WPA Identities & Disability @dkenzie - Tumblr Blog

Rice, Theory, and Critique

A lot to talk about this week. I'll start with my initial reaction to the first piece.

Rice seems to fault touchstone WPA documents for not citing poststructuralist theory and for not giving more specifics. I even felt, at times, that he was suggesting that innovation can only go hand in hand with theory. He also decries language that is safe and incontrovertible. I think, though, that the difference between what seems safe and incontrovertible to us and what seems so outside our discipline(s) is worth considering here. Even the broad argument of the "Intellectual Work" document is neither safe or incontrovertible outside of composition, which is why so many WPAs rely on it to frame their work to outside constituencies. Further, "we" need documents with the weight of broader consensus and official endorsement behind them as tools for advocacy, and you don't reach that kind of consensus without language that, within the field, may seem relatively general.

I wonder if Rice is also brushing up against the challenge Banks and Alexander describe, that theories that are inherently meant for critique and disruption are difficult to incorporate into structures and activities that are inherently normalizing. Part of their response is that a WPA can be receptive to and supportive of instructors who bring queerness and queer issues into the classroom, even when the WPA doesn't take action directly. Maybe documents like the Outcomes Statement and "Intellectual Work" can be taken similarly; certain critical and social justice work is beyond its specific scope, but how they are enacted and what they allow or disallow has relevant implications.

Adler-Kassner, The Activist WPA

At the moment, I have more of a string of thoughtlets rather than a fully developed single post: Many of this semester's readings have been stories about WPAs or have been interested in changing stories about WPAs, which Adler-Kassner focuses on changing stories about writers and writing. I'm wondering what the relationship is between changing (or reframing) stories about writers and changing stories about WPAs. I suppose that by emphasizing the WPA as a local activist organizer around writing-related concerns, the WPA is necessarily repositioned as being more than (and have more than) a simple manager (apologies to Strickland). Adler-Kassner’s focus on principles also turns focus back toward the WPA and her positionality, as well. I'm also wondering about the connection between activist WPAing and WAC. Last week, I met with the faculty director of the agriculture communication program, who I am in touch with because I am judging a writing contest for Ag, but most of our conversation was about how Ag might work more with the Writing Lab and the English Department to better support student writing in Ag. It seems to me that, if something develops, those collaborations and alliances will be fruitful ground for shaping stories about writing instruction. I like that Adler-Kassner looks to activism outside academia, but I wonder how her model could be put in dialogue with scholarship on collaboration and interdisciplinarity within WAC. Finally, I’ll link to a recent news story, "Homeless Professor Protests Conditions of Adjuncts," which presents a different model for activism than what a WPA might enact directly. What is the WPA's relationship to this other kind of activism?

Administrative Desire

I was struck by word choice in Deb Dew's "Labor Relations: Collaring jWPA Desire": infatuation (110) dangerous desire (110) (and throughout, administrative vs. scholarly desire) debilitating (118) seduced (118) academically born again (118) zeal (118) attraction to danger (119) passion (119) writerly empowerment (119) By using such language, Dew foregrounds the strong affective and emotional dimensions to WPA work and professionalization, including allusions to sexuality, religion, and physical injury. I have felt administrative desire as I have continued to seek programmatic roles. I can also see a similar distinction to the one Dew recounts from her graduate experience in my peers, between those who are primarily compelled by scholarly desire and may apply for administrative positions late in their PhD work in order to be marketable and those who seek such work early and often and perhaps take longer to make time for publication. Clearly, Dew and others are interested in both producing traditional (ish) research that is connected to programmatic work and presenting programmatic work itself as a form of publication, both of which attempt to ammeliorate the dichotomy. So, what underlies administrative desire? An "attraction to danger," as Dew puts it? An interest in more macro-level and sustained facilitation of learning than is typical in a classroom? An interpersonal desire to work with people? A technocratic desire to work with mechanisms of curriculum and assessment? An idealistic desire to make change? Moreover, what are the consequences, dangerous or otherwise, of having that desire and to bringing it to our work?

