Post-Civil-Rights Whiteness and Diversity: When Are We Going to Stop Talking about Race?

Joyce Irene Middleton, chair of the CCCC Committee on Diversity, has written this week's post on whiteness and diversity. In it, she links ideas and arguments that the committee will use to develop its position statement on diversity. During the next two weeks, members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity will respond to Joyce's post by adding their own comments, and we all invite our readers to join in the conversation. We also encourage folks to use the blog series in their graduate classes come fall semester and ask their grad students to respond. Our new regular schedule for invited Guest Bloggers in our "CCCC Conversation on Diversity blogging series will on 6/4/2009.

Blog Entry

The emergence of whiteness studies helps to shed new solutions in ways to think about diversity in the twenty-first century. Initially, some readers may ask the question: “what does whiteness have to do with diversity?” The answer is, quite emphatically, everything, especially if the intersectionality of identities is important (and too often it is not). The current and lingering oppositional thinking about race (not ethnicity), as either “white” or “non-white” has actually helped to sustain early US markers of identity and difference. This kind of racializing is rooted in fossilized markers of difference: whiteness, ethnicity, post-colonial identity, race, and gender. We continue to do this, even though late twentieth-century scholars both in the humanities and sciences agree—especially with the availability of DNA evidence—that the concept of race, including the white race, is a mythology—a powerful construction of ideology and human identity that perpetuates an illusion of human difference.

Importantly, any concept of diversity that is linked to race and whiteness furthers the illusion of racial purity. This committee wants to assert a new discourse on diversity that abandons the false illusion of racial human difference (without abandoning the powerful history of racism). We hope that this new discourse on diversity will support a paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service. Effectively, we will move from talking about whiteness and non-whiteness as a personal reality (the illusion) to focus solely on the persistence of historical and institutional whiteness and racism (the reality).

In 2005, Valerie Babb, writing in Jackie Jones Royster's and Ann Marie Simpkins’ edition of Calling Cards Theory and Practice in the Study Of Race, Gender, and Culture, an award-winning anthology on constructions of race, gender, and culture, raises a question about why “whiteness continues to exert its unstated privilege” (28) in the United States in the twenty-first century, especially in the academy? The persistent invisibility of this social (and global) racial construct continues to influence the values of our academic writing, teaching relationships, and professional memberships. For example, here are the rough numbers that reflect the current CCCC membership profile:

• Asian, including Asian Indian or Pacific Islander 76
• Black/African American 146
• Prefer not to answer 130
• White--Non-Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 3,010
• American Indian or Alaska Native 18
• Two or more races 32
• Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 78

For most CCCC members in this profile, these numbers pale in comparison with the increasingly non-white student body in U.S. colleges and universities. Over the recent decades, many rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars have devoted their work to revising traditional histories of rhetoric and composition. Effectively, they have given us, not only re-gendered and re-raced readings of those histories, but they have also given us close examinations of the intersections of race, whiteness, gender, listening, silence, and other pedagogical topics (See, for example, Morrison, Booth, Allen, hooks, Giroux, Glenn, Trainor, Ratcliffe, Welch, Royster, Kennedy, Donawerth, Babb. Villaneuva, and Middleton).

These scholars, and others, are examining and questioning the specific, interconnected, relationships between whiteness, race, ethnicity, and gender with our current practices of teaching and writing in the university. One question that arises from this kind of research is: How can we recognize the influences of whiteness not only in our personal language use, classrooms, and departmental business, which are important, but also in how discourses of white privilege and racism use us? In talking about race, I always talk about whiteness and race (and racism) together. Importantly then, what kinds of antiracist work – scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional – will we make visible in our practices in order to disrupt the persistence of white privilege?

The Responsibilities of Social Justice: Activist Literacy, Race, and California State University

Introductory Bio

Dr. Virginia Crisco is an assistant professor at California State University-Fresno where she teaches literacy and composition pedagogy and where she co-coordinates the first-year writing program. Her research interests focus on the intersections of literacy and rhetoric as it manifests in the practice and pedagogy of public writing and civic participation to inform the spaces of the classroom and the community. Crisco's recent publications include “Rethinking Language and Culture on the Institutional Borderlands” in The Journal of Basic Writing, “Graduate Education as Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique” in Pedagogy, and "Conflicting Expectations: The Politics of Developmental Education in California" in the edited collection Developmental Education: Policy and Practice.

Blog Entry

My current scholarship focuses on the literacy practices of activism. Out of qualitative research with the Green Party of the United States and my first-year writing class, I called what I was observing “activist literacy:” the rhetorical use of literacy for civic participation. Drawing on scholarship from Jacqueline Royster, James Berlin, Ellen Cushman, de Certeau, Bickford and Reynolds, and Barton and Hamilton, I argue that community members use activist literacy in response to institutional structures they want to change. Activist literacy focuses on critically understanding and challenging socio-political power structure; it emphasizes the deliberate use and interpretation of language to challenge and shape the reality of self and institution. Finally, activist literacy finds value in building coalitions and collaborating with other individuals or groups for the purpose of changing dominant attitudes, positions, policies, and laws. My work with the Green Party taught me that it is ok to NOT always compromise for the good of all, particularly when compromise means that the majority doesn’t understand the minority. The party taught me that sometimes activists have to make people who value the status quo uncomfortable, challenge them, and help them to recognize what they have rendered invisible, especially the associated consequences.

Though I do not argue that the issues the Green Party face are the same issues that people of color and whites face trying to create an antiracist society (though this is a goal of Greens as well), I do argue that some of the practices of activist literacy can be used toward that end. Critical Race Theorists such as Beverly Daniel-Tatum, Catherine Prendergast, Patricia J. Williams and Gloria Ladson-Billings argue for a version of reality that makes many whites uncomfortable, and they insist that the racial battles we have historically fought in this country have not really changed race relations (e.g., civil rights of the 1960s). Activists take responsibility to learn the histories of race relations. We read between the lines of dominant histories to see what is kept invisible. We resist claims that erase people of color or suggest that their histories are unimportant. As whites, we recognize and critique our history of domination and erasure. Activists’ deliberate use and interpretation of language position us to reflect on our own language-using practices, consider how they demonstrate what we know and what we are trying to learn, and allow us to make arguments that rewrite histories and make the invisible visible. When activists can build coalitions and collaborate with other individuals, we recognize our abilities to listen, to give up some of our own desires to balance power structures, and to be willing to work with others in momentary or long-term alignments.

Activist literacy needs to be applied to particular contexts in order to be useful in making change. For example, I currently work California State University, and, like other states, California is having a budget crisis. Their solution to this crisis – a hardwon solution – is to cut education. In fact, according to the California Teachers Association’s publication California Educator, education took the biggest hit in the most recent budget battle. California State University does not receive guaranteed funding like the K-14 education system, and it does not benefit from grants and gifts given to the University of California system. But the state university is still required to accept the top one-third of students graduating from California high schools and is called on to provide a 4-year, public education for Californians and others in the nation and abroad. The student population of the CSU, in general, is racially and ethnically diverse (In fact, systemwide, whites are the minority at 43.6% of the student body.), and these cuts, while affecting faculty workload and lecturer positions, also impact the students who seek higher education in California.

The California Faculty Association has started the “cuts have consequences” campaign that includes videos of activism and stories from faculty, lecturers, students, and staff about the effects of cuts on the CSUs website (http://www.youtube.com/cutshaveconsequences). Students’ stories in particular show how these cuts create even more challenges to get a higher education:
• Students explained that larger class sizes mean fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and to get individual attention.
• Students shared that finishing their degree might take longer because the numbers of required classes have been reduced.
• Students discussed deciding between taking a semester off or prolonging their education by taking classes that are available (but not getting a full load) because required classes are not being offered. This could mean for many of our students additional student loans and another semester out of the workforce.
• Students pointed to rising tuition costs – doubled in five years – which makes it difficult for them to afford books.

