Realizing Diversity as an “Excitable Utterance”

Introductory Bio

Susan Miller is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Utah. She has directed writing there, at Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her books include Rescuing the Subject: An Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, which won the Journal of Advanced Composition Best Book award and has been re-published with new materials by Southern Illinois University Press. She wrote Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, which won that JAC Best Book prize, the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy prize for best theoretical book and the National Council of Teachers of English/CCCC Best Book award. Her Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Ordinary Writing was named a Choice Best Academic Book and also shared the National Council of Teachers of English/CCCC Best Book award as one of two books that have twice received or shared this award. She has most recently published Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric and The Norton Book of Composition Studies.

She has been a University of Utah Bennion Public Service Professor, has served as academic advisor to the Board of a Salt Lake Jail literacy initiative, "Booked," and serves as Permanent Advisor to Salt Lake Community College's Community Writing Center. She has chaired a University of Utah Tanner Lecture and Utah's College of Humanities Committee on Gender. She has served as a member the Conference on College Composition and Communication Executive Committee, its Nominations Committee, and the James Berlin Dissertation Prize Committee. She also chaired the first Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association Division on the Teaching of Writing, has twice chaired the MLA Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition, and has served twice as a member of the MLA Delegate Assembly.

Her teaching has focused on first-year composition and on initiating a range of courses in new graduate-level programs in rhetoric/composition. She also teaches the History of the Book in collaboration with the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, leads a creative writing workshop for university and community medical professionals, and sponsors a national summer writing retreat for doctors.


Blog Entry

I once taught an undergraduate whose legal research (she’s a lawyer now) analyzes the paradoxical results of legal exceptions to hearsay rules. Contrary to the usual dismissal of hearsay evidence, in domestic violence cases “excited utterances” (in the US, less clearly called “excitable speech”) are accepted as factual. In other words, the system--police and judges who process these events--automatically apply to them the scenarios of Law and Order scripts, which regularly portray fearful battered women who “won’t speak up,” or who will instead readily lie to make a point. So police and courts act on excited utterances (“He said he would blow my head off!”) that are often precisely “excited,” provoked, rhetorical statements that are treated legally as “truth,” completely apart from the larger relational contexts that produce them. This requirement, to accept excitable speech as fact, enforces a letter of the law that may destroy family relationships by casting people with complicated histories and many possible futures as the characters of a simple made-for-TV story. As teachers who highlight the nuances of language and its always-approximate constructions of realities, we notice this denial of rhetorical credibility to women, as to many other groups. Their language is often disenfranchised by a normative deafness that reads what we say through already expected identity politics.

I have also regretted excited utterances in my own teaching. This same student recently told me how she shared something I said in her class as an example of such political assumptions during a campus job interview. She told her hosts that in my literacy studies course, she had enthusiastically warmed to the class’s presumed purpose, thinking it would be teaching (at least partially) how to correct the language and thus improve the lives of the illiterate. When I began the course that semester by asking about literacy practices in the students’ hometowns, she replied, “In my school, I was the only one who ever read a book, or watched PBS, or kept up with news that wasn’t farm reports, or ever read fiction other than romances or mysteries. I was the only person who went to the one Shakespeare play.”
She then told her approving job interview hosts, “And she [referring to me] listened closely, thought a minute, and said, “Isn’t that a sort of fascist attitude toward your neighbors?” She met the job interviewers’ gasps (“You poor thing”) with the following response: “I was crushed. But I went home and thought about it a lot. She was right.”

It’s not much fun to realize that students often forget our names before the next term or that they so vividly recall words we don’t want repeated, ever, certainly never out of context and without explanation. My remembered “sort of fascist” phrase from long ago grated on my ears now—I was immediately defensive and righteously worried about my permanent record. But I also imagined that surely I had never again said anything like that to a student. In fact, I probably had, over time, learned caution about my vocabulary (if that is the test of never again saying “anything like that”). But juxtaposing her legal research results with this vivid anecdote, I can’t be so sure now.

On reflection, I understand better the intensity of my classroom response and its place in all my teaching about and through diversity. Like others writing in this blogging series, I am deeply marked by my childhood experience of diversity in maybe the world’s most foundationally complicated city, Washington, D.C. My thesaurus’s treatment of that word, diversity, includes the city’s local facts in evidence since its plotting in 1800: The term has always embodied range, variety, mixture, miscellany, and assortment, the word’s alternatives.

Washington, DC is a special place prescribed by the US Constitution, a “District of Columbia,” made for a federally collected, predominantly transient population. This national space was surveyed by an African American and planned by a French recruit to the Revolution. Refugees first populated it. Later and still, temporary residents have joined them in work that involves regularly scheduled arrivals and often-permanent departures after military, judicial, congressional, and executive assignments for the nation. Paradoxically, the relatively small contingent of detached civilians like my family and me experience such shifting circumstances as entirely normal. We are less surprised by differences than by similarities. Washington, DC is only rarely thought of as a place of original affiliations, or of a unified city spirit. Few temporary residents and visitors notice that it doesn’t have an unadulterated “image.”

