This working group will examine the possibilities and limitations of the keyword essay as a mode of thinking and analysis in research and academic writing. We are driven by the recent popularity in published collections of ‘keywords’ across multiple disciplines and seek to examine the keyword essay as a new genre of writing among the professoriate. Our working bibliography of keyword anthologies includes Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2014), Keywords for African American Studies (2018), Keywords for Media Studies (2017), and Information: Keywords (2021). The editors of and contributors to these volumes are academics who see the value in distilling the terms and trajectories of various fields through the keyword essay.
The following questions will be grounding our meetings:
- How else can we think of the keyword outside of the essay genre?
- To what end can keyword essays be useful as a genre for public-facing writing? To what end can keywords make specific methodologies and critical debates legible outside of their respective field?
- What information or critical insights get lost or left behind as authors move to consolidate discourses around keywords?
- What is the utility of keywords as a pedagogical tool for undergraduates and graduates?
- How can the keyword essay be a supplement to the elevator pitch for ABD students
Our meetings will provide participants the space to propose and present keywords that are significant to their own research, theorizing, and creating practices. Throughout the academic year, the working group will build its own anthology of keywords based on the work produced by its members. In this way, we hope to critically reflect on the making of keywords–both intellectually and materially.
Organizers
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Mahashweta Chakravarti
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Mahashweta Chakravarti is a fourth-year PhD candidate in English. Her research interests include postcolonial writing, anticolonial thought, and ecological forms in cultural texts of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Naomi Extra
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Dr. Naomi Extra is a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In her creative and scholarly work, she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. Her current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positivity, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. Her research/creative work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the African American Intellectual History Society.
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Brittany Marshall
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Brittany Marshall is a fourth-year PhD candidate in English. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Black women’s writing with special attention to poetry and poetics, print culture, and Black feminist theory. She is also a graduate fellow of the Black Bibliography Project.