Many of you who are Brown/Black/Queer/Multiply-Marginalized will experience the requirements and procedures of the PhD in exactly the way that these Jim-Crow-esque hurdles have been historically designed: as a project of colonial schooling. Our task here is to do the work differently--- as what la paperson has called a decolonial rider. That means something quite specific for rhetoric-composition graduate students and so these pages intend to shape an alternative vision of moving through and out of the PhD program with your mind-soul-body fully in tact.
You will find a variety of overviews at this part of the website. There is a 5-year identity plan that attempts to offer you a kind of intellectual identity for each of your five years in graduate school here. This "identity frame" attempts to counter the dominant representations and vocabularies around "professionalization" and "professionalism" that plague graduate education right now and most often act as euphemistic discourses asking you to white-assimilate. Instead, I am deliberately choosing the term "identity," from its original coinage by the Combahee River Collective as a point of critical solidarity and awareness of multiple/intersected marginalizations. In this 5-year identity plan, I offer cues on things to think about as you direct yourself in and out of classrooms and programs.
You will also find the comprehensive exam for the PhD program in Rhet-Comp at this section of the website. The guidelines for the comp exam are obviously readily available in the graduate program. However, that language is not mine, especially the rationale, so I am presenting you with an alternative here---an adjacent world but never the same. For those of you who work with me, especially on issues related to race/gender/sexuality/disability/schooling, you will need to carefully mind and mine all the ways in which you use and mimic white institutional talk and do something different. You do not need permission to move differently in the academy (I did not ask for permission to go public with my own alternative rationale after my own words were edited away after HOURS of useless conversation). Excuses and fears do not absolve white accommodationism. Stop talking about it and trying to convince other folk you way... JUST DO THE THING.
Finally, you will find guidelines for taking the comp exam, writing the prospectus, and organizing your dissertation committee. If you decide to work with me as your chair or committee member, please make sure that you read this section closely to see if my style matches yours. Everyone has a certain pedagogical style when they work with dissertaters. No one says it like that, because many faculty just hide behind the procedures of the program. I won't fake the funk on that here. I have a style and so I do my best to lay out what that's gonna look like so that you aren't surprised or confused.
You will find a variety of overviews at this part of the website. There is a 5-year identity plan that attempts to offer you a kind of intellectual identity for each of your five years in graduate school here. This "identity frame" attempts to counter the dominant representations and vocabularies around "professionalization" and "professionalism" that plague graduate education right now and most often act as euphemistic discourses asking you to white-assimilate. Instead, I am deliberately choosing the term "identity," from its original coinage by the Combahee River Collective as a point of critical solidarity and awareness of multiple/intersected marginalizations. In this 5-year identity plan, I offer cues on things to think about as you direct yourself in and out of classrooms and programs.
You will also find the comprehensive exam for the PhD program in Rhet-Comp at this section of the website. The guidelines for the comp exam are obviously readily available in the graduate program. However, that language is not mine, especially the rationale, so I am presenting you with an alternative here---an adjacent world but never the same. For those of you who work with me, especially on issues related to race/gender/sexuality/disability/schooling, you will need to carefully mind and mine all the ways in which you use and mimic white institutional talk and do something different. You do not need permission to move differently in the academy (I did not ask for permission to go public with my own alternative rationale after my own words were edited away after HOURS of useless conversation). Excuses and fears do not absolve white accommodationism. Stop talking about it and trying to convince other folk you way... JUST DO THE THING.
Finally, you will find guidelines for taking the comp exam, writing the prospectus, and organizing your dissertation committee. If you decide to work with me as your chair or committee member, please make sure that you read this section closely to see if my style matches yours. Everyone has a certain pedagogical style when they work with dissertaters. No one says it like that, because many faculty just hide behind the procedures of the program. I won't fake the funk on that here. I have a style and so I do my best to lay out what that's gonna look like so that you aren't surprised or confused.
