Selected Recent Projects and Publications
Giving Voice to Generative AI Refusal (with Maggie Fernandes)
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, forthcoming January 2025.
The podcast Everyone’s Writing with AI (Except Me!) was born in the summer of 2024, after nearly a year and a half of writing studies discourse about how to adopt, incorporate, and respond to generative AI. As two writing teachers who don’t police generative AI in our classrooms but also don’t want to facilitate its instruction, we felt (and feel) that there is a gap in the conversation. This gap is: how do we refuse the generative AI takeover? How do we resist the further EdTech-ificaiton of writing classes, writing programs, and higher education more generally?
We wanted to be able to respond both to the emergent disciplinary conversation and the broader conversation about technology and higher education. When news about the environmental impact of generative AI hit mainstream media as both Google and Microsoft announced they failed to meet climate goals, we knew we wanted to talk to Dustin Edwards (2020) about his work on digital damage, as one example. Both of us enjoy podcasts and have for many years admired the impressive rosters of writing studies podcasts: The Big Rhetorical Podcast, Pedagogue, and re:Verb, to name a couple. We’ve been inspired, too, by critical podcasts like Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us and linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna’s Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 which often take on the subject of AI hype.
Fernandes, Maggie, Emily Brier, and Megan McIntyre. “We’re All Still Grading: A Call for Honesty in Writing Assessment Discourse.”
Composition Studies. 51.2. 2023.
We argue against the language of ungrading and for more detailed, specific, contextual discussions of alternative writing assessments, assessments built on a disciplinary foundation and the work of writing studies scholars like April Baker-Bell, Asao Inoue, Carmen Kynard, Geneva Smitherman, and others who have spoken and written about writing studies, writing assessment, and their relationships to linguistic justice. Specifically, we have two related concerns:
The language of ungrading misrepresents how students experience our courses, as well as the responsibilities that most writing instructors have. We should be honest with our students and ourselves about the fact that our classes are graded, and we need to confront how standards are intentionally and unintentionally communicated not just via letter and numerical grades but also through how we frame writing assignments, tasks, and feedback to individual students.
Relatedly, the popular and non-disciplinary discourse about ungrading, while effective in sparking conversations about problematic assessment practices, flattens the critiques of normative and oppressive writing assessment that our field has challenged for decades. We must turn to specific conversations in writing studies related to linguistic diversity and disability justice to develop practical assessment approaches that reduce harm done to our most vulnerable students.
“Practicing (Antiracist and Anti-ableist) Multimodality: TA Training and Student Responses to Implementing a Multimodal Curriculum in First-Year Writing.” (with Jennifer Lanatti Shen) Professionalizing Multimodal Composition, Eds. Shyam Pandey and Santosh Khadka. University Press of Colorado, 2023. 61-77.
There are many reasons that faculty choose to assign multimodal projects in writing classes: they give students opportunities to use composing skills they already have; they echo the ways that students create and communicate outside of class; they reflect, as Christina Cedillo (2018) reminds us, an embodied approach to writing. For many, though, we suspect that this decision also boils down to this: these projects are more creative, more engaging, and just more fun for teachers and for student-composers. In this chapter, we outline the literature, particularly in antiracist and anti-ableist pedagogy, that informs our ways of thinking about multimodal writing pedagogy, review the process that led to Jennifer’s multimodal first-year writing course as a graduate teaching associate, and discuss the results of a brief survey of Jennifer’s students. We conclude by offering a few takeaways for teachers considering a similar critical, antiracist/anti-ableist, multimodal approach.
“Networked Intervention and the Emergence of #BostonHelp.”
Hashtag Activism. Eds. Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie. University Press of Colorado, 2023. 21-37.
On April 15, 2013, the US was stunned when a pair of bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Within seconds of the blasts, word of the incident began spreading across social media. Most early tweeters used #BostonMarathon, the official race hashtag, or simply #Boston, to share news, search for loved ones, and generally express their grief over the attack. As it became clear, however, that runners stranded in various parts of the city weren’t likely to be allowed back to their hotels and belongs, a new hashtag emerged: #BostonHelp. The earliest users of the tag – including @mollfrey, who appears to first have suggested it -- used it specifically to offer shelter for displaced runners, who likewise used the tag to find someone willing to help.
The balance of tweets, weighted as it is toward boundary work and offers of material support, makes one thing particularly clear: acts that might be considered wholly (or at least largely) rhetorical are a vital part of the network that enabled material interventions. Boundary work, in particular, represents an important rhetorical intervention: if we examine the network created by the #BostonHelp hashtag over time, we see that the incidences of tweets meant to offer emotional support – a purpose not supported by the promotional and policing work of some members of the network – tapers off quickly as users begin to understand the purpose of the group as material and not emotional. Still, this seemingly non-material boundary work is vital to the efficacy of the offers for material support. That is, the rhetorical work of policing and promoting the hashtag allows the network to expand and reach additional displaced runners and material supporters.