“The Necessity of Genre Disruption in Organizing an Advocacy Space for and by Graduate Students”
by Ashanka Kumari, Sweta Baniya, and Kyle Larson | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020
Introduction
On November 6, 2018, graduate students via nextGEN (2018) composed and sent a “listserv-to-listserv” email, actioning a collective and bold return to the Writing Program Administration-Listserv (WPA-L). Taking two weeks for a spontaneous graduate student collective to digitally complete, this response built upon momentum-based community organizing to escalate the contrast between the two listservs and spotlight the structural inadequacy and rhetorical irresponsibility of WPA-L’s genred discursive space.1 The nextGEN listserv itself emerged from a campaign to build an advocacy space for and by graduate students. The product of a single campaign cannot build and does not encompass the totality of a movement necessary for graduate students to achieve equity. nextGEN therefore responds to the needs of graduate students (domestic and international) and will build, organize, and grow as necessary. Since the symposium’s central themes concern sustainability, self-care, resources, equity, and justice, we, the first three nextGEN listserv moderators, reflect on the need for genre disruption in a field that touts striving for these values, but continuously replicates inequitable, unjust practices. We share insights from our praxis of creating, building, and organizing an advocacy space for graduate students centering around principles of justice, equity, and community. This essay focuses on nextGEN’s genre-disrupting, genre-creating orientation, drawing upon three rhetorical elements to social movement-building: disruption, sacrifice, and escalation. We suggest moving past limiting institutionalized genres, looking to opportunities that social movement genres afford for advancing and habitualizing equitable, just practices.
[1] We follow Nowacek (2011) in defining “genred discursive space” as a “constellation of associated social relations, goals, identities, ways of knowing [and feeling], and even knowledge domains” (p. 19).