Winner of the 2015 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award
Unlike much current writing studies research, Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference addresses conversations about diversity in higher education, institutional racism, and the teaching of writing by taking a microinteractional look at the ways people define themselves and are defined by others within institutional contexts. Focusing on four specific peer review moments in a writing classroom, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum reveals the ways in which students mark themselves and others, as well as how these practices of marking are contextualized within writing programs and the broader institution.
Kerschbaum's unique approach provides a detailed analysis of diversity rhetoric and the ways institutions of higher education market diversity in and through student bodies, as well as sociolinguistic analyses of classroom discourse that are coordinated with students' writing and the moves they make around that writing. Each of these analyses is grounded in an approach to difference that understands it to be dynamic, relational, and emergent-in-interaction, a theory developed out of Bakhtin's ethical scholarship, the author's lived experience of deafness, and close attention to students' interactions with one another in the writing classroom. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference enriches the teaching of writing by challenging forms of institutional racism, enabling teachers to critically examine their own positioning and positionality vis-à-vis their students, and highlighting the ways that differences motivate rich relationship building within the classroom.
Stephanie L. Kerschbaum is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and a 2019-2020 NCID scholar-in-residence. During her time at the University of Michigan, she would love to connect with faculty working in disability studies, narrative and story-based research, Deaf studies/sign language studies, as well as with those who work on projects related to faculty mentoring, supporting minority and underrepresented faculty, and issues around academic culture and institutional transformation.
She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. Her work focuses on understanding how the ways people interact can help higher education institutions address issues of diversity and difference. Her first book, Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference, was awarded the 2015 Advancement of Knowledge Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
In her current project, Dr. Kerschbaum is developing the concept of "signs of disability" to work alongside markers of difference (Kerschbaum, 2014). "Signs of disability" asks that we attend to the signs of disability all around us and collectively build new ways of noticing and engaging disability in our everyday lives. Combined with markers of difference, signs of disability enable understanding of not only how difference moves but also how difference matters.
