Katrina Stack

The @WhitPlantation adds a new exhibit about "Enslaved Resistance to the Experience" that speaks to the keen Black strategy- and place-making that always occurred at plantations, even if not properly recognized. yahoo.com/news/articles/… via @@YahooNews

Is St. Paddy’s Day really approaching if I don’t make my Guinness, Jameson, and Baileys cupcakes? ☘️

Dr. Derek Alderman, Dr. Katrina Stack, and PhD Candidate Seth Kannarr recently published a new article, “Bringing The Conversation into the Geography Classroom: Public Storytelling as Authentic Learning” in The Professional Geographer. Read here: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

.@theAAG @AmericanGeo @NCGE1915 @NCSSNetwork Bringing @ConversationUS into the Geography Classroom: Public Storytelling as Authentic Learning. Honored to write w/@Kat_Geographic @stjk1997. Proudly representing @UTKGeography @UTKnoxville @ArtsSciencesUT tandfonline.com/eprint/U6NWKTF…

Also, new figure skating fans, don’t fret because the World Championshjps happens in 4 weeks - post-Olympic Worlds is known for general chaos (some skaters are tired, some are using it for redemption, some didn’t go to the Olympics and end their season at Worlds) and is often fun

@eastgorteau This tweet was absolutely referenced in the Runthrough and you’re so right

ngl i do think usfsa would gladly trade both ice dance and mens ogms for one womens 😭

@SGreen96620 @stevemagness Just fyi, 11 of 24 total skaters fell. Same number as 2022 in this event. Maybe some other stepped out or popped but 11 skaters got deductions for actual falls.

Ilia Malinin hadn't lost in 2 years. Two time world champ. The only human to land all of the quad jumps. Then...his brain betrayed him. "All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there. And I just did not handle it." Choking is a threat disorder. Your brain is a prediction machine. Before any big moment, it calculates: Past experience + current environment + the story you're telling yourself = predicted state. When that prediction is threat, your brain protects. It latches on to confirming evidence. Ignores the rest. Fear feeds the prediction. The prediction feeds the fear. Malinin experienced this in real time. He stumbled in the team event days before. His brain coded "Olympics = danger." It had evidence to support the spiral. By the free skate, the loop was cemented. "All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head." His brain was no longer in the present. It was prosecuting the past. Replaying every negative voice or experience to try to convince him to run away, to escape the situation. His protective brain was on overdrive, and his brain was convinced the situation was life or death. When an expert chokes, they regress. The brain shifts from autopilot to micromanagement. Our smooth, automated movements become segmented, like a six-year-old learning to throw a ball. This is partly because with the heightened threat state, the link between perception and action gets severed. Nothing "feels" right. And we compensate by over-controlling. So we're thinking about every step along the way. And the end result is disaster. Malinin's quad axel requires mass amounts of trust in thousands of hours of training. Under threat, his conscious mind tried to control what should have been automatic. It's like pulling back a slingshot and instead of letting it go, trying to push it forward. What drives our brain to move from slight underperformance to "choking" disaster? 1. Identity Cementation This threat gets turned up to 11 if our sense of self is deeply intertwined with the outcome. Malinin arrived as the Quad God. It's his Instagram handle, on his warm-up gear, it's his identity. When your identity IS the performance, your brain treats failure as existential. The brain doesn't register "I might lose." It registers "I might lose myself." When Rick Ankiel got the yips, he explained it in similar terms, "I made the mistake of thinking, being good at baseball is what made me who I was. When that glass is shattered, there was nothing left. Going from baseball's prodigy and poster boy. All of the sudden you are blindsided. You're the most vulnerable you've ever been, and everybody can see right through you." The harsh irony of performing well is you have to care a lot, and try hard...But caring and trying can be your downfall. Your brain registers caring as a signal that this is sefl-defining, you prime the fear/threat centers, and before you know it, your brain's stress response is freezing, fleeing, dissociating to protect itself. The key is to care a lot...but having just enough space between you and the thing... 2. Mistake Spiral The second item that causes us to move from underperformance to choking is the compounding of our mistakes. Research shows that after a mistake, we get a distinct error signal, an involuntary attention shift, and what amounts to an internal handbrake: motor commands temporarily get suppressed. If we linger there, the pause becomes rumination. The rumination transforms into catastrophizing. It's why processing mistakes and failures, taking away their sting is so important. 3. Judgement --> Self-Protection We don’t choke in practice. We do so when we are being evaluated or judged, and in front of others. When something meaningful is at stake and we have an audience. We have a social self-preservation system that is on the lookout for anything that might threaten our social status. If our self-preservation system is inundated with constant signs and signals that our social status is going in the wrong direction, our system becomes hyperresponsive. --- So how do we get out of protection mode? 1. Acknowledge the moment is big. Don't fight it. 2. Build an identity broader than any single performance. 3. Be the defense attorney. Give yourself evidence. 4. Find something you can control. The smallest thing you can impact that moves you forward 5. Surround yourself with people who love and care for you no matter what. Good vibes are contagious 6. Simulate the worse. Michael Phelps called it playing the tape. And you have to visualize the disaster, to make sure your brain doesn't freak out. Before the Olympics, Malinin told ESPN he was treating it "like any other competition." Afterward: "I honestly definitely underestimated it." This is one of the most common pieces of advice in sport. Your brain isn't dumb. It sees the Olympic rings, the cameras, and the weight of expectation. When you tell yourself "just another day" and your brain knows it isn't, the mismatch doesn't calm the system. It alarms it further. It's a prediction error that alerts the brain that our previous stress response isn't good enough. This is NOT just another day, so sound the alarm. And...we overshoot the response, moving to full dread. It's not too different than what runners experience during preliminary races. They think, this is going to be easy, I should qualify with ease and be able to run slower. But...that mindset primes the brain to overreact to the first sign of discomfort. The day before he set the world record in the mile (3:51), Jim Ryun wrote in his log "That was hard!" for a 4:07 prelim mile. He ran 16 seconds faster in the final, reporting it "felt easy." The only difference was the expectations going in. Don't pretend the moment is small. Acknowledge reality. And remind yourself that you are prepared to meet it. The best of the best feel the same nerves you do. The same doom loop fires when you freeze during a presentation, go blank in a job interview, or can't find the words in a hard conversation. It's a human problem. A stress response designed to protect us from lions, tigers, and where being separated from the tribe went death. We can't fight biology. But we can learn to work with it better.

