 So I just want to welcome everybody to today's Faculty Author Spotlight, our live Zoom Q&A discussion with several faculty members who've recently published books in the last year and a half or so. So it's a little bit wiggle room there. My name is Courtney Kearney. I am a, or the scholarly engagement librarian for the physical sciences and data management at Howard Tilton. I want to thank all of our panelists today who I'll introduce in just a moment and also those that helped organize the event includes Amanda Morales and Melissa Chimintra, as well as Alan Velazquez at the library. Collectively, we've all been working on this the last few months to try and get to this moment where we can actually talk to our faculty members and hear about the work they've been doing, the process that kind of surrounds that work and kind of where they're going next. So today's talk we have five faculty from across campus. We have Dr. Joan Blakely from the School of Social Work. She has a publication titled, Why Are You Here? The Lack of Belonging Among African American Students and a Predominantly White School District. Then we have Dr. Joel Dinnerstein of English with Jazz, A Quick Immersion. We also have Dr. Victor Holkkamp of the theater department discussing his book entitled, interchangeable parts, acting, industry and technology in U.S. theater. And we also have Dr. Mimi Shippers from sociology with polyamory, monogamy and American dreams, the stories we tell about poly lives and the cultural production of inequality. And last but definitely not least, we have Dr. Nubian's son from social work with motherhood as immortality. So we have a really great, I think, array of topics today and hopefully everyone who's attending will have a better understanding again about the authors themselves and the work they produced. And we'll have an opportunity to ask more questions. So we're doing the webinar feature of Zoom today. So for the participants or the attendees, you'll see there's an option to use chat as well as the Q&A. Feel free to say things in chat. But if you have a question for any particular panelist or the group, if you could put that in the Q&A, that would be great. It makes it a little easier to decipher comments from questions. And we'll probably do questions at the end after we go through a few topics for discussion with everybody. So to get us started, again, thank you all for being here today. And we have a few questions, like I said, and we're hoping that, you know, this is informal conversation. So I know that's hard to do in Zoom because the way Zoom does its thing. But we're going to start with the question of how and why did you choose your book topic. So what brought you to the place to write that book? Was it your previous research or the work you're doing? Is it a shift from what you normally do? And so, again, I'm just going to put that to the panelists and I'll let you guys discuss that. And yeah, thank you. I'll go ahead. So the book is about how to read texts through a poly lens. And by poly, I mean polyamorous, right, relationships that include more than two adults. And I had written a book previously about polyamory. But this book, in particular, I was motivated to write because really often when I engage with texts, I, from a poly perspective, I see that the people writing the texts or producing the texts are not seeing the world as if polyamory is possible. And so each chapter takes a different kind of text and reads it with a poly gaze, what I call a poly gaze. And mostly it was hopefully an intervention in the way people engage with media, rather than articulated to other scholars or other academics. This is John Blakey. I'm so excited to be with you today. I kind of feel like the book or this topic chose me. I think that I was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the School of Social Work for a long time. And so these issues of belonging and sort of, you know, students experiences and how they feel being in a predominantly white space had been something that have been thinking about for a long time. So this topic, although the paper was really focused on high school, it really helped me to understand a lot of the students experiences. And what was happening at this within the School of Social Work and how to make the environment more welcoming so that students really did feel a sense of belonging. Well, I was gonna wait till I was to last because actually didn't choose the topic or the book I was chosen. So I am a jazz scholar and there's a new short is a new series called quick immersion for short accessible books for a general audience. I was the publisher emailed me to write a short narrative history well to do whatever I wanted actually but to do a short accessible work for people without any technical musical knowledge. And so I refused a couple of times, because he wanted to give me nine months and 40,000 words and I thought that was impossible. And the reasons I chose to do it would take me too long to explain some of them personal. But the reason I actually chose to do it was I thought that since our attention spans are now so short, I had to learn how to write a short book, both of my monographs are like 300 pages or 350. Well, the only way I'm going to learn that is if I do it. So that is actually that and the fact that I want people to love jazz and even people I know who are American historians and American studies people do not spend any time trying to enjoy what is America's classical music so I said well alright a book that I'll tell the jazz story which is about art and aesthetics and African Americans survival and music and I'll do it through the five cities that happened and maybe