2011 Richard Ohmann Outstanding Article in College English Journal Award Recipient:
Nancy Welch
Nancy Welch is Professor English at the University of Vermont where she teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, fiction writing, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Author of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World (2008), The Road from Prosperity: Stories (2005), and Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction, her work focuses on what Marxist theorist and Berkeley Free Speech Movement activist Hal Draper termed “rhetoric from below”: the radical, change-making rhetorical practices of labor and social justice activists, the soapboxes students can make or claim to speak out against injustices and inequities in their lives and communities. In addition to “‘We’re Here and We’re Not Going Anywhere’: Why Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions Still Matter” in College English (January 2011), her recent scholarship includes “La Langue de Coton: How Neoliberal Rhetoric Pulls the Wool Over Shared Governance” in the September 2011 issue of Pedagogy. Her current project, “Informed, Passionate, and Disorderly: Uncivil Rhetoric in a New Gilded Age,” examines the challenge the Lawrence Bread and Roses strike of 1912 posed to middle-class Progressives concerned with the strike’s breach of “civility.” She is active in United Academics, the union representing faculty at the University of Vermont, most recently as chair of the delegates’ assembly and coordinator of the Don’t Downsize Education at UVM campaign.
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Nancy Welch's article "We're here, and we're not going anywhere: Why working class rhetorical traditions still matter" is very much in the spirit of Richard Ohmann's commitments to working class politics. The article examines the rhetorical ingenuity and successes of the 2008 Republic Windows and Doors workers' six-day protest in Chicago. Welch argues "students of public writing and rhetoric, concerned with how ordinary pole can claim and hold a platform from which to speak and be heard" have much to learn from this protest and that we writing teachers should see ourselves as workers and study and use the political rhetorics of working class movements. It's a powerful piece, attuned to the realities of the labor and responsibilities of the writing teacher. In her own words, Welch's study "can further enrich what it means to compose.
--Beth Brunk-Chavez
2010 Susan C. Jarratt, "Classics and Counterpublics in Nineteenth-Century Historically Black Colleges", Volume 72, Number 2 (November 2009)
2009 Christopher Carter, "Writing with Light: Jacob Riis's Ambivalent Exposures", appearing in the November 2008 issue of College English
2008 Mary Queen, “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World” appearing in the May 2008 issue of College English.
2007 LuMing Mao, “Studying the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition in the Present:
Re-presenting the Native’s Point of View” appearing in the January 2007 issue of College English.
2006 Paul Kei Matsuda, “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition” appearing in the July 2006 issue of College English.
2005 Eli Goldblatt, “Alinsky's Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for
Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” appearing in the January 2005 issue of College English.
2004 Susan Romano, "Tlaltelolco: The Grammatical Colonial Indios of Colonial Mexico" appearing in the January 2004 issue of College English.
2003 J. Blake Scott, “Extending Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis: Transformations of Home HIV Testing” appearing in the March 2003 issue of
College English.
2002 Candace Spigelman, "Argument and Evidence in the Case of the
Personal" appearing in the Sept. 2001 issue of College English.
2001 John Alberti, "Returning to Class: Opportunities for Multicultural Reform at
Majority Second Tier Schools" appearing in the May 2001 issue of
College English.