Researcher Profile
I was Rosa Parks and the Statue of Liberty. Our elementary school plays were unconventional (unless as a future mother to elementary school students I learn otherwise). I believe, though, that the enacting of such prominent figures of justice and deep democratic concern for all peoples was not lost on me even as a child. This same concern propelled me through an undergraduate degree in literary studies in which I analyzed the plight of characters subject to oppressive social circumstances. And in my dual studies in philosophy I looked for theories that helped explicate the larger systems and positionalities of subjects within them that nurtured and developed such circumstances. It was not until my first semester in a master’s program in English with a concentration in literature that I met Victor Villanueva and Bob Eddy who helped me initially see that all I was doing in Lit was rhetorical analysis of racism and sexism. Combined with problems and possibilities I saw as a FYC TA, I began to understand the Rhetoric and Composition was the place for me.
This conversion narrative, as they’ve been termed in many instances of Rhet Comp scholarship, is not at all uncommon, but it is indeed what brought me to seek a doctorate at SU’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program. Still, my time at Washington State University with Victor and Bob, as well as Kristen Arola, Patty Ericsson, and Barbara Monroe did much to cultivate what I am beginning to formulate as my scholarly project. It seemed to happen through a series of accidents, really—if I hadn’t taken Barbara’s “Rhetoric of the Contact Zone” class my second semester, if patty’s zeal for participation in our professional community at every level hadn’t been so contagious, if Victor hadn’t provided me with a language for describing the serious economic disparity I’ve witnessed first hand, and if Bob hadn’t exposed us to so many works in composition that sought capture through practical pedagogies a way to deal with social injustice and attempt to reform the university as an institution from within, I don’t know where I would be now. (Though I’m fairly certain a lack of passion and particular skills would have barred me from any kind of successful career in Literature.)
In our Theories and Methodologies of Teaching English 101 course, Bob consistently begged us to consider the racial histories and politics that inform the writing classroom. We read Rochelle rock’s Sista Talk and Adam Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. We thought about the material conditions of our students (mostly white, middle class) in comparison to the situation of writing classrooms in other parts of our country. And we asked “How? How can we use the space of the classroom to help our privileged students consider the cost of their own privilege on others whose perspectives are not readily available to us?” This question and the work of Paulo Freire, whose liberatory pedagogy left me feeling righteous and excited for when I’d teach for the first time in the Spring of 2007. But when I got to that classroom and found my students so resistant and unwilling or unable to challenge their own assumptions and positionalities, I became angry. Once, I screamed at one poor student “That’s the kind of racist comment that will get you kicked out of my classroom!” Another time during a conversation about Du Bois, I called my students out, exasperated: “I get the feeling that most of you think that people are, at any given time, where they are because they chose to be.” They nodded in incautious agreement. “Why would my mother choose to be a crack whore?” I practically screamed. One of my scholarly projects was born. It has since been fascinating to me how we position ourselves as teachers in the classroom, and how we can invite students of the dominant social categories into the conversation about oppression and social injustice in meaningful ways that maintains the dignity of everyone involved while not yielding to a bourgeois practice of niceness. I see conflict as healthy in a classroom and something we need to learn to artfully cultivate and navigate. I have also since learned that we need to be suspect when classrooms seem to be going too well. These events have led to one of my upcoming exam areas in Critical Pedagogy and these questions I’ve posed will doubtless be a source of lifetime contemplation, scholarship and growth.
In Barbara’s seminar we read Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which spoke well to my difficulties described above. We also read Scott Lyon’s “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” and Bizzell’s “Rationality as Rhetorical Sovereignty at the Barcelona Disputation, 1263.” In addition to having read Bootstraps and Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes” for Bob’s class, these works taken together helped me to conceive of a fundamental problem at the center of my new work—whom did the content of my teaching actually serve? Whose writing was I teaching, professing to be correct? Out of this class was born my fascination with the politics of discourse. I have yet to really flesh out the scope of this project, but I have some of my preliminary projects and interests down. For Iswari Pandey’s class on contemporary rhetorical theory I wrote an analysis of what we mean when we use some of the most basic terms of this field: English, Basic Writing, and Academic Language. What I found is that these terms, as evidenced in Parks’ analysis in of the STROL debates in Class Politics, actually convey much more about power than they do about language. They function to create ominous and unstable communities of membership, and more often, exclusion. I see it as an essential part of the commitment to justice in rhetoric and composition work to remain true to our acknowledgement of the epistemic and ontological centrality of language and cultivate the best practices possible in our classrooms given the diverse literacies and languages of our students. This is another problem I see as inherent in the work I do as a teacher and scholar.
