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Carmen's Graduate Handbook 2.0
Many of you who are Brown/Black/Queer/Disabled/Multiply-Marginalized will experience the requirements and procedures of the PhD (both the entrance and exit requirements) 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 PhD candidates in rhetoric-composition. My goals and desires are to support graduate students who are interested in an alternative, radicalized vision of research/ teaching as they move through and, especially, OUT of their PhD program with mind-body-soul WHOLLY IN TACT. We CAN unsettle graduate education as part of our work together.
Many parts of this website section are meant to complement the policies presented in the graduate handbook at Texas Christian University (TCU) from an alternative context that can get to the doing of a PhD. I have created a 5-year identity plan (click here) that hopes to offer a kind of intellectual identity for each of your five years in graduate school that is also applicable outside of TCU. This "identity frame" attempts to counter the dominant representations and vocabularies around "professionalization" and "professionalism" that plague graduate education right now that ask 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 ask yourself as you move in and out of classrooms and programs with a radical vision of your identity possibilities as teacher, writer, and scholar.
You will also find the comprehensive exam for the PhD program in Rhet-Comp at TCU (click here) at this section of the website (this includes details about the teaching portfolio and the presentation at oral exam). At the end of your coursework at TCU, you take comprehensive exams (as is pretty much the case everywhere). The guidelines for the rhet-comp comp exam are obviously readily available in the TCU graduate program and will match what other places do. 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. Comprehensive exams are often the hot-seat of a colonized education, but we don't have to travel that route. 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 or approval to move differently in the academy (I did not ask to go public with my own alternative "handbook"--- once I saw that the conversation was going nowhere critical, I moved TF on). Excuses, fears, and compromises do not absolve white accommodationism. Stop talking to everybody/anybody, begging for agreement, asking for permission, and/or trying to convince other folk to come around when it comes to curriculum and instruction . . . JUST. DO. THE. DAMN. THANG. YOUR. DAMN. SELF. I am not suggesting that you stop agitating. Never that. Just don't wait on other folx's agreements and approvals to do YOUR WORK.
Finally, you will find guidelines for writing the prospectus (click here) and organizing your dissertation committee according to chair, 2nd reader, 3rd reader, and external reader (click here). There are also tips here for dissertating and going on the market. Once you finish and pass your comp-exams, you need to finalize your dissertation topic and timeline. If you decide to work with me as your dissertation chair/advisor or committee member, please make sure that you read these sections closely to see if my style matches your needs and direction. 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 graduate program as if these are the Commandments from The Almighty Himself. Don't get tricked by such folk: Academia is not our God. I won't fake the funk with you. I have a particular graduate teaching/mentoring style and so I do my best here to lay out what that's gonna look like so that you aren't surprised or confused.
Many parts of this website section are meant to complement the policies presented in the graduate handbook at Texas Christian University (TCU) from an alternative context that can get to the doing of a PhD. I have created a 5-year identity plan (click here) that hopes to offer a kind of intellectual identity for each of your five years in graduate school that is also applicable outside of TCU. This "identity frame" attempts to counter the dominant representations and vocabularies around "professionalization" and "professionalism" that plague graduate education right now that ask 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 ask yourself as you move in and out of classrooms and programs with a radical vision of your identity possibilities as teacher, writer, and scholar.
You will also find the comprehensive exam for the PhD program in Rhet-Comp at TCU (click here) at this section of the website (this includes details about the teaching portfolio and the presentation at oral exam). At the end of your coursework at TCU, you take comprehensive exams (as is pretty much the case everywhere). The guidelines for the rhet-comp comp exam are obviously readily available in the TCU graduate program and will match what other places do. 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. Comprehensive exams are often the hot-seat of a colonized education, but we don't have to travel that route. 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 or approval to move differently in the academy (I did not ask to go public with my own alternative "handbook"--- once I saw that the conversation was going nowhere critical, I moved TF on). Excuses, fears, and compromises do not absolve white accommodationism. Stop talking to everybody/anybody, begging for agreement, asking for permission, and/or trying to convince other folk to come around when it comes to curriculum and instruction . . . JUST. DO. THE. DAMN. THANG. YOUR. DAMN. SELF. I am not suggesting that you stop agitating. Never that. Just don't wait on other folx's agreements and approvals to do YOUR WORK.
Finally, you will find guidelines for writing the prospectus (click here) and organizing your dissertation committee according to chair, 2nd reader, 3rd reader, and external reader (click here). There are also tips here for dissertating and going on the market. Once you finish and pass your comp-exams, you need to finalize your dissertation topic and timeline. If you decide to work with me as your dissertation chair/advisor or committee member, please make sure that you read these sections closely to see if my style matches your needs and direction. 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 graduate program as if these are the Commandments from The Almighty Himself. Don't get tricked by such folk: Academia is not our God. I won't fake the funk with you. I have a particular graduate teaching/mentoring style and so I do my best here to lay out what that's gonna look like so that you aren't surprised or confused.
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