"Heart of the Mission": An Interview with Dr. Cary Cordova

This past year, Dr. Cary Cordova, Associate Professor of American Studies at UT-Austin, published her first book, The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco with University of Pennsylvania Press. To celebrate the release of Heart of the Mission, Sarah Carlson, a doctoral student in UT-Austin's American Studies program, sat down with Dr. Cordova to discuss the genesis of the project as a dissertation; the various pools of inspiration from which Dr. Cordova drew her research questions; the writing process and its relationship to teaching and community engagement; and much, much more. Please read on!

SC: Can you tell us generally just a little about the book, the project, and how you came to it initially?

CC: I’m originally from San Francisco, and I had come to graduate school here at the University of Texas at Austin in American Studies. It was around the time for me to figure out what my dissertation was going to be about and I was struggling. I knew that I had come here specifically to work in Latino Studies, but I had somewhat initially thought that my interests were going to be literary. But, because I had a background in art history and because a lot of things were happening in the Mission District in San Francisco at that time in terms of gentrification, I suddenly started thinking about the possibility of writing about where I came from. I had travelled a lot and I had seen the ways in which there is the influence of geography and economic demographics on how people understand Mexican Americans or Chicanos or Latinos. And I had never seen work that represented San Francisco in that conversation in a meaningful way.  So that became the project.

SC: So it started as your dissertation. All projects inevitably change, so how did this change from when it started as a dissertation and also, when did you know it was time to shift gears. How do you know when you just have to say, “this is different from what I started with?”

CC: Okay, so there are a couple of gears in there, because there are a couple ways in which it finally became a dissertation, and then it finally became a book. In terms of a dissertation and the process of it coming alive, I had help and support from archives and fellowships that made it possible to write. That’s important. But also I think that I had gotten to a point where I just needed to be done. And I think that it's a really important, transformative moment, mentally for a scholar, when you are so committed to being done. That was incredibly helpful for putting words on a page.In terms of how the project changed: I think the project was always perhaps overly ambitious. I sometimes counsel students now to bring it down a notch. I learned that there were some things I just wasn’t going to be able to do. Those things are on shelves in my mind. And so there was some level of acceptance for that.The hardest part about transforming the project into the book was that I had to both expand it and cut it a lot.

SC: Okay, can you talk about that? Simultaneously writing for expansion and concision?

CC: Basically, I had to cut probably 20,000 words or something. Like a lot of words. Thousands of words. And probably more than that because there were also spaces that needed clarification. In terms of a transition from the dissertation to the book, there were at least three new chapters that were added.So there were more chapters but less space. Which was maybe a good thing for me, because it made every word excruciatingly important. I think it’s really helpful in a way in a book that you realize that you don’t have to be as repetitive or redundant as you do in a dissertation. There’s some way in a dissertation in which you have to constantly affirm your argument. In a book you have some level of fluidity and maybe also hope that people have been reading along with you and that these things you’re pointing out are not necessarily coming out of the blue. You can focus on the really necessary parts.I think there’s a huge learning curve to writing a dissertation. None of us has ever done it before. Some of us have maybe seen it done by others, but that's quite different from trying to figure out:  “How do I structure things? Am I going to be chronological? Am I going to be thematic? How do I integrate my sources? How do i have an argument? What is my argument?” And so for the dissertation, those are just basic fundamentals, and then for a book its important to reach out much more to other scholars and hopefully other people in the community in the world that have an interest in the topic. Trying to make it legible and accessible and teachable are some of the things that go into transforming a dissertation into a book.

SC: You mention that no one has done a dissertation before they do one, and that you have to confront all these daunting questions. But of course, other people have done it, just not the way you do it. So who are people or what are other projects that, during your dissertation, you looked to or were inspired by? And then during your book, what or who informed the way you did things?

CC: I think when I was initially processing what I wanted to do I was really inspired by by the work on the Harlem Renaissance, and I loved how a variety of scholars had pinpointed this moment in time when a lot of artists and writers and intellectuals were communicating with each other and forming an intellectual community. I couldn’t help but think about the ways in which that registered for me in terms of thinking about the artists and the activists that I knew from San Francisco, especially in the Mission District. So I think that scholarship was an inspiration and ambition.

SC: Where do you see this fitting in academic conversations, but also in a broader conversation beyond strictly scholarly writing?