These are the stories of how White, Latino/a, Asian, Black, Filipino, American Indian, and Pacific Islander students have trouble getting a higher education – and these effects are not applied equally across the board. For example, system-wide about 30,000 students are non-citizen resident aliens. In the example of one of my students, Ivonne, her family moved from Mexico City to Fresno when she was young. She was able to attend her first year of college with the help of CAMP (college assistance migrant program) but needed to rely on scholarships for the remainder of her education – even though she grew up in California. Though students like Ivonne are able to pay resident tuition, which is significantly cheaper than nonresident tuition, they are not eligible for federal financial aid.

This budget crisis puts California State University workers, students, alumni and California residents, in general, in a place to consider how to move forward. As we saw with the last election, people can make a difference. President Obama and Vice President Biden’s “Renew America Together” initiative challenges us to recognize the power we have to help our communities. Californians need to educate the population about the importance of higher education to the economy and the future of the state and then we need to let our state representatives know that they have to invest in higher education.

This blog is my opportunity to voice my thinking and consider deeply and carefully how we might apply activist literacy practices to our profession in order to support diversity and social justice. I want to thank Asao Inoue and Joyce Middleton for allowing me to share my ideas, but I also want to call on folks in the discipline to help us consider how our professional ethics, pedagogical practices, research methods, and educational policy should reflect our values in relation to diversity. Below are some of my ideas; I encourage readers to add more:
• We need to find ways to translate the scholarly and classroom work we do into community conversations through blogs, letters to the editor, news columns, you tube videos, etc – in other words, through the literacy practices that our communities use to get information out and to educate citizens about the importance of their participation.
• We need to teach our students the importance of multiple kinds of writing, to recognize that student’s development as a writer, community member, and professional can benefit from learning multiple genres of writing (both academic and community oriented).
• We should resist goals that only see teaching as the development of workers and embrace goals for education that encourages community engagement and participation.
• As white professors/professionals, we need to recognize our privilege and white and people of color should listen to what our peers, colleagues, students, and staff have to say about what it means to be a person of color in the institution.
• We need to work to change our retention and promotion structures to recognize not only Dean’s notion of writing with the community as an important intellectual contribution, but also the value of consulting with our representatives in state and national governments particularly because this can allow us to educate decision makers on the value of our work.

To fight the budget battle, the Alliance for the CSU was created (http://www.allianceforthecsu.org/index.html). This activist organization is made up of students, citizens, faculty, staff, alumni, and others who care about the future of the CSU. This organization is a good model of activism, as they are working on multiple fronts to educate the community and state government about how budget cuts affect public higher education. Initially through the activism of the Alliance, we were able to win back about $66 million to the CSU budget from the Governor’s original May 2008 Budget Proposal, yet the CSU Chancellor gave back $31 million of it. And. when the state was looking at a $41 billion deficit, it was clear that the CSU was going to get cut again. Still, the Alliance continues to educate and fight for the CSUs – and the diverse student population it serves – as a crucial special election comes up in May 2009.

Distorting the Hush: Diversity as Political Rationality and Public Pedagogy

Introductory Bio

Vorris Nunley is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Nunley is interested in Rhetorical and Critical theory, public pedagogies and composition, visual culture, neo-liberalism and African American expressive culture. His work addresses the intersections of rhetoric, space, and episteme (knowledge). Informed by work in literature, rhetoric (traditional/ethnic/gendered), cultural studies, and critical/feminist geography, Professor Nunley argues for the existence of a strand of African American rhetoric and knowledge he refers to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). Recently, his work engages neo-liberalism as a public pedagogy and how it commodifies, produces, and mediates the construction and reception of masculinity/femininity, Blackness, the communal, and excess. He is currently the Professor in Residence for the Honors Program. He works with vice-provost on epistemic diversity. He also lectures and does workshops on related epistemic diversity issues. His book Keepin’ It Hushed: African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric and Knowledge will be published by Wayne State University Press in 2010.

Blog Entry

Experts in the institutionalization of diversity in corporate America and on university campuses refer to the hegemonic version of diversity as compositional or body count diversity. Compositional diversity, or what I refer to as neo-liberal diversity, pivots around the inclusion of different bodies and various subjectivities. To wit: let’s add some icing to the normative institutional cake. A little chocolate. A smidgen of brown, yellow, gender, and class. Oh, did someone forget the red again? Can we queer all of this damned icing? And while we are at it, let’s disable the cake? While compositional diversity is a necessary first step, it falls short, if the end game—particularly for those of us interested in more transformative social practices, political rationalities, and public pedagogies—is intended to exceed mere inclusion. Neo-liberal diversity discourse, for the most part, is a status quo buttressing, political rationality that inadvertently smuggles in hegemonic institutional, social, and racial relations through the backdoor of tolerance and market logics. Neo-liberal diversity does not reconfigure or dismantle what constitutes legitimate political and social knowledge.

Instead, it jettisons rhetorics of gender, race, and sexual orientation from the epistemic and then explicitly or implicitly relegates them to the stagnant, theoretical backwaters of difference, the cultural, the resistant, the sociological, and my personal favorite, the alternative.

Wendy Brown in “American Nightmare: Neo-liberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” describes a political rationality as “a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship . . . [it] governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains”(5). Neo-liberal diversity, as both an economic and political rationality, allows a euphoric discourse celebrating a range of marketable differences, for togetherness across those differences, and for colorblindness, tolerance, commonality, and ethnic unity—as long as they are flattened into a homogenized logic. A logic informed by what Slavoj Zizek (borrowing from Walter Benjamin) in Violence (2008) refers to as the “culturalisation of politics, depoliticizing diversity from unruly episteme and messy politics, and resituating it into difference, personal feelings, and a supermarket for ethnic choice" (140). In my view, what Brown argues about tolerance as a “depoliticizing trope” in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006) also applies to diversity: “One sure sign of a depoliticizing trope or discourse is the easy and politically crosscutting embrace of a political project bearing its name” (16). As a result, Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, President Obama, and most major corporations also support diversity.

At this point, I ask readers not to misread my critique: Compositional diversity is important. It carves out a space for marginalized folks to have a job in the academy and elsewhere. In the classroom, it allows previous, backstage student voices (to borrow Erving Goffman’s term) to occupy center stage. And if neo-liberal diversity is merely about center staging marginalized academic and student voices so that they can be slotted into the normative political rationality, then let’s celebrate the inclusive dance, but not the illusion of a transformative political rationality that seduced many of us to purchase admission tickets to the diversity ball in the first place.

In terms of American and African American rhetorical practices, President Obama’s March 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech offers a useful example. The speech was rhetorically savvy, and productively galvanizing in the fragmenting wake of the Bush years as it was an epideictic speech in praise of the common that advocated for inclusive America.

Unfortunately, “A More Perfect Union” re-inscribed the normative political rationality through the trivialization, then the omission of African American epistemes, knowledge’s, and subjectivities I refer to as African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR). “A More Perfect Union” accomplished this through its disavowal of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s assertion that “racism is endemic to America.” Obama argued that his primary reason for distancing himself from Rev. Wright was that he had a “distorted” view of America (see "A More Perfect Union" speech at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobamaperfectunion.htm).
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For good or ill, Rev. Wright’s claim is a commonplace in AAHHR. Hush harbors are African American Black publics, micropublics, or what Michael Hanchard in Party/Politics: Culture, Community, and Agency in Black Political Thought (2006) refers to as lifeworlds. Lifeworlds foster the taken-for-granted bundles of beliefs, subjectivities, standpoints, and the language use which ordinary people engage in to create meaning within African American civil society. A civil society where African American rhetors speak to and exchange knowledge and information with primarily African American audiences (6-8, 223-224).

In African American hush harbors, African American political rationalities and terministic screens are not alternative, not counter, nor merely cultural; they are normative. Rev. Wright was the fifth most popular preacher/speaker in the United States due in part to his immersion in the epistemic parreshia (dangerous or frank speech) of AAHHR. Indeed, most African Americans understand White racism/privilege to be endemic to the American nation-state. Further, scholars as disparate as David Theo Goldberg, Ruthie Gilmore, Cedric Robinson, and Elaine Richardson have all written directly or indirectly about the centrality of Whiteness and racism to American identity and how both are not only coterminous with the development of the nation-state but also with Enlightenment humanism and modernity. Even if most African Americans did not agree with Wright’s position, they certainly understood his position to be legitimate and rational, not distorted. But the normative political rationality required the President to distance himself from both Rev. Wright and from the political rationalities of AAHHR to rhetorically construct himself as invested in diversity and multiple identities yet, racially non-partisan, rational, civil, and therefore, electable.