that will have enough narrative threads for people to read it. And of course it starts in New Orleans, which is really why the guy got in touch with me. That's my story. Greetings, everyone. Thank you all for co creating this space today. I recently completed a piece. Motherhood is immortality as a part of an anthology that I was invited to participate in. And this poem is a genuine flexion to my mother inspired by my mother but it's for all mothers. And this piece took a while to publish, because I didn't know at the time I learned at the end that the editor lost her mother. So this is a very timely piece. And we were able to process through the poem and support and build community around our thoughts of our mothers and in celebration of our mothers. Hi, I'll just echo what everyone said thank you so much for for those of you setting it up setting it up and for those of you that are spending your lunchtime with us thank you very much for being out there. I got interested in my topic as I was interested in how we ended up in a place where we can teach people to act without them actually being in a play, which is actually a very recent innovation in sort of art and aesthetics of theater. So the story really starts at the end of the 19th century and sort of works through the 20th and the main through line that I was interested in pursuing is the ways in which the way that people talk about acting and the way that people talk about learning how to act really echoed the larger scale industrial around interchangeable parts and mass production that emerged at roughly the same time and so I essentially trace these two streams, as we move into the 20th century and move acting from being a completely apprentice based on the job system of how you learn how to act into a place that exists in a place like too late where they hire somebody like me to teach in a theater program. Thanks everyone. And so the next question is what was the most difficult and or most rewarding part of this writing editing process. And I'll again open the floor up to anyone who'd like to speak. And I feel like with any project it's always finding the story. What's the story that I want to tell. And I think when you have so much data. Again, it's hard to decide what which parts do you kind of, you know, privilege and bring to the surface and is that another book is that part of this book and so it's always that kind of. I just find that regardless of what I'm writing. You know the issue but I think that that was the most challenging part I think it's also the fun part right because it's it's it's really, you know, getting to tell the story and for me. Most of my writing is academic trying to tell it in a way that lay audiences can can pick up my book and understand you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I kind of I want to build on that because I kind of led with the difficulties at nine months and 40,000 words to write a history of jazz so. But my the question was the same as yours, which is that I knew I was going to do it when they asked me a question and I thought alright if I were going to do this how would I do it. It's always dangerous when you're start thinking about it. And I said what are the narrow what's the narrative I can tell in a short period of time because you can't do it through musicians because there's too many of them. So I would do it through the five cities where jazz developed New Orleans Chicago Kansas City New York Los Angeles. And so each chapter is kind of a biography of a city, and why the music developed there and continues in the present. And once I had that I knew I was, I knew I was lost and I would take the assignment. That's pretty much what happened. One of one of the things that I think all writers face is confronting one's own biases and one's own opinions and perspectives and desire for outcomes. And I found that I have a chapter on journalists portrayals of Mormon polygamists. And it was really I found it really difficult to not let my own stereotypes and assumptions, sort of guide my reading of both the journalists accounts, but also the empirical research on fundamentalist Mormon polygamists, which shows that there's a lot of variation and how people practice polygamy. But I came in with the assumptions that most of the journalists had, right, that it's, they're all, you know, male dominant, they're all abusive, they're all criminal endeavors. And so it was, it was interesting for me and difficult to sort of allow myself to entertain the possibility that there could be feminist Mormon polygamy, which it turns out there is and and Muslim polygamy. So my most difficult part of the writing ended up being the most surprising and in many ways rewarding part of the writing for me. I'll throw I mean this is a little bit different in character from what's been said I mean there were many difficulties. I'm there are people who are far more skilled at doing this sort of thing that it clearly I turned out to be. But one late breaking curveball is that after I got the feedback back from the press from the peer reviewers, they asked me essentially to add new critical lens to the analysis that I had done and the book was already at about 300 plus typed pages. So there was a little bit of back and forth about how that would work but the good thing is that the press gave me the room to add that in but it meant I had to get up to speed on actor network theory which sounds like something I should know about since I was talking about actors but actor is very different. Many of you probably already know actor network theory but it was basically entirely new to me so I essentially had to give myself a whole seminar and actor