CC: In terms of where the work fits, I have always thought of my work as some sort of an intersection between American Studies and Latino Studies, and I’ve gradually learned that I’m very historical. I always approach my work as an interdisciplinary scholar but I have come to realize and accept that there are a lot of ways in which my work has been deeply informed by historians and the techniques of historians.I would also hope that it is readable. I did want it to be accessible to the people I was writing about. I think that that was a really important component for me.

SC: Speaking of the relationship between scholarly work and communicating with audiences besides scholars: how does your research affect how you teach? And how does your teaching inform what you’re doing as a scholar?

CC: A lot. I think one thing that I learned as a teacher was to try to simplify, to try to really find my priorities in terms of what I was going to lecture about or what I was going to focus on in classroom. And I started to think about the applicability of that as a writer and the ways in which I really needed to prioritize what was most important in my argument and allow for the fact that maybe not everything else was going to fit in perfectly, maybe it was okay to lose some information for the sake of streamlining and making something more cohesive.That was really important. I think also teaching helped me think about chapters in a more helpful way, because I started to think about the relationship between lectures and chapters. Approaching chapters as lectures can allow you to think of a chapter as its own contained way of reaching people--still part of the book, but also including its own argument and its own life. I felt like that was helpful for me in terms of structuring my ideas.

SC: Related to teaching and writing, I have one last big question. What advice do you have for students, whether they are working on their undergraduate term papers, working toward a dissertation, or turning a dissertation into a book?

CC: So, if its about writing, then I think part of writing is allowing yourself to do research, enjoying the process of research, but writing as you go. You can build an endless archive of research, but if you’re not transforming it into your words, then you’re just creating a harder and harder situation for yourself to finally bring your words to the page. Do a little bit of research, a little bit of writing, a little bit of research, a little bit of writing.

Kimberly Hamlin Gives Talk TODAY at Noon: "Finding Sex and Gender in the (History of Science) Archive"

Dr. Kimberly Hamilin, Associate Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio, will give a talk today at noon in Garrison 1.102. Hamilin's lecture, entitled "Finding Sex and Gender in the (History of Science) Archive," will consider the relationship between scientific study, gender, and the women's rights movements of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.Hamlin is the author of From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (2014, University of Chicago Press). She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Leif Fredrickson to Give Pubic Lecture this Monday (2/19) morning: "The Age of Lead: How Suburbanization Poisoned the Inner City"

Dr. Leif Fredrickson, Ambrose Monell Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, will give a public lecture this Monday, February 19th at 9 AM. The lecture will be held in Burdine (BUR) 214, and will feature a question and answer period following the lecture.Fredrickson will lecture on a key aspect of his research: the link between mid-century processes of suburbanization and the environmental degradation of inner cities. Specifically, Fredrickson's talk will examine the history of lead poisoning in Baltimore and the nation, exploring how metropolitan development – especially suburbanization – produced or exacerbated unequal lead exposure to across racial, spatial, and class lines. Suburbanites and suburban development benefited from lead-related technologies, such as lead piping, lead-solder, lead-acid batteries and leaded gasoline. These benefits were often not shared by those in the inner city, however. Moreover, many of the pollution externalities of these technologies were foisted onto the residents of the inner city. This was particularly true of leaded gasoline used by suburban commuters. But the production and recycling of other lead products, such as lead-acid batteries, was also concentrated in the inner city, and so was the pollution from these products. In addition, suburbanization increased lead hazards in the inner city by accelerating housing deterioration, which exacerbated lead paint hazards. Some suburbanites even benefited more directly from this housing deterioration through their profitable ownership of slum housing in the inner city. Suburbanites, meanwhile, were able to carve out healthier, and wealthier, environments on the metropolitan periphery.

Dr. Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake, to give Lorde-Robinson Lecture, 2/15 at 3 PM

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Dr. Christina Sharpe, Professor of English at Tuft's University, will deliver the Audre Lorde-Cedric Robinson Distinguished Lecture in Black Studies this Thursday, February 15th at 3 P.M.  The lecture will take place at the Glickman Conference Center, CLA 1.302B. Sharpe will lecture on her 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. From Duke University Press: "In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward."  

