Laura Gray-Rosendale Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Alternative Modes of Inquiry for the Discipline Laura Gray-Rosendale is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University's Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program. Her most recent publications include Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000) and Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition (with Sibylle Gruber, SUNY Press, 2001). In the past you've done quite a bit of research on basic writing studies, publishing work in the Journal of Basic Writing and your recent book Rethinking Basic Writing. But I'm curious what projects have been occupying your time lately? I continue to be very interested in basic writing issues and do have a project in the works that continues that kind of research. But I just published a book called Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition with Sibylle Gruber for SUNY Press. As with much of my research, the rationale for this project really grew out of my experiences teaching — specifically teaching graduate courses in modern rhetorical theory. It's quite easy to find texts for our students that will work well to display the canon of contemporary rhetorical theory, in the readers that showcase pieces by Burke, Foucault, Perelman, Toulmin, and the like. However, those texts that provide a wide range of pieces that challenge this rhetorical canon and take it in new and compelling directions are really hard to locate thus far. Like many of us, I think, every semester I found myself searching for texts that challenged the canon of contemporary rhetorical theory so as to provide counterpoints and contrasts to the traditional version of our contemporary rhetorical research. There simply were no such texts available. Instead, I found myself piecing together readers, many with essays I did not feel were as cutting-edge as the research in the discipline in fact reflected. When Sibylle and I began talking about the problem I was having, it became clear that such a book was sorely needed. So, many hikes later, Alternative Rhetorics is what we came up with. It not only aims to affect the canon of rhetorical theory in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and technology issues, but to challenge how we view these categorizations as well. I hope faculty and students find it a useful resource for scholarship and teaching. We sure had fun working on it. Are there common themes or issues that tend to captivate your thinking these days? Why do you think these are the ideas that drive you? I suppose you could say that I am both captivated by theory of various kinds as well as suspicious of it. To my mind, no good teacher can buy theory completely since the practical matters of the classroom situation and context always influence it, challenge it, and reform it. So, one common thread in my work is the investigation into and challenge of theories of various stripes. Another common concern in my work is my interest in marginalized discourses of different kinds — the discourses of basic writers, women (especially survivors of violence and assault), and minorities. As a result of these interests, my work embraces autobiographical writing while always putting pressure on its constructed nature, its variations and contradictions in the way identity is lived out, and the like. And these interests continue. Now I am at work on a book with Gil Haroian-Guerin at Syracuse University tentatively titled Fractured Feminisms that will examine the ways in which feminisms work as well as don't work in practice, how feminisms are defined in context, and how feminisms are at work in rhetoric and composition studies. Asking questions that contest traditional understandings of feminist rhetoric is what this project is about. And I continue to believe that to be a feminist and a rhetorician, one necessarily puts pressure on the rhetoric of feminism itself which has, at times, been detrimental to its own stated goals. Other projects I have in mind for the future involve the blending of the autobiographical with other genres and the mixing of levels of discourse to create autobiography. So, yes, there's a definite theme here. What do your interests reveal about the state of the discipline right now? In many ways these approaches are not "original" in any sense but rather are indicative of where the discipline finds itself right now — the cultural and historical situation in which we are working. I think my work represents some new trends in scholarship by folks who were trained in continental philosophy, discourse analysis, postcoloniality, feminist theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies. We've been living with this work for a while now. We kind of grew up with it from the undergraduate level. The languages are familiar and interesting to us. Much of this work we find appealing and enriching, but we also want to put pressure on it. We no longer feel we have to adopt these theories wholesale in order to create an identity for the discipline, to ensure its professionalization, or to lend it an expert voice. Rhetoric and composition does have a clear identity at this point, even multiple identities. It has a professional and institutional place. Given that fact, we can turn our attentions elsewhere. This is a luxury that the scholars who built this discipline did not have. And I am so grateful that they've done this work, because it makes my own work possible. I also think my work represents a larger trend we see in the discipline-the attempt to embrace the personal, to not fear it, or to only relegate it to the realm of teaching alone. There are a number of excellent collections out there now that discuss professional issues and people's personal lives. Haroian-Guerin's The Personal Narrative is one such text that accomplishes this incredibly well. Rather than separating these identities, people are more and more interested in the ways in which they