Obviously, all of us under the guidance of institutional “diversity” have in some measure felt the demands of similar fluctuations. We have realized that similarities are as nuanced as differences, and that monolithic ethnic, racial, regional, sexual, religious, or for that matter, disciplinary identities are bygone fictions that cannot be retrieved. But these have also not yet been entirely replaced in assured ways. And even without noting these instabilities within ourselves, which are incrementally exposed by new biological and historical information, nor attending to new methods of posing and answering questions about identity, we have cooperatively and passively followed many dictionaries by thinking diversity is achieved as “variety”—as it is defined in a dictionary, as in one example, “a city of great cultural diversity.”

That same dictionary also separately defines the term as “social inclusiveness,” what I take to be the energy attached to the word in our institutions--CCCC and a larger cultural phenomenon, post-secondary education. But social inclusiveness is double-edged. The phrase attaches itself to separate, excluded groups that appear in the completion of this dictionary’s definition as follows: “ethnic variety [and] socioeconomic and gender variety, in a group, society, or institution.”

Dictionary “diversity” further acknowledges that the word implies “discrepancy.” In this closing dance step, the definition gets down: Diversity is “a difference from what is normal or expected.” Diversity is not entirely, with us, or with anyone, a “socially inclusive,” liberal acceptance of “the Other.” The sources of institutionalized diversity prevent it from being a surprising historic achievement that we can individually and collectively claim. Laws have mandated such acceptance, and people well-schooled in reason and generosity enacted that mandate. Its irrefutable evidence of our humanity as teachers visibly cooperates with the positions and projects that colleagues writing this blog about diversity have, thank goodness, imagined and enacted. The formerly praise-worthy idea of “tolerance” has quickly become uncomfortable for women and many others, who now assume we contribute to a normal, expected variety, and not as “tolerated” interlopers.

That is, diversity is not now a halcyon dream without successful, hard won, perpetual enactments. But by virtue of its built-in, often nurtured, “discrepancies,” it remains problematic. My obviously well-intentioned student enrolled in a literacy studies course that immediately put her in touch with her individuality (and thereby with evaluative convictions about those who were not meeting what she assumed were still institutionally expected, “educated,” norms).

As her teacher, I immediately expressed my “own” opinion about her individuality and her expectation. I asserted that categorizing others makes Others of us. Both of us ignored an obvious premise, that if we are to rewrite institutional structures and improve their results, we need relationships constituted by interactions with difference, unmediated by evaluative beliefs about superior and inferior cultural norms. Yet in most instances, we instead perceive language uses, sources of authority, preferred entertainments, and the aspirations of others as “not ours,” and we rank their significance or importance to us. We still occupy a mainland constituted by numerous accessible spaces of privilege that are nonetheless surrounded by discrete islands of difference and hierarchy.

This is to worry again about Ann Frank’s adolescent and ultimately deadly belief that people are (all) really good at heart. Experience teaches us that both insiders and outsiders are capable of sexism, racism, and especially of unacknowledged classism that encourages us to “treat” with tolerance and lessons those who are outside what we take to be our indispensable boundaries. Yet as my student’s mature legal research argues, we, and “socially inclusive” diversity itself also have a rhetorical identity well apart from “excited utterances.” Our shared interests across many diverse groups can determine the elections, curricular choices, supported research, and community projects of our organizations. Obviously, those interests are themselves always shifting, rhetorically selected, ways to form relationships with each other.

Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 2006; Jesse Stuart's, The Thread That Runs So True: A Mountain School Teacher Tells His Story, 1950; and Lisa Delpit's article, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children," (1988), represent a few suggested titles on diversity that reflect some of the reading and writing for this blog post.

“To Be Real”

Introductory Bio

Joseph Janangelo is immediate past President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (wpacouncil.org) and associate professor of English at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches courses in composition, theory, and visual rhetoric. His publications include Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs (with Kristine Hansen) and Theoretical and Critical Perspectives on Teacher Change. Joe's articles have appeared in such journals as College Composition and Communication, College English, Journal of Teaching Writing, Rhetoric Review, and WPA: Writing Program Administration. A longtime volunteer tutor for children living at Chicago House (a residence for families impacted by HIV/AIDS) and for adults incarcerated at Chicago's correctional facilities, Joe has often seen evincing support for some of the ideas and ideals that get called "diversity." In this blog, Joe and his friend Professor Doug Hesse debate that contested and mercurial concept.


Blog Entry

I begin with the saying: “difference is the difference that makes a difference.” Of those words, we might wonder: what makes a difference for whom and to what? In asking such questions, our work both flounders and flourishes.

