“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
Our Exigence
Aptly enough, the idea for this symposium arose partly in reaction to the series of racist and sexist incidents on the WPA-L–arguably Rhet-Comp’s largest, most public online discursive space–and the outsized role graduate students played in protesting and enacting change. For those of us who have been discounted, marginalized, and oppressed in these volatile spaces, neither the fact that these incidents occurred nor the subsequent groundswell of digital activism by and for graduate students is as explosive or shocking as some have framed it. Instead, we see these incidents and graduate students’ reactions to them as more visible iterations of longstanding inequities in Rhet-Comp and student-led direct action against them.
Although the scholarly conversation within Rhet-Comp has rightly acknowledged the importance of graduate students’ enculturation into the field, we contend that the conversation has traditionally, narrowly focused on graduate students’ utilitarian function as teachers in training, only further reinforcing their status as cheap, disposable labor (e.g. Anson, 1993; Macrorie, 1963; Nyquist, 1991; Williams, 1949). And when we have talked about graduate students’ scholarly development, both historically and more recently, we have often employed the deficit model of the Other, the alien, the foreign, non-native, immigrant, or international student who “needs help” assimilating to the hegemony of formal academic discourse (e.g. Abasi et al, 2006; Ackerman, 1991; Alvarez et al, 2017; Angelova & Riazantseva, 1999; Berkenkotter et al., 1988).
The work collected in Anderson and Romano (2005) and Baliff et al. (2008) signaled a culture shift within Rhet-Comp toward including current or recent graduate students’ own voices and experiences, but structural change in higher education is slow going and hard won. It was not long before that the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) (2001) issued the field’s first position statement specifically aimed at graduate student professional development. It would take nearly a decade for the Council of Writing Program Administrators to establish WPA-GO (Elder, Schoen, & Skinnell, 2014), a graduate student organization whose success in providing visibility and voice were subsequently emulated in IWCA-GO, WAC-GO, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Committee on the Status of Graduate Students, the latter of which consisted only of faculty and had no graduate student representation at the time. And it would take nearly another decade for CCCC (2019) to issue their own graduate student-centered position statement. Meanwhile, graduate students’ own concerns related to the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions that affect their development remain primarily relegated to informal spaces such as teacher-training colloquia and social media. And although several special journal features arising from the recent WPA-L incidents have appropriately highlighted graduate student perspectives (Cox et al., 2019; Baniya et al., 2019), Rhet-Comp has yet to produce a scholarly publication devoted to graduate students sharing their own visions of the current status and possible future of graduate study in our field.
Indeed, much of the exigency in providing this space and moment is directly in response to how neither academia in general nor Rhet-Comp specifically knows how to conceive of graduate students as a defined group or category of experiences. In our programs and professional spaces, graduate students are usually, and often awkwardly, treated as “undergraduate students with more motivation” or “baby faculty,” as if they don’t have their own identity but merely exist in a fleeting cocoon stage before some mythical, ultimate transformation into their final form. This simplistic construction perpetuates a liminality/transitionality narrative that subversively denies graduate students their own unique identity and justifies the precariousness of their positionality within inequitable disciplinary and institutional structures.
We therefore committed to co-creating this symposium in Xchanges with leaders of graduate student organizations in Rhet-Comp to give more visibility to graduate students and the scholarly conversations and structural transformations that they want for our field and its approach to graduate study. Though the precarity within which Rhet-Comp graduate students find themselves at present is not new (WPA-GO, 2019), it has definitely been exacerbated by a global pandemic presently plunging the economy into recession and amplifying the financial hardship of already underfunded public and under-enrolled private colleges and universities (Flaherty, 2020). Even before this crisis, however, graduate students were at the forefront of developing innovative ways to resist and transform structural inequities, so that the critical analyses and recommendations collected herein only become that much more significant now, and the need to pay attention to them all the more pressing.