I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe. I am a galactic cloud so deep so involuted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me and has taken. I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.
- Adrienne Rich, Planetarium
Hello
My name is Janel, but my friends and colleagues know me as J. I am an ABD in the Department of Communication Studies and the graduate program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I currently live in the "Bull City" Durham, NC and I am an avid homebrewer, art-maker, music-lover and sports fan.
From my Blog
Dissertation
I am currently writing a doctoral dissertation entitled The Value of a Pint: A Cultural Economy of American Beer. To compliment/complicate this interdisciplinary research project, I am creating a [currently untitled] series of mixed-media artwork. Though created to stand independently, the projects together tell multi-layered story about contemporary American culture, capitalism, power, everyday material artifacts, and the subjectivities that emerge in relation to such fraught and overdetermined formations.
More >>
Work Summary
I am scholar, college instructor, and communications professional. I pride myself on producing work that integrates these three skill sets, maximizing results for my students and clients.
Teaching
Over the past 6 years, I’ve taught undergraduate courses as a graduate student and independent lecturer in two large state universities, two community colleges, and a small private fine arts college. Each day I have the opportunity to interact with students, whether in the classroom, in our shared community, or electronically, I work to accomplish three goals—to emphasize the importance of learning, to concretize the connections between academic knowledge and students’ lived experiences, and to foster critical awareness of social injustice.
Marketing Communications
For more than a decade, I've worked in the marketing communications industry. I have created a range of web sites, newsletters, advertisements, corporate identities and logos, press releases, blogs, multimedia presentations, signage, instructional technology and more. In each of these applications, I strive to differentiate my work by applying theory-based and market-proven strategies that deliver measurable results.
Selected Courses Taught
Practices of Cultural Studies
This course is an intensive introduction to Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary tradition that emerged primarily from the UK and US in the 1950s and 1960s. Students are encouraged to take a conjunctural rather than disciplinary approach to academic work, as the course mirrors the evolution of cultural studies over the last 5-6 decades, organizing around central problematics, themes, or crises in the contemporary world that seem to require more than simplistic explanations.
Media and Popular Culture
In this course students examined the communication processes and cultural significance of popular media. The course was structured as a dialogue between mainstream American popular culture and associated sub-cultural responses across a number of traditional and emerging media forms.
Communication Through Web Design
I independently designed this course to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of communication practices in online media with emphasis on content, editing, usability, and design. Students, most with no web design or scripting experience, created websites as a final project for this course.
Gender and Interaction
In this course, students discovered how gender is constructed and performed in our society and the implications of those constructions. We focused on the ways in which gender is created, established, communicated, and reified through rhetoric and rhetorical interaction.
Sample Marketing Communication Projects
Web Design: Thomas J Condon
Web Design: School of Journalism & Media Studies at San Diego State University
Package Design: Beer Label
Education
PhD - Communication Studies, Certificate in Cultural Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*Expected Spring 2012
MA - Communication Studies
San Diego State University
2006
BFA - Visual Communication, Concentration in Digital Design
American InterContinental University
2004
BA - English, Concentration in Creative Writing
Virginia Tech
2000
Conference Activity
My paper, Take back the pint! (re)Feminizing beer and the affectivity of brewing bodies, has been accepted for presentation Food Networks: Gender and Foodways, an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Notre.
Previously Presented Papers
Beckham, J. N. (2011, November). Subcultures as Regimes of Valuation. Presented at the annual convention of the National Communication Association, New Orleans, LA.
Beckham, J. N. (2010, June). Food and Drink: Engaging the Logics of New Mediation. Presented at the annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, Orono, ME. ** Recipient of Linda Elson Scholar Award for Top Student Paper
Beckham, J. N. (2008, November). From Subcultures to Micro-networks: Revising the Modern Narrative of Progress. Presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, San Diego, CA.
Beckham, J. N. (2008, November). Ideological Crystal Lattice or Machine Gun Critique?: The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy Land. Presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association - San Diego, CA.
Beckham, J. N. (2008, November). De-coloniality and Domestic Resistance: Everyday Life inside/outside the Academy. Presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association - San Diego, CA.
Beckham, J. N. (2007, February). There's No 'I' in Token: Resistance, Complicity, and the Activist Potential of Tokenism. Presented at the annual meeting of the Western States Communication Association – Seattle, WA.
Beckham, J. N. (2006, December). Communicating Art-work: Queering the Construction of Feminine Gender Identities. Presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association - San Antonio, TX.
Beckham, J. N. & Condon, T. C. (2006, May). Discord and the Academy: An Interdisciplinary Artistic Dialogue on Identity and the Future of Qualitative Research. Presented at the 2nd International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry – Champaign-Urbana, IL.
Beckham, J. N. (2006, February). When ‘Queer' is not: Subverting the Subversive through Binary Identity Construction. Presented at the annual meeting of the Western States Communication Association – Palm Springs, CA.