To me, diversity is not a thing; it’s not a SIG, a journal’s special issue, or a specific initiative. I suggest configuring diversity as viral--everywhere at once--multiply situated (comprising ethnicity, gender, sexuality, faith, experience, age, and aspirations/inhibitions) and peripatetic--always traveling, visiting, planting, threatening and, for some, behaving parasitically.

As teachers, we might ask: if diversity is so complicated, then how can we be inclusive while getting things done? One way is to visit its interests on every committee–to ask as we work--who might see or have problems working and living with the ideas, approaches or artifacts under discussion? That could mean seeing the difficulties, complications, and resentments within the alleged “opportunities.”

Two texts inform this view. One is Karen H. Anthony’s Designing for Diversity: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Architectural Profession. Anthony discusses architecture—the spaces where we live and work—and notes that most structures are made for one kind of user, the able-bodied heterosexuals. She warns that “ironically, unless drastic changes are made, the profession will likely continue to alienate those diverse members that it needs most” (181).

Another text is Harry C. Denney’s Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring. Denny describes writing centers as sites of diversity in action and in partial hiding, because identities are developed across perceptions of race and ethnicity, class, sex and gender, and nationality. Admirably self-critical, Denny writes that he “tend[s] toward warm and fuzzy conversations about diversity that raise consciousness but rarely upset or threaten—especially myself” (33). Admitting privilege/vulnerability as a white gay man, he wants students and tutors to work together by “parlaying shared experiences to new contexts, rhetorical conversations, and academic genres.” He writes, “The trick to pulling off that sort of conversation is honoring experience without the student coming to feel objectified or patronized” (79).

Seeding Change

Anthony's and Denny’s work resonated when Joyce Middleton asked me, “What experiences with the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) have informed your concept of diversity?” At CWPA, our members, Executive Board, and leaders work to make our organization more open to the needs of the staff, faculty, and student constituencies we serve (in both a responsive and anticipatory sense). Our work includes:

Seeking and Valuing Intake
WPA continually experiments with ways of learning about, and acting on, members’ concerns. Our conference features a session called “WPA Listens,” where members discuss their mentoring needs and volunteer their expertise. In other sessions called “Meet the Executive Board,” members raise their concerns with 4-5 Board members in informal conversations. We also use idea cards (a practice started by past President Shirley Rose) so that members’ needs can immediately direct our organizational actions.

Focusing on the Work, Not the Title

Much WPA scholarship takes university models as tacit design concepts. Jeff Klausman
(Whatcom Community College) and I are currently conducting interviews to learn about WPA work at community-colleges which are often undervalued sites of creativity and instruction.

Mentoring Diversity

Since 2009, Tim Dougherty (a graduate student at Syracuse University), Michele Eodice (immediate past president of the International Writing Centers Association), Duane Roen (Arizona State University, Vice-President CWPA), Sheldon Walcher (Roosevelt University) and I have collaborated on “The WPA Mentoring Project.” As co-chairs, we approach mentoring from multiple perspectives. Recognizing that our members are multiply situated, we don’t assume that one definition or approach fits many, much less all, graduate students, adjunct and full-time teachers, Writing Center Directors, and WPAs.

To invite conversation, we circulate online surveys (designed by Sheldon) to get membership input about things WPA needs to change or improve. We then post our findings at http://www.wpacouncil.org/mentoring_report. This post helps us to find members' suggestions for organizational action. So far this has resulted in redesigning signature events (for example, the WPA Breakfast is becoming more interactive than ever), and there are more member-driven sessions at the WPA Conference. Another strategy we use is to thread inclusive comments into our pre-conference institutes. In 2008, WPA offered an institute to help teachers address the needs of English Language Learners. In 2009, we invited Doug Hesse, Susanmarie Harrington and Duane Roen to lead an institute to help experienced WPAs achieve mid-career renewal.

Lest this sound like unfettered good news, let’s remember Anthony’s idea that without major change, organizations “continue to alienate those diverse members that it needs most” (181). Those “warm and fuzzy conversations” (33) may leave people “feeling objectified or patronized” (Denny 79). My hope is that we can use any “progress” as provocations for more change.

The following ideas are on my "keep (re)doing” list:

--Be leery of inherited designs. Re-read your organization’s documents and practices with a critical eye and revise them as needed;

--Make changes, but don’t simply design or re-design changes for people, but with them. Use conversations and technology for intake; then circulate the “findings” (which are also narrations) for scrutiny and critique;

--Understand that people have good reasons to be unhappy with professional organizations. Listen when members say why they are discontent; ask former members why they left. Recognize that struggle and resentment are often fueled by histories of invisibility and mistreatment; recognize that anger can be an energizing source of purpose, creativity and change;

--Become critical readers and authors of your organization’s story. If your organization wants to diversify, ask yourselves, “what are we really trying to do?” If the answer is to grow your organization or to retain members, start again.