Indeed, neo-liberal diversity not only embraces multiple identities, spheres, discourses, and identities; not only celebrates the choices, diversities and hybridities of post-racial ontologies; not only cheers pluralized border-occupying subjects and subjectivities; but also attempts to produce all of the aforementioned on the very terrain of the subject as citizen-consumer.

Citizen as consumer-subject privileges market logics of utility that gloss over the antagonisms between citizens as political-subjects in the quest for unity, commonality, and consumption. Flattening tensions in the hegemonic political rationality is one reason why in the state of California, voters could both support President Obama—a marketable Blackness or diversity object that did not disrupt the dominant political rationality around race—but then, simultaneously, vote against Proposition 8, the so-called Gay Marriage amendment that definitely transgresses the hegemonic political rationality around masculinity gender, and marriage expectations.

My primary concern in this posting is not with President Obama’s intentions; rather, my argument is that the “A More Perfect Union,” speech, together with and by extension, neo-liberal diversity, function in tandem with the very political rationality that requires the rendering of African American and other hush harbor rhetorics invisible or distorted. If we take seriously Henry Giroux’s notion of neo-liberalism as public pedagogy as he argues in his book, Against the Terror of Neo-Liberalism, then we must also understand pedagogy and learning occur across a spectrum of social practices and settings through the educational force of the entire culture. Neo-liberalism and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech can be said to be public pedagogies that are marked by both the possibilities and limits around what is intelligible and sayable in the public sphere vis-à-vis diversity, race, and sexual orientation, flattening out a more unruly, but more vital democracy.

But such flattening makes for a more easily digestible, more consumable, diversity cake.

Cross-Cultural Rhetoric: Diversity on a Global Scale

Introductory Bio

Dr. Alyssa J. O'Brien is a Lecturer at Stanford University, where she directs the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric program and publishes scholarship and textbooks on visual rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and intercultural competencies.

Since arriving at Stanford in 2001, Alyssa has co-authored nine textbooks and instructor manuals as well as many articles and conference papers. These include three editions of Instructor's Notes with Professor Andrea Lunsford (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, 2007, 2009), and three books concerning visual rhetoric with her colleague and friend, Christine Alfano: Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World; Envision: Researching and Writing Arguments; Envision In-Depth: a Reader (Pearson/Longman, 2006-2009), along with three instructor’s manuals for those books.

Alyssa has been an invited speaker in Asia and Europe on subjects such as global learning, communication for leadership, visual rhetoric, and “mapping a change in writing.” Over the past three years, she’s directed the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project (or CCR), a research and teaching endeavor originally funded by the Wallenberg Global Learning Network. CCR now connects students across five continents and involves universities from ten countries through video-conference technology and blogs. Since Alyssa began as the Project Director for the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric project during its first pilot in the fall of 2005, she has turned her research focus to intercultural communication theory, diversity on a global scale, and technology-enhanced learning. She has developed courses in Cross-Cultural Rhetoric, Globalization, and Intercultural Communication for Leadership. In addition to teaching these courses through collaborative connections with faculty colleagues at the University of Örebro, the University of Uppsala, National University of Singapore, the American University of Cairo, the University of Sydney, and Khabarovsk State Academy in Russia, Alyssa's responsibilities include serving as the Project Director, the Grant and Proposal Writer, the Report Writer, and the Data Analysis and Project Evaluation Coordinator for this important work.

Alyssa won the Phi Beta Kappa Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006, and what she enjoys most is helping people discover their voices in writing of all kinds. She is honored to be invited to contribute to the CCCC blog. Contact Alyssa at aobrien@stanford.edu.

Blog Entry

Stanford University is an incredibly diverse campus. I feel privileged to teach there as part of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Stanford even has a web portal devoted to diversity, where you can explore student groups and research initiatives or read Jane Stanford’s founding commitment: to “resist the tendency of stratification of society [by] keeping open an avenue whereby the deserving and the exceptional may rise through their own efforts.”

But a striking phenomenon I’ve noticed is that soon after arrival, students are quickly inculcated into what we (and they) call the “Stanford Bubble.” Does this happen elsewhere? After one week of dorm bonding activities, school chant practices, scavenger hunts into San Francisco, and the noble address of Convocation, students morph into a new, unified identity: part of the Stanford family, a member of a distinctly Stanford culture, with its obligatory othering process (Beat Cal!). My students even joke about the fact that they all wear Stanford gear to class, as if someone might forget the name of the University.

Now while this academic enculturation process may be funny, necessary, and even helpful (We pride ourselves on not letting any student “slip through the cracks” or get into trouble, as the family cares deeply about each member.), it has its consequences, I think, for diversity.

To meet the challenge of preparing students to interface with, communicate with, and live/work with diverse people outside the Stanford Bubble after graduation, I’ve been fortunate to work with several colleagues on a grant-funded research and teaching initiative called the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project (CCR). As an emerging field within rhetoric and writing, cross-cultural rhetoric has, as its pedagogical goal, the transformation of students into global citizens, equipped with the communication and collaboration strategies they will need for active, ethical participation in a diverse world community. At its heart, the CCR Project believes that we need to connect students in our classes to real audiences—have them present their research, receive feedback on their writing and speeches, and learn about others through live class-to-class video conferences and dialogic blogging.

Since we started this work in 2006, the Stanford CCR project has connected students and teachers across five continents, and our strongest partnerships are with Sweden, Egypt, Australia, Singapore, and Russia. We are, however, always looking for new partners, especially from institutions in communities with cultures quite distinct from Palo Alto, California.

Perhaps paradoxically, our students love to have a “virtual class” with diverse populations just as much as they love being part of the “Stanford Bubble.”

I would like to thank Joyce Middleton for the opportunity to explain the project here and how it aims to support the mission of diversity at Stanford as well as in the academy at large.

CCR began as a research project in 2006. It was a collaboration between colleagues at Stanford–notably Andrea Lunsford, Christine Alfano, Marvin Diogenes, and myself–and colleagues in the Rhetoric Program at the University of Örebro, Sweden. Supported by a grant from the Wallenberg Global Learning Network, we developed a teaching methodology, global learning curriculum, set of pedagogical best practices, guidelines for dedicated-learning spaces, and technical parameters for digital learning in small globally-distributed teams. We connected our classes to other classes around the globe and found out the best ways that students could learn about the diverse views of those outside their own rhetorical situations.

An international version of Mary Louise Pratt’s theoretical conception of the Contact Zone, the intercultural encounter at the center of CCR, can be understood as a third space of learning. Elsewhere, I have theorized this as a space of negotiation—a new site of collaboration made possible by cross-cultural connections facilitated through digital pedagogy solutions (O’Brien & Eriksson, 2009). The goal is to produce deep learning about cultures, values, ways of communicating, and ways of perceiving the world.

In this site, global citizenship takes on active roles in constructing new knowledge, analyzing and defamiliarizing culture, and extending global learning beyond the sphere of individual or national boundaries. In this way, CCR helps foster intercultural competencies, what theorists Dixie Goswami and Carl Lovitt (1999) describe as the increasingly important skill of approaching others with consideration for and sensitivity towards diverse cultural contexts.

But isn’t such learning possible at campuses that emphasize diversity? To address this question, we set up a test-control condition to determine if students learned intercultural competencies from working with diverse students within the Stanford community as they did from collaborating with others abroad; our statistical analysis showed the force of academic enculturation and the need to connect students outside the campus in order to learn diverse viewpoints.

