The Authority File

With the rise of “insta poetry” and young poets taking up a (small, but present!) section of everyone’s local Barnes & Noble, you might assume that awareness and appreciation for poetry in today’s youth is alive and well. And while those factors are significant for boosting sales and public engagement in contemporary and traditional poetry, garnering interest in the classroom is a different matter.

As Tanis MacDonald, General Editor of the Laurier Poetry Series, explains, poetry collections often do not stay in print. This presents a problem, as teaching from a volume of poetry creates a much richer educational experience for the reader than single poems. To fill this gap in academia, the Laurier Poetry Series emerged in the early 2000s. The Series publishes selected poetry series spanning years of a poet’s work with a scholarly and historical overview of each poet to help introduce young academics or a general audience to the text. In this four-part series, we speak with Tanis about the impact of the Laurier Poetry Series, teaching poetry in today’s age, and her own work as a writer and poet.

In this first episode, Tanis discusses her past research as an elegy specialist and her time as a support worker in at-risk communities, in addition to her current teaching role in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Tanis also provides background on the Laurier Poetry Series, exploring its aim to make poetry accessible to undergraduates and available in print—her first task as editor was to create a collection for Canadian feminist poet Lillian Allen. Last, she underscores the importance of having physical books of poetry available to students in order to support the authors and strengthen interest in poetry as an art form.

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In the final episode of this four-part series, Adrian Guan and Tim Weisenberger, both product managers at SAE International, discuss the challenges of establishing industry standards across the wide-ranging disciplines of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity for mobility. Adrian and Tim highlight SAE’s role as an intermediary between stakeholders, able to push forward new research by bringing together academics and industry leaders through publications, forums, and collaborative research projects. Further, the guests spotlight how AI and cybersecurity intersect, underscoring why information access and information security go hand-in-hand—new technology often precipitates the need for robust cyber policies.

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Safety is one of our top concerns when buying a car. As the vehicular industry grows more advanced, safety features like automatic braking, blind spot warning systems, and lane-keeping assist have entered the market. However, as helpful as these new technologies may be, they also highlight the complexity of modern vehicles and concerns over cybersecurity. Believe it or not, cars can be the targets of cyberattacks, too. So how has the mobility industry adopted cybersecurity protocols to keep our cars safe—beyond airbags and seatbelts?

In the third episode of this four-part series, Tim Weisenberger, Program Manager of Emerging Technologies at SAE International, explores the essential role of cybersecurity in the mobility industry. He explains how the industry has evolved to adopt robust cybersecurity protocols and SAE’s role in forging connections across the discipline. Further, Tim demonstrates that the unique nature of the mobility sector has encouraged the industry to prioritize cybersecurity, implementing a baked-in cyber approach to avoid potential fatalities and economic loss. Despite the growth in the maturity model standard in the past decade, Tim underscores the difficulty of standardizing cybersecurity policies, and points to solutions like problem definition, evaluation, and risk assessment.

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In higher education, artificial intelligence is often associated with research aids or chatbot tools like the recently released ChatGPT. However, AI-based systems have applications far beyond scanning primary source documents or organizing data. In the case of the mobility sector, AI now plays a major role in planes, cars, and delivery systems, leading to questions of regulation, safety, and research support for this highly emergent field.

In the second episode of this four-part series, Adrian Guan, Product Manager at SAE International, discusses the distinct characteristics of artificial intelligence, its effects on mobility, and how SAE develops AI standards and research. First, Adrian provides a fascinating introduction to the mechanics of AI, explaining its data-based, machine learning process. He then walks through AI’s potential impacts on the mobility sector, highlighting use cases in aerospace and on the ground—adaptive cruise control, delivery robots, and driving education simulators, in addition to the many projects currently in the production or prototype stages. Last, Adrian underscores the importance of safety and equity in AI design for mobility, and touches on the challenges of bridging the gaps between different sectors of the mobility field utilizing AI.

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Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity touch a variety of fields. In fact, their malleability and wide-reaching applications allow them to influence disciplines in medicine, engineering, and mobility. SAE International, an organization for engineering professionals, recognizes this link, developing resources for members—in academia and commerce—to aid their advancements in the vehicular and aerospace arenas.

In this four-part series, Adrian Guan and Tim Weisenberger, both product managers at SAE International, chat about the evolution and future of AI and cybersecurity for mobility. Adrian, an expert in AI, digs into the distinct, highly emergent characteristics of artificial intelligence and how that factors into creating robust safety standards. Tim, an expert in cybersecurity, explains how cyber practices in mobility have matured in the last decade and why a risk-based, process-driven approach is so crucial in this area.