@kasmagikas Shaidorov is from Kazakhstan 🇰🇿

“Full starfish out there in the middle of the ice …” Johnny Weir, commenting on the post skate act of Mikhail Shaidorov (AIN),🥇 winner of the Figure Skating Men’s Free Program

@seacrist_cindy @lanadel_rules He gave himself that moniker.

@lanadel_rules Exactly,Tara Lepinski and Johnny Weir labeled Illia the Quad God,was that for NBC and ratings.This puts too much pressure on skaters to live up to others expectations.

Can the US media learn from Ilia Malinin now that this has happened 3 times in a row that branding someone as unbeatable is a level of pressure that no one can take in sports where the slightest hesitation can mean losing? I’m so tired of this, it’s not fair to the athletes

We'll say it again: the Team Event has to be AFTER the individual events. We said it from the start, from 2014.

In her first English-language interview, Papadakis reflects on the partnership that forced her to leave the sport—and cost her a deal with NBC. vogue.com/article/gabrie…

Tonight, a new French ice dance team that exists only because of the investigation and subsequent suspension of an alleged sexual abuser could win the Olympic gold medal. Here is my @usatodaysports story (no paywall): usatoday.com/story/sports/o…

I love the Winter Olympics because people in my life know that I’m the figure skater / judge who can answer their questions.

This program won’t see Olympic ice and I’m genuinely sad.

@ayeegreen Thank you!! ☺️

Can you even believe it 🥹

No Winter Classic will ever beat this.

Because nothing says “one week till your dissertation defense!” like having a broken foot.

All images from the Beauford Delaney Papers, MS.3967, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire.

On this day 70 years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. On display at @UTKLibraries are these sketches done by Beauford Delaney, which precede his Rosa Parks series. They include phrases like "Ain't getting up" and "I will not be moved."