Thus, what we have learned in three years of research and teaching in CCR is that students experience a defamiliarization of their own cultures, coming to realize the rhetorical concepts of decorum and doxa. We defamiliarize ourselves from our own culture when we become aware of other people’s doxa, their hidden assumptions and things taken for granted. Theorist R. Brislin (2000) argues that intercultural communication competencies need to be transferrable from culture to culture. The benefit of a video-conference and collaborative-blog based methodology within a curriculum dedicated to global learning is that participants learn concrete skills and modes of communicating that are, in Brislin’s words, “practical when individuals or group members are about to go to many different countries” (p. 264).

I would add to Brislin’s formulation that intercultural competencies are increasingly necessary when individuals meet in virtual spaces of negotiation (video-conference or blogging), and these sites are more common modes of contact today with the economic and environmental challenges to actual travel.

Moreover, since rhetoric by its very disciplinary definition focuses on the art of discerning the best means of communicating in any situation, by applying a rhetorical approach to fostering intercultural competencies, the intercultural encounter made possible through video-conference teaching can avoid the dangers of immersion-based learning, namely, the pitfalls of selectivity and stereotype-reinscription noted by researchers Ronald and Suzanne Scollon (1995). By contrast, rhetoric enables what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication” (p. 408).

As one student wrote on an exit survey after a three-way connection between Stanford-Sweden-Egypt:

Overall, I thought it was great to have students from three different schools (and therefore three different countries). More schools/students meant more perspectives, and this enriched our discussion and overall experience tremendously. My group analyzed Nelson Mandela's speech, and it was amazing to see how the students in Sweden versus in Egypt versus in the US responded to the question "Would this speech work in other countries? Would it need to be changed?" Students from every country responded that the speech would have needed to be modified in their country of origin, but each country/school had different reasons. This experience broadened my understanding of how students from different countries look at the world, analyze rhetoric, and view their own culture in a larger globalized context.

While we’ve been thrilled and grateful to work on this project as an initiative dedicated to diversity on a global scale, we realize that for researchers and teachers working in this area—new challenges arise.

1. How might we foster intercultural competencies among students collaborating on writing projects in English only?
2. What is the role of translation at the site of intercultural exchange?
3. How can we avoid the limitations of contrastive rhetorics in which, as researchers Bennett and Salonen (2007) claim, “cultural knowledge does not equal intercultural competence”?

To address these concerns, my own teaching and research has recently been dedicated to developing a rhetorically-based writing pedagogy that allows for a diversity of languages and learning styles. My contention is that collaborative multimedia production as a rhetorical act enables deep learning of writing practices and cultures; a global learning curriculum therefore needs to include negotiated multimedia texts as alternative forms of academic writing. Perhaps in this way, the intercultural encounter can make possible what theorists Chen and Starosta (2000) call “an individual’s ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences in order to promote appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication.”

If our own teaching and research practices help us break out of the “Bubble” we’ve been enculturated into, then we can better serve our students and our communities. I think we’ve only just begun this important work, and I welcome your comments, perspectives, and future collaboration in this effort.

A Shared Address

Introductory Bio

Meta G. Carstarphen, Ph.D., is a Gaylord Family Professor and Associate Professor of Journalism in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She served as Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, for the College from 2006 to 2008. In 1993, she received a CCCC “Scholar For The Dream Award” for Outstanding Research by an Emerging Scholar of Color. An experienced book critic, Carstarphen is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including, “News-Surfing the Race Question: Of Bell Curves, Words, and Rhetorical Metaphors,” in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition (Gilyard, ed, 1998). Carstarphen has edited two books, including, Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender and Identity (Greenwood P, 1999) and is the lead author of Writing PR: A Multimedia Approach (Allyn & Bacon P, 2003). Currently, she teaches courses in public relations writing and campaigns; race, gender and the media, and research and cultural studies within the media.

Blog Entry

Diversity is the street where I live, and I would argue, the neighborhood that all of us inhabit. Like Victor Villaneuva, though, I find the word itself problematic, at least in terms of how we most often encounter it. One definition I found online equates diversity with “variety” and “multiformity.” When diversity is poised as an organizational or institutional goal at our various colleges and universities, we are often left with the strangely disembodied target. How much diversity is enough? And who gets to decide?

Diversity in some ways is too placid a term, connoting just the right mix of different elements, operating in a perfect balance with all of its parts. But I think the experience of diversity involves a sometimes raucous, sometimes contentious and sometimes blissful set of interactions. Mary Louise Pratt’s essay, “Arts of the Contact Zones,” captures the spirit of this social context as the author describes the “joys of the contact zone” incorporating a host of experiences from “rage” to “revelation” and beyond.

And yet the notion of multiple varieties existing in one temporal space is as commonplace to our everyday sensibilities as our everyday lives attest. I encountered one recent reminder of this as I trekked along the I-35 highway corridor between Texas and Oklahoma. Right inside the southern border between the two states, a large billboard loomed along the roadside, proudly trumpeting the specialties of a local eatery: “Catfish, BBQ and Mexican food.” Imagine the cultural cornucopia in place to make such a space possible—American Indian, African American, European American and Mexican American. Ironically, this restaurant resides in the state that, in 2007, passed the harshest anti-immigration law in the country at that time, with a not-so-concealed agenda to hasten the exodus of Mexican and other Latino residents.

So as I consider diversity as a state of dynamic flux, I find my research interests intensely concerned with historical constructions of diversity. A major project now centers on my work to give close readings of some of the nineteenth century Native American and African American newspapers published in Oklahoma pre-statehood. These periodicals, a tiny part of massive archives held at the Oklahoma History Center, are texts that offer multiple possibilities for new readings of the cultural histories of this state, region and country. What would happen if knowledge of these periodicals jostled along with knowledge of larger newspapers? In a dynamic environment of diversity, would we see—as the Law of Requisite Variety posits—a wider, more flexible view of knowing?

Such an idealized goal looms more concretely in the classroom as students attempt to move beyond sometimes deeply held biases for or against diversity by talking to real people in their acquaintance. A course I developed for the Gaylord College of Journalism called “Race, Gender & the Media” attempts to provide an academic space where students can examine, in a critical fashion, their assumptions about how the media represent race and gender. Over the semester, students are invited to combine their personal experiences with scholarly perspectives, all with the goal of encouraging them to locate themselves in the media professions to which they aspire.

One project involves a long-term research assignment where students work in small teams to
investigate and analyze historical and contemporary race/gender topics. The teams examine the ways in which the topic has been presented in the media and they critique those representations based upon the information they have garnered from a wide array of other sources. Their goals are:

· to determine if the coverage they found was accurate and fair,
· to ascertain the relevance of the topic to contemporary readers and viewers, and
· to suggest better ways in which the information could be communicated to mass audiences.

In previous semesters, I have required students to present their research projects in poster-style fashion in the lobby of our building, inviting written questions and comments from other students and faculty members.

One student group researched the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and included archival newspaper reports of this event as well as contemporary coverage of hearings considering reparations for survivors.

As new media have figured more heavily into our curricula, poster boards have given way to class blogs. Colleagues who also teach critical and cultural topics have championed the use of wikis in place of the traditional research paper.

One of the fundamental activities of journalists and media professionals is the interview, and another assignment I assign my students is the diversity interview. The assignment has a few key requirements. One, students must select someone, an acquaintance, who belongs to a visibly different racial or ethnic group from themselves AND gendered differently from themselves. As a corollary to this requirement, students cannot pick anyone currently taking the class or anyone with whom they have an intimate relationship! Two, students have to conduct this interview in a public place, like a restaurant or campus space. Three, students are required to comment on the experience of interviewing their subject, in addition to reporting on the facts and responses they receive, providing them with an informal experience in ethnography. They all ask a core of common questions that I provide, including:

· Tell me about where you were born and grew up. Do you think the racial attitudes at your
home are different from the ones you have experienced here?
· How do you describe yourself physically?
· When do you think about race? What makes that happen?
· Would your life be different if you were another gender? A different race? Why or why not?
If so, in what ways would those differences be evident?