Dr. Betsy Beasley to Give Lecture on Houston's Historical Development as a Service Empire

This Monday, January 29th from 9 - 10:30 A.M. Dr. Betsy Beasley, Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, will give a lecture entitled "Expert Capital: Houston and the Making of a Service Empire."  The talk will be held at Burdine 214, and will feature a Q & A period at the end of the event. Dr. Beasley's lecture is based on her forthcoming project of the same name, under contract with Harvard University Press.  Dr. Beasley has provided a short description of her lecture, which you can read below. We hope to see you there!"What are the environmental, political, and cultural implications of an economy dominated by companies that profit from fossil fuels without actually getting their hands dirty producing them? During the second half of the twentieth century, U.S.-based oil companies faced both domestic and international threats. At home, easily accessible oil reserves sputtered, their supplies in decline, while refinery workers organizing across racial lines challenged corporate power, and new social movements demanded greater environmental responsibility from fossil fuel producers. Abroad, anti-colonial campaigns decades in the making transformed oil-rich colonies into new nations skeptical of the U.S. and committed to nationalizing natural resources. The traditional model of the U.S. oil company--in which a company's value and profits stemmed from the crude reserves it controlled and the refined fuel it marketed and sold--was in jeopardy. As the oil giants faced uncertainty, oil executives, engineers, and logisticians invented a business strategy to adapt to a new economic, environmental, and political climate. Rather than profit from their direct ownership of oil reserves, they built oilfield services companies that sold their management, engineering, and logistical expertise to oil producers around the world. This talk shows how these white-collar experts created a new market that commodified their self-proclaimed oilfield experience and knowledge. In the process, they diffused the threat of oil industry unionization at home, staved off responsibility for environmental destruction, and made U.S. economic power palatable in a postcolonial world."

Dr. Randolph Lewis Interviewed in National Geographic Cover Story, "They Are Watching You.."

Dr. Randolph Lewis, Professor of American Studies at UT Austin and author of the recently published book Under Surveillance: Being Watched in America, was interviewed for the most recent cover story in National Geographic magazine, entitled "They Are Watching You--and Everything Else in America."  The article is about the expansion of surveillance technologies and practices over the past few decades, and Dr. Lewis specifically discusses the detrimental effects of surveillance's "constant badgering" of the American populace--especially for those "who really feel its undertow."  Give it a read!

Dr. Steven Hoelsher to Give Gallery Talk at Blanton, 12/14, 12:30 P.M.

Dr. Steven Hoelscher will give a Gallery Talk on the Blanton Museum's blockbuster photography exhibition entitled "The Open Road:  Photography and the American Road Trip."  The talk will occur on Thursday, December 14th at 12:30 P.M. in the First Floor Temporary Exhibition Gallery at the Blanton. More information about the talk can be found here: https://blantonmuseum.org/events/perspectives-hoelscher/More information on the exhibition itself can be found here:  https://blantonmuseum.org/exhibition/the-open-road-photography-and-the-american-road-trip/ 

Dr. Randolph Lewis interviewed in The Texas Observer

Congratulations to UT AMS PhD and current faculty Dr. Randolph Lewis who was interviewed this week in the Texas Obserabout his new book, Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America. We've included an excerpt below, and you can read the whole interview here:

You introduce the concept of the Funopticon, or the lighter side of surveillance — from hobby drones to surveillance cameras designed to look like cuddly animals. Why did you want to write about how surveillance can be fun?

The Panopticon, from Foucault, was the dominant metaphor in surveillance studies in the last 100 years — thinking about how we’re going to internalize the gaze of the warden in all these senses. It’s a powerful metaphor, but it tends to be deployed in a sinister, scary, Orwellian way. And I was looking for a way to account for the lighthearted, voyeuristic and sexual side of surveillance. What do you do with the fact that people like to download apps that let them see random CCTV footage from around the world?So much of surveillance culture is driven by men looking at women in objectifying ways, sometimes called “perveillance.” For example, a lot of casino CCTV operators and shopping center parking lot operators are young men who are using the equipment maliciously as a form of sexual harassment. There’s pleasure in there, and some of it’s dark and disturbing.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Lewis!

Five Questions with Randolph Lewis, Author of New Book "Under Surveillance"

Dr. Randolph Lewis, Professor of American Studies at UT-Austin, has recently published his newest book entitled Under Surveillance:  Being Watched in Modern America.  AMS : ATX sat down with Lewis to discuss the inspiration for the new book, the relationship between surveillance and democracy, the interaction between Lewis' scholarship and teaching, and much more.   Please read on!

Can you tell us a little bit about your bookUnder Surveillance, and how you came to the project?

