Integrating critical and trans-affirming pedagogies in argumentation and debate: A heuristic narrative

Courses: Storytelling, persuasion, gender and communication, argumentation and debate.

Objectives: In this essay, I map a unit-specific activity for an undergraduate class in argumentation and debate. I argue for the integration of a trans-affirming pedagogy as a key rhetorical frame in communication studies courses. Such pedagogical commitments push instructors to integrate a critical communication methodology while challenging structures that continue mitigating trans experiences, embedding critical interrogation of systemic injustice. Borrowing from LeMaster (Discontents of being and becoming fabulous on: Queer criticism in neoliberal times. Women’s Studies in Communication 2015;32:167–186. DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2014.988776), I use trans heuristically, whereby “trans and transgender are not necessarily intended exclusively as identities?… In this way, trans and transgender have two functions: as heuristics and as identities” (p. 169). Thus, as a pedagogical approach, a trans sensibility extends instruction methods to consider, criticize, and analyze binaries of thought, mundane performances of identity, and unlikely communicative phenomena that “get at gender in unsuspecting ways” (LeMaster, B., & Mapes, M. Transing priestly performances: Re-reading gender potentiality in Erdrich’s the last report on the miracles at little no horse. In S. Howard (Ed.), Critical articulations of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014, pp. 161–177). Using an activity from the unit “Argumentation with and as Narrative,” I draw on Enke (Enke responds to Nakamura. In V. Muñoz & E. K. Garrison (Eds), Transpedagogies: A roundtable discussion. Women’s Studies Quarterly 2008;36:288–308. DOI: 10.1353/wsq.0.0093) to ask, “How do we engage with the privileged spaces we occupy as trans and nontrans educators as a way to build alliances that are liberatory rather than oppressive to one another?” (p. 303).     

Recognition and difference: a collective biography

This paper opens the space of post-qualitative research through an exploration of how acts of recognition and non-recognition work on and through the bodies of individual subjects. Using stories generated in a collective biography workshop and drawing on concepts from Foucault and Butler, and also, in contrast, Barad and Deleuze, the paper explores the way these different epistemologies intra-act with ways of seeing/reading/being recognizable subjects.     

Effect of Strenuous and Mild Pre-Meal Exercise on Postprandial Lipemia

Abstract

An attempt was made to elucidate the mechanism whereby exercise facilitates postprandial lipid clearance. Two separate experiments examined the effects of mild and strenuous pre-meal exercise on postprandial lipemia among human male subjects. In each case, a high fat meal was consumed after a fasting blood sample was taken. Additional samples were drawn 3, 5, and 7 hr. following the meal on both a control and an experimental day. Optical density was employed as a measure of serum turbidity. Data were analyzed through analysis of variance.

Strenuous pre-meal exercise appeared to hasten postprandial lipid clearance without affecting the magnitude of lipemia. Mild pre-meal exercise was seen to reduce the magnitude and duration of postprandial lipemia. These observations tend to negate the concept that exercise influences postprandial lipemia via digestive and/or absorptive mechanisms.

It is hypothesized that gross differences in response to the high fat meal witnessed between the two experimental populations may be due to the variance in the mean ages of the groups.