When the discussion begins, I (and the students) become fascinated by the complexity of these identity answers. Diversity is in flux, illuminated by the voices of real people who do not fit into one-dimensional categories or experiences.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

Composition, Colonialism, and Hemispheric Pluralities

Introductory Bio

Damián Baca, Assistant Professor of English, earned a Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University in 2006. He is core faculty in the University of Arizona’s “Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English” Ph.D. program and affiliate faculty in Mexican American Studies. Baca's most recent publication is Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures Series) with Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. In addition to co-editing a manuscript, A Brief History of Rhetoric in the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE, Baca is co-editing a forthcoming special edition of College English on “Writing, Rhetoric, and Latinidad” with Victor Villanueva. Baca serves on the NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, the NCTE College Section Steering Committee, the CCCC Progressive Special Interest Group and Caucus Coalition, and is a member of the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus. As a recipient of NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation as well as the federally funded Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Baca is committed to mentoring students of underrepresented populations as they prepare to enter the professoriate.

Blog Entry

I’d like to thank Joyce Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity, NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color Research Foundation, the CCCC/NCTE Latino Caucus, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation, and the Ronald E. McNair post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program.

Although some Composition specialists theoretically embrace “diversity,” they often do not reflect on the origins of Western Composition that are the fruit of a Eurocentric interregional system before which they are profoundly uncritical, and, because of this, they struggle to contribute valid alternatives for exploited populations of the Americas. Thus, “diversity” is a semantic landmine that I generally avoid when describing my teaching, research, and service. I instead think in terms of hemispheric (and global) pluralities. Let me explain.

Raised in a multilingual, matrifocal family that endured shifting national identities, I became sensitive to the politics and geopolitics of culture at an early age. Rhetorical mediations between Mexican Spanish, Spanglish and English formed a web through which I made sense of the circumstances into which I was born. But the intellectual location of U.S. writing specialists prevented their well-intentioned pedagogies from accounting for the practices of such creative processes. The inherited patterns of thinking that emerged in Western Europe under capitalism and their philosophical extensions (that celebrated corpus from Phenomenology to Postmodernism) remain systematically narrow and inadequate. It wasn’t until confronting articulations such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” that I began to understand explicitly the traces of colonial power present at all scenes of writing instruction in the “New World,” as well as the innovative rhetorics emerging and persisting from the peripheries of North Atlantic imperialism.

Today, Rhetoric and Composition scholars too often retreat from confronting the enterprise of Western writing instruction as a consequence of colonial power, in particular, the transnational transfer of European systems, technologies and theories of writing to the Western Hemisphere, and the subsequent covering of pre-existing writing practices and tools of literacy of subjugated civilizations.

Operating directly against the humanities’ Western logic of exclusion and erasure, Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness revises our field’s imperial imaginary by “inventing between” AngloAmerican, Iberian, and Mesoamerican cosmologies. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa de-naturalizes standardized English literacy as the normative tool of communication by entwining various Castilian varieties—both the standard vernacular of an ex-colonial power and some of its subalternized counter-cultural admixtures, admixtures that are so common today. Anzaldúa furthermore introduces the potential to displace the supremacy of the art of letters by continually evoking pre-Columbian record keeping practices, which re-inscribe the Mesoamerican concept of Tlacuilolitzli—the earliest expression for writing in the Americas—translated as “the spreading of color on hard surfaces.” Ancient Mexican writing, influenced by the preceding 10,000 years of development in Mesoamerica, supported a fully socialized “higher education” network which fostered the realization of an organized and consistent legal system, an exact science of time-astronomy-and mathematics, complex faith systems, advanced knowledge of herbal medicine, elaborate architecture and sculptural art—all of this without Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum and without the invention of the alphabet.

By merging Mexican and Western technologies of writing, we are no longer obliged to accept the Western philosophy of a grammar, of linguistic control or taming the tongue and mind, as universal components of writing instruction. Possibilities for accessing theoretical and pedagogical potentials, no longer constrained by an elite class of practitioners, become available. If, in place of theorizing Composition based on a vanguard Western mythology, we accept new mestiza consciousness as a point of origin, we might be encouraged to think about, practice, and teach rhetoric in such a way that is directly responsive to comparative developments of writing, both past and present, from Olmec glyphs to the Inca Quipu, from Maya hieroglyphs to Aztec pictographs to Chicano codices and Zapatista internet communiqués. The earliest writing systems in the “New World” develop from the abstract to the pictorial—precisely the reverse of what many might teach us to believe. Fifteenth century Aztec writing is almost entirely pictorial, while earlier Maya hieroglyphs of the fourth century are far more abstract. The history of writing and writing instruction, therefore, is not a triumphant progression toward the alphabet, but rather a series of co-evolutionary processes in which different systems follow their own transformations. No longer limited by parochial assumptions about “true writing” as the representation of speech through alphabetic systems, the field could study and learn from the construction of knowledge through various technologies of information storage and transmission, whether one writes with letters or with colors or with a system of knotted cords. New translations of rhetoric that “emerge from” the American colonial periphery would provide thorough knowledge of what the field has yet to generate: a materialist, historically-grounded theory of writing that accounts for those civilizations that maintain the longest cumulative histories of writing and writing instruction in the Western Hemisphere. Such subalternized knowledge is also responsive to current trends in digital rhetorics and digital literacies—trends that belatedly call for increased awareness of so-called visual, multi-genre, and multi-media writing practices.

New mestiza consciousness as a rhetorical practice creates a locus of enunciation not where Iberian and Mesoamerican legacies are mere alternatives to Composition Studies. Anzaldúa’s rhetorics suggest, quite to the contrary, that Composition is not necessarily a suitable or superior alternative to the immense hemispheric plurality that remains obscured. As a teacher and researcher of writing, my largest obstacle is not the last eight years of “Cowboy Conservatism” in the Oval Office, but an enduring John Wayne pedagogy of the study of written language. It is the field’s compassionate colonialism that systematically deforms the history and theory of writing under divisive periodizations and spacializations that declare the Western cosmology as the genesis and center of all critical thought.

As a way out, I suggest a shift from merely “talking about” writing and “diversity” from the harmfully narrow perspective of those in the imperial center, to “writing and teaching from” Anzaldúa’s conceptual borderlands. We might also look to the forgotten Fernando Ortiz and his misappropriated “transculturation,” W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” Emma Pérez’ “decolonial imaginary,” Caribbean essayist Edouard Glissant’s “Créolization,” Malea Powell’s “trickster rhetoric,” and Guaman Poma’s “arts of the contact zone”—these distinct enunciations, grounded in the lived experiences of the peripheral colonial world, express new potentials that surpass the limits of post-Enlightenment rationality. In place of the uni-linear, developmental, racially coded framework “from Ancient Greece to Modern America,” the idea of temporal simultaneity is invoked in which it becomes possible to see multiple histories and memories coexisting, without political rankings or assumptions that all cultures and rhetorical practices progress along the same imperial path.

In this light, an education in Composition and Rhetoric would interrogate the overhanging colonial determinant of the study of written language—not for what it declares, but for what it conceals: the epistemic limits of an enduring Eurocentric telos, too often passed off as universal and disembodied, without cultural roots or limitations. By provincializing and possibly even abandoning the field’s imperial horizon, perhaps we might prevent Composition Studies from becoming the humanities’ final attempt to keep John Wayne alive for one last Western.

Challenges from the Margin: Diverse Feminist Theories for Diverse Women

Introductory Bio

Dr. Hui Wu is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her scholarship encompasses history of rhetoric, comparative studies of rhetoric, global feminist rhetorics, and archival research in rhetoric and composition. Currently, she continues to study post-Mao Chinese literary women’s feminist rhetoric and has begun writing about and translating China’s first book on persuasion, Guiguzi (Master of the Ghost Valley, 400-300 BCE). Her Chinese translation (Jiangxi Education Press, 2004) of C. Jan Swearingen’s Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies offers Chinese academics an alternative perspective of the history of Western literacy. Her critical anthology in translation, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.

Editor's note: find Hui Wu's Works Cited page at
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEfiles/Groups/CCCC/huiwuworkscited.pdf

Blog Entry

Time is ripe for CCCC to address diversity in terms of what we do as scholars and teachers. Today, each of us is part of the diversity we live and work in. Personally and professionally, diversity is what I am, what I live, what I “do” in everything I do. Yet diversity remains an issue with the whole baggage of problems, problems that permeate our research, teaching, and service. Feminist theory and research methodology can serve as a prime example. For years, until recently, “Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. Feminist analyses of women’s lot tend to focus exclusively on gender and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct feminist theory (bell hooks 15).