The third primary area of my research, and incidentally what will be my major exam area, is that of technology and literacy. In Bob’s class one of my esteemed peers suggested in conversation one day that idea of using MySpace in the classroom. Thinking back now it seems like such a simple moment that could have just as easily passed with my taking no notice, but it didn’t. I was an avid MySpacer myself and sought any opportunity to connect with my students on a personal level; so I tried it. This became the substance of my first two conference presentations, one at the Eastern Oregon Rhetoric Conference and the other at the C’s in 2008. The project also served as my portfolio paper for my Master’s degree and my writing sample for Syracuse University. Combining aspects of my other two research areas, in my students’ work (mostly reading response) on MySpace I saw alternative forms of discourse and prominent themes of racism and sexism that went unspoken in the primary work of the classroom. I saw a sense of abandon that made me question how students conceived of audience differently in online social spaces. I saw a building community that was absent from the community. In essence I saw possibilities, challenges, and a severely under-researched space of literacy.
Continuing my interest here was a class I taught for Upward Bound at the University of Idaho. The deft with which my first generation college student, or even first generation American in some cases, students of color from low-income families picked up the skills of writing and creating in digital spaces as we created a magazine and website with the Adobe Creative Suite seemed to complicate previous scholarship I’d read in which issues of access and ideological design in technology in effect shut down the conversation about the potential of technology to serve as a means to social justice. In our magazine these high school students explored questions of racism in material distribution, domestic violence, homelessness, the energy crisis, and even MySpace. They represented things that mattered to them in video, graphic design, podcasts, and traditional writing. I saw in their work an enthusiasm, and even hunger, for the chance at expression outside of the realm school typically insists is “fit” or “right.” This led to my second appearance at CCCC and as I’ve already expressed, my major area of scholarly inquiry. Among other things I’d like to investigate how we can reconcile problems in technology with its possibilities, how to work with teachers who represent the more Luddite among us as they begin to incorporate technology into their classrooms, how to work with those who still refuse, and how various technologies facilitate or silence the very diverse and politicized literacies of an increasingly diverse body of students. As I continue reading and growing here in the CCR program, these questions are also expanding to ask questions about service learning and community literacy, and I seek a dissertation and career that will enact these questions and values—but lets get through coursework first, yes?
Although I describe specific incidents as happy accidents that occasioned to fashion me into the scholar I see myself becoming, I must admit that a lot of these projects were a long time coming out of my own biography. My already alluded to mother’s (and father’s actually) addiction, my budding literacy, my need to rely on school and other communities during my formative years and my witness of things unsavory and unjust and just plain painful as a kid helped plant these seeds within me. Role models like a woman who stood up against a machine of racial political when she was already tired enough, migration stories that painting this nation, my home, as a place for gathering together and assembling of new and brighter families and opportunities were narratives I needed just to survive. I had no way of knowing then just how important these stories would be or how far they could take me.
If every scholar has one central project or questions that they spend their career thinking about, I want mine to be one that falls on the left side of the rhetorical spectrum I’ve identified. I want to know all the ways we can expand the means of and meaning of knowledge and authority such that we can expand the material realities of who has access to and can produce it. I want to work in a field that values many contributions from many voices with many methodologies. I want to see the problems and multiplicity and live in the ruins of it all. I recently came across one of the most beautiful quotes I’ve ever read. It was Michael Eric Dyson who wrote: “Social Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.” Composition and Rhetorical Studies for me is like hearing the language of love in the most unlikely of places, and maybe even learning and teaching how it’s spoken.
