In this co-authored reflection by seven graduate students and one instructor, we revisit the “Apocalyptic Feminisms” graduate class taught in Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in which students were asked to engage with interdisciplinary writing on the Anthropocene and to hone their own feminist praxes through going on and documenting their walks. We reflect on the “Walk and Movement Reading Instagram Engagements” assignment, exploring what walking can offer to deepen theoretical, methodological, and praxis-based approaches to environmental and (...) place-based learning. We do this by writing from a cascading voice approach, where each reflection stands on its own and together builds into a whole greater than its parts. Following on an introduction to the course and assignment, we begin with a conceptual outlining of the meanings of place, decolonization, and academic community. Next, each of the graduate student collaborators responds to the following prompt, “How did the walking project on IG [Instagram] influence how you thought about questions of place, decolonization, and classroom community during a pandemic?” Each co-author develops a robust engagement with this question drawing on their own pandemic Fall 2020 semester, their photographs from the course, and the insights and practices they developed in conversation with each other throughout the span of the semester. Together, this reflection offers thoughts on the feminist and place-based utilities of walking pedagogy as well as, through collaboration, challenges the very way in which academic scholarship is done at the site of the late capitalist academy and its topos of success, competition, and meritocracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of the historical retrospective of the concept of myth and the process of semantic transformation of this term in historical retrospect, as well as to study the features of the combination of different mythological and neo-mythological layers in modern literature. The article investigated myth and mythological discourse in literary studies, formed the basic definitions of myth at different historical stages of social development, studied the foundations of neo-myth and its (...) artistic realization in the literary plane. On the basis of modern Kazakh prose, the plot, composition, motif, and imagery schemes built on the use of mythological and neo-mythological discourses were considered. Emphasis was placed on possible mythological sources and the question of what myth can give to literature was discussed. (shrink)