A World without WPAs

The group seemed to get some mileage out of my question, what would the profession be like without tenure? I have another "What If?" scenario we can tackle if we have time. A current issue for writing centers is that many of them have to compete now with for-profit writing tutoring services such as Smarthinking, which, in the worst case scenario, could endanger the existence of locally-based, brick-and-mortar writing centers. My question is this: Can you imagine a future where most writing programs and centers are online and are not even run locally out of the university? How likely do you think this is? If it happened, what would the work of the composition or the WPA be? Who would we work for, and how would our identities change? This seems like a good time to ask the question, in light of Strickland's argument that WPA has been central the the work and identity of the composition professional going back to the founding of the CCCC.

Interdependence and Rhetoricity

Taken together, “Death of an Adjunct” by Daniel Kovalik and “Death of a Professor” by L. V. Anderson show how easily individual experiences can be coopted into larger narratives, even for good causes. Margaret Mary Vojtko was easily read as a victim, even though the truth (or at least a more thoroughly researched version of events) appears to be more complicated. Anderson makes a case that, the real problem of adjuncts’ working conditions aside, Vojtko had a degree of responsibility for her conditions, and I was struck by the reasons why. When asked about planning for old age, Vojtko “said she thought everything would go on as it always had,” leaving Anderson to conclude that “[s]he treated the broken furnace like her eyesight and her mobility—a disability to circumvent” (10, 12 in PDF). From this account, Vojtko appears to be afraid of change and unwilling to fully confront her embodiment and her need for others. I immediately thought of theories of interdependence prevalent in disability studies, articulated by Jay Dolmage in his recent book Disability Rhetoric:

“We are powerfully conditioned to cordon off our own bodies and minds. But perhaps rhetoric itself can help to make sense of this interdependence: we can understand the rhetorical utterance as something shaped not only by an author or speaker. Maybe the same can be said of the body.” (113)

Dolmage goes on:

“We are, only because language, rhetoric, and embodiment are communally not normal, not “able.” This essential imperfection often means that we do need others, or we need access to other modes and discourses of being, and this makes our existence essentially prosthetic.” (115)

Dolmage also comments that it “becomes dangerous to view prosthesis purely as a metaphor or trope—we can overwrite the real experience of people with disabilities,” while at the same time, “we also come to understand, through the shifting cultural value of prosthetics, that the material and rhetorical always interact” (116). His key example here is veterans, who after WWII were expected to overcome, while after Vietnam came to signify a social problem.

Similarly, reading WPA narratives “purely as a metaphor or trope,” we risk overwriting real experience with the hope that we can understand cultural values. For Deb Dew and many others, WPA work, like prosthesis, reveals ongoing interaction between the material and the rhetorical. She writes that “the company of others naturally shapes and determines, enables and constrains administrative production” (125). This embodied interdependence between human stakeholders and discursive and non-discursive modes of a WPA’s “material and intellectual responsibilities,” (125) and experiential narratives are one way of getting at these interrelations; this goes for experiences of WPAs as well as adjuncts.

#interdependence #jay dolmage #deb dew #adjuncts

One More Thing: Race and Gender

I meant to add in my last post that it's very interesting that one of the commenters on the article about black UCLA law students refered to "these women" with faulty psychology as if to refer to the whole group, even though both women and men were featured prominently in the video.

#race #gender

Being Black in Higher Ed

A Facebook friend, who is an Assistant Professor in rhet/comp, posted this video and article over the weekend in which black students at UCLA Law School discuss their experiences.

The video is called “33” because there are only 33 black students out of roughly 1100. These students describe feeling isolated, not being listened to, having to represent their communities and racial groups, and having to constantly worry about how they will be interpreted. I imagine a similar video could be made by black assistant professors, but seeing the video just after reading Craig and Perryman-Clark got me thinking about the different politics of disclosure and critique faced by students vs. faculty. Yes, Craig and Perryman-Clark were authorized to discuss their perspectives in the WPA Journal, but they also did not cover their experiences at their current institutions much, focusing instead on their time as graduate students.

