"On the Front Lines: Graduate Student Roles in Shaping Discourse in Digital Spaces"

by Mandy Olejnik and Cara Marta Messina | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

📋 Contents

Introduction
#WPAListservFeministRevolution
Channeling the Back Channels
Moving Forward in the Field
Conclusion
References
About the Authors

This article is part of Xchanges 15.1’s Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition.

Introduction

Like many graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp), we follow the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L), which had been described as “intended primarily for individuals who are involved in writing program administration at universities, colleges, or community colleges” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, n.d.). We learned about the listserv through our coursework and professors and were encouraged to join in order to see online scholarly conversations. What is not as apparent from our introduction to the list, however, is a certain silencing, hostile culture that many members perceive. This has long been a whispered gripe of junior members in the field; one of Mandy’s mentors was advised to never, ever post on the list for these reasons, as an example.

Recently, scholars have more directly grappled with these issues in professional discourses. Mandy is an author in the “Building a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Ethos” symposium released in WPA: Writing Program Administration (Cox, Kumari, Manivannan, Olejnik, & Roundtree, 2019), where graduate students, junior WPAs, and senior WPAs collaboratively discussed the challenges of writing program administration work. Cara is a member of the WPA-L Working Group (n.d.), whose goal is to reimagine the infrastructure of the WPA-L, including adding moderators and behavior guidelines. These examples demonstrate how the field is reshaping professional spaces and discussion, and the ways graduate students have contributed to these transformations while also, as Polk, Russell, & Sockwell (2020) remind us, face “navigating the relationship between opportunity and exploitation” in the labor they contribute for better discursive spaces (Introduction).

This symposium piece works through our actions and reception during a series of controversial threads on the WPA-L, our social media presence, and the horizontal mentoring we’ve practiced. We engage in a dialogic reflection to challenge the status quo and reimagine a just, inclusive, and equitable field. In each section, we include guiding questions that shaped our responses. We encourage you to also consider these guiding questions and share your thoughts on Twitter under the hashtag #WPAListservFeministRevolution, or discuss them with your colleagues. By working together and extending these conversations, we can continue to make sustaining changes that extend across time, venues, and people.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7