Crafting Graduate Writing
Gabriella Wilson, Syracuse University
When I write, I require space and time; my ideas need room. I’m incapable of writing for short bursts; I need hours of uninterrupted time to work with the ideas and thoughts I’m trying to articulate. Only having three hours to write seems cheap; how can I work through my thoughts in such a short time frame? Similarly, I refuse to knit complicated pieces that require me to look at a pattern unless I have the ability to think and reflect. I have to carve out the appropriate amount of time and space to think through the exact places my needles need to be. When I’m deeply engaged with the texture of the yarn, the specific places where I feel the fiber threaded between my fingers, deeply concentrating as I exert just enough pressure to coax the yarn across my needles, I feel as if I’ve cracked a code, unlocked a door. When I write, I experience similar feelings of excitement and gratitude when I can work through a problem. Like when I knit, I require multiple open documents and screens so that all of the pieces I’m working with are spread out visually. I need time to reflect on how I’m threading the various pieces of my writing together. Writing and knitting have both taught me to move more slowly and to foster an awareness of how different tools and objects inform my crafting practice.
Throughout my doctoral program, I’ve thought a lot about how I engage with doctoral work, eventually noticing how I often approach my writing similarly to how I interact with other habits and passions in my life, like walking and knitting. As I reflected on conversations with other graduate students, I noticed how the hobbies graduate students engaged with seemed to influence the ways they approached writing and the writing process. I began to see similarities between how graduate students construct processes around and alongside their doctoral work and the objects, ideas, things, places, and people in their proximity. Consider what one of my study’s participants said about the ways they sew and write: “… I enjoy sewing, and I enjoy gardening. I'll describe sewing because it's kind of similar to when I sit down to work or write. I need at least 2 hours to get into it. Whatever it is that I'm doing, I can't do something like, you know, start to plan something, and then come back and work for an hour or two and then do a little bit more planning. I need to plan the whole thing out. Kind of get it, get it moving.”
As I thought about what it means to engage in doctoral work, I considered how doctoral students’ embodied, material experiences with objects, ideas, and environments often seemed to shape and influence their orientation to and perception of the world. And so I wondered, how do the interactions and engagements that doctoral students have with their hobbies shape/influence/impact their doctoral writing/research? And what does that mean for the ways we think about graduate writing education? Through an IRB- approved study of 60 survey participants and three interviews, this article explores patterns in how doctoral students approach writing and the writing process and demonstrates the necessity of reflecting on the ways non-academic, everyday practices are brought into conversations regarding writing and the teaching of writing in graduate programs. This is important, especially for first-generation, working-class, and graduate students of color who may feel they lack tacit knowledge about graduate school because they may not have certain social, cultural, or economic privileges. Calling specific attention to non-academic, everyday, generational practices and their role in writing and analysis can help to create a more welcoming invitation to writing for graduate students from under-valued academic backgrounds.
As future writing instructors, rhetoric and composition doctoral students are a critical population to study because they are beginning to craft their disciplinary identity, so their writing takes on extra importance as one of the ways in which they construct how they want to be read in the field (Gardner & Mendoza, 2023; Lutkewitte, Kitchens, & Scanlon, 2022). In the edited collection Re-imagining Doctoral Writing, the authors argue that the changing landscape of higher education necessitates reconceiving of doctoral writing as a “spatialized, embodied and felt practice– as one bound up with pleasures and possibilities as well as pains” (Badenhorst, et al., 2021, p. 6). The collection characterizes doctoral writing as deeply personal and embodied in ways that ask the reader to expand their notion of what influences writing. In my exploration of how doctoral students' hobbies inform their writing and writing processes, I reconsider what knowledges are engaged in the process of teaching doctoral writing while considering graduate students’ everyday experiences and entanglements, like the hobbies they take up in their limited free time. The themes that arise in the survey responses reflect alternate ways to approach graduate education through multimodal engagement and non-academic activities.
