UNLEARNING DISCIPLINARITY: WRITING FOR INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Responding to movements for social change such as #BlackLivesMatter, many universities and writing programs have committed to adopting both professional and pedagogical antiracist strategies to promote structural and linguistic justice. This response, however, has been uneven. This presentation buildS on a call from Glenn Hutchinson, who argues that writing instructors must “unlearn disciplinarity” to address the real-world needs of students and make room for other ways of knowing, composing, and claiming rhetoricity. To “unlearn” the discipline is to confront our field’s history and perpetuation of racist, sexist, and ableist practices and to understand how the institutions of which we are a part reinforce and propagate structural racism, sexism, and ableism. Engaging with scholarship grounded in Black Composition Studies, Critical Race Theory, Disability Rhetorics, Disability Justice, and feminist and critical embodiment pedagogies, I review pedagogical and professional strategies for teaching writing that center embodiment, non-normative literacy practices, and that resist the conditions that create exclusion.

This project will be presented to the DePaul University Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse in Spring 2023.