The History of FYC Labor
Primary Methodologies: Feminist Rhetorical Practices; Historiography; Local/Micro Histories
My dissertation links several research areas in order to use historical inquiry to make concrete recommendations for contemporary interventions to labor crises in FYC.
I was initially interested in response to student writing and assessment, but all my research kept bumping up against the constraints of labor conditions in FYC. And the more I looked into the history of labor in FYC, the more shocked I was at the subordinate position labor played in historicizing the field as well as the over-reliance on broad historical narratives to describe labor conditions that were, in my opinion, just as situated and contextual as they were pieces of a larger historical narrative. Thus, my dissertation investigates the history of labor in FYC by building complex portraits of significant figures in the field of Rhetoric and Composition and by explicitly considering their labor conditions and their attempts to navigate those conditions. I argue that a better understanding of the history of labor in our field can usefully inform labor debates happening today. Recommendations from my research encompass curricular reform, rhetorical strategies to advocate for change, the denigration of teaching in (some) research settings, and serving under-prepared student populations.
Right now I’m collecting and analyzing archival and secondary research on Barrett Wendell (Radcliffe Schlesinger Library, Harvard’s Pusey Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library), Edwin Hopkins (Kenneth Spencer Research Library), George Wykoff (Purdue’s Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives), and Mina Shaughnessey (CUNY’s Morris Raphael Cohen Library). Each of these scholars taught and wrote at different pivotal moments in the develop of FYC and Rhetoric and Composition. Taken together, they both validate and complicate existing histories of the field and help us consider the choices we make today, particularly in relation to labor.
My historical work uses feminist rhetorical practices (as defined by Royster and Kirsch) and local histories not to recover lost scholars, teachers, or sites of rhetorical engagement but to re-see and complicate established historical figures.
Read my Dissertation Abstract
Read about my research plan and philosophy in my Research Statement
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