Submitted: Hearing Corwin Hall

Needless to say, the last few months have not been particularly productive for me, but every now and then I fought through the COVID-malaise to produce something. It helps when collaborators are invested and involved and when a project feels like it has significance for my lived experience.

All this to say that in the next 30 minutes, I’ll have (finally) submitted something based on our sometimes frantic, but always intriguing work with the Wesley College Documentation Project and Michael Wittgraf’s mixed-media piece “Hearing Corwin Hall.” I’m sending it to Epoiesen, an electronic journal that is equipped to bring together video, documents, images, and text.  

The article is called “Hearing Corwin Hall: The Archaeology of Anxiety on an American University Campus” and is cowritten with Mike Wittgraf and Wyatt Atchley, a talented photographer whose photographs offer nuance, atmosphere, and critique within the article itself.

The article has also benefited from my embarrassingly recent discover of Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) which helped me connect my own feelings of anxiety and dread to conditions on my campus (if not in larger society) and as a meaningful experience worthy of both critique and documentation. My hope is that this piece is the start of some of that work (especially as seen through Wyatt’s vision and Mike’s music and video). 

This is a pretty personal article for me, so I’d love it if you check it out here. Most of the links should work, but a few won’t because those are videos that we’ll hopefully publish if and when this thing gets formally published.

Wish us luck!!