Since 2001, my publications on post-Mao Chinese women writers’ rhetoric have been addressing methodological problems caused by the dominant interpretive feminist framework that has evolved from white middle-class women’s perspectives (Wu 2001, 2002, 2005). Such perspectives, I have been arguing, disable us to explain the lot of women of other cultures, ethnicities, and classes. The dominant feminist theory focusing on individualism and women’s sexuality hardly provides a valid critical lens for the understanding of non-white, non-middle-class women’s lives. It does not respond to post-Mao Chinese women’s rhetoric nor explain their lived experiences. First, individualism is a concept inherited from the Western white male tradition for the independent pursuit of the self, so it is still patriarchal. Second, sexuality as a critical concept is developed from white women’s gender perspectives against white men and for the sexual emancipation from white men. To other women, for example, African-American women, the fight for women’s sexuality is a family quarrel between white women and white men (Morrison 21). Other women want “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights” (Morrison 30).

To the question, “how do you address diversity in your research, teaching, and service?” I am providing this answer--what I have been doing is addressing problems to shape and reshape feminist theory by making Chinese women’s feminist rhetorics visible and their voices heard, because of the challenges these women pose to the feminist mainstream theoretical framework.
Since the late 1980s, particularly the most recent years, Western feminists' interest in Chinese women’s life, history, and writing has exploded. Yet, for more than three decades, post-Mao literary women, who came of age in the late 1970s, have been baffling their Western sisters with their vehement repudiation of Western feminism. For so many years, this breach has been barely patched. And for so many years, the disassociation and repudiation have undergone intensive examinations in the West but with little satisfaction to either side.

My reading of their writings shows that post-Mao women writers’ experiences under Mao and their observations of women’s lives during economic reforms have largely shaped their feminist standpoint, a standpoint that distinguishes them from white middle-class women and Chinese women before and after their generation. This standpoint encourages women to develop themselves into strong world leaders who embody both the Confucian value of the exemplary human and the modern feminist values of the independent equal woman. The ostensibly conflicting values have possibly engendered their disassociation with many Western feminist critics, whose reading of their works is often dominated by individualism and sexuality.

Such an interpretive framework fails to appreciate post-Mao women writers’ collective activism for a women’s literature, which distinguishes itself not only from mainstream male literature, but also from two types of women’s writing for commercial purposes--one that encourages women to shape their bodies and minds for male approval and the other that focuses on sexual encounters with graphic details mostly read by Western critics as free expressions of women’s self and sexuality. The post-Mao female writers want to continue developing a literature of women, by women, and for women, a literature that centers on women’s past and present, including women with/without choices, working women, impoverished women, married/unmarried women, and young women. They hope this literature will educate men (not fight against men for sexual rights) and emancipate women to develop China into a society respectful of human rights and free of gender discrimination.

It’s no coincidence or surprise that I am frequently quoting African-American women in this blog. Actually, my research draws upon their womanism more than mainstream feminism, because of some interrelatedness between post-Mao Chinese women and black women in the U.S. These two groups of women in different socio-cultural contexts have both been deprived of human rights by the state political machine, a regime that has also oppressed their men. Theirs is not only gender oppression but also socio-political oppression.

This cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-class feminist standpoint is what we should continue to advocate and develop in order to read diverse women’s writings, rhetorics, and histories on their own terms. This is because “it has become so commonplace for individuals doing feminist work to evoke gender, race, and class, it is often forgotten that initially most feminist thinkers, most of whom were white and from privileged class backgrounds, were hostile to adopting this perspective” (bell hooks xii). Until recently, few feminist critics of white middle-class backgrounds have transcended their own race, culture, or class to use theories of non-white, non-middle class women to reflect upon their practices or theories. It is quite often to see feminist critics of other cultures and ethnicities being trained with the dominant feminist theory, but it is rare to see their theories being part of the training unless the course title has some distinguishing “Other” words—“African-American” or “third world.” Isn’t it odd that other women should master the dominant feminist theory consequently to deprive their own voices and find no valid methodology to explain their own lives or interpret their own writing?

I feel it compelling to take this opportunity to promote diverse feminist approaches and show how cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-class approaches can bring us “together in difference” (Mao). A successful example is Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening, where she braves the ideology of white supremacy openly. Her confession about her refusal to include Alice Walker in her previous book, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions is like a fresh breeze into a room covered by layers of heavy dust from years of feminist talk that has never personally transcended the dominant discourse. Ratcliffe’s approach is encouraging and aspiring. It is encouraging, for it shows that it the margin is pushing the frontline of feminist research, taking its footing in the mainstream framework. It is aspiring for it testifies that marginalized feminist theory is indeed useful to the analysis of mainstream identity and discourse, making us better critics, theorists, and teachers with diverse perspectives. Evidently, the feminist theoretical landscape demands culture matters, “race matters” (Middleton), and class matters.

"A CCCC Diversity Statement--in Four Voices"

Editor's Note: Happy New Year, and welcome to our new CCCC blog posts on diversity
and writing for the 2009 spring semester. As always, your comments and
responses to our guest writers are welcome.

Guest Writers: Annis N. Brown, Cathleen Clara, Ellen Cushman, and Alma Villanueva

Introductory Bio

Annis N. Brown is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy program at Michigan State University. Her research interests lie in the historical and contemporary implementation of urban educational policy and critical literacy studies. She works with pre-service teachers, student teachers and veteran teachers in various capacities. She is an active member of the Graduate Student Council for the American Educational Research Association, and currently serves as the community leader. She was also the Training and Support Coordinator for The New York City Teaching Fellows and previously taught middle school English Language Arts and Social Studies in the South Bronx.

Blog Entry

So, what do we really mean by diversity? My mind consistently veers toward this question every time I hear the infamous four syllables. I teach pre-service teachers who are overwhelmingly white and predominately middle-class. In my learning as a doctoral student, I am professed to by mostly white faculty. Does inserting my African American self into either of these equations automatically equal diversity? Am I creating diverse learning environments by sharing my experiences as a teacher in the South Bronx, and inserting the requisite Brice-Heath, Delpit, Banks, and Nieto into my syllabi? When thinking about diversity I have more questions than answers. However, there is no place where I make better sense of these questions than in the classroom.

In my collegiate teaching, my pedagogical leaning is toward a womanist conceptualization of care. The strength of the women in Jackie Jones Royster’s Traces of A Stream, the historical memory of the educators in Michelle Foster’s, Black Teachers on Teaching and the framework construction of Nell Noddings in Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education all inform my instructional stance. This pragmatic application of Black feminist ideals, high expectations and social justice transcends place–it is applicable across both homogenous and heterogeneous groups. Caring about whether both the margins and the center are represented, in texts assigned and activities taught, creates a vibrant learning environment where ideas can be stretched. Expecting and requiring intellectual rigor that translates into practical application and genuine learning, while leaving my students with the charge to “do something about it” is my instructional legacy. I am teaching English teachers who will radiate across this nation to choose the books that children read, create the assignments that frame adolescent understanding, and engineer curricula for towns, districts and states. These causal relationships further complicate the true meaning of diversity.

This lovingly pragmatic approach that I espouse is also borne out of my experiences as a student. I grew up in schools that were poor and racially segregated. The caring that emanated from the predominately Black and female teachers in my classrooms prepared me to begin to comprehend a world where I am seen as a minority. These intersections have caused me to explore the realities of urban Black girls, their teachers, and their rhetorical practices. How can their cultural understandings diversify our perceptions of teacher and learner? How do popular and public stereotypes about “that loud Black lady” interact with domestic and private home expectations of docility and femininity? What can the latent texts and silences that lie beneath speech tell us about the marginalized spaces of “double minorities”? This research agenda will continue to inform my teaching, and my identity as a constantly evolving pedagogue. What I really mean by diversity is shifting consciousness, shaping outlook, and sustaining change.