As with many articles about controversial topics, the comments themselves are interesting, running the gamut from calling on the administration to support these students more to describing this isolation as great and noble. Since my last post was on individualism, I zeroed in on comments that essentially blamed the victim:

“Maybe if these woman [sic] stopped going through every day thinking of themselves as ‘black students’ representing a group and just thought of themselves as students, a lot of the tension would dissipate. I think the conflict is somewhat self imposed when your psychology is ‘I'm different and I need to be on guard’ because the non-minority students will pick up on it and react accordingly. Then the whole thing feeds on itself.” –Joel P.

“Much of what they're saying is based on an assumption of what they think other people think about them. This idea that they are ‘representatives’ of the black community also seems self-imposed. While I don't doubt that UCLA’s law school can benefit from more black students, those there now can't bow to adversity. When I was in law school, the black population represented the vast minority of students, as is the case with almost all law schools in this country. We sat front-and-center in class, were always prepared, and stuck together. Law school is a very difficult process, with the key word being ‘process.’ Some of these students simply sound fragile, and their fragility isn't exclusive to race. There are plenty of non-black students who experience the various pressures of law school.” –Cornelius J.

So speaking up is treated as complaining or whining, and not being able to just take it and move on makes them “fragile.” Because other individuals have persevered in their situation, they have no excuse. Moreover, their identity is treated as an aspect of their own “psychology” that they can choose to change. This reaction resonated with an argument I’ve seen against the existence of ADHD, that people struggling with ADHD are just too invested in their identity as someone with ADHD and they should just stop. It’s interesting to hear a similar argument when the identified problem is others’ perceptions and the identity in question has a clear visual signifier.

Individuals, Individualism, and Diversity

A key idea in disability studies (DS) and disability activism is that disability is not the purely individual phenomenon it is often treated as, to either be treated medically or overcome through hard work and perseverance. Individuals are not disabled merely by bodily impairment, but by social stigma and material infrastructure. At the same time, another important effort in DS is to draw attention to individual experiences and voices that have been rendered invisible or illegible. I see the same dual need to move the spotlight both off of and onto individuals in our recent readings.

In the coda to Chapter 3 in Promise and Peril, for example, Thomas Miller characterizes what all the narratives in the chapter have in common in order to seek a broader meaning (82), and Jeanne Gunner urges the authors to go a step beyond their individual experiences to consider how those experiences are “symptoms of cultural systems,” forces such as “the troubling social agendas that writing programs serve, the complicity of full-time faculty in unfair labor practices,” and “the instability of ‘solutions’” (87-8). Asao Inoue draws attention to multiple readings of the harm inflicted on some students through writing assessments: “Do we see the failures produced by linguistic diversity, by the judgments we place on other Englishes, as problems created by the assessment technologies . . . as problems that students primarily face . . . or as student deficit? Or do we see these problems as curricular problems that demand more courses in order to teach to these issues?” (136). In other words, is the problem with the individual or the system, and, if the latter, what part of the system? Grimm’s critique of the individualistic bootstraps narrative eliding systemic problems in writing center discourse, (21) Holt’s use of Bruffee to theorize her isolation and search for community (33), and Craig and Perryman-Clark’s problematizing of individual “intentions” in conversations about race and offensiveness probably deserve a follow-up post. For now, I’ll point out that this these points about the problems with individualism coincide with a need to keep individual uniqueness visible, as calls to celebrate diversity focus too much on “common ground,” (Alexander 167) as opposed to approaches that take individual difference seriously in an attempt to more deeply understand diversity. (McBeth 131) As we read more experiential narratives from WPAs, I also feel an ongoing tension between wanting to extrapolate “big picture” meanings from the lot and wanting to dig into each narrative’s uniqueness that could otherwise be glossed over.

