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Books Published
Designing, Teaching, Leading, & Theorizing Out-of-the-Box Student Travel. Co-edited by Irina Gendelman and Jeff Birkenstein. Lexington Books, October 2020.
Summary: Classroom on the Road: Designing, Teaching, and Theorizing Out-of-the-Box Faculty-Led Student Travel explores real-world, out-of-the-box examples of faculty-led student travel that challenge the dominant paradigms of conventional tourism. Contributors share teaching methods that can be adapted for a variety of university travel scenarios and encourage students to be responsible and thoughtful members of the global community who seek out valuable experiences in other cultures to go beyond the standard consumption of touristy clichés. Furthermore, this book contributes to existing discourse about travel by going beyond being “just” a tourist to become a person who impacts—and is impacted by—other cultures and the commensurate politics of place. Contributors discuss issues of cultural imperialism, economic disparity, and responsible travel that can help protect unique destinations from the homogenizing effects of global capitalism, encouraging respectful and responsible travel.
Books in Progress
Irina Gendelman & Jeff Birkenstein. Slow Motion: How to Walk Your Turtle, Explore the World, and Teach Outside Your Classroom. Under consideration by publisher.
Summary: Slow Motion combines context, practical advice, extensive personal experience, inspiring examples, expert commentary, discipline critique, mini guest essays, and thought-provoking insights to make a vigorous and encouraging case for college educators (and their students) to adopt a slower, more mindful approach to class, field trips (local), and travel (far and wide).
Women Wandering Purposefully: The Flâneuse in Literature and Popular Culture. Co-edited by Irina Gendelman and Jeff Birkenstein. Under consideration by publisher.
Summary: The flâneur, moving and rising in tandem with the modern industrialized city has been many things, mostly notably, perhaps, he has been male. But that is not the entire story. Of course, it is not. In our volume, we intend to explore the female wanderer who, perhaps by default, has always had to move with more craft, with more purpose, with more cunning than her male counterparts in our misogynistic world.
Articles
“Teaching Travel through Wandering and Food.” Irina Gendelman & Jeff Birkenstein In Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society. Ed. Carlnita P. Greene. Peter Lang Publishing. December 2018.
“Eating, Reading, and Traveling Locally,” Jeff Birkenstein and Irina Gendelman. In Teaching Food and Literature. Ed. Jeff Birkenstein. Edited Collection in Options for Teaching series. MLA, forthcoming.
Presentations and Conferences
"Slow Motion: How to Walk Your Turtle, Explore the World, and Teach Outside the Classroom." Interactive session delivered at the Washington Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference. Bellingham, WA 2024.
“From Summit to Shore to the Future: Food and the Global Pandemic in the Puget Sound Region.” Association for the Study of Food and Society online annual conference. June 2021.
“From the Beginning: Indigenous Storytelling of Food and Medicine.” Course Design Poster Session. In the Language and Literature Program Innovation Room. MLA. Seattle. January 2020.
"The Language and Culture of Food, Place, and Travel." Paper presented at the Western States Communication Association Convention. Seattle, WA, 2019.
"Pedagogies of Place and Race." Paper presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. Louisville, KY, 2019.
"Mushroom hunters: understanding culture through discourses about food, foraging, and land sovereignty." Paper presented at the International Convention on Food History and Food Studies. University of Tours, Tours, France, 2018.
“The Literary Flâneuse Slow Eats the City.” PAMLA. Western Washington University. November 2018.
The Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Symposium on Indigenous Food and Culture. Attended with students. University of Washington, Seattle, 2018.
“Urban Archivist: Preserving Street Art, Graffiti, Signs and Other Ephemeral Markings on Cities” paper presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2016.
"Global citizenship: wandering through mega-landscapes" paper presented in Urban Communication at the National Communication Association Convention. Philadelphia, PA, 2016.
“Innocents Abroad: Backpacking with Students, Tourism, and Popular Culture.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference. Seattle, WA. March 2016.
“‘Tree Bathing’, a Deep Ecology: A Forest Walk to Reflect, Write, and Observe Nature and Mycology” paper presented at the Whidbey Sustainability and Contemplative Practice gathering, 2014.
“Imagined Places: On Wandering and Digital Landscapes.” Invited Lecture. PLATO Lecture Series at The Evergreen State College. Olympia, WA. April 2014.
Awards
Visiting Teaching Fellowship at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Awardees: I. Gendelman & T. Milstein. 2022.
MLA Humanities Innovation Course Development: “From the Beginning: Indigenous Storytelling of Food and Medicine.” Awardees: J. Birkenstein & I. Gendelman. 2019.
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