Student Work | Dr. Shannon Finck

OUROBOROS: A Journal of the Publishing Industry’s Innovations and Reinventions

Students in my Fall 2024 ENGL 3140: Editing for Publication class spent the semester brushing up on their editing skills while reading Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, a history of literary publishing and conglomeration in the US. Meanwhile, they put their skills and knowledge to work, creating an online journal that reflects their own interests in…

Lit Que(e)ries: A Journal

Students in my Spring 2024 LGBTQ+ Literature class (ENGL 3695/WGSS 3910) created, edited, and published their own open-access journal with essays organized into thematic clusters (modeling their work on ASAP/J, Post45 Contemporaries, etc.). This was my first time doing a collaborative project at this scale with students, and the final product reflects the beautiful, ambitious,…

Environmental Short Films (ENGL 1102, Georgia State University, Fall 2023)

Over the course of this semester, my ENGL 1103 students studied examples of climate storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional, in order to consider the question of whether and how narrative can intervene in or shape serious conversations about climate change and help us envision the future. The objective of the short film assignment was to…

Climate Interviews (ENGL 1102, Georgia State University, Fall 2023)

Now that the effects of anthropogenic climate change are becoming more widely apparent, writers and scholars have emphasized the importance of keeping a record of planetary change as it unfolds. Because climate and environmental concerns differ from place to place, firsthand accounts comprise an important part of this record. In this class, students paid careful…

A Work(place) in Progress: A Podcast by ENGL 1103 Students

The final assignment in Honors ENGL 1103: Labor Histories & the Future of Work asked students to consider as a class what labor-related events, innovations, and ideas might bring people together as a community of listeners, and to pitch a podcast series addressing those themes and topics. Working in teams of two and three, students…

ENGL 1103: Labor Pamphlets

The first assignment in ENGL 1103: Labor Histories & the Future of Work asked students to practice using the Southern Labor Archives to find examples of labor pamphlets and zines, produced by workers and unions in their efforts to organize their peers and colleagues, raise awareness about their laboring conditions, and reform their industries and…

HON 3280: Service-Learning Blog

Read HON 3280 students’ accounts of their service-learning journeys and see some of their public-facing projects here: https://sites.gsu.edu/hon3280/ This blog is an ongoing and evolving record of the course, so there will be even more to see here soon!

Short Films on Environmental Literacy (ENGL 1101, Georgia State University, Spring 2023)

These short films by Isaac Breiding and Zion Brown demonstrate students’ award-winning efforts at describing the difficulty of feeling especially connected to the natural world in urban settings (and given the pace of contemporary life as college students) as well as what they might be missing out on by not prioritizing those connections. Both of…

Sample Student Podcasts (ENGL 1101, Georgia State University, Fall 2022)

In this class, we discussed episodes of audio podcasts (Broken Ground, Living Planet, Who Cares Wins, & Breaking Green Ceilings) that each took on a small piece of the immense and intricate puzzle presented by global climate change. Our exemplary compositions used several rhetorical approaches by presenting both problems and potential solutions/mitigations with guest experts and co-hosts (building…

Digital Anthropo-Zine Archive (ENGL 1102 & 1103, Georgia State University)

The following examples represent student-made zines–micro-publications that are often written with a specific community in mind, produced in small print runs or digitally, and distributed locally by hand, by link, or by QR code. Students started by studying the contemporary history of zines, which have been produced to communicate fresh or radical ideas to a given population,…