WAC Clearinghouse | Across the Disciplines | Special Issue: Anti-Racist Activism | Review Main Page

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Author Profiles: Legion of "Going There"

So, we decided near the beginning of this process to call ourselves the Legion of "Going There."  We committed to say the hard things to each other, to listen, and to go to the uncomfortable places in order to learn together. Where is there? Well, it's all the places you'll read in these pages. We also hope it's the "ongoing explicit pursuit" of the new equality (Young, 2010, p. 2). If you want to know more about us, read on.

Phil Zhang
I was born Phillip Feilie Zhang in Guangzhou, China on May 28th, 1989. After a brief two-year stay, I immigrated to Tulsa, OK with my mother and father where I attended Jenks Public Schools from kindergarten through high school. In 2007, I moved to Norman to attend the University of Oklahoma. Initially, I intended to go to Pharmacy school, but I quickly changed my major to Psychology after the first few chemistry courses. Though I had no particular interest in writing in high school, English courses at OU introduced me to a less constricted form of writing. I then decided to work towards a minor in English Writing, eventually graduating in 2011. Afterwards, I returned to Tulsa to pursue a career in the Psychology field.

Jessie St. Amand
I joined the OU Writing Center as a peer consultant two years into my undergrad English career in Fall 2009, itself two years after defecting from the ultraconservative ideology I was raised with in my white, suburban, compulsively heterosexual religious community in the north Indianapolis area. My struggle since then has been to loudly access authentic forms of student power to address problems of inequality and misinformation in the university and in society. Along with self-teaching feminism and antiracism from the feminist blogosphere and my close connections to the Norman, Oklahoma LGBTQ community and my community of activist poets collected from around the OKC metro, the conversations I've had with coworkers and supportive authority figures in the university Writing Center have been key to starting to see speaking and writing as tools to fight oppression. My writing style, when it comes to these topics (and everything comes to these topics!), is like the feminist blogosphere in that it quickly falls away from the professional into the creative and personal and relies a lot on links to what I have read. Fitting in that genre, the mosaic style of the pieces making up our homepage is meant to evoke feminist tumblr accounts like The Microaggressions Project.

J Quaynor
I joined the OU Writing Center in an unconventional manner. The director, Michele Eodice, discovered me at a freshmen success seminar that I chaired for my fraternity. She saw my passion for writing, and the rest is history. I am an English Writing Senior seeking to further my studies in graduate school. I am highly involved in the Hip-Hop music genre, as well as its journey to be seen as a viable source of art, speech, and rhetoric. I have split my time living in Whittier, California (southern California) and parts of Oklahoma. Seeing two very different spaces of race dynamics has molded me to become even more highly aware of race. Beyond being a young Black male in college (an extreme minority), I am always on the search to find ways to dismantle the power structure that we have been conditioned to accept as life. This is what led me to co-authoring an article such as this. Even though I know I cannot end racism and inequality alone, I hope that taking steps such as this will lead to the deconstruction of the issues ailing our society.

Talisha Haltiwanger
I began working at the OU Writing Center in the Fall of 2009. Since beginning this project, I have graduated from the University of Oklahoma and am currently pursuing a master's degree in Rhetoric and Composition from Colorado State University, where I am also an instructor of first year composition. While working as a consultant in the Writing Center, I also worked in other areas of the university, including as a student teaching assistant for two University College courses, as a student supervisor at an on-campus food service, and as a TA and instructor for the Sooner Upward Bound program. Being involved in these various programs, I interacted with freshmen students, student employees, international students, and inner city high school students (almost all minority), many of whom were planning to apply to OU upon graduating college. Working with and meeting people in these different university contexts gave me a wider view of the university, and I could see how race came into play with different groups of people. I could also see how it was an issue that was simply not being addressed as much as it should. So, when the opportunity to work on this project came up, I immediately saw it as an opportunity to explore the issue further and perhaps bring light to issue of race on the OU campus.

Evan Chambers
I came to the OU Writing Center at the end of 2009 and worked as a consultant for a year and a half. While consulting, I was also an instructor in the Department of English during that time, which made reading essays as a consultant a very different task. I am currently finishing my MA in English and am the program assistant for the Writing Center. In that role, I consult and work closely with the undergraduate and graduate tutors here. I am part of a team that creates professional development material for our Writing Center consultant staff, and part of our design in this current project has come out of the conversations and activities held in our consultant practicum. As a state-licensed public educator in English, my background has caused me to look specifically at pedagogical opportunities and mishaps in addressing (or ignoring) matters pertaining to race in education. But not until I encountered the racism in my own teaching material did I begin to recognize the enveloping capacity of racist ideology and value-making. Hopefully, such awareness is a start toward something better.

Geneva Canino
I joined the Writing Center at OU while I was in the English Department getting my MA, and when this project began, I served as program assistant. One-on-one writing center work radically changed the course of my study, and through conversations with other writing center people, I believe it deepened my commitment to activism and helped guide me towards seeing how an activist pedagogy includes more than just the issues that affected me personally. I was sort of the typical white feminist during my undergraduate degree, interested in social justice but ignorant to the depth and breadth of the problems. This blindness, I think, is a testament to the need for allies to do better, be better, teach better because an ally that cannot see beyond her own interests to the interconnected nature of oppressions is no ally at all. Much of my understanding of critical race theory actually came from reading feminist blogs from academics and non-academics alike and from great presentations at writing center conferences, so the use of the internet in this project was of great interest to me and I believe in its usefulness as a form. I am currently a PhD student at the University of Houston in Composition, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy.

Moira Ozias
I have been involved in the writing center world since 2002, when I started as a writing consultant at the University of Kansas, and am currently Associate Director of the Writing Center at OU. I'm also a PhD student at OU in the College of Education. Having grown up in a nearly all white (and definitely all rural) town in Kansas, I didn't start asking serious questions about race until I was in college (which I now recognize is itself a privilege of my whiteness). It was the off-the-record, out-of-class conversations with friends who were Black and Latino that made me question, get sad, and get angry. This led me to an interest in postcolonial theory, then to questions of racial justice and the teaching of writing as I moved into composition studies, and later social work. Now I'm honored to work with and learn from a number of faculty and students who care deeply about questions of educational equity, access and racial justice, among them Michele Eodice, Elon Dancy, Penny Pasque, Zanice Bond, Rasha Diab, Beth Godbee, Jasmine Kar Tang, and my co-authors here. They give me courage to act.

• "Going There": A Conversation Between Consultants
• Writing as a Vehicle for Learning & Activism
• On Family and Abuse
• A Response to the New Racism (poem)
• Author Profiles

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