Research
Recent developments in the field of Composition and Rhetoric foreground issues of social justice and the need in education for articulating and committing to DEI missions. Comp-Rhet scholars are bringing a sense of urgency to framing the teaching of writing as a central driver of equity and inclusiveness for students of all cultural, gender, neurodiverse, and linguistic identities. In some cases, researchers have focused on the possibilities of translanguaging as a resource multilingual students might use in their everyday educational writing. Other scholars have focused on issues of antiracism and histories of English as a colonizing force that excludes international and multilingual students from drawing on their own valuable linguistic resources in order to learn, produce knowledge and realize themselves through writing.
Language, Race, and Justice: Dr. Laura Lisabeth is interested in the many social and cultural implications of White Mainstream English in education and how linguistic injustice has been historically formed and is structurally invisible. She argues that narratives of English language correctness such as style guides create controlling images of writers and writing based on American understandings of literacy dating back to the early 20th century. Writing in higher ed continues to privilege standard forms of language correctness even as classrooms have become diverse communities filled with students whose experiences and ways of constructing knowledge are excluded by White Mainstream English.
Environmental Justice, Women’s Empowerment: Dr. Peg Spitzer’s book project, Women Power and Climate Change in the Global South: The Path toward Environmental Social Justice examines the lived experience of rural women climate change activists through their own life histories, drawing examples from India and East Africa. It confronts the issue of how NGOs and organizations from the Global North can best contribute to facilitating positive changes in the communities where they work by focusing on empathetic cooperation rather than seeking to impose imported solutions that are unlikely to endure. There is increasing global awareness of the need to include women as active change agents in achieving environmental social justice.
Gender and DEI: In her research on early modern English women writers and feminist theories, methods, and approaches. Dr. Lucenko explores how women writers asserted their rhetorical agency and authorial legitimacy through racial, colonial, and imperial ideologies. Situating women writers within the complex fabric of the culture and society in which they lived means seeing them as both oppressed and oppressors, and understanding the implications of race in their cultural productions.
Global/Cross-Cultural Rhetoric (World Rhetorics): On the “rhetoric” side of the PWR faculty’s scholarship, some of us have also contributed to scholarship on cross-cultural rhetoric (e.g., “World Rhetorics,” “Cultural Schemas,” “Bonds of Difference,” “Teaching World Rhetorics,” and “Beyond Colonial Hegemonies” in DEI related publications linked below).