network theory and then apply that to the research that I've been doing for a long time and work that together into something approaching a cohesive manuscript so it was successful enough to get published but it was definitely definitely a moment of challenge for me. One commitment that some folks may see as challenging is my commitment to balancing the creative my creative joy of public publishing works and the heavy empirical drive with publication and and I do that because I believe that there are various ways of knowing there there are values in our stories. And so I really enjoy the balance of the two and always and also think about accessibility to stories and to narratives. And so that balance exists, you know, for those reasons also. Thanks y'all and can y'all talk a little bit about some of the things are surprises that you learned in the research process. So, you know, you start out with one I with a research question or an idea of the process that you're hoping to or thinking you're going to head in that direction. Did you learn anything or do things change for you along the way that kind of shifted, maybe the topic you were discussing or how you just discussed it anything, anything that surprised you or along those lines. Yeah, I can lead off on this one. Maybe so originally when I was planning this project I was going to stay focused just on live theater. But I got some resources to head out to Los Angeles and do some work in some of the studio archives from the early part of the 20th century I've gotten a few scattered references that the studios have been doing some actor training as well during that time so I was able to dive into that story and that ended up being a much more integral part of the final product than I had originally envisioned. And it's also I was, you know, it's really fun as well because you know theater the names aren't necessarily quite as well known but you know you say like MGM like pretty much everybody has something to think about like what MGM might be so it was a good hook to get a little bit more interest in the project as well. Plus a great chance to do some really fun archival research and tell a couple stories that aren't necessarily the same ones that you would normally think of in that time. This is Joan again. I guess what surprised me was I guess the simplicity of what I what I found it was kind of a moment of like it was right there but I guess when I went into I was expecting to find a lot of a lot more things. I mean, you know sense of belonging has many different aspects to it. But I never considered the possibility that one of the participants described it as, you know, like we feel like we're a guest in this house in a house right in a place. And, you know, we're invited to come in, but we, but none of the food that we like to eat is is available. The music that is played in the house doesn't represent us. We're able to sit but we're not able to kind of lean back and get comfortable and, you know, put our feet up. And the way that they described it was a really like wow I never really thought about, you know, spaces like that like schools or places to think about, you know, what do we do to make people feel a part of whatever we're doing. And so it was very, it was kind of this, you know, aha the moment but I really was thinking much more racism and racism is certainly a part of some of that but I was just thinking of much more sort of bigger things, and to find out that it was really about, you know, you know, wanting to be in, be an integral part of this space wanting their there to see themselves reflected in the space, wanting to be valued for who they were and what they brought to the space was really. I never thought that that could have such an impact. And so that's what really kind of surprised me. This is much less profound indeed, Dr. Blakies, but because I was working on a kind of distillation. The there were two challenges. I mean the general challenge was how do I find the narrative threads for each chapter right it's a biography of each city right how do I I know who the musicians are going to be sort of. What are how am I going to connect, you know, New Orleans in the first two decades of the 20th century to now. That one was easy. I live here I know what those threads are. But the so that's the general challenge which developed only as I wrote the book, or what we're going to be the narrative threads and I was surprised and happy to find that there were generational threads both musically and literally and through venues and through various sort of African American institutions often and sometimes the clubs that did that. But the subset of that is in Los Angeles I had no idea really the clip the chapter on Los Angeles is almost entirely new. Like that was all me immersing myself in books on jazz of Los Angeles on the West Coast, and then finding one of the great things and the real surprise of the book to me, which was musician harsh tap Scott who's not famous pianist and who spent his entire life. In South Central LA, developing an orchestra that played only community venues churches, especially clubs community centers, and all kinds of musicians including perhaps the most famous young jazz musician Kamasi Washington, developed under his mentorship. He never toured he was a world class musician who just was his commitment was to African American community. And so I knew about him but did not know both how effective he was, and how well that would fit so basically to sum up that I could make. I could connect Los Angeles is a jazz scene which starts on the central in late 1930s which was basically the Harlem of Los Angeles to the present through several people