Studying hobbies and their connections to writing offers insight into broader contexts and relationships when thinking about writing habits and processes. Laura Micciche offers a framework for understanding the ways that writing is influenced by the everyday engagements authors maintain. Micciche (2014) argues that writing is “more than something one is called to do, dependent on time and energy, a linchpin to academic advancement; it is also codependent interaction with a whole host of others– materials, power grids, people, animals, rituals, feelings, stuff, and much else” (p. 498). This attention to the entanglements that codetermine and orient writing demonstrates how the objects and hobbies that graduate students interact with influence the methods, content, and processes of graduate writing. Mark Houston (2021) furthers this argument, arguing that through the objects, or things, that students write about, they reveal “the role [material objects] play in the production and transmission of knowledge” (p. 348). For Houston, the transmission of knowledge generated through material objects creates an embodied practice that students engage in other contexts, like writing. Drawing on Karen Barad, Houston argues that the ways students engaged with objects in writing “became ways of knowing what they could know and write, and made certain thoughts and ways of expression possible” (p. 350). The things students know born through their engagement with objects orient students in certain ways that then shape how they perceive the world and the processes they engage with as they construct their writing. Studying the objects and entanglements that coexist within writing processes and practices allows for an exploration of the epistemological knowledge behind embodied and material processes that influence graduate writing.
Scholarship about hobbies categorize them as either serious or casual leisure activities; this distinction differentiates between how people engage with their hobbies based on normative ideas about devotion, labor, and attention to practice (Stebbins, 1996). While this scholarship is intriguing, it doesn’t speak to the ways I position hobbies as meaning-making practices that influence and impact writing processes and practices. Instead, craft rhetorics offers a way to consider how hobbies and their entanglements with material objects orient graduate students through embodied and material processes that transfer to practices of writing. Like crafts, hobbies also depend on repetitive movements and habits. The development of certain habits or ways of thinking and being created through hobbies serve as orienting devices for graduate students (Hamraie, 2016; Mudde, 2022). Casey Boyle (2016), in a discussion of craft, refers to these orienting devices as habits of the mind, and Richard Young (1980) defines these habits as knacks. Importantly, these habits of mind are dependent on embodied and material practice, speaking to Richard Sennett’s (2008) argument that the “intimate connection between head and hand” creates a dialogue that “evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding” (p. 9). These developed habits and rhythm are central to understanding how the embodied and material experiences graduate students have with their hobbies influence how they approach other embodied and material processes, like writing.
Transfer studies offers an interesting perspective to consider the developed habits and rhythms that emerge and are recontextualized across embodied and material experiences and processes. However, transfer studies has not contended with the ways that writing materials and other surrounding objects and values influence writing and the writing process. Jeff Ringer and Sean Morey’s (2021) argument on the posthumanization of writing transfer clarifies the necessity of expanding approaches to writing studies to include the more-than-human, which would include considering the tools and objects that graduate students use as they engage with their hobbies. The authors argue that “a posthuman conception of writing transfer would decenter the human writer and draw attention to the nonhuman actants that shape and occasion writing” (p. 301). This is important for transfer studies because of the ways that it draws attention to the recontextualization of everyday practices and their influence on academic identity construction; Ringer and Morey’s assertion that a posthuman conception of writing decenters the human would create space for considering how objects, environments, tools, and other materials influence doctoral writing. Considering and exploring the ways that objects, tools, and environments shape transfer processes elucidates the influence of hobbies on writing and writing process, demonstrating the necessity of considering the ways that graduate students draw on everyday practices within academic spaces and making spaces for nontraditional epistemological knowledge in the academy and within the instruction of writing and writing process.
Methods
Drawing on feminist methodologies (Hallenbeck, 2012; Schell & Rawson, 2010; Royster, 2000), I collected survey responses through Qualtrics, asking for responses from doctoral students across a range of institutions in various disciplines. Survey questions asked participants to describe their hobby and how their hobby influences their core identity, scholarly identity, doctoral writing and writing processes, and teacher identity. It’s important to note that the survey was primarily completed by white women between the ages of 20-40. There are a number of gendered dynamics and labor inequities that shaped the data’s gendered and racial bias, including poor outreach on my part to graduate students of color groups and organizations, a lack of leisure time due to economic precarity, and gender and racial social norms that more prominently represent white women as hobbyists (hooks, 1996; Christensen, 2022). The interview participants' positionalities are reflective of the data’s demographics. I decided to interview participants based on survey responses and conducted interviews in September 2022. The participants that I talk about below are “Christine,” a sixty-year-old white Hispanic woman who researches the impact of letters and micro stories, and “Jamie,” a thirty-one-year-old white person who prefers not to use pronouns and is researching material rhetorics and memory in a mining community (all participants are identified using pseudonyms). Given that my data is not generalizable considering the small sample size, this article does not aim to draw conclusive claims about the themes that arose; instead, the data offers new ways of thinking about meaning-making practices that graduate students engage with and how these practices come to matter in graduate students’ doctoral writing.