Introductory Bio

Cathleen Clara is a third-year teacher education doctoral student in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy at Michigan State University. She is studying adolescent literacy, young adult literature and urban/alternative education. A former alternative high school teacher, she has taught language arts and social studies, content area literacy and children’s literature. She has also written curriculum for a local school district and is support staff for freshman study abroad experiences.

Blog Entry

In working with pre-service teachers, I create a learning environment that encompasses ideas of pedagogy that critically engage popular notions of diversity and multiculturalism. As a former alternative high school teacher, I longed to be able to name the practices I used in my classroom, so this course is heavily weighted in critical pedagogy and critical literacy. I teach a course in secondary content area literacy where the majority of my students are White, middle-class, female, Christian and were ‘good students’ in high school. As part of this course, they spend time working in an urban alternative high school, where many of them encounter students who are not only different from them in race and class, but also in their experiences and perceptions of the purposes of schooling.

I feel that part of my job is to widen their perspectives on diversity and to help them be able to work with all of the students in their future classrooms, especially those who have had different life and school experiences from their own.

I begin this course by asking my students to write about and discuss what they already know about teaching and learning based on their own experiences as students and pre-service teachers. We then build on those experiences through their field placement and activities that challenge their traditional notions of what education is and can be. I use varied texts (by writers such as Lisa Delpit, Linda Christensen, Bill Bigelow, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Greg Michie and Mica Pollack--to name a few) that push my own and my students’ current knowledge and perceptions of literacy and schooling. This helps us redefine not only who students are and the challenges they face in a school system that panders to one type of student, but also to redefine our notions of literacy in content and context.

My biggest challenge is getting my students to engage ideas of incorporating material that is outside the traditional (white/middle class) curriculum. They struggle with issues they find controversial (GLBTQ, language diversity, oppression, etc) and how they can really teach and work with students around subjects and experiences that speak to their own and their students’ lived experiences. In order to help my students think about these lived experiences, we read three diverse novels; PUSH by Sapphire, Ironman by Chris Crutcher and The Other Side of the Sky by Farah Ahmedi. These texts inevitably lead to heated discussions about what can and cannot be taught in schools and how involved teachers can and should become in students’ lives. Ultimately, I believe that my job is to help my pre-service teachers learn to really love kids for who they are, not how they perform in our overly structured and standardized school system. As teachers we work primarily with human beings and secondarily with our content areas.

Soon, I will begin research on the possible influences diverse texts might have on pre-service teachers’ beliefs, perspectives and assumptions about students and adolescents. Eventually, I plan to look specifically at student and teacher relationships in alternative education and how those might better inform our preparation of pre-service teachers.


Introductory Bio

Ellen Cushman is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She has published two books: The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community and Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook with co-editors Eugene Kintgen, Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose, as well as numerous essays. Initial findings from her qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity will appear in College Composition and Communication, The Public Work of Rhetoric (eds David Coogan and John Ackerman), and in a new book underway: The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing Linguistic, Historical, and Cultural Perseverance.

Blog Entry

For me, diversity has best been understood in terms of the tools people use in their everyday struggles and acts of making meaning. Be it a fifty-year old African American woman completing a welfare application with her sisters; a Korean freshman grappling with the English translation of a complex idea so eloquently written in Korean; a Cherokee language teacher trying to structure a language lesson for his English L1 students; a professional writing student creating a digital video to represent the history the effect of allotment on Cherokee families; or three graduate students tackling the idea of diversity with me—as we strive to represent ourselves, we put media together to show who we are; where we stand; what we need, think, and believe; and hopefully, to reach our students and readers. These tools of representation have grammars and conventions for their use; these are:

the rules that write us as we write with them,
the structures that shape and limit the reach of our voices, and
the cultural values that imbue our meaning making.

To understand the ways in which tools come to hold value for the people who use them, this work draws upon two areas of scholarship that have remained, unfortunately, relatively unconnected. On the one hand, I draw upon the scholarship that explores the rhetorical and literate strategies of African Americans (Richardson, Smitherman, Pough, Royster, Moss, Gilyard, and Middleton), Asian Americans (Lu, Okawa, Young, Guinsatao Monberg), Native Americans (Crane-Bizzarro, Powell, Lyons), Latino/as (Villanueva, Moreno, Baca, Perez), and Whites (Ratcliffe, Kirsch and Ritchie, Prendergast, Trainor). Taken together, these works have had noteworthy impact on unmasking the power and privilege of particular linguistic tools and the cultural rules that govern their use. On the other hand, this work draws upon the scholarship that explores composing with various tools (Anderson, Wysoki, DeVoss and Webb, Ball, Trimbur, George, Halrbitter) and the effects of mediation on the people who use them (Hawisher and Selfe, Haas, Charney, Holdstein). This too-brief list of colleagues working in the area of composing with various media points to the ways in which these tools cannot be seen as instruments alone, that they structure us as we use them, and that tools of representation have cultural values and status related to the practices of their use.

Ultimately, though, any understanding of mediation as a cultural practice that may be drawn from this line of inquiry will be useful only insofar as it’s helpful to communities and cultures this work serves. Understanding diversity for me must weave tightly with teaching, writing, and public engagement activities. Many of the classes I teach ask students to learn to work at the intersections of culture, community, and technology, what Ernest Morrell and I have called a praxis of new media. For example, students enrolled in multimedia writing created educational installations for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to facilitate the Nation’s efforts to write histories of the formation of the state of Oklahoma from the perspective of Indian Territory. These histories are one small effort in a constellation of rhetorical practices the Nation has developed to persevere as a sovereign entity. This perseverance will be illustrated in a book-length study of the evolution of the Cherokee writing system. Diversity, then, can be understood through a combination of research, teaching, and service.


Introductory Bio

Alma Villanueva is an MA candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Michigan State University, and a first-time teacher of college composition. Her scholarship focuses on imperial rhetorics in their local and global manifestations, currently with a particular interest in composition pedagogy that at once provides students access to institutions of power and works against the ideological ramifications of contemporary neocolonial discourse.

Blog Entry

I teach “Preparation for College Writing,” where white Americans of the middle class are a minority. I have first generation immigrant students, international students from China, Japan, and Turkey, and I have first generation working class white American and African American students. There is one middle class white student, and there is me, a white-looking middle class woman. Diversity?

As I stand in front of my twenty-three students from different social locations within and without the States, I have to push to hear a diversity of voices. Everyone knows the American way: to assimilate and try to get it “right.” Discussions on language variations and linguistic prejudice become silencing moments in which confused students try to understand the “right” answers and the “right” histories whereby ethnic and national discriminations perished sometime after a Black preacher had some dream. They strive for me to tell them how to do “correct” American English in writing and talking, meaning, of course, Edited American English and Standard(ized) American English. Where is the diversity, even as I look out into a room full of people that are supposed to epitomize “diversity”?

Diversity is a way of seeing and being in the world; and as educators, students, and colleagues within this field, we need to embrace a diversity that speaks from the citizens of this earth and about the structural conditions that harm too many of us. We need to encourage and promote a diversity of voices, a diversity of ways of thinking. In order to work towards a diversity as it ought to be promoted and exist in education and other institutions, much of my recent scholarship aims at Ernest Morrell’s (2008) vision of critical literacy, which is not only to create “aware[ness] of the various social, ideological, cultural, and political contexts in which the languages and literacies of power operate,” but also to work towards the production of “counter-language and counter-texts” for a “redefining of the self and the [eventual] transformation of oppressive social structures.”

In other words, teaching composition with diversity means teaching ourselves, one another, and our students. It means learning from our students. It moves from the small scale, the individual, and radiates outward, affecting greater social structures. It is not only reformative or reactive, and it is not only responsive; but it acts on its own accord, towards liberatory ends. Not just critical pedagogy, but a pedagogy of liberation. Diversity ought not be about having a multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, genders, and other such identities; rather it is about a diversity in discussions about structured discriminations against persons of color, gays and lesbians, non-American nationalities, women, non-Christians, the working class, and the impoverished of the U.S. and the world.

