trying to figure out how to make some actual digital storytelling happen, authentically within the rhythms of this community that I was embedded in. Tapestry and mentor teams don't do projects, right? So, me sitting here, saying, "Hey, you want to do a project?" It was like, a little bit of a non-starter until COVID started, and everyone's like, "Please give us a project." So, I was like, "Okay. Well, what about more of a workshop, like one and done kind of thing?"
And this just opened my eyes to what it's like to run this organization. A huge chunk of this organization's budget is spent on the child protection friendly version of Uber. It's called HopSkipDrive or something. And it's like, the drivers have to be triple background checked and there's cameras in the cars, but if you need to get a ride for a minor, from one place to another, ride-share style, it's like, as you might expect, five times more expensive than an Uber or Lyft. And so, to get the whole organization together for a day of traditional story center style digital storytelling, would've cost $10,000. And it just never would've occurred to me. And it was totally bound up in the material realities of that organization. And I think what's beautiful about participatory research is figuring out how to work with rather than against, those contextual realities of the partners that invite us into their spaces.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I want to ask Abby and Nick to share with us as well. And one thing I just wanted to call attention to, and something Abby said before was, Abby said, "I was just making all this art while I was doing this project." And so, there's something, really, I think, powerful about the process of you, Kyle, saying, "I was out on these walks, and these are all embodied practices that we are engaged in while we are inquiring, that these aren't separate." And so, I just think that that's another important kind of element to include here. Tran talking about, "I don't know, I just picked up this thing and I started playing with it."
And the thing about dissertations, those of you who've done it, we know this, and sometimes you feel like you've done many when you live dissertations as a sponsor, is that, it lives in you. And so, while you're dissertating, whatever that word means, you could be watching something, you could be out on a walk with your daughter, you could be playing with materials, and you're engaged in that kind of deep inquiry. So, I think that's also another really important layer to add here, that the processes by which we make sense of, the times in between on task dissertation activities, also are generative of our inquiry. And so, what do we choose to do in those moments, I think, is a really interesting piece, too.
I think Nick, Abby?
Abby Emerson:
Yeah. What I was going to say is very related to what you all were just talking about, Kyle and Lalitha, is that, I felt a spark around making. I was just like, "I'm going to make." And I think that the making process became kind of a vehicle for... Or maybe not a vehicle, but a vessel for my anxieties. And it was very therapeutic for me because I mean, I'm hearing... Some of you are like, you had these backgrounds in this area and whatnot, and that's so wonderful and amazing, but I was not in that position. I was like, "I'm just doing this thing that is brand new to me and I'm doing a dissertation, and yet I'm trying to do this new thing while I do a dissertation, which I don't know why I made that choice. But I decided I was going to go down this path." And so, the making process was very healing for me, very therapeutic, very... It was a place for me to kind of process how I was feeling emotionally while I did this big project, that is the dissertation.
And so, I felt a lot of spark around materials, like hot glue that is in the room. That was one that really kind of resonated with the type of making I was doing. And then, also, some ideas as well that were related to my data. Mazes became a really common theme in my work as well, and I was working with those a lot. So, I kind of felt sparks in that way, and that's what kind of kept me moving is, actually, the process of making, because it made me feel good.
And then, in terms of the snuff or whatever, I guess it makes me think of the poem, Whatifs, by Shel Silverstein, is like, if anything, it would've been myself that was the reason I didn't move forward in this particular multimodal way. The anxieties of like, what am I doing? And that was related to many parts of myself and my own identities. Okay, I'm studying race, but I'm using an abolitionist framework. I'm white. Layers for me to unpack there.
And then, also, like I said, I didn't identify and don't identify so much as an artist, but here I am doing this thing. And so, will people laugh at me? I don't have the vocabulary to even talk about art because I've never taken an art class. And so, it felt... Yeah. I think it was like, for me, if there was going to be anything, it was going to be myself that stopped myself. And so, I had to work really intentionally to just say, "No, I'm just going to do this and whatever. Maybe it's weird and maybe it's wrong, but I'm just going to try and I'm not going to be afraid to be seen trying."
