“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 Takeaways

One current running through all the symposium pieces is the emphasis contributors place, not as much on their experiences within Rhet-Comp graduate study specifically as on their experiences as graduate students along demographic lines of identity, such as class, dis/ability, ethnicity and race, sex and gender. This emphasis should come as no surprise as the demographic body has more and more won the visibility and attention it needs in and beyond Rhet-Comp, and with increasingly nuanced acknowledgement of our differences. One takeaway, then, is that our graduate degree programs are far from being the great levelers of inequality that we might sometimes wish them to be. What’s more, graduate degree programs in Rhet-Comp could more explicitly take up consideration of our students’ identities, the cultural and linguistic assets associated with them, and the differences in need between them. One identity axis that we are particularly glad is represented here is perhaps the least talked about in graduate student professionalizing literature: motherhood and its associated caretaker status. As well, we see our contributors speaking about these axes intersectionally, for example, in how single-mother graduate students are excluded from extracurricular activities and inadequately accommodated in their teaching schedules and modalities, reminding us that our programs must be as nuanced as our scholarship in taking identity into account.

Furthermore, we notice that our authors draw as much if not more from literature outside of Rhet-Comp, and speak as much if not more to their status as graduate students in general, than they do literature and identities specific to our field. This tells us that our field as perceived by the authors collected in this symposium still represents a capaciously interdisciplinary terrain; that the experiences of graduate students in Rhet-Comp are likely more universal than we might tend to perceive through our tribalistic frames of disciplinary specialization; and that there is something visceral and palpable about one’s status as a graduate student that carries deeper material, affective, embodied, and discursive connections to one’s demographic body than one’s disciplinary identity, and than recognized by our limited conceptions of the place of graduate study in Rhet-Comp.

It is due to this very visceral and palpable nature of those connections that our symposium authors are able to so incisively define their identities as graduate students against particular problems, with consideration toward specific needs, and with an eye toward concrete solutions. More than any of our other takeaways, we hope you’ll pay careful attention to their eloquently stated ideas. All eleven pieces make calls to action, whether to change the very material conditions of graduate learning, teaching, and training, or to substantially shift the mindsets and behaviors of graduate students’ peers and mentors, or as is often the case, a combination of both. In some way, by choosing the traditional discursive framework of the symposium through which to amplify graduate students’ calls for radical change, we are capitulating to the hegemonic forces within academia responsible for the very problems graduate students are now speaking up about, and indeed, we risk perpetuating them ourselves. Yet, as an open-access journal with a longstanding tradition of mentoring emerging scholars in Rhet-Comp and showcasing their innovative contributions to the field, Xchanges has always been a site of pushing back against conventional thought and ideas. We hope, then, that this symposium will serve multiple audiences: those who would benefit from reading their peers articulate their experiences and visions for a more equitable field; and the faculty members, mentors, administrators, and others in positions of power, who can help to effect the changes that these authors and their contributions so urgently and astutely demand.