including, most importantly our staff Scott, it was like when I realized that I went all right, we're done. I'm out right that was the big that was the big challenge that I actually didn't know when I started the book how I would do that one. So, that was that was satisfying I must say gratifying more than satisfy. I'll say that finding out about a whole group of people who identify as fundamentalist polygamists with a feminist sensibility was like, you know, it's so surprised me. And then once I read more about it it wasn't as surprising as I initially thought it would be. But also, there's a whole history of people committing to non monogamy. As a political endeavor, tied with all sorts of other kinds of political affiliations, and that history has been erased by people writing historical biographies and treating the non monogamy as this weird perversion this person had outside of their political commitments. So like the weaving of one's sexual life and relationship life with one's political commitments. I mean there's a whole history of that that I would love a historian to write someday. And thanks for that y'all it's really interesting to hear all the different aspects are the things that like you learned along the way that surprised you. And I think it's common in any sort of writing research endeavor that happens and it's nice to be reminded that it happens across the board, you know it's not discipline specific. So with that I feel like you know somebody else started to touch on that on this a little bit but I'm really curious to hear about now that you've completed this work. And for some of you it may have been last year, you know sometimes it's a couple years after the publication of this but what are you working on now. How did you know how does it connect to the your current work or the current publication that we're kind of highlighting today. Is it connected I mean sometimes these things aren't as linear as you see them so can you talk a little bit about what you're working on and where it's going and how you got there. So I guess this process really fueled or unearthed my desire to do more work around diversity, equity and inclusion. Like I said just to see how important it was that I think that oftentimes we, we, we stop at diversity and so we have a lot of diverse, you know people in in a space, but we don't then take it a step further to think about inclusion, and then equity and is that you know are they. And so I think for me it was like, you know we're really good at the diversity part not so good at the inclusion and equity and so really thinking about that piece, not only, you know, as, as my administrator with my administrator had on, but also thinking about you know the social work profession it's really made me question and think about the social work profession just made me think about the fact that most of what we teach students is from a white lens. You know, people of color are sort of this, you know add on or it's a it's a week in the in the curriculum, but you know how do we begin to turn that on its, you know, its head so it's really kind of. It's stoked my desire for really wanting to delve in deeper in this area and think about. Like I said, equity and inclusion, there's to me is nothing worse than having a student come to Tulane, for example. And leave because they don't feel a sense of belonging and so now they've got student debt that they have to start paying back and don't have anything to show for it. And so for me that is really my commitment is how do I make these spaces better and how do I make these spaces more welcoming so that students feel like they, they are part an integral part of any space. So that I think that's what that's kind of where my work is is heading in this project definitely opened that the floodgates to that. And in many ways my. My next project is is very much connected to the work in American dreams. So in American dreams it's like looking at texts through a poly lens. And in my next book I'm working on theorizing the effect of walking through the world with a poly affect. Might have on one's orientation towards the environment animals potential political allies across difference so polyamory as a way of thinking about relationships as open. And always, there's a potential for the relationship to change and to move in different directions, whereas like a monogamous couple diet is closed, and walking through the world with that sensibility versus walking through the world with a poly sensibility. And how poly affect my full meant the ability to form political alliances across differences. I don't know if that made any sense. It's in progress. No, it makes sense. Maybe I don't. I might thematically my next the current project has nothing to do with the jazz project. I'm formally a little bit by writing a book that was for totally accessible and writing in a kind of streamlined pros and sort of compressed way I realized I wanted to. I wanted to write a non academic book. This wasn't new to me and when I was young I was an aspiring novelist so I've never really enjoyed writing an academic pros I mean I figured out sort of how to do it and not hate it, but I've never enjoyed it. And I'm an English professor I love language. And so I have been thinking for quite some time about writing a memoir of my friend my Jewish family. And I decided and I've been working on it, probably since the summer I decided it was the time one because I didn't want to write one because I have another project that's going to take me a while to do the research. I can't write that for a while, and I'm teaching courses sort of doing the research, but the other is I mean quite simply. I'm so I have