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Nick, before you jump in, I want to ask you to respond to this question, but also take us to the next question in your response, and that is, the work that you all did or the approaches you all took in your dissertation, how does it travel with you now? How does it live in your work now? How have you expanded your thinking?
So, I'll turn both of the spark and redirection question to you, Nick, and invite you to kind of move into that piece.
Nick Sousanis:
That's good because I was struggling with the spark and snuff, so that's probably helpful. I mean, again, I think it's important to say, for me, that I just didn't know any better that you weren't supposed to do things like that when I was a returning student, so I had some time behind me. But I will say, I was a comics maker, I made a lot of comics as a kid, but coming to university, that's not a thing you could do. I don't think my students realize that, now that I run a comics program like, "You couldn't do this." And not just for people who were geeked about comics, like I was, but also just my students are just, they do say, "Oh, that looks like a fun class", and then they get into it. So, that didn't really exist. And even if it had existed, my perception of comics would not have been as an intellectual activity, it would've been as entertainment, it would've been as this other thing you do, but not as the way to do your thinking.
And so, in my case, I ran an arts magazine in Detroit and I came back to making comics. I was invited to be in something around the 2004 presidential election, and that's sort of like I shifted to doing comics as essay, and that really shaped all I did, going forward. And then, we put on an art exhibition of games and art, and I did the catalog essay as a comic, and those were the things I applied to TC with. So, I really saw this shift in less me telling entertaining stories, and more, how can I make ideas tangible and accessible? So, really, that's probably the spark, is that, seeing the potential for what I could do. It came before coming to school or before coming back to school.
As far as the snuffing, I'm really stubborn, so I don't know. I don't know. I mean, again, I was older and I'd done this stuff, so the snuffing of everybody... I think I hit the right time that people were open to this and they were very hungry for it. Even before I'd drawn any of it, there was a tension on it. So, I was just going to do what I was going to do. And I don't know any better and I don't know how to be told not to, so... I don't know what to say more into that. But I will say, I think this is important, and I think it'll tie into the second part of this question, is that, I set out to do this to make high concepts, tough scholarship, whatever, accessible. That was my goal. But I think what really happened for me is that, I saw a different way of thinking about things from the start.
I get the question, "Did you write first and then add pictures?" And I say, "No." I say, "It all happened at once." And then, the action of drawing from the start, really changed how I could ask questions and where I could go. So, had I done something like that, like written a script and then drop pictures in... I mean, a very different thing. I think a much less interesting thing, but it would definitely have been different.
And I see that in my students who, again, come to me often as non-drawers, Abby to your... I get students who are just like, they try stuff and they get excited, and those are often some of the most amazing students because they're just hungry to try and they don't have... I mean, I can say this for myself, I have a lot of years of drawing that get in the way, sometimes. I have the style, those kinds of things. The ways of doing that I have are kind of hard to let go, and I find the people that come without it are often some of the more interesting creators because they're fresh and they're discovering things.
I mean, I think that was really key. I came trying to do this about access, but it really changed how I think and what I think of matters. And so, going forward, when I talk about my work and when I teach things about... And this has come up a number of times. Things about the body and how much we learn through the body has been... It's very salient to how I teach and how... Even in our classes that aren't making classes, we draw from the start, and I get everybody making marks. I'd like to get them up moving more. I'm not quite as comfortable in doing that in my own classes, but I embrace that, in general.
And I guess, the question is about future work, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm in a very, very slow midst of a sequel to the earlier thing, and it's really wrestling with those questions. It's all visual. I mean, the nice thing about doing it not for a dissertation is I'm aware of the format from the start, I'm aware of how to deal with page spreads and how to try fancy things that I couldn't really think about for the dissertation because I was limited by how you had to format it. But the questions I'm wrestling with are about the body, about how we learn, about where we come from as people and as a species, and how that has implications for learning. But I'm pushing myself. I give myself many, many difficult constraints to push my drawing harder and to push the research harder. I mean, it's really fascinating. And I'll stop here, sorry. It's going on a bit.
