| "Diving into the Wreck": A Feminist Inquiry of the Dissertation in Composition | ||||||||||||||||
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| Session: C.19 on Mar 12, 2009 from 1:45 PM to 3:00 PM | Cluster: 107) Institutional and Professional | |||||||||||||||
| Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters) | Interest Emphasis: not applicable | |||||||||||||||
| Level Emphasis: all | Focus: feminist studies | |||||||||||||||
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| Adrienne Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck" provides a suitable metaphor for feminist graduate students of composition in the midst of the dissertation process. These students navigate the continuum between isolation and community, collaboration and competitiveness, wellness and dis-ease, as they struggle to find time to write in spite of the demands of work and family--trying to make headway amidst the often choppy waves of love and loss and deadlines. As Marilyn Valentino encourages us to do in her call for proposals, this panel will work to explore the waves of thought--in our case, thought about the process of writing a dissertation. Most stories of writing the dissertation are written after the degree has been attained--when something of value has been salvaged from the wreck, when we got "the thing [we] came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck/ the thing itself and not the myth" (Rich, 61-63). The dissertators on this panel, however, have agreed to come up for breath mid-process, to take a break long enough to reflect upon the tactics and strategies used by feminist compositionists in the past, the recent past, and the present as they strive to succeed day after day, chapter after chapter, and revision upon revision. This session is geared toward anyone involved in dissertation work--those who are considering taking on the task, those who are mid-process, those who have recently finished, and those directing dissertations or serving on committees. Panelist #1: From Dissertators to Advisors: Feminists Negotiating the Dissertation Process Certainly, I am not the first feminist compositionist to consider the confines of the dissertation genre in my field. Others before me have described their experiences in _The Dissertation and the Discipline: Reinventing Composition Studies_, edited by Nancy Welch, et al., and _ALT/Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy_, edited by Patricia Bizzell, et al. Based on the principles of Feminist Empirical Research as described by Joanne Addison and Sharon McGee, the feminist dissertator not only has the right but the obligation to "have a voice in the development and reporting of the research" (3). Moving beyond a radical feminism that would label the current dissertation process in composition as a patriarchal construct that favors male ways of knowing, Elizabeth Flynn's _Feminism Beyond Modernism_ endorses a post-modern feminism that "does not oppose modern intellectual and social traditions" (13). "Rather," Flynn claims, "[post-modern feminists] are critical of [these traditions] and attempt to find alternatives to them" (13). By interviewing six well-established compositionists who identify themselves as feminists, I will investigate the ways they negotiated the boundaries of the dissertation genre both as the students they once were and the advisors they now are. I will also try to uncover their perspectives regarding the conventions and limitations of the genre and how (if?) it has changed over time. Panelist #2: Diving into the Recent Past: Exploring the Use of Feminist Action Research in the Dissertation Process Does a dissertation have to be written in acadamese with a target audience of less than a dozen? Does the emphasis on collaborative learning necessarily have to end as the dissertation process begins? With over 60% of Ph. D. candidates not completing their degrees (according to Barbara Lovitts' _Leaving the Ivory Tower_), the material realities of writing a dissertation are worth investigating in order to discover what helps or hinders candidates as they dive for their terminal degrees. Though it may seem that I am asking whether the dissertation in composition has to be written in the traditional way, I am more interested in exploring the ways in which principles of post-modern feminism and critical pedagogy can be incorporated into the dissertation process. To answer this question, I will interview six self-identified feminist compositionists who have successfully defended their dissertations within the past two years, paying close attention not only to the strategies they used to "survive" this process, but also noting the ways in which they tried to change the very process itself. I am particularly interested in the interviewee's answers to this question: as feminists in the field of composition, do we have an obligation to critically reflect upon the dissertation process and the product that results from it--or must we attain the degree before we can question the process and the genre? Panelist #3: Present Practices of a Dissertating Compositionist: Collaborating through Dissertation Study Groups Composition research includes a great deal of information about writing collaboratively--from Elbow's seminal Writing Without Teachers to Anne Ruggles Gere's _Writing Groups: History, Theory and Implications_--but do the rules for collaboration change when it comes to the writing of a dissertation? Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill, in a study of dissertators in the field of sociology have used the term "liminal self" to describe doctoral students writing a dissertation. Deegan and Hill argue that this liminal self is a temporary, transformative state dissertators inhabit as they make the complicated shift from student to professional writers. From this perspective, then, the writing of the dissertation becomes a rite of passage fraught with perils. I posit that participating in a dissertation writing group with three other members of her doctoral cohort has allowed her to put into practice the feminist tenets of collaboration and support, thereby helping ease the journey from liminal to professional self. Building upon scholarship for the fields of composition and sociology, I will present the results of an auto-ethnographic study of how participating in a dissertation writing group can help liminars navigate the sometimes unfriendly waters of writing a dissertation. | ||||||||||||||||
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