Doctoral Dissertation
As a material commodity beer has remained surprisingly unchanged since it's invention—composed of roughly the same ingredients, combined in roughly the same proportions, to achieve roughly the same product. What has been in dramatic flux, particularly over the past 100 years, is how beer is valued. This study considers the complex and numerous weavings of beer into the fabric of contemporary American life. Changes in the valuation of beer (for instance beer valued as a means of supporting US troops during WWII, as a racialized social ill, as emblematic of American masculinity, as a touchstone of activism advocating sustainable practices of producing, distributing, and consuming food and dink) and subsequent changes in pricing and profit are most often seen as products of "economic" change or products of "cultural" change. This project endeavors to understand such changes as a complex articulation of the two.
I am creating a [currently untitled] series of visual artwork as a companion piece to this research project >>
Committee
Director - Lawrence Grossberg, PhD
Sarah Dempsey, PhD
Jay Garcia, PhD
Michael Palm, PhD
John Pickles, PhD
Masters Thesis
Art speaks to, through, and in the case of confessional art, about individuals as cultural players. Through confessional art and the privileging of personal experience, questions of identity enter public discourse. When individuals experience music, attend poetic performances, or view paintings created by confessional artists, they enter into dialogue with artists’ creative processes and artistic products. Through this dialogue, both socially and personally assumed identities are cooperatively constructed, performed, and deconstructed by both the creators and users of art. My thesis research explored how the experience of identity dissonance, a psycho-emotional discomfort reified by an individual’s performance of two or more incompatible identities, is rhetorically enacted and subsequently legitimized by confessional art. A mixed critical rhetorical and performative autoethnographic methodology was used. Through the critical cultural analysis of a body of contemporary confessional art works, the rhetorical implications of artistic dialogue were investigated as they pertain to the performance and negotiation of identities. By including autoethnographic reflexivity and a performative engagement with the rhetorical texts, a holistic research narrative was generated that acknowledges the research process as an enactment of identity in itself and embraces the necessarily activist investment on the part of the researcher as a queer, black, female scholar.Committee
Director – Valerie Renegar, PhD
Patricia Geist-Martin, PhD
Esther Rothblum, PhD
Areas of Interest
I am broadly interested in the various intersections of popular material culture, cultural economy, media studies, and visual culture. Currently, this hybrid intellectual space is finding expression in research in critical food studies. I am fascinated by everyday cultural practices, how they are implicated in relations of power–how racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity and religious intolerance, for example, exist as particular expressions of power that are often subtle, mutable, complexly interrelated, easily justified and seemingly innocuous.
Fellowships, Scholarships and Awards
Martha Nell Hardy Award for Outstanding Teaching
Given to the graduate student whose work in teaching her or his own class or assistance with a large lecture section is characterized by excellence. 2011
Special Initiatives Award
Recognizes the student, group of students, or student organization responsible for initiating projects or activities of a special or continuing nature that contribute substantially to the life and well-being of the Department of Communication Studies. 2010
Outstanding Achievement in Service & Leadership
Given to the graduate student who provides direction, coordination, personal initiative, and service to the graduate students, the department, and the discipline. 2007
William N. Reynolds Royster Fellowship
Competitive, UNC-wide, 5-year fellowship. $20,000 annual stipend, fees, tuition, and health insurance. 2006
Virginia Tech Literary Prize
First Place, Poetry for Yesterday You Called for Your Sweater. University-wide literary competition. 2000
Virginia Tech Literary Prize
Second Place, Poetry for Blues Bar. University-wide literary competition. 2000
Virginia Tech Creative Writing Award
Awarded to a graduating senior for demonstrated excellence in creative writing. 2000
Alfred E. Knobler Scholarship
Cash award provided to a graduating senior demonstrations “love of learning, appreciation of English, commitment to community, and high personal and academic goals.” $1,500
Publications
Book Chapters
Beckham, J. N. (Forthcoming). Drinking Local: Sustainable brewing, alternative food networks, and the politics of valuation. In T. Conroy (Ed.), Food and Everyday Life. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.Journal Articles
Beckham, J. N. (2012). Food and Drink: Engaging the Logics of New Mediation. Explorations in Media Ecology, 10 (1&2). 25-28.Creative Writing
Beckham, J. N. (2000, Fall). Giving it Back [Poem]. Silhouette Literary Magazine.
Beckham, J. N. (2000, Spring). threehundredsixty [Poem]. Silhouette Literary Magazine.
Beckham, J. N. (2000, Fall). Tuto [Short Fiction]. Silhouette Literary Magazine.
Beckham, J. N. The Answers to All Your Questions [Poem]. HazMat Literary Review
Beckham, J. N. (2003). Blues Bar [Poem]. Exit 13 Magazine, 11
The Wonderful World of Beer
You get range of responses when you tell someone that you are intellectually, professionally, artistically, politically and recreationally into beer. But as someone once told me, these kinds of things are just entry points for thinking about and engaging the contemporary moment. Whether this is true or not, beer is a passion I take seriously.