A case in point: In the ADE Bulletin (2008), “The Color of Leadership and the Shape of the Academy: Talent Search 101,” Dolan Hubbard notes that African American scholars are in high demand. But he also states that many universities can pay this “talent” more than the HBCUs can. Therefore, Hubbard writes (citing Doug Steward in the ADE Bulletin of 2006) “it is in our enlightened self-interest as a profession to improve ‘the pathways to faculty careers in English for African Americans and other minorities.” Here difference makes a difference, but for whom? What’s really changed when most universities can outbid most HBCUs?

I’ll close by suggesting that it is critical to keep finding and probing the provocations within any successful moment or success story. Teachers and students are optimists; we’re good at giving change and reconciliation many chances to work. But optimism should also embrace vigilance, even if that embrace is painful. If it makes sense that diversity is viral and peripatetic, then learning more about it may give us some unsuspected means for noticing, responding to, and anticipating the many opportunities for indignity--and for dignity and good will--which abound in our students’and our own lives. To be real and to move forward would involve the hard work of re-reading and revising our defining documents (e.g. mission statements, committee charges) and practices to learn more about the founding designs and (de)evolving deployments that helped get us “here” in the first place.

Note: A year ago, I invited Doug Hesse write a response to this blog, but after an extended editing process that required trimming this entry, Doug asked me to cut his section. He's posted it online, and you can read it at https://portfolio.du.edu/portfolio/getportfoliofile?uid=164174.

Disability as Diversity: A Thematic Approach

Introductory Bio

Margaret Price is an assistant professor of writing at Spelman College in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in journals including CCC, Across the Disciplines, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and Creative Nonfiction. In 2011, the University of Michigan Press will publish her book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life.

Blog Entry

In 2006, I joined with the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition (CDICC) to co-write “A Policy on Disability in CCCC.” I remember that many of our emailed conversations focused on the question of disability as “a diversity issue,” and the final version of the policy states: “CCCC affirms that people with disabilities bring a valuable source of diversity to college composition classrooms, university communities, and to our professional organization” (http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/disabilitypolicy). The concept of “disability as diversity” has received considerable attention from writing teachers and scholars. A 2001 article in CCC, “Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability” (by Brenda Brueggemann, Linda Feldmeier White, Patricia Dunn, Barbara Heifferon, and Johnson Cheu) noted that, in 1997, a motion at the CCCC Business Meeting asked that disability be included within the various “diversity” issues considered by the organization; and the sourcebook Disability and the Teaching of Writing (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2008) includes an article by Ray Pence, “Enforcing Diversity and Living with Disability,” that remarks, “That American studies would include class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality seemed natural to me. [But] when I thought of disability as a subject of scholarly interest I confined it to applied fields such as occupational therapy and special education.” Other works, including Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture (Southern Illinois UP, 2001) and Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA, 2002), offer further exploration of disability as “a diversity issue” in the classroom, in pop culture, in historical and institutional documents.

I firmly believe that disability is—in the common phrase—“a diversity issue.” I’ve invoked diversity myself in various articles and essays about disability-studies (DS) in rhetoric, research, and pedagogy. And yet, as I continue to work to incorporate critical awareness of disability into my writing classes, I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with references to disability qua disability. Pence’s point about the commonsense association of disability with medicalized fields such as occupational therapy or special education remains true, despite decades of work by DS scholars to demonstrate the ways that disability is a cultural and rhetorical issue—in short, is a “diversity issue.” This post is in fact a story—a story about trying to teach disability as diversity, about trying to teach disability as an issue of rhetoric and body rather than medicine and diagnosis.

Since 2004, I have taught at Spelman College, a historically Black college (HBCU) for women in Atlanta. I am white, queer, disabled, and from the northern U.S. Although I thought a lot about my race and sexuality when I first arrived at Spelman—some of my thoughts are recorded in the Creative Nonfiction article “Then You’ll Be Straight” (2006)—for the last few years, I’ve been thinking more about disability, and the ways that it intersects with the local contexts of my Spelman classrooms.

Incorporating disability studies (DS) into classes at Spelman has been an illuminating journey. My aim in incorporating DS is to engage the concept of disability as diversity—that is, getting beyond dominant narratives of pity, tragedy, and/or redemption and addressing disability and “normality” as critical constructs. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and James C. Wilson have suggested that English studies and writing classrooms may be sites especially well-suited to such exploration, as it involves “the reading, articulating, and reinterpretation of meaning in language and culture” (“Constructing a Third Space,” in the MLA anthology Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, 2002). It is often assumed that exploration of disability in the humanities classroom encroaches on medical discourses better-suited to biology or pharmacology; however, DS asserts that the questioning of medical discourse and its operation in the culture of power is a project that must be taken up in humanistic thought.

