Outside the Zoom Room: Collaboration, Migration, and Telenovelas by NANCY GATES MADSEN, Professor of Spanish
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Not surprisingly, what I accomplished during my sabbatical year did not fully reflect what I had originally proposed. Like many others, I too needed to pivot due to changing circumstances. Okay, maybe “pivot” is a bit of an overstatement. Instructors who compressed fourteen-week classes into seven, taught in two different classrooms at the same time, and marched along from January to May with nary a break, all while developing ever more creative ways to vavoom their zoom rooms were the ones who had to pivot. Me? I did more of a shimmy to one side, modifying some of my projects in order to be able to complete them. What follows is a short summary of two elements of my sabbatical year. One goal of my sabbatical was to pursue professional development in the areas of medical and legal Spanish, in order to better serve students in our Professional Spanish courses (Spanish 350 and Spanish 341). I had planned to pursue various in-person opportunities to increase my knowledge and hone my interpreting skills, ranging from volunteering at medical and legal clinics in Decorah to traveling to the US-Mexico border and working with the Florence Project, an Arizona-based organization dedicated to providing free legal services to refugees, immigrants, 22
Agora/Fall 2021
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
obody wants to read about the experience of the professor who was on sabbatical during 2020-21. “Tell me more about how you didn’t have to figure out how to teach in person, online, and hybrid all at once!” “However did you survive without zoom meetings? It must have been ghastly!” So if the very thought of reading an account that chronicles an academic journey outside the pandemic teaching trenches makes you feel physically ill (or potentially violent toward the author), read no further. I totally understand.
Nancy Gates Madsen and Mackenzie Zenk ('21) and asylum seekers. With the disappearance of most of these in-person opportunities, I sought other ways to fulfill these goals. In-person medical interpreting became online training and development, and the visit to the border to explore issues of immigration turned into a collaborative research project with a talented student and advisee, Mackenzie Zenk (’21). We spent the year analyzing the rhetoric of migration in a Mexican novel by Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and our weekly zoom conversations to discuss our research quickly became the highlight of my sabbatical year. During our collaboration, Mackenzie focused on researching media representations of border-crossing, while I dug into the literary analysis of the novel itself, to see how Herrera’s work dialogued with dominant narratives of migration. The paper, “Destabilizing the Binary Rhetoric of Migration in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán el fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World)” explores how Herrera’s 2010 novel sub-
verts the migration narratives typically seen in the news. Media portrayals often employ simplistic binaries to describe border-crossing: legal versus illegal, us versus them, North versus South. Herrera’s novel provides a more nuanced picture of migration that is often lacking in mainstream representations. First, the novel disrupts the common characterization of North and South as opposing poles of civilization versus barbarity by questioning the portrayal of the migrant journey as a perilous march toward a promised land. In fact, the “civilized” North proves more dangerous and lawless than the “violent” South, as the southern border zone in Signs embodies cooperation and improvised community between migrants, while the North remains the locus of fear and violence. Second, Herrera’s novel destabilizes the concepts of borders and the rhetoric of “us” versus “them” by emphasizing both the inadequate nature of the existing binaries and the transformative power of migration. In short, by questioning the binary narratives