a unique situation. I grew up in what I now have to call pre hipster Brooklyn because otherwise people think I grew up in whatever they think Brooklyn is now. And I grew up in an urban Jewish world that was working class that has simply disappeared from public memory. And so, and it was a fairly interesting childhood but more importantly my family is very unusual in that I'm about quite literally mathematically as young as you can be to be first generation to the Ellis Island migration. My, and my parents had me very late, my mom was 45. She and my father was 48. They came over right before Ellis Island. And so mathematically be very hard to actually be much younger than I am. And so I look at the as a set of lost worlds. There's the lost world I grew up in. There's the very unusual thing of if you're born and your parents are as old as most people's grandparents and your grandparents are still alive. And we're basically part of an extended immigrant community that I have firsthand knowledge of which is very unusual. At this point, I thought, all right, I want to sort of get see if I want to get that down. And since I had been thinking about it for a while, I said all right now is the time because I now have language. Well, I don't but I now have to figure out how to write in a fictional voice. Again, even though it's a nonfiction book in a nonacademic way. And let's see how that goes. So I'm doing all right at it. I haven't quite found the voice but I'm enjoying it. And the last thing I would say is I'm very lucky. My mother had two pairs of kids and my I have a sister who's year old and me so I basically just throw everything by her and ask her whether it happened that way whether it works whether other people think it'll work and I'm not sure I could do this without her in fact I'm sure I couldn't do this. So that makes it viable. So that's what I've been working on since I finished writing this probably in March or so and it's going all right. We'll see what happens. I can jump in next. So the next thing I'm working on is actually a history of stage and screen representations of New Orleans, which I thought somebody had already done but it does not. It seems like this is a weird gap in the remarkable literature on the city that we're in. It was actually prompted to a certain extent by my work I actually did it on the previous book although thematically there's next to nothing overlapping them but when I was doing the archival research out in the studio archives I ran across a set of location documents and New Orleans was an early on location spot for Hollywood so I jotted that down and then went back to looking at how people were acting but was sort of intrigued by like why that might be and what was sort of filmed there. And this was before I even was working at Tulane and then I got the job at Tulane and I came here and got this book done so it seemed like the perfect time to sort of dive into this next topic. I just want to say to Victor Victor how has that not been done. I can't believe there's no book like that. I know I managed to get like an undergraduate research assistant to like scour the bookshelves in case I'd overlooked something like both of us turned up nothing so I mean I'm still sort of expecting that like two or three, my luck two years from now and I'm forced the way through like it all suddenly to go up but so far. No, like there's been individual studies of like a particular like film or something like that but nothing that sort of looks at the whole history of the representation of the city and because the city's been around for so long there's been representations for a long time. So we have an annual Tennessee Williams Festival, and we don't have a book on representations of New Orleans and stats. Although again if anyone out there knows of that book please let me know like save me from myself. I'll share. I didn't know I wanted to leave space for anyone who wanted to share my next project is called saving lives and including our own, and it looks at examining best practices of justice like when, who are reproductive justice leaders in the south, and this piece of reasons funded by the new confab, and it'll be in the journal for criticism studies, and this piece comes out of my work with several reproductive justice leaders in the south, and just hearing their stories over time of healing got into reproductive justice. And how work has informed and how they're healing and challenge and ongoing challenges have affected their work in the south so I'm really excited to have this space to highlight those things and to share other best practices with other. Thanks everyone for that. And I'm going to open up questions to the attendees as well again if you could put questions in the q&a. And while they're doing that, and I was going to ask if y'all could as as experts in your field and researchers, talk to those who are early career, maybe graduate students PhD students, you know the types of publications, you know you've talked about this, it's kind of come up you know it takes years sometimes it's something that maybe on the back burner or not, and they're, but like, advice to them on writing these types of publications, the process, and any insight you can give to them would be really wonderful. Well, in the grand tradition of academia I'll recommend a book that was recommended to me by my acquiring editor at University of Michigan where I published my book by William Germano I think and it's called getting it published. And it is a very straightforward at least for it worked very well for my field it's a very straightforward sort of guide through academic publishing. So what the basic steps in the process