Probably because of our specific location at an HBCU, I have found repeatedly that students at Spelman are eager to compare the experiences of disability and racial oppression. Here are a couple of statements from first-year composition students (reprinted with permission) who took part in a collaborative project with an upper-level literature course, taught by Dr. Pushpa Parekh. In these two paired courses, we read and viewed disability texts/films and discussed them in an online asynchronous environment. Students from my first-year writing section wrote:

"I think that the disability movement parallels the Civil Rights movement in many ways. The idea is freedom and justice for all. Just as the Civil Rights Movement was a movement protesting unequal treatment and limited access (Jim Crow laws), the disability movement is one demanding recognition of human equality and value."

"I don’t think [disabled people are] saying to portray them as normal people with no problems but that they ARE capable of doing some things on their own. It’s kind of like when I hear that all black women are teenage mothers or that we’re not expected to go to college or to be that doctor or lawyer."

I have struggled to figure out how to respond to such comments. Comparing two different social movements, as the first student does, is one thing; comparing two different sets of human experience, as the second student does, is another; and in both cases, I find myself wondering—to what degree are such comparisons helpful and generative, and to what degree do they participate in a collapsing of difference? How can we get beyond classroom conversations on diversity that adhere to simplistic bumper-sticker nostrums (“Celebrate Diversity!”) and into the more complicated, localized, and sometimes painful conversations that lead to true coalition?

As I continue to revise my courses at Spelman, I find myself moving away from readily labeled identity categories (“disability,” “race,” “gender”) and toward themes that invoke these categories but—I hope—invite a more complex consideration of the categories’ intersectionality. For instance, last semester I taught an Investigation (qualitative research methods) class focused on the theme of “Investigating Wellness.” I chose this theme knowing that wellness has a particular meaning in Spelman’s local context: our health services center, which incorporates both a medical clinic and Counseling Services, is called the Wellness Center. I elaborated my hopes on the syllabus with this statement: “We will define ‘wellness’ broadly, so that it can refer to emotional, mental, community, spiritual, or physical wellness. Our investigations will include consideration of medical discourse, disability, Black women’s wellness, and challenges to conventional definitions of ‘wellness.’ Your own understanding of what ‘wellness’ means, and the ways your stance changes and deepens throughout the course, will be of central importance.” In the course, we read works ranging from Atul Gawande’s Better, a popular/statistical analysis of medical discourse (Metropolitan Press, 2007) to G. Winton James and Lisa C. Moore’s Spirited, a collection of writings that explore “the soul and Black gay/lesbian identity” (Redbone Press, 2006). Using the theme of “wellness,” I was trying to get away from the commonsense associations of disability: the wheelchair, “special” education, deficit.

Students rose to the theme with great energy and extraordinary resourcefulness, and pushed my own understanding of wellness—not to mention of disability, race, and a number of other identity markers—into new territory. Their research projects engaged questions on topics including food allergies, Black women’s emotional responses to Michelle Obama, depression and suicide, and HIV/AIDS. In most cases, the studies focused on discursive questions such as attitudes toward particular issues, or ways of defining them. One student chose to conduct a case study of a person she was very close to who has degenerative arthritis; the student’s major finding was that this person’s spiritual life was the key factor in her ability to live day-to-day with pain and impairment.

However, “Investigating Wellness” was not simply a success story. Familiar and problematic discourses continued to circulate in our discussions: for instance, the assumption that individuals should “overcome” obstacles, in reference to both race and disability, was heavily valued throughout the semester. Yet it was also one of the most fulfilling classes I have taught at Spelman. I had omitted my usual requirement for a “final presentation” from the syllabus, thinking that I wanted to spare students—and myself—from the usual round of dull PowerPoints and forced question-and-answer sessions. But to my surprise, students asked for an opportunity to share their findings, and together created a list of requirements for the kind of final presentations they wanted to see. (Among the collaboratively-determined requirements were “Make it interactive and fun,” “Don’t rely too heavily on a Power Point,” “What assumptions did you bring to the project that were challenged?” and “What other research questions did you find along the way?”) I discarded the readings and exercises I’d planned for our final two course meetings, and instead we ate pizza and talked about our research in terms of race, disability, gender, age, class, and many other factors.

That, to me, is a successful “diversity” experience. I had terrific students—I don’t want to underplay that aspect of it—but I think part of its success may have occurred because I consciously turned away from conventional markers of diversity (“race,” “gender,” “disability,” etc.) and asked students to foreground their own interests, their own curiosity about human experience. I have noticed that teachers in various sites seem to be moving away from what has called the “laundry list” of identity categories and toward notions such as “vulnerability” or “minority studies” (see the Vulnerability Project at Emory’s Race and Difference Initiative, http://www.rdi.emory.edu/, and the Future of Minority Studies Project, http://www.fmsproject.cornell.edu/). I believe that such themes invoke our diversity, our shared and different oppressions and privileges, our humanity.

