 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 4.30 to 5.00 session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation, Justice, Literacy, Critiques, and Cultural Landscape. Our speaker is Dr. Marianne Dei-Aduardo. Marianne is an author and editor and adjunct professor in science, writing, and global literature. Her recent book, hermeneutics, Metacognition, and Writing in 2021, is about the importance of the critique in science writing. She is a published author of more than 50 books and articles. Please check out the website found at conferenceopensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is being livestreamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC21. Welcome, everyone, and let's begin the session. Thank you very much. I would like to thank the Open Simulator Conference staff. Everyone's been so pleasant friendly to help me set up. This particular performance today is based in participating in teaching, writing, editing, presenting, and performing case study researches since 2003. I shall begin the explanation and argumentation of this talk by giving background on my own peace studies and cultural studies, as well as my interest in cultural poetics and approaching literature through the investigation of cultural landscapes. In the first piece of literature that I'm going to read on this first slide of Poetics of Social Justice, we reflect on 30 Klein's work in Ready Player One. Architectural structures materialize post-humanity in Ready Player One. In this novel, architecture is a sign of a dystopian functionality. But Klein's vision may be extrapolated from other science fiction authors, one of them being Margaret Atwood. So in the very early stages of this talk in the introduction, we're going to look at this semiotic praxis. It means that Ready Player One is a sign. And Klein's use of social dysfunctionality, reflecting our current socioeconomic virtual dependency, is a sign that creates mythic connectivity. This is the dystopia. In Ready Player One, Klein creates imagined space. And a biomimetic look at the book shows loss of the natural world in the genre, as well as an extrapolation of a darker version of our future. He projects an imagined future based on pop culture of the past. And he alludes to what we're talking about, a literary space that is so fantastic. On the next slide, we are going to begin study of the poetics of social justice. And we're going to define this poetic space through the work of Rita Dove. Social justice is a thematic presence that we all share when we're able to see that the universe is on the side of justice, a Kingian principle. Social justice as being oneself in the world, free from injury and hatred, blessed with hope and joy, is an ultimate journey in the research and writing. Social movements initiated by literature include the beat generation, the powerful poetics of Flannery O'Connor, the poet Frank Bedart, who uses narrative strategies. His works of poetry embody the flow of human emotions. The pathos appeals to emotions and feelings and persuades an audience. Bedart's dramatic monologues are an intrapersonal lens into the inner pain innate in the human emotional experience. Frank Bedart was born in Bakersfield, California on May 27, 1939. His recent works include Half Light, Collected Poems, 1965 to 2016, published in 2017. This book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. He's a messenger of hope for us. His writing is prophetic, motivational, and steadily charges forward with exceptional theoretical foundations. One can see that the poet Frank Bedart uses mythological theory. He mindfully embraces situations of courage and despair in his conversational poetry. As part of the LGBTQIA community, Bedart inspires equality. Therefore, through a student-directed pedagogical model, with writers like Zora Neale-Hurston, Anne Patri, Ralph Ellison, as well as Martin Luther King, and the composer Terence Blanchard, my writing classes fuse into a learning community. I've been doing case studies, for example, on Flannery O'Connor. Case study two is on work that defines social movements. Case study three is on a trip to Florence, where I wrote about the work of Thomas Merton. Case study four was a journey to Birmingham, Alabama, and writing about civil rights. Case study five was social justice engaging peace through the work of Rita Dove. And this is what we are going to see in the next slide. So Rita Dove creates poetry of social change. She bridges the common with the uncommon, the dead with the living, and the past with the present. She teaches us to live with ourselves and to be the social change we seek and share truths. She uses poetry of human dignity related to identity. The poet also creates poetic language of truth and beauty. Based on truth, the poet invites us to enter mythic imaginative space. The poetics verify the melodious nature of the poetics of social justice, and integrate community and ancestral conversations. Presence of history, autobiography, and myth reveal the poetics of respect for life. My creative approach to teaching blends cultural poetics with the concentration on social justice as a paradigm. The philosophical theory of signs and functions called semiotics gives meaning to alliterary work, and particularly to its apparent and deepest significance, which would presumably be missed by most