or sort of like it gives you a model of like how do you approach an editor. What can you expect from the peer review process, what parts should you already like be, you know, what sort of timetable and calendar could you sort of expect. So I would say that her advice was really great to me and so that's the one that I would share. I would for advanced graduate students and early career for professors who are thinking about writing a book. I always say, don't write a book right chapters, because if you sit down to write a book it's going to be overwhelming, take a chapter by chapter. And what even when you don't feel like writing sit down at the computer and open a document and start editing, or just drop in ideas in. Once even, I mean that's, for me that was the hardest thing to actually drag myself to the desk and open a document when I didn't feel like writing and I found that once I did that is like, Oh, yeah, I could, I could edit this or I could add to that. A lot of people say every single day, I took days off, but every single like work day, sit down and write. I would say that it really depends on the discipline. I know that for social work. We are not encouraged to publish books until we're sort of further along in our career. They just count less in the beginning. And I know that's not true of other professions, but I do know that that's that's what has been told to me. And I don't know that I would would have been ready right then. Anyways, I think it's taken a long time to just to develop my ideas and my voice and all of that. And I think that again I would say depending on the, the discipline but I also think that, you know, to just kind of keep in mind the things that you are passionate about that you do really want to write about and so I think that, you know, the thing that was given to me was think about your career, you know, think about this as a as a as a career as opposed to a dissertation or as a, you know, that there's some ideas that you have that are more, you know, like Joel is going to take to write, then there's things that you can sort of get out, you know, more quickly. And so I think it's just being able to know which is which. And to know that everything doesn't have to be done right now that that it can, you know, come out through through a process, I guess, would be what I would say. I don't have much to add I mean you can't write a book like mine you can't write until later in your career so this book in particular I have no advice about. But I would echo both what Mimi and Joan said which is to say, I actually do think I mean it doesn't didn't work maybe took days off but I actually think at the beginning you have to actually set some hours that are the same hours every day. And you should sit down and write and particularly is very hard when you're a junior scholar, particularly if you're a grad if you're a doctoral student to believe in your own ideas often enough. So you should as as we said you should write your own ideas down without quoting anybody, like a couple of times a day. And even if you throw them out. For the most part any idea you come up with is going is probably going to need or have the support of some of the things you're reading. So the footnotes will come later, but it can be very torturous when you first think well I have to do this sentence by quoting this person, or say as you know, you know Victor Turner has pointed out whatever. And I think it's liberating and empowering. If you think, well if you're doing this you must have ideas having already dealt with this discourse. So what are they and write them down. You can throw them out later, but write them down in your own voice and start trying to figure out a right in a sort of academic way. So there are a few things I would like to offer to those thinking about this writing process, and I would say it will be great for you to serve on some editorial teams of boards or review some works in your field. And also getting a mentor that's always been helpful. We get being a part of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, like professional groups or groups built around your specific demographics that where there's always a constant fueling of people wondering about top topics communicating about things that they find interesting and pulling out request proposals those have been very helpful. Also, round writing accountability partners and circles. Those I have a couple of friends that we just get on just for an hour and just write, you know, and also very early on, I was encouraged to think about as a social worker. What narrative do I want to bring out into the world and help shift and realize and use writing to do that as a tool in that work so those are a few things I have. Thanks everyone I think those are all really great interesting tips that kind of like cross the gamut it's very broad in terms of from books to the process to finding mentors I think that's all really helpful. And we have a couple questions in the Q&A. So I'm just going to start from the first one and I'll read it out loud. And if it needs any clarifications we can also ask the person who submitted the question to follow up. So this comes from Lisa Hooper. She asks, she says Victor and Joel you both indirectly hinted at the sometimes outsize capacity of publishers and editors to shape our scholarly literature. I'm well aware of the impacts socio cultural biases play in academia, and particularly in publishing. For all panelists, I'm wondering if you have one piece of most important advice for success and self preservation. You would give to new authors who are most likely to be subject to these publisher biases. I can't really speak that