"Pathways to Diversity: Social Justice and the Multiplicity of Identities"

Introductory Bio

Eric Darnell Pritchard is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a faculty affiliate in the department of English, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. He studied English-Liberal Arts at Lincoln University and literacy, rhetoric, critical theory and African-American gender and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Pritchard's research and teaching interests include literacy, African-American and Queer Rhetoric, community-based writing, critical pedagogy queer theory, black feminist theory, masculinity studies and hip hop studies. His current focus is on the intersections of race, (queer) sexuality, gender and class with historical and contemporary literacy research.

Pursuant to those interests he is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Black Queer Literacies. The study draws on the life story accounts of 60 black LGBTQ people who he interviewed about the relationships among their everyday literacy practices and identity formation across their lifetimes. The study focuses on the fluidity of literacy and identity and its interplay with black queer cultural productions (literary, visual, performance) in activism, spirituality, education, and in digital realms.

For his scholarship and community work he has received numerous honors, including the "Scholars for the Dream Award" from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the A. Philip Randolph Award for Community Activism from the Wisconsin Black Student Union.


Blog Entry

I want to thank the members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity for the creation of this space for a very important conversation. As a young scholar in rhetoric and composition I especially appreciate the invitation to be in the conversation with people who, in their work, have blazed so many trails for me to ‘tell it my way.’

My response to the question “How do you address the topic of "diversity" in your scholarship, teaching, and service?” reflects the sentiments of Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell and other guest contributors to the blog. Each has professed their commitment to diversity, while acknowledging their specific contentions with the term as it’s sometimes invoked. In my case, I have long emphasized and used the phrase ‘social justice’ rather than diversity. I prefer social justice because I hear in it the recognition of institutionalized social inequalities and the necessity of intervention into institutionalized oppression in pursuit of social justice. Diversity is one result of anti-oppression work. Social justice then is a pathway to diversity, a pathway that I think we continue to struggle with everyday. I often wonder: how effective is it to emphasize the importance of having ‘everyone at the table’ — to use a phrase often employed to illustrate diversity —if discussions don’t center the inequities each encounters en route to the proverbial table? What effect does this structure of the conversation have on the sustainability of coalitions for social justice? This question seems especially necessary given past and on-going discourses in society that ignore the specificity and continuance of oppression. The result of this discourse is an emphasis on equality and diversity that leads (prematurely) toward post-race, post-gender or in sum, post-oppression, without a necessary uptake of the impact of oppression. Here I briefly explore the centrality of these issues to my own work and more broadly to our research, teaching and professional service as members of the rhetoric and composition community.

In my research I respond to these challenges through a call to reconsider the usefulness of the phrase ‘multiplicity of identities’ as an alternative to lists of discrete characteristics as a category of analysis. This analysis can be of socio-political and cultural issues, and by extension, histories and theories of rhetoric and literacy traditions and pedagogical models. A recognition of identity as multiple is central to highlighting the problematic of pointing toward actions like inclusion or tolerance as representative of diversity or resorting to simplistic understandings of institutionalized oppression and identity. This is important because, in quests for social justice, how can we confront the social inequalities that threaten diversity without completely grasping the complexity of identities, oppression and communities as multiple, fluid, linked and/or simultaneous?

For example, my work on the literacy traditions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people showed me the consequences of the field under – theorizing the multiplicity of identities. By under-theorizing I refer to theorizing identities as narrow or monolithic or through an oversimplified interpretation of intersectionality. For many of my research participants, resisting this predisposition has allowed them to assert their identities as Black and LGBTQ (amongst many other identities). Through this the black LGBTQ person destabilizes the heteronormativity by which blackness is often read and also resists the erasure of difference in LGBTQ/sexuality studies research across disciplines, insisting on paradigms that center the “heterogeneity of sexuality” whereby sexuality “is constitutive of and constituted by racialized gender and class formations” (see Roderick Ferguson’s “Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality”). As such through their life story accounts my research participants intervene into composition and rhetoric research that depicts black and LGBTQ identities, movements and concerns in ways that fail to synthesize race, class, gender, sexuality and other identities. I should also say that this oversimplification of identities is endemic of work outside the realm of African-American and LGBTQ related research too. To move beyond this issue, I contend that we must return to the full definitions of women of color feminist writers and activists who first theorized and applied “intersectionality” — particularly the women of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization. In their position paper “A Black Feminist Statement” Combahee described identities and oppressions as being on different paths that sometimes intersect and overlap, and at other times are synthesized or blended. The latter part of this definition — the synthesis — has often been ignored while the former — the criss-crossing of identities — has been used to define intersectionality. “Multiplicity” (see Michael Hames-Garcia’s “Who Are Our Own People?: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity.” ) of identities references the entirety of this definition of intersectionality. Through it we can explore multiple oppressions and identities in ways that do not elide the specificity of difference, but acknowledges the intertwining of these oppressions and identities. Thus, for all of us for whom social justice is a goal in our scholarship, teaching and professional service we must always be attentive to the multiplicity of identities and by extension the simultaneity of oppressions and the unevenness of power and privilege. This includes provisional privileges as well (see Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”).

Viewing identity through multiplicity does indeed make things fluid in ways that we are not socialized to be comfortable with or accept. However, I argue that the material circumstances of our students and our lives warrant that we embrace the complexity of people’s lives. If we do so, we will be able to access, document and analyze situated rhetorical and literacy traditions that are easily overlooked when we see identity too narrowly. Also, in terms of quests for social justice and embracing difference, multiplicity is a powerful lens because the specificity of the effects of oppression and differentials of power/privilege occurring in one body and/or across communities is better illuminated. This is important to any movements toward “diversity” because it forces us to take into account as full a rendering as the stories of everyone at “the table” as possible. Multiplicity reminds us, as put so eloquently by poet and essayist June Jordan, that “freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all… and either we [emphasis mine] are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self interests and I am working for mine” (409). We must all recognize that our freedom is bound up in the oppression of other people. Further, multiplicity engenders a conception of diversity that recognizes difference as not a problem to be overcome but as a source of power. And perhaps most significantly, multiplicity supports the politics of coalition building across communities as necessary and sustainable. It suggests such coalitions are possible through the hard work struggling with one another for collective social justice and not against one another for individual advancement. A deeper understanding of identity and oppression is crucial to doing this hard work together.

Multiplicity of identities can also be useful to mediating professional development /institutional support structures. For instance, at the CCCC convention each year, there is a given time slot for caucuses and some of the special interest groups (SIGS) to meet. Generally this time is allotted for Friday evening of the convention when it comes to the ethnic/racial caucuses, queer caucus and many other caucuses and SIGS. Many of these caucuses meet at the same time, and though I doubt this is the intended effect, it forces people to choose one identity or commitment at the expense of others.

In my own experience, I remember having to literally run up and down the stairs of the conference hotel at a past CCCC, going from the Black Caucus to the Queer Caucus that met at the same time. In this sense, I am forced to either stretch myself to be in all the spaces with which I identify, get support and work to support others in these communities or, I am forced to decide which of my identities is most salient. Another example is those persons who identify as multi-racial/ethnic. If all the ethnic/racial caucuses meet at the same time, a person of multiple races/ethnicities will be unable to participate in the different spaces relevant to their personal and professional development. A restructuring of this schedule would also be very useful to building ally and coalition relationships between the various constituencies attending caucuses as it would allow space for members to be in other spaces as allies if that was desired by a given caucus or member. I could go on and on with the ways in which other persons from any number of identity groups are put in this situation. Our inattention to multiplicity of identities not only impacts our scholarship and teaching, but clearly, has limited our potential to provide the most comprehensive support to our colleagues at the institutional level as well. As Catherine Fox says, in English Studies, we operate under an “ironic display of desire to construct a collective identity for English Departments … occluding genuine reflection, dialogue, and struggle about what might constitute safety for marginalized peoples” (in “From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in ‘Safe Spaces’,” in College English, May 2007) and consequently, how one arrives at a true coalition or collective identity.

We must resist the impulse to do violence to one another through oversimplifying the oppressions and identities we each encounter if we are to ever achieve the transgressive research, teaching and service we all imagine as our contribution to meaningful social change.

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.