readers without help from a critic, which explains the work in a totality. As we see on the next slide, we are going to define the poetics of social justice. And in defining this, we define it through, of course, our own personal definitions, the meaning of what we do to survive, and flourish. We're going to have a workshop, a writing workshop, toward the end of this talk. And what I'd like you to begin to think about is what would you do if you were given the task of defining social justice in your own life and in your livelihood? What kinds of experiences have you had? And then how can you share that with others? How can you craft your own vision through short stories? Would you do it through a blog? These are the kinds of experiments that I'm doing. And I noticed that by reading the poetry of Dove, I have begun a life based on understanding home. Dove was born in the same era as myself. So the poetics of social justice of Rita Dove was a presentation for the Northeast Modern Language Association. And my claim in discussing this and studying her poetry is that the importance of reading, writing, and analysis of the poetry of Dove is a doorway to producing and practicing social justice in your own community, not only in your own home, but on your own neighborhood and in your own communities. I performed case study research on a single subject. And then I put this all in information in a YouTube channel. So you could always go to, in fact, this presentation is in my YouTube channel, recorded there for you. This PowerPoint, the slides. Now in the case study, I would read a poem like the Yellow House in the Corner, then reflect. What is a reflection? A reflection is how it makes us feel. Does it make us feel equal, equal to others? And so the case study began on March 8, 2020. And it's really ending now. This one-year case study on a single self uses a journal to record reflections. And the purpose of this is a qualitative study. So I anticipate healing and growth. This is my eighth case study during a period of high researches. Pairing music and linguistic intelligences in 2003 was another case study. Individually, when we do a case study on a single subject, it is very important to task ourselves with writing religiously almost every day. So your creative approach in the case study then becomes something like this. It's original frameworks. Original frameworks about perhaps, like I mentioned, blogging. As a blogger since 2000, I've kept a series of writings about my love of nature, for instance. And Dove writes a lot about home. So if you wanted to write about home, you would be understanding her and how precious home is, how precious the feelings of home are. My home really is the natural world. I also paint the natural world. So if you go to merianwriting.blogspot.com, you will find helpful articles on writing about your activities. This is called life story writing. Now we're starting the workshop part. I'm already indicating to you that writing is a lifestyle. I take a journal everywhere. Our home offers the first type of a nature walk, which I was doing actually all day to prepare for this talk. And the talk was evolving as I was sitting under trees or walking around my garden. Writing about even short travels like walks around the garden ignite a special feeling for me. So this is where I get the writing life from. And all my life, my favorite way to enjoy has been the outdoors. I visit the beach and I create travel journals. So this is part of why we're talking about the art of writing and how important this research is. The critique is a piece of writing that we use for science writing. I teach in the Graduate School of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. Lehigh offers us great research, not only outcomes, but a great research camaraderie. And the modern and social imaginary that we also are using in this talk today is something I'm doing for another university, University of Maryland Global Campus. The social imaginary was coined by Canadian hermeneutic philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor analyzes the way that Western societies have both imagined and attempted to realize themselves according to popular conceptions of their moral purpose and moral order. In this book, Hermeneutics, Metacognition and Writing, I use the hermeneutic philosophy to explain literature. Hermeneutics is a system of understanding a text. Hermeneutics tells us that a critique is the way we can write about how texts affect us. And when we do that, our writing is original because we're writing about our own reaction. We're using the knowledge of the writer to understand cultural milieu. It is through a conceptualization of certain things that we become our own selves. Going back to Plato's Socratic method as I brought life into the critiques in my teaching of science writing at Lehigh, there's a possibility of understanding and revealing our intuitive knowledge. I teach my students to write every day, reading critically, English as a minor or major or English as a path, writing a thesis, writing notes, writing blogs. In 2017, I published an article called Implementing Learning Strategies based on Metacognition. And I was proud to speak at an open simulator conference in 2014 on this topic. I present Learning Strategies about Thinking. So in the symposium in 2019 about critiques, I