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Articles Conference Reviews |
"We Are 113!"Session I Featured Session - "We Are 113!" Panelists:
What is 113? You are. And so am I. Still, after attending this featured session at the Cs, I’m not entirely certain what 113 is. This uncertainty, believe it or not, is perhaps exactly what the panel intended for participants: comfortable uncertainty about the limits of the presentation genre, of conference design, and especially of our academic identities. We should not be certain we know where these things end and begin, nor what their associated genres expect from us. This “We are 113!” uncertainty is meant to obscure—or at least reconfigure—the constructs that divide and compartmentalize our professional from our personal lives. “We are 113!” is about imagining possibilities, about looking at ourselves as more than simply “academics,” because, as we all know, each of us is more than that. It’s about the art of the work that we do, and about how our lives are, for better or worse, art. Shelley Rodrigo, from Mesa Community College in Arizona, set up (and then moderated) the panel via an IGNITE presentation: which is a presentation of 5 minutes, containing 20 slides, with 15 seconds of talk connected to each slide. Each member of the panel followed the IGNITE format, leading to what Rodrigo called an opportunity to “compose in different modalities, especially when we ask students to do so.” This allows all of us—presenters, instructors, graduate students, FYC students, professors, WPAs—to do some deep thinking about audience, to apply the IGNITE slogan of “Enlighten us, just make it quick.” If this review were an IGNITE presentation, for example, then the first slide might be a large question mark. Or maybe a picture of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Or of someone levitating. Certainly, it would be an image of something that at some point in our collective history, we could only vaguely imagine as possible. I watched and listened as Rodrigo first articulated both the possibilities and purposes of “We are 113!” to the room. In the spirit of “contesting boundaries,” a session theme at this year’s Cs, she argued that must acknowledge that we are all “partners in scholarly crime.” We need to re-envision collaboration, scholarly work, and the traditions of our disciplines. She pushed us to ask questions like “What is a scholarly panel? What is a scholarly presentation?” She reminded us—not that we needed reminding—that we regularly mold ourselves to fit the lines of our chosen disciplines, but in the everyday-ness of the work we do, the disciplinarity of our professional placements are quite often blurred. Panelists like Paul Matsuda exemplified this blurriness in his own IGNITE presentation, which creatively explored the idea of being a “specialist” in the field. He wondered aloud: is he a “specialist” in second language learning and writing? He is. But what does that mean when second language writing permeates all aspects of writing? With 15 seconds per slide, he endeavored to enlighten us—and himself—in possible answers to questions of specialization and disciplinarity of composition scholarship and teaching. So, while this review is not exactly an IGNITE presentation, at this point in my own 5 minutes, I’ll try to “make it quick.” This isn’t easy when you’re reviewing a panel with luminaries like Kathy Yancey, Greg Anson, Paul Matsuda, and Cindy Selfe. It gets even more difficult when each panelist presented us with a unique story about who s/he feels she is in relation to whom, perhaps, we think s/he is. Chris Anson for example, shared a childhood experience about exploring a sewage tunnel in France with “rats as large as German Shepherds”—and how this memory has set him up, metaphorically at least, for the dark tunnels of WPA leadership. Cindy Selfe allowed us to examine the question “What is Cindy?” along with her, as she shared images of colleagues and family members flashing concurrently with her discussion about her own (everyone’s) “fundamental human quest for connection and attachment.” Who we are, she highlighted, cannot exist in the absence of who we know. Somewhat like Selfe then, but also not like Selfe, my own IGNITE presentation might now show you a slide of my husband, my dogs, and my best friend since 2nd grade. But you might also see Linda Adler-Kassner and Karen Lunsford, who guide and collaborate with me in my graduate student work at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). You might see Lorna Gonzalez or Kara Otto, my colleagues and fellow grad students at UCSB. What this panel attempted to do was spotlight the quality of the relational self and the nature of identity as it functions to interact with and shape our academic selves. Jay Dolmage, another panelist, asked us to think about the collective identity of the Cs. He opened his IGNITE presentation with questions like “How are you managed? How are you molded?”, and he framed these questions within the proposal categories suggested by the Cs call for proposals each year. Then he asked a deeper question: “How might we imagine the Cs in 2020?” One possibility (not really a welcome one according to Dolmage) would be that we continue to look the same as we do today. A danger, he argued, that would imply that we continue to be inspired by only slightly shifting ideas, by only tentatively modifying our traditions. Another danger is that we go corporate (“This conference brought to you by Phoenix University” was one of Dolmage’s 20 slides). These potential futures outline the problems of tradition in the conference genre, the commodification of our work, and the corporatization of the university. The 2020 conference, he suggested, needs to invite more diverse forms of our specialties, of our disciplines. It needs to be more accessible and more interactive. In the Q & A following the panel’s IGNITE presentations—each of them personal, intriguing, inspiring, and very different from the typified conference presentation genre—one audience member asked if 113 meant Cs conference presentations might shape up in the form of, say, interpretive dance. “Yes!” said Cindy Selfe. “That would be amazing.” But the more clearly outlined definition of 113 was explained by Rodrigo: when the organizers of the 2011 conference categorized the thousands of accepted proposals into categories relevant to the conference theme of “All Our Relations” as well as the more obvious categories that make up the field of composition, there were 112 possibilities. What, then, the category of 113 became was a space for all of us to not be categorized. Therefore, in honor of “We are 113!” this is my imaginary final slide: a return to the icon of the question mark, a full-screen depiction of the unknown, an invitation to play with what it means to have a specialty or specialties, with new ways of identifying as a disciplinarian or scholar. It’s okay not to know what 113 is. It is, perhaps, not meant to be defined. The 113th space is one we can work in as artists of our own lives—professional and personal, a space which reveals the continuity across our connections and identities, academic or otherwise. |