“Editor’s Introduction: Rhetoric and Composition Graduate Students Define Their Identities Against Dominant Narratives”
by Al Harahap and Brian Hendrickson | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020
Welcome to the Xchanges Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp). We are proud to present to you this collaborative effort by current and recent graduate students who identify as members of the Rhet-Comp community. To ensure that we foreground the voices of the authors over our own, we’ll begin our introduction with a synopsis of their contributions.
The Authors
Given the liminality of graduate study in general, the concerns of this symposium’s authors are immediate and pressing, as evidenced in Mandy Olejnik and Cara Marta Messina’s contribution, which opens the symposium by calling on the field to create policies and infrastructure to ensure more equitable discourse in the digital spaces that are so important to graduate students’ enculturation into Rhet-Comp. Despite these barriers to enculturation, Andrew Bowman and Bruce Kovanen demonstrate a deep awareness of our field’s history of labor activism in their recommendation that graduate students practice direct collective action to address the labor inequities that they and other contingent faculty increasingly face. Liz Miller meanwhile draws upon disability studies to critique neoliberal notions of wellness destructive to graduate students’ wellbeing and advocates for Rhet-Comp to instead integrate networks of care into the fabric of graduate study. Alexandria Hanson, Alejandra I. Ramírez, April M. Cobos, Heather Listhartke, and Skye Roberson then extend Miller’s critique to neoliberal notions of productivity that disadvantage single-mother graduate students in Rhet-Comp.
All of our authors took pains not just to critique but recommend strategies to actualize a more equitable field, frequently through the lens of their own encounters with inequity during the course of their graduate study. Caleb Lee González explores how counter-storytelling can function as a powerful scholarly endeavor through which graduate students of color can critique and transform graduate study in Rhet-Comp, while also rendering its mechanisms of marginalization more visible to their more privileged colleagues. Sherwin Kawahakui Ranchez Sales provides his own counterstory to draw our attention to the ways in which graduate students of color enrolled in predominantly white programs and institutions can disproportionately suffer from imposter syndrome, which is why the community cultural wealth that affinity groups provide is so invaluable.
Lida Colón then focuses on the unique challenges of Black graduate students in Rhet-Comp and how Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC) provides a model for contributing to their success. Amanda Presswood and Virginia M. Schwarz of the Writing Program Administrators Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) call for equity-centered approaches to assessing programs and professional organizations. Thomas Polk, Alisa Russell, and Allie Sockwell Johnston of the Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Organization (WAC-GO) caution against the ways in which our attempts at enculturating graduate students into Rhet-Comp can actually play out as exploitative. Bringing us full circle, Ashanka Kumari, Sweta Baniya, and Kyle Larson of nextGEN detail the formation of their own initiative in direct response to incidents on the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L), and how graduate students will need to transform outdated discursive structures or invent new ones in order to address structural inequities in Rhet-Comp.