Category: Syndicated

Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

Throughout the semester our class has been discussing artificial intelligence and its burgeoning role in society, the economic sphere, and the classroom. We’re all hesitant, concerned, and a little freaked out by the future AI poses, but we’ve lessened some of our paranoia knowing that people have been terrified by pretty much every information distribution technology ever created. In past weeks, we researched the public reaction to the invention of the pencil, the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer and found that people worried things would drastically change for the worst just like we do now. Well, except that you probably won’t stab yourself in the eye with an AI chatbot. Granted, you might want to if you’re stuck using one for customer service. Anyways, we kept all this in mind last week when we went home and jumped down the ole AI rabbit hole reading whatever books, articles, and social media posts piqued our interests before bringing our research to class to solve this AI problem once and for all.

During my research, I poured through Chunpeng Zhai’s scholarly review, “The effects of over-reliance on AI dialogue systems on students’ cognitive abilities: a systematic review.” Zhai reviewed the currently existing studies on how AI usage affects students when they start using it heavily in lieu of more traditional research methods. As the title suggests, studies show that students can become overly reliant on AI chatbots, foregoing critical thinking and rationality and accepting output without question. According to Zhai, this leads not only to plagiarism and misinformation but to decreased cognitive abilities and retention as the student starts relying on quick answers over slower and more thorough research methods. So, while AI can help with “surmounting challenges like writer’s block or navigating complex parts of manuscripts,” increased usage can also hurt the student in the long run by holding him or her back mentally and educationally or getting them in trouble for plagiarism or the distribution of sensitive information.

This is what was buzzing through my head when I came into class. We began our discussion talking about the analogue technologies I mention above, asking which themes applied to technologies of past and present. We quickly realized that there were several themes that were always relevant including access, standardization, sustainability, and fear that AI will begin to mine itself like a snake eating itself or some sort of self-contained toilet that ingests and expels its shit in a never-ending cycle of… uh well of shit… or content or something. I guess that fear is new unless you count all those old stories about self-writing typewriters or the way that the internet, social media, and algorithms push people towards uniformity in what they read write.

From there, Hailey moved on to an article by Mark Watkins about how AI is “unavoidable not inevitable.” Seemingly identical definitions aside, Hailey explained that the article took a middle ground approach instead of looking at AI as some kind of savior or villain. Perhaps the academic impact can be lessened with ethical teaching, and the environmental impact isn’t that bad compared to streaming your favorite show on Netflix. “Actually,” said Sel, “AI is worse.” That’s strike two, Mark. Michelle brought up an article that claimed Microsoft’s greenhouse gasses increased by 23% after investing in AI and data centers. This aligned with research Sel did about the often-forgotten environmental effects of initial investments into the data centers, training, manufacturing, and transportation required when creating an AI system.

The conversation then shifted towards race and gender issues caused by AI’s embedded prejudices. Lourdes talked about Joy Buolamwini, who’s spent several years following AI as a researcher, activist, and artist. When Buolamwini was a grad student her class had an AI program that worked as a mirror reflecting your image and adding something onto your face based on how it reads you. “For instance, if you’re not feeling brave it might give you a digital lion mask,” said Lourdes. Well, when Buolamwini used the program, it failed to recognize her face until she put on a phantom of the opera mask. As a black woman, it seemed likely that the data embedded into the program was largely not coming from people who looked like her which is why it failed to recognize her. She ended up doing her dissertation on these concepts and spending her life pushing for a more inclusive AI.

The conversation continued for some time after this. I know this because I still have lots of notes that I don’t think I can get to without either writing too much or falling asleep. We probably could have talked all night or not actually that gets pretty depressing after a while. Anyways, after some time the conversation ended with Sel showing everyone spotthetroll.com which is an online quiz that asks visitors to guess whether the ridiculous social media account snapshots it shows are real or not. Turns out you can’t really tell, but real or fake, they’re all assholes. I can take some comfort in that, I suppose. So, here I am full circle back to the research I did about critical thinking and the overreliance on believing everything your AI chatbot pumps out to you. I didn’t do very well on that quiz, so whether I’m overly reliant on AI or not, I guess it’s still a struggle to find out what’s true. Our research in class, however, shows that it’s not that hard to identify who’s an asshole though. So, when you’re worried about all the synthetic things online right now and whether you or anyone else is sorting whether its real or fake, just remember you can still tell whether it’s shitty or not, and honestly I think that’s more important a lot of the time.

