April Conway Research Agenda

As a feminist teacher-scholar, I am interested in the intersections of research and teaching, and in the empowering possibilities of making connections across academic and non-academic spaces. My background in subfields of English and the Humanities affords me the opportunity to make connections across teaching and research goals as much as across disciplines. In rhetoric and composition specifically, I situate myself within literacy and composition studies, including writing pedagogy, with a focus on civic and cultural rhetorics, and research methods and methodologies.

Like Amy Propen, Nedra Reynolds; and Amy Diehl, Jeffrey T. Grabill, William Hart-Davidson, and Vashil Iyer, my dissertation, Practitioners of Earth: The Civic Rhetorics of Grassroots Cartographers and Writing Instructors’ Literacy Practices, establishes the political, material, and cultural significance of geographic maps within a rhetorical context. In this research project, I argue that literacies utilized to create geographic maps advance the civic rhetorical work of communities misrepresented in public discourses. Specifically, I explore how grassroots cartographers make maps to change dominant narratives and material realities of misrepresented communities, and how writing instructors teach geographic maps as a form of civic rhetorical pedagogy. The analysis of the data, conducted through interviews and textual analysis, and guided by feminist, teacher-research, and grounded-theory methodologies, suggests that numerous literacies are critical to this civic rhetorical work, but that culturally-influenced technological and communal literacies are prevalent. Findings from the project conclude that while there are similar literacy practices in and outside and composition classroom, many of the literacies that establish community agency are unique to culture and place. Results from the project suggests that writing instructors interested in developing pedagogies centered on civic rhetorics can strengthen their teaching by learning from the work of grassroots cartographers and other community advocates outside the academy. I plan to pursue publication opportunities resulting from the dissertation. Namely, I will prepare an article examining the literacy practices of grassroots cartographers to submit to Community Literacy Journal. I will also prepare an article for Writing on the Edge that synthesizes findings about writing instructors’ mapping activities, civic rhetoric learning outcomes, and how cartographers’ literacy practices can inform composition pedagogies. In addition to publications related to the dissertation, I will seek publication opportunities related to other research interests. For example, I plan to submit a course design about feminist-based pedagogy in a service-learning writing course to Composition Studies. Finally, I will submit an article titled about rhetorical space, cultural rhetorics, and memory to Enculturation in the hopes this piece can find a home at this journal.

Moving forward in my career, I see my research interests evolving along with the trajectory of rhetoric and composition, and English and the Humanities more broadly. For example, while I currently assign multimodal compositions, I anticipate conducting teacher-research on multimodality and writing pedagogy, specifically about assignments incorporating audio-visual technology as related to concepts of representation and place. These multimodal composing pedagogical goals are influenced by the teaching and the research of Cynthia E. Selfe, David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel. Furthermore, based on my background in intersectional feminism and an interest in digital rhetorics, I developed a course that emphasizes the connections between digital rhetorics and race, gender, and sexuality. This course is aligned with the work of Samantha Blackmon, Kristine Blair, and Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes and opens up the possibility of conducting research with students who can analyze and re-create digital representations of their racialized, gendered, and sexualized digital selves. Though I teach research processes in my undergraduate classes, I designed a graduate writing research course that includes scholarship by Gesa E. Kirsch, Patricia A. Sullivan, and Heidi A.

April Conway Research Agenda

McKee and James E. Porter. In such a course I can directly tie my scholarly interest of research practices to teaching research methods and methodologies. The goals of these courses are not only to enrich my teaching practices, but also to conduct teacher-research that I, and my students, can share with colleagues at my institution, at conferences, and in publications.

My positionality as a feminist scholar informs why I choose to explore how people do the everyday work they do in order to make their lives and communities better, focusing specifically on literacy practices in and outside the composition classroom. Ultimately, I aim to make connections across concepts, practices, and spaces so that my students and my peers will benefit as much as I do from the research I conduct.