“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

Part 2: First Year Moderator Reflections: Sacrifice

Kyle Larson’s Moderating Story

I wrote an antiracist response to the reaction on WPA-L to Vershawn Young’s (2018) 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication call for proposals. Consequently, senior scholars publicly shamed me and privately wrote a “mentor” of mine, who subsequently distanced themselves from me and with whom I no longer work. It says a lot about the field’s center of power when the most vocal reaction to antiracism is outrage, rather than outrage being directed toward the alignment with white supremacist discourse.

Some graduate students and early-career faculty expressed solidarity with me on different social platforms. On Twitter, Lucy Johnson, Estee Beck, and I began discussing the need for graduate students to have our own space. Estee Beck then named nextGEN and secured the listserv space through her university. Lucy and I met that weekend on March 25, 2018, to strategize actualizing nextGEN. We subsequently tweeted a recruitment call for Startup Team members. Less than two weeks after my response on WPA-L, nextGEN went live.

Three Startup Team members volunteered to become moderators: Sweta Baniya, Ashanka Kumari, and me. To be perfectly honest, I volunteered to moderate based more on a feeling of responsibility than excitement. The genre of moderation just felt lacking and tired… It felt disconnected from the reasons behind the space’s exigence, history, and emerging identity. It became clear, however, in its first week that this space needed more than the dominant genre of moderation if it was going to develop into an important and sustained space of community engagement. It didn’t need moderators; it needed community organizers.

Maybe our willingness to move past institutionalized academic genres results from the three of us being first-generation students. I’m not sure. But I do know I have been incredibly fortunate to co-moderate with Sweta and Ashanka.

Sweta Baniya’s Moderating Story

I didn’t know WPA-L existed or I could ever be a part of it. As an international student navigating the field, there was a dearth of information on these kinds of spaces. After reading discussions on WPA-L, I as an international student felt very out of place, as I came here leaving a patriarchal, hierarchical, and gendered space in Nepal. As Twitter was/is my space for navigating academia, I saw Kyle’s tweet calling for students interested in creating a listserv, and I expressed my interest.

Historically, international students have fewer opportunities at home institutions, which limits our abilities to gain professional experience. That’s why I signed up. Being involved with the Startup Team offered a chance to contribute and be a voice for international Rhet-Comp graduate students. Scholarship invites conversations from around the world; however, the field remains limited in understanding and hiring international graduate students. Responding to this, nextGEN members wrote a letter against discriminatory hiring practices regarding international graduate students. This letter, composed by listserv members, calls for faculty (who serve as search committee chairs, members, and beyond) to advocate for international scholars and against policies adversely impacting them (nextGEN, 2019). This statement has been pivotal in raising awareness about international graduate student issues. We gathered signatures of support from nearly four hundred scholars, faculty members, organizations, caucuses, and special interest groups.

When I started my role as a moderator, I didn’t know what role I was taking up. A year and a half later, I have found that nextGEN has been an important asset in helping me establish my identity as an international graduate student. nextGEN was the need of the hour—to raise, discuss, and share graduate student concerns and push the field towards becoming more graduate-student friendly.

Ashanka Kumari’s Moderating Story

Moderating nextGEN has evolved far from what we expected. In fact, Kyle, Sweta, and I recently discussed how the term “moderator” in the traditional sense doesn’t really encapsulate our work so much as “community organizer.” The work of initiating and growing nextGEN means shaping a space that grew and continues to grow rather quickly, and striving to build guidelines and support that best meet and serve the community. Because of the dynamic response, we continue to give nextGEN our energy to maintain momentum.

It’s been a little more than a year since we established this space. Today, we have more than 500 listserv subscribers, engaging in weekly discussions on a variety of Rhet-Comp topics. We’ve made numerous professional strides to be proud of, including a collaboratively co-authored listserv-to-listserv response to problematic decorum on WPA-L, calling for a code of conduct and moderators in that space (nextGEN, 2018), and an international students anti-discriminatory open letter (nextGEN, 2019). Additionally, nextGEN co-founders have helped organize numerous graduate student gatherings at national conferences. In his greeting message, 2019 CCCC Program Chair Vershawn Ashanti Young (2019) highlighted the role of nextGEN as a “group of multiracial graduate students talkin’ bout: we at the C’s and in dis profession, y’all better recognize” (p. 5). Recently, the Startup Team’s service was recognized with the 2019 Kairos Service Award—and this was just in its first year.

And while these numerous steps forward, recognitions, and movements appear impressive, they would not exist without the labor of numerous unpaid graduate students including and beyond the Startup Team. Our discipline continually values research and teaching labor above service work. Service like editing journals, organizing conferences, serving on committees, and, in this case, moderating a listserv are historically unpaid labor, typically not valued like research and teaching for tenure. Arguably, many of us spend as much if not more time in service roles, places where we interact with community members within and outside our institutional borders. So why do we continue to ignore or undervalue this labor?

For hundreds of graduate students in precarious positions, nextGEN offers an additional avenue to receive mentorship, gain insight about the discipline, and grow as teacher-scholars. We ask questions. We build bibliographies. We share resources. We collaborate.