In this first episode, Adrian and Tim discuss their backgrounds and SAE International’s role in the market and mobility community. They also dive into the offerings SAE provides—books, standards, conference papers, and events—and how the organization acts as a partner and forum to bring industry experts together.

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In the second episode of this two-part series, Dr. Sarah Derbew, assistant professor of Classics at Stanford University and author of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, discusses the future of Classical Studies. She digs into the complications of “decolonizing” a subject like the Classics—one that centers Greek and Roman civilizations while sidelining those in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As Sarah explains, applying the term to an entire discipline can lead to superficial results, with the assumption that implementing inclusive and equitable practices is a one-step solution or short-term process. She also unpacks her current research on the intersections between Greek and African antiquity, and shares her hopes for the evolution of the Classics, including an interdisciplinary lens and thoughtful, ethical considerations from young scholars that she has already begun to witness.

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As librarians, faculty, and researchers look to diversify their collections and curricula, the Classics provide unique challenges. Centered on ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, the discipline has diminished other ancient studies, often highlighting Greek and Roman entanglements with Egypt, but sidelining additional groups or contributions in Africa. Fortunately, Classicists today are looking beyond traditional modes of study to broaden and modernize the subject. Strategies include focusing on marginalized or ignored perspectives, and incorporating an ethics of care and anti-racist lens to shed new light on the past and today.

In this two-part series, Dr. Sarah Derbew, assistant professor of Classics at Stanford University, joins the program to discuss the future of Classical Studies and her book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity. The title works to separate ancient and modern depictions of Blackness, taking care to demonstrate how a modern understanding of race can lead to reductive and harmful categorizations of ancient people; modern, socially-constructed terms can’t—and shouldn’t—apply to those in the past. Despite this distinction, Sarah’s fascinating work also manages to tie together the ancient and the present, acknowledging the interdisciplinary scholarship that has informed her research, and revealing nuanced connections between the Classics and Black Studies.

In this first episode, Sarah introduces us to her research area and provides an overview of her book. She explains why she differentiated between “black” (with a lowercase) and “Black” (with an uppercase) to dissuade readers from perceiving skin color in ancient times the same way we do today—removing the modern ramifications of race allows for new social markers to break through, such as clothing, language, accessories, and more. She also explains how framing her book as an anti-racist study informed her research, how Classicists have historically approached ancient depictions of Blackness, and why addressing a researcher’s own experience and subjectivity creates a more rigorous and ethical work than falsely claiming objectivity.

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In this final episode on postcolonial literature and animal studies, Sundhya Walther, author of Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature, chats about the evolution of the animal studies discipline. She discusses her interdisciplinary approach to research, engaging with fields like conservation biology, anthropology, and urban studies to better interpret animal-human interactions. Sundhya also digs into the future of animal studies, the field’s Euro-American limitations, and how its intersection with environmental studies may progress into a broader ecological field of environmental humanities. Last, she reflects on how the climate crisis factors into the discipline, and the inherent politics of this research, noting that, “our work is a political commitment, is an ethical commitment—to me, that’s absolutely central and I don’t see how you could practice in these fields without having a politics, without having an ethical approach.”

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In this third episode, Sundhya Walther, author of Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature, discusses the focus, intentions, and scope of her title. First, she explains the emphasis on Hindu-influenced literature, and her explorations of the (false) idea of India as a Hindu nation, in addition to various animal-human ideologies projected onto Hinduism. Sundhya also dives into why she limited the book’s scope to mammals of a “charismatic” nature, and the intention behind the brief moments of reflection or “provocations” included between each chapter, achieved through visual art. Last, she highlights Multispecies Modernity’s goal of finding a “postcolonial freedom” for nonhumans through “instances where animals…disturb the kinds of discourses that set out to define them, or put them in place, or categorize them as certain kinds of animal, where they might create kinds of disorder that even fleetingly or even only fictionally can allow a kind of freedom from that power, that colonization.”

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In this second episode, Sundhya Walther, author of Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature, walks through her approach to research on disorderly, multispecies living. She explains that her background as a literary scholar naturally points her to animal-human interactions in literature, but she also examines mediums like film, visual art, and distinct events or phenomena. In addition, she discusses the balance between investigating stories of multispecies intersections and avoiding the pitfalls of ascribing meaning to “the other.” Naming her approach a “non-devouring practice,” Sundhya underscores how her research must respect otherness and avoid appropriative interpretation. Last, she digs into the connections between postcolonial theory and animal studies, and why an attachment to order in modern life—primarily through the separation of humans and nature—leads to the denial of our disorderly, multispecies world.

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