Cultivating Writing Community When the Sky is Falling: Reparative Writing, Together

Session Submission Type: Skills- and Resource-Sharing Session

Abstract

In the face of perpetual crisis (political, institutional, or climate-driven), writing keeps us grounded. However, in _Making Time to Write_, Cathy Mazak shows academic systems of structural inequity are designed to push disabled, minoritized, and/or historically marginalized scholars to “either break down or burn out” (4). Furthermore, ableist cultures of overwork, administrative work creep initiated by gaping institutional budget cuts, and the exponentially increasing amount of care work and emotional labor necessitated by ongoing local and global catastrophes feels omnipresent. These elements converge to threaten the time, concentration, and energy that makes collective knowledge production for liberation possible. In short, the more our mental bandwidth is dispersed, our commitment to collaborative writing and study groups outside of the institutions that drain us become more necessary, even radical.

Four panelists, all mid-career scholars at public institutions, founded the “Coast to Coast Writing Group” (C2C) in 2023, seeking a different way of imagining scholarship after bouts of isolation, frustration, exhaustion, and despair. Founded on connective synergy, trust and compassion, the C2C has kept its four members afloat and focused for nearly two years. Rather than capitulate to the perpetual neoliberal demands for “accountability” and productivity, the C2C anchors itself in the interdisciplinary concept of “critical generosity”: originally developed by performance scholar David Román (1998), recently adapted to consider editing praxis by Cathy Hannabach (2023), and to inspire a reformation of academic peer-editing processes by musicologist Holger Schulze (2024). Each week, the simple act of critical generosity—meeting virtually to share research and provide feedback—has cultivated more than a collective investment in our individual scholarship. By consistently safeguarding time to champion each other’s work, we have cultivated a truly regenerative space. It is powerful to hear from trusted colleagues that your writing and research are captivating and enduring, thus your time and labor are valuable in the face of what U.S. academic institutions seem to be working against: our own worth as scholars, thinkers, community-builders. Such critical engagement from colleagues that believe in your work, is especially bolstering amidst myriad professional crises facing higher education—such as the latest attacks on DEI initiatives and scholarship. We share vital information across institutional and disciplinary locations and give each other feedback as we’re building—literally lifting each other up in spite of everything. This weekly commitment has made us intellectually stronger and more compassionate, to ourselves and others. Our very textual voices are collectively shifting, toward a welcoming, public-facing writing more legible to our various research communities.

But we won’t just be talking about writing groups, we’ll workshop steps for starting groups: giving advice, resources, time and space to begin the process! We’d like to pass our methods along as part of a Skill-/Resource-Sharing Session at ASA 2025, in hopes that our experience will inspire others to cultivate a sustainable research community across institutions, time zones, and disciplines. Participants are encouraged to attend with colleagues they have considered founding a writing group with. There will be a reading list and other resources to share.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Liana Silva

Panelists

• Dolores Inés Casillas, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Todd Craig, University of Pennsylvania

• Priscilla Peña Ovalle, University of Oregon

• Jennifer L Stoever, SUNY at Binghamton

Biographical Information

Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media, the representation of accented Spanish and English languages within popular culture, as well as the integration of Ethnic Studies within K-12 schools. She is the author of _Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy_(NYU Press, 2014), which received two book prizes, and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the _Companion to Latina/o Media Studies_(Routledge Press, 2016) and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UC Santa Barbara) of _Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning_(Routledge Press, 2018). _Sounds of Belonging_ has been cited in different media venues, such as the Associated Press, Pacifica Radio, ABC News, Buzzfeed, and National Public Radio (NPR). Her current manuscript explores the politics of language learning and language ply as heard through different media technologies.

A product of Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses in Queens, New York, Todd Craig is a writer, educator and DJ whose career meshes his love of writing, teaching and music. His research inhabits the intersection of writing and rhetoric, sound studies and Hip Hop studies. He is the author of the 2024 NCTE David H. Russell Award and 2025 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award winning _“K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies_(Utah State University Press) which examines the Hip Hop DJ as twenty-first century new media reader, writer, and creator of the discursive elements of DJ rhetoric and literacy. Craig’s publications include the multimodal novel _tor’cha_(pronounced “torture”), and essays in various edited collections and scholarly journals including _Amplifying Soundwriting_, _Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric_, _Fiction International_, _Radical Teacher_, _Modern Language Studies_, _Changing English_, _Kairos_, _Composition Studies_ and _Sounding Out!_ Dr. Craig teaches courses on writing, rhetoric, African American and Hip Hop Studies. Presently, Craig is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at New York City College of Technology and of English and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Priscilla Peña Ovalle (she+they) is a media scholar focusing on mainstream popular culture, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. She is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Graduate Faculty member of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. In addition to _Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom_ (Rutgers 2011), Ovalle’s research can be found in _Women and Performance_, _American Quarterly_, _Sounding Out!_, and the anthology _Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity_(Rutgers 2019), among others. Ovalle served as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2021-2023) and is currently working on a project about the production and performance of hairstyles in U.S. music videos and commercials.

Liana Silva is a high school English teacher in the Houston Independent School District, essayist, and writer. She is also the managing editor of _Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog_. In 2021–­ 22 she chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on K–­ 16 Alliances. Before her career in K–­ 12 education, she was the Editor-­in-Chief of the professional newsletter _Women in Higher Education_ and a Graduate Writing Specialist at the University of Kansas Writing Center. Most recently, she was a guest co-editor of _English Journal’s_ May 2023 issue, Care-full Curricular Conversations.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of _Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog_, and author of _The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening_(NYU Press, 2016). She is a founding member of the Engaged Digital Humanities Working Group at Binghamton University and Co-Director of The Binghamton Punk D.I.Y. Community Archive. A 2018 Whiting Foundation Public-Facing Scholarship seed grant awardee and a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Jennifer has published research in _American Quarterly_, _Social Text_, _Radical History Review_, _Modernist Cultures_, and the _Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies_ among others, as well as in _The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop_(2018) and _The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art_ (2021). Currently, she is co-editing _Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader_, with Liana Silva and Aaron Trammell (forthcoming on NYU Press), as well as the three-volume _Encyclopedia of Sound Studies_ contracted with Bloomsbury Press (with Michael Bull and Holger Schulze). Her book-in-progress, _Living Room Revolutions: Black and Brown Women Collecting Records, Selecting Sounds, and Making New Worlds in the 1970s Bronx and Beyond_, inspired the course "Black Women and Creativity in the 1960s and 70s" that she has taught in partnership with Wiki Education since Spring 2024. You can read about her students' work increasing the Wikipedia presence of Black women artists in "Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon honors Black artists" and Wiki Education's “History is only as equitable as its sources and writers."