much to publish your biases. I've been fairly lucky. With getting the interest of publishers. I can say, if we're talking about self preservation for doctoral students or, you know, junior scholars. And it just occurs to me that you should ask your professors to read the first thing they ever published, because it's probably not going to be great. And it's probably going to give you a certain amount of confidence in the areas that you find challenging which is how much you depended on deferring to other authorities and other works and how little, you know, you took a whole discourse and said like one little thing, because that's how it works. And, you know, as someone said earlier I think maybe you get overwhelmed by what's possible, and it wouldn't really narrow it down and I'm pretty sure most professors would be willing to share that with you. And so that's the thing I would say but I leave it to everyone else to speak to publisher biases. It's just not something I've had a lot of trouble with, except one longer story about having a perspective thrown out but that's not about that. Just Joan, I haven't had any issues with publisher bias, but I guess one of the things that I've done is that I don't, I just keep trying. So if one publisher doesn't like it, then you go to the next one. And again I take feedback and I look at it and I think about, okay, you know, is this valid? Would this help flush out my idea a little bit more? But I think that there's always, I guess I believe there's always a home somewhere for it. And so you just got to find that home. And so I just, you know, would say, you know, don't give up. But I think, like Joel said, my ideas, as I am further along in my career, my ideas are better or more flushed out or just more thoughtful than they were certainly when I first started. And I feel like, you know, 10 years in and I'm still trying to find my voice. I'm still trying to make sure that, you know, who I am comes out in my writing and stuff. So I think it's just a lifelong journey. I echo Dr. Blakey in finding the home. Even if you build it, you create your own journal, you write your own book, you do your own things. I always value, I graduated from Clark Atlanta University. And the motto there is find a way to make one. So I heavily believe in if, you know, you have things that are near and to your heart that you want to let out in the world. And it doesn't seem like it's fitting, make it happen, you know, with your own, build your own house. Also, guess edit, you know, send a proposal to guess edit on the journal or with the publisher propose, you know, different ideas and different topics to different editorial, you know, bodies and make your own way. So the next question comes from Grace John. She asks, Have you had a chance to share your work with your students? If so, I'm wanting to hear about how you did that. I'm one of those professors who assigns my writing in my classes. And before I wrote the aminogamy, which was the first book I wrote about polyamory, I taught a class in the summer called polyqueer sexualities. And I actually, you know, I worked with my students on some of the ideas, and they were incredibly helpful. And their ideas were really invaluable to me. And that, that was, that was a really valuable experience for me in terms of, you know, working with my students or introducing my students to my work. And I always say, when I do assign my writing, I tell my students that I've moved on from that writing. And, you know, it's open to critique and, you know, please be comfortable critiquing it or, you know, engaging with it. Forget that I'm in the room. But I, I don't know, I'm a true believer in the old academic model where, you know, one of the great things about the university is it's a community of thinkers. And my students, I'm there to mentor my students in becoming and facilitate, becoming thinkers, independent thinkers and facilitating their thinking. So talking about my own thinking process, thought process, I think is good mentorship for my students. It's not quite to the level I think that Mimi seminar probably was I did for the first time run a tides class this semester on New Orleans on stage and screen so that was a fun chance to get a chance to sort of like see some things both together and then have the students sort of branch off and see some things independently and sort of report back and just to spend some time sort of each week kind of talking through like, you know, for those that weren't from New Orleans like what are the things that you thought about New Orleans before you got here and how does that get reflected in the media that you've consumed. And then we're able to go out actually into the city safely with masks, and sort of see, you know, what the what is actually there and how that might relate to it. I haven't shared directly I think with with with my students, like Mimi said I have assigned some of my readings on other things. But I do feel like I've tried to live it, at least what I'm talking about and again, I'm fortunate to have the topic that is, is sort of, you know, appropriate in this kind of setting. So just really practicing that practicing what I wrote about with students and making, you know, contributing to a sense of belonging that that students have. So I think that's important. But I've always, again, I'm the second person in my family to get a bachelor's degree first to get a master's first to get a doctorate, and I always wanted my family to read my, my work and so it's always kind of been a standard of mind of, you know, I write in a way that my mom could pick up my, my, my publication and, and, and read it and understand what I'm talking