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• Reflections: 7th Annual Gesa E. Kirsch and Center for Writing Studies Graduate Student Symposium

  May 4, 2016 9:45 am by Katherine Flowers
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  It was my pleasure to attend the 7^th annual Gesa Kirsch Graduate Symposium on April 21, 2016. This year’s symposium continued many of the traditions started in previous iterations, including graduate student panels, faculty panel chairs, an alumni keynote speaker, and a post-symposium happy hour. At the same time, everyone brought their unique perspectives, methods, data, and arguments to their presentations. In this recap blog post, I try to do their work justice.

   

  

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  The symposium opened with a panel titled “Communities and Spaces for Literacy Education and Rhetorical Agency,” chaired by Professor Lindsay Rose Russell. First, Kaia Simon shared some of her ethnographic research with Hmong women in her talk, “Fathers Teaching Daughters: Literacy that Changes Family Relationships.” For her participants, literacy can catalyze new kinds of relations and forms of agency. While Simon’s work focused on daughters’ experiences with their fathers, Maggie Shelledy’s research focused on the flip side, by examining how writing plays into one man’s interactions with his loved ones, including his daughter. In “If it Hadn’t Been for Writing, I think I would Have Lost my Mind”: Resilience, Love, and Writing in Prison,” she argued that “resilient dwelling” is one way that incarcerated people use writing and rhetoric to maintain relationships and their humanity. Prison writing programs and resilient dwelling can be important parts of incarcerated people’s lives, but Shelledy reminds us that ultimately they are not a solution to the prison’s ambient rhetoric. As Evin Groundwater began the final talk in the panel, he slyly signaled that his talk would be a little different than what had come before: “Enough with fathers, daughters, love, and literacy!”; it was time for “The Hegemonic Maintenance of Gaming Rhetorics of Space as White, Masculine, and Male.” And yet, as I listened to his fascinating talk about the spatialized rhetorics of outrage in contemporary video games like Call of Duty and Elder Scrolls, I was struck by the common threads of race, gender, and affect in all three presentations.

  

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  The second panel turned our attention from mostly extracurricular settings to the topic of “Navigating Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations, Writing Centers, and Classrooms.” Professor J. David Cisneros introduced the panelists and moderated the discussion. Maria Carvajal began with her archival research on “Change within the System: Felipe Ortego y Gasca and the National Council of Teachers of English.” The life and career of Ortego y Gasca (or Ortego, or D. Ortego…) emphasizes how fluid and malleable our professional identities and our field have been and can be: he opened up the American canon to Chicano/a writing, served on NCTE’s Task Force on Racism and Bias, and used Spanglish in his writing, well before the 1974 Resolution on Students’ Right to their Own Language. Logan Middleton’s presentation brought us back to the present, to the experiences and perspectives of deaf and hard of hearing students on campus. In “Writing Deafness: Negotiations of Composition, Signing, and Mediated Language,” he asked us to move beyond official policies and to consider anew, “What is our philosophy” about working with students with disabilities? I found his insights from a participant named Isabel illuminating (she frequents the Writers Workshop, and doesn’t find certain assistive technologies helpful), and his methods ingenious (video-taping his participants and their interpreters during interviews). Bruce Kovanen gave the final presentation. In addition to winning my “Best Slide Show” award of the day, Kovanen brought together two thorny disciplinary issues in “Writing Centers and the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” He argued that while there is a gulf between the Framework and writing centers, weaving the two together has the potential to make space for RAD writing center research that neither perpetuates the “special snowflake” myth nor goes too far down the road of correlating GPA to other variables.

  

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  In the afternoon, Professor Kim Hensley Owens of the University of Northern Arizona gave the keynote address: “In Lak’ech, the Chicano Clap, and Fear: A Partial Rhetorical Autopsy of Tucson’s Now-Illegal Ethnic Studies Class.” After mentally filing away her strategy of dividing the talk into three “movements” for future use, I sat back and listened to her analysis of what this class’s “tricultural curriculum” was like, how students responded, and how the state government intervened. As she examined the many kinds of reading, writing, rituals, and performances playing out in these Mexican American Studies classrooms, and their roots in critical pedagogy and the Farm Workers Movement, I realized that this case was about much more than what textbooks to assign or ban. In the final movement of her talk, she meticulously traced the In Lak’ech’s poem’s many iterations, translations, and adaptations, through to its widespread daily use in Tucson classrooms. She concluded with a consideration of Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of neplanta, and a question: How do we overcome the fear that can shut these programs down? By the end, I was torn: some people would surely be less afraid of this curriculum if they saw how it actually played out from the perspectives of Hensley Owens’ participants. At the same time, this kind of fear may not be a bug but a feature of a curriculum that poses a genuine challenge to white supremacy and education as usual.

  

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  Following the keynote, graduate students Donovan Bisbee, Annie Kelvie, and Katrina Kennett presented their research in an afternoon panel called “Public and Professional Writing.” Professor Eric Darnell Pritchard chaired and moderated this panel. In Donovan Bisbee’s talk, on “The Viability of Precedent: Social Movement Discourse and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he invited us to consider the rhetorical and material impact of Casey and an amicus curiae brief filed by 178 pro-choice organizations. He examined the curious fact that this brief’s writers engage in some of the same pro-life discourse as their adversaries, and what this might mean for how we understand the link between court cases and social change. Next, Annie Kelvie presented “Writing in the Religious Professions: A Case Study,” about one of the participants in her ethnographic study of progressive churches. Her portrayal of her participant’s embodied, digital, and collaborative rhetorical practices was so captivating that by the end of the talk several of us had followed Pastor Leah on Twitter. Katrina Kennett gave the final presentation, “Drawing into Relation: Teacher Planning Practices for Classroom Instruction.” Kennett reported findings from her study of how teachers plan, and theorized planning as a kind of making that involves drawing various resources and goals into relation. I found her analysis of how teachers voice future students and future selves particularly insightful.

  

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  Tom McNamara and Yu-Kyung Kang concluded the symposium with reflective presentations on their dissertations. After introductions by Professor Kelly Ritter, they each shared their experiences in graduate school, as well as the historical, familial, and professional forces that have shaped their trajectories. Both presenters emphasized how much chance is involved in our work, from the families we’re born into, to schools we go to, to the teachers and mentors we encounter, to the places we live and move to, to the timing of all of the above. I look forward to seeing how they continue to navigate these complexities after graduation, in new jobs at new universities in new cities.  

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