Mitchell St. John is an English master’s student at Chico State. He has a daughter and a dog and he writes sometimes when the situation warrants it.

 

 

Further Reading:

• long list of curated AI resources here
• Zhai, C., Wibowo, S. & Li, L.D. The effects of over-reliance on AI dialogue systems on students’ cognitive abilities: a systematic review. Smart Learn. Environ. 11, 28 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7

Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

Well, it’s finally happened. We’ve been told all semester that winter would be coming, and there has been a slight chill following us the past few weeks. We should have been preparing, but we didn’t listen. That’s right, it finally happened. We read Bruno Latour’s “Third Sense of Uncertainty: Objects Too Have Agency.” This piece has been the specter haunting us (and by us I mean Hailey [the Elder]) the past 7 weeks. The problem I had with the piece? Not once did the word chair show up. I have been waiting all semester long to read this chair piece! (If lost on this semester-long joke, take a look at the expertly written pieces which precede this one). 

What, then, does Latour’s piece contain? Well, like Wolfram Von Eschenbach has asked his readers for over 700 years, I too, then, must ask: “would you like to hear what it said?” (24).

Giving us a few examples, such as “kettles ‘boil’ water, knives ‘cut’ meat, baskets ‘hold’ provisions, hammers ‘hit’ nails on the head” (71), Latour is bringing to the forefront the work that these objects do. Latour, to be on the same page, is not arguing that these objects desire to do these jobs like a Hegelian “master-slave dialectic” pushed to the extreme as in “The Brave Little Toaster.”

What is being argued is that sociologists have not utilized their research to their fullest potential since they have not taken into account the way that objects play much more important roles in how we function as a collection of disparate societies, cultures and identities than has been thought. If thought at all. Latour makes this clear stating that ANT (Actor-Network Theory) “is not the empty claim that objects do things ‘instead’ of human actors: it simply says that no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored even though it might mean letting elements in which, for lack of a better term, we would call non-humans” (72). We must, then, not only think humans live in a world of pure human-to-human interaction. How would such a thing work without religious buildings with their myriad of objects in each room, each bar without its specific beer glasses for your stouts and ales, or a classroom without desks and chairs? (Kim might have an idea regarding the last example). We, then, have been missing the mark for a long time. Before we get too lost in the sauce though, we should heed the instructions of Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton before moving forward with our newfound passion to study how objects influence our existence in ways never thought of before.

In their piece titled “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice” Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton, following Latour’s ideas, bring objects to the forefront of literacy studies. They likewise do something interesting with this idea, bringing the idea of technologies and their influence on time and space to our attention. Stating that “literate practices depend on powerful and consolidating technologies” (338), Brandt and Clinton explore this idea, going on to write that local literacy events “can have globalizing tendencies and globalizing effects, accomplished often through the mediation of globalizing technologies (347). Why does such a thing matter? Brandt and Clinton remind us that these technologies, being things such as “ledgers, files, documents, books, computers” have “all played a role in mediating larger and longer pieces of the social world, holding them in connection, across continents” meaning that “engaging as readers and writers with these things engages us, as well, in this kind of transcontextualizing work” (347). These things do something great for me too. They allow me to not only participate in transcontextual literacy in terms of language and technology (Lord knows how many books I brought back from Germany), but also to explore this with time. The picture from the top of this piece being a great example. It is interesting then, how we have thrown technologies and objects to the wayside on our quest to study literacy. This came up in conversation with our class which, like Eschenbach, I will take great pleasure in showing you what happened. 

In class we got into a discussion, naturally, about how technology shapes our literacy practices. Kim put on an adorable video where a toddler asks Alexa to play Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark” which I will link here: Baby Shark and Alexa. In the video, Alexa plays many different things, but not once does it put on the “Baby Shark” song the young girl is pleading for. That is, not until the girl’s mother is able to get Alexa to understand what it is her daughter is looking for by pronouncing the song in a way where the k at the end is emphasized, allowing Alexa to better understand what was being requested. 