Data
Embodied Knowledge
While analyzing survey and interview results, I found that some responses were explicit about how their hobbies have changed how they approach and think about their work and writing. Some doctoral students wrote about their hobbies and engaged directly with the objects and things they were passionate about outside of the academy. Others argued for a strict life-work balance that refuses to write about or research the hobbies they are passionate about; however, the methods and methodologies they used in their engagement with that hobby frequently showed up in the methodological orientations they explored and used in their doctoral writing. Overall, the majority of survey responses prove an interesting connection between how doctoral students engage with their hobbies and how they orient themselves in their doctoral work, demonstrating similarities between how graduate students engage with particular writing rhythms, approaches to writing, and the ways that graduate students consider materiality in their writing and research.
The survey respondents demonstrated that engaging with their hobbies facilitated their writing, provided them with space to escape their work life, and taught them values that stemmed from their engagement with the hobby. For instance, one survey respondent argued, “I now see craft as one of my primary ways of making, marking, and remembering meaning. I approach writing sideways through sewing; I compose ideas and words while composing materials. I feel most fluent when crafting/sewing/making something, and the ongoing material presence of the made-thing builds my trust in my composing-self more than the scores of out-of-sight word docs chilling in my USB graveyard ziplock bag.” Importantly, this response highlights a common sentiment expressed across the survey and interviews. Many graduate students used their hobbies to facilitate their thinking and writing processes. For this respondent, writing is literally enabled by their crafting, which happens alongside any writing that they complete.
In her interview, Christine recalls how sewing provides her with space and time to think through her writing: “I'm also thinking sometimes about what I need to write while I'm, you know, just doing some of the more tedious work in my sewing. I just feel that working with your hands is something that makes your brain work.” Later in the interview, Christine elaborates, “My mind wanders too much. I think that using your hands is like using a pencil to write on paper, which helps you remember things. You take notes by hand. I think that manual engagement helps you to organize your brain.” Both the survey respondent and Christine draw explicit attention to how the embodied, material engagement they experience as they engage in their hobbies enables them to think through their writing. As Maureen Goggin (2017) argues in speaking about bodily knowledge and crafting, "bodily knowledge is as important, if not more so, than vision and cognitive knowledge in embroidery—the feel of the fabric, thread, and needle, as well as the movement of the hand, require a kinetic familiarity” (4). This entwinement between embodied and material engagement clarifies why hobbies are easily recontextualized to other composing processes. The role of embodiment and attention to materiality generated through bodily knowledge is central to understanding this transferability, recalling Ringer and Morey’s argument that transfer studies must take seriously more-than-human agents who act on the writing process.
As I wrote this article, I was struck many times by the need to print out the text, cut it up by paragraph, and rearrange it on my floor. There’s something about moving my words around that helps me visualize an effective and generative structure and organization that will bring my thoughts together. I’ll move close to each piece as I read over what it says, moving text around before I feel satisfied. Similarly, I hold my knitting up close as I try to determine the intricacies of a stitch. I can’t move forward until I know and have an embodied understanding of where each needle needs to be and when. In the same way, I have to move my thoughts and writing around before settling on its construction; I have to visualize and physically maneuver each thought into position. Similarly, drawing connections between handicrafts and writing, Eudora Welty was famously known for describing the writing process through the process of sewing: “I pin [pieces] together and then when I want to cut something. I cut it with the scissors” (Chouard, 1998, p. 7). This is an instructive example of what I argue about the close entanglement of material and embodied practices like writing and hobbies facilitated by epistemological and process-centered transfer.