Diversity -- A Transnational Matrix of Relationships

Introductory Bio

Rebecca Dingo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. She holds a joint appointment in Women’s and Gender Studies and English. Rebecca's research intersects feminist rhetorical theory with transnational, public policy, disability, and visual culture studies. She is interested in how public policy-making at the local, national, and global levels are created not only to persuade policy-makers but also every day citizens. In her scholarship Rebecca demonstrates how the rhetorical dynamics of the policy-making process structure--through public, legal, political, and administrative institutions--audiences' collective and individual identities, cultural memories, value systems, senses of place, and material circumstances.

Rebecca Dingo’s monograph book project, "Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing," examines the formation of transnational publics by exploring the vocabularies of transnational policy initiatives. The book aims to develop a broader practice of rhetorical criticism that accounts for the transnational paths along which arguments travel, the interarticulated points at which local and global logics meet, and the historical contexts that enable these logics. Her latest essay, “Linking Transnational Logics” (College English, May 2008) examines the networked arguments in World Bank and U.S. gender-mainstreaming policies. Rebecca’s work has also appeared in Concerns: Journal of the Women’s Caucus of the MLA, The Journal of Women’s History, and Wagadu: Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies.


Blog Entry

Diversity?… hmmmm…. Do I really “do” diversity? That is what I thought when I was invited to blog about how I address diversity in my teaching, scholarship, and service. Ok yes, I hold a joint appointment in English (rhet/comp) and Women’s and Gender Studies; I actively participate in recruiting and hiring minority job candidates; I publish essays that focus on third world women, post- and neo-colonialism, disability, and sexuality; I teach “Feminist Rhetorical Theories” (a course I designed to explore an expanded diverse canon); and I do also frequently teach that large lecture course titled “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” which is, in a lot of ways, teaching students to notice and respect the diverse experiences, needs, desires, and geopolitical situation of women. But oddly, I have never considered myself to be a diversity scholar or teacher per se. Unlike Victor Villanueva and Melea Powell, both of whom mentioned on pervious guest blogs, that they resist the use of the term diversity and unlike Asao Inoue who finds that teaching “diversity” usefully provides a way to teach students about power and identity, I do not think about diversity quite in the same ways.

Rather, in my teaching and scholarship I strive to untangle the happenings that connect us while showing how indeed, these connections are often uneven or unfair. I fear that if I simply teach about diversity or even sameness then my students will not be able to get past the simplistic idea that all “difference is good.” While difference and diversity can be good, people such as David Horowitz (who is known for creating a nation-wide movement to make university teachers teach and “respect” intellectual diversity), have made me question the usefulness of the term or even the concept. (And in fact, his movement demonstrates exactly what Krista Radcliffe mentions in her guest blog: words function as tropes and in his argument diversity has become a new trope.) While this sounds all good and well, intellectual diversity has become a way for universities to police their faculty thereby creating a hostile and suspicious work environment. My university recently adopted an intellectual diversity statement and while we are lucky that few of us have felt that we are being watched, this movement has affected my teaching (and scholarship)—but surprisingly, in some positive ways.

In an attempt to avoid being too much of what the Horowitz folks describe as a “liberal” teacher and scholar I invite my students (and my scholarly audience) to think about the various ways they are connected with other parts of their local communities, nation, and world. I have found that the emerging sub-field of women’s studies, transnational feminism, to be particularly useful for moving my students away from thinking only about their own privilege and how they are different from others to making connections to each other and the ostensible “other” (thereby making the other not so unfamiliar or exotic). I use the term transnationalism to refer to how globalization has influenced the movement of people and the production texts, culture, and knowledge across borders. A transnational feminist lens asks that we consider how social, political, and economic forces are dynamic, unbounded, and uneven; these forces function in a supra-national, trans-regional, and trans-local network making it necessary to reconsider how we understand identity, sovereignty, citizenship, and textual production. Transnational movements have had uneven material consequences throughout and within different regions of the world. These consequences require rhetoricians find new ways to examine how texts are written and dispersed, how they persuade, and how they might impact audiences who reside in different geopolitical locations. Indeed, I think that these consequences also necessitate that we expand our understanding of diversity.

This is not an easy task because we tend to want to exoticize people and places that are unfamiliar to us; we have already been taught through images, reports, preconceived notions, etc. that there are distinct differences between the so-called first and third worlds, the city dweller vs. the country dweller, Poles vs. Chinese, Americans vs. Africans, to name only a few examples. And yet, due to an increasingly transnational market, economy, and community, these assumptions are simply that: assumptions. Take for example the supposition that the U.S. is significantly different from India. Despite the fact that the U.S. is considered a high- income nation and India a lower-income nation, poor citizens and immigrants from both countries are being helped financially through micro-loans from the Grameen Bank (the bank that won the Nobel Peace prize, along with its founder, Professor Muhammad Yunus in 2006) . The Grameen Bank is best known for providing Indian women with microloans to begin independent businesses; recently, the New York Times reported that the Grameen Bank has begun to provide microloans to communities in Queens, N.Y. This simple example demonstrates how third world poverty very much resides in the so-called first world and that differences become muddied in a transnational economy.