But when I say it's a different way of thinking that, very frequently, if not, always, the drawings themselves, the drawing process itself asks me to do research that I had no business doing otherwise. I didn't anticipate doing it otherwise, but I'm trying to solve some problem on the page, and it says, "How do I solve this problem?" And to solve it, I'm like, I got to know something more about this thing. And I don't even know what that thing is, but now I better start reading in this area and maybe I'll find something that works, which is why I'm so slow, but it very frequently sends me in directions I don't expect to go, and it's really the drawing's fault.
The drawing has been a very good partner in saying, "Go look at some other things that you don't." And it changes my understanding. And the last thing, sorry, is that, the drawing itself forces me to understand things in ways that I don't think I would with text. I've been doing stuff about conception, about molecules. There's things that there's no good pictures and there's no good writing, and I have to figure it out. And I realize in trying to draw it, that what I'm looking at isn't quite right, so I really have to make sense of it for myself so I can explain it to others in ways that are really transformative. With that, I'll stop, for real.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
No, I appreciate that. And as others are responding to the question of, what does it look like for you now and in the future? I'm going to just invite the audience to get questions ready because we want to make sure you have time for your questions.
OreOluwa Badaki:
I can-
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Go for it.
OreOluwa Badaki:
... continue. Building on some of the discussion before, I think even for me, the pushback that I would get, if at all, actually was really generative in understanding the multimodality of the dissertation itself. I think there's a danger in considering the dissertation as the natural neutral thing, and then everything else is multimodality, and understanding what modes made sense in this traditional format, and having conversations with people that forced me to think about that, and then also invited me to think about, "Okay, well, this might work in this context, but here's something else that might be more interesting." So, the example of this piece, for instance, this was a chapter on the role of seed keeping at the farm I was working at, and specifically the differences between seed saving and seed keeping.
Seed saving is about prolonging the genetic materiality of a seed, making sure it can adapt for the future, that sort of thing, which is super important. Seed keeping is about understanding the context in which that seed can germinate the stories, the people, the histories, the legacies. And a lot of the interviews I was doing, people were talking about movement and dance in that process. And so, when I was having conversations with people who may have been averse to multimodality, not because they hated multimodality, but because they wanted me to graduate, and they were like, "This is great. Keep doing this, but you need to do this. We understand what this process is like. I think it's important not to paint people as multimodal villains." But if I could-
Lalitha Vasudevan:
That's the subject of your next comic, Nick, multimodal villains.
OreOluwa Badaki:
Multimodal villains. But when I can make the argument that, actually, this is actually coming out of my data, it makes sense for me to present this finding, this particular finding in this way, everyone was happy, so to speak.
And so, now, for me is, I come from... My approach to multimodality comes from a multi-literacies framework, which is less about each specific mode and the inherent value of each specific mode, but how do you engage in multimodal analysis of every mode? So, even if it is a text, how are you seeing that, analyzing that multimodaly? And so, I'm trying to approach that in whatever modality I'm working in. Usually, it's writing or embodied practices, but... So, that's sort of how I'm taking this forward, and that's the conversations I had with Chris and Lucius when we put this tapestry together, it came from that orientation.
And in terms of more direct, like what am I doing now? So, I am working on two more pieces based off of this piece. So, this was based off of a mythology around okra and how okra came from West Africa to the America. And the next piece is going to be based off of rice and rice cultivation, and specific dances from Mandinka people in Guinea-Conakry and Guinea-Bissau around rice cultivation. So, I'm excited about that. And I'll pass it on.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Tran, Kyle, Abby?
Tran Templeton:
So, the question is...
Lalitha Vasudevan:
How are you carrying these ideas?
Tran Templeton:
Got it.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Where does it go?
Tran Templeton:
Right. So, a central concept that, I think, within that, the dissertation sparked for me is just this notion of how to listen. How do I listen to not just the child, but how do I listen to an image? My work is not just children making photographs, but also listening to the ways that they talk about the photographs or talk around the photographs or talk at the photographs. And so, how do I look at all these aspects of their gesturing and their communicating and their image making, and what can that tell me? But also what does it not tell me? And what do I have the right to know and not know?
