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The Meaning of Authorship

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Category: campus experience Video duration: The Meaning of Authorship
Authors Edward Gitre, Renee LeClair, Cara Daggett and Andrea Baldwin explain what authorship means to them on a personal level and why it's important to emphasize diversity in authorship in today's society.

This video was presented at the Virginia Tech Authors Recognition Event held on March 28, 2022. 
For me, authorship is about communicating a perspective. So as a historian, it's a historical perspective. It was about an interpretation, but using a wide range of skills. And this wider platform as a way of expressing that viewpoint. So it's about the written text, but it's so much more like the fact that I can include images and video and just different kinds of multimedia into authorship was really exciting because it can be much more creative. And that's what it was for me, the ability to think really beyond the horizons of the page. To be an author really means to be a collaborator and blending of resources to move something forward. It's very important to tell people about what you're doing, to communicate with them, to be proud of what you're doing as a means of putting yourself as well as your university forward. Sharing what you're doing on a more national and international scale. Through these textbooks, we've been able to meet people and meet other collaborators and really look at different ventures that we wouldn't have seen potentially. How do not publish these resources? It's important to me to raise up voices that have been marginalized and bring out stories that don't get thought of as common sense or don't get heard. And give language to activist movements who might need a phrase or a way of understanding something or a metaphor that might be really helpful to communicate to others. And that brings a certain position that you can use for good or ill. And that's, that's the thing about authorship. Language is powerful and it can be powerful for multiple ends. As a black woman who was also an immigrant from a poor working class family. There are not a lot of us in the academy, not many at all. I'm thinking about black women whose work that I'm reading now, they are the works that made me feel like I could be a part of this space. And so I'm hoping that my work will be able to do that for other black women. And so that we can continue to multiply in this space and change the space as we're here. And so for me, being an author as part of my philosophy, my praxis of how do we build community, not just now, but how do they also help other black women to see themselves as authors and see themselves as part of the academy.