Speaking further to the way that engaging with a hobby can spark epistemological knowledge transfer, a survey response reflects on how drawing and writing become integrated and conditional upon each other to facilitate brainstorming and creativity. The response notes, “Even before coming into rhet/comp and when I was in art school, I primarily used sketchbooks to write toward drawing. Though I draw as well, when developing ideas for visual works, I went through the process of writing. Now, writing and drawing are one process that interchangeably works toward the development of ideas.” While art school may seem a disparate institutional setting from a doctorate program in Rhetoric and Composition, this response makes clear that drawing from nontraditional and unpredictable, especially creative, epistemological knowledge and skill can help to facilitate and aid the writing process. This integration of writing through drawing and drawing through writing facilitates the respondent's construction of ideas; another respondent reflects on how their hobby similarly aids in the creation of ideas. “On an abstract level, I think learning to do complex design work in knitting has given me ’templates,’ in a way, to think through how concepts in my writing might relate to each other. (Like structuring a paper in the ways I might structure a lace or cable knit design.)” The material and embodied knowledge gained through knitting facilitates the respondents' writing process by providing a foundation from which to begin developing their writing and ideas. This is similar to my process of cutting up drafts and reconstructing each paragraph like a puzzle on my wall to restructure my ideas and thoughts, a process I learned through knitting.
As seen in the responses above, it’s evident that the epistemological knowledge gained from engaging with certain hobbies transfers to other embodied and material processes, such as the writing process. Even more so, engaging in embodied and material processes like hobbies seems to facilitate doctoral students' thinking and writing. Particularly, we can see the ways that hobby engagement seems to be recontextualized across contexts in the following sections when participants discuss the recontextualization of knowledge around protracted processes and timelines, in addition to how knowledge transfer aids them in choosing certain methods and methodologies. I use recontextualize here after Rebecca Nowacek’s articulation of transfer as recontextualization. Nowacek (2011) argues that “transfer understood as recontextualization recognizes that transfer is not only mere application; it is also an act of reconstruction” (25). I argue that this is because doctoral students take the knowledge they learn from engaging in their hobbies and apply that knowledge to their approach and process when engaging in doctoral writing. This demonstrates that exploring embodied and material literacies such as hobby engagement can provide nontraditional ways of mentoring graduate students through doctoral programs in ways that relate to their everyday lives and practices, thus circumventing a reliance on academic literacies that not all graduate students have access to.
Hobbies and Methods/Methodology
In addition to informing the approach graduate students take in their writing process, hobbies also seem to influence the objects that graduate students seek out in their research. For Jamie, their hobby, quilting, informs how they approach the materials that they work with in their doctoral writing: “I've been working a lot more with film, which I think honors materiality a lot more. So that's one way that it has affected my writing in that I have moved away from writing as sort of my starting point.” Jamie explains that quilting has influenced their focus on materials and objects in their writing, which speaks to not only how their hobby has influenced the kinds of materials they choose to analyze in their writing but also how they approach the writing process. Rather than approaching their writing through alphabetic text, they take a broader and more expansive view of materiality and the different starting points from which they can begin their research, including beginning from conversation as opposed to writing. Moreover, Jamie’s consideration of multimodal approaches to composing extends to how they see themselves pushing against restrictive and limiting ideas about rhetoric and writing in the field: “Since I started, since I started really engaging with sewing, like beyond just every once in a while, I have pushed back a lot against sort of traditional writing and what traditional academic writing looks like.” When graduate students expand how they view the writing process to also include the nonacademic literacies they have garnered in other spaces and contexts, it appears that they may also begin to question traditional academic writing and practices that disengage from everyday practices. While this in and of itself is not a reason to push for multimodal engagement from graduate students, it does suggest that when graduate students are asked to draw on everyday knowledge, they may be more willing to take a more expansive approach to their research and sites of analysis, which is overall beneficial to a growing discipline.
Christine sees a direct connection between her dissertation methods and her hobby– sewing. Responding to Christine’s articulation of the methods that she uses in her dissertation project and how they align with a particular sewing project she had shown me, I summarized, “You're stitching together these jeans that are coming from other places in the same way that you're kind of collecting these stories.” Christine responded, emphasizing, “Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, stitching things together, but they, we own them. I own it.” Christine had shown me how she creates door mats out of old jeans– the materials that she was stitching together to create something new. Later as she described the ways that she collected stories for her research, I was struck by how the methods she described connected with the ways she had articulated how she engages her hobby. Noting that her hobby emphasizes an appreciation of “old things,” Christine mentions that she studies old letters, and she harbors a fascination with studying their impact on history. Christine then takes these letters and stitches together the stories of others in the surrounding area to better understand a particular context. Christine mentions an appreciation for old things a few times throughout the interview, even making the point that this appreciation carries into the importance she places on recycling and reusing materials. Christine’s awareness of her appreciation of old things illustrates concretely how our engagement with hobbies (Christine’s “old things”) informs the orientations we take up in other contexts and spaces (her appreciation of and stitching together of old things leads to recycling and reusing materials or stitching stories together).
