She is an award-winning teacher and coeditor of Narrative Culture and has published numerous articles and book chapters.
Bock applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards, and reported the following:
Page 99 features an image of a decorated graduation cap. The text around the top edges of this particular cap reads “#RUNNIN’ REBEL” (referencing the mascot of the institution where the graduate earned his undergraduate degree) and “#FUTURE DEVIL” (referencing the mascot of the school where the graduate intends to pursue his studies). The center of the flat top of the mortarboard presents a list of degrees in a checklist format in big, bold text: “B.S. B.A.”, “Master’s,” and “PA.” Next to the text “B.S. B.A.” is a giant check mark. The two other degrees listed have a blank box next to them, indicating that they will ultimately be checked as the graduate continues on in his educational journey.Learn more about Claiming Space at the Utah State University Press website.
The text on that page begins by identifying how “Decorated caps often align the individual graduates who wear them with the widely circulating narrative of the American dream, foregrounding its key tenets that also converge with folk ideas central to US worldview identified by folklorists, including individualism, optimism, unlimited good, and orientation to the future.” After providing a range of examples of what this looks like in practice, it highlights how “this future-oriented worldview is central to the graduation ceremony as a whole, apparent even in the term used to describe it: commencement, meaning beginning.”
This page does illustrate one key idea in the book as a whole, specifically that the forms of personal expression we see on display via decorated mortarboards are, in fact, always larger than personal. In other words, these visual and material performances of the personal work to position graduates in relation to broader discourses surrounding higher education in the United States. At the same time, readers who look only at this page would not get any sense of the book’s extensive attention to the creative ways in which graduates claim the communicative space of their mortarboards in the culturally significant ritual of commencement to speak back to – and often complicate – these broader discourses. Readers would also miss the voices and perspectives of graduates from diverse backgrounds that are presented throughout the book, voices and perspectives that offer important insights into how graduates “on the ground” grapple with complicated understandings of the purpose and value of higher education.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