#diversity #individualism

Enos & Borrowman, The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration

I’m not sure what to make of the ending of Megan Fulwiler’s narrative, “Notes from a New WPA.” The author who started her piece by calling herself, among other things, a “physician,” the “cure,” and the “salve” (92) ends it by describing a sudden diagnosis of leukemia that meant chemotherapy and hospitalization. While away from work, Fulwiler finds that many of the uphill battles she had been fighting were won. What are we to make of these victories? Do we take her stated lesson at face value, “that change happens slowly and in stages but that it does happen”? Was the program better off without her? Does sympathy beget political capital? If these interpretations seem strange, stranger still is Ed White’s: “If Megan Fulwiler were writing fiction . . . her development of leukemia would serve as a symbol of the devastating effects of putting one’s heart into an impossible job too early in one’s career” (130). It’s notable that White overlooks the success and hope in Fulwiler’s ending and instead uses her illness to cast the narrative as “what happens when new and energetic faculty members discard conventional wisdom and take a jWPA job” (130). Maybe the real takeaway is that we shouldn’t let illness carry the symbolic weight it so often does in narrative; sometimes it just happens. I mean . . . I’m pretty sure you can’t get leukemia from being overworked.

Illness and disability as literal experience blur with their use as metaphor in Margaret Weaver’s chapter, “Identity Theft of a Writing Center Director: The New Art of Academic Punishment.” Weaver describes the unexpected loss of her directorship and her subsequent “fear of fluidity” the way that some describe traumatic accidents that leave them physically impaired and struggling with new, uncomfortable identity labels. She even describes herself as “immobilized” by this change (282). The trauma so affected her actual physical health that her doctor mandated a two-week medical leave. Interestingly, Weaver’s perceived loss looks like an opportunity for growth to one of her colleagues, “like a chicken hatching, moving beyond writing center scholarship into the larger discipline of comp/rhet” (286). Writing center scholarship is infantilized; taken a step further, are those who choose a lifelong career in writing centers developmentally challenged?

#cancer #writing center #ed white

Hall, The Academic Self

The Academic Self by Donald Hall is overall a very positive book, meant to empower young and prospective faculty to develop effective habits, discover self-efficacy, and find the value in all aspects of their work (yes, “even administration”). Underneath the optimism in this self-help book are the sometimes-stated negatives that would require this “help.” Hall mentions “paralysis” several times (6, 16, 56, 58) as well as “isolation” and “inertia,” which are contrasted with “intellectual movement and professional energy” (56). As choice figures prominently in the book, Hall refers to “potentially debilitating anxiety about the consequences and sustainability” in his discussion of the self-help conversation (4). Hall also describes the negative version of self-consciousness as a “terrible state of social and professional incapacitation” that may require “psychiatric attention;” (5) more succinctly, he quotes Carlyle as calling self-consciousness a “disease.” As Hall further discusses academic work, “functionality” is pitted against “dysfunctionality” (64).

Recurrent metaphors of being physically immobilized appear alongside literal references to psychiatric pathology. While Hall may want to reach out to academics who already feel they are in this position, he seems to more directly address those earlier in their careers who see it as a possible future for themselves; he is addressing fear and anxiety about injury and breakdown, and his advice is preventative medicine. Indeed, the path to a positive selfhood and working life is steeped in the language of medical cure: “Burnout is avoidable and even reversible” (55).

So, what does this mean, and why does it matter? If metaphors of physical injury and impairment become a pattern in academics’ (and, soon, WPAs’) anxieties about the future and lived experience, that pattern is important to understanding the cultural imaginary that informs their narratives and self-understanding. When literal references to physiological distress appear, they become touchpoints between imagined and material reality. Moreover, the way we imagine illness and disability impacts the place we make for people with disabilities in our society and institutions. Where this thread will take me through subsequent readings remains to be seen.

Purpose Statement

This journal will take a disability studies lens to readings assigned in ENGL 696: Emerging WPA Identities at Purdue University, as well as reflect on other relevant experiences and observations. I doubt many readings will address disability specifically, but instead I'll be looking for:

Use of medicalized language

Constructions of normalcy, lack/deficiency, and independence/dependence/interdependence

Tropes that resonate with disability narratives (cure, overcoming, etc.)

Embodiment in relation to subjectivity, ways of knowing, etc.

Places where the interests of disabled writers or WPAs or insights from disability studies might add to a conversation

First post is on the way.

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