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Glad to see the Rhetoric Society of America leaders put out this Letter of Solidarity with the members of CCCC.

My letter to the National Council of Teachers of English re: their plan to dissolve CCCC

Dear colleagues, I write to you in shock and outrage over receiving news on social media this morning that the NCTE has plans to dissolve the CCCC. I have been attending the Cs, as we affectionately call it, over the past 18 years. I have reviewed conference proposals, I am a past recipient of both the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award and the Outstanding Book Award, and I have and am currently serving on the Outstanding Book Award committee. Like many other writing studies scholars, the Cs has been a site of intellectual community, mutual support, restorative scholarly conversation, and incredible career-shaping experiences for me over the years.

To learn about NCTE's plans on social media is appalling. That NCTE would consider dissolution of the Cs without so much as speaking directly to its members is an embarrassment.

I have heard that Cs might be absorbed into the College Section; as a writing and rhetoric scholar, I have never been a part of the College Section, but always found my home squarely in the Cs among other writing scholars. I am in the middle of a research project right now on the disciplinary importance of writing studies, its vulnerability to administrative cuts (within the university, I thought!), and how cuts and disregard for writing studies expertise makes general education vulnerable to infiltration from legislative agendas. NCTE will find itself collaborating with this trend, even leading it, should it procede with this plan.

Having served on the governing board of a different professional organization and conference, I am well aware of how exceedingly expensive it can be to host a conference. The astronomical gouging of hotel and conference center prices among many other factors I am sure makes it difficult to secure a financially viable annual conference. Yet the accessibility of the Cs has long made it an entry point for emerging scholars to find their footing and find their people. Cs launches careers. This plan will burn that bridge into academia for many.

I have heard that Cs officers were given less than two months to create a longterm budget plan. This window of time is insultingly small. Moreover, it is my understanding that the Cs Secretary Treasurer is the NCTE Executive Director, and that she has failed to attend the Cs conference or deliver reports to Cs members at the Cs business meetings for the past two years. Nor has she provided detailed budgets to Cs officers. Explain to me please how Cs officers are supposed to create a budget plan of any quality without this information?

I was scheduled to renew my NCTE membership next month as the new academic year begins - I will not be renewing my NCTE membership under any circumstances that does not include the CCCC.

Please respond to this message and to the substantive concerns of the scholars who have supported NCTE through their involvement in CCCC for decades.

Kendall

#cccc #conference on college composition and communication #academia #academic organizations #professional organizations #ncte

There is no more “state of the humanities” as such. There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled. There is no sense calling for independent or solitary action by something called “the humanities” when that category has been so thoroughly absorbed by concerted attacks on democratic governance, due process of law, rights to privacy, security, assembly, and expression. We are all humanists now.

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.

#what i'm reading #humanities #public education #democracy

Gift link

#what i'm reading #democracy #authoritarianism #losers

The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?

#what i'm reading #humanities

doggirlpaws

The spirit of Diogenes is alive and well

rowark

This is funny, obviously, but even if you don't go to the extreme of the example above, this is a separate seat for one person, with a back and 4 legs:

But it's not a chair. It's a bar stool.

This, however, are all chairs:

Each one is missing at least one component of the chair definition above.

So like... it's almost like strict definitions are exclusionary.

#definitions #facts of usage

Identification with others occurs before the first keystroke in a browser, rather than at the moment of interaction. The algorithms and programming, even when the user is not specifically identified or even online, predetermine the type of website that would be most fitting for each individual. The user is simultaneously active and passive in the identification process; active in searching for ideas and knowledge, but passive in the function of the algorithm that groups people together. Digital consubstantiality is an unconscious process, insofar as it is a neurotechnological process that occurs in the background of our cyborgian minds: the computer and networked server.

Aaron Hess, “You Are What You Compute (and What is Computed For You): Considerations of Digital Rhetorical Identification,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2014, p. 13

#what i'm reading #identification #drafts

Punk rock and its accoutrements—including the handmade, Xeroxed ‘zine—pass into history, replaced by Taylor Swift and Snapchat, or whatever.

Thinking about firing up this account again for use in my summer course on Rhetorics of Gender...

#judith butler #zines

The strike for a cost of living adjustment earlier this year galvanized students at nearly every single campus in the University of California’s 285,000-student system.

Thinking about how UC caved (because how else would they have functioned as a university?) and rehired the students they fired for a wildcat strike--thinking about this in light of ongoing graduate employees strike at the U of Michigan.

#strike #solidarity #graduate school

Writing is required to succeed in and eventually leave graduate school, writes Laura R. Micciche, yet Ph.D. students often don't receive enough support for this mostly invisible private work.

#writing #grad school #social distancing

In our latest dispatch, an English professor argues that plowing ahead with university reopening in the fall is akin to the Thatcherite mant

#covid 19

Lia Paradis envisions a professor’s typical day on campus come September.

And this is a vivid imaginative pair for the last post.

#social distancing #universities in the time of covid-19

Last Friday was National College Acceptance Day, the day when colleges traditionally ask students to plunk down their deposits for the next school year. Though many schools have extended that deadl…

This is really spot on.

#social distancing #universities in the time of covid-19

I remember being an undergraduate student and being put off by queer theory’s constant pointing out of homophobia and opening up of queer wounds. I understood that the world was anti-queer. Anti-me. I didn’t need queer theory to tell me the advertisement on my cereal box also wanted me dead. When I came across Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a grad student, I felt suddenly engaged with queer theory again. What can academia do to heal, to comfort, and to reform dominant understandings of the world into something that enables queer people to keep living?

Game Studies - Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect by Kara Stone

#what i'm reading #reparative reading #queer theory #hermeneutics of suspicion

A cross-campus virtual institute at ANU focussing on issues of gender and sexuality in both research and employment.

#zoom university #working from home

Students say that universities, despite their massive endowments and ongoing fundraising, are not meeting their basic needs as they continue their education in the midst of a pandemic.

#zoom university #strikes

Daniel Stanford discusses solutions for online teaching that may help save bandwidth, be more accessible to students, and create a unified online learning environment.

A nice little graph of alternatives to live meetings, in case you too can hardly hold one thing in your head at a time.

#zoom university

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