Kim turned to us after playing the video, and asked us “what is going on here?” to which Hailey responds that “she understands that there is a lady in the box who plays ‘Baby Shark.’ She doesn’t talk to it like she talks to a person though. There’s very much input-output compared to a conversation.” I found Hailey’s take very interesting since this brings to light that, while objects and technologies may have agency if one agrees with the writers I discussed above, the way we treat these objects and technologies as tools to communicate with others can be very impersonal. I think, however, that our shaped idea of how to interact with others as humans, which comes to us at a later age could play a role in how we interact with these technologies. Take, for instance, this video of an older couple trying to get Alexa to play a happy birthday song for them: POV: Alexa Ruins The Birthday Party . The couple listens to Alexa and waits their turn to respond, like one does in a conversation with another human. Just as Hailey pointed out with the young girl, they “know” there is a lady in the box, yet their conditioning of how to deal with a “lady” (in a box or not) has been formed through years of interacting with humans. One wonders, then, how younger generations will interact with humans both inside and outside of the box. 

This conversation led to the next, which was whether one preferred audiobooks over reading a physical book. The answers were very diverse. Hailey asked the question as to “how much of an audiobook is ‘reading’?” I, although staying mostly quiet due to taking notes during this class period for this piece, asked, “is reading the Bible on stained glass still interacting with the Bible?” Hailey, taking a time to think, responded “no,” while Kim nodded her head, understanding the trajectory of my question. I neither agree nor disagree with Hailey, but I do think it brings to light how these technologies of literacy, while seen through our modern lens, might make us forget how these technologies have morphed throughout centuries, yet their mission(s) have always been there.

Our conversation moved to something everyone loves to hate talking about: AI. (For data, see Chico State’s Fast “Facts” on AI integration from their page on AI.) We were told by Kim that the usage of AI is being thrust upon us since, as she has been told multiple times, such a thing is “inevitable.” This messaging is being pushed even harder by Chico State’s AI page (linked above) with fast “fact” statistics which Kim, after crunching the numbers, told us “the math“ for these stats ”ain’t mathing.” While many of us were against, and disgusted (though not shocked) by the rhetoric our campus was using, our perceptions regarding AI were refreshingly varied. Sel found AI to be an interesting aspect of current human culture, but couldn’t morally justify using it since the environmental impact would be too great. Julian, on the other hand, stated that AI was a great tool to help him think outside the box, allowing him to be forced to utilize other avenues of thinking. I personally never use AI due to my own moral implications, but I am finding that this “inevitability” that we are being warned about means this technology might have an agency that, although I am not ready to interact with, will decide whether I can interact with society at large or will be thrust aside, left to fend for myself. I could not think whether it would be better to use the “future is now old man” picture or the ending from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” I have decided, then, thanks to the power of technology, to use both. 

Bradley Mendoza-Wilson is a first generation college student halfway through their first semester of graduate school at Chico State. Bradley got his bachelor’s in English literature with a second major in German. He decided that was not enough and tacked on two minors in Medieval/Renaissance Studies and European Studies. When not running around campus or working on papers, Bradley can be found in a myriad of places reading medieval poetry or walking through historic cemeteries with his wife.

Further Reading

Brandt, Deborah, and Katie Clinton. “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice.” Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 34, no. 3, 2002, pp. 333–47, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15548430jlr3403_4.

Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival: With Titurel and the Love Lyrics. Edited by Cyril     Edwards, 1st ed., vol. 56, Boydell & Brewer, 2002, pg. 24, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781846151347.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. E-book, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 71-72. https://hdl-handle-net.mantis.csuchico.edu/2027/heb32135.0001.001.

 

Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

To write this post without at least a dozen footnotes would feel like a disservice^[1]. In its fullest embodiment, this featured curation would be a multimedia mess of marginalia^[2]: post-its, doodles, stickers, highlights, GIFs, and probably even audio clips of our raucous sidetrackings in class. As a paper, it’d be riddled with QR codes, and as a digital artifact, it’d be scribbled-over in MS paint.

Annotations change depending on the context, and in this case, my annotational abilities are constrained by the nature of a publishable website page… meaning I can’t expect Kim to fiddle with HTML or Javascript^[3] to accommodate the ramblings and sidebars. She’s already doing enough with hosting our class readings on Perusall, free of charge, where we can drop memes, inside jokes, song references, intertextual connections, gut reactions, definitional work, and even the occasional trauma dump on a particular vulnerable literacy reading^[4].