So, the work is really just looking at an image. I mean, we all know this just by the fact that we consume images all the time, that there are ways of looking, that produce particular knowledges. But also, what looking at children's images does for me is illuminate what I cannot know and never know. And I think that's really important, and that's what I take with me in my work.
What I'm working on now, one of the things is, I'm trying to take a turn from looking at children to looking at children's relations with non-human animals. And so, those lessons and how to listen and how to live with uncertainty, are really helpful in that space.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Kyle or Abby?
Kyle Oliver:
You want to go, Abby?
Abby Emerson:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I feel like too many things, still. I'm six weeks into my first post graduation job, and so I'm in that state where I'm ideating and I'm figuring out, what is it? Okay, what is next after this dissertation thing? And I think one of the big things that art did for me in my dissertation was it created a space, not just for me to give my information to a certain audience, but by having an exhibit. For me, one of the goals was that, people that were interested in this topic, being racial justice in schools and teacher learning, could meet each other. And so, it was a space to build community. And so, that is kind a thread I'm continuing in what I'm starting to pick up in a new city, and figure out, what is going on here and how can I support that work? That has been happening and will continue to happen. So, that feels like a thread that came from the art in a bit of a way.
The other thing that has been nagging at me is that, one of my participants talked about, when facilitators go into school communities and work with teachers around racial justice, she was talking about some of that being open wounds. And that imagery has really stuck with me for the last year. And so, I didn't really do anything with that in my dissertation, but there's something about wounds and schools that I kind of want to play with. And then, I've been painting some sticks as well. So, there's that, too.
Kyle Oliver:
For me, I would say, part of what I'm trying to do right now, I have this day job in administration. As I try to get some stuff published in whatever that means from this study, one of the things that I'm realizing is, tapestry was the pseudonym for the organization, and a suitable one, but it's also the sort of metaphor of the piece. And I'm realizing that, to get some things published from it, I need to do more work, disentangling the interwoven parts of the tapestry. And so, that's pretty slow-going for me. The taking apart something that's been put together is non-trivial in my brain. So, that's an ongoing struggle, but it has its own richness.
The thing that I'm thinking about in terms of what's next is that... It's sort of like a real crisis in my denomination in publishing, right? There's not a lot of Episcopalians, and so the Episcopal Church Publishing House, it's a tough business to be in publishing books that have this pretty small niche kind of likely audience. And I'm trying to take that as an invitation. There was nothing stopping me from putting my dissertation in the podcast stores and just distributing it that way. And of course, there was a committee that put some kind of stamp on it, that made that not a illegitimate thing to do.
But I'm kind of interested in... There's real need for a Christian ed textbook in my denomination, sort of textbook. And I'm kind of interested in the idea of a collaborative project that would, what would a multimodal multimedia playbook for religious education look like? And we'd have to sort of convene it in a way, again, that there was some kind of sense of legitimacy. If we're going to self-publish this, we need some intellectual heft to it. But I'm trying to take the mess of what it's like to try to sell books in this tiny little niche, as an invitation to self-publish something with some collaborators, and fill this real need that we have for the thing that you use to teach priests how to teach. So, we'll see.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I want to just underscore two things that you said around publishing and publication venues. And one of the things I forgot to mention, the beginning of today was that, today's panel is the first in a series that we're calling the Multimodal Scholarship series. We have two more events coming up later this semester, including one in December around, what do you do with this stuff? How do you archive it? How do you disseminate it?
But then, we also, in the spring, we're working with Nancy Lesko, who's the editor of TC Record, to, at least, have one, maybe two panels on multimodal publishing, because one of the pieces, and some of you might want to ask them about this, one of the challenges that has come up is, where do I put this stuff? How do I distribute it? Who is going to read, engage, and experience these outputs?
And so, I think those are going to be productive conversations. But hopefully, I've vamped long enough that some people have questions. And I want to invite the panelists to ask questions of each other, if you'd like to do that as well.