overlap. So my approaches and interests may say something about new trends in scholarship, new views about theory, and new conceptions of the value of the "everyday" or the "personal." I hope we see more and more of this kind of research. Try to imagine the discipline of rhetoric and composition in ten years. Where do you think it will be? Where do you want it to be? This is an important exercise for us to do regularly, I think — to anticipate and imagine potential futures since this will have an impact on how we envision and set our goals for research and teaching. So, here are my thoughts. They are partial at best, but I think they will echo thoughts and concerns many of us share. In ten years technology studies will have to be a greater part of our discipline than it is now, and rhetorical studies of the visual will necessarily get stronger and more sophisticated. These are areas of rhetoric and composition that are getting stronger all the time, but we still need better language to discuss television, film, Web and Internet work, and the like from various perspectives that take into account cultures other than our own. I am very excited at that possibility for change in the discipline. As someone trained in cultural studies and who does a lot of pop culture research, I often feel like we need new vocabularies and approaches to account for the complexity of media forms. So these will be fruitful changes for many of us. I also think professional writing will become a stronger arm of rhetoric and composition studies. It has to be since our discipline is growing by leaps and bounds. A major part of our jobs has to involve this component. Of course, this is potentially good, perhaps leading to a merging of the community and the academy. No longer will we necessarily have the chasm between the "real world" and the "academic world" in quite the same ways that seem to exist now for many of our students. But this inevitability also has real drawbacks. As a result of this change, corporate entities will likely have a greater say in what we teach, how we teach it, and the scholarship produced as a result. I personally find this possibility more than a little troubling, as any left-leaning scholar would. In whose service are we doing our jobs? The academy's? The corporate marketplace's? What happens if the goals and interests of the academy and the corporate world become less and less distinct? Do we become little more than a supplier of workers for the corporate marketplace? As part of this discussion, the role of community colleges in writing education needs to be investigated as well. I continue to hope that community college teachers will have a greater voice in our scholarship, teaching, and directions for the discipline. This is very important. I also think that we will see rhetoric and composition become increasingly interdisciplinary in its scholarship. I was trained in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program at Syracuse University, a very interdisciplinary program, and I feel this training has given me a broader range of approaches and perspectives to draw from in my teaching and research. I think this interdisciplinarity is likely to make our scholarship more thorough and detailed. It's also likely to create critical crosstalk across disciplinary lines, those close to home (English, communication, linguistics) as well as those farther afield (biology, engineering, forestry). In order to meet our own goals as a discipline this seems a necessary step. I also have one concern for our future, and I hope it's one we can begin to take very seriously. Thankfully when I was first on the job market, I had a very good selection of positions to choose from. But if we put too many Ph.D. candidates in rhetoric and composition on the market, our graduate students will have fewer and fewer job possibilities. If we do not watch this carefully, we will do what institutions have done to their literature graduates — left them with too few job options, overeducated yet in poverty, with no place to go. Many a literature professor, for instance, has urged her graduate students toward writing certain kinds of dissertations and doing certain kinds of research with little consideration of what the market needs or demands. When the graduate student looks for jobs, she then finds little for which she is qualified. With this in mind, in rhetoric and composition we must remain very attuned to the kinds of jobs out there as well as shifts in those jobs and their descriptions. As literature faculty are retiring now, lines are being reallocated, leaving job seekers in literature with fewer and fewer job possibilities each year. I don't want to see this happen to our graduate students in rhetoric and composition, and it certainly could in a few decades if we aren't vigilant. So I think we really need to be careful of repeating this problematic pattern and graduate small numbers of students who are extremely well-prepared for the jobs out there. We also need to pay close attention to the number of jobs in rhetoric and composition, expecting some ebb and flow in new lines and money allocations. In doing so, we can protect ourselves during lean years which are sure to come eventually. I think it's best to plan the future of the discipline with this potentiality in mind since it affects everything — the nature of our scholarship, our teaching, and our service. So I guess you could say, on the whole, I'm urging us to look at alternative points of view and approaches at this point, to reassess what we've been doing, and to push toward a future that involves a diversity of perspectives. And, I want to thank Bedford/St. Martin's for the chance to articulate these things. I hope they shape the kinds of books Bedford/St. Martin's publishes as well as the kinds of books we send to them for publication in the future. Many thanks for this opportunity and for your interest in my work!

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