Professionally
I am Professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. I teach, write, and research at the intersection of the fields of English and women’s and gender studies, and previously served as director and co-director of Concordia’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. I regularly teach courses like Writing of Women, History of the English Language, Writing to Change the World (first-year composition), The Ethnographic Essay, Global Literature, and Editing and Grammar for Professionals. In all of these courses, my students are asked to question, consider, and contextualize expectations and conventions–of genre, of representation, and of authority. My Ph.D. is from the University of Kansas, and I am a proud Jayhawk. A brief CV can be found at this link: Karla Knutson, Selected CV
I am also a mother, partner, daughter, sister, and feminist.
Ideologically
No matter what I am doing—playing with my daughter, reading, watching a film, talking with family, friends, and acquaintances, or meeting new people when traveling or at my neighborhood grocery store, I ask questions. I ask questions about what people are doing, about their reasoning for what they are doing, about what matters to them, about what they’ve learned, and about the possibility of doing something differently.
I’m curious about everything. I don’t think that makes me nosy, though; I think it makes me fun! It’s why I love to travel with my spouse and our daughter (at odds with our concerns about climate change). It’s why I read and watch narratives and documentaries almost insatiably. It’s why I like people, both known and new to me. When I meet you, I will ask you questions. It will be fun for both of us!
Pedagogically
But never fear—as a professional writer and reader, I know how to ask questions (ahem… it’s because I study and teach English—the most versatile, practical, yet enjoyable of all possible majors: for more info check out my forthcoming post about the value of an English degree and the Humanities). All of my courses teach my students how to ask questions too, whether writing a profile, a life story interview, an ethnography, an autoethnography, a literary analysis, or a reflection. As I discuss with my students, asking the right sort of questions is a way that we show we care about another person. It demonstrates that we have thought carefully about who that person is, about what is going on in their lives, about what matters to them. I am concerned when someone doesn’t ask questions during a conversation! But I know there are myriad reasons for not engaging in questioning during conversation (such as cultural context, particularly in the Northern Plains region of stoic, reserved people; gendered socialization, e.g. some identities are taught to perform emotional labor and kin-keeping, and others are not expected to do that work; hierarchy and power differential, for example, some people don’t feel the need to demonstrate interest in others if those people aren’t deemed “important”; social anxiety, and general unpleasantness, of course). Some of these reasons are compelling; some are rude.
Asking questions is a form of research, and I’ve spent my life studying how to do good research, doing it myself to enrich my life both personally and professionally, and teaching my students how to do it too.
We use research to help us better understand things in our lives. Like I tell my students on day one of writing classes, we conduct research and write about it—to help us pursue answers to questions that matter to us and to contribute by sharing the fruits of that investigation with others.
Publicly
All of my publications are attempts to make sense of social, cultural, and historical expectations, assumptions, and situations. Whether questioning advice about breastfeeding as a new mother (https://demeterpress.org/books/normative-motherhood-regulations-representations-and-reclamations/), or dismantling the stereotypes surrounding only children and the suspicion of mothers who dare to have only one child in pronatalist societies (https://demeterpress.org/books/maternal-regret-resistances-renunciations-and-reflections/), or considering academic motherhood at various stages in the life course (forthcoming), or articulating how first-year writing courses can empower students through ethnography (https://minnesotaenglishjournalonline.org/2015/04/30/the-ethnographic-research-paper/), I use research to help me say something I want to say.
Personally
Sometimes what I want to say is personal. Yet just like the feminists who recognized that “the personal is political” in the 1960s and 1970s, research teaches me that others have had similar, different, or variations of my experience. Following in the storied footprints of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience, and writing theorists Peter Elbow and Jane Tompkins, I use research to corroborate my experiences and ideas, to provide counter-examples, and to contextualize. Like these three writers, I am interested in blurring the lines across “academic” and “personal” writing. And I want my students to recognize the opportunities they have to do this too, as well as when they can’t—when the generic conventions must be followed.
English is a discipline rooted in asking and exploring questions, in interpretation of texts, yes, but also situations, encounters, scenes, moments…everything, really. Analyzing how a text has been constructed, the conventions of a particular genre, the rhetorical decisions made by a writer instills questioning as a habit, professionally and personally. I asked questions and was drawn to English, but English has given me the skills first to analyze or read a situation or text and then ask better questions about it. It means that I relentlessly ask questions about my life, my world, and its expectations. It also means that I do not mind subverting expectations and traditions. Nothing annoys me more than when someone gives “it’s tradition” as a reason to do something but has failed to consider the history and contemporary value of the tradition. Reflective revision must be practiced not only in our writing lives but also in our lived experiences.
I am privileged to have a rich life filled with so many people and experiences I love—my family and spending time with them, being a mother, spending time outside, traveling with my two fellow adventurers, cycling, eating, cooking, swimming, and of course: reading, watching, and writing.
Thank you for visiting my page and following my projects. Questions enrich my life, and I hope that they do the same for you.