lectured on identifying a mythology to put that thinking down in an arc, in an order, in a beginning, middle, end. Further study in the area of critiques uses different online platforms, such as Daigo Pages, D-I-G-O, which I'm on, a YouTube channel. You can also go into Google Scholar to study research techniques like hermeneutics, but the critique is imperative. So we're seeing in the next slide, how metaphors and social commentary are very important for us to make in our writing. Critiques engage readers in analyzing key articles by scholars in the field. Use blogs, websites, books, pamphlets, newsletters, or journals, or material demonstrating techniques of close reading. Writers possess qualities of memory, which we know that Doug is teaching us. Play podcasts of sample student essays to show other students how to recall events. Hermeneutics includes a significant transformation. Writers plan evaluate, monitor, embed, inform, and train. Prewriting in an informal journal is helpful, but why do writers write? Social justice, thematic tools, paradigms are in the construction of novels of, for example, Charles Dickens. Literature is inspirational. Charles Dickens teaches peace through his literature. He is an agent of change as well as Dove. As we move on, we're thinking about aging, about metaphors, about critical hermeneutics, about a way to understand a text and to make that text our own. Continue to understand that works can represent the life of the writer and they can represent your life too. That's why I really consider writing a healing therapy. My intention is to provide readers with tools to research with the use of social justice as a reason to write and a methodology of applying the social justice paradigm for writing. Conclusively, I am seeking to develop empathy. Next, we're going to think about what we're going to envision in researchers changing spaces. And this is what we see in many, many writers. In the literary works of Margaret Atwood, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Stephanie Powell Watts, we see that there are themes of immigration and trauma that have lasting effects on humans. So through metaethics, I seek to resolve questions of human morality, spatializing the landscape that we create, whether it is in human rights or it is with civic values is very important to me. And I've been presenting lectures and conferences on human rights and civic values. I present research focused on the landscape of a literary work. Where does it happen? How did it happen? And why does it happen? Reflection in the study of literature and space is centered on a remembrance of marvelous days of writing. We're going to wrap up soon and we do want to have some time for questions. Remembering the poet and the imaginary imagery of the poet, we commit ourselves to practicing projects that are going to define peace within us. A peaceful space within us is one of the final images that I'd like to give you. And remember that Dove teaches us to live with ourselves, teaches us about human dignity, discusses social functionality of literature as well as the theoretical processes of the literary scholar to write for cultural change. And her deep love resides in her language and poetics. Next, we're asking you to be a writer. We want to share during the pandemic to inspire. The pandemic changes us and we are initiating hopes for survival. Offering us away in metaphors and healing through writing, not only our own writing, but reading the works of others. So there we go, that's it. If there's, we have a minute for questions. We do. And actually, Mary-Anne, you shared a URL earlier and we missed, it was quick of course and we weren't able to write it all down. Can you share that in chat, the URL? Sure, sure. Thank you. And are there other questions? Boy, this is a great topic. Who is the current soaker, Michael? I think we have time for one more question. Okay, I can share that. Anyone else have a question? Here is the URL. Oh, thanks, France. So Mary-Anne, do you think the choice of space that inspires a writer says something about their writing personality? Oh, I definitely think so because we can only write if we're comfortable where we are. Like Toni Morrison always said, she had to write alone and she always started on paper and I've made a tradition of doing that. I write my books in notebooks in the least expensive, little tiny, those little old notebooks like we used to write when we were little. That's where I start with, I'm comfortable. I have to be in a space of comfort I think and I think that's where the healing starts for me. On the back of this book that we see in the link that I provided in Spatializing Social Justice, the editors commented that you should listen to your own voice and that you explore the healing process through words when you're either reading or writing. Excellent. Well, thank you, Mary-Anne. What a wonderful, informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session which will begin at five p.m. In this keynote region, that doesn't sound right. Yes, it does, okay. And it's entitled Path of Least Resistance, The Challenge Facing Virtual Environments. We also want to encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper grid resources in OSCC expo two region along with sponsor and crowd vendor booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.