Calling attention to the ways of making and composing that graduate students develop during other material and embodied processes validates embodied knowledge that graduate students already possess, creating space for the kinds of embodied, generational, and household know-how that is often marginalized in the academy. Exploring connections between multimodality and everyday practices like hobbies offers one way of pushing conversations in writing studies and transfer studies to move beyond normative composing practices, creating space for marginalized knowledge and marginalized identities. Considering graduate students’ multimodal and everyday hobbies in graduate writing education is an important practice for doctoral students who are considering the kinds of materials they hope to study and the methods and methodologies they want to explore as they construct their doctoral identity. Jamie’s response especially highlights how their multimodal engagement is precisely what created space for them to approach the writing process through multimodality and pointed consideration of materiality. Asking graduate students to draw on their everyday practices and experiences, especially hobbies, can offer graduate students who feel they lack certain tacit knowledges in graduate school affirmation that they have the know-how to navigate the writing process given their embodied and lived experiences with other embodied and material processes.
While discussions on multimodality often explore how it functions in the undergraduate classroom, it is necessary to consider what multimodality and other nonacademic literacies can offer graduate education. The importance of multimodal engagement for exploring how graduate students position themselves in the discipline is central to the research of Lillian Campbell and Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday (2021), who argue that multimodal research “has much to offer writing TAs working to understand their complex positioning and unique identifications providing an analytic framework for attending to how embodied talk ‘index[es] specific discourses about self, writing, [and] academia” (p. 32). While Campbell and Fiscus-Cannaday are thinking about multimodal engagement and writing TA education, the ways the pair discuss multimodality's influence on TA identity construction is imperative for the ways that I consider what multimodality offers graduate writing education. I draw similar conclusions, arguing that considering graduate students’ multimodal engagement in graduate writing education is an important practice for reflecting on how doctoral students hope to locate themselves in the academy within their writing and the kinds of ideologies and epistemological values they hope to embody. The survey response that opens this section especially highlights this through its insistence that multimodal engagement is precisely what allows the respondent to understand the ways they approach the writing process and the ways they compose their being through craft, suggesting that graduate students frequently draw on these every day, multimodal experiences to craft a sense of self in the discipline. Every day, multimodal and embodied practices that graduate students foster outside of the academy offer generative ways of considering how graduate students can contextualize these experiences to approach and navigate their writing process during graduate school.
Protracted Timelines and Failure
Finally, another theme that arose in my study dealt with temporality, suggesting that the ways graduate students engage with their hobbies influence how they understand writing and the organization of their time spent on research and writing. This also impacts their attention to process and project management. Interestingly, this attention to process and understanding of time management appears to be shaped by doctoral students’ repetitive, embodied experiences and material engagement. One survey respondent reflected on how engaging with their hobby was instructive for how they learned to engage with various kinds of writing processes during graduate school:
First, I see projects with long investments of time and long timelines (i.e. knitting a sweater, piecing and quilting a quilt) as rewarding, with satisfying benchmarks along the way; this has obvious similarities to a project not only like a dissertation (which I'm currently writing) as well as my other ongoing scholarly projects (co-editing an edited collection; authoring an article on a different subject than my diss), which helps me have a sense of perspective for the length and the journey, as well as an ability to appreciate and take joy in the small victories along the way.
Given the connection the respondent draws between the length and patience required for completing graduate writing and composing certain crafts, the respondent uses their knowledge of embodied, repetitive, and material processes to consider their approach to writing project timelines and juggling different projects and temporal benchmarks. Another survey response mentions how observing the crocheting process helped them through the overwhelmed feelings they experienced during the dissertation process: “The other helpful thing about crocheting is that it really helped reinforce how every bit helps. There were times when I'd sit down to watch a YouTube video and crochet. Through the course of that 10-20 minute video, I might have only gotten halfa-row done, but it was still a little bit of progress: farther than I had been before.” Building on attention to protracted processes, this response reveals how engaging with hobbies is generative for cultivating patience for long-term and incremental doctoral writing projects. This is similar to how I learned to approach my doctoral writing; I practice patience when I take on big knitting or crocheting projects, like making a blanket or sweater. I enjoy the slow process and the balance between when my engagement can feel relaxed and familiar versus when my engagement requires my full attention. The ways that I lean into an embrace of slowness are informative for how I manage the development of my writing projects’ timelines.
