Last week, our chapter hosted an asynchronous event featuring blog posts from UWM alumni who graduated with a PhD in English and Communication. A common thread binding these posts was the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic on multiple facets of their lives—from their scholarship, teaching, activism, and their personal lives. Reflecting on the blog posts, there emerge two prominent tensions these rhetorical scholars are experiencing: responsibility-capacity and fracture-recalibration.
Anne, Hillary, Storm, Kristin, and Jenni each articulate a feeling of responsibility as scholars to create meaningful scholarship that addresses the onslaught of natural, social, and political violence that seems to have no end. These scholars discuss a responsibility to use their academic privilege to continue engaging with various communities and people, whether this be their students, Black Lives Matter protestors, academic colleagues and organizations, and friends and family. This responsibility, however, weighs heavily on these scholars as they are confronted with their own mental, emotional, and physical capacity to fulfill what they understand as their responsibilities. Energy is low, and fatigue is felt in multiple and intersecting ways. We are over one year into this pandemic, violence against Black men, women, and children has been occurring for centuries in this nation, and natural disasters seem to be getting progressively more severe in quantity and quality. Positive steps forward like the development and administration of COVID-19 vaccines are complicated by things like the extraordinary number of cases of COVID-19 and COVID related deaths in India. The jury’s guilty verdicts for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin are met with the unsettling notion that this is accountability for his murder of George Floyd, not justice. We all only have the capacity to do, think, and feel so much. Yet, responsibility pushes Anne, Hillary, Storm, Kristin, and Jenni on.
In the process of feeling and be asked to do more than one’s capacity, these rhetorical scholars note a feeling of fracture—within themselves, within their communities, and across the globe. The blog posts by our UWM alumni indicate that the fractures inevitably reverberate through various communities, the nation, and within themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic, as Anne Basting puts it, “points neon signs” at these fractures—highlighting, accentuating, and further rupturing what was already in existence. These neon signs seem to draw Anne, Hillary, Storm, Kristin, and Jenni in, and they have responded to being interpolated by recalibrating themselves and their work: recalibrating from isolation to togetherness and collaboration, turbulence to belonging, reflection to action, and irresistible gravitational pulls to new orientations.
We are appreciative of our panelists for their contributions to our scholarly community. In this current moment, reflecting with and nurturing the communities we are a part of are both a necessary and exhausting commitment. We can understand the contributions of Anne, Hillary, Storm, Kristin, and Jenni as exemplifying the tensions, responsibility-capacity and facture-recalibration, and perhaps as saying what we have been feeling for the past weeks and months but could not articulate ourselves. We urge you to (re)read these blog posts as a mere description of their contributions does not do them justice. As we continue to learn how to recalibrate to each new current moment, our chapter is thankful and appreciative to have our academic communities and relationships to lean on.
Kristin Wagel, Gitte Frandsen, Kristiana Perleberg, Daphne Daugherty, Danielle Koepke, Amanda Reavey
Rhetoric Society of America 