Jana L. Pickart (she/her) is an artist-researcher-teacher and Ph.D. student in Language, Literacy & Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.
Her special interest is pursuing critical disability studies, her passion is playing with language, and her vocation is teaching English to multilingual adults. She uses critical race theory (CRT) and transraciolinguistic lenses, along with ways of knowing and doing from critical disability studies and arts-based research, to pursue antiracist research aims. Her current research investigates how researchers have conceptualized adult multilingual learners’ racial and ethnic identities and considers how ‘cripping’ ethnography can open space for doing social science otherwise.
Jana has twice been awarded fellowships from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned her MA in Arts Politics, to create and exhibit original multimedia artworks.
Her graduate study at New York University focused on investigating the tangible impacts of using poetry and new media as peacebuilding tools to facilitate embodied healing. Her exhibited artworks used digital art and performance to choreograph her poetry as a moving and interactive body for social justice. She used materials ranging from yards of clothesline, borrowed lingerie, smashed grapefruits, and hammers to trace the complex fractures that grief, legacies of trauma, and violation have written in silence on women’s bodies.
Jana has taught at Suffolk University, Holyoke Community College, and Cape Cod Community College.
PUBLICATIONS
Pickart, J. L. & Barclay, S. (forthcoming). “Where do we exist? A call to queercrip joy in public space through stimming. In J.J. Wright and C. Burkholder (Eds.), Theorizing queer joy: Tracing the affective geographies of queer joy for social change.
Pickart, J. L. (2011, December 28). “Touching Their Ancestors’ Hands: An Interview with Anne Makepeace.” Boston Review.
CONTACT
jpickart (at) umass (dot) edu
Full CV and references available upon request.