I find a transnational studies methodology to be a useful way to think through the concept of diversity because a transnational analysis does not ask who suffers more, who has more power, or how two (or more) groups are similar or different but instead sets up a matrix of relationships and examines connectivities. A transnational perspective that examines how economic globalization has influenced the flow of people, labor, capital, culture, and knowledge across borders allows rhet/comp scholars and teachers to analyze more precisely how diversity is enmeshed with larger global exchanges (money, goods, power, representations, knowledges, etc.) that affect the changing nature of identity. In addition to rhet/comp scholars recognizing how race, class, ability, sexuality, gender, etc, impact one’s identity and rhetorical situation, a transnational studies lens asks us to examine identity alongside the global circulation of and interarticulation in texts and situations.

I use a simple exercise in my classes to illustrate this circulation of goods and situations. I ask my students to look at their clothing tags to see where the item was made. For the most part, the students’ clothing comes from parts of Central and South America, Asia, and sometimes Africa. We then think about how these items connect us to people we might not know by considering the various hands that might have touched the fabric before the students purchased the item. I then ask them to think about the other non-tangible ways they might be connected to those people who made the clothing. For example, I invite them to consider how women who work in the maquilladoras along the U.S. and Mexico borders have an unacknowledged relationship with former female factory workers who might now work in U.S. megastores. The women working in the megastore might have worked in a factory that produced the same goods as the Mexican factory but due to transnational trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that factory might have moved to Mexico leaving these women without a stable income. Both sets of women, then, are linked by the very products produced at the maquilladora—one woman makes the items the other sells them—yet, in many cases both sets of women cannot afford to purchase the very products they produce and sell. In this way, U.S. and Mexican workers are linked within a complex network of economic, geopolitical, and labor forces even though they reside in different geopolitical locations and may have very different lives. Ultimately, these women are unevenly connected to each other due to increased global financial, cultural, and gendered networks.

So do I “do” diversity? Well, yes and no. I suppose that for me, the concept of diversity has productively shifted in my research and teaching so that I am less interested in how diversity or difference is expressed and more interested in climate and situation that creates a matrix of sometimes uneven connections. In my teaching and research, I thus show how the circulation of texts (and the climate in which they are produced) often creates this matrix making it necessary for rhet/comp scholars to turn a critical eye on diverse public texts we might otherwise disregard.

Rhetorics of Survivance: "Recovery" Work for American Indian Writing

Introductory Bio

Malea Powell is a mixed-blood of Indiana Miami, Eastern Shawnee, and Euroamerican ancestry. She is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and American Culture at Michigan State University where she directs the Rhetoric & Writing program and serves as a faculty member in the American Indian Studies program. Her research on examining the rhetorics of survivance used by 19th century American Indian intellectuals has been published widely. Her current scholarly project focuses on American Indian material rhetorics and the degree to which such everyday arts tie tradition and innovation in the cultural practices of contemporary Native women. She is at work on a book manuscript, Rhetorical Powwows, that ties her historical and material scholarship together. Powell was, for seven years, editor of SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures (a quarterly journal devoted to the study of American Indian writing), for which she twice won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers “Writer of the Year” award for scholarly editing, and she was just appointed the Associate National Director of the Wordcraft Circle. She is also the lead editor for a textbook, Of Color: Teaching Literatures of Color Rhetorically (Prentice Hall/Pearson). In her spare time, she serves on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Great Lakes Native American Cultures, Inc. in Portland, Indiana and writes romance novels.

Blog Entry

How do you address the topic of "diversity" in your scholarship, teaching, and service?

For me, diversity isn’t a “topic” at all. The behaviors that our discipline frequently categorizes as “attention to diversity” are part of every classroom already, are part of every scholarly audience already, are part of every university and every community we enter already. So the way I know to respond to questions like this is to say that my main goal as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and colleague is to change the way that knowledge by, about, and for American Indians is produced, distributed, taught, and received. In order to do that, I know that I have to make Universities safe and productive spaces for all folks who have not traditionally been advantaged by American academies – folks of color, women, queer folks, otherly-abled folks – because our scholarly fortunes are deeply connected.

While most of my scholarly work has been firmly centered in Rhetoric Studies, my commitment to American Indian intellectual production requires that I also substantially in the American Indian Studies community, both local and national. As editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures for 7 years (SAIL is the only journal in the United States that focuses specifically on writings produced by Native peoples, and as a well-known scholar in the discipline of Rhetoric & Composition), and now as the Associate National Director of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, I have both the responsibility and the opportunity to mentor dozens of Native scholars (and non-Native scholars of Native writing) across a wide array of disciplinary and institutional arrangements. Both of these are positions that might be conventionally seen as “service” but that, done well, also require substantial intellectual investment and innovation. Deciding to take these positions wasn’t about elevating my own scholarly profile – it was about elevating the profile of entire fields of study and practice. It’s important to me that my work in academia always point to something larger than myself – to wider communities and practices who need to be noticed.

