Today, we'll explore this question through the kaleidoscopic lens of our collective experiences. I invite you to compose a "scene" from your own experience, drawing on Royster's article for inspiration. You might tell a story about a "cross-boundary exchange" that you witnessed or in which you participated. You might offer your personal testimony as 'subject' within an academic discourse community. I leave this writing prompt open to invention and discovery.
I encourage you to reflect on experiences that have been a source of dissonance, experiences that moved you out of your comfort zone into what Mary Louise Pratt calls contact zones--"areas of engagement that in all likelihood will remain contentious" (Royster 615).
Write for about 25 minutes. You may choose whether or not to post this writing to your blog. At 9:45, I'll ask volunteers to tell their stories so that we can hear them, in order to "include voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and constructed" (Royster 612).
My sense of things is that individual stories placed one against another build credibility and offer. . . a litany of evidence from which a call for transformation in theory and practice might rightfully begin. My intent is to suggest that my stories in the company of others demand thoughtful response (Royster 612).
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Since I don't have a "personal" blog, I'll post my response to today's prompt here:
My first introduction to Jackie Jones Royster was in a “contact zone,” and though it happened more than ten years ago, the experience still shakes up my comfortable assumptions about the academic discourse community and my own “good intentions.”
Here’s what happened: I was at a meeting of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric, a coalition of women scholars which is a sub-group of the Conference on College Composition (the professional association of college English and communication teachers mentioned at the end of Royster’s article). The theme of that year’s meeting was “Lifting As We Climb,” and a panel of scholars offered presentations on their professional experiences as women academics, teachers, and researchers. I don’t remember much about the presentations themselves. Lectures can be boring even for professors (though I was a grad student at the time).
At the end of the session, Jacqueline Jones Royster stood and addressed the panel. She challenged the chairperson to tell the assembled members what “Lifting as We Climb” meant. She expressed mild surprise, as if she’d absent-mindedly forgotten something, then invited Professor Royster to introduce the topic. Professor Royster responded, “No, I want you to do it.” That moment remains etched in my mind and body. I can still hear the anger in her challenge, I can still feel the tension of that moment. I assume that the discomfort was felt by all those assembled—mostly white, middle-class female academics of good will and good intentions. But not one of us, except for Royster, had noticed that we had silenced the very women we professed to honor.
“Lifting As We Climb” is the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896 to show "an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women" (http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1888/National_Association_of_Colored_Womens_Clubs_formed).
We had appropriated their motto, without attribution. To use Royster’s metaphor of “home training,” it was as if we had stolen something that belonged to someone else, or borrowed without even a simple “thanks.” Even though I wasn’t a participant, I felt like an accomplice. (I still do.)
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