Workshop Leaders
Amy Lueck, Santa Clara University
Brice Nordquist, Syracuse University
We live and work in an era of interconnected global and local crises that are as difficult to face as they are to deny. COVID has exacerbated glaring inequalities, the climate crisis is here, and in the U.S. we are experiencing threats to every aspect of our 245-year-old democracy. One of the key barriers to addressing these crises in academic contexts are the ideologies and structures of containment that function to construct boundaries between institutions, among disciplines, across categories of work, and at the interface of academic and community spaces.
This workshop seeks to unpack these ideologies and use the critical insights we generate together to consider how an academic discipline and its constituents might ethically and effectively respond. What should research agendas, courses, and programs of study in writing and rhetoric look like in this era of cascading crises?
We’ll begin by seeking to better understand ideologies and structures that delimit effective collective action, with particular attention to academic structures and practices of containment. We’ll use a case-study approach to apply the critical insights generated by the readings to existing publicly engaged projects and programs, gleaning from them strategies for cultivating intersectional awareness, mutual aid, and collaborative problem solving within and across communities. Participants will then have an opportunity to examine a project, institution, community, or context of their own through the lens of shared readings and group discussion. They will leave with renewed insights into their own contexts of crisis and containment and collaboratively generated strategies for collective action to address them.
Note: This workshop has limited space for remote participation.
Brice Nordquist is an associate professor of writing & rhetoric and the Dean’s Professor of Community Engagement in the College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. He works through ethnographic and participatory research and public arts and humanities projects to study and support students’ movements across contexts of learning and stages of education. His book, Literacy & Mobility, received the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication Advancement of Knowledge Award.
Amy Lueck is an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Santa Clara University, where her research and teaching focus on histories of rhetorical instruction and practice, women’s rhetorics, feminist historiography, and public memory. Her book, A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856-1886 (SIU Press 2020), brings together several of these research threads, interrogating the ostensible high school-college divide and the role it has played in shaping writing instruction in the U.S. Her recent research builds on this work by attending to the conceptual boundaries and metaphors shaping history and remembrance at various sites and among diverse communities.