The book looks at what I call the "soft tissue damage" of surveillance culture---the ethical, aesthetic, and emotional toll of living with ubiquitous CCTV, big data, drones, TSA scanners, and other surveillance technologies in the contemporary US. After all, we’ve moved into an unprecedented state of visibility in which our secrets—what we say, what we buy, what we want—are constantly laid bare to various systems of social sorting with long memories. I find this disconcerting to say the least, especially because we haven't really had a thoughtful conversation about what it means for our democracy.That's where the book comes in, I hope. A few years ago I looked around and was surprised there wasn't a good American Studies book on contemporary surveillance culture. So I jumped into a new field with both feet, feeling quite passionate about exploring the impact of these new surveillance technologies on our lives.

What projects or people have inspired your work?

I learned so much from the emerging field of Surveillance Studies, which has an excellent journal called Surveillance and Society. The work of many contemporary visual artists was also important---some of them set the tone for what I am doing. I also loved the personal tone of the work I heard in the Public Feelings workshop in Austin over the past five years. Finally, I got important encouragement from my editor, Robert Devens, to write in my organic voice, which is more accessible and somewhat more literary than what is sometimes found in academic journals.

How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?

The book is smack between academia and "beyond," I think. I've stood on the shoulders of many previous scholars, added my own experiences and excavations, and tried to clearly explain what I learned. I certainly tried to write the book in a way that was careful, vivid, and accessible. Some chapters were rewritten 20 times to get the writing to where I was happy.

How do you think your research has affected your teaching at UT?

I often craft new courses from my research interests, but I'm just as happy doing them from scratch. In fact, my favorite courses are often ones that take me into new directions that I haven't yet written about. For instance, my urban studies course for first year students comes out of running the End of Austin project, while my new seminar on popular music comes out of my experiences as a musician and fan as much as my cultural studies training.

Conversely, how do you think your teaching has changed your research?

The conversations with students are always clarifying---you can test out ideas and see what really works, and are alerted to things that you might have overlooked. It's one of the great benefits of working at a research university---you get to toggle productively between teaching and research.

Finally, do you have any advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their experience at UT?

Really get to know people. After all, we have a fairly lively and welcoming cast of characters on the fourth floor of Burdine Hall. But we're just a starting place. Especially in the case of our own grad students, I would say that American Studies is a great creative community, but don't forget that UT is a vast universe of potential collaborators. Meet people outside of the department whenever you can--that nurtures the deep interdisciplinary spirit that is possible in American Studies. Frankly, it's a spirit that infuses my book, which couldn't really exist in any single discipline, but is very much the product of ranging widely across multiple fields and looking for new connections and insights. 

ASA 2017 Annual Meeting: List of UT AMS-Affiliated Presenters

From Thursday, November 9th to Sunday, November 12th, the American Studies Association will hold its Annual Meeting at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Chicago, IL.  Below is a list of the members of the UT-Austin American Studies community, including graduate students, core faculty, and affiliated faculty, who will be presenting papers and serving on panels at the conference.   The list is in chronological order.

Thursday, November 9th

Carrie Andersen: “War Games: Virtual Drones and the Production of American Empire”The Imperial Dynamics of Counterinsurgency Warfare Thursday, November 9th, 8 – 9:45 A.M.Soldier Field, Concourse Level West Tower

Christine Capetola: “Gimme a Beat!: Janet Jackson, New Musical Technologies, and Vibrationally Breaking the Silences on Black Life in 1980s America”Black and Latinx Musical Resitances Thursday, November 9th, 10 – 11:45 A.M.Atlanta, Ballroom Level West Tower

Cary Cordova - Panelist Program and Site Resources Committee: Public Art and Activism in US Cities Thursday, November 9th, 10 – 11:45 A.M. Comiskey, Concourse Level West Tower

William H. Mosley: “Fugitive Genders and Performed Dissent in Alexis De Veaux’s Yabo.”Reinventing the Black Literary Thursday, November 9th, 10 – 11:45 A.M.Dusable, Third Floor West Tower

Simone Browne - Panelist Power and Authority in the Era of Trump: A Roundtable on the New American EmpireThursday, November 9th, 12 – 1:45 P.M.Regency B, Ballroom Level West Tower

Snehal Shingavi - Panelist Defying Erasure: Imagining a Palestinian Future Thursday, November 9th, 12 – 1:45 P.M.Haymarket, Concourse Level West Tower