To engage with the reading on my own is enriching, but to share annotations in a community of learning is enlightening. We live out just a portion of the nearly boundless ways of annotating while we discuss the range itself. For starters, Remi Kalir’s work on annotating in Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice posits that annotation is the embodiment of the joy of reading, but we raised a handful of complications that, in the end, only further fortified Kalir’s point. Though an annotation may not be born from joy, it is inarguably the embodiment of the act of reading, the physical manifestation of our inclination to process a text as we alter it in our processing. We further act as evidence for Kalir’s idea that annotation is a social verb in the way we create environments of shared reference, direct mentioning, and interaction with each others’ ideas.Take “text” and “reading” in a wider lens, following Kalir, and allow yourself to consider all forms that a text can take: billboards, bodies, billiard tables, bins in your garage, baby clothes^[5]. Kalir defines annotation as, simply, “a note added to a text.” Hailey raised the question of whether the annotation has to be contained *within* the text itself, to which we wagered no, due to the nature of an annotated bibliography. A quote tweet^[6] is an annotation of its own just as much as a tab in a textbook. Graffiti on a government building is a public act of engagement, if not civic commentary (Kalir).

Annotation (in a traditional sense of notes on the page) may not always be accessible for a number of reasons: ownership/financial availability, lack of tools/medium, or uncertainty on how to “best” annotate are just a few of these roadblocks, lending to a larger criticism of the frameworks that prevent annotation. Books, when regarded as sacred or immutable objects^[7] on a physical level, are afforded a material agency that then trumps the reader’s agency in annotating the text. Kim herself, in class, admitted that she often gets only a few paragraphs into any given book before she’s reaching for her pencil to make some kind of note. Unconsciously, I’ve adopted this practice from graduate school myself. What if I only rented my textbooks for my wallet’s sake? Sure, I annotate exclusively in pencil, but I wouldn’t have the time to clear my notes with an eraser before Chegg is threatening my loved ones to get the Norton Anthology back in pristine condition^[8].

From that example, imagine a world in which a market of textbook exchanges allowed students to not spend several hundred dollars per semester on tomes critical to their field^[9]. Imagine, further, the value embedded in those books if the notes from prior students could be included. The minute weight of ink or graphite on the page may not change the heft of the book, but merely leaving that knowledge accessible for the next student to peruse its pages compounds its value^[10] and makes it a weighty resource. What do the traces of prior students’ educations leave us to unearth and infer about the students themselves?

This raises the idea of annotations being shared, public, and communal— in the words of Kalir, “a collective act and accomplishment.”

Questions abound, then, of who is making the annotations, who is allowed to witness them, and even allows us to consider trends that might arise among annotations. Muir National Monument just a few hours from us exemplifies the capacity of annotation for public good, and as our classmate Michelle says,

The decision to retain an annotated sign rather than producing a new sign is significant. A replacement would not call attention to the fraught history or to the steps taken in the pursuit of justice, and the changes might then be taken for granted or forgotten entirely. Also, I imagine a new sign would present all information in a uniform design, whereas the annotated version elevates the additions rather than making them equal to the existing timeline.

Another prime and nuanced example of annotation’s social agency/ability is explored in Chapter 5 of Re/Marks on Power, which is titled “Book Marks” and focuses on the case of Alex Gino’s novel Melissa’s Story. Though Gino initially named the book after the titular trans character’s deadname, they soon began working to rectify it via #SharpieActivism: a movement encouraging librarians and anyone else with a copy of the book to change the cover by “defacing” it. As a matter of fact, the term “defacing” itself brings a self-aware tension to the perception of annotation as disrespectful by some. Reader, you likely understand the value of annotation as a literacy practice, so I will not waste our time here and instead include a comment from our colleague Lourdes at the end of Kalir’s chapter.

Can you construct a scenario in which an annotation devalues or extracts meaning from the text it is enacted upon? In quite literally any case, I can only imagine a deepening of a text’s rhetorical situation and impact regardless of the annotation itself; whatever is written is inherently adding to the meaning of the text because there must be some sort of relationship between the annotator and the text, the annotation and the annotator. Blood-red paint strewn on a statue of a colonizer is a radical form of annotation many have referred to as “defacing”^[11] Even scribbling “STUPID!” or a hate symbol across a message of racial peace and unity enhances the force of the initial message and highlights the exigence for its existence^[12]. A smiley face, check mark, or strikethrough on a graded paper are annotations with their own weighty ability to alter meaning and perception of the student’s work.

