On October 27, Maggie Shelledy, Annie Kelvie, and María Carvajal shared some of their work in progress at a data session at the Center for Advanced Studies. The session was facilitated by Dr. Jonathan Alexander (visiting from UC Irvine), attended by faculty and graduate students, and sponsored by the Center for Writing Studies. The presentations represented a range of field sites and methods, but what they shared was a commitment to illuminating how people practice rhetorical agency. Furthermore, each scholar focused on writers who do not always get credit for their rhetorical savvy: church members, formerly incarcerated college students, and first-year writing students who use Spanglish.
Annie Kelvie opened the session by giving us a glimpse into a planning meeting at a progressive, Protestant church. In the course of reading and responding to a draft of a text for an upcoming church service, her participants negotiate what to do, both rhetorically and morally. For example, after hearing a benediction that includes the phrase, “Let us affirm God’s kingdom by not missing a single cry of ‘I can’t breathe,” one member inquires, “Are we focusing on justice or are we focusing on race?” It is a good question, and Annie’s data showed that writers in religious settings are well aware of and well equipped to address such questions. Dr. Alexander also highlighted the significance of genre in the data, and of how particular genres—like the benediction—can create both openings and obstacles to creating meaning.
Next, María Carvajal shared excerpts from two interviews with Spanglish users at Illinois. These writers’ self-reflections make it clear that they do not use Spanglish in a random, rote, or remedial manner. Spanglish is instead a rhetorical resource that writers may draw on, depending on the topic, audience, and other aspects of the situation. As one of her participants put it, “It’s a cool in-between language because it connects two worlds very effectively,” and it can play a role in academic writing, as well as interactions with friends and family. Dr. Alexander remarked on the rhetorical awareness involved, and Dr. Deborah Brandt posed a question: where do these students get their definitions of Spanglish? Indeed, between and even within each interview, their definitions of Spanglish vary, from a cognitive ability, to the practice of crossing between English and Spanish, to a language system in its own right, to a political act. María’s work is timely as our field attempts to navigate questions of code switching, multilingualism, translingualism, and students’ right to their own language.
In the session’s final act, Maggie Shelledy explicitly raised the issue of rhetorical agency in her work with formerly incarcerated college students, some of whom are still attending college. In her data excerpt, when she asked one participant how he has changed over time, he responded with an extended narrative that moved from his adolescence, to a tense encounter at his current college campus, to the nature of the interview setup itself. Specifically, he pointed to the fact that he still prefers not to sit with his back to the entrance or exits, and that he “pays attention to things like that, always,” but that he also believes “there’s certain things you have to turn on and off” as you change environments, including the environment of an interview. Maggie’s data, with what Dr. Alexander called its “lively” narratives of rhetorical deliberation and action, revealed the problems with certain myths about incarcerated people, such that they are destined for social death, or dependent on higher education alone for agency.
Ultimately, I left the session with ideas for my own teaching and research, and renewed appreciation for my colleagues and their work.