By Manal Nadeem
On behalf of the Editorial Team (Huda Imran, Jude Saleh, & Manal Nadeem) & Faculty Advisor (Dr Maria Eleftheriou)
This year, The Inkblot Magazine invited the AUS community to reflect on the following prompt:
“Patchworks are, put literally, pieces of cloth stitched together. They are a union of colors, textures, and materials married to form a beautiful, intricate whole. Done well, they can make both sprawling tapestries and pocket-sized handkerchiefs. Done not-so-well, they can unravel and come undone at the seams.
Rich with symbolism,“Patchworks” is an invitation to pick apart the seams of the self and reflect on the collections and composites that make you who you are–of identities, memories, places, languages, and more. In an age of speed, patchworks can also be products of patient labor and love and delicate devotion. Or an emblem of tradition enduring in the face of modernity. What does “patchworks” mean to you?”
This year’s theme, “Patchworks”, emerged from a unanimous editorial decision. We agreed that it was a metaphor waiting to be mined—one that was compelling in its unresolved meaning, the absence of any prescriptive definition, and in how it gestured both towards process and product: towards fragments and fractures; towards beauty and brokenness; towards parts coalescing and converging to form a beautiful, if precarious, whole.
The entries we publish here, selected from an open call for submissions, capture the multiplicity and plurality inherent to patchworks. Nouran Azzam’s A Stitched Life offers patchworks as a metaphor for metamorphosis, for growth and self-actualization. Maryam Abdulla’s Lining deconstructs patchworks into a series of processes: of sewing, stitching, and mending the self in order to memorialize the past. Nourhan Ibrahim’s Patchwork Consumerism infuses ‘patchworks’ with both sociological and sentimental meaning and considers how “patchwork consumerism”—the frenzied impulse to own and acquire items as a display of identity including, most recently, Labubus—can become a gateway to community.
Our academic entries, selected from WRI 221: Peer Tutoring coursework, consider ‘patchworks’ as pedagogical inquiries. Fahimah Saiyed and Manal Nadeem both anchor themselves in the diverse demographic landscape of AUS and consider, respectively, how tutor-tutee relationships impact writing center outcomes and how diverse secondary backgrounds influence preparedness for university academic writing. Meanwhile, Yousef Alafghani considers the shifting pedagogy of the Writing Center in the age of AI and Noha Eldib and Zaynab Ghani situate the Writing Center in cross-disciplinary conversations of pedagogy and psychology.
Editing this issue, in all its poetic and prosaic plurality, has been a source of much joy to our team over the past few weeks and months. We hope these will offer fruitful fodder for reflections on the multiplicities that make us who we are. As always, happy inkblotting and introspecting!