Tuesday, November 28, 4:00-6:00pm EST
Registration link for Zoom: https://myumi.ch/EPMnk
Our social media feeds are cluttered with unending news of impending legislation, policy rollbacks, and vociferous attacks on BIPOC, transgender, queer, and disabled people. So-called “anti-woke” schooling efforts have resulted in the dismantling of DEI infrastructures in numerous universities and school districts, alongside statewide adoptions of right-wing curricula that reinvents histories on race and racism in the U.S. Anti-trans actors have successfully lobbied for bans on gender-affirming care and have spearheaded campaigns that target all domains of trans life, ranging across access to bathrooms, medicine, sports, and learning. Our home institutions have declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be over, all while immunocompromised, chronically ill, and disabled people continue to die.
In the midst of this onslaught, how do we survive, much less maintain optimism? This roundtable and workshop considers digital storying as a means for maintaining and amplifying community.
Panelists
Christina V. Cedillo is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her/their research examines embodied rhetorics and rhetorics of embodiment at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. Drawing on critical race theory, disability rhetorics, and decolonial theories, Christina’s work highlights rhetorical tropes and topics across time periods that expose how colonization and coloniality affect the lives of multiply marginalized people. Their writing has appeared in journals College Composition & Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Argumentation and Advocacy, Present Tense, Composition Forum, and in edited collections including Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman & New Material Rhetorics, Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times, and Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance Within and Beyond the Classroom. Christina’s current research focuses on BIPOC women activists’ responses to dehumanizing legal and scientific discourses through their public speech, writing, embodied presence, and movement through space(s) to theorize concepts for analyzing “marginalized multimodalities.”
V. Jo Hsu (They/Them) is an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics. They work on storytelling as political strategy, focusing on the entanglements of race, disability, and gender. They’re committed to fostering durable and mutually accountable relations across difference and are actively involved in several national and international health and disability justice organizations. You can access most of their work at www.vjohsu.com.
Ada Hubrig (They/Them) is a disabled caretaker of cats. Their day job is assistant professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. Their work focuses on fostering disability community, especially as it overlaps with care collectives and trans communities. They’re invested in creating community with multiply marginalized humans within and outside of academia. They share open access copies of their work at https://shsu.academia.edu/AHubrig.
Pratiksha Thangam Menon (prUH-THICK-shAA thUNG-um men-in) is a PhD Candidate in Communication & Media Studies and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Digital Accessible Futures Lab. Her research focuses on the mainstreaming of supremacist ideas through the circulation of online humor. Her work has appeared in Ethnic & Racial Studies and JSTOR Daily.