Haeny Yoon:
So I am Haeny Yoon. I'm here with Dr. Ioana Litera. In front of her example and exemplars of memes that she has used not only in pedagogy and teaching, but also in research and methods. Maybe just tell us how you got into this and what you were you're trying to accomplish.
Ioana Literat:
I study memes. I've written a bunch of articles about memes from a creativity perspective, from a political expression perspective. I also use memes in my teaching a lot. If you look at my slides, you'll see memes pop up everywhere. I also use memes as research methods, and that's been one of my favorite ways to play with memes, actually, to ask participants to express themselves through memes as a participatory visual method. I share memes in my group texts with family, with friends. So I feel like they really penetrate all aspects of my personal and professional lives, and also at the intersection of their personal and professional. So in a way, it's not surprising that I gravitated towards this means of expression.
Haeny Yoon:
I think the thing that stuck out to me is just... You obviously are the meme queen and I think you kind of brought this into the group and it became such a pivotal part of how we related to each other, and then how we shared it and expressed it with other people even outside of the group. And so I'm wondering how the group or meeting in the group and doing the collaborative work has mobilized or extended the things that you were already doing?
Ioana Literat:
I think it gave me license to be playful and to be more authentic, to be myself. And actually that's what I really love about memes, that they can be a serious object of study. Looking up here, we developed a coding app, and here we're literally coding a meme and thinking about it as an object of study, and then writing a very traditional journal article about it. But that same thing, that same template, that same meme can also be a playful object. And so within the group, I think through our interactions, through our activities, it really pushed me to understand that it's okay to be playful and that play can be serious work, but that is something that I've taken from the group and really embedded into my teaching, into my mentorship, putting more of myself out there and not thinking that I need to be this thing in this particular role, closed off in certain ways.
Haeny Yoon:
I think part what you're saying is the play and the authenticity and being able to think about the playful as even intellectual and the playful as even joyful, something that we all kind of aspire to-
Ioana Literat:
And how those two are not mutually exclusive.
Haeny Yoon:
Yes, exactly. I think ultimately the shift is that we want to create spaces of play and creativity and joy as intellectual work that circulates even in academia. So talk to me about what the shift might look like in academic spaces.
Ioana Literat:
We need a very specific blend of regularity and openness, and I think that's what really was so successful in this group, that we had regularity and structure in the sense of making time to meet every week, having a kind of structure to our activities. But at the same time, there was an openness, both in terms of the content. The title of our initial faculty collaboration grant was suspending closure, and that was very true to what we actually did in the group. And also openness within ourselves to be vulnerable, to try new things, to think in different ways, to learn from each other.
So to me, there's this really interesting tension between you do need some structure and you need support to have that kind of regularity and to have that kind of structure, but then you also need that [inaudible 00:04:25] bash it openness. And I think another aspect that I want to make visible is that the institutional support also matters on a symbolic level, I guess. Again, giving us license, official license to do this kind of work that matters for our colleagues, that matters for our students. I love talking to my doctoral students, for instance, about this kind of work so they can see what is possible in academia, and so they can see how we're developing in these collaborative interdisciplinary, within these structures.
I think it's just bringing more of myself into the classroom and being more open about not only my achievements, but also my challenges, my dilemmas, my tensions, my mistakes, and also making my passion more visible, I guess. I really care about the things that I study, and so I want to make that more obvious in case it's not obvious. Maybe I thought before that it's obvious. Of course, I'm doing this work because I care, but now I think I'm, again, giving myself permission, giving myself license to make that more obvious. I really care about these things and this is why, and this is why you should care too.
Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, and what I hear you say is that it makes doctoral students or the new emerging scholars in academia kind of think about what's possible.
Ioana Literat:
Yeah, and we've extended some of this work beyond our group through the faculty retreats, through our doctoral mentorship program. So I think we ourselves are also trying to make it visible and trying to expand it beyond the group, but that institutional support has really been key.
Haeny Yoon:
Can you talk a little bit about what the goals of the faculty retreat are?
Ioana Literat:
Yeah. It's really sharing a part of our process and I guess maybe sharing a part of our ethos with the larger faculty. The activities have varied between the different retreats, but the structure has been similar, and again, it's bringing people together in this interdisciplinary context and encouraging a sense of play, a sense of openness and a sense of learning from each other.