YOU GOT A SOURCE FOR THAT?

 

Citations and corrections are a sort of annotation, too, as evidenced in Twitter’s^[13] Community Notes feature and Bradley’s astute gif addition in our Perusall. We annotate in parentheticals— especially the neurodivergent among us, who rabbit hole into tangents and digressions like margin-scrawlings before drawing ourselves back to the primary body of the text: our conversation. Kalir points out that even meme vernacular references the act of annotation, demystifying the act and threading it into our daily language and humor.

At this point, in all of the ways humans love to leave their presence, their voice, it’s harder to conjure up a concrete list of any places or texts^[14] upon which we can imagine no feasible, meaningful annotation possibilities. Tree trunks, a half-eaten and sauced-up hotdog, a gentrified building, a child’s bicycle, a keypad. Annotations abound: septum piercings, yearbooks, my late mother’s collegiate doodles, my partner’s little nick of a scar below her neck from her long-gone cat, the Lascaux Cave Paintings. And all of the little sticky notes in the books held close to our chests. We love to remark, to mark again, to make our meanings known.

Sel Hartman is a Masters student in English at California State University, Chico with a keen interest in cultural rhetorics, digital humanities, and literacy education but rarely the time to dive into these subjects with the vigor they’d prefer. Between classes and office hours, you can find Sel working at a grocery store, playing with their calico kitten, or daydreaming about maps and travel. Sel hopes to spend the rest of their life learning and yapping, but one day with a PhD to sound fancier. 

[1] So, footnote I will.

[2] I do truly hope alliteration doesn’t bother you. There’s more coming.

[3] God forbid

[4] “particularly vulnerable literacy reading” is such a grad student thing to say, I don’t even know where to begin.

[5] Remember what I said about alliteration?

[6] Can I even technically call it a quote tweet now? Quote-post? It has so much less grace to it, I fear.

[7] Or, perhaps, the infallible word of God

[8] For legal purposes, Chegg Incorporated has never placed any threats on mine or my loved ones’ wellbeing.

[9] I might really be asking you to stretch the limits of your whimsy, here. I know. It’s pretty darn hard to imagine a mutually beneficial, well-organized, and functional system of knowledge access that doesn’t produce monetary gain in our capitalist hellscape.

[10] Exponentially, in my opinion.

[11] https://hyperallergic.com/569756/confederate–monuments–removed/ A liberal-leaning perspective from 2020 & a more conservative or centrist approach published in 2015 (with the comments serving as their own sort of annotations) https://cwmemory.com/2015/06/25/why–it–is–still–wrong–to–vandalize–confederate–monuments/

[12] BOO! Assonance! I bet you thought you were safe.

[13] Please don’t make me call it X. I’m so sorry.

[14] Or people, or posts, or histories, or life forms, or— Things.

Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

We read two articles for class: “Literacies of Refuge: ‘Pidiendo Posada’ as Ritual of Justice” by Cati V. de los Ríos and Arturo Molina, and “The Skin We Ink: Tattoos, Literacy, and a New English Education” by David E. Kirkland. Both texts were examples of research in literacy studies.

“Literacies of Refuge” explores how culture can be a form of social justice, specifically illustrating how a traditionally religious parade about Mary and Joseph seeking shelter was re-expressed as an immigrant’s search for refuge. As we discussed in class, anti-immigration policies have arisen since the time that the article was written, resulting in disruption of daily life activities because government agents could be on the prowl. Thus, the idea of publicly celebrating one’s own identity as an immigrant, which the parade embodies, now seems radical and dangerous.

Highlighting that specific demographics, having no connections to the affected group, are unaware of the intense fear and danger said groups experience, Kim Jaxon related a conversation she had with one of her east coast friends:  “If they’re not doing anything wrong, ICE won’t bother them,” said the friend, referencing the immigrants.