When graduate students enter doctoral programs, they may feel unprepared for the ways that graduate school requires patience and the managing of various long-term projects that can feel endless– I’m thinking especially of the many tedious rounds of revision that graduate students often endure as they hone their craft and writing. The tacit knowledge necessary to navigate these experiences can be drawn from alternative and under-valued sources, like graduate students' engagement with their everyday practices outside of the academy. Moreover, centering embodied experiences can allow graduate students to more confidently consider how to approach project planning and management when it comes to projects that demand incremental progress and repetitive material processes. Emphasizing the necessity of expanding views of the writing process to become more inclusive of alternative and under-valued everyday experiences has the potential to create ways of valuing and affirming other knowledge when mentoring graduate students.
While the patience and organization required of protracted temporal processes is important knowledge and practice for approaching doctoral work, survey respondents especially spoke to how hobbies provided them with a way to navigate failure in their doctoral work. A survey respondent described the ways that failure plays a pivotal role in how they approach dog training, which has translated to their approach to doctoral work: “Dog training has taught me that there are two ways to teach: 1. through success 2. through failure.” The respondents’ hobby teaches them to embrace failure as central to the ways that they approach how they teach their students. So often graduate students, especially first-generation and graduate students of color, are taught they do not have the time/space/or institutional credibility to fail. However, graduate students will inevitably experience failure during their time in graduate school, as all scholars do– they might be rejected from conferences or journals or may not be selected for fellowships they apply for. Reframing failure can prevent graduate students from creating deficiency narratives about their work or exacerbating feelings of imposter syndrome, which is especially important for graduate students coming from marginalized academic backgrounds who often experience increased feelings of imposter syndrome (Carr, 2013). Allison Carr writes that “failure reverberates. It expands. And it makes visible what we often take for granted” (p. 12). For Carr, failure attunes her to noticing, practicing attentiveness, and sitting in discomfort, all necessary embodied experiences for graduate student work through during their doctoral studies, given the ways that failure is an omnipresent academic experience. Encouraging students to look at everyday practices where they regularly fail can be one way to encourage an orientation toward failure that moves beyond deficiency narratives and feelings of inadequacy, especially for marginalized graduate students.
In the responses above, we can see how graduate students learn to approach and engage with their hobbies influences the kinds of practices and processes they take up in their writing, highlighting the ways that hobby knowledge transfers to a writing practice that also appreciates slowness and failure. In the response above detailing how dog training influences their pedagogical approach to failure, learning to determine the reason for failure and analyzing the situation to determine why they failed– as a dog owner– is transferred to another embodied and material process that they engage in– teaching. Through my experiences, it becomes evident the ways that the (many) mistakes I make while knitting influence the ways that I approach moments when I feel stuck during the writing process or when I receive disappointing news about a submitted proposal. Ultimately, this orientation toward failure cultivated through my engagement with hobbies has taught me the importance of sitting with discomfort and taking a flexible approach to the liminal positions I embody as a doctoral student. Paying attention to the kinds of orientations graduate students develop through their entanglement with objects can “break students free of familiar patterns of thought and writing,” as well as commonplace, neoliberal ideas around slowness and failure that persist in the academy and graduate education (Houston, 2021, p. 340).
Conclusion
This study offers a reconsideration of how graduate programs can approach teaching graduate students to write and the kinds of experiences that graduate students draw on as they construct their writing. It also pushes writing studies more generally to think about the entanglements that influence writing construction. Offering additional and alternative ways of thinking about how graduate students construct their professional identities, especially through attention to everyday practices, creates different ways for graduate students to grapple with how they intend to navigate the writing process. This is especially important for graduate students because it extends beyond normative approaches to writing and the writing process, creating space for other kinds of know-how and practices not frequently brought up in academic spaces.
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Gabriella Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program at Syracuse University. She has a Master’s degree in literature from Rutgers University-Newark. Her writing has appeared in Peitho; The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication and Globalization; The Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric; and Writers Craft & Context. While Gabriella’s interests span a range of diverse topics, including disability rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, and anti-racist pedagogies, a common undercurrent of her work involves exploring and constructing spaces that disrupt the privileging of ableist assumptions.