Barrett's Blog

Sitrep 8: March 23, 2025: “Your success isn’t up to you.” – Chris Smith, “Enduring Skills and the Future of Work” Inside Higher Ed’s 2023 collection of articles titled Job Search Success in Today’s Dynamic Higher Education tries to casually walk in the direct center of the fence, portraying the difficult realities of the job search market today in higher ed, while also reassuring the reader that they have some agency in the process. Their ads promise that “While your competition sips their morning coffee, you’ll have already applied and be on your way to a productive and rewarding day – and possibly a new job too” (3), while at the same time Katie Smith offers three pages of do’s and don’ts for writing a single introductory email to a perspective employer: “In conclusion, writing effective emails during the job search requires time and effort” (6). If one masters the process of writing an email that includes developing templates, researching the names, titles, and pronouns of anyone...

 Sitrep 7: March 16, 2025: Musicals It didn’t really take much convincing for me to agree with Stacy Wolf that the gesamtkunstwerk quality of the American musical should earn musical theatre a (pleasurable) space in canon-constructed university courses, even in disciplines outside of theatre. My earliest experiences with theatre of any kind, as a spectator and performer, involved musical theatre, and those formative moments likely have inspired the inclusion of musical theatre into my pedagogy. When I taught film studies, I gave space to “the musical film” as one film’s canonical categories, and I certainly include musicals in my Intro to Theatre and Acting courses. That being said, I also found Hye Won Kim’s article less relatable and at times problematic. Not because she doesn’t raise valid points about representation and creating spaces for diverse performers and narratives in commercial theatre (and the troubled history of the canon in this regard), but more because I’m lef...

  Sitrep 6: Mar. 9, 2025: The Audience of Patricia Ybarra                 I found Patricia Ybarra’s article on how to read a Latinx play a helpful primer. Ybarra asserts that the article targets non-specialists and also those who teach plays (50), so I consider myself to be among the intended audience. Their synthesis of themes and topics within Latinx plays, such as family structures and dynamics, legacies of generational violence, the infrastructural resources (and lack thereof) of the barrio, and the quest for cultural belonging help situate these plays while pointedly resisting the frequent homogenization of Latinx plays in educational framings that often unintentionally tokenize and reinforce the notion that Latinx works are lumped into a culturally ‘other’ experience for readers (49). Reconsidering her article now, I’m thinking about the specific content of the article, but also why it feels particularl...