Previously, the MLA sponsored a two-part working group at the 2024 conference: “Defining Emplaced Humanities Methods: Clinic of the Soul I and II.” We envision the proposed session as a follow-up to that working group as a way to demonstrate outcomes of that cutting-edge work by emerging scholars in a specific regional context.
To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will be strictly limited to a 15-minute presentation of their book chapter. Katharine Trostel, the co-director of the Rust Belt Humanities Lab, will preside and, along with session organizer Patrick McGinty, will pose questions to spark discussion. The session will begin with Shu Wan’s "Rust Belt or Rising Belt? How to teach Asian Buffalo History to Buffalonian students.” Wan argues that though the Rust Belt may be perceived as synonymous with deindustrialization, unemployment, and depopulation, “the implications of the same locale are entirely different for Asian-Americans and immigrants from Asia.” Wan’s work notes the proliferation of Asian immigrants in Buffalo, creating a “distinct perception of the Asian Rust Belt as a land of hope,” and his presentation aims to reflect on his practice of teaching Asian-Buffalo history to students at the University at Buffalo, where he employs and models emplaced humanities practices by “inviting four Buffalonian speakers of different Asian backgrounds to join my Asian history classroom and share their stories with students.”
Marc Blanc and Ryan Prewitt treat the university as a driver of regional identity and development in the second presentation, "Teaching Rhetoric and Composition across St. Louis’s Gateways and Borderlands.” Their presentation focuses on how “the confluence of several regional identities and modes of economic production in St. Louis creates opportunities for teachers to prepare students to analyze divisions of class, race, and region that characterize St. Louis and other Rust Belt ‘borderlands’ cities such as Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH.” Their presentation offers examples of assignments given to first- and second-year writing students that unpack how universities “have significantly impacted the economic development and social layout of the city in distinct ways,” and quite relevantly, they draw numerous explicit connections between social characteristics of St. Louis and New Orleans, making it an especially compelling presentation for this year’s conference.
The formal part of the session ends with a presentation by Patrick McGinty, who models how emplaced humanities practices have informed his creative writing pedagogy in “Emplaced Escalation: How Emplaced Humanities Practices Can Help Creative Writing Students Create Tension within Their Rust Belt Identities.” Providing examples of readings, assignments, and student work given to undergraduate students in Western PA, McGinty demonstrates how students in his creative writing classes have been able to enact the titular narrative escalation and produce creative work that can “gesture at the received narratives of their region then escalate into a more individualized authoring of their spaces.”
The presentation–which features work from different academic ranks, disciplines, and states within the Rust Belt–will build to a discussion where new questions are posed: how can emplaced humanities practices inform pedagogy in other disciplines and/or collaborations? What might emplaced humanities practices resemble in a different part of the Rust Belt or a different region entirely? Together, the presentations and discussions can serve as a model for ways to use the humanities to find new solutions, tell better stories, and empower our students to imagine themselves as productive citizens within a rooted context.