In terms of my own scholarship (and that phrase always seems awkward and more than a little selfish to me), much of my published work is rooted in a large, wide-ranging archival project called Rhetorical Powwows: American Indians Writing/Making Survivance. The project is focused on two things: first, a critical understanding of the way in which mainstream scholars have theorized “the Indian” for the past 150 years, and on the rhetorically sophisticated ways in which Native writers, intellectuals, activists and artists have responded to those constructions. This is the archival, textual piece of the project where I read the writings of the Native intellectuals rhetorically, listening for their use of popular nineteenth century notions about “the Indian,” and listening for the ways in which they reimagine what it means to be Native after centuries of colonization, genocide, and assimilation. It is that reimagining that I mark as “survivance,” and the tactics through which they enact that reimagining as “rhetorics of survivance.” This piece of the project is the most conventional in that it fits well with the current way that scholars in Rhetoric Studies have traditionally conceived of what it means to “do” rhetorical history. The second piece of the project radically challenges those traditional notions by investigating parallel rhetorical practices engaged in my Native “makers” – basketmakers, beadworkers, quillworkers, etc. – and understanding those practices as part of the same rhetorical and intellectual traditions begin enacted in print.

There are two significant things about this scholarly project in relation to the prompt for this blog:

First, it provides important “recovery” work for American Indian writing in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and important critical intellectual work to situate that writing. It also provides important new ways to think about American Indian material production as a rhetorical act. So it complies with scholarly traditions in the discipline then challenges those traditions and provides innovative interventions into conventional practices.

Second, while I have worked consistently on this critical project over the past decade, my decision to postpone the seemingly logical outcome of such research – a single-authored critical book – was purposeful, the result of a series of decisions I made to be a different kind of scholar, one who studied and participated in the project of American Indian survivance by creating a space where American Indian Studies and Rhetoric Studies can both grow.

I believe the accumulated result of my intellectual and “service” contributions to date has been, ultimately, larger than the contribution I might have made had I published even an important single-authored monograph in one of my chosen disciplines – Rhetoric Studies or American Indian Studies. In fact, I’d say that the kind of book I’m writing now wouldn’t have been possible without the past 10 years of working otherwise.

Additionally, I believe that a serious commitment to engaged and innovative teaching is an integral component of my responsibilities as a scholar of color. I’ve taught a wide range of courses – from first year writing to graduate courses in Rhetoric, American Studies & American Indian Studies. I take each course assignment seriously as a rhetorical and scholarly challenge. One of the ways in which I structure all of the courses that I teach is to focus on critical engagement with texts through historically informed and culturally situated rhetorical reading strategies. I think it’s deeply important that students in all of my classrooms understand that history and culture matter so I use a variety of strategies to gently insist that students attend to the connections between past and present, and that they extend their rhetorical investigations significantly beyond the edges of the text – to go beyond “what happened in this text and what does it mean?” to considerations of how the text makes meaning and what consequences that meaning has in the lives of people who live a multitude of realities. It’s true, I tend to have a lot of students of color enrolled in my classes, but I have a lot of “white” students as well. One thing I know from a long career of teaching is that the kinds of supports, strategies, and interventions that work especially well for students of color almost always work especially well for all students.

An extension of my commitment to classroom teaching is the amount of time I spend recruiting, supporting and mentoring graduate student. Because I already cast my role in the graduate classroom as that of a rhetorically experienced colleague, and because those classrooms are informed by my understanding that learning is a process of constant negotiation and resituating, my mentoring work necessarily extends that understanding to foster graduate student engagement with their discipline/field and their institution as cultural texts that can be situated, negotiated, revised and analyzed. And because I have high expectations for the level at which graduate students engage with these varied texts, I also take a good deal of time to simply know, support, and socialize with the students I work with. The academy can be a difficult place for many graduate students, especially for women and students of color. I ended up in the academy because of the support and encouragement of my family, my teachers, and my elders; I see it as my responsibility to them to extend the same level of support and encouragement to others.

In fact, if there’s one constant in that way I approach my scholarship, teaching and service, it’s the understanding that none of us gets “here” (no matter how that “here” is defined) by ourselves. Meritocracy is a myth – we all stand on the shoulders of others. The key is realizing where we’ve been helped, where we may have unfairly taken advantage, and how to be responsible for those who made our lives “here” possible. For me that means extending support (sometimes more support than I actually received) to the folks around me – both students and colleagues – in a generous way. It may sound corny, but I try to live as a scholar/teacher by treating folks in the way I’d like to be treated. I don’t always live up to that ideal but I do try, and I do judge my actions by it. And I do try to arrange my life as an intellectual in a way that both honors my elders and enables a better future for Native peoples.

So I guess my answer to the prompt is that there’s no “trick” for “adding” diversity to any part of our lives as scholars & teachers – honoring diversity is a way of life.