Oh, yes. Lucius is pointing out the other thing that I was going to say. That is written right here, Lucius, which is, as you're considering your questions, one of the things we wanted to point out was that, the pieces you see in the gallery, they were Lucius' and Chris's responses to each of these five people's dissertation work. And so, when we think about how something is represented, these are five of many ways that things could have been represented, but it was a conversation and it was a active deep inquiry and curation. So, if you want to ask Lucius and Chris about those pieces as well, the floor is yours.
Lucius Von Joo:
I know this looks like a prop, but it's recording for audio later, so you'll be thankful when the questions are recorded as well. So, I'm going to give you this, but it doesn't echo your voices.
Matt:
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the fascinating presentations and talks. My name's Matt, and I am a professor in the Dance Education program. I've been thinking a lot... Hi, Pat. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of epistemic equity, whose ways of knowing get acknowledged and validated, and it's so wonderful that we're here at TC and these diverse ways of knowing are evaluated and accepted and rewarded within the context of the neoliberal corporate academy. But thinking about the broader context of education and the ways in which the ways of knowing that are represented here are not validated for many, many students, and as people who think deeply and work in these ways, are there ways to expand this out of doctoral education into honoring and validating multiple ways of knowing across education, in general?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Abby and Nick, did you hear that? Yeah.
Tran Templeton:
Nick's got an answer.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Oh, go ahead, Nick. Jump on in.
Nick Sousanis:
I don't know if I heard the question, but I think I got the gist of it. And if I'm answering wrong, you guys can kick me.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
We can just stipulate wildly.
Nick Sousanis:
Yeah. This made me think of some things that have come out of responses to my work, which... I mean, I think the thing I've been most pleased with is what... Because it's been used in schools from high school to undergrad, is what students have then done with it? And we've got dance people here.
I had a student make a choreographic dance to the work, which is really cool. That was exciting. She was an undergrad at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. And that was really cool. It was very exciting to see her work to dance. But what was super cool is that, she did her undergraduate thesis as a dance, no longer related to my work. But the fact that she'd been able to do this for a class because that had been allowed, and she'd seen the possibility for it, meant that she got to fly with it.
I mean, I did miss some of the words, but I think I heard the question. The thing I've seen, and I've gotten to talk to lots of high schools and undergrad courses and grad courses is that, the examples that are out there, I think, feel like they're giving people some license to try their own thing. And I've just seen some terrific projects from comics to dance to... I don't know. I mean, I document them as I remember, too, but... So, was that what the question was, if I understood?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yeah. And I think Matt was getting its legitimacy as well, right? If I'm hearing you correctly, that there is this kind of, you all were doing doctoral work... Oh. You all were doing doctoral work, and that brings with it both a platform and a certain kind of a built-in legitimacy. And I think, Nick, you're talking about sort of how these outputs might open up practices and invitations?
Nick Sousanis:
Right.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yep.
Nick Sousanis:
And I think, the legitimacy... I mean, I know, certainly, having defended this thing where I was, made a big difference, but getting it published and getting it published by who published it, I felt like... I was never a hundred percent clear that I'd done the first of these things, but I didn't want to be the last. I really didn't want to be the one that killed everybody's potential, going forward. So, to have it come out in the place it did... I mean, I know that because I've been on the committees for some of the future ones, they can point to it now and they can say, "Oh, this happened." And now, those exist, and they can point to that. And now, this conversation exists so more people can be pointing to it.
I don't know. My experience with undergrads and others and high school students feels like it's definitely expanding these conversations that maybe didn't exist 10 years ago or so. They're there and they have more and more exemplars to point to.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Ore?
OreOluwa Badaki:
I really appreciate this concept of epistemic equity. One of the thinkers that really guided me along my dissertation was Walter Mignolo and this concept of epistemic privilege, which is the idea that when you are marginalized, you have a view of the world that is just incredibly dextrous and expansive because you aren't used to being in the norm.
And so, for me, I chose to work in urban agriculture and community gardens as opposed to school gardens. I mean, I love school gardens. I hope to work more in school gardens. But in community gardens, there's inherently an intergenerational aspect, and so it's not just sort of working with young people, you're also working with their cousins and their grandmothers and their moms and their uncles, at least, at the farm I was working at.