My Work
I currently work for Fifth Season Gardening Company, a retailer of organic gardening supplies, indoor gardening and hydroponics supplies, and homebrewing and wine making supplies. We have five locations in Carrboro, NC; Raleigh, NC; Greensboro, NC; Asheville, NC; and Charlottesville, VA. As the Homebrew and Wine Making Supply Manager, I do ordering and inventory management for all five stores, manage vendor relations, and look to make and maintain connections between Fifth Season, our community, homebrewers, and the larger world of craft brewing.
Beer Activism
The Pink Boots Society was created to inspire, encourage and empower women to advance their careers in the Beer Industry through networking and education. As a member, I work to:
- Encourage women consumers to taste beer and learn about the history and craft of beer.
- Encourage women to become homebrewers.
- Encourage women to become professionals in the beer industry.
- Support PBS members to advance their beer careers through education.
- Promote women in the beer industry to Media.
- Increase the number of women beer judges at GABF and other competitions.
Big Girl Brewing Company is a “concept brewery” on a mission to restore the place of women in the world of brewing by creating ass-kicking, consciousness-raising craft beers. Thought not a traditional venture in any sense, my concept brewery has become a enjoyable way to see myself as a homebrewer in a culture that is dominated by white men. It's been a great way to share information and to bring a side of feminism to the table when I pour the fruits of my labors at homebrew festivals.
Beer Appreciation and Education
Fall 2011 will be an extremely busy time for me in the world of beer and brewing. In addition to my doctoral dissertation and creative work I will be involved in a number of beer events.
September 10th - Top of the Hops - Charlottesville, VA
I gave a talk for Fifth Season on homebrewing in the Greatbrewers.com Brew University Area of the festival.
September 22nd - The Science of Brewing - Durham, NC
I did a demonstration with co-worker Ethan Johnston for Fifth Season about the science behind brewing ingredients at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science's Science of Brewing Event. We got some press in the Independent Weekly.
October 8th - World Beer Festival - Durham, NC
I again served on the "Brew Crew" for the 16th Annual World Beer Festival in Durham, NC. I was on the festival site all day hauling kegs, moving ice, dumping slop buckets and generally insuring that the event went smoothly for brewers and visitors alike.
November 12th - Homebrew for Hunger - Chapel Hill, NC
I have been working hard since late summer, planning Homebrew for Hunger a fundraiser sponsored by Fifth Season benefiting the Food Bank of Eastern and Central North Carolina. More >>
Dissertation Art Project [Currently Untitled]
In the course of researching and writing my dissertation, I found there to be a number of paths, back alleys, tangents, obsessions, and problem spaces to which I simply could not attend within the finite space of the research project. I decided to develop a series of mixed-media artwork, through which I can explore some of what my dissertation cannot take up due to limitations on length, time, and need for coherence…but perhaps more so because some stories are better told in the conceptual space of expressive creative work.
I am currently working on two pieces for the series. The first piece takes up the historically messy interconnections between the brewing industry, baseball, American identity, and black masculinity in a installation of deconstructed and recontextualized baseball cards. The second piece explores beer consumption as a site of meaning with reference to urban blackness. It introduces rarely posed questions about gendered interaction in these sites of meaning making through formal explorations of the brown paper bag and 40oz beer bottle.
I am planning to show this work in March/April 2012 in conjunction with a short talk about my dissertation research. If you have leads on possible locations for this opening/lecture/reception in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, or Durham, please contact me.
Creative Writing
As an undergraduate student in the English Department at Virginia Tech, I specialized in Creative Writing. I was the very grateful recipient of instruction and mentoring from a bevy of talented writers, poets, and critics including Nikki Giovanni, Lucinda Roy, Tom Gardener, Bonnie Soniat, and Jeff Mann. Though creative writing is no longer the center of my intellectual efforts, it is a creative practice that will continue to inform all aspects of my life.
Short Fiction
Tuto (coming soon)
Poetry
threehundredsixty (coming soon)
Giving it Back (coming soon)
Rebuilds, Reclamations and Renovations
Around the House
In June 2009, I bought a 1920s-era bungalow in Durham’s Historic Hayti neighborhood. Located on Fayetteville street, just a block or two north of the campus of North Carolina Central University, within a mile southeast of downtown Durham’s American Tobacco Campus, and adjacent to the Rolling Hills/Southside neighborhoods, the house is sandwiched between three areas slated for major redevelopment in the next 5 years.
The past two years has been a swirl of renovation projects and learning experiences. I have at times bitten off more than I could chew and at others surprised myself with what I’ve accomplished. See the photo gallery >>
The CX500 Project
In fall 2010 I bought a 1980 Honda CX500 with the intention of rebuilding it into a vintage cafe racer. The bike was bought without a tank or headlight, but with all other parts in tact.
Currently I am working on major elements of the body before I tackle the electrical and mechanical systems. The process has been slow--as I have to teach myself a set of new skills every time I have a chance to work on the project--but a ton of fun.