Faculty Spotlight: Assistant Professor Ida Yoshinaga

Posted February 11, 2022

Name:                        Ida Yoshinaga

Department:              School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Title:                           Assistant Professor of Science-Fiction Film

Hometown:               Wailuku, Maui, Hawai‘i

Alma Mater(s):         University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa

1. Who had the greatest influence on your education and/or career path?

As a non-traditional scholar who went through graduate school three separate times over three decades to earn my Ph.D., balancing my academics with family caregiving work, I have benefited from a host of dedicated academic mentors. This includes departmental and faculty-senate chairs, teaching-center coordinators, playwrights, fiction authors, poets, social scientists, cultural-studies scholars, area-studies researchers, program heads, and social-justice activists. I feel as if I were spiritually raised by a village of the best Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander intellectuals and artists of the late 20^th century onwards to become the eclectic (read: funky and imaginative) researcher I am today.

2. What's the goal of your research? What do you hope to change with it?

I aim to unearth community social networks and worldviews/values within the homogenizing and exploitative mass-media workplace of global capitalism. This has been established through the rise of cultural creative labor and through inclusive and reciprocal management-worker relations. I wish to work collaboratively with diverse minority community members within the media industries to broaden and enrich cinematic-narrative work at all levels and in non-abusive, culturally meaningful ways. Mass media should be refreshed with matters of relevance as well as with formally fresh approaches; this only happens if non-hegemonic (relatively unprivileged, in terms of long-term political position within the larger social structure) creative workers are not just hired, but also given creative control and true voice in media platforms.

3. Why did you decide to teach at Georgia Tech, and what's the best part about working here?

As a lifelong student of the speculative arts, I found the Science Fiction Studies program at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) incredibly original and attractive. It offers a nationally respected minor within Georgia Tech’s undergraduate curriculum, events and activities that push scholars and students at the thrilling intellectual discourses of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, fairytale, and superhero/comics studies. The chance to work with Dr. Lisa Yaszek, Dr. Susana Morris, and others whose research unearths the multiracial and non-binary histories of speculative and fabulist storytelling was too promising to pass up! Georgia Tech’s amazing library collection of Science Fiction works, the Science Fiction Lab, the campus student-run podcast series themed to Science Fiction — the whole institution screams studies of the future through understanding our imaginative representations.

The best part is Georgia Tech’s students, who we get to “catch” while they grow into 21^st-century technocultural professionals. They seem the perfectly informed group of learners for our genre’s subject matter of vision, invention, and scientific and technological ethics.

4. What moment in LMC/at Georgia Tech stands out as the most memorable?

Teaching my first class, LMC 3206 (Culture and Communication) in Fall 2021, and within a month of the August start date, realizing that average Georgia Tech undergraduates were way smarter than even the honors program students I had previously instructed. I have been spending the past few months trying to figure out how to adapt my classroom/online pedagogy to become a teacher worthy of their raw intellectual skills, career ambitions, and overall life potential.

5. What's your favorite course to teach and why?

Currently, I am teaching LMC 4813/8803 (Special Topics in digital media for undergraduate and graduate students). Together with the M.S. Global Media and Cultures (GMC) program, we hope to transform it into a cross-listed, regular GMC course offered by the School of LMC. I am developing it as an “Oral Traditions to Screenplay” class, as a channel to pass on my theoretical and formal knowledge of scriptwriting and the fantastic genres to students.

6. When you're not working, what do you like to do?

What? No work?!

7. If you weren't doing this, what would you be doing?

Writing and producing in a network, cable, or streaming scripted series that combines comedy with fantastic or speculative genre and labor politics. It would have to be a workplace-themed story concept. I love tales of everyday jobs in the global economy, about the types of strategies that ordinary people adopt inventively and relationally to survive neoliberalism. We have all been trained to operate as salvage capitalists, but what are alternative economic modes we take up on the way to getting through this savagely unequal century? Those moments of connection and subversion and necessary humanity? That kind of writers’ room. Maybe with monsters.

8. Do you have any advice for LMC students at Georgia Tech?

Trust your gut or develop one that can be trusted. Be kind to, and observant of, others. Your generation, raised within the richness of all the information our culture can generate and our tech can distribute, has so much knowledge … how can you evolve that information into societal ethics and spiritual wisdom? Find that inner compass early on, and you will save yourself (much, but not all) heartbreak and valuable life energy.

9. If prospective students or alumni are interested in what you do, can they contact you? What are some topics you can speak to?

Students can best start by taking one of my classes or bringing a specific project to me for advice. I am interested in learning what concerns and excites students and how they are making a go at life, especially through their labor and any expressive arts they have undertaken. During my 28 years and counting in academia, one of the delights is that student interests have evolved so much, yet some basics — making a living, finding a meaningful path forward that reflects one’s values, staying healthy and grounded, discovering joyful practice, coming to terms with the universe/God/existential dilemmas — seem to persist. What can you teach, how can you inspire me, if we were to cross paths? Am I meant to offer you what I have, my knowledge and hard-earned insights? We won’t know until we talk.

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