And so, I didn't necessarily see bringing in multimodality. I didn't see myself as bringing in anything. They were already talking about how their grandparents told stories, like they were telling movies or the embodied ways their grandparents told stories. And so, just listening to that, I think, Tran, you were mentioning, just the beauty and poetics of listening. And so, it was more about just making space for what people already were doing.
And yes, recognizing that my social location is an academic institution, but that also means that I could bring in resources. So, the grants I was applying for, for the writing group, and I could pay the youth writers, and I could pay local artists to come and do this work. Yeah. I mean, that's not the only way, but I think just finding ways to... People are already doing this. This is not new. How do we sort of invite what people already know, and amplify it?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Other questions?
Patricia:
Hello. I'm Patricia Dye, I'm from the Dance EdD program, and Mr. Henley is my advisor and my professor. I just want to say thank you. I started this journey at 2018 with TC. It's the first doctoral, EdD program in Dance Education. I'm totally out of my element. I'm so thankful that all of you have given me assurance that this can be done. Mine, specifically, that I've figured out, just like I've heard your stories, is of course... Not of course. But I'm an archivist. I've always been an archivist. The stories come out of me about my diaspora, and as a teacher, I just retired from the Board of Ed for 25 years, in the same school with a pedagogy I learned from my mentors.
So, I'm here to find out, how am I going to write this proposed instantiation and your multimode ideas? And the way of knowing and the way of understanding has given me assurance because I've been. I'm like... His name Kyle?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Nick.
Patricia:
Nick, I'm on the floor with you. I didn't know what was going on, what language to use. Academia was like, "Why?" But I know I wasn't going to give up, so I needed to figure out different ways of doing, and being able to explain and embodying... Thank goodness, the Professor Henley, who brought in this an embodied study, I said, "Oh, I can do that." And I'm a dancer, and also from the diaspora.
So, what I'm saying to you is that, you made me feel that this can be done. I don't have to give up. I'm just excited. And I want to be part of those two more series, because I still don't have the language, yet, and I need to listen to what you've said several times also. I'm dyslexic, so my processing is different. So, I'm delighted to be here. And my professor's behind me, so that made me nervous. But thank you again for listening. Thank you.
Patricia:
Thank you.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thank you.
Patricia:
So, the question is, I just want to say thank you for giving me some tools. Yeah. And I just need more of it. I just need to keep hearing more so I can make some distinction of what I can use, as an archivist, in a documentary, for my proposal, because I'm not reading that... I mean, as far as [inaudible 01:09:58]. Thank you.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Thank you, Patricia.
Tran Templeton:
Thank you.
Patricia:
Thank you.
Nathan:
Thanks for this, you guys. This is really great. And I apologize for being the professor who showed up late and then immediately asks a question, but apparently not embarrassed enough by that to stop me. So, sorry if you already answered this. But one thing that I really loved hearing from you guys was how these different representational systems allow you to think about ideas and practices and data in different ways. I think that's a really important aspect of thinking and learning, is the ways in which we use representations to do that.
And also, Ore, you mentioned about the ways in which your dance also allows you to communicate this in a different way, so that the readers can also experience it and understand these ideas in different ways. Something I'm wondering about, and I've been thinking about this a lot is, what does this look like from a boring citation, like practice, right? One of the useful things about text is it's really easy for me to cite somebody else's ideas, build on it, wrestle with it, because it's text and because I'm writing a text, and so we can do that.
And no doubt, there's tons of remix practices in all of these different areas that you guys are working in. But I'm curious if you could just say a thing or two about, how have you engaged with other people's work in your own multimodal practices, and how do you think about developing norms in these communities so that when these next dissertations and these next projects that are multimodal come out, they can also continue to engage, not just in their own ideas, by themselves in isolation, but with this broader field of thinking?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I'm going to restate the question, just for Abby and Nick a little bit. But the gist was... I can't give all the context that Nathan did, but in brief, he's asking, how have you engaged with other multimodal approaches and projects in your work, either previously or now, and how are you part of developing norms so that other people, as they move forward, can continue to engage with your practices? Is that right, Nathan?
Kyle Oliver:
Can I take a go with that?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Go for it.