about. I think I've also really wanted to share my work I don't want to write for writing sake I want to change practice I want to change the way people are experienced you know systems and institutions and that and so that means sharing my work and so that's why I signed up to do, you know, this speaker series which I'm, you know, grateful to have this platform, but I speak in the community I talk about my research and in as many different venues as possible, because again I just want it to get out there I want to make a difference in the lives of the people that I research and work with and so I think that that's how I share it, but not specifically directly with students I have not said this is my work but like I said really trying to live that. We have one last question in the chat and, and I think it's perfect timing as we approach one o'clock so this one is actually from Eric we take to Professor whole camp. What Hollywood films best represent New Orleans, I particularly like. Elia, Elia Kazan's film panic in the streets, I think I just put should maybe their first name apologies. No worries, no worries. So, you know, again in the grand fashion of academia I'll just say that's an interesting and complicated question because it sort of depends on what New Orleans you're trying to represent. So I can give you a couple different things that I'm interested in looking at but I'm not like I haven't totally dived in so I'm sure there's some other things that are sort of out there so panic in the streets is great right it's got it's the city that has disease. So like, like when you think about like what are the things that people are traditionally associated with New Orleans over time like disease is one of those things so panic in the streets sort of links us to that. There's a couple different film versions of the story of Jean Lafitte so prior to the Civil War New Orleans was a tourist destination because of its role in the war of 1812. The legend of Jean Lafitte was sort of ripe for Hollywood because it's pirates and swashbuckling all that kind of good stuff and so that for some people was really exciting as well. We wrapped up my tides class with princess and the frog and talked about so why is this story the first African American princess from Disney like. Why is that said in New Orleans and not Atlanta or Dallas or Pittsburgh like why is it. Why is it not just in the United States but why is it in New Orleans and what is that sort of represent to, you know admittedly an audience that is younger than perhaps some of the other ones. And then we were able to sort of compare that with works that we'd looked at earlier you know there's some great documentaries that sort of look at New Orleans as well we did bury the hatchet and for a lot of students. That was the first introduction to the Mardi Gras Indians tradition so that was a new way of them sort of like seeing the city so it's a great question and one that I hope to answer at further length at some point down the road so thank you for that. I'm also open to any suggestions other people have for other films I'm compiling my list and up to like 22 pages of things so send them my way if you've got them. I have one recommendation for you and sure you know about it but it's also. Two things that I know that seem to film New Orleans the way it feels to live here because so much of it is tourist I mean contemporary is touristy based, you know is all NCIS New Orleans in some way. And one of them is obvious one of them is Tremay, which I'm especially the first season. But the other one is a small indie flick called a love song for Bobby long and came out in the late 90s. And although it doesn't do the cultural stuff at all. It doesn't do race well at all. It is filmed really well because there's somebody whoever was the DP to probably the director. New Orleans is a very flat city as we all know. And so living here is very horizontal there's not a lot of vertical. And so they filmed it at about 10 feet and never above it. So it actually feels like you live here. And also it has John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson. It's like Scott Johansson's like third film or fourth film she's very young. And it is surprisingly good film. And in a way it's neighborhoody it's cultural everybody drinks too much people fish. And it is a very rare kind of minor indie film about New Orleans that actually resonates with living here if you live here. And so therefore makes for an odd representation of New Orleans because it's not trying to be one. That's great thank you. Well we are right at one o'clock I want to thank everyone so much for coming today for submitting your videos to us and allowing us to share your work with everybody for being here today to talk about the works you've done and and the process and giving us insight into all of that and where you're going with this it's been really fascinating and wonderful to both see you and hear your voices here so thank you. It's really great to be able to connect as well in a time when we can't see each other in one room. So we really appreciate you coming and taking the time. And I want to thank the attendees as well for being here and taking the time to listen and hear all the wonderful things you'll have to say and contribute so thank you to everybody. Thank you to everyone who's been behind the scenes working on this and we hope that next year we will see you again either here or in the audience. So keep an eye out for our call for submissions. And again thanks again and I hope everyone has a wonderful safe day and week and holiday next week. So yes thank you. Thank you. Thank you Amanda and Courtney for organizing. Thank you.