Lisa B. Thompson - Chair Aesthetics in/and African American Cultural Formations Thursday, November 9th, 2 – 3:45 P.M.Addams, Third Floor West Tower

Elissa Underwood: “Creative Pedagogies: Storytelling as Revolutionary Practice”Critical Pedagogies: Storytelling as Revolutionary Practice Thursday, November 9th, 2- 3:45 P.M.Gold Coast, Concourse Level West Tower

Nicholas Bloom: “Off Your Asses and Into the Gas Fields: Lessons in Citizenship for Poor White Men.”Troubling White Nationalism and Whiteness Thursday, November 9th, 4 – 5:45 P.M.McCormick, Third Floor West Tower

Janet Davis - Panelist Rethinking History and Methods in the American Studies ClassroomThursday, November 9th, 4 – 5:45 P.M.Wright, Third Floor West Tower

Natalie Zelt: “The Feeling is Real: LaToya Frazier, The Photograph and Fact.”Alternative Views: Photography, Self-Representation, and Fact in Contemporary American Art and CultureThursday, November 9th, 4 – 5:45 P.M.Gold Coast, Concourse Level West Tower

Friday, November 10th

Christine Castro: “Busters and Beats: Negotiations of Confinement, Public Space, and Identity in Nuestra Familia Music”Liner Notes on Soundscapes of Memory Friday, November 10th, 8 – 9:45 A.M.McCormick, Third Floor West Tower

Briyana D. Clarel: “An Exercise in Unapologetics: Centering Black Queerness as Self-Care and Pedagogy.”Radical Self-Love as Decolonial Education Friday, November 10th, 10-11:45 A.M.San Francisco. Ballroom Level West Tower

Anne Cvetkovich - Panelist Avery F. Gordon’s The Hawthorne Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins: A RoundtableFriday, November 10th, 10 – 11:45 A.M. Gold Coast, Concourse Level West Tower

Joshua Kopin: “Leave It to Linus: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Parents as the Children of the Fifties”Artifacts of Dissent: Comics and Emotions in Dark Times Friday, November 10th, 10 – 11:45 P.M.Hong Kong, Ballroom Level West Tower

Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez - Panelist Dissenting Documents: A Roundtable on Teaching with Special CollectionsFriday, Nov. 10th, 2-3:45 P.M.Wright, Third Floor West Tower

Amanda Gray - Panelist The Work that Makes All Other Work Possible: The Pedagogies and Solidarities of Care WorkFriday, November 10th, 4 – 5:45 P.M.Hong Kong, Ballroom Level West Tower

Saturday, November 11th

Omi Jones: “Resonant Frequencies/Physics and Embodiment”Dialoguing Physics and BlacknessSaturday, November 11th, 10 – 11:45 A.M.Addams, Third Floor West Tower

Emily Roehl: “Anti-Pipeline Performance and the Mise-en-scene of Environmental Justice Struggle”Race, Environmental Justice, and Public Lands Saturday, November 11th, 10 – 11:45 A.M.McCormick, Third Floor West Tower

Julia Mickenberg - Panelist The Russian Revolution at 100: Lessons, Lineages, and Legacies for Radical Practice Today Saturday, November 11th, 4 – 5:45 P.M.Skyway 260, Skyway Level East Tower

Robert B. Oxford: “Fracking, Social Justice and Assembling the Eco Counter Archives: Documenting Environmental Activists in Houston”Teaching Environmental Justice at the Intersections of Activist Practices and Critical AnalysisSaturday, November 11th, 12 – 1:45 P.M.Field, Third Floor West Tower

Caroline Pinkston: “Remembering Ruby: Akili Academy, Civil Rights Memory, and the Remaking of New Orleans Public Education”Remembering the 1960s Saturday, November 11th, 2-3:30 P.M.Dusable, Third Floor West Tower

Sunday, November 12th

Sequoia Maner: Reviving Tupac Shakur in the #BlackLivesMatter Era: Kendrick Lamar, G-Funk, and the Performance of Dissent” Three Generations of Funk: Performances of Dissent in Kendrick Lamar, Jessica Care Moore, and Sarah Webster Fabio Sunday, November 12, 10 – 11:45 A.M.Skyway 260, Skyway Level East Tower

Shirley E. Thompson - Chair, Visibility, Visuality, and Incarceration, Sunday, November 12th, 12 – 1:45 P.M.McCormick, Third Floor West Tower