Kyle Oliver:
I mean, I think one of the freeing and exciting things about working in these different representational formats is the creative intentionality about how to engage in these other ways. So, I'll just give a little shout-out to one of the ways that I do that in my dissertation is... In podcasts, you actually need some ads. You need to give people a little break. If they're going to listen to an hour long chapter, there's a couple of places where you need to put the story down for a second and pursue something else. And in my case, that's where the lit reviews happen.
So, the lit reviews are like ad breaks, basically. "This podcast is made possible by Bruno Latour, and let me play some tape for you of him making such and such a point about networks." So, that was a really good example of a native to the medium way of doing what I think you're getting at. But I also think you're totally right, that text is a great way to cite things. And what I also found really powerful is that, having this kind of script layer to this spoken document... I'm reading from the script, and that script can be annotated really, really substantially in a way that frees up the narrative.
And so, Anna Williams rings a bell every time she reads a quote, and her voiceover, it works in an English lit. I promise you, it sounds good. But for me, I just decided, if somebody cares about the citations, they can go and grab the script and look at it. But that frees the narrative up in a way that, I think, made the text, the audible text, a lot more accessible to the practitioner colleagues that I really wanted to listen to this thing. Having to make sense of all these Latour 2005 and long footnotes, they could just totally ignore that unless they were interested.
So, I guess, in my case, it was this combination of find some creative native ways to do it, and then fall back on what is definitely not broken about citation, and just get it out of the way.
OreOluwa Badaki:
Can I just put a plug for a methods book, which sounds very weird, sorry. But the only methods book that actually I enjoyed reading is a book called, Critical Ethnography by Soyini Madison. Soyini Madison is a performance ethnographer, and so she's somebody who conducts ethnography about performances and is also a performer. And something she does is talk about the logic of citation, and there's a couple of chapters where she writes a love letter to Fanon or gets on a call with Karl Marx. And she's writing these performances, and not just like a nod to like, "Here's a quote from Marx", and these are the theoretical pillars of her research, but it really gives you a view in terms of how she's grappling with this work in her performance, in her research, in her ethnography. It was really helpful for me to think about, okay, what are the legacies I'm drawing upon? There are hundreds of years of scholarship that have these same questions that I do.
And think about it creatively. Like, if I had to get on a call with Karl Marx, what would that be like? So, I found that really helpful. I really like that methods book. Yeah.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Anybody else? I think we have time for one more question. Anyone? Anyone? Or from the panel themselves? Anyone? Lucius has one.
Lucius Von Joo:
Sorry, I was just on that same question. The idea of this curation is exactly what you're asking. Nathan, is that... I mean, you're hugged by this work right now. You're turning, and it's so different than when you are just reading it. And there's that deep element that you can get from that, in reading it, and there's that personal nature, but it's also just thinking about, again, someone like me who... My family did not go to school, and so it's that these kinds of sounds and these kinds of responses, when I've read these articles, when I've seen their work, it's this urge to respond to it, but it's this urge to respond to it in a mode that is similar, and it's that way opposed to transferring it. And I think that's a huge part as well. Like, when I'm hearing you talk next to your work, and I'm just looking at it, it's so much more for me. And that's just one approach, so I'm not sure if that's for all, but I can't help but say that, too.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
I think that's a nice note to end on. Tran, Abby, Nick, Ore, Kyle, thank you so much for giving us so much to talk about and think with. And all of you, thank you for being here. Please eat some cookies and brownies and coffee and tea.
And a preview of what's coming up. We have the multimodal toolkit in which Kyle has a piece on citations, so that might be interesting to read a little bit more, if you will.
Kyle Oliver:
And it cites Nick-
Lalitha Vasudevan:
In which he cites Nick, so that's really good fun. And what we will do is we'll be publishing a multimodal bibliography of multimodal scholarship as well, in which we include the work by all of these scholars. But we invite you to share with us as well.
And if you haven't already, I think there's a way to either sign up or check in when you came in here. But certainly, you can look at the DFI website and we will continue to have things posted.
So, thank you for being here. That brings us to a close. Thank you all.
OreOluwa Badaki:
Thank you.