In response, Dr Jaxon pointed out that one of her colleagues feels the need to, at all times, carry the birth certificates and passports of her family members. Otherwise, the colleague fears, deportation may come upon her suddenly like a hawk descending upon a mouse. This changed the friend’s perspective and made her sympathetic to the situation. It is thus ignorance, rather than malice, that can lead a person to downplay the severity of another’s grievous situation.

Sel brought up a circumstance that, for us, hits close to home: recently, somebody from Chico was deported. The specific details of the occurrence are unknown to us. To help their students and staff feel safer, Chico State has removed its publicly available class numbers, so that random folks cannot easily know where people are on campus. Sel also brought up resources that are available to those who have been affected by the ICE activities. Sel mentioned how the local churches have stepped up to help the community and also talked about CAREChico. 

Returning to the difference between the political climate during the writing of “Literacies of Refuge,” which was already escalating in 2020, and the current political climate, the class discussed how the building of “the wall” between the U.S. and Mexican border was considered a big deal in 2020. However, now, the biggest deal is the threat of martial law: the potential for ICE agents and the U.S national military to kidnap anyone, even if they have documentation. A decade ago, the concern was over the meaning behind a wall being built far away. Now, the concern is over what has snowballed into government raids on your hometown.

“The Skin We Ink” highlights how Black youth use tattoos to tell their own story, not only in the tattoos themselves, but also in the conversations, journal entries, and lifestyle they represent. Kirkland, with permission from the high school and the students involved, was able to develop relationships with his participants. They willingly provided him with data, as their identities, through their tattoos and the literacy involved, were celebrated. Our class discussed the importance of positionality when it comes to research, race relations, and power structures: there are significant ethical considerations involving consent and privacy when, as in this study, there is a significant age difference between the researcher and the participants; and in other cases, unlike this study, when the race of the researcher and the participants differ. 

M’Kenzie has heard a similar story to “The Skin We Ink” in a previous class about Spades at UCSC. Dr. Don Miller, the researcher in this case study, visited a high school with the school’s permission to study a group of students and observe how they played spades. He built a relationship with the students and learned how to play spades through these students. The students taught him all the different terminology and phrases that held meaning for them. They had five different tiers, and people had to win a certain number of games in a row before they could advance to the next tier in the game system. The students who played spades developed their own understanding of the game by keeping detailed records and using these records to judge current games based on previous rulings in similar situations. They also taught new people interested in playing the game how to play. Yes, this research method, both in the spades and in “The Skin We Ink,” is both fascinating and creepy at the same time. It leaves one torn about whether the method used to obtain the data is ethical. 

Kirkland’s study itself serves as a case study of how, for the research study of a person or group of people to be effective, such a study must not only honor the identity and agency of the participants by allowing them to, beyond being mere sources of data, participate in the research process along with the researchers, but also how such a study requires, in addition to interviews, many material artifacts, often intimate personal ones, such as journal entries, pictures of tattoos, and transcriptions of private conversations.

The class discussed several times the moral implications of a researcher being in close contact with the people they research. They said that if someone engaged in such practices—following someone down a hall, looking through their journal, taking pictures of them—without asking first, it would be unethical (to say the least; think stalkers). Logically, then, an ethical study requires informed consent, which Kirkland, practicing good ethics, sought before gathering his data.

Transitioning from the research articles to our own research practices, Dr Jaxon asked us what it would look like to research Safe Space, a low-barrier emergency shelter in Chico. Sel said that doing a volunteer shift, engaging in the community of practice, would be the best way to learn about it. Dr Jaxon asked us about ethics. Sel proposed that open and honest communication was important: to inform the supervisors and those seeking shelter about your intentions—in other words, seeking informed consent—before engaging in research. At this point, Dr Jaxon showed us an example of an informed consent document. One should not, Dr Jaxon concluded, treat one’s participants as spectacles to be showcased, but as people with valuable identities who deserve, on a human level, to be respected.

Then, since Kirkland’s study was about tattoo literacy, we began talking about our tattoos. Several students demonstrated their tattoos, and we agreed that some tattoos are pretty, some are meaningful, and some are both.

The penultimate topic was murals, both locally and in other cities. Like tattoos, some can be meaningful – even politically-charged – while others can be merely aesthetic.

Finally, we transitioned to a discussion of our own research projects, with each student in class sharing their thoughts on potential future work.

M’Kenzie Drill & Julian Roloff